Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

 

Writing Excuses 20.27: The Lens of Why 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

Writing Excuses 20.25: Writing Confrontation (LIVE Aboard the WX Cruise) 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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]

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

 

Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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…

 

[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] 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.

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-19-cooking-as-a-writing-metaphor

 

Key Points: Swapping ingredients is creative! Chefs learn from recipes, you can too! Mac & cheese and fanfic. Cooking at home does not mean you are a failed professional chef. Sustenance writing? Meal prepping and writing prep. Creme Brulé. Understand the technique behind the recipe. Things will go wrong. Joyful mistakes! Know what biscuits should be before you make one. Good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.

 

[Season 20, Episode 19]

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[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 19]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Cooking as a Writing Metaphor.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Howard] Hey, you know what I love? I really love to make food for other people. Almost as much as I love eating. But I think all of us kind of love eating. I remember years and years and years ago, we were talking about creativity and how occasionally you'll talk to somone and they're like, "Oh, I'm not creative. I'm just... I can't create to save my life." "Do you cook?" "Well, yeah, of course I cook." "So, if you're cooking a thing and you don't have one of the ingredients you need, what do you do?" "Um, well, I go to the cupboard and I look at what's in the cupboard and I try and find something that'll substitute." "Aha! So what you're saying is you are creative, you just didn't know it yet." And this is one of the ways for me that cooking functions as a metaphor. At a very high level, it's an acid test for whether or not you really can be creative. At a much lower level, boy, there's a lot going on. There is so much going on. There is… I'm sure we are all familiar with the phrase necessity is the mother of invention. Recently, Sandra has had some dietary needs, some dietary requirements, and I've discovered that mayonnaise works instead of butter. How did I discover that? By doing all kinds of reading and research, and it's the same sort of thing that you do when you're writing. And so, in this episode, we're going to talk about cooking as a metaphor for us as writers for writing, and I think this is going to make all of us hungry.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's true. One of the things that I want to say is that… You were saying everybody cooks. I'm like, actually, that's not true. There are a lot of people who don't cook. Or who think that they don't cook. But when we're talking about cooking, when we're talking about creativity, there's this whole range, like, if you have selected a frozen dinner and you stick it in the microwave, that is actually cooking. It doesn't mean always that you have to start from scratch. Like, sometimes you're cooking and you are cooking using somebody else's kitchen, sometimes you're cooking using somebody else's ingredients, sometimes you are like, I'm just not in the mood. And there's still ways to be creative within that. Anytime you're having to make a choice, the choice is the creativity.

[DongWon] Well, and… Like, in writing and in reading, there's so many valences we put on certain kinds of things. Like, we look at French cooking. Right? Michelin star French tradition cooking as like so worthy and valuable compared to other traditions. But, I've had as much enjoyment eating at a very fine dining restaurant as I have standing at a counter in a gas station eating a taco. And the way you enjoy things… And a box mac & cheese at the exact right moment is one of the finest pleasures in life. Right? So they're different kinds of writing and different kinds of creativity and art that fit different situations. That doesn't mean that the box mac & cheese is inherently worse or less valuable than the 300 dollar tasting menu. I am nourished at the end of both of those. I… Both in body and in spirit. Right? And, I think, think about what you're getting out of the things that you're making, rather than how the world would put a price tag on the thing that you're making.

 

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. And also know that, like, there are… That those degrees of interest and degrees of skill, and that skills are things you can acquire. That the, for me, the thing at the core of this, when we're talking about cooking, is nourishing… Although there's some really good stuff that's not particularly nourishing, like, give me a delicious s'more. Like, if that's, like, a toasted marshmallow? Oh, my God.

[Howard] Burnt sugar and air.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So good.

[DongWon] There's a lot of different kinds of nourishing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? There's body, there's emotion, this spirit, there's all these different things. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is absolutely true. But if you're looking at something and thinking, oh, I can't do that because I don't have those skills. The top chefs did not have those skills either when they started.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] They learned them.

[DongWon] And you learn from recipes. Right? You learn from starting to read recipes from a book that explains the basics. For me, that was The America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. I know a lot of people sort of of my generation learn to cook from that book where it just goes through, here's the core techniques, here's how to break down a chicken, here's how to heat up a pan, here's, like, all the very basic techniques that let you learn the different components of what a dish is, what a recipe is.

