Writing Excuses 20.40: Mary Robinette Kowal's Personal Writing Process

Oct. 10th, 2025 06:00 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.40: Mary Robinette Kowal's Personal Writing Process

From writingexcuses.com/20-40-mary-robinette-kowals-personal-writing-process

Key points:  What is your writing process? Random schedule. Fitting writing in the gaps. Retrain yourself to work with your brain. Chaotic and gremlins. Write every day? Reshape habits. A thing you do or what you are? Habit or practice? Hyperfocus. Novel, interesting, challenging, urgent. Microsessions. Rice or eggs? Deadlines. Interruptions. White noise, and travel spaces. Defend your writing time. Today's three tasks and timeline. Reward yourself with the next bit of writing fun. Keep learning, it is never a solved problem.


[Season 20, Episode 40]


[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.


[Season 20, Episode 40]


[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Mary Robinette Kowal's Personal Writing Process.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.


[Mary Robinette]  So, we had this thought. I hear a lot of people say, "But what is your writing process?" and as successful writers, people who are published, what is your writing process? As if it is a key to being able to write. The idea here is that you're going to hear from each of the hosts. We're going to tell you what our personal writing process is. The other people are probably going to look at us like that's what you do? And the idea is that the only important process is the one that works for you. And that that's going to change over the course of your career, over the course of the project that you're working on. So...

[Howard] And by way of clarification, when we say you're going to hear from each of the hosts about this, on this episode we're talking about Mary Robinette's writing process.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Howard] And each of us are going to point fingers and say but how can that even work? Because I do not know how that can even work.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So my writing process is based on having a completely random schedule, but also having started with a random schedule, where I was putting writing in the gaps of everything else I was doing. I started writing novels sitting in a white cargo van in a passenger seat writing long hand while I was on puppetry tours. Because that was the thing that I could do. And then I had this ancient se... I mean, at the time, it was new... This sewing machine of a portable computer. And so then my process was I would transcribe things. The idea of doing that now seems like how did I even. But the kind of lingering effects of that is that I tend to write best in transit still. I love writing on an airplane, a train is amazing. And then at home, my writing process used to work best when I went to coffee shops. And then pandemic completely interrupted that. So, for me, I... I've gone through phases where I'm like I will write every day and I will have this word count. And now it's much more of a... I am having a reasonably good brain day, there are... This is a day of fewer distractions, some of the things that have shifted in my life is that I've had to do a bunch of Elder Care. So I went through a phase where I felt like every time I sat down to write that I would in some way punish the writing. Not by someone in specific, but that if I sat down to write, my mom was going to fall. And so I started to develop this real avoidance of wanting to get into the mode, because something traumatic kept happening. So where I am now with my writing process is that I am trying to retrain my brain and retrain my... I should say I'm trying to retrain myself to work with my brain, because I have an understanding of the fact that I have ADHD, I have depression. I didn't know those things when I started writing. And so, like, I'm trying to learn how to trigger hyper-focus on demand, and how to turn it off, or how to be okay with having hyper-focus broken. So a lot of my writing process now is using binaural sound to say, oh, this is writing time. Or making sure that I have lined up dates with other people. So there's a lot of hacking of my brain that goes on. But people ask me, what is my writing process?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm like it is completely chaotic and gremlins.

[Dan] Right out of the gate, I love this. Because one lesson that gets taught all the time, and I hate it, is that you have to write every single day if you want to be a real writer. And that's not how you work. That's not how I work, either. And being able to recognize, well, this is a good day, this is a good time, and other days and other times, you might have something more important to do. And that's okay. it doesn't make you a bad writer, it doesn't make you an inherently unprofessional writer. It's just how life is sometimes..

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I want to rewind to an earlier thing, though, because the thought that I had as you're describing it is cargo vans don't have very good suspension.

[laughter]

[DongWon] So writing by hand in the passenger seat of a moving cargo van seems like your penmanship is quite remarkable, and I begin to understand why.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I didn't actually think about that. Something that you said, Dan, about the writing every day, reminds me of a thing that I learned for myself, which is that there is value in saying I write every day for me, because one of the things that I struggle with is executive function. And the I write every day reduces the level of executive function, because it means that's a decision I didn't have to make. So I've definitely... and I've preached this on the podcast, I try to write three sentences every day. That's actually not true for where I am right now. I don't actually do that. but that does make it much easier to... For my habit to be I have some free time, I'm going to go on Instagram rather than I'm going to sit down to write. And so that's a lot of what I'm trying to balance is learning how to reshape habits so that I lean towards oh, I have free time, I'm going to write, which is what I used to do. Like, my second novel, I literally wrote, like, probably half of it using a Palm Pilot and graffiti on the New York subways. I was just fitting it into the cracks on everything else I had to do. And now, like, I can arrange my schedule so that I can write anytime I want to, but, like, I have cat videos to edit.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Two things. One, I really love this idea that, like, you fit it into the cracks of your life, and I'm curious about that. But first, I actually read this book on habits, and one of the things that they said is that what habits do is move something that you're doing from a thing you do to a thing you are. And so, for example, people say I am a writer who writes every day versus, like, I need to write every day. And that if you do a habit long enough, that's why people would be, like, I'm a runner versus I am someone who runs daily. And that then shifts so that it just feels like such a baseline of who you are that you go ahead and, like, do it because it feels like it's part of your identity. That can be good or bad. It can become, like, a prison of identity. But that's something that, like... I think that's why sometimes people like that feeling of, like, I am a daily writer. 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The way I think about it is the difference between a habit and a practice. Right? A habit is something that you feel you need to do every day, it's on your calendar, or whatever it is, and if you fall off of that, then it feels like a failure. And I think that failure state often prevents people from returning. Versus a practice is something that you're always working at. Right? You're not expected to be perfect at it. You try to do it every day. And then tomorrow's always another opportunity to be the person that you see yourself as. Right? So, I am a writer, I practice writing. That means that you are making time and space in an intentional way, but not holding yourself to an unrealizable standard. Because I think very few people who say they write every day actually write every day. Right? Stuff happens. Right? There are emergencies, vacations, there's travel, there's all these other things, and quite frankly, I think you should be making time for those things, other interests in your life, other people in your life. And so it's okay if... Even if you are a daily writer, that you are not literally writing every day. Right? And so I think a lot of us can get really hung up on this like completionist perfection, and I think the idea of a practice can make that space for you to still see yourself as that thing and doing the thing without beating yourself up.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I have some other ideas about, like, some of the ways that I have found to go in and out of a daily writing practice. And I will talk about those more after the break.


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[Mary Robinette]  So, before we took our break, I said that I was interested in exploring how I go in and out of a daily writing practice. Because one of the things that I realized, as someone who has ADHD, and, like, in hindsight so many of my career choices make sense because... One of the things that fuels an ADHD brain, or that we respond well to, is new things. But we also really enjoy, like, hyperfocus is a pleasurable thing for us. And so in hindsight, it's... I was choosing careers where I was in theater, so I had a new project every couple of months. Novel, interesting, challenging, and urgent. Those are the triggers. And I love doing those things. And so a new novel, very exciting. So I've realized that when I started, I was still participating in the late lamented Nano. And that is binge writing. That is hyperfocus for a month on a thing. And so now I recognize that,, actually, it's okay for me to say I'm going to focus on this for this period of time. But if I'm in a situation where I have to switch tracks, that I have to be able to learn how to take myself in and back out again for that. And so one of the things that I've been working on is micro sessions. Because I think one of the things that happens to someone who enjoys hyperfocus is that you think,, I'm going to get into that and I'm either going to be punished because I will miss... I'll be late to do something else or someone's going to interrupt me and that'll be frustrating. And so I've been doing... Setting timers and saying, okay, 5 minutes. And that will just... Like, look, I got a lot of words done. I can do this in 5 minute bursts. And then kind of building up. So that if I've been in a phase where I haven't been writing for a while, I can ramp myself up into it. Instead of having, like, a day where i'm like, okay, it's time for me to write, I'm going to write 2,000 words. Because that's what I write when I'm writing at pace, and then I'm exhausted because I haven't been writing daily, and then I don't write. So, like, learning to use these micro sessions to ramp up has been helpful.

[Howard] There's a famous object lesson involving a mason jar and eggs and rice, in which you want to  get everything into the jar. And if you pour the rice in first, there isn't room for the eggs. If you put the eggs in first, then the rice will fill the gaps. And the object lesson is find out what's important to you, put the important things in your life first, and then let everything else fill the gaps. And what you've described with some of the catch as catch can writing process, is learning to... And I'm going to extend and then break the metaphor because I'm me... Learning to be the monk who can write on a grain of rice. Turn your writing process into something that can fill the cracks. That can be on the grains of rice. Sometimes you want it to be an egg. Sometimes you want to block out 4 hours and just write. But you have to have the ability... I say you... For your process, you have to have the ability to write on a grain of rice on some days.

[Mary Robinette] Right. And so that is actually part of the thing is that when I have a deadline, which is, again, triggers the urgency thing, it's so much easier for me to do time blocking and stick to it. Otherwise, I'm very likely to block things out on my calendar and then be like, oh, well, we can move that.

[Erin] Thinking a lot again about the cracks and you writing on the modes of transit, which I think is fascinating, as somebody who has occasionally, like, written on the subway. What I wonder about this is, like, there's so many interruptions. Like, so, being on any form of transit, like, at any moment, like, things could be happening, a road sign, a thing. But it's like things that you anticipate happening. So it's like an interruption that you... Sometimes it's like an interruption that you have internalized is going to happen versus an unexpected interruption. Do you know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like... And I'm wondering, like, if that's something that you've played around with or thought about?

[Mary Robinette] So I think that the interruptions that happen in modes of transit are either things that you're expecting, so you can plan for them, because I know my stop is coming up. Or they're things that you don't actually have to engage with. The interruptions that I was dealing with were things that I had to engage with. Like I am... My mom passed in 2023. We live in a basement apartment. There are three dogs. I hear something hit the ground. And I still have this trauma response of I need to go deal with that. I'm like 100% don't. The dogs are fine. So I think some of that is the difference between interruptions you have to engage with and the ones you don't. But I think the other thing that, again, in hindsight, was happening for me was that there was just enough white noise, just enough stimulus happening either in the train or the coffee shop, that I had to focus harder, and that made it easier to ignore all of the other chat... Like, in the process of I have to ignore all of this other stuff, it made me also ignore all of the other random chatter in my brain, because I had to focus to block everything else out.

[DongWon] Well, one thing that's interesting, and I was thinking about this as we are talking about fitting the writing in the cracks, but also, your life is very demanding. Right? There's a lot of travel, there's a lot of interruptions. And so the question I had was how do you defend your time? And as you were talking about this last bit, I realized, oh, travel, because it's this liminal space...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Where you're sort of... You know how you walk into an airport and suddenly all societal rules are off?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like you're like, oh, I can eat lunch at 9:00 in the morning...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And you see people drinking like three martinis and you're like, what is happening right now?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It's breakfast.

[DongWon] It's breakfast. Right? But there is this thing about, like, airports and planes and trains and subways where because it's like dead time in between other things...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] No one can actually really interrupt you in that time because you're traveling.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You're free in that space. Right? You're protected. So you're... I could see with how much you travel, like, let you have this sort of defended space. But when you're at home, do you have strategies for protecting your time? How are you keeping all the daily demands of your life a little bit at bay for, like, these 20 minutes, this 2 hours, whatever it is?

[Mary Robinette] No one can schedule a meeting with me before noon. Except in very rare occasions, where it's like a time sensitive thing, and that's... And even then, I have let my assistant do that. I don't get to make that call, because I will give my time away. And no one can make a meeting with me after 6:00 p.m.. So I have these windows in which meetings can happen. No one can make a meeting with me on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. And so those are some things that I've done to try to carve out a little bit more time. I also... This is ridiculous, but I've... But it has worked. I have trained Elsie and Guppy that when I am at my desk, and I say, Mary Robinette working now, that they will both mostly curl up and go to sleep. Because they know that they will get treats and that I will play with them when I'm done. And that has made a huge difference. Because as much as I love the fact that I have taught my cat to talk, she is a toddler and needs a lot of attention.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But those are the things that give me the ability to have space to write. The person I have to defend my writing space from the most is actually myself. So...

[Howard] Say that again for the people sitting in the back.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The person I have to defend my writing time from the most is myself. Because I will give it away. I will think, oh, I can do it later. I will prioritize other things. So I've found that the best practice for me is that I get up in the morning, and when I've managed to do this, I have a really good day. Or I'm already in a good brain space. So I'm able to do it. Cause-correlation. Who knows? But I write down these are the things... The time-sensitive things that I have to do today. Here's the places I need to be. Here are three tasks that I'm going to try to accomplish. And if I don't write down writing as one of those three tasks, I will... I have effectively given my time away. But then I do a timeline for myself of what I'm going to be doing. So what I'm basically doing is I'm clumping my executive function at the beginning of the day when it... When I have the most of it. So that when I finish a task, I can look at my notebook, and go, oh, now I'm supposed to move to this... Move on to this... Now I'm supposed to write. And reframing it as... I just said supposed to. I've been trying to reframe it as now I get to write. Because supposed to comes with a certain amount of shame and guilt if you don't do it. So, now I get to write. And then I have a couple of things that I only get... Like, I have this candle that I love and I only get to light the candle when I am writing. I have a playlist of music that I really like, but I only turn that playlist on when I'm writing. So I have a couple of things. And then there's usually... the other thing that I've found that works very well for my brain is to have another piece of writing that is my reward for finishing this piece of writing. It's like once I finish this, then I get to do that. And once I finished that, then I get to do, like... Then I get to write the scene where they make out, and then I get to do the scene where the dragons are flying. And then I get to that... seeing the next bit of writing as the reward for this bit of writing helps me... It's like linked excitement.

[Dan] The thing that I really love about this, and I suspect that we will find it is true for all of us, is that your writing process is continually evolving.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] It's not one thing that works for you. It's things that are changing. And some of that is your circumstances have changed, who you are living with, what job you have, but a lot of it is just you are learning more about yourself. You just said that you... Something you have found...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] About yourself. Giving yourself a reward. You are an incredibly accomplished and experienced writer, and you are still discovering things about yourself and your process. And that is, I hope, really beneficial for aspiring writers to hear. That on the one hand, maybe the downside, is that you never hit the point where you've perfected everything. It's never a solved problem. But the upside is that you are continually learning, you are continually growing, you're continually figuring out new things that work well for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, that's our hope for you, our listeners, as you are listening to us talk about our writing processes. Because all of us are going to have... All of us have different brains and all of us have different strategies and challenges and goals.


[Mary Robinette] For you, I have some homework. What helps you want to do the things that you aren't writing? The other things in your life, the other tasks, the other joys that you have. What helps you with those? Because the tools that you use for those also work with writing. So is there anything that you use, like, is it lists, is it spreadsheets, is it by doubling? What is it that helps you want to do something? And can you use those same things to guide your writing process?


[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.


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Writing Excuses 20.39: Wrapping up our Conversation about Lenses

Oct. 2nd, 2025 06:23 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.39: Wrapping up our Conversation about Lenses
 
 
Key points: How do you make one big mega-lens? Don't do it! Use the lenses during revision? Cherry-pick! Technique is for when you are struggling with the art. Use the lenses as exercises. Which lens do you resonate with, and which one do you struggle with? Where, worldbuilding, is the hands-down winner. Who! What is my motivation? To have a thing happen in the story, what kind of place do I need? The lens of slaps? Celebrate what you're good at.
 
[Season 20, Episode 39]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 39]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Wrapping up our Conversation about Lenses.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] And I'm going to start this episode with a confession. Which is that our entire conversation about lenses came from the fact that Mary Robinette and I were in a conversation, and I was like what if we just talked about writing as like who, what, when, where, why, and how. Like, we all remember that from when we're children. It's super easy. And I feel like we found out like that there's so much complexity within these very simple theoretical lenses. That each of these lenses has lenses within the lenses. And so, my biggest question for all of you is how do you take all of this and like synthesize it. I mean, we've been talking about it and how it was done in All the Birds in the Sky. But for people who are trying to figure out how to take all of this knowledge and put it together into one mega lens, how the heck do you do it?
[Dan] Well, my advice would actually be to not do that and to ignore us entirely.
[Erin] Nice.
[Dan] During the process of composing and writing a book, I really feel like it has to come from you as a person, it has to be an expression of yourself and what's interesting to you and of how you're feeling. And then, in the revision process, you could go back and look… Use all these lenses to say, well, what have I done? What did I do? How did I do it? Is there a way that I can amp that up a little bit, or is there a lens… When I look through the lens of who, there's nothing to see. Clearly, I need to characterize better. They feel… At least for me, and how my process works, these all feel like really great revision tools. But using them as first draft writing tools runs the risk of just being too formalized and…
[DongWon] And overwhelming.
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah. One thing I think about with how we approach this podcast and what our pedagogy is as a group… Right? Is so much… I mean, the phrase we use all the time is tools, not rules. Right? We're not giving you guys rules, we're just trying to give you a deep tools kit that you can pull from when you need to. And so the way we think about putting together a season, and this season in particular, I think, was a lot… Breaking down these lenses into a bunch of subtopics. And so, giving you the ability to be, like, I'm struggling with X, Y, or Z. And then you can go back and cherry pick, and be like, I'm going to listen to this episode. Or relisten to this one, or whatever it is. Right? And I'm going to continue along Dan's trend here of not being very good at marketing the podcast, but…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] There's a way in which you don't need to listen to necessarily every episode that we do. What I want you to do is to feel like this is the thing that I need to be hearing right now, this is the thing that useful to me. I mean, plenty of people do listen to it back to front, but also, plenty of people dive in in the individual moments. Right? And so I think I'm doing a little bit of an end run around your question, Erin, in some ways. Because we all are synthesizing all of these things as we write. So hearing it once is helpful, but don't try and hold it all in your head, I guess is what I'm saying. And be more targeted about, like, hum, I'm struggling with this issue.
[Mary Robinette] Just jumping off of that, but then to actually answer Erin's question.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about the idea that the technique is there for when you're struggling with the art. I've talked before about when I was learning to do this particular style of puppet, I had to walk the puppet around the table, and that my mentor was looking for me for the point where I had internalized how to do the technique, so that when I was performing, I wasn't thinking about technique, I was just thinking about art. And in an ideal world, when you are writing, you are just dealing with stuff that you have internalized and you are… The artist is happening. You're chasing the emotion, you're chasing the tension, you're chasing the things you want to read and the things you enjoy. But I don't think that these things are limited to using them in the editorial process. I think Dan is absolutely right, that's a great place for them, but I also think that when you're writing, and you hit a wall and you're like, uck, I don't know how to move past this. You can reach for one of the lenses, and snap it in, and go, okay, is this where I'm having problems? Am I having problems with the who? Am I having problems with the where? And that that can give you a way to use technique to move forward, to find your way back into the art again. I know that when I am dealing with depression, that's when I am most likely to reach for the techniques. Because I can't trust my own judgment as well, because I am in a depressed state. So the way I learned to use things like this is what DongWon was saying was to cherry pick, to pick and choose. I would say pick one of the things that we've talked about, and say, okay, today I'm going to write and I'm going to do the thing I'm just going to chase the emotions, but I'm also going to keep this one lens on while I'm doing it to see if there are any opportunities that can occur while I'm writing. And when you do that, you will train yourself over time so that you do internalize that and you aren't having to think about it consciously. But, yeah, if you try to do all of this all at the same time, that's trying to learn 15 new techniques simultaneously, and you don't learn any of them well. So, I would do targeted practice with them.
[Howard] Yeah. There's a process that I'm working on learning right now, and it is creating comic pages using Clip Studio Paint. And I'm going to break it down into three pieces here. Piece number one is laying out the panels, because panels sort of dictate pacing. Piece number two is penciling the illustrations, composing the picture, because that's drawing the eye in, telling… The blocking and whatever. And piece number three is the dialogue. I can't obviously do all three at the same time. But I know that I have to do all three. And sometimes, I'll get stuck in the dialogue because I don't know the pacing yet. And so I have to stare at a blank page, and I have to just put panels on it, until I know where that line of dialogue has to go, and once I know that, ah, I can write the rest of it. Sometimes I have to pencil something. Relating this to the lenses, sometimes you're working on characters, and you feel like you've really grounded yourself in the lens of who, but you're stuck. And you take a step back and realize, oh, that's because everybody is standing in mid air in a white room. I need to come back to the lens of where, and I need to create a place. And until I've created the place, these people aren't going to be able to walk anywhere because their feet won't have any traction.
[Erin] Yeah. Something I… I love that, and something I find really helpful for myself is to try to think about the lenses as also exercises. So sometimes, like, if I can't figure out, like, let's say I've got two people, I'm like, oh, I love these two who's… They're who-ing around and I don't have a place for them. But I can't figure it out for this story. Sometimes it's helpful for me to take them out of the story and write what would these two people be doing in four different places? And that will give me a better sense of who they are and a better sense of which settings I think resonate with them and which don't. Or let me think of, like, eight things that could happen to them if I'm stuck on what. Because I think I am someone who can sometimes get really into one lens, and then it'll only take you so far. Like, at a certain point, if you only have plot and no character and no setting, like, you can run out of interest in the story yourself. Because it feels like you're just painting by numbers. And so I'm really interested in kind of figuring out how that all works. Like, how can I figure out this lens of who, even if that means taking the people out of the story and working on them separately in some sort of separate exercise. And so I hope that for you, this could also be something that you do. Maybe you can think about something that you want to do from one of our exercises as just a way to, like, remind yourself that you still have this lens. That you still have the capacity to use it, even if you can't figure out where it belongs in your current work. It's something you know how to do. It's a technique that you have that you can rely on.
[Dan] I wanted to add to that, because I've done that accidentally. A couple of years ago, I started getting a lot of jobs writing audio scripts. And in audio scripts, at least in the type of format that I was writing for, there was no narrator. And so everything that was in the scene had to be conveyed audibly. If there was a machine, it had to be. And so I got really good at writing dialogue. I think it improved my dialogue so much, because I didn't have a narrator there, there wasn't this third-party saying, he said, exultantly. I wasn't able to rely on those kinds of tricks. And all of that had to be conveyed just through the dialogue. And then, I went back to do a regular old prose fiction book project, and realized that I was no longer writing setting into anything that I wrote. That I had forgotten how to write narration, and how to let the characters feel like they're actually in a place instead of floating in an empty white room, like Howard said. And then I had to relearn that whole process and get good at that again. It was painful, and, like I said, I did it accidentally, but it was really great to go through, because I feel like I'm better at both of those things now, having focused on them individually.
[Erin] I love that. And it makes me think of a deeply personal question that I will ask you after the break.
 
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[Erin] So, thinking about your experience, Dan, working with one lens and forgetting another, I'm curious for everyone, is there a lens that you personally resonate the most with, and is there a lens that you struggle with? And then, what's the difference between the way you approach those two?
[Mary Robinette] We all stare at each other, going, oh, now I'm [garbled]
[Dan] Oh…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] Think about my process and…
[DongWon] I mean, I think I can answer that first, because most of the writing I do is game oriented. Right? As someone who runs games, as someone who does worldbuilding for games, and things like that. So, for me, I mean, where is the obvious, hands down, winner. Right? I'm thinking so much about what I call critical worldbuilding. It's a term I stole from Austin Walker and friends at the table, but it's this idea of the worldbuilding you use is a way to communicate your intention about the thematic's of the world. Right? So that… It derives from why, but you can use all the things about cultures you create, the physical landscapes, and just constantly asking why is the world like this? Why is this physical space like this? Why do I want there to be a desert here, why do I want there to be a forest here, why do I want this culture to eat this kind of food? And that provides a space for my characters to bounce around in, and or my players really to bounce around in and create character, and from that, we get story. Right? And so delineating the playspace by creating the world is so much of the primary tool in my kit. Or at least the starting point for prep. And then the rest of it is all this, like, desperately grabbing whatever you can in the moment.
[Mary Robinette] I tend to start… Like, where I start my stories from… Who knows? Sometimes it's plot, sometimes it situation, and all of that. But the… Of the lenses, the one that comes the most naturally to me is the lens of who, I think that is really because I came out of live theater, where we did not have control over the where, we didn't have control over the why, somebody else was telling… There was… Somebody else created the structure, somebody else was doing the decorations, and the direction. And so the thing I was in charge of was what is my motivation? How does this character sound? How do they move? And so that's the lens that I… Like I am just… I understand that one, that's the one I have internalized the most. I think the where, also, I tend to… Because I was a set designer, I tend to think about that. But I don't always think about the when. Like… Which is funny, because I write historical stuff, right?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But a lot of times when I go back, when I'm looking at my stories where I have fallen down is not thinking about implications of calendar. And so… That is the part that I have to pre-plan the most. Like, you will sometimes hear me talk about these massive spreadsheets that I've got to figure out the time… Some of it's because I have to deal with technical stuff, like, the time lags, but a lot of it is because I know that, just like in my real life, I will have two things happening at the same time that could not possibly happen…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] At the same time.
 
[Howard] The… Jackie Chan movies always seem to have a very clear sense of where driven by why will this be a cool place to have a fight. And I'm not propping them up or dissing them or anything. I'm just saying that that attitude, that idea, that mindset of I want to have a thing happen in my story, what's the place that I need?
[DongWon] How can I get as many glass panes in one scene…
[Howard] Exactly.
[DongWon] As I possibly…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] How can I [garbled] one ladder?
[Howard] For me… Oh, the ladder fight. That was so epic.
[Mary Robinette] The best.
[Howard] For me, it's… For 20 years, it's come down to which character is going to be able to deliver the punchline. And that… That reverse engineers into a very detailed understanding of who… I have to know all of the who because… I mean, early days, yeah, I was just telling dad jokes, and it was fun. But I very quickly realized I don't want to make fun of science fiction. I'm telling social satire. I… This is all character-driven humor. Oh, no. You can't have character-driven humor if you don't understand what makes each and every one of these characters tick. And so, for me, yeah, it always comes back down to who. Which is problematic because when I need to draw backgrounds, I have to know the where…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And, oh, backgrounds are the worst.
[Dan] I think it's interesting that Howard and Mary Robinette both said who, because that would be my answer to this question as well, is who. Who is in this story? Whose perspective are we going to see this from? I can't write something until I know who I'm writing about. And I think that's true of all the lenses to some degree. But who is the one that preoccupies my mind more than anything. For my book, Extreme Makeover, I had this incredible new science fiction technology that I wanted to write about, and I knew what was going to happen in the story, but who does it happened to? Who is going to be the most interesting person with whom the reader can experience the story I have in my mind? That is, for me, the very most important thing.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it makes sense to me, that all three of you said who. Right? Because, for me as a reader, as an editor, and all these things, plot descends from character. Right? Who the person is determines so much, and what they want determines so much of what action is going to unfold from that. Right? And so I love hearing that from your perspective, it's the who. In my second role, or primary role, honestly, as an agent and as an editor, for me, that lens that I'm coming to fiction with is the why. Why did you write this book? What is this book? Why are you the one to write this book? And so that's the lens with which I'm analyzing what you've done. But I think as a writer, starting with who makes the most sense. But, Erin, you never answered this. I jumped in ahead of you. So…
[Mary Robinette] You have to answer your own question [today]
[chuckles]
[Erin] Please, those aren't the rules I set.
[Laughter]
[Erin] No, it's funny. I mean, I want to say who. And some of this is actually looking at… And if you're trying to answer this question for yourself, how do I engage with others stories? What is the lens through which I am interested in the way things are told? I'm a big soap opera viewer, because I… Soap operas are just characters slapping each other and making out…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] It's very who focused. Lots of things happen, but it's very who. I like the WWE for the same reason. Big people with ladders, meaty men slapping meat, but it's about…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] It's about who these two men…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Oh, is this safe here?
[Laughter]
[Erin] I'm sorry. Anyway…
[DongWon] It's just men slapping each other. That's what I'm getting out of this. The lens of slaps. I think…
[Erin] Anyway. No.
[DongWon] Continue, though, please.
[Erin] I think that who is obviously important, but something I've been realizing recently is I've been talking a lot about, in my own life, about the weight of the story, and feeling like the characters are moving through a space, and that they are carrying all the things that they brought with them, and that who they are, and the… But the when and the where, the setting, the culture… So all of that is who, but I think it's like, less… It's a very embodied who. It's a very… To me, it's very like voice-y… I'm a voice-y writer… A voice-y who. And, like, part of that is, like, how do you tell that story? And it's why I find what, the plot, really difficult. Because when you're telling a great story, you, the person, can bring people through a lot of things that don't make sense, because they enjoy the way you're telling it. But it doesn't work as well in prose as it does if you put people around a campfire. Once you print it, you can't control the setting in which they are enjoying your words. And so therefore, you have to have more actual structure to go through, that brings that who along so you don't just feel like you're wondering after an interesting person into the desert to, like, starve to death.
[Mary Robinette] What you're talking about makes me think about the way I answered that question, which is… I told you which lens I was using, like, came with unconsciously to me. But I think that an interesting thing would be to look at which ones are you using… Are you grabbing because it is uncomfortable, because you do want to experience. And I was a little bit flippant when I talked about the when. But the difference between telling a story around the campfire… The when… The whereness of that versus telling a story from a stage makes me think it reminded me that one of the things that I have been playing with recently is thinking about consciously changing the who I am writing for. So… Because I tell different stories, I put different things in, because I'm… I know this person really loves found family, this person really loves queer fiction. This person really just wants to see Pirates. And that that changes my choices a lot. And so character comes naturally to me, but thinking very consciously about the outward expression of that, whether that's the when or the where or the who, I think is kind of fun to play with.
[Howard] Kind of like the lens of who, for me, is a contact lens that's just always on my face, and the other lenses are things that I will pick up and grab as I need them. I'm always grabbing for all of them. I'm writing science-fiction that has an epic scope. Well, obviously, there's going to be when, there's going to be where. We've talked a bit about the why I tell any of these stories. All of these are things that I reach for. I think that I may have come closest to fully internalizing the tool of who. At risk of sounding like I'm way better at it than I really am. Because all of these are things that I need work on.
[Erin] And yet, I think it's good to celebrate, like, what we're good at.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Which is going to lead me to the homework.
 
[Erin] I want you to think about all of the lenses, and think about something that you think you do really well. The lens that you think comes most naturally to you, that you enjoy the most. And I just want you to write down what it is, maybe one place that you've used it, and really congratulate yourself for using the lens that you are using the best, the best way that you can.
[Mary Robinette] I love that homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

Sep. 27th, 2025 12:13 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders
 
 
Key points: A sequel? Backburner. Multiple POV and omniscient POV. Hidden narrators. The book grows up with the characters. Whimsy! Humor. Silly, noir, goofy! Pair humor with other stuff. Scientists and witches, lasers and spell books. One zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000... overload and boring. Add emotion and relationship. Fill the silence with active listening. Beat-by-beat plot? Many iterations. Little bits of information...
 
[Season 20, Episode 38]
 
[unknown] I swear, Detective, I was nowhere near the Polo Lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered. I was on a Who Dun It mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy. You, too, can join us on our next deadly cruise, February 6, 2026, seven nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas. Call now, if you dare, 317-457-6150 or go to whodunitcruises.com.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.
 
[Mary Robinette] And we're very excited to have a special guest, Charlie Jane Anders, joining us today.
[Charlie Jane] Hi.
[Mary Robinette] So, for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds in the Sky. And we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process, and to talk about tone, and some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when we're…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When playing with this book. And I think it… It turns out this is fairly timely, since you're working on a sequel right now.
[Charlie Jane] I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel, and people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster… By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus some deleted stuff from All the Birds. But it's… I wrote about 30,000 words, and I kind of… I have to kind of stop and think about it. So, that's on the back burner. I have other projects I'm probably going to work on first. But that's… I've written a chunk of a sequel.
[Mary Robinette] Amazing. [Garbled]
[DongWon] Interesting. I mean… We're such huge fans of the first book, and it's been such a delight talking about it in the past few weeks here.
[Charlie Jane] That's awesome.
[DongWon] So, I'm very excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Eventually.
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] At some point, there will be a sequel.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers, who are like, oh. Oh, I'm not the only one who does 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go huh.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I promised… Like, I decided to promise people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster this thing as a preorder reward. And so I always kind of knew I was going to, like… Just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel. And so I was like I know I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done. I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000, and it just kind of ballooned to 30,000. Because, that was just the section I was writing got to be that long. But… Yeah. I mean, it's going to be… I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work, and I'm going to have to… I'll wait until I'm at the point where I like feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, do you want to talk about the… Some of the work that you did with the first novel?
[Charlie Jane] Sure.
[Mary Robinette] Because… There were a bunch of things that we were very excited about. When we picked it, one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one POV…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And because you were tipping into omniscient POV. It's something that we don't see used a lot. But I felt that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around the story that takes place over decades.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean… It's interesting. Like, I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious, kind of dipping into omniscient POV with that book. Like… And I didn't do it that much. I did it here and there, like, there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscient, and, like, I go much deeper into that omniscient thing. Like I'm just much more leaning into that. But I… I feel like it worked. Really, I thought it worked pretty well sparingly. Like, I thought doing it, like, once in a while, was really like fun, and if I tried to push it, it might have gotten… I don't know. I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV. I think for reasons that are kind of misguided.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] But I think they think that omniscient narrator is going to just like literally be omniscient and, like, just tell you everything that's going on. Which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators.
[DongWon] Right.
[Charlie Jane] Like, they don't… Like, there's always a degree of, like, selectiveness  in what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is. Like, even going back to when it was more ubiquitous. But, yeah, I mean… There's a scene in All the Birds in the Sky which I'm sure you all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Charlie Jane] And they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes, and then the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed, they actually guessed right and he is an assassin. He's actually… Wants to kill them. And, like, that was, like, I was like, oh, this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading. And instead, I don't know how many people have come up to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked. Which is so funny. Because I was like… I almost cut it out, I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna make people stop reading the book. It's gonna like… It's gonna destroy the book. So, for me, to just like throw that in. And I just… I felt like it was a fun playful thing. And I think the playfulness was an important thing with the omniscient narrator in general. And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger…
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] To people on the Internet who were saying you can't do X, Y, and Z, and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because [garbled]
[laughter]
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there's, like, a very, very vocal and very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed and I think you're exactly right, that there is such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience. I can totally see why people… I mean, that moment jumped out at me too. It's such a great little moment, and so deftly sliding from one perspective to another, and then opening up more of the world. And I want to go back to something that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator not really being quote unquote omniscient. They're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective. How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character then?
 
[Charlie Jane] I mean, I think that like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kinda become a character in the book at some point. And, like… I've read, like, three or four novels published in the past year, and I'm… I think of the title of one of them off the top of my head, but I don't know… It's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I think of the title of. But I've read, like, a few books in the past year where the narrator appears to be omniscient, and then at a certain point, like, halfway through the book, you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from there vantage point of like… And, like, that's a trick that I see people do lately, of, like, oh, you think it's an omniscient narrator, but it's actually Fred. Who, Fred, knows a lot of stuff and just hasn't introduced themself yet. Just kind of like hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book. And, obviously, I feel like it's been out for long enough that, like, The Scent of Bright Doors. You don't find out who the narrator is until almost the end of the book.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Like, I feel like that's a trend right now, the hidden narrator. The narrator who is actually… He's a specific viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end [garbled]
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Charlie Jane] Sorry.
[DongWon] Every single time, I find that really delightful and enjoyable. So… Maybe I'm part of the trend here.
[Charlie Jane] I've always [garbled] Yeah. Like, I feel like it could get overdone at some point. Maybe we'll be like, okay, enough of the hidden narrator. Like… I definitely… I think, yeah. I really like that. But I also think that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator. Like, have a narrator who just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or a person who just is in a privileged position has a degree of what appears to be omniscient, and then is like, ha ha ha. And there's probably a version of All the Birds where it turns out that it's narrated by Peregrine, the AI, and like… I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago, and one of the things I toyed with was, like, maybe for me to have a narrator speak up occasionally. It could be Peregrine, the AI, as narrator [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Because Peregrine does have this privileged viewpoint. But I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient narrator. But I think… Like, I very much came up… Like, one of the traditions that kind of influences me is the tradition of, like, loosely, like, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who at least when I was young, they were compared a lot. In fact, how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him, and they're obviously [garbled] in some ways, but they do have that kind of… They do have a narrator who is chatty and over shares and kind of like… Often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways. And I love that. I think it's really fun and funny, and I think we've lost something by not… Like, I think it's… There… It's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like omniscient narration, there also are just busybodies who give writing advice with a little perspective where there like, these are the things you must never do, and, like… And those people… They're… I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up.
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] Or learn to be less prescriptive, really. But, yeah, I like the playfulness, I like the… I think when you're writing… But to return to your question, DongWon, because I didn't really answer it. When you have… When you're not in a particular character's POV, I think it really helps if the narrator has, like, maybe not opinions necessarily, but, like, they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular, like… They're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not quite like within the confines of what people in the scene know. And so the narrators sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information. And so I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.
 
[DongWon] Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again, like, is it another layer in between you and the text?
[Charlie Jane] It's a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it's not me me…
[DongWon] Right.
[Charlie Jane] It's not like me being, like, hi, is Charlie Jane, I'm going to tell you stuff. But it is kind of… It is my kind of… Obviously, everything in the story come from me in the end, of course, as always is the case. I think it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any other characters, I guess, is what I would say. But it's still not the authorial viewpoint, necessarily. And, like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff. Or you can have a narrator who provides misleading information or… I feel like a part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to, like, spoil the story, or, like, tell you too much, and, like, omniscient narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you… Like, give you more perspective, but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray. Or whatever. Or… I don't know. Um.. Yyeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator, for me, specifically, was the way you were using it to shape tone. Because in the first part of the book, when they are little, it takes on this kind of swami British, like, children's fantasy novel. Or children's… And then as we move, the omniscient narrator… There's a continuity of tone, but also, the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go. So that when we get to them as adults, we get very few intrusions of the omniscient narrator. They just appear at just, I think, very key points, because the rest of the time, it is stylistically more like an quote adult novel. Which is either… Which tends to be, in science fiction and fantasy, tight third person. Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters. That was something I thought a lot about, for sure, and I thought… I mean, I dialed it way back, like, in the earlier drafts, like, the first couple chapters, like, the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairytale style. Like, almost, Once upon a time, there were two sisters. It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that. And people were like this is too hard. Like… It's too jarring. That transition from, like, straight up fairytale, like, kind of to something more grown-up. I also, like, when I had the more fairytale stuff in the beginning, the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center, because I was going to start out with, like, two girls in the woods, and, like, it's very fairytale and… But Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer. And, like, just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page 1 that this is not that story. And in the end, I cut that, because I ended up not going quite that far into fairytale land and it felt intrusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page 1. But… And actually, Roberta is not really a serial killer in the final draft. She's just… She has killed someone, but there was extenuating circumstances. He kind of deserved it. But, yeah. I mean… But the tone kind of evolving was something that I really struggled with. And, in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with. Like, I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy and in fact in my subsequent works, I really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit, because I felt like I… It… That can kind of take over and it can become, like, the exclusion of, like, character and emotion and stuff. Like, I feel like I had to pare back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully… Like, fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and… So there was a lot more kind of… For lack of a better word, twee kind of whimsical cuteness in the first draft, and I really dialed it way back, and, like, only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.
[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we go ahead and take our break, and when we come back, let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.
 
[Mary Robinette] And as part of our break, Charlie Jane, I think you're going to tell us about your newest book?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Thank you. So, my newest book, which came out on August nineteenth, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well. It does get a little darker and sadder in places. It is about a young trans woman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she's a witch. And her mother, Serena, has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened. And Serena [Janie?] decides the way to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of embrace life is to teach her mother how to do magic. Which, magic being magic, has some unpredictable results, and magic is kind of a mirror for, like, your desires and your sense of self in this book. And so, not surprisingly, Janie's mother comes to use it very differently than Janie does, and that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflict. But there's also, just, like, a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff, mixed with a lot of cozy queer vibes and, like, queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as, like, we get flashbacks about Janie's mom when she was a young woman, and also Janie is researching queers of the eighteenth century. Which turns out there was a lot of them.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] So, yeah, it's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just, like, this icon from your childhood.
[Mary Robinette] It sounds so good. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.
[Charlie Jane] Yay.
[DongWon] [garbled] That sounds really amazing, and just what we need.
[Charlie Jane] Well, thank you.
[Mary Robinette] Let me remind you, that is Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.
 