 

[Howard] It… I hadn't thought about this before, but boxed mac & cheese may be kind of like fanfic. In that you start with something where you know exactly what it's be… You've seen it a thousand times, you know exactly what's in it. But you make the boxed mac & cheese and then you reach for the Panko breadcrumbs and the bacon bits and you put them in on top and now you've done slash fic.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You've done your own take on Kraft mac & cheese or whatever. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Because at some point, at some point in your cooking journey, you realize, hey, you know what? I… What if I actually use real cheese instead of this powdered stuff, and a mixture of milk and butter? How do I get to that point? That might be interesting. I'm going to try that. As a writer, boy, what if I build my own fantasy universe instead of using Gray Hawk, instead of using Dungeons & Dragons?

[Dan] So, one of the things to remember about this is… Nobody looks at the home chef and says, "Aw, it's too bad you're a failed professional chef."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Haha!]

[Dan] Right? Like, just because you cook at home doesn't mean that you have professional aspirations, or that you need professional aspirations. And writing can be the same thing. It's something that we do because we love. Even if your goal is to eventually make money with it, you start because you love it. And it is a thing that brings you joy. And, so making sure that you know kind of what your goals are as a writer can help you deal with those thoughts of inadequacy or criticisms coming from outside. Somebody finds out that you're a writer, they'll immediately ask, "Oh, have you published anywhere? Have you sold anything?" Shut up. That's beside the point.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That might be our goal, but that's not why we're doing it.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. And one of the distinctions I think about when thinking about what the difference is between… Not the home chef and a professional chef, but what I think of as sustenance cooking versus cooking for joy. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The… I resent sustenance cooking. When I have to make myself lunch in the middle of a work day, or it's seven o'clock on a Wednesday night and I'm starving and I need to prepare what to eat, like… I'm furious at the idea that I need to, like, stop and cook.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? That's sustenance cooking. Versus cooking a meal with… For somebody you love or for yourself or whatever it is. And the difference, to me, is intention. Right? When you approach what you're doing with intention, that changes… That changes from the emergency I need to feed somebody box mac & cheese to the I'm going to build a sauce for this mac & cheese. I'm going to add the breadcrumbs. I'm going to do more with it. So, even if it is fanfic that you're doing, when you're approaching that fanfic with the kind of intention about what you're trying to accomplish and what effect you want to have on your audience, that, I think, is transformative and brings a different level into it.

[Howard] Okay. Pop quiz. What is sustenance writing? I'm going to say email.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I was going to…

[Howard] I'm going to say email.

[DongWon] I think journaling can be sustenance writing. I think email. But I do think there… There's a lot of kinds of writing… I think a lot of writing… The kind of writing you would do for fanfic, the kind of writing you do just as tests to see if something works. Right? I think there's a lot of times people are sitting down and forcing themselves to write. They're like, I have to get a thousand words out today. Right? Otherwise I can't call myself a writer if I'm not doing that. I think writing when it comes from obligation as opposed to a pull towards craft and attention… And that's not me saying that writing… That kind of sustenance writing isn't important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's hugely important and valuable. And learning how to do that's import… In the same way that me learning to feed myself, even though I resent it, is also important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but also, like, learning to feed yourself in ways that you don't resent…

[DongWon] Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] Learning to do sustenance writing in ways that you don't resent. Like, I… One of the things that I often find is that I have something that's prepackaged, that's available. So, for my emails, I have templates, often. These are things that you can do. And also, for me, when I'm writing… Like, when I need to make progress on a project, sometimes I have to do sustenance writing on that, where it's like, I just have to make forward progress. And if I break it down into small chunks that… It's like meal prepping. Where I'm like, I know that tomorrow I'm going to be able to do actual, like, prose writing, but today I can do my meal prepping, I can set all of my ingredients up, I can make a bullet list of these of the things that I need to do. And often, when you do that prep… When you walk into the kitchen, it's like, oh! As a complete accident, we have… I've got… It turns out that I don't actually love shopping for groceries, and doing the menu planning. But I really enjoy cooking. My husband is often… He's doing some volunteer work that's 20 minutes away. And so he will let me know, I'm on my way home. And it's not a predictable time. So what I've been doing is, I've been doing all of the sous chef work, all of the prep work, and then I get that 20 minute notice, and I walk back into the kitchen and I cook. And I'm finding that that is actually starting to influence the way I'm writing, too. That I will do some prep work, and I'll take a little bit of a break, and then I'll come back and it's like, oh, look at this gift that I've given to my future self.

[DongWon] This is me spending a day and making stock…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Kimchee for the month. Whatever it is.

[Dan] Yeah. There's this… I love this idea, and it's reminding me of the cooking thing that I'm going to horribly mispronounce, because it's French. Maison plase? [Maison plais?] The idea there is that you prep all your ingredients in advance. That you pre-chopped everything, that you premeasured everything. So that when it's time to cook, you just have them close at hand. And I'm realizing as I listened to everyone talk, that that's how I use outlining. That if I have my outline, and I am an extensive outliner… I outline scene by scene. And so when it is time to write the next thing, I can open that outline and look at it and I know who's in this scene and what it is supposed to accomplish and what is supposed to happen and blah blah blah. Which is just like having everything pre-chopped and I can just pick it up and throw it in a pan.

[Mary Robinette] And it doesn't have to be outlining. You can also, if you're a discovery writer, you can also bank sensory details. So that you've got those ready at hand. So what does this room look like? I will often use C. L. Polk's five four three two one technique. Where I just write down, okay, what are the five things that are visible in this room? What are four things that I can hear? And I'll just go through those… All five senses so that they're banked, so when I sit down, I've already thought about that. Even if I'm doing some discovery writing.

[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. And after the break, I'm going to argue with someone who's been dead for 150 years.

 

[Howard] All right. In the nineteenth century, French chef Antonin Careme famously declared that there are five mother sauces. Espagnole, veloute, bechamel, tomate, and hollandaise. And I looked at those when I learned this and realized four of those are thickened with a roux, which is butter and flour. And one of them is a water and oil emulsion. Dude, there are only two mother sauces.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are only two, because four of them are exactly the same thing, all you're changing is the flavor. I bring this up because this only ever happens in cooking. I've never had writers argue about what kinds of forms there are for writing, or anything.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, you are not hanging out with the right writers. That's all I have to say. There are only three stories.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] It's only Man meets man, man… It's like…

[DongWon] There's only The Heroes Journey, there's only Save the Cat, there's only…

[Howard] Yes. The one I heard was there's only two stories. Somebody… Stranger comes to town and somebody goes on a trip. And I'm like, those of the same story, it's just the point of view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's only one story!

[Howard] The point here is that I love structure, I love formula. And the first thing that happens when I look at a formula or a structure is I begin asking it… I begin trying to break it. I wrap it around things it shouldn't be wrapped around, I play with taxonomy. I love this. Does it result in good cooking? Eh… Maybe. Sometimes. Does it result in good writing? It can. What are the things where you've done this? Where you've taken a form and you've said, well, this form is interesting, but it really doesn't mean what I think… What everybody says it means. I'm going to do something else with it.

[Mary Robinette] Um... [Kaily.]

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is… I think that is the heart of this, is that we'll hear a writer say, "Oh, I don't want to do anything formulaic." And the difference between formula and formulaic is very interesting. So I tend to think of writing as recipes. And when I am doing recipes, I always wind up swapping something, because, you know what, I just want a little bit more of this, or a little bit more of that. And when I'm writing, also, it's like, the number of times that I have secretly done a retelling of something and I just haven't told anyone that it's a retelling… And I haven't asked… I've like filed the serial numbers off really hard. No one's noticed. No one's noticed, but I'm using somebody else's recipe. This is… Like… There are… You go to a restaurant and you order the cream Brulé, and there's a whole bunch of… Like, boy, that is a very simple dessert that you can really mess up. But that's something… That's a recipe that someone invented, and it has become a genre.

[Howard] Someone whose first question was, can I use this blowtorch in the kitchen?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] The answer is yes.

[Howard] Yes, you can.

[DongWon] [garbled] fire.

[Mary Robinette] I had a Parmesan cream Brulé with a spicy red pepper jelly on top of the Brulé part is an appetizer that was transcendent. And that was someone going what if… What if I take this well-known thing and swap some stuff out?