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[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor, and where to place it, and how much to dial it up or down, and it's a fun, but complicated, subject sometimes. When you were working on All the Birds in the Sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I mean, I think from the jump, it was a very whimsical novel. And, like, I was writing a different novel… Like, what happened is, backing up slightly. I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir like paranormal detective… Not quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel, in the kind of vein of, like, Jim Butcher or Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, or the Octave… The October Daye novels. Like, that kind of stuff. And it was like… We're talking 2011. I was working on this urban fantasy noir book, and I was walking in the park, and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head. And I had to go write down a bunch of stuff about it. And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently. The urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places. It had a lot of very silly stuff, but it also had that more noir tone. So I always knew that this was going to be more whimsical. And I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun, kind of almost goofy, novel. And, like I said earlier drafts were much goofier. And I feel like, as a writer, I am someone… At least I have been someone to whom goofy humor comes really naturally. Like, my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with, like, ridiculous premises and, like,… Just like the silliest stuff  I could come up with, and they weren't very good. They didn't have… The characters are one-dimensional. Often, they just ended, like they would just, like, oh…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And that's the… Story's over now. Go home, folks. Nothing to see here. Oh, you wanted resolution. Oh, well, too bad.
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] But, yeah. No, I was really good at goofy, zany humor, and it… Basically, I would say that the course of, like mo… The first, like, I don't know how many years of my career, from, like, when I started writing fiction seriously to All the Birds in the Sky, I was learning to kind of… Learning to pair humor with other stuff. And eventually kind of dial back the humor, because I got the feeling… And I got feedback from people that the humor was… That I was like sacrificing character and emotion for the sake of humor and that… And so now, I think, I am… When I use humor, it's something that I… Is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally. But originally, it was just like the automatic thing that I always did. And then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that [garbled] or under that or whatever. And I think that… I mean, there's a version of All the Birds… Like, in my very, very first crack at All the Birds in the Sky, it was going to be just like complete, like, campy comedy of like scientists and witches battling it out with, like, lasers versus, like, spell books versus, like wizar… Like, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody's just like… There's like every silly trope from both genres, just like bursting out all over the place. And that would have been actually very boring. Because one zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000 zany tropes is just like…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] It just becomes… It just… Yeah. It just becomes, like, overload and it's boring and… Functionally, they all start to feel the same. Like, an elf and an alien are not that different, unless you put a lot of effort in making them different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Charlie Jane] And so, yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be… And I had just written Six Months, Three Days, my short story that [garbled] attention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional. And so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it. And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of whimsical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of, like, being… Especially the main part of the novel, when they're growing up, being in their twenties, and just, like, getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And, like, you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life, kind of, but life still kind of sucks.
[Mary Robinette] You also have to be an adult.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Charlie Jane] Like, yeah. Being an adult is just… Yeah. Anyway. And so, yeah, and I feel like I really tried to have more of the humor come out of character, and I'll give a very specific example that I think I've probably touched on before. There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to, like… His relationship with his girlfriend Serafina is unraveling, like, they are just… Things are not working out between them. And there is a moment where the narrator… Like, they just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be, like, a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging as he's just over… He's trying too hard. And there's a moment in an earlier draft, where the narrator said… Says, Lawrence tried to fill the silence with active listening.
[Chuckles]
[Charlie Jane] Which I thought was a [garbled] line, because, like, you can't do active listening if, like, nobody's talking. Right? And then I was like, you know what? That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump. What if it is Lawrence reflecting to himself, I wish I could fill the silence with active listening. Or I am… Or just realizing, in his own mind, that he is trying to do this thing that's impossible. Then it's got pathos as well as humor…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up. This is like… This thing I'm trying to do is not working.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And by changing… Just changing, like, three words, from, like, the narrator, like, standing above and, like, looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing ruefully, kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is… He's messing up, and that this is not working. That just made it… It was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] And so that was a lightbulb moment for me, of just, like, oh, the humor can actually come from within the characters, and the characters can be part… They can be in on the joke to some extent, or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way. Kind of. I don't know.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that, because I can see now that you've pointed it out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book. Right? I mean, there's about six different tones in the book. Because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories. Right? And I can sort of see that… You talk about the early version as being very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy in play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it in a lot of ways. Right? Like, that original concept you had of, like, laser guns versus spell books, big explosive battle. That kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, it's quite scary and really upsetting, actually.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah.
[DongWon] I mean, like, we watch a witch die, pretty horribly, like on screen someone who's been really interesting and compelling. God, I love the way her magic works in the book, too.
[Charlie Jane] Oh.
[DongWon] But then I can sort of see where you start with this idea of, like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it. You don't lose the crazy energy of it, because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns, and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange. But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get out the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody. Right? All of those things that, to me, were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city, of trying to figure out how to be in a community with people, and all of that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves, while they are… Have been influenced by someone…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Else's idea of what the best version of themself looks like. And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of… It's like, aha! That's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It's not just a spoonful of sugar. Right? But there is a little bit of that, like, that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit. And it's interesting, because you can… I think both are failure states in terms of only being whimsy and only being lightness, and then only being darkness and grittiness. Right? Like, I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the author's trying to get at, if it's just, like, overwhelming violence and horror and upset versus overwhelming just charm and whimsy and… Both are hard to dig your sort of, like, teeth into. Right? To continue with food metaphors here. It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because, like, if you look at this book on a beat-by-beat plot basis, it's very dark and grim.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I guess so.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's like two different kids who were… Who dealt with very different forms of abuse from neglect.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean…
[Mary Robinette] And then the… And increasing, like, escalating bullying, escape to places in which they experience different kinds of bullying. They have a brief… They both get a brief heyday of everything seems to be going well. But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationships. And then the world ends.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's pretty…
[Charlie Jane] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Bleak. But it doesn't feel bleak while you're reading it. I mean, a couple of places that it does, but it is [garbled]
[DongWon] Only in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] That, as we feel that heaviness before heading into the next sort of emotional beat. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.
[Charlie Jane] Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] That was so… I mean that… I think I went into Roald Dahl mode a little bit, like Roald Dahl…
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] Books was like stories that I read when I was a kid, of, like, people being really kind of tortured…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] By adults, or by each other, and, like… I don't know. I… Yeah, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me, dude, that was like… That was really a lot. And this is the thing, I… With every book I write, like, I don't know… Like I just… I don't know until I… Until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it. There's some parts where there like oh, this is funny, and other people are like, that's really horrifying…
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] And I'm like, oh. Okay. Like I just… I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell sometimes when you're inside a story.
[Mary Robinette] It's hard to tell.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. God.
[DongWon] When you're inside it… And then… I think it's also sometimes what community you're in. You know what I mean?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah.
[DongWon] And if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles can sometimes not travel well and certain other communities.
[Charlie Jane] That's very true. Yeah. And like… Yeah… I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like I'm just going to do all of it and see what I can get away with, kind of.
[DongWon] Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Can I ask you… You said there's one version where it's like this, and there's one version where it's like that. Do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?
[Charlie Jane] I mean…
[Laughter]
[Charlie Jane] For that… For… When… I'm going to send people… When, I'm hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material. I had to… Like, one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like… Scenes that almost made it into the book, like, they got very close, but they were cut for link reasons. But also, there's a whole… Like, I'm calling it an alternate ending. It's like I feel a little bit bigger than that. It's like a whole other, like, version of the climax with a lot of stuff leading up to it that was different. And I… So the other day, I was looking back through the draft folder and I have things labeled, like, sixth draft, seventh draft, but it's very arbitrary.
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Charlie Jane] What you consider a draft, what you consider… What's just another pass. But it definitely went through, even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes… Went through editing with Tor. It had already gone through a bunch of different versions before that, for sure. Like it had already gone through multiple iterations. And, like, there were versions that were very different. Like people who get that PDF are going to be like, whoa. This book was going to be much weirder. Like, I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be. Like the… There was a very different version where, like, the climax is very different. And the plot is much more elaborate. Like, I think I dealt… I pared back the plot a lot to try to reach something that was more kind of… Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. Speaking of paring things back, okay, it is probably time for us to pare back to our homework. Did you have some homework for our fair listeners?
[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes… Like, intrudes into the scene a little bit with, like, little touches of omniscient, I thought… Think it would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and, just like add, like, five or six narrative asides that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know in the scene. Just like little bits of information. It doesn't have to be, like, major reveals, it could just be, like, oh, and by the way, this guy ran over someone's dog and nobody knew, and he got away with it, or something like… Just little bits of information that there's no way that anybody… Any of the characters, other than maybe the character we're revealing a secret of, could have known. Or, unbeknownst to these characters, three blocks away, this was happening. I don't know. But make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like… Not… Not just like complete like random information, but stuff that's, like, relevant to the scene and hopefully adds, like, a little bit of humor, but also, just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's happening in the scene.
[DongWon] I love that.
[Charlie Jane] And just see how that looks, see if… What it does to that scene.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's great homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.37: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Why

Sep. 18th, 2025 05:24 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.37: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Why 
 
 
Key points: Why? Intent. Thematics, tone, tradition. Core idea! Discover the theme after writing the book, or decide the theme before writing? Conversations or canons? Exploring questions. Hospitality. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 37]
 
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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 37]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" through the Lens of Why. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[DongWon] So, this is our last segment in this deep dive that we've been doing with Charlie Jane Anders book, "All the Birds in the Sky." We are delighted that we have an opportunity to talk to her as well, so there'll be an interview of her coming up to sort of recap a lot of what we've been talking about, which will be especially relevant for this week's topic, because, in part, we are talking about intent. This episode is really about the lens of why, and as we've talked about earlier in the year, things we're focused on are the thematics of the story, the author's intent, the way she uses tone and tradition to sort of express the core idea of the book. Right? So we're hitting this one last, because we get to kind of sum up a little bit some of the things we've talked about before in terms of setting, in terms of timeline, and in terms of character to get a real sense of how is she assembling all of these into a legible, coherent thematic message in all of this. And so, I guess, my question for you all, and it's a little bit of a broad question beyond just this book itself, but when you're thinking about your intention of putting these thematics in a project, how are you approaching that and how do you see Charlie Jane doing that here?
[Mary Robinette] It varies for me, project to project. Some of them I discover the theme after I've written it. This book feels very much like a lot of the themes were decided ahead of time. Which is, I think, some of it is the friction between two opposing views of the world.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But the other thing, for me, that I think… That I found intriguing was the… That friction comes from the stories that we tell ourselves about the world, and I see very deliberate decisions being… Book 1, book 2, book 3, like, the decisions that were to frame each of those, the decisions about the kinds of conversations the kids had, the tropes that Charlie Jane is using of here's a fantasy kid, here's the science fiction kid. I see those as being decisions that were probably made… Like, baked into the idea.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this has an explicitly dialectical structure. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You have two opposing viewpoints that have to reach synthesis by the end of the story. Right? In this very classic Hegelian structure, to get too wonky about it. But you have magic on one side, or magic and community and connection, and then you have sort of rationality, science, cerebral kind of approach to the world. In this sort of, like, we can solve the big problems versus we need to be… Trying to solve too big of a problem causes more problems. Right? That's like sort of these two competing viewpoints. And sort of the tension between individuals within those viewpoints with the systems that they're embedded in as well. So, you have all of these different layers, but the fundamental thing is quite simple, of magic versus science. Right? And then as you dig into that, she's found ways to layer on complexity over and over and over again to each of those elements.
[Howard] Yeah, because the schools of magic have finally come together historically. You had the healers and you have the tricksters, and they were at war, and science didn't enter into it. That was… Those two were fighting. And when we look at the way, I think the character's name is Milton, his approach to solving things with technology in many cases is to buy up technological solutions that would be competing with the way he wants to do it. And so that dialectic between… Or that contrast, that conflict between science and magic is reflected within each of those realms.
[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about… I was wondering for myself, thinking about, in magic, it's really explicit that there are these two things that had to come together. And I was wondering, like, what is it on the science side? It's harder… It was harder for me to parse. And as you were talking, I was thinking about, I guess, it's makers, because there's a lot of, like, makers and takers. Like it seems like there are the people who create things and then the people who acquire them from others. Which feels like it isn't exactly… Because the person they're taking from was also a maker, but, like, it feels like there is so much acquisition that it doesn't even allow for there to be a diversion within that side of things, in the same way that there is in the magical side of things.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I… That's interesting, because I actually thought that Serafina was in many ways representing the other side of science. Because she's working on the science of emotion with the robots. And that that is a thing that Lawrence specifically has trouble with, that he specifically has trouble with his own emotions and his relationship with this girlfriend and the types of science that he's doing are very, like, this is cool, this is flashy, let's go into another world. But emotions, that's this amazing almost witchcraft thing that the girlfriend is doing.
[DongWon] And it's the thing that changed Eunice. Right? To become a Peregrine, he needs that emotional resonance from having this connection to Patricia, and, yeah, I mean, there's also the magic she's accidentally putting into him, and all that. But the… On the magic side and on the science side, we get this microcosm view of what it is like for these two opposing things, and this sort of like uneasy synthesis that we get in the magic world of the healers versus the tricksters, that is really not a synthesis, it's just doing two different things at different times in a way that doesn't really work. You know what I mean? Like, the tension between the healers in the tricksters is like constant throughout that, and it was just such an interesting thing of her putting in this model of, like, here's the bad answer, here's what it looks like when you think you're synthesizing, but you haven't actually done the work to combine two different things.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And then… I mean, there's a little bit of a thing at the end of, like, we don't see how relieved that work… The hard work of synthesis happens between magic and science happens at the end, it's a little bit like done magically, but, like, a gesture towards this future that is more resolved than what we've seen in the magical world or in the scientific world, because, again, there is that tension there too, between the emotional and the science or between the makers and the takers. Right?
[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me, and I don't remember the exact, like, that in… When Lawrence goes to MIT, to see the rocket launch, and there's this dude who says, "Do you want to come see this really cool thing that I did with the rocket?" And… I can't remember her name, but the woman who's showing him around…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Isabel.
[Mary Robinette] Isabel. And she's like, "What you did?" And this idea of the takers who take credit for things that other people did as opposed to people who are, like, look at this community that we're working in.
[DongWon] And we see that in Milton, too. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And Milton puts Lawrence in that role of literally parachuting in and being like, oh, your company [garbled] Right? And we see what that does to that guy over time as he becomes, like, a more depressed version of himself, but also this more cautious version and a little bit wiser than the other people in the room, when they're like, "Should we blow up the world? What do you think?" You know what I mean? And, like, it's such an interesting scene because we get this note… I think it's him who has that note of caution in that conversation. But, yeah. So, in seeing sort of like the way in which these dialectics are like structured throughout the book, there's also this meta-commentary thing that's happening here. Right? That we have these two opposing ideas in terms of magic versus science, but we also have this book is synthesizing multiple traditions. Right? It's speaking to fantasy and science fiction, it's speaking to genre and to literary. Right? And we've kind of touched on these a little bit.
[Mary Robinette] And I think it's also speaking to age groups as well.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's like middle grade, YA, and adult all at once. In terms of the book itself, sitting at these, like, crossroads between all of these different genres and categories, in a way that I think… Not to put you on the spot, Dan, but it seemed like it was a little uncomfortable for you, and maybe like how do you bounce off the book a little bit. I guess, like, when you're looking at where does this book fit into the conversation that a genre is… How do you blend those two things? Right? We see a lot of science fantasy these days. But what makes it feel more one than the other?
[Erin] This is not an answer to your question at all.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But I…
[Howard] But I'm going to say it anyway.
[Erin] [garbled] Another path.
[DongWon] [garbled] stupid.
[Erin] [garbled] But it's like one thing that I love… If you go to book readings with, like, literary people…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] They'll always ask what works is your work in conversation with?
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] And, interestingly, despite the fact that I think science fiction and fantasy are extraordinarily historically focused genres, I don't hear that question as much on the genre side of things.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think it's assumed that you're in conversation with everything, and therefore, why are you even asking. But I don't actually know the reason that is.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there is a real resistance to that. Instead, in science fiction and fantasy, we talk about canon instead of conversations. Right? And, maybe I'm betraying the amount of time I've spent at poetry readings by trying to get us to talk more about conversations. Right? Because I think this book is in conversation with Earthsea and Diana Wynne Jones on the one side, and with, like, big idea science-fiction on the other side. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] They're such like… The characters on the scientific side are so clearly inspired by old school science-fiction, of, like, we can fix the world by doing X, Y, and Z, and then this heroic fantasy, this magical school stuff on the other side. And so trying to blend those two…
[Mary Robinette] You're making me think of something that I noticed just recently at a literary reading, and I was the only science-fiction person there. And I noticed that everyone who started their readings, whether they were doing poetry or a novel, would start with here's why I told this story, this is what this story is about, here are the images that I was interested in. And then they would read it. And whereas I'm like, hello, we're on Mars. Okay, let's go.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Let's take a break there, and when we come back, I really do want to dig into this, like, why did you write this book question.
 
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[DongWon] Welcome back. I think… Right before the break, Erin and Mary Robinette, you were both talking about these questions that you encounter in the literary world that you don't necessarily encounter in the genre world. Right? And we're drawing really, like, broad distinctions between those, but I think it's a little useful in this case. The thing that I'm always thinking about when I'm considering a manuscript, or reading a book, whether or not I enjoyed it, is do I feel the author's perspective in the text? Do I get a sense of where they're coming from, and why they wrote this thing? And then sometimes I'll ask them that and people seem really surprised at the question. Right? In the way that you're saying of, like, you… In our spaces, we don't always step back and consider why. Do you think it's useful to think about why before you start writing?
[Mary Robinette] So, what's interesting to me is that I do, in novel length, at any rate, I do usually have a reason that I'm conscious of before I start writing the book. A Why. For short fiction, sometimes I'm just like [uhu] and there's a story.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And that's coughed out. But with novels, there's always a question that I have that I'm kind of exploring. Like, in the Martian Contingency, I just joked that I was, like, all right, everybody, we're on Mars. Let's go. But what I was actually interested in was what does it take to create a new community in a new place. And so that's my why behind the writing is this question. And I don't know… Like, what I find useful about it is that when I was having to make a decision between two choices for something I could do in a scene, it helped me narrow down to this is the one that supports that question I'm asking.
[Dan] In my own writing, I have found that if I don't know why I'm writing a story in advance, or if my why is very shallow, then the book will come across as very shallow. My cyberpunk books, the [cherry dog?] books, which I love, and I will happily write more of them. The very first one, I wrote it because I wanted to write cyberpunk. That was the whole why. The question I was exploring was can Dan write a cyberpunk…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Book? And I think that you can see that in it. It doesn't feel as deep or as interesting as the other books in that same series. By the time I got to the third one, it was very much me exploring my relationship with my teenage daughter. What is it like, how is that relationship formed, how is it maintained, how can it go sour, and that was what I was looking at, doing it through the lens of this cyberpunk adventure story. And so when I have a why am I writing this and what is this about in mind in advance, even subconsciously,…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] The writing is more interesting.
[DongWon] Well, I think also, we've been saying this thing in terms of literary writers talk about who are they in conversation with, and then the why. I think a lot of that also is them looking back at what they have written. I don't know that they have those answers upfront. So…
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] Just to be clear, we're not saying that, like, this kind of writer thinks about it ahead of time, this kind of… I think we are all unreliable narrators…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Of our own intent in mind and all of that. And so I think sometimes it's figuring out what the hell did I write after the fact.
[Howard] I do not remember who wrote it, and it would take me a while to source it, but I remember the quote very well, which was the things that you think are your weaknesses are strengths. You're not ready to see your actual weaknesses.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Mm... Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That's a little close to home.
[Howard] I know. The first time I read that, I was like, oh, I hate that. I hate that so much. But on topic here, when I ask myself why am I writing this story, there's a spectator up in the nosebleed seats who says, whatever answer you come up with, that's great as long as it get you writing, but you're wrong. Because there is a real why there that you're not ready to look at yet. You need to be able to look at it before you finish the story. But be able to answer the question upfront. Be able to have a meaningful why that gets you writing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] But there's going to be something under that that's more important. And I know that sounds kind of whoo whoo and mystical, but…
[DongWon] You need to have a reason, it doesn't have to be the reason.
[Erin] Yeah. And I'll be honest, I really admire people, when I ask them, and actually a lot of genre people, like, who will sometimes say, like… I'm like, what are you writing? They're like, I'm writing about, like, grief and my cat. And I'm like, oh, my God. I'm writing this chick who sits in a room. Like, I…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] A lot of times, I am very, like, focused on what I'm trying to do and not why I'm trying to do it. And I really admire the ability to understand the greater why. I think a lot of times, for me, it's a little bit more like these are eight things that made me think about writing this story, and some of them are very silly, and maybe one of them is a little bit important, but probably not. And then, like, just kind of throwing that in a bag, like a bag of things, and shaking them.
[Dan] I hesitate to put words in Charlie Jane Anders mouth, and we can ask this question… We can ask why did you write this more fully when we do the interview with her. But the thing that kept coming across to me while reading it was that she was writing this book to kind of point out that magic and fantasy and science fiction were not all that different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Both sides came up with genuinely terrible plans to save the world. Both of those plans had the same ultimate effect of destroying community as a concept. And the finale is we have to synthesize these things and bring them together, we're really not all that different. And I don't know if that is what she actually intended. I don't know if that is… Like, I was reading it almost as a response to our community.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Dan] Fantasy and science fiction authors fighting with each other.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Dan] And, again, we'll have to ask her, but that's how it felt to me.
[DongWon] It's interesting, because, again, I think if… Maybe her idea at the beginning… I mean, we're projecting. Right? But as a thought experiment, if the idea at the beginning was I'm going to write a novel about the fight between fantasy and science fiction. But at the end of the day, what the book is actually about, and the final reveal is that the dialectic isn't math and magic, the dialectic is isolation and community. Right? And that's the thing that is really being contested with is how do we connect to each other, when we have all these differences. But you're right, that each of their solutions on the science side and on the magic side was what we need to do is disconnect from each other…
[Mary Robinette] And…
[DongWon] That is the enemy.
[Mary Robinette] And we see that on a small scene level, again, going all the way back to the beginning of the book, that the… When Patricia goes and she talks to the parliament of birds, when Lawrence goes and he goes to MIT, they both have a sense of belonging in that moment, of something amazing happening. Lawrence, in particular, felt like… There's the line when they see the two minute… Or two second time travel thing, about, that it was like a… Being let into a secret club. And then that gets taken away from them. And so I think through the whole book, you're absolutely right, there is this sense of community versus isolation, community is healthy, isolation is not healthy.
[Erin] Yeah, I think that it's really interesting through this whole discussion, listening to different things that we've said about the why of this book is like, DongWon, you've talked about the soul of San Francisco, which I… Like, being fought over, which is something I know zero things about. And I… It makes me wonder, like, is it even… Is it important… I think it is not important, I will say that we actually know the why…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] As long as it feels like there is a why, to what Dan was saying. And, what I think is interesting is sometimes people in science fiction especially will say, like, I didn't like this story because it felt like it was trying to teach me something. It felt like the theme was too strong and too easily understood. And I wonder if that is what it is. Like, if it… If everybody comes away with the exact same point…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Then it feels like it's too heavy on the page.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That there should be a little bit of a lightness that allows you to read a few different thematic elements into it, as opposed to just like banging you over the head with one.
[Mary Robinette] I heard Elizabeth Bear said this thing. She said the difference between a story and a polemic is that a story asks you a question and a polemic answers it.
[Dan] I was about to say the exact same thing. When I teach about theme, that's what I tell students, is that theme is a question that your book is going to explore, not necessarily a book… Not necessarily a question they're going to answer.
[DongWon] Well, I was thinking about the movie Sinners, because it's all I think about these days, and one of the things I really love about that film is it refused to resolve into an easy answer. Right? It presents you lots of easy answers along the way, and then one by one, knocks those pins down. Right? And then leaves you in this place, not of confusion, there's an emotional clarity. But then when you try to unpack it into easy lessons, it's very resistant to that. And I think one thing that is really lovely in this book is we start with thinking, oh, it's going to be X or it's going to be Y. And then the end result is something different. Right? And I… It still feels like… She sets up the shape of the answer, and that shape is still true, but the details all change along the way and really matter what those changes are.
[Howard] One of the questions that I ask myself, usually mid project, is not why am I telling this story, but it's why is anybody reading it. And you can take it tongue-in-cheek. Why would anybody read this? I'm working on a bonus story right now for the next Schlock Mercenary book, and I realized I was doing a fine job of telling the story, but part of the why with people reading it is because they want to look at the pictures. And I realized I needed to pay a little more attention to what was going on in the background. And then I started doing some worldbuilding in the background, and came up with this whole thematic idea of [Geiger Suisse] as the architecture. And one thing led to another, and I realized, oh, yeah, I really needed to ask that question. Because now the story is deeper. There's more going on, because I recognized that the reader doesn't just want to read the story that I have in mind, they want to look at something else that inspires, makes a sense of wonder, or whatever. And I don't have to ask or answer questions with it, I just need to put things in.
[Dan] Geiger Suisse sounds like a genre of music that I would deeply love, and never listen to.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] This is pretty accurate, I think. But something you were saying made me want to add yet another metaphor into the lens of…
[Unknown] Yes, please.
[Mary Robinette] Writing. Which I got from… I've been thinking about it a lot. Which I got from Amal El-Mahtar, where she did a keynote speech talking about writing as an act of hospitality.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Which it. And I've been thinking about it in terms of the why of it. That when you buy a house, when you decorate the house, when you buy furniture for that house, that you're serving the why of yourself. These are the needs I have, and that that is the writing of the story. But you're also thinking about who you want to be inviting into the home and the circumstances under which you want to invite them in. So, like, someone who knows that they have a lot of out-of-town guests is going to want to set up something that has a guestroom. Somebody who's like, oh, my God, please, no, no one into my house, is like we have barstools. But when someone comes into your home, like, you… Like if someone's coming in with a mobility device, you'll add a ramp, you'll rearrange the furniture. But if someone comes in and they don't like the color orange, you don't hide the orange. So, knowing why you're making changes to the story is about knowing how it serves you, but also how it serves the people that you are inviting into the story. And some of that goes back to the things we were talking about earlier, about providing context for people who wouldn't… Who come into the story who don't have the context, but you want them to feel welcome.
[Erin] I think that's true. I also think though I do want to say a word for stories that live in a place of discomfort. In which the point is for you to sit on furniture that you would never have sat on…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And not enjoy it and make that think about what this says about the way you sit in the way you stand in the world, and where you feel welcome and where you assume that you are not welcomed. And so I think there's something really exciting about hospitality, because hospitality can be a welcome, and hospitality can also be something that you are doing to someone. You can be inhospitable on purpose, in order for people to think about what it means in order to be hospitable to others.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] The thing I would say about that is, like, a haunted house is also an act of hospitality. People are signing on for the ride.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] although, you should communicate what this is. And so, yeah, I think sometimes, if I'm inviting people over, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to serve you my food, the kind of things that I eat and like to cook. And I'm not going to serve you something that you literally can't eat, because you're vegetarian or allergic to an ingredient.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] But beyond that, also, this is my home, it's my created experience that you're going to experience [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] And there's some people that you don't invite into your home.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And also they're…
[Howard] Gordon Ramsay.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But also, like, I… When I… I have a massage therapist who will come to the house sometimes to help me deal with some stuff. And, yeah, I experience some pain.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] In that house and I am better for it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But that is, again, deliberate decisions and the why of it. So, but, the why at first is how does it serve you the writer, and then you start thinking about who else you want to affect.
[Howard] Which is why I say it hits me about mid project…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] When I have to ask that question again.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So…
[DongWon] I love this topic. I feel like we could talk about this for a very long time, but we're going to leave it there for now. Thank you all for going along with us on this deep dive into Charlie Jane Anders "All the Birds in the Sky." I'm very excited to talk to her and find out more about her perspective on it and the things that she wants to talk about, in terms of the process of writing that book.
 
[DongWon] In the meantime, though, I have a little bit of homework for you. I want you to take some time away from your drafting as part of your writing process, and really sit down and think about your intentions. What is your why of this project? Why are you feeling like this is the story you need to write now, in this moment, as your next thing? And write that down. It doesn't have to be long, it can be a simple sentence. And then once you've written it down, take it out of your notebook, put it in a desk drawer somewhere, and don't look at it.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.36: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of When

Sep. 12th, 2025 07:15 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.36: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of When  
 
 
Key points: When? Flashbacks and foreshadowing. Chronoplotologically! Foreshadowing for tension and stakes. Beware of flashbacks in the middle of action scenes! Don't use flashbacks to relieve tension! Visible foreshadowing and covert foreshadowing. Foresahdowing as revision. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 36]
 
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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 36]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" through the lens of When.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] And we are going to be looking today at the lens of when. Which is a little bit of a cheat, because when we did our lenses, we put where and when together. And we did, I think, a single episode about time. And I am also going to cheat in that this story takes place… This book takes place in multiple time periods, but I'm completely uninterested in that.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I'm not going to talk about it at all. Instead, what interests me is the use of foreshadowing. When I think about time, I think a lot about flashbacks and foreshadow. Where you are in the time of the story, the when of the story moment.
[Dan] Well, and it's interesting, because this book takes place in four different times, but they are not presented chronologically. There are a lot of flashbacks in it. And so she is using time very intentionally and very specifically. And just because something took place, like, in school for Patricia, doesn't mean that we're not going to hear about it at the end of the book, because that's when, emotionally, it needs to be there.
[Howard] So it's chronoplotologically… We start in grade school, and we end with them as adults. But when the plot requires it, we flashback chronoplotologically.
[Erin] That is not a word.
[Dan] I like how so many of our jokes are Howard saying a weird thing, and then we all stare at him, and then he explains it, and we go, oh, okay, actually, that makes sense.
[Laughter]
[Howard] That's not actually the definition of a joke. If it was a joke, we'd be laughing with me instead of at me.
[Mary Robinette] That's not the function of you in the pod… No…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And we're back to the lens of who.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled]
[Howard] Let's go back to when.
[Erin] Yeah, let's go back to when. One of the things that I found really striking in this story is Theodolphus. I assume that is how you pronounce…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] His name. When Theodolphus is introduced to show us the horrible future that will happen to these kids. I'm sure Theodolphus does other things, and he does, but this is, I feel like, a huge thing. Because it is a big flashforward. It is a big jump forward to show us this future, and to really, I think, set up how we view these two kids. And I'm wondering, like, how did that affect do you think your reading of the story to know that there was a future when that we are theoretically, like, hurtling towards for the rest of the story?
[DongWon] I mean, the foreshadowing felt really essential, because it creates tension throughout the book. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It gives us stakes in the relationship beyond just the general interest in the characters. Right? And I think a couple episodes ago, we were talking a little bit about the tension between a literary impulse and the genre impulse a little bit. And this is, I think, the connective tissue is in here. Right? In terms of what she wants us to do is pay attention to the nuances of a relationship, and she's going to give us this genre framing device around prophecy, around doom and the end of the world and apocalyptic kind of visions. But the thing that's also so interesting about what she does with Theodolphus is she goes through a great deal of work to humanize him. Right? He is an assassin, who knows all these different ways to kill people, but (a) he can't kill these kids, which makes him, like, a Sunday morning cartoon sort of villain in a funny way. But also, the way in which he genuinely enjoys being a guidance counselor…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Added so much dimension to him, and adds so much pathos to when we see him again in the future as sort of this sad broken man on the street. Right? And sort of reiterating the doomed prophecy that he was given initially. Right? And so there's this thing of… He's a character who is there as an antagonist out to kill these children who we've grown very fond of, or hopefully have grown fond of, and… But because he's shown to be a creature of empathy and understanding, it add so much texture and context to the doom that he projects. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, and also it's interesting, as you were talking about it, I was reflecting, this prophecy that he was given at the beginning. It's, like, actually, no, that is not when he was given it in terms of when we experience the book.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So his scene is… Contains both a flashback and foreshadowing. Because we meet him after the kids have played their game about what are these people. And then the narration does a quick flashback. As it happens, she was correct. And then we meet him, and then he is another flashback to the going to look into the seeing hole or something like that…
[DongWon] Something like that, yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It… Like… How he gets the prophecy and then… But the prophecy is about the future. So it is this interesting back-and-forth. I think one of the things that I see Charlie Jane doing with this is choosing the moment when to flashback and flashforward. Choosing a moment where it's going to add to tension and help keep the story moving. Where I see the failure mode of this with a lot of early career writers, when I've done my own stuff, is the flashback happens, like, in the middle of a high impact action scene, and everything stops, because the story is now no longer moving towards a goal, it is looking at the foundation work.
[DongWon] One of the things I love about this book in general, and this comes… And I see this in how she uses time. So, flashforwards and flashbacks too, foreshadowing and things like that, and how she uses POV in terms of getting close to the character and out… Zooming in and out and all these things, is she does a lot of this in ways that break conventional rules.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] It's like, oh, you're not supposed to shift POV like this. You're not supposed to have just a character… Like, Theodolphus kind of comes out of nowhere as this POV character, and I was like, who's this guy?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] What's he doing here? And yet it's like it just works. There's so many things that she does because it works in the moment more than it works in the meta-structure of the book. And… Without disrupting the meta-structure of the book. I don't think she does that. But there is a priority that she has in terms of impact in the moment that makes this such effective storytelling for me.
 
[Erin] And, so I'm wondering, if you're trying to do this, and you're like, okay, I understand the chronology of the story, I understand the plot of the story. Now I'm going to try chronoplotology, which is [garbled] as we know, the practice…
[Howard] I love you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Of doing that. Like, how do you actually figure out when is the time to flashback, when is the time to project forward in order to create or release that tension?
[Howard] I have found an almost ironclad rule for when not to flashback. And that is don't flashback as a tool to relieve tension by stepping away from the tension and telling another story because that's just going to upset people. Find a different tool to relieve the tension. If I have to explain something in order to move this other scene forward, I need to explain it somewhere else, rather than breaking tension in order to do it. So all I've got for you right now is my personal ironclad don't. Which is not going to be ironclad for anybody else.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I often refer to one of my favorite tools, which is the MICE quotient. That if… A lot of times, the flashback is because I need to start the story… This thread moving. But if I put that thread in where it belongs chronologically, it does not work chronoplotologically. Howard, I hate you.
[DongWon] Why have we done this to ourselves?
[Mary Robinette] It's a useful…
[DongWon] Actually, it is.
[Mary Robinette] Unfortunately, it is a very useful construction, I just wish it was easier to say. But, like, if we had done all of these things strictly chronologically, we would have been starting with Theodolphus and his vision about these kids. And that's not useful. So the way I think about it when I'm talking about the MICE quotient is it's about the sequence in which you are telling the story to the reader. So I look at which things are the things that I want to keep tension on, and then when do I need to introduce something in order to activate either existing tension or introduce tension that is moving forward. And a lot of that, then, has to do with additional decisions. The problem with giving a lot of advice on this is that we can kind of say here are the metrics to look at, but it is very much a season to taste.
[DongWon] Well, what's also really important about the way the foreshadowing in Theodolphus works in this first section is that it's not about… The stakes aren't the end of the world. The thing we're concerned about is that the world's going to end. The thing that hits us emotionally is that Patricia and Lawrence are going to be at war with each other.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] It's the fracture of the relationship that is the stakes. And what Theodolphus does to these kids, because he can't kill them, is to try to turn them against each other. Which is a thing that he's actually successful at doing, in large part, and is the thing that's most hurtful to these kids and to us, the reader, who's experiencing this journey. Right? So the foreshadowing works and is introduced at a point where we already care about their connection and now you can have stakes, because there's something at risk.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? And the risk is how these characters see each other and how they feel about each other.
[Erin] Not to, like, over index on the idea that we're talking about lenses, but this actually makes me think of going to the eye doctor, and I promise this will connect. It's like when the eye doctor is, like, doing the is it better if you look through the left eye or the right eye.
[DongWon] One, two.
[Erin] What they do first is the big things, like, the big, like, how… Basically, like, how nearsighted or farsighted are you?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And that's the main lens. And then they'll do small adjustments to, like, astigmatism that are like… This is when they're like, is it one or two, and you're like, you're making this up. They're all the same.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But I think one of the things that I'm thinking about with this is figuring out what is the major lens through which you want your reader to experience the story? Here, as we talked about in talking about who, the major lens is who. And what the when does, it's those smaller things that actually make the who clearer or less clear as it needs to be for the story, but it doesn't take over as of when focused story would be, which would be to take us from the beginning into the end. And, speaking of taking us from the beginning into the end, we are going to take a break, and when we come back, birds.
 
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[Erin] Pickle!
[DongWon] See, reader, this is what we call foreshadowing…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] [garbled Erin] called the shots before the break, and we all just cocked our heads and looked at Erin, seeing how this was going to result.
[Mary Robinette] Cannot wait to see the bird die.
[Erin] So, the birds. In this story, there is a thing about time on the page, which is that the birds show up throughout the latter half to say, "Too late! Too late! Caw!"
[Mary Robinette] Too late.
[Dan] Yes.
[Erin] Too late! And so that's interesting, because it is… What is that? Would you consider that to be foreshadowing, is it… I mean, it doesn't end up completely coming to pass. What is the purpose of having the birds remind us of where we are in the world and the story as an in-story element.
[Howard] This comes back to the timing of introducing Theodolphus. We had to earn… Theodolphus had to earn the right to be prophetic. And he earned it by us believing that Patricia saw the tree and had magic and Lawrence created an AI in his closet. And so now we can believe that this guy had a prophetic experience. If we had heard it first, we wouldn't have believed it. Okay. Well, so now we've got unreliability of narrators set aside for a moment. We come to the birds, and we have earned, or Charlie Jane has earned, the story has earned the ability to convince me that when a bird says a thing, it's important and it's true and the bird might not fully understand what it's saying, but I'm supposed to feel something. And what I feel is an increase in tension, a little bit of dread. It's too late? How far too late is it? But if we had led with the birds, which obviously we couldn't, but if we'd lead with it, the story hadn't earned it yet, because it hadn't told us that the birds could do this.
[Dan] I don't remember if this works exactly, but I'm pretty sure it does. As the birds kind of replace Theodolphus. He disappears from the story, fairly abruptly. And it's after that that the birds start saying too late, too late. And I think a big part of that is we don't need the prophet anymore, because it's already happened. The thing he was prophesying is here. And so that's what the birds are, is, okay, this thing is happening now.
 
[Mary Robinette] The balls are falling. One of the things, as we're talking about foreshadowing, that I kind of want to draw attention to is that there's kind of two modes of foreshadowing that are happening. One mode is stuff that Charlie Jane is doing deliberately, thematically, and very visibly. Those are the things like the there's a prophecy, that kind of thing, that are very clearly on the page and they're addressed at the reader. And then there's also invisible or covert foreshadowing, which you don't notice until you read it a second time, like some of the things that I was calling out in earlier episodes where she's saying this is a thing that she had learned about Lawrence, that you couldn't count on him, that those… There's reasons that that comes back later, and it's not necessarily something that you would notice on the first time as, oh, this is a big thematic thing. When… Like, I've talked to early career writers who are trying to figure out, well, how do I put the foreshadowing in? And what I want you to know is that mechanically, the way you do that is that most of the time, the foreshadowing is you get to the end of the book and saying, what have I put on the table already and what ingredients can I use? And grabbing those and writing… So that a lot of the invisible foreshadows or the foreshadowing that the reader doesn't necessarily notice the first time around is what I think of as hindsight foreshadowing, which is usually the reader mechanically reaching back. I have found that when I have attempted to put the foreshadowing in, unless it is this very conscious, very visible… If I want the subtle foreshadowing that the reader… That every single time, I am telegraphing things in ways that are unpleasant for the reader. And that Charlie Jane is managing to do these two different types of foreshadowing without falling into this annoying, well, I could see that coming.
[Howard] One thing that may not be obvious to readers is that you are not reading books in the order, word for word, page for page, in the order in which they were written. With rare, exceedingly rare, exception, you are reading something where it's been written, and then the smarter version of the author has gone back and retroactively foreshadowed or whatever.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'd be very interested to learn if Theodolphus was in the first draft of the novel.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I… My suspicion is not. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] But I think what's so interesting about the way foreshadowing works here, and this… Really going back to over indexing on the metaphor of lens here. Right? Is the way the foreshadowing and the way prophecy works in this is a lens into character. Over and over and over again. How the characters interpret the information they are given influences how they behave in the future, which reinforces their trauma, their rifts, their disagreements. Right? And so Theodolphus, a creature of violence, sees the violence coming at the end and cannot imagine a resolution other than the end of the world. Right? And then Patricia, being told that Lawrence is going to do this thing and that she must kill him, can only see that she must distance herself from this person who has distanced himself from her. Right? And so it's just like this repeats over and over again, and then, where the bird prophecy comes in at the end of the too late, too late, is simply Patricia interpreting that of oh, it is too late, it's too late to save the world, it's too late to do the things I needed to do. Lawrence is gone, I screwed all this up, and that is her own negativity, her own depression, her own cycle of trauma sort of repeating itself in that. When actually, the birds are talking about something completely irrelevant. I mean, to spoil the ending here, it's like the riddle from the birds… It don't matter at all. It's just her getting back to the tree. That's the important part. She was too late to come back and answer the riddle, but the parliament of birds are kind of just a bunch of idiots…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] As far as we can tell. You know what I mean? Delightful idiots, I love birds, but that seems accurate. I mean… And so it is this thing that because it is so closely filtered through the unreliable perspective of the character, we can see the way in which foreshadowing becomes yet another tool in her toolkit (A) to create tension between these characters and create that forward momentum of the plot, but to let us understand the perspective of these individuals and the flaws in that that drive them to make decisions that are quote unquote nonoptimal, in that way of, like, well, what if… Why didn't they just do X, Y, and Z, and that would have saved everything? It's like, because that's not how people work. People make flawed decisions on imperfect information for good reasons all the time.
[Erin] Yeah, it's like… It's interesting to me that both of the… Both the magic and the tech people are sort of… They feel like they are in a foreshadowing, like, they both project forward…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] What they believe the future will be, and then attempt to do something heinous to control it or change it or flee from it. And so a lot of the entire book is, in some ways, like what happens if you see the future and you don't feel like… You see it coming, and it feels like there's nothing you can do to change it. Which is where I'm going to reveal that I, an unreliable narrator, lied and do want to talk a tiny bit about the time in which…
[Laughter]
[Erin] This story is set. Which is that, like, it is set in a world that is not ours, but is very technologically similar to our own. And so I'm wondering, like, how does that… Do you think that changes the way you read the story, or, like, the disasters of the story, in that it feels like it could… It's not an impossibility to the when of our own times or was that just me?
[DongWon] The whole book is so heightened. Right? Everything about it is heightened from the way the kids experience their adventure, the emotions around the rifts between them, and then the disasters that are happening at the end. And yet, I mean, in the years since this book was published, we've all experienced natural disasters, we've experienced conflict, and we've experienced a lot of things that are hinted at or explicitly described in this book. Not in a literal one-for-one way, but a lot of what she's talking about here feels very familiar. And it's why my reading of it is so grounded in a specific place and time of, like, this is about this city's conflicts. This is about this particular thing that she was working through in her own mind of what do we do about the problem of this city? What do we do about this conflict between these communities?
[Mary Robinette] I think it's inevitable that you will read the book through the lens of whichever time that you're in.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And having an overlap of when the book was written makes a lot of the parallels, I think, a little more clear. But also, as we move farther away from it, the billionaires destroying the world kind of situation, like, that again, that is something… This specific incarnation of it is something that happened years after Charlie Jane wrote the book, but it is still something that resonates, that connects. But when you read much older books, I think we still have those resonances and connections where we can draw parallels to where we are now or when we are now. So I think it's inevitable, and I think it's something that we can kind of overthink as writers too much.
[Erin] I was going to ask, do you think that's something we should… I know there's something people will worry about, especially people writing science fiction, near future, current versions of us is do you worry that what you're writing becomes dated? Do you worry that you're out of time, and then people will not relate to your story anymore?
[DongWon] I mean, that's the thing, is that science fiction is never about the future. Science fiction's always about the present moment it's written in. Right? William Gibson's Neuromancer feels futuristic even to us now, even though the technology is wildly outdated compared to what we have now. Right? You watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. None of our technology looks like that…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] At this point, but that movie still feels futuristic to us. And that's okay. You need to hit the feeling of futuristicness, but you don't need to be predictive about technology. And, I mean, frankly Charlie Jane did a pretty good… There's some called shots in here in terms of, like,…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] Generative AI, billionaires who are willing to destroy the planet just so they can go to Mars. Right? Like, there's a number of things that are just called shots here, because I think communities that she was in, being a tech journalist for so many years, all those kinds of things, like, I think, gave her a certain perspective that let her call these shots. But also those things that are coming true in this moment, 10 years from now, who knows what they will be. But because the thematic resonances are so rich, I think even if those technological things don't work out, because this book is about a moment in time, as all books necessarily are, and letting that be felt, I think, it works in a way that I don't need it to… In the way that Neuromancer doesn't need cell phones to feel like crazy, cool, future tech. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] To address the question very, very specifically, when I am writing, I'm writing for an audience who comes from the same chronological context that I do. I'm not trying to write for a future audience. If I were trying to write for a future audience, I would write something very, very different. And I recognize that the audience who reads whatever I write today… Ah, you know what, about 80 percent of what they get out of what I write is something that they brought with them into what I wrote. In 100 years from now, in the unlikely circumstance that anybody's reading anything I wrote 100 years from now, the number will be closer to like 95 percent.
[DongWon] I think the thing that keeps it from feeling dated is when you lean into concepts and trends.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Like big ideas, rather than like lingo and details. Right? Like if somebody was like [scibidee?] toilet in this, it would be like, whoa, that was a very specific moment. Actually, that would be a wild called shot from… If she wrote this back then. But…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] If there were things that are just like so of a particular moment in slang, unless you're writing a thing that is intended to be a period piece. That's where you need to find the fine line between what's the idea of the thing versus, like, putting a specific version of the thing in your book. Right? So everything being a slightly abstracted form and, like, shifted one step of these tech companies and these like billionaires rather than being this is this person doing this thing for this company, I think that helps to keep it feel from… Keeping it from being too dated.
[Erin] Agreed. And now we have come to the time for the homework.
 
[Erin] So, pick a scene in your current work. And I want you to think about two moments. One moment in the past of that that is resonant still with that scene, and one moment that will happen in the future that is also resonant with that scene. And write two different versions of the scene. One in which the past weighs heavily on it. And one in which the foreshadowing of the future weighs heavily on it. And then see what the difference is.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.35: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Where

Sep. 4th, 2025 05:45 pm
mbarker: (MantisYes)
[personal profile] mbarker
 Writing Excuses 20.35: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Where 
 
 
Key Points: Place! Grounding? Context. Lived in. Details. Unnecessary details. Interactions. Senses. Familiar place and character interacts with place, draws reader in. Setting as immersion, but also as a lens on what the character thinks and feels. What is the emotional function of the place? Sense of wonder?
 
[Season 20, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Where. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Howard] And I'm here to talk about places. All the Birds in the Sky had, for me, some of the most memorable and grounding place moments in anything I've read recently. One of them was when Lawrence is taking his trip to, I guess it was MIT, to go see a launch, and someone tells him, oh, I'll give directions to your parents so they can find their way there. And someone comments that they'll never find their way there without specific directions. Because I remember a couple of occasions driving in Boston and complaining about it to someone and having them tell me, oh, yeah, the budget for the Boston MTA is handled like here's the amount of money you have. See how wrong you can make all the maps.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And I bring that up because it feels like something that everybody who lives in Boston knows. And it's something that, by the characters brushing up against it in this flirtation with the location, we become very grounded in it. Oh, yes, that's Boston.
[Mary Robinette] What I like about that, actually, is that the way Charlie Jane is handling one of the tools that we have, which is context. Anyone who knows Boston knows that this is true, but she also provides context for people who don't know Boston. Which is a great trick that you can use with, like, secondary world fantasy. It's not just for real-world places.
[DongWon] Well, I mean, what I really love in the later portions of the novel is how lived in this vision of San Francisco feels. It feels like the author has such a deep connection to this place. And, I don't know if Ernesto's bookstore is real, and if it's inside the mall that is described in the book, but I believe that that's a real place that has been transformed in this way. I believe that these streets are laid out like this. And there's so many details from the bus stop to the parks to all these that feel very authentic to me in a way that is so detailed, that gives this backdrop, and this context, to the characters. Right? And so this fight between magic and technology feels really rooted in this fight over San Francisco that we've seen unfold over the last couple decades. I can't remember exactly when this book comes out, but, like, it is definitely in the heart of that conversation. Right? And so place is really informing the characters responses and goals in a very deep way.
[Erin] Yeah. I think something really interesting about, like, why it feels lived in is that there's always the unnecessary detail which is often the way we think about place. You know what I mean? It's like if you… I think sometimes the mistake you can make as a writer is to be like I'm describing the beach, so I'm going to talk about how, like, there's sand and waves and all the things that a beach contains. But a lot of times, it'll be, like, that's the beach where, like, every spring, the penguins, like, flood it for some reason. How they got there, I don't know. And leave behind penguin eggs, and, like, then you have to step over them. That's the thing that, like, if I went, I would remember about the beach.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It is either something emotional context to me or an interesting detail that distinguishes it. Like, the mall where all the signs are in… Or half, or all the signs are in Spanish, is something that, like, you're going to remember that's going to distinguish it, and I love that she manages to put that in.
[Dan] Well, and so much of the description of place is couched in interactions. Yes, she's not just describing the bookstore, she's not just describing the restaurants, but giving real specific details about how the characters interact with those places. Two of the ones that really stood out for me were, at one point, they flagged down a food truck, which is so completely outside of my experience with food trucks that it immediately took me somewhere else, and I'm like, oh, this must be a thing that the author has experienced. This must be unique to that place. The other was they… I think it was Lawrence was eating fried chicken at some point, and just going on and on about how it didn't leave his fingers messy. And that's such a small little detail about this one specific chicken place that fries in such a way that it doesn't get all greasy. And those are such a brilliant way of letting you into that space.
[Mary Robinette] I also am just going to… That the interaction thing made me remember a line… When the kids are in middle school, and they run away to try to go to the river, because it makes a pew pew sound.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And there's this line, well, this sucks. Lawrence squatted down to examine the river, nearly soaking his butt in the slushy ground. What's the point of ditching school if we can't go make laser noises from the ice? But the… That squatting down to examine the river, nearly soaking his butt on the slushy ground. Even if you haven't experienced that kind of wetness, that kind of… If you are someplace that doesn't get snow, that doesn't get sluggish, you know what it's like to have your butt wet from sitting on something that was unexpectedly damp. And I love that she gives us this very tangible thing that implies the rest of the world, and also through a way… Like with your fried chicken example, you know what it's like to eat fried chicken and thinking about the wonder of, oh, wow, fried chicken that doesn't make my hands messy. It's like… It just… It invite you in and implies everything else through one of the other things that we use for where, which is that… The senses.
[Howard] Yeah. There's a chain here that I want to make sure we've established the connections. Having a place that I'm familiar with in the book grounds me in the book. Having a character interact with a place makes the setting and the character work together. If you've got all three of those, to where I know the place and the character interacts with the place, then you've completed this link that has drawn me all the way into the story. And yes, Mary Robinette, as you were saying, the senses. I think of the spice house. The description of that house where the wood smells like things used in curry. The woods in the first chapter… If any of you have gone wandering in the woods as a kid, and been lost, there is an emotional element to a forest where you don't know which way the road is. And Charlie Jane connects us to that, and connects the characters to that, and uses where as a lens to pull us… Me, anyway, all the way into the story.
[Mary Robinette] I think the other thing that she does that's related to this is that she's also using the where, the place in the characters perceptions of it, to underline some of the major themes of the book. There's this line… I'm going to read you a fair bit here, but…
 
The parrots were eating cherry blossoms on the top of a big tree on the crest of a steep hill not far from Grace Cathedral. A half a dozen green birds with red splotches on their heads just tearing the ship out of those white flowers. Petals scattered across the sidewalk and the grass as the birds squawked and worked their crooked beaks while Lawrence and Patricia watched from the steep bank of the parklet across the street. San Francisco never stopped astonishing Lawrence. Wild raccoons and possums wandered the streets, especially at night, and their shiny fur and long tails looked like stray cats unless you looked twice. And he talks a little bit more, and then says, the only reason Lawrence ever saw these urban twists of nature was because he hung out with Patricia. She saw whole different city than he did.
 
And that, for me, is like cap… Like encapsulating the strength of their friendship and the crux of the book, that they see different worlds. And so, by presenting these different worlds, by having this moment where Lawrence is looking at the birds, but we know that he is not seeing the birds the same way Patricia experiences birds, is, I think, one of the fun ways that Charlie Jane is using where to support this theme that we've been talking about with the book.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, sort of encapsulating a lot of what we've been talking about. So, I think the mistake that people make when talking about setting or worldbuilding is that it's about immersion. Right? People think it's about immersion, and it is, to some extent.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You want to, like, have your reader smelling, seeing, what do this feel like when they touch it. I think all that is incredibly important, but even more important than that is the lens into how the character thinks and feels about the world. Right? And that is everything from both examples, in terms of, like, the fried chicken and the slush are telling us something about Lawrence, in that he's kind of fussy.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] He doesn't like to be dirty. It would be so bad for him if his butt touched that slush, in a way that Patricia would be not notice it at the same level. He's thinking about, is there grease on my hands? Right? And the thing about getting, and what I love about what she has done here with San Francisco in the latter half of the book is… The way I talk about New York City is that it's haunted. Right? Because anywhere I go in New York City, after having lived there for the majority of my adult life… I no longer live there, sadly. But is I have so many memories of every neighborhood, and versions of that neighborhood, and versions of the person I was in the people I knew and who I went there with, who I was hanging out with then. All of these things are layered on any space I go to in New York, pretty much. Any neighborhood, any region. They're… I just have lived so much of my life there. Right? And so setting, I think, when I think about it is this leads into character and emotion, because it's about what they were connected to in that time, how the people that they are with… In the way that that scene you just described is changing literally how Lawrence sees the world. He is noticing the parrots of telegraph Hill. He is noticing the raccoons. He's noticing all of these different elements that he just would have been invisible to him without this person that he's with.
[Howard] Okay. I have a question that I want to ask all of you. And it's a tricky one, so we're going to wait until we've taken a break.
 
[Howard] I promised you a tricky question. It's so tricky that I have to explain it first.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] In many stories, the place that a thing happens, the where, is chosen because something… It had to happen somewhere. It's… They have to be standing on something. They have to be breathing something. San Francisco, in this book, is not that place. It is a character unto itself. But are there places in this book, and I can only think of one, are there places in this book that are used because the plot had to do a thing, but it doesn't really matter where it happened. And the only one I can think of is the flashback to Siberia. We had to have a thing happen that was bad, and it had to happen where there was methane [clathrate?] And so on and so forth, and so we picked Siberia. But it could just as easily have been Canada or Alaska or something.
[DongWon] I'm going to disagree with the premise of your question a little bit. And then I'll sort of circle back to answering the thing that you're asking. But, to me, I don't think that San Francisco is just a character of the book. I think the book is about San Francisco in a very, very deep way. Right? And it's about this sort of fight for the soul of the city in terms of this community and connection on one side, this pursuit of technological solutions on the other side. Right? This technocracy that has sort of taken over how they think about the city versus this person, Patricia, who is out there helping people who are living with AIDS, helping people who are homeless or being taken advantage of. Right? It's this real fight over what it means… And also just sort of the myopicness of what is happening outside of San Francisco that influences so much of the book, of, like, oh, yeah, that happened in Korea. That happened in Florida. That happened over there.
[Howard] I will concede that in my haste, I understated the importance of San Francisco.
[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Howard] To the story. The question stands, though.
[DongWon] The question does stand, and I do think that it's one thing that's really interesting is when she does jump to other locations, aside from Boston, Boston and MIT feel really important, because that's like where a lot of his tech starts from and then ends up in San Francisco in the Bay Area. Right? But then the stuff that is happening outside that, whether that's Denver, Colorado, maybe it wasn't about Denver… Colorado or [Saguaro?] they all feel a little bit like, oh, this could be kind of anywhere. Because the book isn't about those places, the book is about this place over here. Right?
[Erin] Oh. I was just going to say that… You're talking about place as a character, it occurs to me that place being a character doesn't mean it has to be a particular type of character. So, like, in this way, perhaps, like, it is a… It is the thing that the two… It's like they're trying to, like, fight over in this divorce type of thing. The two sides are fighting over. Where Siberia, to me, feels like an antagonist. There are a few times in which the place is the antagonist. The Eastern European city that Patricia gets dropped into and can't understand anything that they are saying. The maze part of the school where it's like… It just… The way that that places described, it's just a litany of bad things that happen to you there. The maze isn't really described, it's like, and then maybe you get stuck in a whole or, like, then, maybe you fall off a wall, and, like, your flat, or whatever happens in the maze. And then it's like… But we don't ever see it, other than that.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And so, maybe, the thing to think about a little bit is what kind of character is the place playing? Is it just a one off, is it a deep part of it, is it something that the characters are going to have to fight with or against?
[DongWon] Well, thematically, bad stuff happens when you don't have deep connections to the place. Right? All the places you're describing, the characters aren't connected to and that's where all the bad stuff in this book happens.
[Mary Robinette] So, I actually want to talk about one of the places that is a literal character, which is the tree.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Mary Robinette] And one of the things about the tree is that when she first sees it, it is just a place. The birds occupy it. And then the second time she comes across the parliament of… Where the parliament of birds, she… It is just the tree and her talking, and it's just a character at that point. But then when she returns to it as an adult and looks at it, she is aware of it as a place, but also as an entity. Which is, I think, one of the interesting things about this, because one of the… It's something that happens with the other characters. We see it happen with her and Roberta, that her relationship to them changes, so her understanding of them changes. And I think that also happens with place, but I think the tree is the only thing really that she experiences as a child and as a… Like that we… Has a continuity all through the thing, that her relationship to it changes.
[Howard] The tree functions as opening and closing parentheses. And if you include Lawrence's closet, and treat Lawrence's closet as Peregrine and then as Caddie, we have opening parentheses twice with the tree and the closet, and then at the end of the story, we have closing parentheses for the tree and the closet, Caddie, become one. That's a neat structure. And it's not there… I say it's not there for the reader. It's there for the reader, yes, because structures like this, even if you don't see them, they help resonate with you, they help you know that the story has ended.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] But, as a writer, knowing that you are going to come back to a place helps you build the story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like, when she describes the tree the second time, or when she comes back to it as an adult with Lawrence, it says Patricia had forgotten how massive and terrible the tree was. But when we… It's described earlier, it is not described as massive and terrible. How overwhelming the embrace of its two great limbs, how, like an echo chamber the space in the shadow of its canopy was. She'd expected it to seem smaller, now that she was a grown-up, just as… Just a tree after all. But instead, she looked up at its great hanging fronds and its gnarled surface and felt presumptuous for even coming into its presence again. And that is such a different perception of the tree and her relationship to the tree than she has at the other time she experiences it. So this is, for me, one of those things, one of the lenses we talked about was the lens of time, and this is one of the things for me that… It's, I think, a great example of how you can use place and a character's place trip to show their growth and evolution.
[Howard] The roles of these places… There's a tool that I use a lot, which is what's the emotional reaction I want the reader to have to this chapter, this scene, this whatever? What is the emotional function of a thing? When I first began reading the story, the woods were grounding me. There was this sense of joy and comfort, of a child in the woods. Because I had that experience as a kid. Which, we then get to the tree, and it becomes sense of wonder coupled with a little bit of dread. Because I don't know what's going to happen. And in reading back over some of these places, I looked at the emotional functions of Siberia… I like the antagonist. The emotional function of the bookstore, the emotional function of San Francisco, which is manifold and hugely layered, and even so, I am understating it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But that tool, as I look at the lens of where from the perspective of a reader, I step back through the meta- and ask myself, okay, as a writer, how did she do this? How much of this is deliberate in the selection of place and the writing about place, and how much of it did Howard just happened to bring to the story because… Because Howard?
[Mary Robinette] I guess we'll find some of that out when we get to interview Charlie Jane later.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Meanwhile, we should probably go on to homework.
 
[Howard] You know what? I have homework, and it's related to that thing what I just said. List the locations in your current work in progress. Next to each one, describe it story function. Is it there to ground? Is it there to evoke sense of wonder? Is it purely plot logical, a thing had to happen in a place, and so I picked this one? Is it worldbuilding? So make this list, the places in your work in progress. And then take a step back from it, and ask yourself if any of these places can be changed or should be changed, based on what you now know about them.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.34: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who

Aug. 28th, 2025 07:51 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 20.34: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who 
 
 
Key points: Who? What makes up a character, what makes up our experience of them? History and community, motivation and goals, stakes and fears. How do they react to things? What is our proximity to them? 
 
[Season 20, Episode 34]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 34]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, what we wanted to do is take this… These things that we've been talking about, the who and the way there and why the when, and take one work and look at how a single work is deploying all of these things. Last season, we took different works to represent different concepts. This season, we're taking one work, because, in reality, when you're writing, you're doing it all in a single work. We're going to start with this lens of who, and I'm just going to briefly remind you of some of the tools that we were talking about. When we were talking about the lens of who, we were talking about, like, what makes up a character, what makes up our experience of them. There's the idea of history and community, motivation and goals, what their stakes and fears are, how they react to things, and then there's also our proximity to the character. Are we looking at them in first person or third person, third person omniscient? Those are the kinds of things that we're thinking about. There's the mechanics of it, the… Which voice we're using. But there's also the… Their… Our experience of them as a person. One of the reasons that I pitched this particular book to the group, All the Birds in the Sky, is because it takes a look at our two main characters, Patricia and Lawrence, at three different points in their life. There is their childhood, when they're like six years old. Then we see them in middle school, which, as we all know, is a brutal time. And then we get to see them… Actually, I guess it's four different times. We get to see a little bit of their teenage years. And then we get to see them as adults. So, one of the things that I liked about it is that there is this opportunity to talk about who and talk about… And we see the impact of their history as we move through the book. So I think one of the questions for me for you all is, when you are thinking about how these characters move through this book, I'm taking things kind of sequentially, when we think about history and community, how is Charlie Jane using those to shape our understanding of the characters through the book?
[DongWon] I love that we're starting with the lens of who, because to me that is the primary question of this book. Right? This book, more than anything else, is a character study about a relationship between two characters. And using the time jumps is such a beautiful way for us to get a sense of how things that happen to them in early childhood influenced the adults they became and the choices that they make. Right? So, seeing these lenses evolve over time is, to me, the joy of reading this, of this deep commitment to asking questions about who are these people and why are they the way they are. Which starts with… At home… It starts with their family lives. Who are their parents, who are their siblings? And the community that they're embedded in from the very, very start.
[Howard] There's a tendency for readers to… Just because this is the character who is my point-of-view character, and because these two characters have had a moment together, as a reader who is reading a thing that the author has just given me this moment, I will inflate the importance of that moment way beyond what in the real world that moment might be like. And that's one of the reasons why I so love a point later in this book where Lawrence and Patricia are talking, and they've kind of been… They've been apart and they realize they have a very different perspective on some of the things that happened as children. As a reader, I'm like, oh, that was hugely formative, that's critically important to the rest of the book. And one of the characters is like, ah, that was just this thing I did one time. And then someone else says that was the most important thing that you… You saved my life.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And I love that, because it grounded me in my experiences of growing up. I have memories of things that were super important to me, and the other people are like, oh, that was just a Tuesday.
[Erin] Yeah. I also think, though, one thing that I find very interesting about this book is, like, picking… What you're talking about, Howard, is like picking the moments, also, as a writer, what are the moments in your characters' lives that you choose to dramatize. And there's a moment later in the book in which… I can't remember which one of them says something like I realize that may be, like, I recontextualized my entire life through the lens of this relationship. And this entire book is that. The book actually recontextualizes their lives through the lens of this relationship. There are whole periods of their life that are really important that either get told way later, or, like the schooling part, like all the interesting parts where they were growing their separate selves, and instead, it's the moments when they are together which tell you what's the arc of the story that we're trying to read. And so, there's so many things that happen in your characters' lives that you can focus on, but this book knows what it's about, and therefore picks the specific moments that make that point.
[DongWon] Yeah. 100 percent. And then this also plays into the unreliability later in the narrative. Right? When they're young adults out in the dating world trying to build relationships, there are a couple moments that I really loved where someone would break up with the character or the character would break up with somebody. I'm thinking about this with Patricia and Kevin, I think his name was, the guy that she was seeing. Where she was like, yeah, I don't know what this relationship is. Is it a relationship? We keep trying to talk about it and not talking about it. And then he breaks up with her, being like, hey, I tried to talk to you about this so many times. You wouldn't talk to me about it. And just seeing that inversion, and… Because we have all this context of where she comes from, we understand why her communication style is like this, we understand the trauma that she went through, this like rupture she had with her best friend who was the only person who saw her, and then ran away. And just her fear of commitment makes so much sense. And being able to put us in the moment of that inversion, of her having to step back and be like, oh, no, I see it now of what happened here. I think would have been a hard trick to pull off if we'd just been in this story about adults. But because we know what her relationship with Lawrence was like as kids, we can see the echoes of that reverberating throughout that. And Lawrence's relationship with his girlfriend, that he like puts on a pedestal, which is like a little bit how he related to Patricia when they were children. And, like, all of these different elements. And it just creates all this really rich, interesting context for us to understand relationship dynamics of young twentysomethings in San Francisco in whatever era this is. I don't know. That really, really works for me.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And there's something that Patricia says when they're in their middle school years. In narrative, this was a metaphor for how it was with Lawrence, Patricia realized. He would be supportive and friendly as long as something seemed like a grand adventure, but the moment you got stuck or things got weird, he would take off. And it is… I don't know that that is necessarily true of Lawrence all the time, but I think that that is how she has assigned him in her brain. We…
[DongWon] It makes the heartbreak later makes so much sense.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that struck me as I was reading was that both… Because I had read the book initially, and then I was doing a reread to prep for this. And one of the things that I was struck by was that both kids have this incredibly special moment when they're little, when they're six, where they feel… Or not six. Patricia's is when she's six, Lawrence is a little bit older. But where they feel like they belong. And that they are seen and they're understood and that they have a gift and that they are special. And then they spend the rest of their life trying to get back to that place. And that is frustrating, like watching the frustration and how that manifests and they're both… They both are pushing against it in different ways because of the… Who they are, but they're both pushing against it… Pushing against the same kind of thing.
[Erin] I think that's a really interesting lesson to maybe take from this is that… We've talked before, I believe, on the podcast about sort of essence expression, like what something is at its core versus how it's being shown in the world right now. And I think sometimes it can be really easy as you're trying to make a story or a book go forward to get really focused on expression. What is the character's goal in this moment? What are they trying to achieve, did they achieve it? Did the thing blow up? But why they are doing it is really interesting and also, like, should be really consistent, I think, or have a real reason for changing. And so I think sometimes, like, the character arc can become an arc of action as opposed to an arc of reason for action, and what's interesting about this is this book really focuses on all the things they do are, like, watching a friend, like, make the same kind of mistake, but differently. It's like if you know a friend who has a specific, like, dating habit. They date different guys, but it's like the same thing. You're like, oh, you're doing this again, but in a slightly different way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, you learned this lesson, but not the underlying lesson.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And I think that is the thing that's really interesting to focus on, and to take away as a writer.
[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that Charlie Jane does that I thought was kind of subtle and interesting. And I will talk to you about that when we come back from the break.
 
[Mary Robinette] Welcome back. There's this thing that she does where there are multiple times where Lawrence and Patricia define, even though, like, one is fantasy and one is science-fiction, where they define the thing that they want is the way the other one moves through the world. So there is the example of this is I wish I could sleep for five years and wake up as a grown-up, except I would know all the stuff you're supposed to learn in high school by sleep learning. So that's a science-based solution for her problem. But then Lawrence has a magic based thing, I wish I could turn invisible and maybe become a shapeshifter. Life would be pretty cool if I was a shapeshifter. And it's the idea of, like, even though they are very different people, they are the other… They want what the other one has. And they both see the other one as you have it figured out. I wish I could have it figured out like that.
[Howard] I think one of the most powerful things that Charlie Jane accomplishes with these two characters, and it relates to what you just described, in the world building, these characters have to see the magic, see the science-fiction. And the way they are differently embedded in that universe is… I found it very, very immersive. From the first chapter, where Patricia is in the woods, I was there. And I think that's… That use of POV in order to communicate the world building was very, very well done.
 
[Mary Robinette] Let's actually talk about that a little bit more, because that's one of the other lenses that we use, is that proximity to the character. That's something that I think Charlie Jane plays with a fair bit through the thing, that there are places where we go omniscient and all the dialogue is reported. And then Patricia said… Not and then Patricia said. And then Patricia told him about everything that had happened. But there are other times where we do go deep into it, and we live it, and we have all the tactile experiences. What do you think about the ways that that's being manipulated?
[Dan] So, one of the things that impressed me the most about this book was the way that she was able to immediately, in one or two sentences, tell me exactly who the side characters were.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Even though we never really get close proximity to any of them. This is so focused on Patricia and Lawrence, and to a lesser degree, Theodolphus. But I remember being so delighted early on, in like the first or second chapter, when she illustrates this beautifully that both kids are messed up by their parents, and have a terrible relationship with their parents, but into completely different ways. And if I remember correctly, it's Lawrence's parents are kind of distant and don't pay a lot of attention, whereas Patricia's parents demand perfection. And we just get that in, I think, one sentence each. And it's so powerful when you immediately know exactly who these characters are, and why they are problematic for our leads.
[Erin] Well, I also wonder… It's funny, thinking about POV, like how… Like, if you were an outsider, like, looking at these parents and kids, like… There's something very childlike in the way they perceive the punishment. Like, do they really send Patricia to her room for like 18 years and only passed sandwiches under the door? Maybe they did or maybe… But that also sounds like something like a kid would say. Like, and then for like a year, I had to like only eat sandwiches with one bread. And, like, how much of that is in the POV of a child…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And how…
[Howard] Lady, that was 15 minutes.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Exactly. You had to go to your room for half an hour. It was not like… But I don't know. Because…
[Howard] Yeah.
[Erin] We're so in the POV that we so get the other characters through this specific lens. And I think that's why they come through so clearly. Because the characters, the main characters, have such a very specific point of view on their parents or on the adults in their life that it comes through super clearly whether or not it's objectively true.
[DongWon] Well in… This goes back to the thing I was talking about earlier, in terms of the inversion around understanding what their relationship was. Because that's a tool of proximity. Right? We're zoomed in so close on each of their experiences of this relationship that we're getting this, like, 20 something I don't know how to date kind of perspective.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And we're embedded in that until suddenly we get that revelation, and then we zoom out. Right? Everything just sort of snaps into focus in this relationship in a very cinematic way where we can look back on the relationship that's been described to us and then, like, oh, yeah, that is how she's been treating that guy, or oh, yeah, he's doing this thing to her, and her experiences of what the hell is happening the entire time. Right? And so I think that is such a masterful use of proximity and creates this feeling that I couldn't shake throughout the book where I wasn't, like, experiencing characters, but, like, I was like, oh, these are like my friends, was this feeling that I had throughout, which was, like, an interesting sensation, and they felt like people I was in community with rather than people I was learning about. And I think it is a little bit of that, trying to parse the thing that your friend is telling me, they were like complaining about their relationship, and you're like, but this is your fault, though? You know what I mean?
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Like that little bit of a thing, of trying to be like figure out how to help your friend, and I'm doing that same math with like how to help Lawrence with this situation? How do I get him to chill out about this girl that he's dating so that he doesn't ruin it? And you're like, my gosh, he's going to ruin it. And the only way he's going to figure it out is by ruining it. So…
[Erin] And, it's funny, is I also see this about the entire world. So we'll probably talk about this more in one of the other lenses, but what I think is so… What I found really interesting and what I highlighted the most in this entire book were all of the horrible things that were happening in the world…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That were asides to the characters' lives. They're like, and then that thing in Haiti, and… I don't know, the thing and the heat and the… And they would just mention it among, like, things that were impacting… They're like, I can't go on a date here because, like, I have to remember to not flush the toilet because of that water crisis…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Back to my date. And so, it's so hyper focused in some ways on their own lives as we all are, that they let the broader parts of the world, which we mostly get in omniscient kind of asides go, until they cannot let it go anymore because it intrudes on their worlds.
[DongWon] The one that really stuck out to me was in the moment where Patricia and Lawrence are like, finally, like connected and they're in the middle of that sex scene… That's very intense and we're in their experience. There's a sideline about the, like, and on the television they're talking about how superstar whatever the name of the star was obliterates half of the East Coast. And I went, damn, that's a really broad way to phrase that. And then forgot about it, because of the intensity of this scene. And then she gets the call that her parents are, like, trapped and dying in this, like, thing. And it's like, oh! Obliterate was used literally and intentionally. They just weren't observing this catastrophe that was happening outside their window. And it's like you feel the heartbreak of experiencing joy while the world is falling apart around you.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And that is… Again, that use of coming in and back out again.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] With the proximity is so interesting. Before we wrap up, I did want to touch about the motivations and goals and the stakes and fears, because… And I realize that I am wrapping like three lenses all into one…
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] But it informs the way they are reacting through the whole book. How much do you think their motivations, goals, stakes, fears are set up in the beginning and consistent through the book, and how much do you think they change?
[Howard] Um… In the beginning of the book, these were kids who were trying to figure out how to interact with the world, how to survive the world, and they arrived at two completely different toolsets. By the middle of the book, I feel like they've both figured out the world is broken and there are things that they can be doing to help. And they have completely different toolsets. And the fact that they have different toolsets and blind spots… The inability to see what someone else's toolset might provide leads to the conflict at the end where these two characters, who are both the good guys, are each other's antagonists.
[Mary Robinette] All right. I think what you said about how they… One of the things for me was that they… It sets up that they are trying to survive N, and that that's something that they are constantly trying to do. But in the early part of the book, because they are children, their reactions are not how do I survive this thing that is happening to me. And that as we progress through, their reaction becomes how can I influence things so that those things don't happen to me or anyone else again?
[DongWon] I think my one critique of the book, or my major critique of the book, I think comes to some of the stakes questions. Right? Because we have these world stakes in terms of the world is getting worse, and we have this sort of tech bro attitude of, like, I can save the world, in which… The Sam Bankman-Fried kind of perspective…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Which we've seen the flaws of. And we have this other perspective from her coming from this more holistic magical thing. Sometimes that felt a little… Like, there's a version of this book that I would have really enjoyed which is a contemporary realist novel about these two kids growing up and then living in San Francisco and experiencing this tension that is really core of what's going on in this city and has been going on in this city, especially when this book was written. And so sometimes, I felt a little disconnected to me from the supernatural state. Right? Because we have this thing where the tree at the beginning of the book asks this question, and that it establishes as a major stake. We have the AI that he builds in the closet. That's established as a major stakes. And so by the time those two things come back in, I've been thinking about them this whole time, and kind of wondering where they are, and knowing in the back of my mind that those are the stakes that are going to matter at the end of the day. But there a little disconnected from the moment to moment action. Right? And, like… They are connected to the characters motivations in that they are central to the questions that they are interested in in terms of conductivity, community, helping people, in terms of Patricia, and these technological solutions and sort of abstract ideas in terms of Lawrence. But in the specificity of those two things which are important for the end, they disappear for a very long time. But because they're highlighted at the very beginning, I never forgot about them. So there was a little bit of friction around the stakes of the story in that way. Even though the emotional stakes were so well rendered and so established, the plot stakes felt… I felt a gap…
[Howard] I agree. I look at that problem and I think, dang it, Charlie Jane Anders wants me to read smarter than I want to read.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think that's true in so many ways. What I loved about the way the character interaction works in this book feels very queer to me in a specific way, because it is about holding empathy and understanding for the characters, while also holding them accountable for the things that they're doing. Which is a thing I think we strive for in the queer community. I think we strive for it in a lot of communities, but it's a thing that I observed, and something about the way the dy… Social dynamics work and the way the characters talk to each other felt so familiar to me in a certain way that I really appreciated about this book. Because I think she is asking a lot of us to hold in our heads, here's who this character was as a child, here's who this character is now, and keep that empathy, while also holding them accountable.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] So what's interesting, and I see that Dan has something…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That he wants to say, but I'm just going to slip this in. One of the things that I particularly liked about the tree and the AI was that both of them were things that would be explained away as childhood make-believe. Because I remember Eliza, the computer, and the way ChangeMe is described at the beginning does not seem any different than Eliza. Right? But they are pretending that she's… That this is real and this is… And so I liked the tension.
[DongWon] For the context, Eliza's one of the first chatbots which was used… Claimed to be used as a therapeutic tool because it was responding in a humanistic way, but it is just canned responses.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's just… Yeah.
[DongWon] So… Wish [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, ChatGPT. That it gives the illusion of intelligence, but it isn't actually intelligent. The thing that happened to her as a child could have been a dream that she had.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And so I liked that… You describe it as stakes, but for me it falls back into the history thing. It's that there's an imaginary friend that they both had that is shaping a lot of the decisions that they make. But then it turns out maybe not so imaginary.
[Dan] Yeah. So, I'm glad you brought up critique. Full disclosure, I did not love this book. I'm kind of the dissenting voice here on the podcast to an extent. But specifically talking about what the stakes were, one of the realizations that I had partway through, and maybe this is a very different interpretation than some of the others had, is that what was going on in the world was really kind of beside the point. And a lot of the stuff with the tree and all of that, those stakes were there, but the real core of it was just who they were as people. And every time I would say this book is so boring, nothing is happening, I would have to stop and say, no, actually, there's a lot happening. It's just all internal to who they are. This is not a book where there are big action scenes. There are action scenes in it. But it is a book where… Like, the breakup with Kevin was a really big deal. And these kind of smaller moments were actually, for me, the real stakes of the book is who these people are, and what are the milestones of their progress on to becoming somebody different.
[Erin] And I think when it comes to stakes, one of the things that I took away from it was the idea that, like, you want to think that your life is so important and maybe it isn't. Even though these characters are in fact important to the world in some way, they felt like they were being… It felt, for me, for a lot of the book, that they were tools of greater movements they didn't understand. They were tools of people who had big plans that they would never tell them, and so they were just trying to, like, do the best they could to get from moment to moment of happiness, because everything they were doing was at somebody else's behest. Like, both of them were working for organizations they didn't fully understand, doing things that they didn't fully get, until it was happening. And so, I felt like in some ways maybe it's like… And there's all that thing about aggrandizement and, like, whether or not you're supposed to think you are the driver of the story or not in a story that's so focused on two characters. It's like this interesting contrast between how much does one person change the world and how much are they just trying to remain in the world as it changes around them.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that one of the things that worked for me was that I did come in reading it as a character story. And so, because there were so many other things in the world that were happening in the background, the fact that other… That action that I was interested in was also happening in the background, just kind of felt like part of the texture. That, for me, this was two characters who both just wanted to belong, and they also wanted to stop feeling insignificant.
[DongWon] One thing that… And I think Dan and I are sort of coming at the same critique from different directions. I think we had different eventual emotional responses to it. But one simple rubric I have, and this is very reductive, so don't yell at me, but, like, is the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is often around this idea of literary fiction being primarily about portraiture, and genre fiction being primarily about building out a model. Right? It's about asking a question and answering it. Right? And this novel is, I think, attempting to do both. In that it is writing the literary and genre line in a certain way, and I appreciated its instincts to try and do both, but I think there's a little bit of friction between those, in terms of the overall question of how do we solve world problems. It's about connection, it's about integration, it is about, like, organic [garbled] network kind of things, which is the eventual… hybridizing community approach and technological approaches. Right? That is sort of the thing that she's arguing for at the end of the book. But then the substance of the book is primarily about character portrait and relationship portrait of two people feeling and bonding and coming together in this thing. And that becomes the metaphor, that becomes like the synthesis in this dialectical approach of these two different things. That relationship encompasses those two things. But what I loved about the book was primarily the literary project of portraiture.
[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to say that I wonder now how much of that is intentional. Because what you just described is actually what's happening in the book.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] The conflict between fantasy and science fiction, the conflict between two genres of understanding, the technical and the touchy-feely.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And with that, I think it is time for us to give you your homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, since we are focusing on the lens of who, and one of the things that I found most compelling about these two is how they are shaped by the other person. Who does your character envy? And why? And what action can they take to act on that desire?
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.33: Raising Children as a Metaphor for Writing

Aug. 22nd, 2025 07:19 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.33: Raising Children as a Metaphor for Writing
 
 
Key Points: Relationships change over time. Do your best, but you can revise a book, but you don't edit a child. As you grow as a book parent, you may relax your control. Agents and editors as aunts and grandparents may be able to listen to your book. When a book leaves the house, it has its own relationship to the reader. Presume competence. Grieve, then forgive. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 33]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 33]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Raising Children as a Metaphor for Writing.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] And, we have been doing this series of episodes where we talk about different metaphors for writing. And when this series was pitched to me, the first thing that came into my head was, oh, I will do an episode about raising children. And I have regretted that ever since.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Because, first of all, only two of the five of us have children, and, second of all, there is a fundamental difference, I think, in how we think about these two things. I do think that this would be a valuable way to think about writing. But, when we raise children, we have clear goals for them. But they tend to be very general. I want my kids to grow up and be happy and successful. But the real joy of raising children comes in watching them express their individuality and meet those goals in very unique and different ways. And we could look at media and how many movies have been made, how many books have been written, about parents that have much more specific goals for their children and the children react, and they have horrible relationships with each other… Because I don't want to be a doctor, dad. Just because you are.
[Mary Robinette] This actually sounds like a great metaphor, I think.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Dan, you were telling us at breakfast that one of your sons had just returned from studying…
[Dan] In Taiwan.
[Howard] In Taiwan. Which is fascinating and wonderful and cool, and my memory of that child was him jumping up on the table and shouting, "Pepsi, Pepsi, gun gun gun."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] Okay. And these are two very different things, but it's the same person. And your process for raising that child has likely changed.
[Dan] Yeah. I don't have to keep him off the table anymore. It's great.
[Chuckles]
 
[DongWon] Just one thing I want to say at the top of this conversation is we are very intentionally not prescriptive about writing advice.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] We are, however, saying there's only one way to raise children, and that…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] No. I mean, Dan, only… I mean, I don't have kids, I would never be in a position where I'm going to try and tell a parent, here's how you do it. But I think in the way that we talk about writing, there's a lot that we can take over… Take from individual processes, individual experience, and sort of extrapolate from them. So, anything that we say about how to raise kids…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Don't take it as a prescriptive, specific list of things you must do.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I mean, my child is covered in fur and is actually a cat.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Well, we have two dogs at home. So most of my children are covered with fur as well.
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] No, but, like you said, Mary Robinette, I do think this ultimately is a very good metaphor for how writing works, because we've all experienced this, where we're trying to write in a certain way, and the characters have a mind of their own, and they go off in a different direction. Or the book itself takes a different tack. When we write it, we realize it's about a different thing than we thought it was about when we started it. And this happens all the time. And so, why does this happen, I guess is my question. It seems so ridiculous from the outside to say, well, what do you mean the characters have a mind of their own? You're the one writing them. And yet every author can attest that that's true.
[Mary Robinette] I'm not actually one of those.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Interesting. Tell me about that.
[Mary Robinette] But I think it has to do with what you talked about a little bit at the beginning, which is that you have this intention. And I also think that it has to do with my own personal background as… Coming out of theater. So when I do have a character that's not doing what I want them to do, I recast them. And you can't recast a child. But, having said that, the reason I was like, oh, this is a really good example, is that I may have an intention, but my relationship with the book changes over time. And so, as a result of that, my understanding of what I want that book to be also changes. Which, for me, is different than my characters have a mind of their own.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] One of the healthiest attitudes that I've found with regard to writing… Writing. Yes, but also mostly raising children, is I'm going to do everything I can to provide the setting, to provide the inputs, to provide whatever needs to be provided, so that this child will grow into someone that I like and who is also happy and able to succeed and so on and so forth. But at the end of all that, they have the agency to choose what they are going to choose. And I have to be willing to say I've done what I could, I've done my part, I've done my best. The fact that they're able to express agency has to be enough. Whereas with books, if all my book can do is choose for itself… Okay, that's wrong…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] If my book is wrong, then I get to go back and try again.
[Mary Robinette] Well, this is one of the things that I see with people who have more than one child. So, with the first child, they're extremely precious and very like, here's how we're going to do things. And the second child, they're kind of like, well… Good luck.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And the third, they have three or four, where it's like, all right, I mean, you won't be eaten by wolves. And I think that happens with writers, that the writers who have only the one book… On your first manuscript, you get very tight and very controlling and very fearful, because you're going to mess it up somehow. And that as you go along, you realize, no, actually these things have a lot more resilience. If I let it read, if I let it do its own thing, it's… I don't have to be that controlling. So I think the idea of kind of relaxing your control over the books as you grow as a book parent is probably useful.
 