 

[DongWon] Because, I think, getting to sort of the core of what you're talking about, and the core of what Howard's talking about in terms of, like, yes, there are the mother sauces, yes, it's important… Blah blah blah blah blah. But what matters more is that there's technique behind each of the mother sauces. Right? And I've read so many cookbooks that have been completely transformative to my practice, that have been so useful. The one that I think made more of an impact than any other is a book called Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. And Ratio, it's a very slim book, and it's just teaching you not to think in terms of recipe, but giving you the logic of why recipes are structured the way that they are. The ratios that go into thinking about food, into thinking about drink, and to thinking about… I mean, Samin Nograt's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is getting out this in a different way. Right? Those are the four elements of any dish. Salt, fat, acid, and heat. How are you applying them, that's going to make things delicious. Right? And so, think about ratio, think about elemental ingredients, and you'll see the logic behind the recipe. And then, any recipe you run into, you could figure it out. Right? Any book you want to write, if you understand the ratios, if you understand the core elements, you can write a mystery, you can write a space opera, you can write a romance, you can do whatever story you're trying to accomplish.

[Dan] I am trying to imagine… We're recording several episodes today. This one is coming before lunch.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And I am trying to imagine what this episode would be like if we recorded it after lunch. When we were full, and we didn't want to think about food anymore. We wouldn't get this enticing description of cream Brulé.

[DongWon] Dan, you're underestimating our ability to get hungry thinking about food.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And writing is a lot like that. And I think a lot of it, a lot of the time… Writer's block, for example, comes down to that same idea of I am full right now. There are words in my brain, I have already written some of them, and I'm just not feeling it anymore. And that's okay. Sometimes it is time to get up and take a walk and digest a little bit.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and…

[Dan] Because that is going to help you feel excited about writing again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and sometimes the reason that you are not interested in cooking or food is because you're ill. And you need to take time to rest. And it's okay. And we don't… We so often have that write every day. And it's like if you don't cook every day… No. You absolutely don't have to cook every day.

[DongWon] If you're feeling uninspired, go out to eat. Go to a nice restaurant. Go to a place you've never been before. Try a new cuisine. Try a new dish that you've never tried before. And that'll help inspire you. You've got to put in the tank to get stuff out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things I just want to quickly hop back to when we were talking about the salt, fat, acid, heat, is that this is something that I have been thinking about more and more over the last year is thinking about the why. So, like, I tend to sit down and talk to you about what a mystery structure is. But why does it work? When we talk about the long night of the soul, or in a heist structure, the false… The all is lost moment. But that's the plot twist where, oh, this was the secret plan all along. And I think it's because there's a contrast. And so when I see people who are playing with the recipe, and they swap an ingredient out, but they don't understand what that ingredient does. That's, I think, when you get the fiction that feels lifeless or formulaic. Because they aren't swapping it with intention, they're just swapping it to swap. They're just swapping it to do something different.

[Howard] That's… Gary Larson of The Far Side perfectly described that contrast element in cooking when the polar bears are sitting outside the igloo and one of them says, "Man, I love these things. Cold and crunchy on the outside, and soft and warm in the middle.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Anyway. But, yeah, that… If you don't know why these things are there, then when you make the substitution, it's a roll of the dice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] You're going to make the wrong sub.

[Dan] Okay. So this is bringing your metaphor back around to a place where the puppetry metaphor also got two. Which is the idea that execution is a vital part of this. That any recipe that you follow is going to be uniquely yours because you are the one who made it. Just like when we were talking about the mother sauces, and the idea that we joked that there's only one story. Something happens to a person. You could reduce all recipes down to somebody eat something. Like, when we get that granular with it, it's not helpful anymore. Whereas, you think about a hamburger, for example. That is a formula. That is a recipe. Although every hamburger that you've had is different from every other hamburger that you've had. You can get very creative with it, you can deconstruct it, you can add different elements to it. But ultimately, it is going to be uniquely yours if you are the one who made that hamburger. And I would rather eat your hamburger than a generic one somewhere else.