[DongWon] As I mentioned, I don't have my own kids, but I did have the great joy of being able to be an auntie to a couple of children who are now full adults. And it's funny, it strikes me as that is a little bit similar to my professional role. Right? Where I'm not involved in the process at the beginning, but I do get to drop in from time to time and encounter them as they are. Right? And so I was able to have very different relationships with those kids than their parents did, and got to be sort of the one that's like, yeah. I see you. You're here, this is the thing you're interested in. This is who you're trying to be. And I'll support you in that or listen to you on that or, like, just talk you through whatever crisis is happening right now that you can't talk about with your parents for whatever reason. Right? And, I think, what you're saying, Howard, there is a lot of truth to it, in terms of you can edit a book in a way that you can't edit a child…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But there's also a reckoning process. I think that happens is an author of having to confront what the book is. Right? Which may not have been your idea that you originally had when you went out with it. But a lot of times what you do is you encounter the book, having written it, and say, okay, what are you now? Right? Who did you grow up to be? And then, now, how do I respond to that and help you achieve those goals? Right? And so, as an agent and as an editor, I get to come in and say, "What was your intention here? What was your vision for this book? And how do we align that with what the book is?" Right? And that is so much the editing process.
[Howard] The quote I come back to all the time, Ralph Vaughan Williams, upon hearing a symphony that he'd written performed, responded with, oh, I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I love that so much. Because, yeah, he acknowledges that's what I wrote, that's what I meant. I don't know if I like it, but…
[Mary Robinette] I just want to check. Are you using music as a metaphor for raising a child and for writing about books?
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Okay. Good.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It's the dobosh torte of…
[Laughter]
[Howard] [Fourier?] cakes. Sorry, now it's food.
[Dan] This is our turducken of writing…
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] I love what you said, DongWon, about being able to come in from the outside and, maybe this is the exactly what you said, but it's what I got out of it. Coming in from the outside of that process, you can often see more clearly what's going on than the author themselves. Which is, absolutely, I think, true of children as well, and it's one of the reasons that we rely so heavily on some uncles and grandparents and neighbors and stuff, because when I see my children, I… It's my first instinct, to see what I have planned for them. And it can take a lot of time and a lot of emotional intelligence to kind of meet them where they are and see them for who they are trying to be, rather than who I want them to be. And, going back to writing, that's the same reason I use a writing group. That's the same reason I rely so heavily on my agent, is they can kind of see what the project is, rather than the idealized version I have of it in my head.
[Mary Robinette] And I will say that I think one of the things that is most helpful for… Is not the auntie who comes in and says, well, this is how you should raise your child. That's someone that you are like, nah, I'm not going to hang out with you.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But the ones who listen and ask questions, whether of you or of the child, those are the ones who can actually be helpful, because they are trying to meet that child or that book where they are.
[DongWon] And meet the parent where they are. Right?
[Mary Robinette] And meet the parent. Yeah.
[DongWon] A lot of my job was supposed to be as the nonjudgmental third-party who listens to everyone complain about each other.
[Erin] I have a burning question about writing and parenting that I must ask you…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] After the break.
 
[Erin] Okay. We are back. And I am so excited to ask this, because when you talked about like seeing your children for who they are, there's a reflection, theoretically, of you as the parent based on who your children have become. Maybe there shouldn't be, but I think a lot of times, a parent is sort of a, like, if your kids are doing something, like, kids are crying on the plane, you'll see parents feeling this shame as if, like, if I were better at this, my children would not be reacting to their ears popping and would instead just be staring into space and, like… I don't know, doing their homework. And so I'm wondering, as a writer, how do you deal with that feeling? If you write a book and you love your book, but everyone hates it or they see something in it that you didn't, and then they want to reflect back on you as a writer, that seems like that would have that same feeling of shame as, like, I thought I did this, and I see it this way, but no one else sees it the way I do.
[Howard] Don't say kill your darlings. Don't say kill your darlings. Don't say kill your darlings.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I need some time to think about an answer for the question.
[DongWon] Well, the thing that strikes me, both in sort of this as a topic, and specifically what Erin was saying is that in a lot of ways, from the outside, again, so much of parenting is about knowing when to give up control. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Because when they are an infant and a toddler and a thousand percent dependent on you for every single thing in their life, you have total control over that. That child. In many ways. Right? You can't control them necessarily when they're going to sleep or whatever it is, and that's the thing you're trying to figure out. But, once they grow, as they become teenagers, as they become adults, as your book is published and put in the world, you no longer have that control. Right? And your relationship to what that book is needs to change. Right? At some point, it's not your book anymore, it's the reader's book. Right? They're the ones with the relationship to it, their reading and their interpretation of it become… Not necessarily more important than yours, but it is different from yours in a way that you don't get to touch. Right? How they feel about it is something… It's really hard, I see authors struggle with this. When authors get in trouble online, it is often because they are trying to control reader response to the book in a way that is not only unwise, it is impossible to do. Right? And so, I think, I could see this parallel… I mean, in terms of, like, oh, you're now a full-grown person with your own ideas, your own emotions, your own thoughts about how the world works. I may disagree with them, but also, I kind of got to let you do your thing now.
[Dan] Well, what I have found with… I've got six kids, three of whom have moved out. Aged up, been adults. And kind of the year when they are 18 years old, in every case, they have ceased to be my beloved child, and they have now become an adult houseguest that I can't kick out.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] This does sound like my novel.
[Laughter]
[Dan] And there is that transitional period where… And it was very, very difficult the first time, and slightly easier the second and much easier the third, where I have noticed that and had to come to terms with what you were just saying. I cannot control you. I should not control you. The whole point of making you in the first place was to let you go off and do greater things than I have done.
 
[Mary Robinette] When the book leaves the house, it has its own relationships with the reader. And that's… This is a thing that I do think that a lot of us forget. Like, when we were talking about the metaphor for puppetry, I talk about the fact that I think about the reader as a collaborator. In this is very much the same thing. It's like the reader… The reader is not a coparent, they didn't help you raise the book. But they are relating to the adult book that you sent out into the world. I…
[Dan] Glad he's not going to buy a motorcycle.
[Mary Robinette] Right, right.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Um… Children as metaphors for books for me is very different from raising children as a metaphor for writing. Because with both raising children and writing, I feel like the very best course material available is just go get started. Good luck. People will yell at you as you go and tell you you're doing it wrong or you're doing it right, or this is how I do it. Because the process of raising children is… Evolves so dramatically, not just as the children age but as the parent matures and finds strategies that work for them with their set of resources and their set of cultural contexts. And… I mean, yeah, there's the… With the first child, if the binky falls on the floor, you throw it in the boiling water and break out a fresh binky, and with the fourth child, if the binky bounces off the dog dish, you wipe it on your jeans, stick it back in the baby, and then consider taking the dog to the vet.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But it's…
[Mary Robinette] Again, this sounds like my novel.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But it's this evolution…
[DongWon] That immune system is so much stronger than [garbled]
[Howard] It's this evolution of process…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And I love that… Here we are with Writing Excuses, trying to fill a void for people in the learning to write aspect of the process, by telling about the learning to parent aspect of the process, and we are not going to help you much.
[DongWon] Well, and the reality is, in both these cases, there's only so much prep we can do.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] There's only so much education and learning that's going to help you. I mean I… In both cases, I think it's good to do some. Right? It's good to do your research, it's good to know what you're getting into, but also, it's going to be different. Every book is different, every child is different, every parent is different. Everyone's life looks different. And so, what your process is going to be is something that you will uncover by doing it. And that is (A) terrifying, but also (B) that openness to finding out what it is as you do it can be really beautiful.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And that is exactly where people get into trouble with both children and books is when they think this is the way it has to be and this rigidity. It doesn't work, because of that evolution.
[DongWon] Wait. Is Doctor Spock Save the Cat?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that's exactly what we've just said.
[Dan] I…
[Mary Robinette] Save the Vulcan? Is that…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Writing Excuses, what to expect when you're expecting.
[Dan] Save Picard. The… I feel like I understood my own writing process a little better when I started GMing role-playing games a lot more. This… Which is a very similar process, I think, to raising children, because you… We have so many layered metaphors and mixed metaphors in this episode. It's amazing. When you are the GM of a campaign, you have in mind a story that you want to tell, whether you bought the book or you've come up with it yourself. But if you go through and just tell that story straight the way it is in your head, you're missing the entire point of role-playing, which is collaborative storytelling. You need to leave room for the players to be the heroes of that story and you are facilitating the story, rather than directing it, rather than kind of mandating it.
[DongWon] I think… Again, chasing this too many metaphors thing… For me, the greatest skill any GM or any player at a tabletop game can have is listening. Right? I think what distinguishes a truly great player from everyone else is their ability to listen to what other people are saying and respond to it. And in all of my experiences with kids, and I love hanging out with kids because they're just fascinating, because they're all just trying to figure out how the world works with their entire brain every second of every day. Because they don't understand yet. Right? And so whenever I've encountered a kid, and I just generally listen to what they're telling me and I responded as if they are having a conversation with anybody I would have in the world, with the full respect and attention I would give another adult, they love that. Right? And they respond so well. I think that's really true of the writing process, too. Right? As you come into your book, and really listening to what the story you've told is and what elements you've put there. You have all the control, you have all the techniques, you have all the tools that we've talked about for all these seasons of the show. But, at the same time, as you're crafting it, I do think that sometimes you need to step back and look at it with fresh eyes and really try to listen to what the story is and what your characters are doing and all of that.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that we say in the animal button community, which actually comes out of working with nonverbal children. Which is, presume competence.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] And I think that this is a thing that would actually help a lot of writers, that when you're looking at the manuscript, and, like, this manuscript isn't working, I'm a failure as a writer, I'm a failure as a storyteller, this story is a failure. That that's the wrong way to go. That if you presume competence, and you look at what things is this story doing intentionally and how can I support the things that it is doing intentionally, that that's the way you support a child, that's the way you can support your own narrative process. Like, there's stuff that you do well, this stuff a child does well. You don't think that a child is a failure because they don't know how to cut with scissors yet. You look at, you've made good color choices, let me teach you how to work with scissors. And you can level them up slowly. And I think you can do that with a manuscript too, that you presume competence, you presume the idea that I had was good, the idea that I want this story to be, these things that the story is doing well, let me focus on those things, let me help that story level up to what it can be.
[Erin] I also think you can presume past competence. This is also like forgive your past self. So one thing that… I don't have any kids, but people who I know who are parents will talk about is, like, the frustration of, like, figuring out something like late… You're like, oh, no, if I had known this when my first kid was doing this, that I figured out on my third kid, I would have done it differently. But you know what? I was the person I was then. And I remember talking to… I can't remember who, but a writer who was, like, a prolific writer who was like, I hate some of my early short stories. But I don't ever pull them out of circulation because they reflect the writer I was at the time.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I want to honor who that writer was, and presume that they were as competent as they could be with what they had. Just because you have more tools now doesn't mean that your old self was bad or wrong, just that you were different.
[DongWon] Yeah.
 
[Howard] The three words that I lean into in those circumstances are grieve, then forgive. I am allowed to grieve having made the mistakes. But now that I've done that, I have to forgive myself and move on. I do want…
[Dan] Yeah. This is why my early manuscripts all have deep-seated trauma from being poorly raised.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I want to… I actually want to talk about grieving and writing and… Which is, I think that this is one of the reasons that rejection hits so hard, especially when you're early in your career, because you do think of it as this story has died. And I don't think that that's… This is one of the places that it is not the same. We have invested ourselves in the story, we have this grief for the potential of the story. But the story always retains that potential, the work you've put into it always retains that potential. And when a child makes a mistake, when they mess up, when they are disappointed because they… Like, they don't get into the University they wanted, where they turn out to not be capable of the thing that you thought that they would be capable of, you grieve the loss of that potential, but the love is still there. The child is still there, the worth is still there. And so I think for writers when you think about a story that's been rejected, you can still… Like, that value is still there, that worth is still there.
[DongWon] I also want to flag one thing which is… And maybe this is slicing something too thin, but I think there's a space between forgiveness and acceptance. Right? And so when you look back at your juvenilia and you can see the errors that you made there or the things that you wish you had done differently, you don't necessarily need to exactly forgive your past self, but you need to accept that you were the person who made those choices and who wrote that thing, and that's not going to change at this point. And that's okay. Right? And I think there is an important distinction there.
[Mary Robinette] Like, for instance, if you go back into the archives of Writing Excuses, you're going to hear me talking about a manu… A middle grade manuscript that I was trying to work out. And we talk about it on the podcast. But the thing we don't talk about, because I had not yet learned this thing, was that that manuscript was white Savior complex and cultural appropriation all the way down, baked in, there was no fixing it. And I am… Like, I forgive myself for having made that mistake. Should I have known better? Probably, but based on the way I was raised in the time I was raised in, I didn't. But I don't continue making the mistake just because I made it in the past.
[Howard] But it's important to recognize, and this is why I lead with grieve. It is important to recognize that sometimes when you're looking at something that you just… You're filled with regret, you're filled with longing, you're filled with remorse, and you have to recognize, oh, wait, I'm grieving the lost time, the lost effort, the lost whatever. Oh, this is grief. I just need to treat this like grief so that I can grieve and then move on.
[DongWon] And get to that place of acceptance, that clarity of seeing the critique of what went wrong and still be able to deal with it.
[Dan] So I'm going to make a final point, and this is going to lead us into our homework. There comes a point in writing, as in raising children, where the thing you are working on does something that you don't like. Whether that is something you've put in intentionally, something you've done accidentally, a character with a mind of its own, or a scene that just doesn't work or whatever it is. And we talked about this in the past where that is an opportunity not for you to immediately, and say, well, this isn't in my outline, and so therefore it is bad, but to take stock of it and say, is this something that I need to change so that it matches my plan, or is this new thing it's doing better, and I need to change my plan? And that is, I think, is true with children as it is with writing.
 
[Dan] And so for homework, what I'm going to say is do that in reverse. Whether you have a child of your own, a child you interact with, or just a person in your life that you are mentoring or that you are friends with. If they are doing something you don't like, take that moment to consider, is this actually better than what I had planned or assumed, and kind of give that moment of grace to them. And sometimes, yes. You need to step in and correct. Other times, you need to realize that they are their own person, and what they are doing is right for them. So look for those moments in your life, as well as in your writing.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.32: Revision and Character Consciousness Tea Obreht

Aug. 15th, 2025 03:24 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.32: Revision and Character Consciousness Tea Obreht 
 
 
Key points:  Think of your characters in layers. Start with one thing at a time. That's my secret, I'm always panicked. Give yourself the freedom to say this is just an exercise. Give your character a discomfort. HALT - hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Character consciousness, the gestalt of what you know about your characters. Generative phase, stumble around in the dark in this abandoned house, then in revision, curate that experience for the reader. What is your character's level of self-questioning? Trauma points, safety, connection, and empowerment. Never tell an editor oh, I'll just have to add a line or two, or three words. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 32]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 32]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] Revision and Character Consciousness with Tea Obreht. 
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Mary Robinette] And we are joined today by our special guest, Tea Obreht. Tea and I have the same agent, and Steph said, "Hey, you should have her on, because she's super smart." And it turns out when you do even a tiny bit of digging, she is incr… In fact, very smart. So… And also, a damn good writer. Tea, would you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
[Tea] Thank you so much for that, Mary Robinette. I'm going to mortify myself now, as a result of this high praise. I'm Tea Obreht. I am a short story writer and novelist. I have three books out, The Tiger's Wife, Inland, and, this year, The Morningside. They touch on Balkan diaspora and myth and folklore, in different applications throughout history and time.
[Mary Robinette] That's… Like, they are so… I don't… Fun is the wrong word. But they… I love the way that you play with genre in them. Specifically, the way you… You're [garbled] a lot of the things about character and expectations. Through the whole thing. So, we're going to be talking, as much as I want to spend a lot of time actually talking about the books, we're going to be talking specifically about revision and character consciousness. This is something that you had pitched, and I was excited about it because I feel like a lot of people think that you have to get all of the beats about a character right immediately the first time around. And it is actually something that you can address in revision. When you are thinking about it, what are some of the things that you're thinking about, like, when you're saying revision and character consciousness?
[Tea] Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, I think of my characters in layers, essentially. I suffer in regenerative ways horribly. I find the first draft of any project, especially when I'm entering it with a character I don't know very well, I find it to be a harrowing slog. It feels unstable, it feel shaky, it feels unreliable. And I think some people really love the adventure of that. They love to explore the unknown and see what will come out. But, for me, writing is really about getting down to the knowns, and being able to shape them kind of as efficiently as possible. Which is why character exploration becomes such a frustrating enterprise. And I've learned now to sort of take the basic elements of somebody's life, and try to start with one thing at a time. So, what is their emotional condition entering the stakes of the plot? What is their job? Do they have… What's the relationship with their mother? That's a really fun one for me, always. And to sort of work outward from that one kernel. Especially if I can't see the totality of somebody right away. I mean, I think sometimes characters kind of walk in and they're fully formed. I've had that miraculous experience. It's just the most wonderful thing when it happens. But, for me, for the most part, it's trying to circle around and around and around in, like, a widening gyre around this character.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Do you know…
[Erin] I'm curious…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, go ahead…
 
[Erin] No, I'm curious, like, as you're doing this, is this something you're doing just as you're writing or is this sort of before you start that first draft? Like, are you knowing the relationship of the mother before page 1, or are you on, like, page 100 and you're, like, actually, now that I think about it, how does she feel about her mother? Like, when does that process take place?
[Tea] It usually takes place, like, in the meat of the work. So, I write towards event first, and then the characters sort of come creeping out as themselves. But, yeah, for me, it's usually I get to page about 100 and then I'm like… And then an interaction happens. Right? With another character. That forces a reckoning about the relationship with the mother, or the fact that they secretly… That they secretly ran over a best friend's cat last week, and actually this is the thing they're hiding. And then it becomes… Then the revision kicks in almost immediately, because the reverse engineering of that fact into every element of this person's interactions has to happen sooner rather than later, so that it can set the tone for the rest of what's coming. So that's how I work, in a big, disorganized mess.
[Howard] In one of the episodes we've… I don't know if it's going to air before or after this one, because time is weird that way. But there's this famous saying that all acting is reacting. And sometimes you don't know what a character is until you see how they react to something. You can have them be proactive and just do stuff, but when you see their response to someone else getting angry or someone else being sad or someone else messing up their order at the drive through, or whatever, that's when, for me, the characters really start to come to life, and I recognize… And sometimes I have to be careful. Wait! Is that character reacting the way I would? Are they reacting the way they would? And so I have to dive back in on that filter.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Tea] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] I often will do some of this work before I start writing, when I'm working a novel. In short fiction, I'm just like, let's see who they are. And then in novel, even though I've done some pre-work, I will always have that moment of discovery. Where there is a piece of information that I didn't have about them that comes out, as you say, because of that interaction, because of the way they're moving through the world. I will… For listeners who have read The Relentless Moon, I will say that there is a compelling character trait that I did not know until that scene happened. And you will know what I'm talking about, if you've read the book.
[Erin] I love a real world example.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I find that, like, I personally fall a little bit in the middle, like I often know the what but not the why, if that makes any sense. So, because I tend to be very voice full, just in my work, I'll take a long time to hone in on the character's voice, but I don't necessarily know why that voice works for me. Like, it's like there's some subconscious character work going on that I don't understand. And then sometimes, in the middle of writing, I'll be like, oh, that's why that character speaks in this particular tone. That's why they use this level of language. It's because… It sounded right to me that they always used 10 dollar words where a five cent word would do. And later, I figured out it's because they feel embarrassed about their level of formal education, and this is their way of making up for it. But at the time, it just kind of felt right. So I feel like, sometimes, I'm like deep diving on my own consciousness, getting back to the phrase, of the character, because I'm doing things subconsciously that I have to surface consciously so I can really work on them, and, like, make them a real thing.
 
[Tea] Totally. Can I ask you, if you don't mind, do you find that when you're trying to zero in on that thing, you feel a sense of panic about it, like, when you don't know it yet, and is there sort of a time limit by which you hope to have the answer, beyond which you don't want to progress with your work until you have it?
[Howard] You know the scene in Avengers where Banner says, "That's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry." That's my secret, I'm always panicked.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Tea] I feel it's true.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Yeah. Sometimes I fret about it. But it… A lot of times, it is that the fretting happens because I need the character to do a thing for plot purposes, and do not feel like I have laid the groundwork to have them make that a realistic compelling choice.
[Tea] Absolutely. And then it feels… Then the work itself feels wasted. Right? You've arrived at this point, or suddenly it feels this way for me. Like, you've arrived at this point, hoping that you will know who this person is, inside and out, and there was supposed to be maybe three layers that were revealed to you by the time you got to this interaction or this choice they have to make or this event that's going to impact them irreversibly. Right? And instead [garbled go little bare?] and now you are forced to write this kind of important scene without all the correct knowledge. And I find that the only way to relax myself entering into that is to say this is not… This scene is going right in the trash. Like, I'm going to find something in here that is going to reveal that extra layer to me. There's a lot of work left to do, not just in the scene that's coming, but everything that precedes it. But I have to do this with the bare stick that I have. I had hoped to arrive here with a better arsenal, but here we are, I've got a twig I tore off a tree. And now…
[Chuckles]
[Tea] That's what we're doing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, when we come back from our break, we're going to talk about what I like to call how to fix it in post.
 
[Tea] All right. I have a recommendation for you. The husband and I are re-watching Deadwood. Start to finish. I saw it in the early oughts, and then I made him watch it, kind of as a compatibility test when we were first dating. He passed. We've been married now for almost 11 years. Deadwood is so sordid, and it's still tough going, and there are scenes of such brutality, but it's such an incredible study of character and such a profound reminder that you can do anything if you find the right voice for it. You can create a whole setting, a whole mood out of language alone. And I really think that show would work just as well if the actors were wearing track suits and walking around an empty stage.
 
[Mary Robinette] So. We've been talking about that moment of arriving and realizing, oh, I don't actually know as much about this character as I thought I did. I sometimes call this internal motivation, character consciousness, there's a bunch of different terms we can talk about, like the character's interior life and when you're like, oh, hello! Aaaa... So I have a couple of tools that I use to audition characters, to try to draw this stuff out. When you find yourself in that phase, you've already talked about one tool which you use, which is that you give yourself freedom to say this is fine. This is just an exercise. Are there other tools that you have found useful for kind of drawing that character consciousness out?
[Tea] Yes. I love to give them a discomfort. I think we have a real impulse, and a very understandable impulse, particularly in the early phase of something, to protect our characters to some extent. To protect them, maybe physically from the world, to protect them from their own bad decisions, and maybe to protect them from the worst aspects of their own character. And it's really that… Or their own personality. And it's that worst aspect of this person's or that individual's personality that I'm looking for, that I often feel unlocks the character for me. So I like to give them an injury or… I like to give them an injury, or just like really… Or…
[Howard] Important thing is we like to protect our characters from us.
[Tea] From ourselves.
[Howard] Because we are their worst enemies. Really.
[Tea] Exactly. They don't stand a chance. Yeah, I like the idea of… I'm always very curious about how people react to things when they're in pain. Right? Or when they're hungry or when they're thirsty or when they're tired. I think it reveals so much. It reveals a lot about me, you know. I wouldn't want anyone to meet me in any of those states for the first time. And, yeah, I think discomfort is a very good way to kind of force the character into a corner and have them react as poorly as possible.
[Erin] You're reminding me of that acronym HALT. They say that if you are, like, grumpy, that you should halt and see if you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] And that those, specifically, because no one works well under those conditions. And so I love the idea that you should not halt and give all of them… Not, maybe, I should say one…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] To your characters and then…
[Howard] No, it is Howard, asshole, leave the room.
[Laughter]
[I'd like to stay in the room]
[Mary Robinette] Stay in the room and expose your pain for the character.
[Howard] Oh, goodness. Tea, I love the term character consciousness that you've kind of introduced us to. I've been mulling over it this whole time, the idea among psychologists, psychiatrists, students of neurology, what is consciousness? Well, it's kind of this blurry, foggy Gestalt of everything we experience and everything we are thinking and moving… And if you take everything that you know about your characters on the page, how they feel about mom, what is giving them pain, what are their motivations, and start to roll that into this Gestalt, this consciousness, they start to become people. In your head. And I didn't realize it for years. I had it super easy, because with Schlock Mercenary, there were a dozen different characters that I knew well enough that I could just as I laid down in bed for the night, I could just say all right, you to, talk about something. I'll check in on you in the morning. And it practically… Once you have that consciousness, it almost writes itself. You just put them in front of things and cool things happen.
[Tea] Totally. And I think part of that, too, is, like, the longevity. Right? Of that notion, this idea of, like, getting this steeped in the… Well, getting these characters to steepen themselves, and then getting to steep yourself in them until you're sort of almost inextricable from each other, and, like, maybe their reactions are not the reactions that you would have in real life. But it is so clear who they are. Right? And I think that's why we spend so long on this idea of, like, character development, what makes up the personality of someone that we're crafting on the page. And then the consciousness part I think has to be rounded out by this idea of, like, how does this personality react to the stimuli around it. Given all the factors that it's been filled with. Yeah.
 
[Howard] So we're fixing it in post. Mary Robinette, we're fixing it in post.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Howard] What... Tea, what are your steps for this? You're going back through a manuscript, you're revising and you either have a clear picture of character consciousness or you don't. But you're making your way. How do you… Tell us how it works.
[Chuckles]
[Tea] Does it work? I… So… I think of the generative phase as, like, my first time in an abandoned house. Right? Like, I've gotten in somehow, and I'm finding my way around, and there's no electricity and there's no heat and there's no power, and I'm stumbling around in the darkness by the aid of, like, a penlight. I can't see very far ahead. I'm like tripping over furniture. There's no logic to the layout. And then my job, in the next phase, in the revision phase, is to curate this experience. Having had an emotional and psychological experience within this house, my job is to curate this experience for the reader. Right? And their way into this character might not be through the same way that I stumbled into the house. Maybe they're falling in through a window, whereas I found the downstairs door. And my aim is to get them to have as close as possible… To get them to a point where they're, if not mirroring, at least echoing my own sentiments about the character. And, I think that, for me, starts with truth. Like, is this reaction true to this person? Or is it, as you were saying earlier, true to me, or is it what I would like them to do? And are they aware of how messed up they are? Like, what is their level of self questioning? I think that's an enormously important sort of part of the rubric for me where… To question whether a character has any feelings about being a good participant of this interaction, being a good citizen in this reaction, or whether they just want what they want? So what is the level of self-doubt is, like, an early revision question that I often ask of my characters.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with my therapist in which she was telling me about trauma points, that there are these points that we anchor to. That something happened in our very, very early childhood. And it's around safety, connection, and empowerment. And the thing that I realized was that most of my characters have not done the therapy work that I have done. So I don't actually have to know actually what that event was. I just have to know what kinds of things trigger them. Like, I'm looking for those consistencies. So I also will find myself working in layers, if you… As you've described, and going back and saying, "How do I bring this out? How do I make it clear, this thing?" And I described to my… To Seth, to our agent, as, oh, yeah, I just have to go back and add a line here and add a line here, and add a line there. And I know what you mean. Which is that what I mean is that I need to think about are they having an emotional reaction at this moment? Are they feeling it physically in their body at this moment? And that often it's not revising an entire scene, it's just adding that layer in. And when I said that to him, he's like, never let an editor here you say it's only going to take a couple of lines. Because they will not understand all of the other work that goes into the decisions that allow you to do it with just a couple of lines.
[Tea] I've had that same conversation…
[Laughter]
[Tea] With…
[Laughter]
[garbled]
[Tea] Favorite aunts. No, but it's… That's uncanny. And I love that, too, because it… Yeah, it's sort of… It speaks to this idea of, like, I've understood that's what's missing here is the fact that in previous scenes of emotional reaction, that this character has, I've held the reader's hand and let them see it explicitly. And for whatever reason, in this scene, in this particular moment of the book, I've let go of their hand and I'm allowing them to make an inference about it, when, in fact, to make the book consistent, I need to be right there with them. And I know all those things, but the editor doesn't, so it is one line or two lines…
[Howard] Yeah. This is something that, as a cartoonist, you keep saying line, and there are so many illustrations that I have fixed by adding literally one-stroke with the pencil, with the pen. Three little lines in one corner of an object can create the illusion of shadow. And now, suddenly, the object has volume. And so… I mean, I love the fact that this holds true in writing as well. Sometimes I only needed to add three words to a character's sentence in order for it to now have all the emotional import that it needed to have. They said the same things, but it meant ever so much more, with the addition of just three words. And, yeah, never tell anybody that, oh, all I need to do is add three words, but it's going to take me 12 hours of reviewing the manuscript in order to figure out where those three words go. And what they are.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I am in the process of doing that with a manuscript right now, and I'm like, I know that it is one sentence and I just have to figure out where it goes. And then you have to adjust everything around the sentence to make it fit, also, is the other thing that is always, always fun. Well, you have actually already given me some homework because tomorrow I am teaching a class at the Surrey International Writers Conference on auditioning the character, and, like, I am inserting the hungry, angry, alone, lonely, tired stuff in there, into that class. But since we are talking about homework, I think you have some homework for our listeners?
 
[Tea] I certainly do. Okay. So the assignment this week, the homework this week, is to write an opening paragraph. Not too long, maybe 3 to 6 lines. It can be something new that you write as a result of this assignment, or an already existing opener that you've been working on, being a little dismissive of, not sure. Not going to micromanage the content, but due to the nature of the exercise, let's say it should be a paragraph that introduces a few new pieces of information. Or a few key pieces of information. Maybe a character, maybe a conflict, maybe a desire, a lack thereof, perhaps a problem, event… You're all listening to this podcast, so you know the drill. I'd like you to consider the information that's contained in your paragraph. And then rewrite the whole thing two more times. Ultimately conveying the same information, but in three different ways. How you do this is completely up to you. Maybe in a different voice, maybe from a different perspective, maybe using only dialogue, framing it as a text exchange between two people. As you write the different versions, you have to remember that it's about the information. It has to be the same, version to version. And then consider, at the end of the exercise, the priorities of each different mode, how it's changing the way the information is relayed and whether that then changes the information itself, and whether it changes the reader's feelings about it or your own?
[Mary Robinette] That's great homework, and I'm looking forward to doing it myself.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.31: Framing the Lens

Aug. 8th, 2025 09:27 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 20.31: Framing the Lens 
 
 
Key points: Frame? How do you choose what's in your story and what's not? How do you select your focus? MICE Quotient. These are the questions I'm asking, and these are the answers I'm giving my readers. Set the frame in the beginning, a promise to tell you about this thing. What does the reader need to know? You may be writing your way into the story, and adjust the frame later. Think about how your readers will connect the dots. Verisimilitude... Captivate your reader, and keep them in frame as long as possible.
 
[Season 20, Episode 31]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 31]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] Framing the Lens.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Erin] And... Wow! We are almost to the end of our entire lens lineup. We have gone through many, many lenses. And before we get into this one, I just want to make sure that you're aware that in two weeks, we are starting our deep dive into All the Words in the Sky. So if you haven't read it, this is a great time to get in there and read it, because we will be dropping so many spoilers and we want you to have a chance to experience the book before we get into it. But first, we're going to talk about frame. And the reason that this one I thought would be a great one to kind of go last, is we've talked a lot... A little... A lot about what happens when you're using whatever lens you 're using. But not how you choose what the lens is actually focused on. How do you choose what's in your story and what's not? All the decisions that we've been talking about sort of presume that you already know what you're focused on. But how do you make that choice? And how does it inform all of the other choices that we've been making?
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's actually one of the hardest things, especially for a new writer, is deciding what to leave out... The... You've got a story in your head, but there's so much detail and you can't capture it all. It's not possible, and it's almost like not pleasant to read. So I wind up using a couple of different tools for my frame. One of which, will surprise no one, is the M.I.C.E. Quotient. Beause that gives me a way to articulate for myself these are the questions that I'm asking. Here are the conflicts that arise because of those questions, and here are the... Here's the answer that I'm giving the reader. Like, are they going to be able to get out of the place? Oh, no, more rocks fall. Ah, yay, they get out.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's a milieu story. And so, I then know that if part of the thing that I really want to talk about is did you know that the lichen that are growing in this cave are.. It's like, I wonder why they glow? Let me tell you about the glowing... It's like the glowing does not matter to them getting out of the cave and surviving the rocks falling. It's not actually important, even though I'm really interested in it. It allows me to say, no, I can set that aside. I don't have to explore that.
[Dan] Yeah. Whereas, if it were an idea story that is specifically about the glowing lichen or whatever is causing the glowing lichen, you could tell the same thing with the same characters and the same setting, but in a way that focuses more on the lichen and the escape from the caves is less of a story element.
[Erin] It's funny. I, I think, go a lot more by gut on this. And it's a lot of, like, how we tell stories. I think a lot about, like, if you were to sit around a campfire and tell a story, and this is also why I like short stories, because it's hard telling a novel around a campfire. It's a good way to lose friends, because…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Actually, the fire goes out and they're really cold and hungry. But, like, when you tell… When people sit down, like, oh, my gosh, I gotta tell you about the time, like, I set my teacher on fire. Don't do this at home. Actually…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Do you want to pick a different example?
[Erin] Yeah. Okay. As a teacher, I have failed myself. Let me tell you about the time I went into this cave with glowing lichen, and did not set my teacher on fire. Then, that is, like, you sort of… You set the frame at the beginning, and I think a lot of this makes me think about when you start a story, in some ways, you are saying, whether explicitly or implicitly, you're making a promise. You're saying I'm going to tell you about this thing. I'm going to tell you about the time I got trapped in the land of the lichen caves and had barely got out by the skin of my teeth. Or, I'm going to tell you about the time I figured out why lichen are glowing in this cave and used it to save the world. Same place, like you were saying, same characters, but you set the frame in the beginning. And so I think remembering that when I'm going… When I'm tempted to go off on a side note is too much like when someone's telling you a story and they're like, and that reminds me of my coworker… But you know what, actually, no, we were talking about the caves… Is to remind myself what is the promise that I made? What's the frame that I set when I started? And then let me continue going. And if it starts to feel like that is a stricture, like, I'm like so mad because every two seconds, I want to go off on this side story, then maybe I've set my frame incorrectly, and I need to rewind, reset, and tell the story I want to tell.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… I think of it… As you were talking, I was thinking another way to talk about it is what does the reader need to know? This is a thing that I think about all the time. What does the reader need to know to continue the story? And if you think about it as navigation, like, what does the reader need to know to navigate the story? If you have ever ask someone who learn to navigate before the Internet, you will get things like, okay, so you have to go down the street. Now, there used to be a school bus parked on the corner. The school bus… Do you remember Johnny? Johnny used to drive that school bus.
[Dan] This is how I give people directions…
[Laughter]
[Dan] And I feel a little called out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, again, you learned to navigate before there were paper maps… Before… Before there were paper maps…
[Dan] Before there were paper maps?
[Laughter]
[Dan] Navigating purely by the stars…
[Erin] You look great, I have to say.
[Dan] Thank you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] when you said that thing about navigation, I was reminded that I'm like… This is unrelated to our topic. But there are two types of people in the world, people who navigate, like, by memory, by this thing, and people who do compass, like. There are people who will be like go three blocks, turn Northeast by Northwest. Then go six blocks in an easterly westerly direction. And, like, that's how they go. Versus, like, actually using things that kind of are more about, like, who lived there and what did things. And it makes me think that, like, frame is partly about what's in the story, but also in how your setting up the telling of the story. Like, directions given by a person who talks about Johnny in the bus is very different than directions by the person who has a much more compass-oriented way. And I think they work, as long as you don't switch from one to the other mid story and confuse the reader, because you've gone from a frame of one to a frame of the other without signaling that you're making that change.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And different readers need different things to navigate through a story. Like, if someone who is familiar with faster than light travel with science fiction stories, one of the things that they do not need you to do is to define FTL, faster than light travel, they've got it. But if you try to have that story go mainstream, you do have to define it because they have no idea what FTL is. If you're… So a lot of times, the frame is not just what is… What promises you're making about the kind of story you're telling, but also the conversation that you're having with the reader.
[Dan] Yeah. And I love thinking about this idea of what you include and what do you not include. Because it really does change the entire tone of the story. One of the things that I chose with the I Am Not a Serial Killer books is to include John's family. They are thrillers, they are about investigations to try to find monsters that are killing people. But we see his family constantly. The first book is basically a string of holidays, and we get to see how he and his mom celebrate them. And does his sister come to this one or not? And is his aunt there? And what do they talk about and what do they do, and how does it matter to them? And the reason that I did that is because I very much wanted the story to be about how John is and isn't a person. How he fits into the world and how he doesn't fit into the world. And using these really common resonant things like Halloween parties and Christmas vacations helps that come forward, because that's something most of us have experienced. And if that were not in there, you wouldn't get that same view of who he is.
[Mary Robinette] I made similar holiday decisions for somewhat different reasons, but also overlapping ones, when I was working on Martian Contingency, because I wanted to talk about what does it mean to create a culture. Like, when you're going someplace, what do you take from home that is part of making you who you are? Part of making you people from Earth, but now you are also Martians, and so there are new holidays and new ways of marking time and new blending. And so for me, if I didn't include the holidays, the parties, the giftgiving, the conversations about the time, it would have just been, oh, things have gone wrong in space. Oh no!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Which was… Which is fun, and like… It's really fun to torture people by dropping rocks on them and stuff like that. But it is… It's a mono dimensional thing. And so, thinking about the frame, thinking about what I want to include, I want to include more than one kind of thing inside that frame. I don't want to include, like, just holidays. Like a story that's just holidays, that's fine. That's also fine. But holidays, rocks fall… Those things are more interesting than a frame with a single object in it.
[Erin] I love that. And I am… We are going to give you, I should say, a brief holiday from us, and then we will return on the other side of this break.
 
[Erin] So, to pick up on something from before the break, I am really curious about sort of how do you decide what… If you're like, I want to include a holiday or I want to include the sense of being a person, how do you know when you're getting off track, like, when you're expanding your frame too far and when what you're doing is actually supporting the story that you're trying to tell?
[Mary Robinette] I think, for me, it's going back to an earlier lens that we used, which is thinking about the why. And that's the… Why do I… Am I telling this story? What are the questions that I'm exploring? And within the frame, when I'm thinking about what goes in it, I'm thinking about the why, but the why has then allowed me to set up, again, the tools that I particularly use, which is the MICE Quotient. So if the conflict, if the problem that is directly in front of the character, is not something that is related to the questions that I have already raised, then it's opening up a new tangent. That's when… It's like, oh. Oh, I'm going to need a bigger lens to fit everything in, a bigger frame to fit everything in. Or things are going to get really cramped and confusing, because it'll be so piled on top of each other that you can't actually tell what's important anymore.
[Dan] Yeah. In the first draft of I Am Not a Serial Killer, there was a whole chapter about civil disobedience in some social studies class, and that became a way for John Cleaver, the main character, to decide to take matters into his own hands and start fighting these monsters himself. And it was… First of all, I realized that very few people in my writing group understood what civil disobedience was, which was complicated… Anyway. But there was also the issue that it just felt wrong. It was a story where it became very didactic. It became the author saying, "Look. This is what's going to happen next." And it was getting far away from that thing I was trying to show about does he fit into the world or not? And so even though it was this chunk slice of life that was able to show some of his classmates and how he was different from them, but it was the wrong thing. It was… It didn't feel organic to the story. Which is what I eventually… What eventually made me decide to cut it out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Most of the cut scenes that I have from short stories or novels are things like that. Things that… If they don't… It's not necessarily that they're didactic, but they… They're taking the story in a direction that is not the direction that I'm interested in going. Again, I can… I will often use MICE Quotient as a diagnostic tool. But it can also… Sometimes it's not that, it's… It's like, yeah, MICE Quotient wise, this fits in, but the tone of the thing is wrong. Like, I'm trying to show people, in Martian Contingency in particular, what happens if you make a kinder choice. And this scene is a character being actively and deliberately cruel to someone. And sometimes it is because it is something that I have seen in media, and I've accidentally regurgitated it without interrogating my own text, my own intentions, without looking through my own lens.
 
[Erin] It's funny, what you're both describing makes me think of something that I think a lot… I do all the time, and I think a lot of people do, which is, sometimes you're not actually finding the frame of the story, you're just writing yourself into… You're writing your way into the story. It's why… There's that old trope of, like, don't ever start a story with the character waking up. You can start a story with a character waking up.
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Yeah.
[Erin] Go for it. But sometimes you're doing it because you know that later in the day, the character needs to do X, and you're still trying to feel your way through the story. So you start with, like, something that feels like a very obvious beginning. It is like… Opening your eyes is a very obvious frame to any day. Like, once you're awake, the day has begun. And so you start, and you write your way end, and so you're finding… You're choosing a broader frame than you actually need because you're kind of doing all the fluff in order to, like, get yourself in the mood and rev yourself up. And I would say, on that note, if you… You're working on a story, you're at the beginning, you're like, I don't know if this is the correct frame. Sometimes you can't know until you get to the end. It's like if you take a panoramic shot, you may not know where to crop it until you look at the whole picture and go, this is where the interesting thing is happening. This is where the action is. And so it's okay to, like, come in and figure out the frame after you've written more and sort of excise the parts that turned out to actually be kind of you figuring out where to go, and what's important.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Sometimes I find that I will start earlier because the story isn't in focus yet, much the same way that when I get up in the morning, as someone who is quite nearsighted, the world is not in focus…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Until I put on my literal lenses.
[Erin] 100 percent.
[Laughter]
 
[Erin] Time has been shooting away through this episode. There is one thing that you mentioned earlier, Mary Robinette, that I want to circle back to. Which sounds so corporate, but I said it anyway. But you mentioned the idea that if you talk about FTL in a sci-fi story for a sci-fi audience, they understand it. But if you take it to a mainstream audience, they're like, FT what? And so I am wondering about frame not just as like the frame that you're putting on the story, but frame as a conversation between the story and the reader. And, like, how do you frame a story depending on who your audience is, what they might be bringing to the story, how you think that it might be received without getting paralyzed by the idea of, like… Or just getting stopped in your tracks, by the idea of what the reader might take from your story?
[Mary Robinette] So, we've talked about some of this, like, when we were talking about the idea of theme and meaning. But I, in particular, when I'm doing my historical fiction, there's language that has always been a slur, but is historically accurate for one character to call another. But it will hit completely differently for a modern reader than it would for someone back in the day. I was talking with someone, is one of the least charged versions that I can demonstrate this with… Talking with someone who said that you can turn any sentence into a sleazy pickup line by adding the word "ladies?" to the end of it. Can I change your microphone, ladies?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Exactly. I feel gross.
[Mary Robinette] But you can also do something with the word "see" which will turn anything into a gangster film. Can I change your microphone, see? It's like I don't know but you just threatened me. You want me to change your microphone, see!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And so there's stereotypes. There are all of these different pieces that we come equipped with when we are reading a story that change with generations, that change with culture. And so when I'm writing, especially historical or going secondary world, I have to think about how that is going to translate. If I have… Using a puppetry metaphor, I remember we were working on a show and I looked at my design and we realized that accidentally, because we had… It was a whole bunch of rats. I was… Pied Piper. And we realize that accidentally we had made all of the rats street rat colors. So they were all dark browns and dark grays and blacks. And it was like that was encoding something that is not the message that we want to be encoding. That is an accident that can be read very, very easily by an audience as, like, mapping it onto black and brown people in the real world. And that's not the intention. And so I… We went back and added in some, like, blonde rats, because do you know rats actually come in blonde? They're really pretty. Piebald rats, to go with the Pied Piper. So going through and breaking that up so we worked sending an accidental message. So when I'm evaluating something, when I'm writing my fiction, I look at what are the things that I'm accidentally encoding that are mapped on the real world regardless of if it's a secondary world fantasy or not.
[Erin] I've sort of two thoughts on this. One is a really tortured metaphor that I'm going to share anyway. Which is if you… People sometimes are in relationships that are [garbled] they're situation-ships, and I had a guy friend who had… Who had a young woman that he was in a situation-ship with…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] He started to make all these things that were like… I called it, like, couples bingo. And I was like if you do too many of these things, like now you're… Like, you can't like take her to Christmas, three weddings, and then, like, be like, why do you think we're dating? It's like, well, I mean, there are certain things that, like, if you hit enough boxes, if you hit enough like… It's like if you're drawing a connect the dots. If you connect enough dots, like, people can figure out what the picture is here. So don't get mad when she breaks up with you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Because she realizes you're dating eight other people. Life lessons there. But the… Like, what I think about that is with stories as well, like, if you… Sometimes people will feel like I wasn't trying to map onto this real life thing, like, that was never my intention, and it can feel like, why do I have to change my story just because other people will read it that way? But, just like my friend's Christmas would have gone a lot better if he had been clearer or made different decisions early on, you don't want to end up having the entire story about your story be something completely different than your intention. You don't want to end up being defensive about your story or explaining what you really meant when you can make it clearer to the reader from the outset by not connecting as many of those dots or adding new dots to the picture or just doing things differently. And so, I know that sometimes it can feel like why should I have to change the story for the readers, or for the world, but the reality is that, like, the world is the world of people that will be buying, talking about, celebrating, marketing, and all of that stuff towards your work. And ultimately, if they don't feel comfortable doing that, the only person it really harms in the long run is you and your career because you are not able to escape the thing that you were not even trying to do in the first place, I think.
[Dan] Agreed.
[Erin] Thanks.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But it… It is absolutely true. And it's… This is a frame. The frame of the reader is one of the frames. The frame of the modern world is the frame through which your story is going to be perceived and enjoyed. When you're talking about, instead of the frame around the lens, when you're talking about the frame around a picture, the picture frame serves to give it context. And the modern world is part of the context that your readers will bring to a story. When you read… There's a reason, like, Huckleberry Finn has warnings on it now. It's still a fantastic story, there's still a lot of really great stuff in there, but there's pieces of it that do not read the same now as they did when Mark Twain wrote it, and then there are pieces that have always read that way, depending on who the reader is.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, like, again, using a less loaded example, Jane Austen use the word electricity in her novels. I 100 percent cannot. Because the frame of a modern reader is that electricity did not exist until they were children, and certainly not in Jane Austen's time. So if I write… Use it, in a story that is set in Jane Austen's time, it looks like an escape, it reads differently than it does when she was using it. Because our understanding of electricity has changed.
[Erin] Wow. Somehow, it's so funny, we've, like, come around to verisimilitude, my favorite ridiculously long word, for no reason, which is, like, the feeling of something feeling real. It's the old one people always talk about is the Tiffany problem, which is that Tiffany is a Middle Ages name, but it sounds like a Valley girl name. And so if you have, like, Sir Tiffany, people will not… Like, it will throw them out of the story. It will throw them out of the frame. Because they will automatically bring their modern frame to it, and they will no longer be able to focus on the picture you are trying to show them. Because they'll be thinking about everything else. What you want to do is captivate the reader and keep them in frame as long as possible. And with that, we have kept you in frame for a very long episode. And so I think this would be a great time to send us away to the homework.
 
[Erin] Which is, to get back to sort of our earlier thought about framing the lens, take a story that you're working on, and what I'd like you to do is think about what happens if you shift the frame just a little. The easiest way to do this is, is there a scene that you could take out that would, like, shift the way that the lens of the story sort of is focused? And what new scene would you add in in order to rebalance your story? Then go and write that scene. And have fun with it.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.30: Using Why To Shape Tone

Jul. 29th, 2025 06:57 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.30: Using Why To Shape Tone 
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/20-30-using-why-to-shape-tone
 
Key points: Tone? Emotional beats. The vibe. Contrasting tones. In space, something always goes wrong. Sentence level tone? Assonance, consonants, emphasis. Sentence length and word length. Punctuation. Imagery. Sensory details. Cherry red, lipstick red, or blood red?
 
[Season 20, Episode 30]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 30]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] Using Why To Shape Tone.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Mary Robinette] Today we're going to be talking about tone. Now, I know that we did a whole episode in Season 18 on tone and mood. We're coming back to tone, because I love talking about it.
[Yay!]
[Mary Robinette] Tone is one of those words that people use when talking about fiction in a lot of different ways. The tone of horror, or the tone of the scene. What we're going to do is we're going to break down what it means, how we use it, and how it can be a tool in your toolbox. So, when we're talking about tone, what are some of the things that you all are thinking about in terms of what it means? Let's start with the meaning.
[Howard] I treat tone in fiction as an emotional word. Like a happy tone, a sad tone. I mean, I come from a music background and so the domain of the word tone is very heavily overburdened. But within the domain of writing, I think of tone as a set of emotional beats that the prose will deliver independent of what kind of story it may be. You can have a horror story that has a cheerful tone.
[Dan] I'm not sure that I have a good answer for this. I think about tone in similar ways.
[Mary Robinette] Same.
[Dan] Yeah. That tone is... tends to be primarily emotional for me. And I love picking tones that are not happy.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Really? Shocking!
[Dan] As exhibited in most of my books. I am really taken by the idea of sadness. I love sadness as, like, a tonal texture in which to tell a story. Dealing with loss, dealing with sadness, dealing with whether or not it is worth hoping for something. This was all long before I developed depression. But I find that to be such a fun thing to play with. I guess I need to ask, though, what you mean by the meaning of the tone?
[Mary Robinette] So, for me, when I'm thinking about tone… Very similar, that it's the emotion. That it tends to have words associated with it, like, oh, this has a bouncy tone, or a loving tone, or a scary tone. But I also think that you can talk about tone in a large-scale thing. It's like, this is the tone of the book. When you open the book, you're like, Nnnn, I am in for a horror thing. That it can hint at the genre, it can hint at this is the emotion that I'm going to have when I walk away from the book. But I also think that it can be within a scene. We sometimes talk about the dark night of the soul, which is a specific tone. That there's… Like, there's a specific mood, there's a vibe that's going on. I'm not sure that tone and vibe are that different, honestly. But it exists in the same way that in a horror book where you… Instead of having the all is lost moment, you have the aha, you're going to get away… Nope, nope. You get sucked back in…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] To hell. And so, there are places where you're going to lay two tones against each other. But the overall tone of the whole piece, the overall vibe, the sensation, the experience that the reader is going to have… That… There's… Um… It's still coloring that contrasting moment.
[Dan] Yes. I see what you mean now. I'm thinking about my book, Partials, where I establish the tone right off the bat, the very first scene, very first chapter, is about a dead baby. The plague that has killed everyone is still around, and the baby is born and passes away. And it's horrible, and that's part of the point, is because I want to establish right up front that is the tone that we are dealing with in this book. Which is not to say that the entire book will be dismal. In fact, most of the book is much more upbeat than that. Because another thing that I was specifically trying to play with in that series was the idea that the adults who remember the world that we lost our always sad and angry about it, whereas the kids who have grown up post-apocalypse, this is the only world they've ever known. They are finding joy in ways that the adults never do. And so there is… That was the easiest best way to get that juxtaposition across was to present the horrible thing and then show the different reactions that everyone in the book has to it. And so that kind of overriding sense of this is a world where babies die is important to establish the stakes, to establish what the emotions are going to be like. But then it also makes the joy and the happiness that the main characters experience that much more meaningful, because you know what they are feeling joy in spite of.
[Howard] Yeah. I am… I keep tripping over just the word tone in context with my music background. And I'm thinking of pieces of music where what fiction, in prose, we would call tone, in music we would call timbre. We would call maybe texture… When you have the brass all standing on a note versus when you have the strings all standing on a note. It's very, very different. That is analogous to, in your prose, the word choice. The line level word choice. But Dan, when you talk about the content of… I am telling the story of a baby dying, that is the minor key versus the major key, the tri-tone versus the dominant seven. That is the tone of the content as opposed to the tone of the turn of phrase. And as a humorist, I'm always balancing the two of those, because if I take the tri-tone, if I take the very dissonant tall jazz nineteenth chord and play it with nothing but woodwinds and harps, that's almost silly. And it's light, and it's airy, and I love taking the tone of my words, the tone of my prosaic turns of phrase, and contrasting them against the tone of the content of what I'm writing. That is a chewy delight for me that I just never tire of doing.
[Dan] Oh, man, that's one of my favorite things to do.
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.
[Dan] If I can get a reader to feel two contrasting emotions at the same time, I know I have succeeded at something.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, as we're talking, you've made me think about a thing that was happening when I was working on Martian Contingency that goes back to the last episode where we were talking about authorial intent. I honestly, when I sat down to write that, what I wanted to do, I just wanted to write a cozy. I just wanted to… Like, my characters have been having a really tough time. I just wanted them to have a nice time on Mars. I just wanted to write about let's have a party. Let's have meals. This is… Let's grow some plants. This is what I wanted to write. And also, the book before that in the series is Relentless Moon which is a really intense thriller. And I knew that that motion for the reader, that coming into this tone of we're growing some plants, that the complete lack of tension was not going to work. So I had to come up with a tone and a reason… Like, I had to come up with an authorial intention for it. But I came up with a tone of tension and keeping tension on my characters all the way through. But most of the plot points, most of the things that are actually happening in the book, I am… Like, there are multiple parties in this book. There's multiple discussions of clothing and sexy fun times and food and gardening. And I'm masking it under this tone of tension. I have created the tension using authorial intent and all of the other tools that we've been talking about. But I had to put that tone in of oh, no, things are going to go terribly, terribly wrong, and I did that on the first page when I had my character looking at the beautiful sky and thinking how lovely it is, and then think, but of course, this was space, and in space, something always goes wrong. And using that contrasting tone between those two things to create tension for the reader that I then play with through the whole book.
 
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of creating contrast, we are going to take a pause now. And when we come back, we're going to talk more about how to actually use this concept.
 
[Mary Robinette] So I find that when I am learning a new tool, that one of the things that works for me is to deal with it on a fairly small… Small level. And then I can scale it up to see how it works on something bigger. So when you are talking about the tone of a sentence, what are the pieces that were using to manipulate the tone of a sentence?
[Howard] Assonance and dissonance… Or assonance and consonants. Repeated vowel sounds, repeated consonant sounds. Or the absence thereof. Putting emphasis… Almost like rhymes. Words with similar emphatic patterns, similar accent patterns. Putting rhymes in. Emphasized and non-emphasized places. If this sounds like poetry, I'm so sorry.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That's kind of the way my brain works. But when I'm crafting, when I'm really trying to craft one sentence that matters, the whole shape, the lilt, the beat, the song of the sentence is governed by every one of these pieces. And… I mean, I can't think about that for every sentence I write, for an entire book, but it's when I know, gosh, like, first line, I have to establish tone. I will shape that sentence very, very carefully.
[Dan] Yeah. A lot of it is also sentence length, word length. Am I using big, long words, am I using short ones? How much punctuation is in there? There's all of these little tools you can use to change whether a sentence feels very fast and punchy, whether it feels fast and simple, whether it feels long and mellifluous. Lots of word length and sentence length and punctuation are tools that I use all the time.
[Howard] The tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Ah. So tasty.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and it is that like word choice, sentence structure, the imagery that I choose. Those are the things that I will look at. The difference between describing a fallen leaf is moldy or golden red. Like, those are both leaves that are dead, but they convey a different tone. So, some of what I'm also looking at is shared context.
[Dan] Yes!
[Laughter]
[Howard] [garbled] when you say shared context. I lean into sensory details. We often forget when we're writing to describe what a room smells like. What a small room sounds like, when empty as you walk through it, versus a large room, versus the great outdoors when you walk… Those are different acoustic spaces. They… At least… Okay, I have an audio engineering background, I can't not hear these things. But I think even to the untrained ear, you can tell if you're in a small room versus a large room, even if the lights are out. And if the lights are out, and the experience the character is having is hearing that they have stepped from a small alcove into a larger room, you've established the tone. And it's probably pretty cool.
 
[Mary Robinette] You're making me think about and wonder if our readers can tell the difference between the episodes that we record when we are all sitting in the same room, which we are doing right now, and the ones where we are on zoom and we are separated, we're distant.
[Howard] And I think the answer to that question is Alex wants the answer to be no…
[Laughter]
[Howard] [garbled] That's the guy who masters our episodes, and so masterfully masks the sounds of the ship or the sounds of the…
[Mary Robinette] But it…
[Howard] Lawnmower outside my window.
[Dan] Yeah, but there's so much more to it than that. There is how much we step on each other. Like, just now, you were still talking and I talked over you. And when we record on Zoom, we tend to not do that as much. Or two people will start out talking at the same time, and then stop, like there's a lot of…
[Yup... bup... nup...]
[Dan] Very weird tonal etiquette kind of things that we do that are very different.
[Mary Robinette] And these are the kinds of very small nuanced things that often a reader won't notice, there won't be a conscious piece of it. So, sometimes you're going into a scene and you may not have a conscious thought, as you are writing, about what this tone is going to be. And this is something that I think you can go back and layer in later. You can add in… If you want a little bit of tension, you can look at the way the characters are interacting with each other, you can look at what are the… Where am I adding in words like tintinnabulation to direct our attention.
[Howard] To the first line.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You've got my attention.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You have got my attention. If you describe something, if you describe a car as cherry-red, or if you describe a car as lipstick red, or blood red, it might… I mean, those might all be the same color of car to your mind's eye, but to the reader, the blood red car is in a very different book than the cherry-red car.
[Mary Robinette] I think that that, Howard, actually is a great segue for us talking about homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] What I want you to think about is to take this idea of tone. Just thinking about it in terms of these very broad things that we're talking about, word choice, sentence structure, the feeling that you want the reader to have. And I want you to have your character do an action. They're just going to have a very simple thing. We're going to write a little vignette in which a character is pouring tea for a beloved partner. I want you to try for a joyful tone. Everything in this is just joy. The tea is joyful. Everything is joyful. Think about the word choices, the sentence structure, the way the character… What the characters notice. The imagery that you're showing us. And I want you to do it again. But I want you to try for a tone of terror. It's still tea, it is still a beloved partner. One character is pouring tea for the other. And there is a sense of terror for the entire scene.
 
[Mary Robinette] You're out of excuses. Now go write. 
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Writing Excuses 20.29: Authorial Intent

Jul. 25th, 2025 07:08 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.29: Authorial Intent
 
 
Key Points: Authorial Intent, or Why am I writing this? Message versus content. Features inform, benefits sell. Execution. Macro level versus micro level. Area of intention. What do I want to achieve? Theme and meaning are often heady cerebral things, but why is very visceral. Sit down and do more writing. The intention that you have when you start a book does not have to be the intention that you have when you later. Make sure authorial intention and character intention are lined up. Make sure you know why those scenes are in the form (genre, etc.) that you are working in. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 29]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 29]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] Authorial Intent. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Howard] And we are gonna talk to you about this particular did this little aspect of the lens of Why called authorial intent. AKA Why are you writing this book? Or this thing? Or this scene, this chapter, this screen play, this whatever? 
[Mary Robinette] Line of dialogue.
[Howard] This line of dialogue.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I want to start with an example from my marketing background. And the example is message versus content in advertising. The message for an auto ad is like this car will make you sexy. But they can't just come out and say that. That's their intent. This car will make you sexy. Their intent is for you to buy the car. The content has to say it subtly. How do you intend a book and then not heavy-handedly just stamp Authorial Intent all the way through it on every page? 
[Chuckles]
[Howard] How do you do better than the auto advertiser does?
[Dan] Well, you're talking about advertising now which is reminding me of my old advertising days. And one of the advertising maxims that gets shared around a lot is features inform, but benefits sell. Like, you can talk about all the things the car does, that's not going to sell the car. But what will the car do for you? That's what will sell the car. And now I'm thinking about that with stories that we tell. I can absolutely think to myself about what the theme is, what the meaning is, what the structure is, all of the stuff that I have put into it. That is not going to make you as a reader enjoy the thing. That is not going to sell the book to you. Whereas the execution of it all absolutely will. And so for me author intent has a lot of different meanings. Because some of it is what have I put into this, what am I trying to say with this? But a lot of it is also just I haven't explored this type of character before, and it is my intention to give this very different type of character or setting… It is my intent to explore this kind of magic or this kind of conflict. Those are more of the benefits. That's the execution, and that's what I think is going to grab readers.
 
[Mary Robinette] I… I find myself that when I'm thinking about like grabbing readers or something like that… But I often do not think about the why of the book. Like, why on a macro level. Because honestly most of the time my why is Cool! I love this idea.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Like, that's my why for writing it.
[Howard] I get to write another book?
[Mary Robinette] Great! It's like Dragons! Yay! That's my intention. Like, I just want to play… Spend a couple of months playing with dragons. That's my why.
[Howard] Can we just put another pin in that and say that's absolutely valid?
[Mary Robinette] I hope so.
[Laughter]
[Howard] That is enough why for me.
[Mary Robinette] Right. But when I get into the book, for me, when I'm thinking about why, that's where I start thinking about how I'm engaging with the reader. And I'm thinking about something that Jane [Espenson?] Calls the area of intention. Which is the… She was talking about this when you were… With jokes. Why… What am I trying to do with this joke? Why is the character doing this? And I find that this idea with the area of intention helps me make decisions on a line by line basis on why this scene is in the book. And what I often in thinking about is, for my why is, what effect do I want to have on the reader? What conversation do I want to engage with? If I think about why on a macro scale, it is that what conversation do I want to have, what question am I asking? But most of the time, when I am using why personally, it is not on the big project level. Because most of the time that upper-level intention really is just Nifty!
 
[Howard] Dan?
[Dan] Yes?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Why?
[Dan] Why? Well, so the project that I'm working on right now… Middle grade fantasy. The intention behind there, the why of the book, why am I writing this book… We've talked about theme and meaning before, and there is theme there that I've got something that I'm trying to say with the book and we don't need to go into that because I think that those discussions where they get into the very strict details, are kind of boring for readers. They're English class kind of stuff. Whereas why am I telling the story in this particular way…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Dan] Well, because I got very excited about it. I was reading a… Some kind of peripheral material to Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion and talking about the land of Eriador, which is the land west of the Misty Mountains and how it is basically a vast unpopulated wasteland that used to be a huge kingdom, that used to be two huge kingdoms. And now there's basically Rivendell and the Shire and the Grey Havens and nothing else, of any particular import. And that, for whatever reason, the idea of this vast lonely land completely captured my imagination. And so why am I telling this story in the way I'm telling it? Because I wanted to capture that almost post-apocalyptic fantasy kind of idea. The idea that this takes place not in a bustling kingdom, not in an enchanted forest, but in this huge empty wasteland where there's just a couple of little villages here and there and very little else. And capturing that feeling, capturing that tone, that is absolutely my intention for the book.
 
[Mary Robinette] And I think that that's… Like, when you're talking about that… What you made me think of are some of the things we talked about when we were in our Who module. That in many ways, we're talking about the author's motivation, the author's stakes and goals. Your goal is to explore this, the Rivendell, and so the why, for me, as an author, is, like, what do I want to achieve? Why am I making these decisions? And it usually goes back to this… To a core idea of some sort. For me, it was the Thin Man in space with the Spare Man.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There's a mood that I want to evoke for the reader. There's… Which will be talking about when we get to tone. But there's something at the core of it, and experience that I want to have and that I want to share with the reader. And, for me, that is often the why, is about the experience. Where is theme and meaning is about the heady cerebral things.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But the why for me is often very visceral.
[Dan] And that's such a… That's why I was going back to this old advertising maxim. Features inform and benefits sell. How fast can this car go is a very different question from what does it feel like to drive this car. What does it feel like to go that fast? What does it feel like when the windows are rolled down and you're on that twisting highway and the radio is on your favorite station? That is such a visceral experential thing, and that's what people are looking for. Beyond just the boring numbers or the high level engineering that goes into it.
[Howard] Let's take a break for a moment, and when we come back, I'm going to say a thing.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Why, Howard? Why?
[Laughter]
[Howard] That's a keeper.
 
[Howard] Earlier, Dan, you said discussions like in English class are just boring. And it occurred to me that if in my English classes in high school, we had discussions with the answer to authorial intent was the author wanted to write this book so that they could sell the book and make money… That never one time, never even one time, came up. My intent, in many cases, when I sit down to write something is, I intend to write anything that will give someone an experience, just when they pick it up and read the back cover, that leads to them buying it, that leads to them reading it, and enjoying it, that then plants a hook within them that will get them to buy other things that I write. And that's a pretty deep-seated intent, and that's not something that I would ordinarily state openly in any of my marketing copy, because it sounds a little insidious. And yet, it's a valid intent. It's every bit as valid as dragons are cool. And the Shire exists in the wasteland, and I want to explore a wasteland. My question now is what are the weird intents we would never talk about in English class, but that are perfectly valid? What are our motivations to write that are just out there?
[Mary Robinette] I mean… I guess… So here's the thing for me. On a certain level, I don't know how useful it is, because, like, I can tell you, like, that my intention is dragons are cool. I had a dream. This is the why of it. The Ghost Talkers. Why? Why does Ghost Talkers exist? I had a dream, and then I was like, oh, I think there may be a story there. And I teased it out, and other parts of Ghost Talkers are there because I put a Doctor Who cameo in every novel, and that's why. Like, why is it there? Because I needed a chuckle. But, so, for me, I think the why can be so personal to the reader. And the question that I'm interested in, and that I hope that we can kind of play with some with this intention is how are you using that intention? You've got an intention, but how are you using it? How do you use it to make decisions when you're measuring against the choice of making it feel like Rivendell versus in space, how do you measure that?
[Howard] At some level for me, the decision that… The authorial intent needs to lead to a decision on the author's part to sit down to and do more writing and I want to have... I want my intent to be compelling enough to me that it keeps me moving. And I feel like being able to… And I guess this is my intent for at least this segment of the episode… I want our listeners to evaluate their intents and to realize, one, hey, that's a valid intention, and two, I'm allowed to keep going back to that well if that's what gets me into my chair to keep writing.
 
[Mary Robinette] So with that in mind, here's the thing that I think is really important. The intention that you have when you begin the story does not have to be the intention that you have later in the book. One of the problems that I think happens to writers over and over again, especially those of us with ADHD, is that it gets boring after a while.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And I am not the same person today that I was yesterday. Yesterday I was extremely fatigued. I had had to do a bunch of teaching that I had not planned on doing. I was… I had been out in the sun, and the things that were interesting to me, the things that motivated me, were very different from today. So, for me, when… If you're talking about that kind of author… That's… For me, that's not authorial intention, that's authorial motivation. Like, what's going to get me to sit down in a chair. That, for me, I think every day you can ask yourself, why is this story important to me today? And it doesn't have to be why it was important to you yesterday. If I am trying to write a story… Here's an extremely personal example, Martian Contingency came out this year. I started writing that book and had ideas for it. And in the course of writing it, my mother who had Parkinson, went into hospice. As I was finishing that book. My authorial intention at that point became I have to finish this before mom dies or I will not pick it up again. That is not a sustainable authorial intention. When I finished writing it, it was months before I did revisions on it. I'm a completely different person. I was the one who's grieving. I was the one who's recovering. And that is a different person who is going through it. So this is why I feel like when we're talking about these big broad level authorial intentions, it's good to think about it and I think that you can use it to say why am I sitting down to write today. But the reader can't tell when that book comes out that that was my intention. So, for me, the thing… That's why I keep saying I find that thinking about it on a micro level of why do I have this sentence, why do I have this paragraph, why do I have this chapter? That is dealing with the person who is in the chair in that moment.
[Howard] Yeah. I actually have a spreadsheet to track those things. My authorial intent for this scene, this scene, this scene. What is this supposed to do? What is my intention for these things? But, yeah, you're right, at some level, it's authorial motivation for me to sit down in front of the spreadsheet and look at today's list of intentions for what needs to be written.
[Dan] Um… We're recording this on the cruise, the Writing Excuses cruise, and I just taught a class yesterday about fight scenes and why I think they're terrible.
[Mary Robinette] I really enjoyed that class. FYI.
[Dan] Thank you very much.
[Mary Robinette] And I have like… I, like, was taking notes and I'm very excited to talk to you more about that… But carry on. Please.
[Dan] So, one of the things that we talk about in there is why are you putting this fight scene…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Dan] Into your story? Why are you putting this action scene into your story? And one of the comments that we got… Several of the comments that we got where exactly what I expected, which is, well, I've read better books before, and there were fight scenes at this part of it. Or I watched movies that I love and there's a fight scene at this part of the story. And I feel like, so often, that is our intention, and that is a very shallow intention. When we get to that level of thinking, why is this scene in the book, why is this chapter in the book, and if your answer is because I think it probably ought to be… I mean, yes, you might be right, but that's a terrible way to start. And that's not a helpful way to go into this scene. If you're writing it out of obligation, without a specific purpose, if the purpose is on… If it's purely tautological. This scene exists because I know that it should exist. You need something more than that. There needs to be some kind of question that you are asking or answering, there needs to be some kind of exploration of who the characters are or a revelation about the setting or the technology or the magic or something. There needs to be a specific intention beyond, well, I've read other books and they have this kind of scene at this point in the story, so I'm putting one in.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I find that there's the authorial intention and then there's the character intention. And often, when a story is falling flat, it's because the authorial intention… The author is, like, I need the character to do this. I need the character to have this fight right now. And the character… Like, there is no sensible reason that they would do that. Their intention is to try to… Based on everything that you the author have set up to that point, has them pointed in a different direction, but you force them to do it without providing them sufficient motivation, sufficient intention, all of the things we're talking about before with character. So, for me, again, it's like with the author, what is my goal for the story? That is the why that I'm interested in. What is my goal for the story? What is my goal in this moment?
 
[Howard] One of the things that you brought up, Dan, is the importance of understanding the why of the form in which we are working. Why are there action scenes in movies? Why are there fight scenes in other books? Why are there… Why are any of these things… Why are there happily ever after's in romance? And if you don't understand some of those whys, if you don't understand some of the intent of the authors who have come before you, the intent to ape what they have done by making your own book follow the same pattern is going to be broken. Because it's not what you mean. It's not…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] You don't understand why this was done and so you're doing it. I mean, I don't want to suggest that you're writing your book for the wrong reasons, but you might be writing that part of the book in the wrong way because of wrong reasons.
[Dan] Well, and that's often why someone says that a story feels formulaic is because the formula has become more important to the author than the characters, than the plot. Because we are following this because we know we're supposed to and not because the characters would naturally do these kinds of things.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and that's why one of the things that we're doing this season is a little unusual, that we are… We're doing a lot of really, really deep dives and we're going to do this whole extremely deep dive into structure in season 21, where we're talking about the what and the how of our big questions. And it is hard to evaluate something when you don't know why it exists.
 
[Howard] And I think that might be a good place for the homework. You ready for the homework? Take your work in progress, and in two sentences, describe to yourself why you are writing this. It might be a scene, it might be a chapter, it might be the whole book, it might be a screenplay. Two sentences. Why you are writing this? And then, for bonus points, one sentence. Why is that the reason that you're writing this?
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.28: The Lens of Tradition

Jul. 19th, 2025 05:47 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 20.28: The Lens of Tradition 
 
 
Key points: Why are we writing the stories we write? What storytelling traditions do we come from? Newpaper comics, mass-market paperback science fiction books. Science fiction and fantasy. Theater, and a Southerner. An immigrant household, between cultures. Anime, comics, SFF! Philip K. Dick, Piers Anthony. What tools did you take from those traditions? I have struggled to shake the idea that published means good. Be aware of what you may have internalized from your traditions. Outside of books, what traditions do you draw on? Music. Science. Doctors, and the practice of medicine. Anime and the Internet. It's a challenge to identify our traditional influences. Understand where you're coming from.
 
[Season 20, Episode 28]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 28]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] The Lens of Tradition.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] And this is an episode that I'm particularly excited about, because it makes us think about... We're in Why... Like, we're in the Why lens, like, why are we writing the stories that we write. And I think that, as much as all of us, I think, we're... Or, I don't know, speak for yourselves. But we're motivated to write by something we've read, a narrative we've experienced... I think a lot of times we forget, as we move on in our careers, to think about what traditions we came from. What are the storytelling traditions that we grew up with? What are the ways of telling stories that we then end up putting in stories of our own? So I'm kind of curious to actually maybe ask a little bit about like where do you think your sort of narrative traditions are? What do you think are the things that you're bringing with you, either as a writer or a reader?
[Howard] My narrative traditions are the newspaper comics and the mass-market paperback science fiction books. And I know those are kind of… Kind of more medium, rather than content, but that was where I was getting my content. And when you look at those mediums, and when you look at the crazy things I made, I think the influence of those traditions on me is pretty obvious.
[Mary Robinette] I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy. And so, for me, most of the stuff that I write is in a conversation with that in some way. But I also come out of theater, and I am a Southerner. And one of the things that I realized when I move around in the world is that there are storytelling… There are ways that we tell stories that I meet someone else who is not from one of those two cultures and the way we have conversation is different. So I'm aware that there is… There are narrative rhythms that are baked into the way I think that have to come out on the page. Even though they are… They are so… It is the water that my fishy self is swimming in. I… There… I'm unconscious of them.
[DongWon] And, for me, I think, literally growing up in an immigrant household, in between cultures, I think, I'm kind of a [polygraph] in terms of traditions. I pull from lots of different places. I mean, both in terms of Eastern narrative and Western narrative, but also, like, I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, but my formal training is in literary fiction and literary theory. And my first job was in literary fiction and literary theory. I pull from lots of different traditions, whether that's anime or Western comics or SFF. And that can be Arthur Clarke and Ursula LeGuin sort of like in equal measure. Right? I love… Pulling little bits from, like, lots of different pools. And that sort of, like, how I sort of have assembled my taste over the years. And it served me well in my career, because as someone who works with lots of different types of creators, but, still, I think if you look at my list, if you look at what I do, there's kind of, like, an overall cluster. Right? You can sort of see how there is things that I'm interested in and I have a tough time saying it's this lineage or that lineage. There's clearly some high points in there, but… I love pulling from lots of different areas.
[Erin] Yeah. I feel like, for me… I was thinking about did I grow up reading? I did. I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, and also comics. I was a really big comics person, especially when I was young. And… I try to think about… I'm trying to think about what it was that attracted me to the things that I was reading. I think I really loved Isaac Asimov's short stories when I was growing up. I loved the puzzle of them, the trying to figure out what the rules of the world were and then, like, the rules of robotics in like… There's a story collection, I, Robot, that is all just robot stories. And they all use the same three laws of robotics, but there's, like, so many stories you can make from them. And I love the idea that you could create a new world, and you only had to make a couple of rules, and there could be so many stories that, like, sprang out of those rules. And then I think about, like, my Philip K Dick phase, and, like, how, at one point in my life in high school, I read every book Philip K Dick ever wrote.
[DongWon] Same.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] What a weird time.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] What a… This is why you and I are weird now.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's way different than what happened to me, which was all Piers Anthony and, oh, my goodness [garbled]
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Erin] Piers Anthony?
[DongWon] Ah yeah.
[Mary Robinette] What happened to my brain?
[Howard] Y'all have made some choices. This is…
[DongWon] Well, I have made so many reading choices in my life…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You would not believe.
[Erin] But the funny thing about Piers Anthony is I actually credit/blame…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Piers Anthony for being the reason that I love the unreliable narrators.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Because there is the series of books that are the Incarnations…
[Mary Robinette] I love those.
[Howard] Incarnations of Immortality.
[Erin] Incarnations of Immortality, where there's, like, this one is war and this one is death and…
[DongWon] With a cool white car on the cover. Yeah.
[Erin] There is the incarnation of evil, who is the villain of the first five, I believe, books. And the sixth book is from the perspective of the evil incarnation. Where you could just see all the events from the previous books briefly as he's like, actually, I'm not that bad a guy…
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] I was really trying to do fine, and then they thought I was evil and I didn't really mean it. And it was really interesting to me to think, wow, you can take the same story and look at it from two different points of view, and those two people will still think they're right, but it's about their perspective. And, like, I still think about that to this day, and, like, the thing that's cool about traditions is thinking about what are the tools, like, the tools, not rules, that you took from those traditions and are now sort of using?
[Howard] The tradition that I have struggled the most to shake, and it's taken probably three quarters of my life to shake, was the idea that if it got printed and put between covers and published to the market, it was good.
[Laughter]
[Howard] No, I'm serious.
[Mary Robinette] No, no, no. That was a laugh of recognition.
[Howard] Yeah. You look at anything and it has been published, therefore it's good. And if I could reach out through the paper cones, the speakers, the whatever and touch our listeners right now and say one thing while gently shaking them, it is, "That was wrong." There… You are allowed to judge things that have been published as bad, or as damaging, or as awful, or as whatever. Because I came away from… I… That tradition, what it gave me was, well, it's okay to write about women in the same way that perhaps piers Anthony did. But, no, that's not what I want to do. There's so many things that I had to unlearn as a result of coming from that tradition.
[DongWon] Well, this is… I got so excited when I saw this particular episode on the curriculum when it was pitched because this, I think, is such an important topic in such a rich and nuanced topic. Right? Because tradition is a thing that we have really positive valences about as a term, because we love our traditions. These are important to us, they give meaning to us, but also, we have a lot of frustration and tension with them, because that can be an old way of thinking. These can be very hidebound, they can be… Things that are traditional can be good and rich and historical, and can also be limiting and sources of pain for a lot of people who are trying to find new ways of being in the world, whether that's because you're queer or you come, like me, from an immigrant community, or whatever it happens to be. These things can be in real tension. And I think we see this a lot within the science fiction and fantasy community. All of us said, SFF is one of our traditions. That means something different to each one of us…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Though. Because you can say SFF and the number of different groups within that is so vast. And if you want to tell feel how intense those differences can be, walk into a science fiction convention and name any science fiction writer born before 1980 and see what happens. You will see fights start to break out…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] At whatever table you're at. And as people have very different opinions of all these different people. And what Howard is saying is absolutely right, that just because it was published and just because it's revered doesn't mean that you have to think it's good, you have to like it, or take anything away from it. Also, just because something is hated doesn't mean you have to throw all aspects of it out, which is a very complicated thing as well. But whether or not things were good or bad, they… We come from those places. And just because we come from a place that had bad things in it, doesn't mean that you don't build off of that and exist within that tradition.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the… Let me talk about a really concrete example. One of the really pivotal books for me was Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin, which I loved. Still love. I've done a reread. It's still a thing I love. But I was talking with Ursula at one point, and she was talking about how she had made a mistake with that book. Because she'd always thought of herself as a feminist, and that she had written this book, and she had intended to shake things up. Her intent had been… We always see an old wizard. Well, what happens if the wizard is young? And her… Coming from a family with anthropologists and sociologists, she's like, it's… What if the character is brown? Because most of the people on the planet are. And what if it's an archipelago? So she'd done all of these things. And then, after the book was written and turned in and published, she realized that she had not given any of the female characters a name. And that was not on purpose. And… Except for one character. There's one female character who gets a name. And that she had not given most of them lines. And what she realized was that because she had grown up reading books written by men for men, she…
[Howard] About men.
[Mary Robinette] About men, that she had internalized that and also wrote a book that was by men for men… That was by a woman, but still for men. About men. And so, for me, one of the things that I realized is how many things I have internalized from science fiction and fantasy. Because the books that I was reading, it's like they're full of white savior complex, where it's the… Usually white outsider comes in and saves the native population of…
[DongWon] Yeah
[Mary Robinette] Some stand-in for… Um… And that I have internalized that without being conscious of it, in the same way that she had. And so one of the things that I try to do is ask questions about those choices. Now, but that is not… There's so many things that I have internalized that I am unaware of.
[DongWon] Well, I mean, I think that's one of the things about tradition is that… Not just to let it be the tradition on its own, and stand as a monolith, and to continue to pull other things into it as you go.
[Erin] Oh, actually, this is perfect, because I really want to talk about some of the things outside of books that form part of our tradition, but we're going to have to do that after our break.
 
[Erin] So, before the break, we started getting into… Because we were talking about, ho, as you know, like, how tradition can sort of… Can sometimes hold us back. Or can create well-worn paths that maybe we want to step out of, step off of. But something I was thinking about when I was thinking about my traditions before I got very excited about talking about Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Was that like… Was that, like, I actually think that the barbershop story is part of the way that I tell stories. Is, like, the way that oral story telling… The what had happened was story…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is something that I grew up hearing people doing a lot of, like, really great storytelling. It's why I always dislike when people say that you should always show, not tell. Because I'm saying some people are great at telling a story. The telling of it is the experience. And I think some of that comes from the way that oral storytellers… They can't get you to do the thing, they actually just have to tell you what's happening, and that there's something great in that. So I'm wondering, like, outside of sort of books, especially given that publishing only was publishing certain stories for a long period of time, are there other places that we can draw and bring into our tradition that we might not think about typically.
[Howard] I'm gonna be… I'm just gonna go back to the well and say music. Because I love music, I listen to music, I pick music apart. I'm the guy you don't want sitting next to you when we're watching a movie at home and there might be something funky with the soundtrack, because I'll comment on it, and I'll rewind, and I'll talk about it. Because I love dissecting sound. And structure of musical pieces can be extremely analogous to structure of books. You've got a symphony in three movements. Well, that's a three act play. Right?
[Mary Robinette] I think one of the other… Yeah. All of that. Yes, but one of the other things that, like, immediately jumped to mind was science. The science in science fiction. I can always tell when someone has a background in science. And it's not about all of the jargon things, it is about the ethos that they bring to the story, the way the characters interact with themselves, with the other characters. Because scientists… Like, real scientist do not work in isolation. There's a team. And that… You can see that on the page in the way that they are approaching the science and the stories, that there is a different type of evolution, I think, to the way those stories unfold than there is for someone who is use to working solo.
[Howard] As somebody who has had to interact with a lot of doctors, because of long Covid, I have determined that there is a vast gulf between doctor and scientist. And it's uncomfortable. Because I come from the idea that we perform experiments, we look for things that are non-falsifiable, we look for a control group, so on and so forth. And in many cases, a doctor looks for, well, what's the most common cause of your symptoms? That. Okay, then that's what I'm going to treat. And out you go. And that's not the tradition of science, that's the tradition of… Practicing medicine…
[DongWon] American health insurance.
[Howard] Yeah, American health insurance.
[DongWon] Yeah. For me, I mean, I think, the outside influences that I would point to the most is, one is anime, for sure, but it's also kind of connected to another thing, which is just the Internet generally. I think, age wise, I'm basically part of the first generation that grew up on the Internet. My uncle worked for IBM, so we had a computer from an early age, and so I was, I don't know, I don't know exactly how old, but by the time I was in middle school, I had the Internet. And I spent my entire childhood on that, tying up the phone line in the house, being in chat rooms that I wouldn't… Shouldn't have been in, looking at…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Bulletin boards I shouldn't have been on, talking to people that I shouldn't have been talking to. Right? Like, nothing bad happened, but, like, I also just grew up with a certain kind of exposure to the world and to a certain kind of chaotic energy that especially early Internet just had. It was a very, very special time of deep creativity, deep chaos, and deep just interaction with the world in a way that it had never really interacted before. And so all of that, I think, deeply informs my interest now. Whether that's an interest in like weird corners of things, knowing a lot about a little bit about a lot of subjects, or even just like a deep investment in what's just going on over there or what's happening in that community.
[Erin] Yeah. I love that you said anime, especially because I can sometimes tell when somebody who has a lot of anime ex… In their tradition, like, rights something, because anime characters will stop and tell you exactly what's happening, how they're feeling, what's going on. They'll name the move before they do it. Which is less the way that we write, like, current American prose. There's actually interesting that I'm like maybe we should be doing more of that, like, maybe that's… It's a popular tradition for a reason.
[Howard?] It's not wrong.
[DongWon] It popped into my head, when you were talking about barbershop tradition, because it is also a tradition where you do a lot of telling in addition to the showing. Right? In a Shonen anime fight that goes across seven episodes, they're telling you every God damned internal thought that they had over the course of their entire life in between throwing one punch. So…
[Erin] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But I… This is a great example, I think. Because I got in a story once, back when I was slushing things, and it was clear that the person had seen anime, but they didn't understand the tradition of it. Because what they did was they described everybody's hair…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And eyes. And they were just like… You could see that they were describing anime characters. But there was none of the anime dynamics. It was not… Like, none of that was happening on the page. But, oh my goodness, those locks were like…
[Erin] Locking. Whew.
[Howard] Hopping and locking.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Howard] I think that one of the biggest challenges for any of us is to identify our traditional influences. In terms of metaphor, you've got somebody who's fully clothed, maybe a little hot, a little bit sweaty, and you've got somebody who's just also fully clothed, but has just stepped out of the swimming pool. And there is a nice cool breeze blowing by. One of these people is shivering and thinks it's very cold. Because all of that water on them is evaporating at once. The weather is very cold. And the other person's like, naw, this feels wonderful. This is perfect. The experience we have is hugely dependent on where we just came from and what we've been associating ourselves with. And if you don't recognize that you are sopping wet, and that's why you are experiencing this as freezing, you lose the ability to work with the new place that you've arrived at.
[DongWon] Yeah. I talk a lot about how one of the most important things you can do as an artist is to develop taste. Right? You have to develop taste to understand what it is you're trying to accomplish, what you're interested in doing. And tradition's a huge component of that. Where you came from is the baseline of where your taste starts. And then, what you add to that, and how you evolve that over time, is how you grow as a person. Right? If I had stayed only in the taste of what I was reading when I was 13, which was a lot of Hieinlein, I think my tastes now would be very different. If I hadn't then discovered anime and the Internet and Faulkner and whatever else. Right? Like, adding all these other things helped me evolve my tastes into something more deliberate. And so when you're thinking about tradition, I kind of cheated and said my tradition is actually combining a lot of traditions. But I encourage, kind of everybody to do that. Just because you came from one place don't forget your roots. Those roots really, really matter. That is the core of what your taste is. But you can layer onto that. You can actively seek out… Hey, I've been stuck in this rut. I wish I was writing stories more from the perspective of women. Right? So if you're LeGuin writing Earthsea, suddenly you look up and realize, oh, no, I did the thing I didn't mean to do. How do you fix that? You start pursuing other types of fiction, you start reading other things, engaging with other things. And that lets you make the thing that you wanted to make.
[Erin] Yeah. Because I think if you have… Like, it's the… I know we've used this analogy, like, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I think sometimes what happens if you can get… If you get really baked into one particular tradition, it may not have the tools to tell the story you're trying to tell. Something that I sometimes find is that if you are used to movies… Like, not even just any particular genre, but visual medium is the only… All of your traditions are visual media, then sometimes when you write stories, you describe what is happening, sort of like describing the locks, but there's no emotion, because when you are watching something, it is the actors who are providing that emotional thing, and we don't notice it as much. So we maybe don't capture it in our brains, and then in our narratives. If you are used to games, sometimes folks who come from a game tradition will have a lot of interesting things going on, but no through line. It's the thing that you're not noticing around you. It is, again, like the thing you're not knowing what those traditions are. So, totally agree that, like, having more traditions helps. And it also means that sometimes you'll recognize that somebody's coming from a tradition that doesn't fit. Because sometimes if somebody doesn't like a story of yours, doesn't like a narrative of yours, it's because it doesn't fit into their understanding of what a story is, based on their own traditions. And it doesn't mean that that story is good or bad, or that their traditions are good or bad, but just that you're coming from a different place. And understanding where you're coming from, I think, makes you both a better writer and a better reader.
 
[Erin] Which brings us to the homework. Which is to make a list of five narratives of any type. This could be a story, a game, a movie, a barbershop tale, your favorite ghost story, that form part of your storytelling tradition. Write them down. Look at them. Then think, how is your current work influenced by the list, and is there any one of them that you would like to bring even more to bear on the story that you're currently working on.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.27: The Lens of Why

Jul. 10th, 2025 05:08 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.27: The Lens of Why 
 
 
Key Points: The lens of why? Authorial intent. Why did you write this book? Theme and meaning? Meaning is what the reader brings to the book. Approach them as questions. Theme is what the author puts into a book, meaning is what the reader gets out of a book. What am I trying to say with this book? Theme and meaning and authorial intent are just a coffee coaster. Help? A story or story structure is a pitcher, that you can put anything in that you want. The reader brings their vessel, a cup, which you fill from that pitcher. A story asks a question, while a polemic answers it. Theme as a series of questions? Moments of discovery of what my theme is? Rewriting can be a joy. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 27]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 27]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] The Lens of Why. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mark] And I'm Mark.
 
[Howard] We are joined by our special guest Mark Ashiro here on Navigator of the Seas...
[Mary Robinette] You will have already been listening to Mark on some of our earlier episodes at the beginning of the year. Because we time-travel. We haven't recorded those yet, so we don't know what we've talked about.
[Howard] We're quite sure they're awesome.
[Mary Robinette] Brilliant. They are brilliant.
[Mark] I'm going to tank those ones on purpose now.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] Mark, will you take a moment and tell us about yourself?
[Mark] Of course. I am primarily a young adult and middle grade author. I have seven published books, many more to come. I'm also very lucky in that I am a multi-genre author and I get to genre hop. So I like taking deep dives into genre structure, all things nerdy.
 
[Howard] Outstanding. Well, let's talk for a moment about the lens of why. This is a category we're using to describe tone and frame, authorial intent. Theme and meaning. All kind of wrapped up under the question of why did you write this book? Why did you write this book? And I want to begin by focusing a little bit on just theme and meaning, because I always struggle with these. So I'm going to ask the question to my fellow hosts. How do you differentiate between theme and meaning?
[Mary Robinette] I… This is my own personal take. And I think about both of those as things that are not necessarily for me. So, theme, for me, is something that people who are writing essays or reviews are about, that it's big, sweeping arcs of stuff. Meaning, for me, is what the reader brings to it. There's stuff about the book that means stuff to me, but it's often a personal thing that never surfaces for the reader. So I tend to, when I'm going into this, approach them as questions. What is the question that I'm asking? And I think that that is essentially what people are talking about with theme. That… Like, I will… The novel that I'm working on right now, the question that I'm asking is how many times can you lie to someone you love? That's not… It's not my intention to answer that question. My intention is to explore it. And I think that's what people are talking about when they talk about theme. But, for me, theme… Like you, Howard, is an amorphous thing that someone… Because I also see people like, ah, yes, thematically, they've used the color blue throughout this. I'm like, or they liked it.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It was on sale.
[Howard] Okay. I'm going to… I need to one trick pony this. My one trick is metaphors. Theme is how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop. And meaning is the owl doesn't care about the question, the owl is just going to bite the Tootsie pop. Meaning doesn't answer the question, necessarily. Meaning provides an answer in a different way, and theme asks the question without necessarily providing an answer.
[Mary Robinette] I think in another way you've demonstrated my thinking here, which is, with your metaphor, you've used a metaphor that kids these days won't get. And so you've got a meaning that is important and meaningful to you, but they're going to bring a completely different meaning to it when they read it. What are you thinking, Mark?
[Mark] So, my way into thinking about this is very similar to yours, is when I'm starting a project, it almost immediately always has a meaning to me. This is the reason why I want to write this, this is what I think is interesting. I don't often know the theme until much, much later. Because the theme will then diverge very much from the meaning that I intended or the meaning that I had for it. I think it's also interesting, as someone who is writing kid lit and is constantly interacting with readers, how often the readers, these kids will go on long five-minute tangents to me about what this book is about or what this story's about. And I'm just sitting there, nodding my head, like, that's totally what I intended. And seeing the way that someone can read something and find 20,000 different things you never intended, you never thought of. And so, for me, that's meaning. That's where meaning is. It is also fun, though, when you have these experiences where someone does see the theme that you have written in there, that is intentional. But, yeah, they don't always match up. I think it is fun, though, I will say, when the two, your meaning and the theme, matchup, and someone catches it. Those are the [garbled], that beautiful trifecta moments you have.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] At breakfast today, Kate McKean said… I asked the question…
[Mark] Yeah.
[Howard] She's going to be on some episodes with us this year.
[Mary Robinette] She will have already been on episodes.
[Howard] She will have already been on episodes…
[Laughter]
[Howard] With us this year.
[Mark] Time travel!
[Howard] Sorry, I keep forgetting to use the future has been tense.
[Chuckles]
 
[Howard] She said, oh, yeah, theme is what the author puts into the book, meaning is what the reader gets out of the book. Which is also a convenient definition. Dan, you were going to say something?
[Dan] I just thought… I'm really fascinated by this conversation, because I think I'm the opposite of you, Mark, entirely. I think about theme a lot. Theme, to me, is what is this about. What am I putting into it? I can't think of meaning… I can't think of a book I've written where I know what it means. Like, that is a completely foreign concept to me. What does this book mean? I don't know. Whereas the theme, what is this about, what am I trying to say with it, that's something that I do think about very consciously.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think about… I think this is why I liked the umbrella term of the why. It's like…
[Mark] Right.
[Mary Robinette] The why of the book. Why is this important to me? Why is this a book I want to tell? Why is this a journey that my characters want to go on? Because theme does have so many different meanings for so many different people.
 
[Howard] There's… We have in a couple of weeks an episode about specifically authorial intent, and, for me, the Venn diagram of theme and meaning and authorial intent… Boy, depending on what angle I'm looking at it, it's just a coffee coaster. It's just one circle, they all fit in the same thing. And so I struggle a lot with these definitions. Help? Help me.
[Dan] We all thought you were going somewhere with that.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I am going somewhere. I am asking you a question.
[Mark] We thought you were providing us with guidance, and then you're like, I need the guidance.
[Mary Robinette] So this is something that… A metaphor that I use when I'm talking about a structure… Structure, but also the relationship with the audience. And I probably talked about this in an episode at some point, but… Hello, we're going to revisit. That when you're thinking about a story, a story structure, that it's a pitcher, that's a container. It contains whatever it is that you want to tell. Pitchers come in a bunch of different shapes and you can put anything in them you want. You can put gazpacho for reasons. You can put a Pinot Noir, you can put apple cider. You can put anything into that pitcher you want. Depending on the genre you're in, the pitchers may have different shapes. You may decide to become a glassblowers and make your own. That's the story as you intend it. When the reader comes to you, each reader brings their own vessel. And when you're looking at the vessel, a Pinot Noir glass is designed to shape the way you're experiencing Pinot Noir so it hits your palate in a specific way, brings out all of these bouquets and things. So if I have a Pinot Noir in my pitcher, and I pour it into your Pinot Noir glass, you are experiencing the story as I intended it. You're getting my theme and meaning. But if you come to me with a red solo cup, you're still going to enjoy that. If I've got hot apple cider, and you come to me with a ceramic mug, perfect! We got a good match there. If you come to me with that Riedel glass, which was so good for the Pinot Noir… It's likely to shatter from the hot apple cider. Which is not my intention. And so, for me, when I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about who in my writing for? But I'm also not… Like, I can't also think about, oh, I have to think about every possible vessel that may come to me. So, when I'm thinking about that meaning, like, for me, the meaning is the way the reader experiences the story. That's… And sometimes, as Mark was talking about, they do line up perfectly. So this is why I have found that if I think about the what question am I asking, why am I telling this, who am I telling it for, that those give me measurable things for myself that I can use to make decisions. I can measure against the is this going to make so-and-so laugh? Then that's… Yes. And that was… That's my intention. That's my… The meaning for this moment. Great. Then I can measure against that. If I want this… If I want a laugh here and it's not going to make them laugh… Other people may also laugh at that point, but also, sometimes, you put in, like, an in-joke that is for one very specific cup.
[Mark] I want to jump in here, because now you just triggered sort of a memory that might help with differentiating between theme and meaning. So my first book, Anger Is a Gift, I wrote… a secondary character is a trans-racial adoptee, like myself. If you're listening and unfamiliar with that term, it is someone who is adopted out of their ethnic and racial culture and into another one. It usually describes kids of color who are adopted by white people. So I have a white adopted mom and a Japanese Hawaiian adopted father. And so I wanted a dynamic I have almost never seen in fiction. Because usually adoption narratives are just… There's an adoption, it's usually not transracial, you might see foster care, orphans,  or whatnot. But that specific experience is so specific, you don't see it. So I wrote this character who's dealing with being Latino who is adopted into a white family and the privilege that comes with that. That's my theme. The themes of privilege and how this person who is a person of color is in a very white society… Not only that, but in the neighborhood she lives in, and then how she interacts with her friends who are from a poorer neighborhood. That's my theme. What I'm talking about, what's the authorial intent. The second day this book was out, I was at a book event with Jason Reynolds in DC, and a man came up to me and said, "I read this whole book last night and I loved it. But I need you to know, like…" It was an older white gentleman and he's like, me and my husband adopted this young black girl, and I think I need to, like, talk to her, because I don't think I've raised her right. And I'm like holding this book open and I'm like, who do I make it out to? Like…
[Laughter]
[Mark] That man got the theme, but it had a different meaning. Because… And I love that you're talking about [garbled]
[Howard] And it had a very powerful meaning.
[Mark] Very powerful meaning, but, also, I was like, that's not it. I do… This is not for you. I was not writing for you, but that is a thing where the liquid I'm pouring out went into… I won't say the wrong cup, because I don't…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Mark] Want to make that judgment call…
[Mary Robinette] No, no.
[Mark] But a cup that shattered. And it was fascinating to me, because I'm like, I love that you did get the theme of this child's parents did not treat them well… Whoa, that is not the meaning I intended at all. Sorry if you happen to be listening and had an existential crisis for the last six years, but…
[Chuckles]
[Mark] But that's interesting because it's someone who understands the theme, but the meaning was still different for them.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] But if that individual came away from your book and what they came away with first and foremost was I need to have a conversation with my adoptive daughter…
[Mark] Yeah.
[Howard] About transracial adoption and parenting. I don't see parents having conversations with their children as a bad thing.
[Mark] Oh, yeah. No.
[Howard] That's… I would not say that cup shattered. I think that someone got meaning from it that you didn't expect, and had a very powerful experience that you didn't intend, but that was probably a net good.
[Mark] Yeah, I agree. I agree with that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I also don't think that sometimes a cup shattering is always a bad thing, because sometimes you need a different cup.
[Mark] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I was thinking about was a conversation that I had with Elizabeth Bear years ago. It was, like, one of those conversations where you're sitting around at a convention, and someone drops a… Just a one sentence thing that blows your mind for the rest of time. And she said that a story was something that ask a question, and a polemic was something that answered it. And so, when you were talking about the questions that you are asking, how does she relate to the people that she knows, how does this impact… Those are all questions.
[Mark] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And what you're showing is one way in which it might be experienced. But I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say you're also showing multiple ways, multiple answers to that. And that is, I think, where you… For me, the thing… Thinking about theme in that way, as a series of questions as opposed to a series of answers, is that it allows space for the reader. And I think any time you can allow space for the reader to come into the story, any time you can invite them in, that you do have the potential for a more powerful meaning.
[Howard] And on the subject of space for the reader, our advertisers don't actually read this, but we're going to give them some space.
 
[Howard] I have an experience I want to share about when I thought… When… I look at it now and think back at it. And I think that learning my theme, learning my meaning, caused me to change what I was writing. Early Schlock Mercenary, I did not realize… This is going to sound a little silly, I know… I did not realize that I was writing social satire. Once I realized I was writing social satire, a lot of lights came on, and now I had, as a writer, I had a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning. I knew what certain themes were going to be. My question for you, my fellow hosts, have you ever had a similar moment of discovery, where you realized, oh, wait. This is what this means. This is what my theme is. And you changed your course?
[Mary Robinette] Mark, I just watched you nod all the way through that, so [garbled]
[Mark] [garbled] And I love this too, especially because, it was for a book that was contemporary, and the theme could only manifest as speculative fiction.
[Mary Robinette] Ah
[Mark] So, my most recent YA book, into the Light, is a secret speculative fiction book, where the speculative fiction twist does not happen until like 325 pages in, when you realize you've been reading speculative fiction the whole time. Which, by the way, actually has made people very angry when they read it…
[Chuckles]
[Mark] Because it's so [garbled unlike]
[Howard] Dan has no experience with this.
[Laughter]
[Mark] Yes. And I'm sure you can speak to (one) it is a very creative… Creatively satisfying thing to do, but I even knew when I realized what the theme of this book was actually going to be, that it was going to be an unnerving and upsetting experience for the reader, because you thought I was leading you into one story, and your very much not being led into that story. And people… I do get why people go into a book and expect one genre and you don't get that. But I had written multiple drafts, I'd figured out structure. But I was having this problem with the two main characters where I was very frustrated because they sounded a little too similar. And what was it about the two of them that made them different enough to warrant this being a book? I had my meaning before I started the book. I had my meaning before I even started outlining it or brainstorming. I knew what the theme was before I started drafting. So I felt very secure in what I was about to do. But when I was actually writing these two narrators, something wasn't right. They felt disjointed, they felt angular. I was like, they're not clashing in ways that are interesting, their clashing in a way that's just upsetting. Why can't I get them to be what I want them to be? It was in a conversation that I was having that I… On the phone with my editor, where I said something very similar, like, they cannot be what I want them to be, and I was like, oh! That's actually the theme. The theme is of this whole…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Mark] Kind of why I was struggling with this is it is a book about religious repression and rejection, it's about two kids who are tricked into conversion therapy. And they go through very different experiences with it. And the theme that I was struggling to vocalize is, for some people in this world, you'll never be good enough.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Mark] And I just was sitting there and I'm like, I'm doing it now, I'm saying they're not good enough and they aren't fitting the mold that I want them to. And I'm like, oh, my God, that's it! And I mean, unfortunately, you have that moment where I was on the phone with my editor, Miriam Weinberg at Tor, where she's like, you're going to have to rewrite the whole thing, aren't you? And I'm like, yeah…
[Chuckles]
[Mark] This is the third rewrite, and I'm like, yeah, I'm going to have to, but I know what it is, in the way I figured out how to… Without spoiling it, was it required something extremely bombastic and very, very speculative fiction. But… And I'm curious to hear, too, for people who have had this, that moment of, like, oh, this is right, this is it. I'm exactly where I need to be.
 
[Howard] I shared with a student yesterday morning… We were talking about the necessity for rewrites, and I said, yeah, I got bad news for you. If you love having written, finding that you need to rewrite the whole thing is terrible. But, if you actually love to write, the opportunity to make this discovery and go back and rewrite it can be a joy.
[Mark] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Because now you get to do it again.
[Mark] With… At least for me, this sort of, like, infectious certainty.
[Howard] You get to do it better.
[Mark] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Mark] Where you've [sussed?] out as you are making decisions, and then you get to make even more because you feel good about the decision you made.
[Dan] I've talked about this a little bit before, but I've had this experience with three of the John Cleaver books. Four, five, and then, in between them, a novella called Next of Kin. Which I think of as my basically Alzheimer's trauma books…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Because they were about memory. The kind of basic premise of the John Cleaver series is that there are monsters who lack something and they steal it from us. And I wanted to have one who didn't have his own memories and so he had to take ours. And does that by… Does that in order to survive. And realized very quickly once I started writing that, that I was trauma dumping my grandfather's Alzheimer's experience all over the readers, and I… Then had that moment of, well, I need to go back and make this a little more palatable and a little more acceptable, but also, wow, I didn't realize that that's what this book was about, and it absolutely, that's what this book is about. That's what all three of those books are about, is me trying to work through my own history with loss of memory and the impermanence that this creates in your life and the other people around you. And having that experience halfway through really changed how I saw what those books were and what their theme was.
[Howard] All right. Well, if we have answered for you the question about what theme and meaning are, and how they are different from each other, please let me know, because I still am not confident in that. But I'm okay with not being confident in it. I feel like this is a place where the definitions we each come up with are going to function as the lens of why.
 
[Howard] And I have a homework for you which should be fun. Take a popular book to film or book to TV adaptation and ask yourself if the film changed the meaning or changed the theme of the book. And then, ask yourself in what ways it did it.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.26: Gaming as a Writing Metaphor

Jul. 3rd, 2025 06:30 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 20.26: Gaming as a Writing Metaphor 
 
 
Key points: What's the difference between experiencing a narrative as a game or prose? Choice, direct agency? Narrative games? Energy and complexity? Games are simulations. What are the actions, what are the verbs? Buy-in! Between games and writing, there's a middle ground of control in games. Competence. Not all books or games are for everybody.  What makes a narrative game? Obvious narrative? Present me with a story, don't make me randomly discover it. Make room for the audience. Let them make their own interpretations, draw their own conclusions. How much do I love the characters? How much do I care what happens to them? What are the levers in your game or narrative? Invite the reader in... 
 
[Season 20, Episode 26]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 26]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses. 
[Erin] Gaming as a writing metaphor.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Erin] And we get to talk about gaming...
[DongWon] Yay! Prepare for a six hour long episode.
[Erin] Yeah. Yeah, I know. I was like, this is actually sort of hard because there's so much that...
[Dan] Yeah.
[Erin] You can talk about when it comes...
[Howard] This play-through of Writing Excuses...
[Erin] Exactly.
[Dan] Kind of a speed run.
[Erin] Oh, my gosh. Yes. But I've been thinking about sort of what is it that separates the way that we game from the way that we write, the way that we experience prose narration from the way we experience being in a game. And the thing that I... the reason I really love games is I actually think that sometimes giving the person experiencing the narrative more choice and more direct agency over what happens, whether that's true or you just make them feel that it's true, changes the way that we experience story. And, for me, that's the big difference between them. But I'm curious, for you all, like, what makes you pick up a game instead of a book for that day? Like, what is the difference between having the same story as a television show versus a game that that show was based on?
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I love narrative, but I don't love narrative games a lot of the time, like, if a game is very story heavy, I'll often be like… Like I tried to play Last of Us a little while ago, and I just was like, I'm putting this down, I'm going to watch the TV show. Because it… The way it was giving me the story felt so slow compared to what I wanted in terms of my ability to consume a narrative, and then all the opportunities for player choice were so constrained to things that felt like they didn't matter, a.k.a., how I searched the drawers in this room versus the big narrative stuff I was interested in, which is, what do we do about this outbreak plague situation? Right? And so, I think, for me, when it comes to what am I looking for from game experience, I want something that's more energetic and more complex than you can get from somebody telling me a story. Right? So this is why I love FromSoft games so much, where I build the narrative by interacting with the world rather than them telling me what the story is.
[Howard] I think it was… It must've been 15 years ago now. I was at a convention and had the opportunity to go out to lunch with Steve Jackson. And he dropped a bit of wisdom that I have never been able to shake. He said, "All games are physics simulations." And I thought, now, that's not true. That's… Wait. Crap. Every game… Chess! Is a physics simulation, at some level, all games are simulations. And so, when I sit down, when I think of gaming or playing a game as a metaphor for writing, I often think, why would I want to play a game like Burger Time instead of working fast food? Why would I want to play a simulation of fast food restaurants instead of working fast food? Well, because I don't want to smell like hamburgers at the end of the day. But these simulations that we play can teach us things. And in many cases, they can teach us the same things that the job would teach us, only without the risk of smelling like [frieda?].
 
[Erin] And, I think that also they create a game play loop. So if you're writing a game, the main thing you have to figure out is what are the actions of the game? What are the things that the game lets you do?
[DongWon] What are the verbs?
[Erin] What are the verbs of the game? And so, like, in a… And it limits them. There are always less than the verbs that you can experience in life. Because a game is not going to be able to, like, do, like, and then I scratched my nose for three seconds for no reason. I mean, who knows… Maybe in the future. But it's hard to get to that level of granularity. And so, they then have to make those verbs things that you are going to want to choose. And, it's funny, I'm thinking back to, like, weeks and weeks and weeks ago, when we talked about second person and how second person requires buy-in. And games are often a second person medium, and, similarly, you have to get the player to buy-in to this is the situation I want to be in. These are the verbs that I want to be able to use to navigate that situation. Like, you may not like the… I love a narrative game. But where it feels like I don't have enough verbs to, like…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Move this narrative forward. Whereas I'm like, oh, actually, for me, the listen, the experience, the watch it unravel is a verb that is one that works well for me. Which is why different people have different desires and loves of games. Like, some people like a puzzle game, like I do. Some people like a narrative, some people like I want to shoot the thing from a weird angle.
[DongWon] I mean, this is why tabletop can be so interesting too, because even in this case, buy-in is so important and difficult to get. So when you're trying to get someone to play a new game system they've never played before, just the lift of getting them to understand what the core metaphors and verbs of the game are can be three hours of sitting there and walking someone through the session or whatever it is. And so how you get that buy-in in terms of, like, what are the world building hooks, what are the character hooks, what's the setting hooks, to get them on board with the idea of these are interesting verbs I want to interact with. I think that can be such a challenge with really effective game writing.
[Dan] Yeah. Erin, I'm glad that you enjoy narrative games…
[Laughter]
[Erin] I'm buying them all.
 
[Dan] Because I'm with DongWon on this one. And I find that I don't like the way games tell stories often. Which is strange to me, and I'm trying to figure out why, and I don't know if I can articulate it. But, relating this back to writing, I… There's an interesting middle ground of control. And we talked about this a little bit. Whereas I'm going to just go and work in a burger restaurant, then I have control over what I'm doing. Maybe not as much, because I am an employee. Right? Where is if I'm going to read a book about that, I have no control whatsoever. And games exist in that very intriguing middle ground, where there's a lot of interaction, there's a lot of input from both sides. And that's… Writing for that is very different.
[Erin] Yeah. I was just thinking about, like, the competence thing as well. Like, we people love a competent character. If you want people to love your characters, one way to do it is to show them being really good at something. Because for some reason, we like it. We like feeling competent. And in a game, like in a burger… There's a game that I play on VR called Star Tenders, where you are tending bar for aliens. And the entire game is just like increasingly complex drink orders, that you have to try to make before your customers get mad…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] And wander off in an alien type way. And so what I like about it is, like, you're not expected to master it the first time.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It's like learn… You get to learn a skill and then they add a little bit more. They had a slightly more complex thing, and all of a sudden, like, the verb that was hard for you in the beginning is one of a much larger sentence that you're able to manage. And that gives us a feeling of competence that really makes us feel like we are able to advance. But I think it's hard to do in prose. Like, you can show a character going through that journey, and have you really relate to that character, and therefore you go through that. But in games, because you're the one who has to make the physical motion, it often feels like in that physics simulation, like, you got a chance to level up.
[Howard] I had a friend tell me years ago. It was the very first of the Batman Arkham games. And he said, "Oh, my gosh, this game was so good." And he described this one scene that plays out. And he says, "And I was Batman. I got to be every bit… I got to do all of the Batman. I did all of the moves, I used all the tools, I used all the whatever." And I played that game and realized, I do not get to be Batman. I was not good enough. I did not learn fast enough. And I got tired and I moved away from it. And that's fine. You play a game for a little while, you decide it's not for you, you play something else. But the idea that the simulation of whatever can map out players differently, where a player gets to have an experience that they've been dreaming about their whole life and maybe didn't know it. My friend Joey, a Batman book would not have made him feel the same way that game made him feel.
[DongWon] Well, and I think that kind of ties into what makes Hades such a big success, is the way they tied narrative to failure. Right? When you fail, you get a little more piece of story, you get a little more piece of interaction. And then you repeat the loop. Right? Like, they were able to build the storytelling into the road like nature of the game. As you go back through it, you learn more about the world, you learn more about the characters, deepening your investment in the character and in their relationships when you do fail. So where something like the Rock City game kind of falls down is, if you fail at being Batman, now you just don't get to progress. You don't get more Batman because you were a bad Batman. If you fail at being [Zacharias], then you're… He's a failure. That's the whole point of the story. That is, you engaging with it and getting more of it as you build those skills and learn. Right? So, like, whether it's your aliens walking away from you in an alienating way because they're upset, or it's being spotted by the criminals because you're a bad Batman, like, the way in which we participate in the stories has to be fluid in that way, or has to be a rewarding experience in that way, or our buy-in starts to break down.
[Erin] I was laughing when you said that because I remembered the time I tried to play Grand Theft Auto, and there's a tutorial quest where you just get on a skateboard, and I don't drive…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] And I'm not good at driving related tasks. I could not finish. Like, it's a thing that they mean for it to take three seconds…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And, like an hour and a half later, I was like, obviously, this game was not meant for me because I can't even get a car…
[Howard] I have decided that my… I should not be stealing automobiles.
[DongWon] I think that comes back to books in that way though, because not… Books unfold… Not all books are for everybody. Right? Like, what makes sense to you and what you have buy-in for and what is an engaging world building character narrative to you will be really different than the next reader. Right? In the same way, that a game about stealing cars is probably not for someone who has never driven a car before. Right? And I think that can be true in fiction as well. And understanding who your reader is is also really important there.
[Erin] All right. I'm going to interrogate you about narrative games and yellow boxes, but first, we're going to press pause.
 
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[Erin] And now we're back. And so… Un-pause.
[DongWon] How was that load screen for you?
[Erin] Hope you enjoyed it. So [garbled] interested in is I'm like people who don't like narrative games? I must find out why? As somebody who enjoys writing the narratives of games. And I think it's interesting, like, the wanting to tell a story versus how much gamers experience it is fascinating. If you write for games, you know that you're writing the item description that, like, 89 percent of people will just be like, nope. X out. It's like you're writing the dialogue that people are trying to skip in order to get to their next action. But I'm wondering, like, when you say I don't like narrative games, I'm wondering what makes something a narrative game? Is it just how obvious it is in its narrative? Is it an outside category? Like, what does that mean for you?
[Dan] Well, I don't think it comes down to the obvious nature of it, because I, for example, really don't like Hades because it is not presenting me with a story. I mean, that's not the only reason. But it's a story you have to discover. And that's a place where DongWon and I diverge, because I don't like that in games, I enjoy being told this is the story that we have to fulfill, go do it. Here's what this is about, go do it. And the idea that I have to just randomly discover what the story is by talking to people or by reading books that I find laying around the environment always just rubs me the wrong way.
[Howard] Sorry. I'm giggling over here. Railroad Tycoon, The Linear Narrative.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I… No, I totally feel you here. One of the things that I love about games where a lot of the story is in front of you, but there's a lot of open space is that… And no, fair listeners, I'm not going to become a streamer of games… But I will often talk back to the characters on screen and say stuff that is just funny to me and is sort of in universe or not in universe, and I get joy out of that. Even though the story is maybe a little flat, I enjoy fluffing it up a little on my own.
[Erin] And thinking about this as a metaphor for writing, it's interesting, because it's, like, how strong… How, like, is the power of the narrative? Like, how much is the narrative saying, like, a story is happening here?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] How much is it making you discover it? Because there are prose pieces where the story is not, like, a very clear, like, plot point to plot point type of thing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But it feels a little more like you're kind of wandering through and story is occurring. And it's interesting thinking about, like, how much are we guiding, how much are we controlling our readers? I mean, we're always controlling everything, but how much is that control felt by them versus is it just feels like they're having to put it together for themselves?
[DongWon] Well, I'm getting on my soapbox for a second here of my obsession with FromSoft games. Right? And so, these are the Dark Souls games, Blood-Borne, Elven Ring, and the reason I love these games so much is they're deeply authored experiences. Like, there's no question that there isn't a very specific point of view behind those blows and that they are creating an experience for the player that has thematics and characters and all the things we expect from story. But you're just getting that story in big cut scenes, where people are talking to each other and there's story being told to you. You're having to discover that story by doing things like reading the item descriptions, by piecing together, like, oh, I thought this boss. This boss was like… Said this one thing that's related to this other boss. Like, you're trying to, like, weave string theory together, the world building and the plot. And I recognize that it's not for everybody, and completely understand why. But what I love about it is I think it gets something… Or gets at something that's really true about all storytelling that we do, which is you have to make room for the audience. Right? And this is a thing I talk about a lot as I'm putting together an actual play show and things like that. One thing I talk about with my players and with the rest of my cast is we need to make room at the table for the audience. There is a fifth seat at the table here, and it's the audience who is here participating in this with us. And it's why I love actual play shows like Dimension 20 or [What's My Number?] or Friends at the Table, because they understand that I am also a participant in this story in an active way. Right? And I think that's true of a book, too. When you write a book, you're writing a book for someone. You have to understand that the reader is there picking it up and interacting with it. Now, their verb is limited to turn the page and continue reading. They have one verb, which is keep reading, don't keep reading. Right? How they feel about that, how they engage with it on a moment to moment basis can change and evolve. But the more you make space for them to make their own interpretations, to engage in a certain way, and to draw their own conclusions from stuff, I think that's where interaction with fiction can be so exciting and so deep and rich.
[Erin] It's funny, thinking about, like, the verbs of games, I'm reminded of… So I used to do writing for Zombies Run, which is a game with only the verb run.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And so, years and years and years of narrative, of, like, small scene of, like, people talking and then something has to happen at the end of the scene to force you to run. And to go to the next thing. Which is like… Was really interesting in figuring out what are the ways to continue to get audience buy-in. Because, if you think of tabletop games, some have extraordinarily complex mechanics that will take you…
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] 10 years to figure out. Or, like that boardgame, where you're like, our first eight hour session…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Is going to be figuring out…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] How this boardgame works. And then, eventually, we'll become experts. But thinking about, do you need that level… Like, how much complexity is too much? Like… And that can be true in a game, but also in a narrative. How much just becomes distracting where it becomes about the experience of the narrative as opposed to the narrative itself.
[Howard] When we look at audience buy-in, it's useful to look at improvisational theater, where the audience is literally shouting suggestions at the stage. And if the audience is not engaged, the show falls flat pretty quickly. By the same token, comedy acts on stage in comedy clubs, the audience is buying in by laughing. They make noise. If the audience does not make noise, we say that the comedian is dying. Because that's what that experience is like. And if the audience is making noise, if there laughing all the way through, the comedian is killing. Why is it so violent? Probably because public speaking is the thing we're all scared of the most. And so we tie it to death this way. But the sense of audience buy-in is very, very visible in improvisational theater and in comedy clubs. And if you think about how important the audience participation is to the performers, and then look at what an audience means to you as a writer, that contrast might change the way you think about what you're writing.
 
[Dan] I've been sitting here trying to think about what narrative is in games I enjoy. And it comes back to a lesson that I have learned for my own writing, which is, how much do I love the characters? How much do I care about what happens to these characters? Because there are plenty of games, and I apologize for continuing to rip on Hades…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Because it's a beloved game that everyone other than me adores.
[DongWon] You're alienating our whole audience.
[Dan] I know. I could not possibly have cared less about any of the characters in that, and so…
[DongWon] [gasp] Dash…
[Dan] I know. And so, playing the game didn't really hold a lot of appeal for me, after the basic gameplay loop, I figured out the narrative side of it didn't work for me. Whereas something like Cyberpunk 2077 and this… So much of this comes down to personal preference… Those characters I fell in love with. And I wanted to spend time with them. And so when I am doing my own writing, I… That's what I keep coming back to is the lesson I learned, which is, I'm asking my readers to spend however many hours it takes to read this book, to invite this character into their brain and spend time with them. It has to be somebody that they love and care about.
[DongWon] Well, it's so interesting, because I played Hades because I love the characters and I played a billion hours of Cyberpunk 2077… I really love that game, I play that game not for the characters but for the world. I find the characters… They're fine, I enjoy engaging with them a lot of time, but mostly, what I want to do is run around that city stealing and driving cars…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] And…
[Erin] No!
[DongWon] Getting…
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] In fights with weird criminals. Like, that's the thing that I really… Like, mechanically and vibes-wise, being in that world… To me, Cyberpunk is a game that's all about vibes. Like, the aesthetics of it, the culture of it, all of that are things that I really, really enjoy, and so… I think it's, like, also [garbled] the lesson when I say make room for your audience in terms of crafting your narrative experience, whether that's a game or novel or short story or a film, it's… You also can't predict what part of your story that people are going to attach to. Right? I know people who play Hades and have never read a single piece of the text… They just like the combat. They enjoy the mechanical aspect of the combat. And I know people who have never played an action game in their life that somehow saw credits on Hades, the thing that I, who play a lot of action games, have never been able to do, because they just love the characters so much that they just kept playing this thing and learned a whole set of skills that they never had before in their entire life. And so, watching what your audience will connect to is something you can't necessarily predict. Right? And you can't control for that. You can have guesses, you can have focuses, but that's why you kind of gotta chase your own interests as much as anything else.
[Howard] I… Dan, I remember a comment you made on the Borderlands games years ago, which was, yeah, this is cute games, and one of them is really fun, the one where you run around shooting things and exploring the world. And then there's the game of comparing red arrows and green arrows on your gear, and I don't like that game at all.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] And…
[DongWon] 100 percent.
[Howard] And I love that principle, that there can be a thing that we just love that is inextricably fused to a thing we despise, and are we going to play anyway? Are we going to continue to consume or are we going to look for something that doesn't have the up down arrows game in it?
[DongWon] This is me and Destiny's death grip on my brain, but… Yeah.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] I think one of the reasons I really love games and game writing is because there are all these different levers you can be pushing in any narrative.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] You can be pushing the character lever, you can be pushing the world lever, you can be pushing the what are the actions lever, which is often a plot lever. But it's like in games, they're all sort of… They are more discrete. They feel more discrete from each other. Like, in a prose narrative, you can really weave in… Like, the world is happening, what the characters, with the action is all at once. But the way that games are designed, like, someone makes the world and then they sort of put characters in it who have their own set of actions. And they can't 100 percent control how you use those actions and that character to experience the world. And because of that, there are intersections that will happen that they will never be able to anticipate as public… Emergent gameplay is here. Somebody is having a gameplay experience you did not intend.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But they were able to find those connections in interesting different ways. And I think it's nice when we think about our stories to think about how are all the levers that we're pulling different? And, like, how… If we separate out the way that were talking about lenses, it's sort of a version of doing that, of thinking about what are all the different lenses, what are all the different levers, and how are we combining them in really interesting ways to make stories?
[DongWon] And also just letting… Learning to realize that you don't have full control over the audience experience. Right? And that they are going to bring their own lenses, they're going to bring their own verbs, the going to bring their own ways of interacting with the story to that experience. And once it's out of your hands, you don't get to tell people you're reading this wrong. Right? Or you can try. Sure. But, like, you're going to get…
[Howard] Feel free to say that. It's probably not going to work out the way…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] And so I think one of the things that I found really exciting about this topic of gaming, not just because I clearly love games, as do we all, but because it is this thing that I think is really, really hard for people who create prose to wrap their heads around, is learning to… Not just, like, ease off of the control, but actively invite in the reader into making this experience with us. And I think learning how to do that is a thing that can really take your fiction from being exciting to truly connecting with a huge fan base.
[Erin] And with that, we're at the end of this game session. And we are going to move to the homework.
 
[Erin] And for the homework, I'm going to challenge you a little. There are probably folks who are listening to this who are like, I only… Last game I played was tag. But I would like you to think about… Take a project that you're working on and imagine that someone is making a game of it. And figure out what would that game be. What would be the actions that the characters would be doing? What would be the parts of the world that the game would be focused on? And just write out sort of, like, a here's the game of my amazing work of art. If you need help with this, you can look at things that are games that were made from things like Lord of the Rings game. Just read a description of it, see if anything comes to you. And then as you're writing that out, is there anything you've discovered about your story that was unexpected?
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.25: Writing Confrontation (LIVE Aboard the WX Cruise)

Jun. 26th, 2025 05:54 pm
mbarker: (MantisYes)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.25: Writing Confrontation (LIVE Aboard the WX Cruise) 
 
 
Key Points: Why are your fight scenes boring? Just blocking is boring! Four parts of a reaction, focus, what the character notices, physicality, thoughts, and actions. Is the problem using all four tools at the same time, or is it using all four tools every time? What's new and different for the character, that's what they notice? Fight scenes that work well contrast the character's history with their anticipation. The idea that confrontation will reveal aspects of character is a good reason to have a confrontation. Confrontations and fights should have emotions, character reveals,  something that matters, changes. Think about ways that strengths can become weaknesses. That's not a nail!
 
[Season 20, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 25]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] Writing Confrontation Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise.
[Dan] Fif… I don't know what to say now.
[Mary Robinette] Just your name.
[Howard] Your name.
[Dan] Ah! I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm cueing Dan.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I'm also Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, we are aboard the Writing Excuses cruise in front of a live audience.
[Applause]
[Mary Robinette] And the first thing that happened on the cruise, one of the first things, was that Dan taught a class called why your fight scene is boring. I went to the class because I would also like to know why my fight scenes are boring and realized, as he was talking, that it actually applied for every form of confrontation that your readers… Your characters go through. It's not just the physical confrontation, it's also the verbal altercations, it's facing off against a dragon. It's… Well, I guess that is a fight scene. But, point being, it applied to a lot of other things. And we thought that it might be fun for you all to listen to how we come up with lesson plans and what… How we react to new material by coming up with something on the fly for you.
[Howard] And in the interest of explaining a little bit of the overall Writing Excuses meta, this happens all the time.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] We start… Yes. We are podcasters with radio voice. We sound like experts.
[Mary Robinette] Ha ha!
[Howard] Which we're not. We learned so much from each other every day. We come on these cruises, we learn things from our students, we learn things from each other's lectures. It's such a wonderful place to be, being just smart enough to figure out that you don't know enough and you have to learn something new.
[Dan] I gotta say, I do love it when we start episodes with how smart Dan was that one time…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] I was going to say, we should do that more often, but that requires me to be smart more often, and I don't know if I can do that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. 15 minutes long, you know.
[Dan] Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] That's the length of smartness we need. Okay. So. There were a lot of things that you talked about, but one of the things that I was struck with… One of the students asked a question that then made my brain go, oh! The student said something along the lines of, so you're talking about how if a fight scene is only blocking, it's really boring. Which is, like, correct. So how do you get the reactions on the page without stopping the fight scene, without slowing things down. And you gave a whole series of answers. But my brain then started unpacking things into thinking about what reactions were. So here's what I've got, and I wanted to toss it around to see if there's something there. That there are four parts of a reaction. There's the focus, the what the character is noticing. There's the physicality of it. There are thoughts. And then there are actions. So, let's say you want to slow down a moment, you would use all four of those. So there's the I see the sword. There's the description of the sword, the sword is long and with a basket hilt handle. And then there's the physicality, the way the sword feels in the character's hands. That there is a weight to it. Then there's the thoughts. Yes, this is the sword that belonged to my father that he made for the six fingered man. And then there's the actions, which would be the slashing and the cutting. And that often, what happens when we are s… When we are… When things bog down is that we are using all four of those at the same time, but we don't need all four of those at the same time. That they can… That we… Sometimes we're only using one aspect, that the only thing the reader gets is the focus. And that's another way that things can go bad, we're just describing the way things look without hitting any of the other pieces of interiority or the character's looking at the wrong things and noticing the wrong things. Like, let me describe in loving details this sword while vamps are coming at me.
[Howard] It can also… I mean, yeah, you bog it down when you're trying to do all four of those things in sequence in turn. Compressing is super useful. You can use the same words or one phrase to cover two or more of those things. The familiar weight of the sword… Well, now I know how I feel about it and I've described that it is an object with mass. Okay, so I haven't said very much, but it's…
[Laughter]
[Howard] But you see where I'm heading with that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] And that's the sort of trick that we've been using forever, which is you put a line on the page, make that line do as much lifting for you as you can.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, the thing that I'm excited about is that this is a… When you say this is the sort of thing we've been doing forever… The thing that I love about doing these episodes, and to refer back to an episode that just happened on the stage, but for our listeners, was several weeks ago, teaching, it forces me to line my toolbox up. Like, podcasting forces me to figure out what are the tools that are actually in there, and how do I use them? So, this is why I was like are these tools here? Have I found a set of tools that I can articulate that…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Makes something that I do unconsciously easier to do on purpose?
 
[Dan] Yeah. I think that's interesting, and I'm wondering if the issue is, are you using all those four tools at the same time, is that what bogs it down? Or is it using all four tools every time and that's what makes it so slow and ponderous? It could be that you need one moment that really gets attention… Like you said, magnify that, and draw it out, and then the others could just focus on one? To seem much quicker?
 
[Erin] I also think… I was wondering, do we use… I was thinking about fighting with swords. So we were in Scotland a while ago, and we got to actually do some sword fighting. Which was quite fun for me. And it turns out that I'm very aggressive with a fake sword, which was a fun thing to learn about myself. What's interesting is, like, I'm thinking back to the moment that I was sparring, and I'm thinking, even though I was reacting a lot in that moment, I actually did not have… Like, I could not have thought in that moment…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Because it was so new to me that thought was, like, beyond me. Like, I mean, maybe I'm sure on some subconscious level, like, I had to think, to, like, move my arm forward. But I wasn't having a deep thought.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I was just like, Go. Ra. Kill that man. But the guy who I was fighting against, a trained swords person, might have had time. He was, like, oh, I thought about the technique that you… He would slow down and say, like, oh, your technique is a little off here. Because for him, the physicality was so ingrained that he didn't have any time to spend on that and could spend more time on the thought. So, I think, what's interesting is thinking about, like, in a reaction moment, what is coming so naturally to your character that it's not worth putting all that space on the page, because it's just a familiar weight. And there's not much more you need to say about it. And what's the thing that's new, that's different about this situation? That is the thing that your character can lean into.
[Mary Robinette] I love that. You have just… And this is the thing that I love about talking to you all is that you just… What you said just combined with two other thoughts. One was the memory of doing that. One of the things that we asked them to do was to teach our writers what it feels like to have a sword. It's not… We weren't trying to learn how to fight. We were trying to learn enough to be able to write about it. And so we asked them to disarm us. And the thing that I remember was that I had about enough time to go, oh! Our swords hit each other, and I was like, oh, I could… And then the sword was out of my hand. And he had me in a headlock.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It was so fast that all I was left with were sensations that I could not register until after the moment, that my hands were stinging, and that there had been a poof of air as he went past. And that was all the time I had. And that just combined with the puppetry memory, which was, we did this show called Pied Piper and it was the hardest show I've ever done. When we started doing this show, we could not get through the entire show in rehearsal, because we were so winded. And, by the end of the show, it's like, I would come off the stage and I put the puppet down, I'd stretch a little bit, have a glass of water, and then I'd picked the puppet up and go back in. And that's my experience of it. But a friend of mine was watching it, and was like, you never stop moving. I'm like, what are you talking about? I took this whole little stretch break. And he showed me video that he'd taken from backstage. My movements are so fast and so economical and I'm not thinking about them at all. That's all I'm thinking about is the newness, the, Ah, I can have a stretch here, I can have a little sip of water. And I think that that happens… That must happen in fights.
[Dan] It probably does.
[Mary Robinette] Sorry…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I was so excited about this. I'm like…
[Dan] No. This is cool, I'm trying to think of how this newness applies to non-physical confrontations, like, you were saying in the beginning. To a conversation or to an argument. And it certainly happens that we get into arguments. Often, with my children, that I have had this argument with you so many times before, and you already know that you have to go to bed at night. Why do I have to convince you every single time? And so, yeah, there are certainly ruts that we fall into. But I'm not sure…
[Mary Robinette] I think… Maybe the… That moment where you're like, that was a strange facial expression. What's going on there? Like, where they have a reaction that you weren't expecting.
[Howard] Yeah. Years and… Many years ago, I was commuting to work one morning and there was black ice on the road. And I can relate the story in a very… Very descriptive, blow-by-blow of everything that happened. But I've driven past that point several times and realized that I can no longer imagine how there was enough time for me to think about what I was doing and what I did… What I ended up doing was driving on the wrong side of the road in order to avoid a pileup of cars at the bottom of the hill. And I looked at this, and I thought, where did I even find the time or the room to do this? I don't understand it. Did time compress for me? Did it expand for me? Or was I just reflexively aware enough as a driver to automatically put my vehicle where things weren't going to kill me? I don't know. But I fall back on that experience a lot when I'm writing action, because it's fun.
[Erin] Speaking of finding the time, I believe it is time for us to take a break for our thing of the week.
 
[Mary Robinette] Our thing of the week is a TV show. It's on Hulu. It's called Death and Other Details. Mandy Patinkin solving murder on a cruise ship. It is so good and it is so twisty. It's 10 episodes, and one of the things that I love about it, it's… I just… I want all of my writer friends to watch it. It is nonlinear in the way it tells the story, because they will tell the story and then they will jump back in time. It is talking about the malleability of memory and how that affects crime and your… How it affects the difficulty in solving crime. There's this scene where he's trying to get someone to remember a scene, but he's also trying to point out to them that their memory is not entirely reliable. And so what you see is the character reliving the scene. She's like, okay, so there was this… The room. And then there was spilled ketchup on the floor, and something else. And then… And then it cuts back to him, and he is waving a French fry with ketchup under her nose. And that has caused her to imagine ketchup on the floor. It is so good. And I want everyone to watch it, because it also… And it also to… I'm going to keep talking about this. It's also talking about the narrative, the stories that we tell each other, and the stories that we tell ourselves. It is so good. Please go watch Death and Other Details, so that I have someone to talk about it with. I see two people in our live audience who have watched it. I will meet you in the bar.
[Chuckles]
 
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[Erin] I wonder, actually, if I have an answer or a thought about something that Dan was asking before the break, which is, how do we take these same sort of reaction tools and use them at a time when we're not hitting people with swords, lifting heavy objects or… I'm glad that you avoided it, Howard, going into many trees and other cars. And I think the newness there is… Can sometimes be that in argument, we sometimes reveal things that we might not reveal in another way.
[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something else that Dan said that… He was talking about, and I wrote it down, that it is a lot of what we're dealing with in those fight scenes is the character… The fight scenes that work well is the character's history contrasted with their anticipation. So one of the examples in the class was out of Dune where Paul Atriedes is fighting Jamis and there's a lot of, like, little flashbacks, very very small ones. But I think when you're having that fight, that the verbal altercation… It's like, I know how these things go, and I'm anticipating the way… I'm anticipating the thing that you're going to say. You know how you… You have an entire fight with someone in your head before you actually start talking to them.
[Erin] And yet, the fight never goes that way.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And the fight never goes that way.
[Erin] Because, I think, like, also your emotions become heightened in confrontation. And, sometimes, like, you can become the, like, a worse version of yourself. Like, you become more strident, you become… You see is on some little detail and decide to use that to pick the person apart. And everyone argues a little bit differently. And so, I think, thinking about, like, how do we bring that to the page. Like, it's not just, yes to no. It's this person brings in lots and lots of facts, and figures. This person appeals to emotion. This person breaks down physically. Thinking about what those things are, whether it's, like, a thing you've seen a thousand times, where you're like, not you again with these facts and figures. Like, Ah, that's what always happens. I should have been prepared. Or if it's something new that you're experiencing. It really, I think, is a great way to get to a heart of character, because sometimes we forget to shield parts of ourselves that we might otherwise, when we are angry, and we are trying to like get a point across.
 
[Howard] This idea that the confrontation will reveal aspects of the character is a beautiful reason to have the confrontation to begin with. A bad reason to put a confrontation or a fight in a book is to say, well, I've reached the point in the scene where something needs to happen, so now they fight.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] And we can tell, as readers, as moviegoers, as TV watchers, as whatever, we can tell when that was the reason for the scene. And we don't love it. Even if it's really, really well done, we don't love it. We want there to be emotion, we want there to be character reveals, we want something to matter, and we want something to change. And if those elements aren't the underpinning of the action scene of the fight, of the argument, of the car chase, the whatever… Then it's just a thing you put in because you felt like this kind of story has to have that in it.
[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things Dan talked about in his class.
[Dan] I know. This is great. I don't have to participate in this episode…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Because we're all just quoting me the whole time anyway.
[Howard] For those of you…
[Laughter]
[Howard] For those of you who have not benefited…
[Dan] It's wonderful.
[Howard] From the video feed… There is no video feed… The smug smile on Dan's face…
[Dan] Oh, yeah. I just ate a canary, and there's nothing you can do about it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Something else that I was thinking about as we were talking… But I'm now interested to see if it can play into verbal confrontations. That… The idea that the character's strengths become their weaknesses because we over rely on them and they shape the choices that we make, even when it's not appropriate. In the example in the physical conflict was, again, the Paul Atriedes and his shield training, that he had been trained so carefully to compensate for the shield and slow down, that he kept missing the other person. And I think that that may also work in stories. Like, if there's someone who's, like, I am always very articulate and forceful, and what they actually need to be… That has served them extremely well in negotiations. But now they are talking to a loved one and it's like, no, actually you don't need to be extremely articulate and forceful, that is a weakness right now. You need to be quiet and listen.
[Howard] There are plenty of stories to be told around when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And you've made a mess, because that's not a nail.
[Erin] That's not a nail is going to be the name of either my next…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Band or my autobiography.
[Howard] It's the label on the box of screws in my toolbox.
[Erin] Nice.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you all for letting me explore this new set of tools with you. I was extremely excited by Dan's class. There's a couple of more classes that are happening on the cruise that I'm also excited about.
[Dan] You should all come on the cruise.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Because the cruise that we've got coming up has a whole different set of classes that I'm also excited for. But, I think it's time for our homework.
 
[Dan] Yeah. So, for the homework, I want you to do one of the things that I did in my class. Which is, go and watch an action scene in a movie, something that you really like, whether this is a Jackie Chan scene or whatever. And then, to kind of underline how different books are as a medium, transcribe it. Blow-for-blow and step-for-step, and see how long you can get into that before you want to tear your own hair out. Because it becomes extremely boring. Then, after you've proven that the blocking and the blow-by-blow doesn't work, rewrite that scene in a way that does. In a way that translates to and uses the medium of prose.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go fight.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.24: An Interview with Charles Duhigg

Jun. 19th, 2025 03:12 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.24: An Interview with Charles Duhigg 
 
 
Key Points: Communication is a set of skills. Proposals should give a taste of what the book will be like. A taste of the book and a roadmap. Voice! Deliberate practice. Three kinds of conversations, practical, emotional, and social. Make sure you are matched by asking deep questions and listening. Practice conversational reciprocity, make sure you are contributing to the conversation. Try looping for understanding: ask a deep question, repeat back what they say in your own words, and ask if you understood correctly. Make your compliment sandwiches with good bread. The goal of a conversation is to understand each other. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 24]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 24]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview with Charles Duhigg.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Howard] And I get the opportunity to drive this interview. And I'm going to begin by introducing our guest. Or rather, letting our guest introduce himself. Charles. Welcome to Writing Excuses. Who are you?
[Charles] Thank you for having me on. This is such a treat. My name is Charles Duhigg. I am a journalist for the New Yorker magazine. And in addition, I write books. The first book I wrote was named The Power of Habit. And then the most recent book I wrote was named Supercommunicators.
[Howard] I just finished Supercommunicators yesterday and there's a thing that you wrote that I actually highlighted because it resonates so well with something I already believe, and I think it dovetails nicely with our topic today. And that thing is "It's a set of skills. There's nothing magical about it." I love that. And this was in the context of someone who has learned to talk to other people in order to elicit information from them so that, I think, they can become spies.
[Charles] Right.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But what we're going to talk about is how to engage with other people in order to pitch your book to them. In order to get an agent, or a publisher, or a bookseller even to…
[Mary Robinette] Or just a reader.
[Howard] Or just a reader.
[Charles] Exactly. I mean, those are all proxies for readers. Right?
[Howard] I mean, if you're hand selling your stuff…
[Charles] Yeah.
[Howard] You have to be able to have these kinds of conversations where you engage with other people and, for whatever reason, they like you and they want to read what you wrote.
[Charles] Yes. It… And I love that you picked up on that that one idea that communication is a set of skills. Because it's kind of like writing. Right? Like, nobody is born knowing how to be a great writer. It's something that you learn by reading and by writing yourself and getting a good editor. Communication is exactly the same thing. And particularly, when it comes to pitching your book. That, like, that is not something anyone is born knowing how to do. It's something that you learn to do. Because you have literary agents who help you out, and you have editors who say, like, I like this idea, but I don't like that so much. And it's a process of evolution. And so if someone is listening who feels like they're not good at it right now, that does not mean you're not going to be good at it forever. It just means you have to learn the skills and practice them.
[DongWon] I mean, 100 percent. I mean, the good news about it being a skill is that you can practice it and improve it over time. Right? And I think writers have such a dread when this topic comes up. And they want their agent to take care of it for them. They want their editor to take care of it for them. And to some extent, that does happen. Right? We're here to support that process, we're here to help you figure that out, and hone that message. But you kind of have to be compelling to get an agent in the first place. Right? And then you have to continue to be compelling in how you talk about your work when you meet book sellers, when you meet readers at any event that you do. Right? And so, you've got a couple books under your hat at this point. What was that process like for you? I mean, was it difficult to transition from knowing how to pitch in a business context by knowing how to pitch as a journalist to doing it on a book project? Or was it all just kind of the same skill set that you'd already developed?
[Charles] It's kind of the same skill set. So one of the things… I was at the New York Times when I sold The Power of Habit. I was an investigative journalist. So my job was really to get people to tell me secrets. Right? To get them to tell me things that they'd not… Don't necessarily want to tell anyone or want to have their name behind. And a lot of that is about communications, is about building trust. And saying, look, let me explain to you why I'm excited about this, why I'm interested in this. What's going on? And I actually… I wrote a story for the New York Times Magazine about, like, the psychology of credit cards, because there's all these psychological tricks that collectors learn to go after people. And I wrote that piece, and I got an email from someone, from, like, a junior guy who worked at the Wiley agency, saying, "Hey, have you thought about turning this into a book?" And so I emailed him back, I said, "No, but it turns out I've been working on a proposal for a year. I'd love to come in and tell you about it." So I met with him, and Scott Moyers, who is now the publisher at Penguin, but was then a literary agent. And I think the thing that, like, got them interested was I was just so excited about habits. Like, I was so excited to say, like, I'd… I was a reporter in Iraq and I got embedded with this army guy, and he told me all about habits. Then I started looking it up at home, and, like, it turns out it's something you can, like, basically fiddle with the gears and change the habits in your life. And I don't understand why I'm so smart, but I can't lose weight. And I think it was just a… It was my enthusiasm. My clear passion for it, that got me over the first hurdle. Because I think that's what a reader is looking for and the publisher is looking for and it agent is looking for. They are looking for someone who is so passionate about this that they cannot wait to tell you all the amazing things that they've learned.
 
[DongWon] You mentioned that you came in for a meeting with them. Right? You sat down with Scott, you sat down with this younger agent, and sort of pitched your idea, and that it was your energy in the room, that enthusiasm that kind of… You felt like caught their attention in a certain way. It's a little unusual to be pitching in person. Right? I think that, like, maybe your status as a Times writer at that time. For, I think, newer writers who are trying to get that across on the page, do you see differences or advantages to pitching in person versus purely over an email? Like, how do you see that process differing over the course of your career?
[Charles] So, it's always great to get in person if you can. Like, I try and do everything in person, including interviews with sources. That being said, that's not practical all the time. And I think the other thing that happened is, before I walked into that office, I sent them a copy of my proposal. And this is, I think, unique to nonfiction. Because I think fiction is very different. But in nonfiction, the way that you sell a book is you write a proposal. And then they give you an advance on the proposal, and you essentially use that advance to go write the book. Right? The proposal is like a roadmap of what you want to do. Now, there's a lot of people who will say, like, oh, write a five or 10 page proposal and just don't spend too much time on it. I actually believe the exact opposite. So when I wrote my proposal for The Power of Habit, it ended up being about 76 pages long. It was about 22,000 words. And I spent an entire year working on it. While I was working at the time, so it wasn't full time. But it was a lot of time. And the reason that I thought that that was important was because I wanted to give them a taste of what the book would be like. Right? Like, I wanted to actually give them, like, something. And also you have to do that work yourself. You gotta figure out what the roadmap is. You need to know what you're going into, and what kind of stories you're looking for. And so, I think when it comes to reaching out to agents and publishers, we put a lot of attention on getting together, we put a lot of attention on the cover letter, but, actually, having a great proposal is really essential. Because many people write a proposal as if they're writing a memo on what the book is going to be like. But the best way to show what the book is going to be like is to write in the manner that the book is going to be like. Right? To, like…
[DongWon] 100 percent.
[Charles] Tempt them…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I think that this is not actually is different from fiction in some ways as it looks on the surface. Because, like, we don't get to write the proposal, we have to just write the book.
[Charles] Right.
[Mary Robinette] But the thing that we do have to do is to hook them on our query letter and our synopsis. And that's, I think, where a lot of people get so frightened, because it's really daunting to take this enormous idea and try to narrow it down, essentially retelling the same idea, but in a extremely condensed form. And I think what you were saying about a taste of the book and a roadmap is very much… Like, when I, not being an agent, but when I'm looking at student query letters, I often read them, like, this feels nothing like the pages…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That you have written.
[Charles] Right.
[Mary Robinette] And so you're telling a false story.
[Charles] Yeah. I think it's really essential. Because I also think that the thing that we're screening for is we're not just screening for topics. Right? We're not just screening for background of the person. Even when I'm reading, I'm screening for voice. Like, I want to know that this person is coming into it with this complete world that's already been imagined and is so rich and it's so vital that it's just… They're going to pick me up and carry me along. And if we write a cover letter that doesn't have that voice, that doesn't sort of like play with us the same way that the book plays with us, then what we're doing is were basically sort of shooting ourselves in the foot. I think.
[Howard] Yeah, and there's… I guess there's a fine line between aping the voice of your book in your proposal as if you're cosplaying the book and using the voice that you use in your proposal… The same voice that you use in the book. That's a distinction that I think is difficult for a lot of people. You… It's easy to misinterpret that. Oh, I'm writing a high fantasy, so you want me to include in my proposal something about the healthy stew I enjoyed this morning? No! That's not actually what we're saying.
[Charles] Right.
[DongWon] One of the things I most commonly say when people are asking me for feedback on a proposal, on a query, or whatever it is, the thing I'm always saying is, like, I don't know… I don't feel you in this book. Right? I'm looking for where your voice is in this book, why is this the only book that you could tell, and you're right, that that comes down to voice. Right? Like communication, I think, is so often about building a personal connection, especially in storytelling. Right? So being able to create that connection, like, I think, the word authenticity has a lot of, like, weight to it that is very complicated. But, like, how do you bring your own authentic voice to a project? Right? How do you make sure that when you're doing that proposal, when you're writing that sample, that it feels like you and your perspective?
[Charles] Right. So, that's a really good question. And I think here's the thing that's true of voice. At least in my experience. Voice is not something that you are born with or that you discover easily. Voice is the product of writing and writing and writing. In fact, there was this wonderful… Adam Moss, who was the former editor of New York Magazine, who wrote this book called The Work of Art. He recently had something in the New York website where he interviewed Jonathan Franzen about writing The Corrections. And it turns out that before Franzen wrote The Corrections, he spent years writing a book called The Corrections that was about an IRS lawyer. And this one little minor chapter featured these folks in Minnesota or someplace like that… Wherever he sets the story. And he realizes eventually after literally years of writing that that's the story. And there's… He gives his journals to Adam Moss and in his journals, he says things like, I've been writing this for three years and I just today wrote the paragraph that I think sounds like what I want this book to sound like. And then you lean into that. And so the thing that is true of voice is that if it's not working, it doesn't mean that it's not authentic.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charles] It means that… Actually achieving authenticity often takes work after work after work, and like peeling back the layers, and just sticking with it. So authenticity isn't something that comes from, like, a wellspring in ourselves. It's something we discover and it takes work to discover.
[Howard] The metaphor that I've used with students and used with myself… You've heard the you have to write a million words before you write your first true word. Whatever. The way I look at it is you've got a couple million of the wrong words in you and they are in front of the right words. So you gotta get them out of the way by writing them. Sorry.
[Charles] Yep. And it's actually… If you look at basically every, like, kind of… The guy who wrote Nickelback Boys and The Underground Railroad, Colson…
[DongWon] Colson Whitehead.
[Charles] White… Yeah, thank you. Colson Whitehead. Colson Whitehead, before he wrote his first book, about the elevator inspectors, he wrote another complete book and basically just threw it out. Right? Because he didn't know what he was doing yet. He didn't know what his voice was. And if you look at every single author, it's kind of like this. I've been reading this, like, crazy science-fiction thing recently. And I loved it, and I went back to some of the early books and they're terrible.
[Chuckles]
[Charles] They're just absolutely awful. Because this guy didn't figure out until his like third or fourth book what…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charles] How to do this. And that's…
[Mary Robinette] I think it…
[Charles] That's okay.
[DongWon] I was about to ask which one, and now I realize why maybe you weren't…
[Charles] Yeah.
[DongWon] Revealing that right off the bat.
[Charles] [garbled] have to say because I… Every… It's called Carl the Dungeon.
[DongWon] Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Charles] It's a… Or Dungeon Crawler Carl.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Charles] Right? And it's just like… It's super fun and it's a great… And his early books are not.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Mary Robinette] But I will say that it's… Going back to what you talked about at the beginning, that it is… We're talking about our skills. And what we're talking about are practices. It's not just that you have to write a million words, it's that you have to do it intentional, some intentional practice. You have to look at identifying what the mistakes are. You have to read intentionally. You have to do all of these things in order to hone those skills. Otherwise, your… There's the aphorism, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
[DongWon] Yeah.
 
[Charles] Yeah. That's… And in fact, in the academic literature, there's this thing known as deliberate practice. Eric… Ericsson was this philosopher who spent his whole life looking at why people are exceptional, and he found that deliberate practice was one of the key ingredients. And the thing that's interesting about deliberate practice, whether it's writing or playing tennis or playing golf… It's not supposed to be fun. Like, the practice doesn't feel interesting, and, like, you're letting your soul free. The practice feels like work.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charles] Because what you're doing is you're saying I'm bad at this. I'm going to do it again and again and again. I'm not going to do the stuff I'm good at, I'm just going to do the stuff I'm bad at again and again and again until it just gets a little bit better.
[Howard] One of the things that I love about Ericsson's work, and I applied it to myself a lot. Cartoonist for 20 years. Daily. Had to go fast. Once you're getting paid to do a thing, what you begin practicing is all of the shortcuts that allow you to keep getting paid rather than learning to do the really difficult things that nobody's ready to pay you for. And… I mean, once I read that, this is, I think back in 08, I remember looking at my artwork and thinking, oh, well, if I ever want to get better, I have to draw stuff that doesn't go into tomorrow's comic. I have to draw stuff for practice. Wow, what a waste of time that's going to be. Now I'm sad.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, I think… No, go ahead. Sorry.
[Charles] It's at the core of how we become great. Right?
[Howard] Yeah.
[Charles] I mean, I think in some ways it's actually this enormous… I know that people, though write a book or they'll write a proposal and it won't sell and they'll be so discouraged. But actually, you've been given this enormous gift. Which is you have been given feedback on what's working and what isn't working. And, by the time you publish, by the time you hit the main stage, you want to be at your best. You don't want to be learning… Like, when I got to the New York Times, you don't want to be learning how to do journalism at the New York Times.
[Chuckles]
[Charles] It's much better to learn that at smaller papers so that you're ready for, like, prime time when you get there. And so it's actually… Instead of being a discouragement, I think it should be this gift to think that, like, look, I just did this amazing thing, and now I know how to do it better.
[Howard] Okay. Well, we've talked a lot about writing and getting better at it. After the break, I think we need to talk about talking.
 
[Charles] If anyone listening is interested in learning more about the science of communication, with why some people seem to be able to connect with anyone, and others sometimes we struggle with it, let me recommend my book, Supercommunicators. And what I've tried to do in it is I've tried to tell a series of stories about CIA spies, and how The Big Bang Theory, the TV show, became a hit. But embedded in those stories is a set of skills that make us great communicators. And at the core of this is kind of what we're learning in neuroscience about communication, which is when were having the same kind of conversation is other people, we managed to connect with them. We managed to become what's known as neurally entrained. And so for anyone interested, I would love to encourage you to read Supercommunicators, and then to tell me what you think.
 
[DongWon] Between drafting your new novel, building your lore bible, or meeting with your critique group, who has time to stress about website security? As a writer, your website is your digital face to the world that lets people know about your work and where they can find it. Securing your website means less stress about anyone disrupting that important outlet. Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress with lightning fast load times, enterprise grade security, and 24/7 human only customer support. They're available in multiple languages and ready to assist regardless of site complexity. It's complete peace of mind knowing your WordPress site is always secure, online, and performing at its best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security and is one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200 percent faster sites by simply moving their WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called MyKinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. And if you're moving from another host, they offer unlimited expert led migrations to ensure a smooth transition, so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's a perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new customers on selected plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today.
 
[Howard] As promised, let's talk about talking. Supercommunicators is fundamentally about having conversations with people where it's a conversation that's meaningful. And as I read the book, I loved it because you started naming… You gave names to some things that I kind of instinctually knew or had learned how to do. Which hopefully will make me better at it. As my friends I'm sure will tell you, I'm not very good at it. I'm not… I'm terrible fun at parties. Or anywhere else.
[Mary Robinette] That's not true.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Deeply not true.
[Howard] I put on my best face for Mary Robinette.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] When you are meeting with someone and you need to have a negotiation, when you are meeting with them… When you are doing what we call a cold conversation, and it's important, I want to know what your toolbox is like. I mean, I've read the book, so the book is its own toolbox. But what's your personal toolbox for that kind of circumstance?
[Charles] Yeah. It's a great question. And I'll… Let me give a little bit of theory and then I'll answer the question with…
[Howard] Sure.
[Charles] Specific skills. So, one of the things that we've found… This kind of started when I was falling into these bad conversation patterns with my wife, where I'd like complain about my day and she'd give me advice on how to improve it, and I would get upset that she was giving me advice and not telling me, like, how righteous I was. And so I went to all these researchers, neuroscientists, and I asked them, like, what's going on? I'm a professional communicator, why do I keep making the same mistake again and again. And they said, well, we're actually living through the Golden age of understanding communication. And one of the things that we've learned is we've learned that we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing. Right? We're talking about my day or the kids grades or where to go on vacation. But actually, every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations. And those kinds of conversations, they tend to fall into one of three buckets. There are practical conversations, where were making plans or solving problems. But then there's emotional conversations. Right? Tell you what I'm feeling, and I don't want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathize. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and society and the identities that are important to us. And they said what's really critical is to be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment. That if you're not matching each other, then you're like ships passing in the night. You can't really connect with each other. You can't even really fully hear each other. So then the question becomes, okay, so if I walk into a negotiation or I walk into even just an everyday conversation that's a little, like, a little tense or a little meaningful, what do I do to figure out if… What kind of conversation mindset you're in and how do I match you and invite you to match me? And there's actually…
[Howard] Yes. Tell me what you do?
 
[Charles] There's a technique for this that psychologists have studied for a while now, which is asking deep questions. Now a deep question is something that asks you about your values or your beliefs or your experiences. That can sound a little bit intimidating, but it's as simple as, like, if you meet a doctor, instead of saying, "Oh, what hospital do you work at?" saying, "Oh, what made you decide to become a doctor?" Like, what you like about… What did you enjoy most about med school? When we ask a question like that which is not a hard question to ask, what we're really doing is inviting that person to tell us where their head is at and tell us something important about themselves. So the number one thing that I do, when I walk into a tough conversation or a negotiation, is I asked the other person a question, a deep question, and then I just sit back and let them talk. Because they're going to tell me what's going on inside their head.
[Howard] So, instead of, hey, how about that Lakers game? It's, hey, what's your favorite thing about being a journalist? Charles?
[Charles] Yeah. Exactly. Or instead of just walking in and saying, okay, there's three things I want to share with you. I want these deal points and I think that it's really important that we do the jacket this way and… Instead of going in, because we tend to think before hard conversations. We tend to think about what we want to say, and that gets in the front of our mind. And so we bully in… Bull into that conversation and we say it. But if we start by asking them a real question, a deep question, like, exactly the one that you just mentioned. Or, what made you decide to be a publisher? What book has been one of your favorite books to publish? Like, what… When did you… When do you feel like you became the publisher you wanted to be? That person is going to tell me so much about themselves.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charles] And at that moment, I know how to connect to them.
[DongWon] Those are good questions.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] My first boss in publishing was a literary agent. This is Chris Calhoun at Sterling Lord Literalistic. He was a great mentor to me. And I always remember that he… One day, I walked into his office and he had written out on a card on his desk, and, like, put it on a little, like, platform where he could see it any time he was on the phone. And it just said, let them talk. Right?
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] And it was… He had the gift of gab and he loved to tell a story and it was sometimes a reminder and… I think about it all the time when I'm meeting new people in publishing, when I'm in a negotiation, when I'm pitching a book, is, wait, this isn't about what I'm telling them. It's also me listening to what it is that they have to say, and making the space for that. And then what you're saying is also the explicit invitation to tell me what's going on with you, and then we can have that connection. And on the basis of that connection, there's trust that we can have a negotiation.
[Charles] That's exactly right. And it… Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] You're just making me think of this thing that my mother, who is an arts administrator and used to have to do fundraising all the time, and I asked her how she did schmoozing, essentially, and she said the other person is always more interesting than you are.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That was her mantra, and then specifically when trying to sell a puppet show… If you think selling a book is hard… Welcome. Welcome to my life… To ask them about what they needed, what they were looking for, and to let them talk. And then you could figure out how you could fill their need, and not to start off by telling them what your product was, what your story was.
 
[Charles] Yeah. That's… And I think that there's something important there. Which is… Asking questions doesn't mean that you just ask questions. Right? And I think particularly for journalism writers, it's really easy to get into this place where you're just asking question after question. And, like… And there never asking questions back of you. And so it feels very one sided. The thing with a deep question is that it's a question that's very easy to answer your own question. So, oh, you became a doctor because you saw your dad get sick when you were a kid. Oh, that's interesting. I became a lawyer because I saw my uncle get arrested when I was a kid. Right now we're sharing something and there is this thing in conversation known as conversational reciprocity or authenticity reciprocity, where a conversation only really feels meaningful when both people are contributing to it. And sometimes some people are not good at asking us questions. But that means that we should see that as an invitation to volunteer things about ourselves in a graceful way. Because it's not that they're not curious about us, it's just that they don't know how to ask questions. They haven't practiced them.
[DongWon] I'm curious…
[Howard] The next question I wanted to ask about the toolbox… How do you learn to listen? Because we talk a lot about, oh, you need to be a better listener. You need to spend time listening. And it took me a good decade to realize that listening was a lot more than just not being the one who is talking right now.
[Charles] Yeah.
[Howard] Mary Robinette is laughing because she's like, oh, yes, I remember you 10 years ago.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's actually been less than 10 years that you learned that.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I was not saying that out loud.
 
[Charles] So, an interesting part about this is that when we talk about listening, listening has this image of being a very passive activity. But when researchers look at listening, what they see is it's an incredibly active activity. When it's done well. So the thing that's happening is it's not enough just to listen. You also have to prove that you're listening. And the act of proving your listening actually makes you a better listener. And there's a technique for this known as looping for understanding that they actually teach in all the business schools and law schools. It has these three steps. Step one is you ask a question, preferably a deep question. Step two is when the person starts answering the question, you repeat back in your own words what you heard them say. And this isn't mimicry, this is about showing them that you've been processing what they're saying. Adding a little bit, like, what I hear you saying is this, and that reminds me of this. And if you actually force yourself to listen closely enough that you can repeat back what they've said and add something to it, then you are actually listening. And then, step three, and this is the really important one. This is the one I always forget. It is, ask if you got it right? Because what you're doing when you say hey, did I hear… Did I understand you correctly? What you're really doing is you're inviting them to acknowledge that you were listening. In one of the things that we know about our neurology and how we evolved is when I believe you are listening to me, I become much more likely to listen to you in return. So this technique… You're exactly right. Listening is a skill. It's a skill that we practice. In the way that we can practice it is this looping for understanding. And it feels awkward the first couple of times you do it. And then it becomes really natural, and it becomes a habit.
[Howard] I mean, so does golf.
[Charles] Exactly.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I don't know that golf ever doesn't feel natural, but…
[Mary Robinette] Actually… I putt. NVR.
 
[DongWon] Because there's a technique that we use in giving feedback. Right? That is very basic and very common, that is the compliment [garbled – sandwich?] Right? You start off by saying a nice thing, you give the feedback, and you say the nice thing at the end. Right? And I think people love to cut out the nice parts of that and just be like, oh, I don't need to deal with that. I want to dive right into the hard part, the criticism. Right? And to me, that always feels like such a mistake, because, to me, the opening part in the final part are the opportunity to do exactly what you're saying, for me to repeat back, here's what I think you were trying to accomplish in this. Here's why I think this is a wonderful project, or what your goals are. And that opportunity for them to make sure that we're in alignment about what our goals actually are in this conversation we're having about how to work on your project, how to improve your writing. Right? And so whenever I see people cut out the compliment parts of the sandwich, I'm always so frustrated because I think, oh, no no no no. That's the part that's really important. That's more important than the feedback in a lot of ways it's is understanding that we're on the same page and moving towards the same goals.
[Charles] And what I love about that is that the compliments you just mentioned… They're not necessarily actually compliments. Like, when the compliment sandwich is done poorly, it's someone saying, like, I love that book that you wrote 20 years ago…
[Chuckles]
[Charles] It was so good. This book is terrible.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charles] It does not work at all.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charles] But if you could go back to that thing you did 20 years ago, that'd be great. Right? That's a compliment sandwich, and the person walks away thinking, like, you're a jerk. I'm not going to talk to you anymore.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] That sandwich needs better bread.
[Charles] It needs better bread. It needs better bread. Well, what you said is I'm not actually just going to give you a compliment.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charles] What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you that I'm aligned with your larger goals.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Charles] Like, there was something about your proposal that excited me so much and you seem so passionate about this, and I am so inspired by that, and I think we're a little bit… We're off-track a little bit on making this work. But you and I are on the same side of the table. And that… Those are what the best compliments are. The best compliments aren't actually compliments. The best compliments are reflections that I see you. And in seeing you, we become aligned.
[DongWon] It's such a useful technique in negotiation as well. Whenever I'm negotiating a contract, a lot of times I will take a breather in the middle of it, if we're up against some particular deal point and just remind everyone that we're trying to do the thing together. Right? We want… We all want to publish this book. We want to publish this book together, and we want to make this work for the writer and for the publisher. So that everyone is winning. Right? And so I think reminding everyone that we all want the same things. And, I think, even when you're thinking about writing a query letter to an agent, starting from a place of I want to find a great project. You want me to find a great project, that project being yours. Right? We're all kind of working towards the same thing, even if it may be doesn't work out on this particular moment, but I think remembering that we all have sort of the same goals and are on the same side of things can be a really useful trick. And… Well, I mean, literally keeping everything from becoming adversarial.
 
[Charles] Yeah. And I think one thing that's really important about that, that you just mentioned, is it gets to what the goal of a conversation is. Right? The goal of a conversation is not for me to impress you that I'm so smart. Or that I'm right and you're wrong. Or that you should like me, or that I'm smart. The goal of a conversation is simply to understand each other.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charles] To ask you questions that help me understand how you see the world. To speak in such a way that you can understand how I see the world. And if we walk away from a conversation completely disagreeing with each other's thing… I'm not going to vote for your guy, and you're not going to vote for mine, or walk away saying that sounds like a great book, but it's not a book I want to publish… That's not an unsuccessful conversation.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Charles] If we genuinely understand each other. Because eventually, we will find a person who agrees with us or wants to publish our book. But we'll only be able to connect with them because we're focused on understanding each other, as opposed to just impressing each other.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I think that might be a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Because at this point, hopefully, our listeners have understood the conversation that we're having and are ready to go have some conversational adventures of their own. But before we go, Charles, do you have some homework that you like to…
[Charles] I would love…
[Howard] [garbled] our poor listeners with?
 
[Charles] I would love to… Can I give two pieces of homework?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Charles] [garbled] and you folks can choose? So…
[Howard] You can give three.
[Charles] The first piece of homework that I would give is to say tomorrow, ask someone a deep question that you might not usually ask a deep question. Right? If it's your kids, instead of asking, "How was your day?" Ask them, "I noticed that you really like Jasper. It seems like you admire him. What do you admire about Jasper?" Or a coworker, or a stranger on the bus. It feels scary in theory to ask a deep question until we actually do it, and then we see how easy it is. And then the homework for writing is, getting back to this voice question, write one paragraph that is terrible. Just pointless, there's nothing going on, but that you feel like indulges some aspect of your voice. Maybe it's funny, maybe it's wry, maybe it's sad. Just do something completely pointless. Set that paragraph aside for a couple of days. Come back to it, and I promise you, you're going to see something in there that surprises you at how good it is. And that is a little bit of a… That's the pebble on the path to finding your voice.
 
[Howard] Thank you so much. Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators. We've enjoyed the interview and, fair listener… You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.23: The Lens of the Senses

Jun. 12th, 2025 04:53 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.23: The Lens of the Senses
 
 
Key points: Sensory details. What do you use automatically? Sound, sight... What do you remind yourself to include? Cues to memory or emotion. Use analogy to describe. Tie it to an emotional moment. The unexpected squirt in the dark. Leave space for the reader. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 23]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 23]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] The Lens of the Senses
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm stinky.
[DongWon] And we all have a regret.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] So we've been talking about the various lenses you can use to approach how you're doing worldbuilding, how you're building your fiction, how you're just constructing your story in general. Right? We've been talking about context and time. But I wanted to bring us back down into the body a little bit today. And what is the most rooting thing you can do in a scene often is to remind your readers of the sensory details of the scene. What do they see, what do they hear, what do they taste, what do they smell? What do they feel? Those are the five senses. I believe I hit all of them. And so... 
[Mary Robinette] What do they taste?
[DongWon] What do they taste? Did I miss that one? Anyways. As we're going through these, or as we're talking about how to make your world feel really lived-in, what are the sensory details that you guys reach for in a scene automatically, or what are the ones that you find otherwise you have to remind yourself to include?
[Howard] I reach for acoustics. Very, very quickly. Because, as an audio engineer, one of the first things that I would do walking into a space is stop, close my eyes, and listen to the room. Not just listening for things that are making noise in the room, but then I also snapped my fingers or clicked my tongue and listen for the T 60, the time in which an echo will drop by 60 decibels. How long does it take for the echo to die away completely? And I realized fairly early on that with my eyes closed, I could tell, without making any noise, if I was in a little room or a big room or a giant room or outdoors. And it's such a fun exercise to do.
[Mary Robinette] I… It's interesting that you say this, because my husband is also an audio engineer. Film and television, he did location sounds. In college, I was an art major. I am very visually oriented, and tactile orientation. So we walk into the same space, and he will be absolutely driven bonkers by a buzzing sound that I don't even know exists until he points it out. And I will talk about the pattern in a carpet that's just, like, why would anyone do this, it gives people vertigo, and he is like, there's carpet in the room?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And this is… I think one of the reasons that it is such a powerful tool, because it's telling you not only about the world, but also about the character. So I tend to default to visual. And I think a lot of writers do. As a result of that, I will sometimes make a conscious decision that one of my character's other… It's primary sense is something other than sight. So… To differentiate them. I try to link it to… Usually something about the career that they've wound up in. Not because the career shapes it so much, but because I think that you get drawn to a career based on what is important to you. But I can reverse engineer that to create some character distinction.
[Erin] What's interesting hearing that is that I… I have aphantasia, so I cannot make mental images at all, and I have a horrible sense of smell. And those are my two favorite senses to use when I'm writing.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Actually…
[Mary Robinette] Interesting.
[Erin] I don't know if it's because I am try… Like with visual, I actually am trying to make it happen. So, something that I will do is I will actually pull up images of the place or something like the place I'm writing about so that I can actually look for what are the visual things that, like, would be happening. And I just love smell because I feel like it's so visceral, even though I don't experience it as much as other people maybe. I just love what it says about the way you experience something. I feel like it's the thing that's the hardest to get away from. Like, if something smells bad…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It also will have, like, a taste effect on you. And so I think it's an interesting one because it kind of has, like, an interesting secondary effect. But I think part of the reason is because they aren't things that I'm experiencing as much, I'm able to think about the way that the character experiences them in a completely different way, and it doesn't… I'm not distracted by my own senses in coming up with the character's sensory experiences.
 
[DongWon] Interesting. It lets you put yourself in the fictional space more because they're things that aren't [garbled] connected to you… A you experienced world. But it's also really interesting about this is each of the senses are tied to memory and experience in different ways. What we see versus what we smell versus what we hear, I think, are all different cues for different people into memory. I… There's a lot of research that scent is the most strongly connected to memory for a lot of people. Maybe less so for you, Erin. But that the scent memory of something… I know, for myself, that sometimes I'll smell a particular smell and I'll suddenly just be back in when I was 13 years old in this particular space, in this particular summer, or whatever it was. And so I think… Are there things that you guys not only are connecting in terms of what's interesting for the character, but if you're trying to evoke certain emotions, do you lean towards different sensory details or do you find that it's more just what tool fits what character?
[Mary Robinette] I often, when I'm trying to evoke a specific emotion, the one that I lean towards is touch. Because I lean into what the body is feeling, where the character is feeling their tension. If they're too hot, if they're too cold. Those are the things for me, when I'm trying to create emotion, that I tend to lean towards. Which is linked to, but somewhat different than trying to create a sense of place.
[DongWon] Right.
[Howard] I do feel like scent, the sense of smell… It's almost like when we remember things, smell ends up as the index tabs. Whereas other things, sounds and colors, don't. And… But I don't do that to try and… I don't include smell to try and make the reader smell something or… I'm not trying to flip through their index tabs. What I'm trying to do is let them look into the character's brain by giving a scent and have the character immediately smell…Ah. It smells like grandma's place. What? Oh, mothballs. I'm smelling mothballs. And if anybody's had that experience, and I think most of us have, where you smell the thing and immediately been in a place or had a thought, that is normalizing, that is… That draws us into the character and gives us, the reader, a sense that we experienced the same thing the character's experiencing.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I will hear people talk about sometimes is that they… Yes, they agree with that, but that they don't use smell as much as they would use sight because there's not as much language for it. However, after my husband went through the audio engineering, he went and became a winemaker. Which, sometimes I have to help him with his research, and that's very difficult.
[Erin] Oh, no.
[DongWon] What a struggle.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] sadness. But it means that I wind up going to these winemaking events, and they have so many ways to talk about scent. One of the things that I was struck by was that actually it's the same toolbox that we have for talking about sight, we're just not used to using it. When you talk about a color being creamy, that's an… That's analogy. Right?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And that's the same thing that happens when you're talking about scent. It smells chocolatey. It doesn't smell like chocolate, but there's that richness of flavor. And this… You can build a sense of something that is not a flavor or scent that occurs in the real world by linking it to things. Like, I just wrote a story where there was something called a basil willie, because people are actually really crap at naming things. We just name it by what we… But then I was sitting there, trying to describe basil. I just had a recent experience where I have a friend who has the unfortunate gene where cilantro tastes like soap, and she's like, what does it taste like to you? And attempting to link it to things that I know that she has smelled and tasted. It's like, oh, yeah, this is all analogy. One of the things that my husband says when people are learning to approach wine is if it smells like that to you, you're correct. If the way you need to describe it is it reminds me of grandma, then someone else can be turned and say, oh, knowing me, oh, your grandmother's southern and you're picking up these bacon notes and these vegetable tones. Grandma's baked green beans are amazing. Now I'm hungry.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Now I want bacon wine.
[Mary Robinette] I can introduce you.
[DongWon] I really want to talk more about the language that we used to describe sensory details. But before that, let's take a quick break.
 
[DongWon] Between drafting your new novel, building your lore bible, or meeting with your critique group, who has time to stress about website security? As a writer, your website is your digital face to the world that lets people know about your work and where they can find it. Securing your website means less stress about anyone disrupting that important outlet. Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress with lightning fast load times, enterprise grade security, and 24/7 human only customer support. They're available in multiple languages and ready to assist regardless of site complexity. It's complete peace of mind knowing your WordPress site is always secure, online, and performing at its best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security and is one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200 percent faster sites by simply moving their WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called MyKinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. And if you're moving from another host, they offer unlimited expert led migrations to ensure a smooth transition, so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's a perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new customers on selected plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today.
 
[Mary Robinette] The thing of the week is an experience that I think is actually going to be hard for you to find. It's called Darkfield. It is a train show and you go… They have containers that they have turned into a theater, and you go into a container and are in a completely dark space. This is actually something that is not commonly experienced, because most of the time, there's a little bit of an LED, there's the exit light. Completely dark space, and they tell you a story through sound and motion. It is wild. There's… They have a couple of different experiences. Flight, séance, and comma. As a storyteller, thinking about how you can tell a story with only a few senses and removing others highlights exactly where we get our information. It's very compelling. It's a little disturbing, and it is a touring show so it may be hard for you to find. But if you can, I recommend seeing Darkfield.
 
[DongWon] I started this episode by talking about how sensory details can be the most grounding. But, Mary Robinette, before the break, you were talking about ways in which actually that sensory experience is so subjective. What I experience is very different from what you experience, very different from what Erin experiences, and Howard experiences. Right? What tastes one way to us, even if we all like the same thing. My experience in eating cilantro is different from yours, because I'm a different person. I mean, my physics, biology, all these things. So when you're trying to use language to make an experience feel universal, make someone feel in the body of this character, you don't know what kind of body your reader has. What are the tricks that we can use to make sensory experience feel universal or feel connected or feel specific in different ways?
[Erin] So, it's funny, because hearing y'all talk earlier about, like, scent being the core of memory, I think, because of a lack of both sent and visuals, like, I actually have a quite poor memory. And I… The only way that I remember things is by feeling like there's a story about it, almost as if somebody was singing a song and suddenly you remember the chorus. And so, like, that's how my whole… My whole life is stories. But one of the things that I do, then, because I'm trying like to convey scents to… Or something to a reader that I don't have is I often make up what a scent is by trying to create an emotional moment and then telling you there's a scent to it. So I would say this smells like a combination of… And a lot of times I'll use a very sensory thing and a fake thing. Sort of. So I'll be like, this smells like rotten meat and sidewalk chalk the day after a rain.
[Howard] Yeah. And as a humorist, I am always, always playing with the words around smell. Because it's so much fun. This smells like something died and then went to gym class without taking a shower. That's a ridiculous metaphor. But… And what we know is that the character has passed judgment on… Maybe it's body odor, maybe it's putrescence, maybe it's both. But we are having, hopefully, a humorous emotional response to what the character is experiencing.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that Erin was saying, just taking that and tying back in, you make me think about the way perfumiers describe perfume, that they're trying to create an experience that takes you through something. So, even though you're saying an imaginary thing, it's like, yeah, it's imaginary, but there's a whole layer of scents that are associated with each of those things that builds this whole in a way that a list would not. It smells like petrichor, sidewalk chalk, and exhaust from streets… But, like, that's a very different thing than the smell of sidewalk chalk after a rain.
[Erin] And the thing is if you say, like… I can think of a lot of reasons why I think, like, that scent makes sense, like, things like rain do have their own scent, a sidewalk after the rain has a certain scent, and chalk has a scent. But I also think that it's very possible that if we had, like, smell-o-vision or, like, I could suddenly smell what you might think of when you thought of that, that we would all have different smells.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But I've rooted it to the same emotions.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So that if I reference it again, or if I'm using it to describe a character, it's sort of doesn't matter that the scents are different because the emotional thing…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That I'm trying to get you to realize through using that sensory detail is the same.
[DongWon] I think that's the thing that we were all talking about, is that really, when we get to these sensory details, so often it's about emotion. How is the character feeling? We're describing sensory details to give us a sense of what their experience is, not just in a physical way, but how that connects to the emotional truth of it. Right? So, in describing… The way you're combining positive and negative imagery when it comes to the scent of something, that gives us a more well-rounded experience of, like, oh, this smells bad, but also a little nostalgic. And what does that mean that this character associates writing me with something a little nostalgic?
[Howard] The mediums that we're using… We have to pay attention to these. Because if you are writing and someone is going to read it, then you are using principally the sense of vision to create a data stream that is giving us… But if the audiobook is read… If someone reads the book to you, you're listening to an audiobook, the information stream is now going through your ears. And there are audiobooks that are not just read, they're dramatized. And so some of the sounds you might put in the text end up performed as sounds. I remember being in a planetarium for a concert, and they said if you see something you like, that's us. If you hear something you like, that's us. If you feel something you like, don't look at us. And then, during the show, they were in the back with a squirt gun.
[Laughter]
[Howard] And it was hilarious, because we were getting information through a stream that we were told we wouldn't be getting.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] Anyway, I'm just fascinated by this.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I love about this is that we're in the module where we're talking about where and when, but we're talking about character, and this is, I think, an important thing is most of the time when your reader is experiencing the place, they are experiencing it through the lens of a character. When we're using these sensory details. How is the character experiencing it? And even if the character isn't there, the reader is interpreting it through their own lens of self and their own awareness of how their body would experience those things. Like, if I see someone who is describing stepping out into the humidity of a southern day, and they are describing the way I described it, which is, it's like stepping into a sauna and being hit in the face with a hot wet towel. I know that, and I have… I bring my own memory to it. This is part of a thing that we talk about a lot, that your reader is building the story with you. And so, invoking those sensory details, even if you're doing it in omniscient, even if you're doing it where there's not a character on the page, you are evoking them for the reader.
[DongWon] I mean, that's what I like so much about this topic is, whether we like it or not, we all have bodies. Right? Whether we like it or not, we all have… We're all in our Gundams made of ham. Right? We're experiencing the world filtered through the sensory organs that we have. And so are your characters. Right? So when you get this opportunity to remind your reader that your character has a body… They don't. They're fictional. You made them up. They literally don't have a body. But the reader does. Right? And so if you can connect those two dots, you will increase the verisimilitude of the reading experience exponentially.
[Erin] And what I like about that in setting is that you can use things that are very visceral and sensory to connect things that are very speculative, very out there…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] To something that we can feel. I was at an immersive theater show at the Edinborough Fringe Festival where we were in the dark. Full black dark, in front of, like, an arcade machine, and you could, like, choose things, and it was all audio. We're just standing there. But at one point, there is… Like, somebody is killed by some really weird out there gun of some sort, and the arcade machine squirted a tiny bit of water. It was the most disturbing thing ever…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because, like, I don't know what that machine does, I don't know what happened to the person exactly, but death plus liquid in your face…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is making you feel like so many things. And I connected really strongly. I don't remember much about that experience other than that moment, because it was so visceral and because it was so sensory and I didn't need to know the specifics of how the thing works because I understand how the thing feels.
[DongWon] I mean… I think this is why… I talked about genres of the body. Right? Because horror is such a classic one, because you can take the most outlandish thing in the world and you bring it down to blood and bone and the smell of somebody dying and now it's so real for your reader no matter how bonkers made up the monster was or the situation was with a haunting was. You made it felt in the body, and then your reader's with you in that moment.
[Howard] I… I love the senses, and I love the idea that when you feel a thing… Feel, smell, hear, see… That seems out of place, it can be absolutely horrifying. A little bit of wetness when there's been a splotchy death noise. A little bit of open fresh air when you've opened a door you expect to lead to another room, and you realize that this door opened into… Don't take a step or you're going to fall to your death. There's all kinds of ways to play with this, where the unexpected sense is part of a reveal that can be humorous or horrific or intellectually stimulating or whatever it is you want to evoke in the reader. You do it with more than one sense, and it's harder.
[DongWon] And it's a place where sometimes doing less can be more. Right? I think if you're really trying to overwhelm your audience with the sensory aspect, it can be hard to parse what's happening. One of the… Going back to horror, I'm thinking about the famous rain room scene in Alien, part of why that is one of the most iconic effective scenes in all of horror history is because it's very quiet. He's there, you can hear the drips of water, you can feel how cool it is on his face, you're so grounded in his body, in that moment of, like, this moment of relief of, like, oh, there's water on my face, the chains are clinking, there's a little bit of a breeze, and there's all these tiny little sensory details that are making that scene pop, right before awful things happen. Right? And it's the quietness in that moment that lets you absorb the sensory reality of it, which then heightens your dread, because you know what's coming.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think along those lines, sometimes, the thing that you can do is to leave space for the reader.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that has stuck with me for a long time from Steven King where he says, you can describe the pain in great detail, going into all of the… The nerve endings lighting up and all of this stuff, or you can say, they ripped his fingernail off. And, like… For our listeners, DongWon, sitting beside me, just winced and turned away.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Mary Robinette] And that's an example of leaving space for the reader. That sometimes you describe the thing that is happening to someone and you don't deliver the sensory details, you let the reader experience them. It's something that you use sparingly. But it's also the thing that relies on the reader having a common experience.
[Erin] I'm just thinking… It makes me think that part of the way that we experience sense is also distance. Like, how far away is the sound, how close is the smell? You know what I mean? And I think that there's like… That is something to think about. And that actually I like to play with more, which is, like, what happens when a sense… Something that you sensed as far away is suddenly closer. Or something that you sense as close… If you're smelling your grandmother's baking bread and then that becomes further away through time or further away through distance. Like, that actually can convey emotion in the exact same scent, but a different context for it.
[DongWon] Absolutely. I really love that. And that's combining the differences that we have in terms of context, in terms of time and distance, and all these things, and how you experience that in your body. So, while we think about how to make space for the audience, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us?
 
[Mary Robinette] I do. This is an exercise that I learned from C. L. Polk. We're going to link in the liner notes to the original essay. And it is an exercise that they use to create an immediate sense of place, that they got from an anxiety stopping exercise. Five, four, three, two, one. You list five things your character can see, for things your character can hear, three things your character can touch, two things your character can smell, and one thing your character can taste. So that your exercise, is to do the five, four, three, two, one. I'm going to put in a slight twist for you, which is, if your character's primary sense is something other than sight, make that the one that's the five.,
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.22: The Lens of Time

Jun. 3rd, 2025 04:05 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.22: The Lens of Time 
 
 
Key Points: Time! Setting? Day versus night? The when of the character? Anticipation and flashbacks, expectations and disappointments. Magnified moments. What is the character noticing? Order or sequence of time. Time as an extension of setting. Associations with time of day. Personal physical cycles! Conveying passage of time. Children, other changes. Sensory details, obligations. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 22]
 
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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 22]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] The Lens of Time.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And this is Dr. Who.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about these different lenses that you can look at a story through. We're looking at the idea of where and when, and time is one of the big lenses. You don't have to be working on a historical piece of fiction to be thinking about time. All stories move through time, even if it's only for a moment. So we're going to be talking about time as your setting. The differences between a story that's set during the day versus at night, or even a scene or a moment. We're going to be talking about how you can use time to your advantage. Not so much in a structural way, but more in that sense of controlling the reader's experience of the story and the character and the setting.
[Erin] We are going to be doing that.
[Dan] Love it.
[Erin] And we're starting now.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When you are sitting down to think about a story, I know, Erin, that you often start with a voice and that you are very much thinking about the character. How much is the character... At that stage, are you thinking about the when of the character?
[Erin] I think a lot... So. I saw a very interesting tweet a long time ago that said that one of the ways you can upgrade your craft is to move time in the story. To actually use anticipation and flashbacks… Not necessarily, like, an entire flashback, but just what is your character coming from? What are they looking back to? What are they looking forward to? And, like, playing with that in the story. That in truth, and in our own lives, we rarely just move forward in time. We're often thinking about, like, our expectations, which is our vision of the future, and our disappointments, which is our reckoning with the past. And so, a lot of times, I really think about how my characters are reckoning with the time they are in in their own times. And, like, also the time that the world around them is in. Are they in sync? Like, are they moving forward in a world that's moving forward with them? Do they want to hold back in a world that they're like they love tradition, but the world wants progress? And then, looking at that as a source of tension in the story, between the way that they're dealing with time and the way the story and the world is.
[Mary Robinette] I love this idea of looking at where they are in time and using that anticipation as a source of tension. That… You're making me think of something that I just did a brief reread of which is in Dune, which is the fight between Paul Atriedes and Jamis, when he has to, like, "Hello! No, here I am! The Chosen One." And what's interesting in that scene is the way Frank Herbert plays with time. It's happening at a particular point in Paul's life and… Where he's a young man, he's approaching a point where he is going to kill for the first time. That is a threshold, that is a time threshold. That's going to be a marker. Before he killed, and after he killed. That's how his world is going to divide. But the other thing that he does in that is that he does these very small flashbacks to before he is in this thing, where he's thinking about my training taught me this. And all of that is setting up this anticipation of the ways the scene can go wrong, the ways that it can potentially go right, but mostly the ways it can go wrong. It's looking at the… That he's been trained in this one particular way, to go very slow against the shield, and that he keeps making the same mistake over and over again because of his training. And so you've got this contrast of this… His knowledge… His history compared with the future that he's aiming for and this anticipation of all the possible paths for which it can go wrong, which is, I think, one of the great things that you can play with with time, is the… Is letting the reader know, oh, there's more than one path for this. There's more than one path, there's more than one way that this can go wrong. You don't know which of those possible futures you're going to land in.
 
[Dan] Yeah. One of the other things going on in that scene is… That also plays with time is what my seventh grade English teacher always used to call a magnified moment. Where it's really an exchange of blows that takes probably ultimately maybe 30 seconds. I think in the movie, it was drawn out to 40 or 45 seconds. But it's still very short. Whereas the actual excerpt is two or three pages worth of material. Because every single second, every single step, every single move of the blade is given this momentous weight. And so it is expanding things out and magnifying every little moment that takes place into this huge, kind of glorious, thing.
[Erin] I love that… I was thinking about, like, fight scenes and love scenes are two of the ones in which the time in which it's taking on the page and the time it was probably taking in the life of the characters are so different. I'm curious, like, how like… Like, how do you make that moment… Like, how do you make it slow down and not fade as it feels momentous? But not slow down so much that people are, like, wow, I've been on three chapters of the same, like, sword cut, and, like, I wish they would do it already…
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] is it just, like, let… Like, how do you, like, actually make time slow and speed within something?
[Mary Robinette] I think that there's two pieces that you're playing with. One is the character's awareness of time, and the other is the actual amount of time that it takes the reader to experience it. So, one of the things that happens in the example that we were just using is 2 to 3 pages takes several minutes to read. And… Unless they are listening to some [garbled] to speed.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it is that reader experience of it will slow it down. Sometimes when something is slow down in ways you don't want it to be… Fight scenes that are slow in ways that are not helping the story… It is because you're taking too long to get us through it. Likewise, you can speed things up by compressing it so that the reader's actual experience of reading it is shorter. Like, physically shorter. But then there's also what the character is noticing. Sometimes you can create a sense of, oh, this took forever, by lingering on the character's experience, feeling all of the things that they feel. The kinds of things that I've been thinking about lately are what they're noticing, where they feel it in their body. It's not that you have to hit all of these beats, but that each time, you hit one of those, you are having the character live that moment again. So if I have my character picking up a sword, and the first thing that happens is that we describe what the sword looks like, and then the next thing is the character experiences the physicality of picking it up. The weight of it, the heft, the balance. We've now experienced that sword twice. If we think about, this was the sword my father gave me, that's a third time that we're experiencing it. If we think… If we cut through the air, if we try some simple bl… Strikes with it, that's a fourth time that we're experiencing it. But all of those are things that probably happen almost immediately for the character. So, those are ways to slow it down, but also to be conscious that sometimes you don't want to slow it down, and you want to just pick one of those, the one that is most distinct to the character, the one that is most demonstrative of this specific moment in time.
 
[Erin] I think that's interesting, because that's making me think about ordering a lot. Which, like, ordering is a function of time… Or whatever. Sure, I'm going to say it is. Ordering is a function of time because I said so.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I think it is.
[Erin] Yeah. But I'm thinking, like, let's say that the character ends by slicing somebody in half. I don't know if this is what happens, but… This is what happens. Then I'm wondering, that, if it's like, if you pick up the sword, sliced the person in half, then notice the weight of it, then think about that it's the fact that it's the sword that your father gave you, it's a completely different emotional experience…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Than if you do all of that before you hit. So, thinking about, like, what order things happen in is really interesting. I also just really love that there are certain things you can do in prose that are difficult to do in other forms. Which is that… Like, I always think people in the world of my character probably find them very annoying because every time they say a line of dialogue, they then think for, like, a long period.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Half a paragraph of deep thought. Return line. Which is, like, an interesting… And we can talk at some other time about dialogue and how not to lose the reader when you, like, have long periods of, like, epic thought in between dialogue. But in real life, that would be quite irritating, unless you think very quickly. But in a story, the reader does want to know what's going on in the character's mind. And so they're willing to, like, pause with you for a moment. Because what they're gaining in that moment of time as a reader is worth the pause in the reality timeline of the story itself.
[Mary Robinette] I think, on that, why don't we pause for a moment?
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I am really enjoying about this conversation is that we're talking about using time in so many different ways. We're talking about the sequencing of a story and how that can change… Just when a character has a reaction. We're talking about using time as a way of… As an extension of setting. And I'd love to actually dig into that part of it just a little more, the idea of time as an extension of setting. I think I've talked about this more on a previous episode, but one of my favorite scenes that taught me so much was from Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey where we get a character going into a room and describing it… First, her experience of it, her interactions with it, when she arrives in the middle of the night and it is fulfilling all of her Gothic fantasy dreams. And then, the next morning, when she gets up, and discovers that the terrifying scratching sound is actually a rosebush that's beautiful outside the window. And that the secret locked cabinet that had a role of enciphered paper in it is actually not actually locked. It was open, she had accidentally locked it, and the enciphered paper is actually a literal laundry list. She just couldn't read it because it was dark. But the… How the literal time can cause the character to experience a place and the reader to experience a place in a different way, which gives you essentially two settings for the price of one.
[Erin] Absolutely. Because we associate certain times of day, I think, with certain things. Like, night and danger often go together. Which is interesting, too, because if you with… If there's a character who's like, not feeling steady in their bones, until the sun goes down, then that's an interesting… That's something different, and what does that mean about the character? What does that say about them? But I often think about, like, I experience my own body differently walking around based a little bit on time of day.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You know what I mean? It's like I am more… Because it feels like you don't have the 360 view in the same way at night. And so I am more conscious of who's around me in the distance. And those are all thoughts that I'm having, and that a character can be having as a way… So then what do they notice? Because we all… The dangers that we view are reflections of our own mentality. And so, the dangers that you view in the night are going to be different than the dangers I view in the night. And so thinking about that, then, that's a great opportunity to maybe get to what are your character's fears? Or what is your character's fearlessness? Where do they feel comfortable? When do they not? When do they feel ill-at-ease? And I think all of those are, like, great moments, I think especially… I think that's especially great when you're trying to get something done clockwise. Like, I need to have the character go to the grocery store…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because it's like, really important later on that they've been there. But it's not interesting at all, so, like… But, if it's all of a sudden, they're going and, it's, like, they've got to go in the middle of the night… Or they need to go out in the day, but they hate their appearance. Then, how does that time actually make something mundane more interesting so that you can hide the plot work that you're doing that will then become more interesting later.
 
[Dan] Yeah. And I think a lot of kind of personal physical cycles can go into this as well. Healthwise is what I'm thinking of, since developing depression and on the particular meds that I'm on right now, I am so much better in the mornings and in the afternoons than I am in the evening. And by the time we get to dinner time, there's just not much of me left. And so I will experience the world and people will experience me in very different ways based on what time of day it is as well.
 
[Mary Robinette] It is interesting how much we are shaped by time. And yet it is also one of those things that I think is hard to convey to readers. Like, the passage of time. The way in which someone is different in the morning then in the evening. One of the questions that I'll hear people ask is, like, how do I let people know that time has passed? If…
[Dan] Yeah. I asked Fonda Lee this question a while ago, because I think she does such a brilliant job of it in the Greenbones saga. With the first book takes about a year, the second about five years, and the third book covers 20, 25 years of time. And how do you convey that so well? One of the little tricks she pointed out was that she made sure to always talk about the children as soon as possible after a time jump, because if the kid that was toddling around and barely verbal last time is suddenly doing his school homework, well, then you know that a certain amount of time has passed. And it became a really interesting shorthand for me to go back and look through the books and go, oh, yeah. She does do that every time there's a time jump.
[Laughter]
[Dan] She starts talking about the kids early on. Because they will change more than the adults will, and so it makes it more obvious that time has gone by.
[Mary Robinette] I think that actually interestingly ties back into what we were talking about for where… How much can you change a place and still have it be recognizable. And, like, how much can you change a time… When you're changing time, what are the pieces? If you don't have the option to have children, if it is just moving day to night, what are the pieces that change, and those are the things that you flag. Like, kids change a lot, but buildings don't change that much. If you're going day to night, the light through the window changes a lot even if nothing else in the room does.
[Dan] Yeah. The temperature could change, the sounds that your hearing outside, whether there's suddenly crickets or something else, that you could… There's a lot of sensory details that you can mention that will immediately clue you in to the passage of time.
[Erin] I also think obligations change over time. Like, from day to night, if you're in a sort of traditional, like, work during the day is the, like… One of the reasons a lot of times writers write late at night and early in the morning is because those are times that people feel that the obligations of life had yet to like come tug on them. And so it's, like, is it quiet in some ways, not just the quiet of the actual room, but the quiet of, like, no one demanding things from you and nobody is needing things from you in this moment.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but… Interestingly, that has been one of the things that has been disruptive for me at this… And I've recognized the symptoms before I say it… That's one of the things that's been disruptive for me about teaching my cat to talk…
[Laughter]
[Erin] There are many, but that's…
[Mary Robinette] Is that her diurnal cycle is not the same as a human's. So she sleeps during the middle of the day, and then, at night, when I am starting to wind down, when, normally, before this, I would have been able to have quiet, because the rest of the world has quieted, that's when she's like, let's play! Let's have zoomies together! Let's use this button board thing and let me mash on it and talk to you. So I have… Like, I'm finding that now I'm starting to write during the middle of the day, which has never been a writing time for me. Because then those obligations, which is this, are quiet.
[Dan] I need to write when my cat shuts up.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God. I love her so much, but choices were made.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] What I love about that is, like, you're not going to get your cat to not be dire… Like, you can have some stern talks, but I don't think it's going to work. And so, also thinking about, like, what are the things… Like, children's growth, like a school day, like, what are the things that keep… That are unchangeable by your character, no matter what they do in the world?
[Mary Robinette] The inevitabilities.
[Erin] These are the inevitabilities of time. At the beginning of the day, they'll have to do this. At the end of the day, they'll have to do that. I was reading Babel…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] By R. F. Kuang and it's all about school. Like, it's a schoolbook, for at least the portion then I'm in. And so there's a lot about the school year, and, like, the passage of time in a school year, which the characters are going through so much internally, but there's still, like, they have to hit the external, go to this class, be in this place, do this thing by this time. And, I think, we sometimes forget or ignore or get used to the strictures of time in our lives. But maybe we should not do that for our character's lives, and think about how we can use that as an opportunity for tension or fun.
[Mary Robinette] That is a fantastic example of great time passage and using time as setting and time to manipulate character. Speaking of time, it is time for us to give you some homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] And it's a really simple one this time. It's similar to the one that we gave you at the beginning of this, looking at the lens of when and where. And this is just I want you to change the time at which a scene takes place. If you've got a scene that's set during the day, what happens when you move it to the night? What changes? If it's set in the spring, what happens if you move it to the fall? You don't have to make all of the changes, but, what happens if you change the time in which that scene takes place?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context

May. 28th, 2025 06:26 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context 
 
 
Key points: Context, worldbuilding, and setting! How do you know what you really need for your story? What will my character interact with? What does the plot need? The 8 gems of Rohisla! Where do you want to create emotion or conflict? Tie worldbuilding to character conflict. Think about the cost of this piece of worldbuilding. Think about implications! In prose, suggesting a broader context is okay, but in gamewriting, people get irritated if there's nothing behind the door. For GM's, don't build more world than you need. Think about what the reader needs to tell the story in collaboration with you. What if you have a context, but no story? First, what can go wrong and who is affected by it? What were you interested in when you built that context? Try a mashup, borrow a character from somewhere else and shove them into this context. Play with unspoken or hidden context!
 
[Season 20, Episode 21]
 
[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of…
 
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[Mary Robinette] Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 21]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] The lens of context. 
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] And this is our first sort of episode now that we've introduced the lens of where and when. I thought the very… The very next thing we needed to do is actually talk about creating context in a story. And what I mean by this is that when you are worldbuilding, especially if you're doing science fiction and fantasy, you can create, like, so much world. You can create all the where's, all the when's, especially in science fiction and fantasy. So how do you figure out what the… How do you figure out, like, what actually is needed for your story? How do you use the world and the setting to create the context in which your story is going to succeed as opposed to sort of just everything you could possibly know about that setting?
[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about things that my character is going to interact with. So I tend to break things into details that are plot specific in that there is a plot event that's going to happen around it, there's a piece of worldbuilding, something is going to happen at the… With the gems of [Releasia?] So we actually really need to know what those gems are.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I love that it changes every time you say it.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I have no idea what you said [garbled]
[Howard] For context, in a previous episode, we created… And by we, I mean Erin…
[Laughter]
[Erin] The eight gems of Rohisla.
[Chorus: Rohisla!]
[Dan] How can you not remember the important…
[DongWon] That was like the 13 gems of Rho…
[Dan] Context?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay, you know what? Let's… I just want to talk about this for a moment, because as… From the standpoint of a humorist, I want to be able to tell jokes in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, where I'm not making fun of sci-fi or fantasy. And so what I establish is a context in which a thing is funny. The gems of Rohisla thing is making fun of the fact that we can't keep track of Erin's worldbuilding.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to write it down…
[Howard] And that's…
[Mary Robinette] So that I can remember it in the future.
 
[Howard] And the best example I can come up with is the one where… And I've used this in my humor classes… Where the puppeteer alien and the Kzin alien are talking about where human's sense of humor comes from. And the puppeteer is an herbivore, the Kzin is a carnivore, and the Kzin says, "I think that humor is an interrupted defense mechanism." And the puppeteer says, "Humans are insane. No sane creature would interrupt a defense mechanism." And knowing that the puppeteer is an herbivore just makes that funnier, because they're like sheep. Why would you interrupt a defense mechanism? But you have to have the context for that joke to play. And so, for me, the decision on building context is where do I want to be able to tell jokes. And that's… At one layer of obstruction up, where do I want to be able to create emotion? Where do I want to be able to create conflict? Where do I want to be able to create a platform that has no railings?
[DongWon] Ultimately, context only matters if it's giving context to something. Right? If you're just giving me context for the sake of having it, I'm not going to remember it. The reason we can't remember the eight gems of Revisla is that it's not tied to anything, other than the fact that we find this word funny for some reason. And it's… Which is why when I talk about how do you introduce worldbuilding, I always say to tie worldbuilding to character conflict. If a piece of information about how the world works is connected to something that the character wants, needs, or has at stakes, or is afraid of, then that is going to make it so that it's memorable. Right? And that can be as simple as children get report cards, when your eight-year-old MC goes home, there's going to be a report card waiting for him, and he doesn't want his parents to find out what it is. Now the piece of worldbuilding that's important and relevant, which is report cards, matters. Right? That could also be children are executed when they turned nine.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] That's going to be an important part of worldbuilding…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Unless they have all eight gems of Rohis…
[Laughter]
[Howard] They were report cards [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] They just sort them into the poop chute.
[DongWon] Exactly. But all I'm saying is that… I think [Steven Universe Show] does this incredibly well. Where you start with a very simple premise and end up at the end of that show with an incredibly massive space operatic level of worldbuilding and scope. And the way they get there is that at each element that they're introducing to that worldbuilding, they're tying it to a very specific character in their conflict.
 
[Mary Robinette] And one of the problems that I think writers run into is figuring out what pieces they're actually going to need. And, for me, it comes down to the cost of it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] How many words am I going to have to spend on it to make the reader understand it? For instance, you all do not need, in order to understand this podcast, you all do not need to know that we are sitting in a hotel room. You don't need to know the order that we are sitting, which chair type people are, that Marshall stands when he is engineering and looks like a DJ. Actually, you do need to know it, it's pretty awesome. You don't need to know any of that to understand, but sometimes we get so excited because we thought these things through that we will put them down on the page, forgetting that it doesn't actually carry any story burden.
[Howard] And worse still, we put these things down on the page, forgetting that any context that is co-… That is made up of information that could be in any way relevant is going to suggest… Is going to have implications. Things that can grow out of it. I think of… And the books and the movies did just fine, so it's okay for me to complain… Hunger Games. The idea that a Battle Royale has become a central societal point post some sort of apocalypse suggests a huge measure of historical worldbuilding that I was never satisfied with the presentation of. And so the story fell apart for me. And I'm not saying that these stories are bad, because clearly they did just fine. But as a writer, I try to make sure that I'm not going to put anything into the context that I have to explain away later because it suggests something that makes my story hard to grab.
 
[Erin] This actually reminds me of something I learned when I was moving between prose and game writing. So, a lot of times in a short story especially, if you want to make your world feel like it has more depth, you will… You can include detail that suggests a broader context than this story has time for. So you could say, like, we met while searching for the eight gems of Rohisla, and you're not… That's not what the story is about, and it gives… And the context that matters is, like, this is my relationship with the character. So you've provided a relationship context, but not a world context. And yet, knowing it, makes you feel like there's a bigger world out there. In game writing, if you do that, people'd be like, in our next mission, we should go collect those gems, and, like, you have not written anything…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For the GM, or if it's a videogame, like, there's nothing behind that door. And so then, players get frustrated, because there like, why did you create a context that I can't explore?
[Howard] You now need help from the eight GM's of Rohisla.
[Erin] Oh, wow.
[Howard] Oh… [Garbled]
[laughter]
[Erin] But I think that that's something that, like, even in fiction, you can do. It's like you really have to be careful, like…
[Yeah]
[Erin] You don't want it to make it seem like the more interesting story is happening outside of the page that the reader is being forced to follow.
 
[DongWon] A piece of advice that I give to new GM's is don't build more world than you need. Right? And, like, if I am starting a new campaign setting, if none of my characters are playing a paladin or a [garbled] or somebody who intersects with religion, I'm not writing down what that pantheon is. I'm not going to sit here spending six hours making up 12 gods for this world if nobody here is religious. You know what I mean? And it's just like religion isn't a major component of the story. We don't need to know all the details of it. We can be pretty vague about it. And then, when you stumble into a situation that requires that, that's when you build it out. Right? And so a little bit of, like, a… You build the track right ahead of the train. Right? You're building it as you cross. And you don't need to have every single piece of this imagined out… Maybe have some idea of where that might be going. But think about, what are your characters interested in? Right? If you have somebody who is a merchant, then, yes, you're going to need to understand the economics of it. If your characters are children, no, you don't need to understand where the grain is being shipped from. You know what I mean?
[Howard] You brushed up against here the concept of just-in-time manufacturing, which became a huge market force in the 30 years leading up to the pandemic of 2020. At which point, we broke enough supply chains that everybody looked at just-in-time manufacturing and said, oh, no. This doesn't work anymore. And I loved how, as somebody who world builds, I was able to look at something that seemed very sensible and suddenly see circumstances in which it completely fell apart, because now I understood, in a way I just hadn't understood before, the way things are inextricably related.
[Mary Robinette] You'll hear a lot of times people talking about worldbuilding as there's an iceberg, but you only need the tip of the iceberg. And then there's an implication that you actually need to build the entire iceberg. For me, it's like if I am telling a story in which Titanic runs into the iceberg, yeah, I need to know that there's this mass under there. But if I'm telling a story about some fishermen who are going nowhere near the iceberg, I don't need to know it's there. When I was building puppets, I would build the armature that needed to be in underneath in order to hold their clothes up. That I would have where their bodies were… Like, the joints would be in the right place. Everything that caused the puppet to move in a way that was believable. But I wouldn't build the muscles, because they… The audience would never see them. They were not anatomically correct, except sometimes, when I was trolling on another puppeteer…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] There, it had a point. Right?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It had a purpose. So, for me, what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it is where do I want to put the effort, but where also do I want the reader to put the effort. Because the reason you don't have puppets be anatomically correct and you try to eliminate all of that stuff is every piece of that adds weight that then the puppeteer has to carry. And because your reader is actively building that story with you, every piece of context that you give them gives them a narrative weight that they have to carry. It's a memory that they have to hold onto. So if you use the context to direct their attention, to give them the tools to tell the story that you want to tell, to tell that in collaboration with you, you're going to have, I think, a more successful story. Do you need to know how things move? Yes, if it's in relation to something else.
[Howard] When I look at Fawzi bear, I think of him as being fluffy all the way through. I don't think of your hand in him. I just think… I mean, the surface of Fawzi bear, the way he moves… He's a big fluffy bear. And so the piece that you didn't build, because you couldn't, because there's no room for your hand, is a piece that I go ahead and imagine for you.
[Erin] And on that beautiful metaphor, we're going to take a short break.
 
[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.
 
[Erin] So the question that I have, now that we're back, is, we've sort of been presuming in our first half that you know the story that you want to tell, and you can then shape the context around that story. What if you've just been worldbuilding in worldbuilding and worldbuilding and you've got all context, and you're not sure, like, where the story is in there? Are there any tools that you can use to actually figure out how to use that context as a lens and not just a landscape?
[Mary Robinette] I have a worksheet we've shared with readers before that I will use when I find myself in this position. It hasn't happened to me a lot, but every now and then, I have an idea and I have the world for it, but I have no idea what the story is. Because most of the time, I do have a character in mind. So I go through an exercise to figure out what kind of things that can go wrong and who can be affected by it. So I will list a list of 20 people who can be in that world, looking at the socio-economic spectrum. I will look at power structures. I will look for those things to look for where things can hurt. Which is not that every story has to be about pain and hurt, but that is usually a place to find a stake and defined someone who has a reason to want to change something. Whether it is something about themselves or something about the larger world. So those are things that I will look for is who has a reason to activate and…
[Howard] Just asking the question is often enough to end up with a character or an entire story. When I look at a magic system or a technology system, one of the first questions I ask is if it's valuable, can it be stolen, can it be smuggled, can it be counterfeited? Just asking the question is enough that suddenly a whole smuggling ring pops into my head, and now I have a story. A whole counterfeiting ring, and now I have a heist or whatever. So, asking the questions about, as Mary Robinette said, asking about the pain points is often the easiest starting point.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, one place to start… I think this is kind of tying into what Mary Robinette's saying, is take a look at the worldbuilding you've created. If you've done a ton of worldbuilding, you've done a lot of creating that context, and you're looking for a story to have that context within, then you can look… What you're looking for is what are you interested in. What you're looking for is why am I writing this story? And you will have focused on different parts of the worldbuilding over others. Say you are focused on the religion and spirituality of this world. Say you're focused on the history and mythology, the prophecies, the economics, the technology. Whatever those things are, figure out which one you were drawn to and build on that. Right? Like, this can be Mistborn's magic system. This can be the history and poetry of Lord of the Rings. This can be the Galactic politics of Star Trek. Right? Each of these are pulling the audience, and pulling you, as the creator, in different directions. And that can give you a starting point of what do you want to have your characters interacting with.
 
[Mary Robinette] I sometimes will… When I'm having trouble with this kind of thing, one of the other things that I'll do is the mashup. Where I'm like, okay, here's this context that's really interesting, this world. What happens if I remove a character from another context and drop them into this one? This is essentially fanfiction, which I think is a glorious thing. But this is a way to have your fanfiction jollies and still get paid for it. Which is that you take a character that you love from another world, you drop them into this context. They're gonna change because of the new context. Obviously, you're going to rename them, but the social circles that they have, all of those things, how do they react? How are they moving through this world? Sometimes I will… Sometimes it's not from another piece of IP, it's… I have this character that has come into my head that I haven't been able to find the world for them, and I just shove them into this context to see kind of… Thought experiment about what happens. And often the contrasts between the two will give me opportunities that I wouldn't have had when I was just, like, single-handedly… Or single-mindedly focused on one thing.
[Erin] Yeah. I think a lot of times… I've been thinking about this in a slightly different way, because of the game writing I've been doing, which is that, while you don't want to create contexts that, like, lead the person down the wrong path, creating game hooks when you are creating a setting is a big thing that people do in tabletops. So you'll write about a world and you'll create little pieces, like little bits of discontent, little pieces of things that the GM can, like, use if they want to, then create a whole story in a place that you haven't written it for them, you've just suggested it. I think of those as, like, the but-also's. Like, if you describe a great place, there's always somebody who'd be like, oh, but also… Like, oh, have you thought about that? Or think about, like, who in your setting would write the Twitter thread that's like…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Hold on to your butts. You think that, like, X thing is great? Like, about this context? Like, here's 15 things that are horrific. Like…
[DongWon] [garbled] Twitter? It's just a horrifying thing to introduce.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You know what? Coming back to the eight gems of Rohisla, you put them into your game, and then in the little sidebar for game hooks, it says, "Actually, six of the gems of Rohisla are genuine and two of them are counterfeits." And now we know that there's a story here that the players might be able to interact with.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that I think is kind of fun to play with, which is unspoken context. Where you, the writer, are aware of something and it is affecting the way you move… Everything happens in the story, but you don't necessarily need the reader to know it. For instance, when we recorded these episodes, we recorded them out of sequence. So the episode that you just listen to, we made a ton of jokes about poop chutes. But we were recording it on Navigator of the Seas and DongWon was not with us. In our timeline, the thing that we just recorded was an episode that you heard weeks ago about the eight gems of Rohisla, and we're all present for that. So it's shaping the way we are moving through. So sometimes it can be fun, actually, to have that little piece of that iceberg, you don't need the whole iceberg there, but just a little piece of the iceberg that is affecting the way characters interact with each other. And it's not that you have to make sure that the reader understands it. Like, I did not need to pause and explain this, you would have been fine without that. But it does affect the story. And so sometimes I will play with that. Like, offstage, these two were totally getting it on, and it's affecting small things, but I don't need the reader to understand it. I don't need to do a side quest to go watch the sexy fun time scene.
[Erin] Well, that is fun.
[Mary Robinette] It is.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I do think it's delightful that our context episode is the one riddled with inside jokes.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Dan] We didn't do this on purpose.
[DongWon] Half of them, I'm not getting, because I missed the cruise.
[Mary Robinette] There's a whole thing about trees and poop chutes and Legolas, like, scooping poop at the bottom, because that's where all his… It's…
[DongWon] Okay.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] All right.
[Erin] [garbled] context.
[DongWon] Without this context, actually.
[Erin] It gets away from us. It's time to give homework and move onto a new one.
 
[Erin] So, now we have the homework for you, which is, I'd like you to take a context, some piece of worldbuilding that you've done, and come up with three different narratives that you could write that use that context. Then, separately, I want you to take a narrative that you've written and come up with three new contexts in which that narrative would succeed.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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