[Howard] I would rather eat your hamburger then let you eat it.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] Well, when you talk about execution, one thing that comes to mind is I think a very important thing. I cook a lot. I feel like I'm a pretty good cook. I like to cook, I make good food, people enjoy it. The number of times something goes wrong in the kitchen while I'm making a meal… Making a meal I've made a million times before. Last time I roasted a chicken and a number of small things just went slightly off the rails. Right? I was like, oh, I don't have the soil. I was making the cocktails, I was like, oh, I don't have lines. You know what I mean? And it's just like things inevitably go wrong. In terms of it could be as dire as you burn yourself, you cut yourself. It could be as minor as this is the wrong kind of onion. Right? And how you respond to that, and how you move through that, I think, is what defines a great cook from somebody who's struggling. Right? And when I see people… I've been to people's houses and they're struggling with the food is not at the level that they wished it would be, it's because they don't know how to respond to a setback. They let the setback overwhelm them and don't understand how to improvise, how to move, how to replace, because they don't know the core elements that were talking about. They don't know the ratios, they don't know the broader elements. So the reason we're talking about all these things is when you're writing, something is going to go wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? You will get derailed in your process, a character arc is not going to work the way you want it to, an emotional beat's not going to land, an action scene won't land. How do you move past that? How do you fix that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, when I have that, I try to look for the opportunities, I try to look for… Going back to puppetry, there's a thing about the joyful mistake. Croissant… Some dude forgot to put butter in when he was making… It's like puff pastry exists because somebody was like, oh, no, I forgot to add butter at the right time, and had to fold it in later to compensate. And now we have this joyful, joyful thing. So when you… When something isn't working, you can step back to what was I aiming for, what were my goals, how do I accomplish that anyway? And then it winds up being a joyful mistake that brings… Because of your response to it, because you brought your own choices to it, you wind up with something that is different than everyone else is making.

[Howard] It was a chemist at 3M who was trying to come up with a new adhesive and came up with an adhesive that really only barely worked. And that's why we have Post-it notes. This is one of the reasons why writing is so much better than cooking. Your joyful mistake may not be right for this book. But you can put it in your trunk and it will literally keep for decades.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The puff pastry is not going to last that long.

[DongWon] It freezes pretty well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] One thing I want to tag onto this is to return to the cream Brulé for a moment. One of the best cream Brulé's I ever had was at a Japanese restaurant which did a black sesame cream Brulé. Incredibly delicious. Combining a traditional East Asian ingredient with French technique and style and riffing on this sort of thing. When you're cooking, you're going to be pulling from lots of different traditions. You're pulling a technique… I make a lot of Korean food. I frequently pull in what would be a French technique into making a Korean dish in terms of sautéing the onions a certain way before hand or whatever, whereas Korean cooks would just toss them in. Right? And it's not that one's better or worse, it's just I put a spin on it by combining these different traditions. But it's also very important to understand why a food… To understand what the dish you're trying to make tastes like for the people who originated it. Right? I lived in Portland, Oregon for a few years, and that is a town that loves to make a biscuit. I also feel like that is a town that learn to make a biscuit by calling a friend who visited the South once and they described it to them over the phone.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Some of the worst biscuits I've ever had in my life. They are…

[Mary Robinette] Listen…

[DongWon] Tough.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You and I, both Southerners… I also lived in Portland, Oregon, and every time that people would be like, you should go to this place, their biscuits, they're Southern biscuits. I'm like, these are not biscuits.

[DongWon] They are so committed to the worst biscuits I've ever had. But the thing is, what I feel in so many cases is, they haven't had enough of the original thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] They don't know what it's supposed to taste like, so they're trying to re-create it. And when it comes to tradition, and when it comes to writing, when you're pulling in elements from other cultures, when you're pulling in structure from another culture, there is an obligation, I think, you have to understand what the origin thing was. You're not trying to replicate it. But if you want to pull elements from it, you need to at least have a facility and be able to recognize what the thing was.

[Howard] What you're saying, if I can distill this all the way down to the roux, is good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I think that might be the point where we do the homework.

 

[Howard] All right. Listen, this whole episode has been about giving you a metaphor for helping you to understand the way you write. The tools that are in front of you. If we've done this correctly, every time you sit down to cook or to eat, part of your brain will also be writing. Because we are terrible people and we may have just done that to you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I'm going to double down on that. Make a list of your top three comfort foods. Top three. Then make a list of your top three comfort reads. These can be specific books, or they can be styles of books. Now, map them, one to one, on to each other. As logically, as rationally, as deliciously as possible.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-17-an-interview-with-christopher-schwarz

 

Key Points: Keep your day job while you jump off the cliff into working for yourself. Say what you are going to say upfront, and then support it. Think about weird things, how to explain them to people, and then make it applicable. Look at How-to through the lens of social commentary. Don't be afraid to self-publish.

 

[Season 20, Episode 17]

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[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 17]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] An Interview with Christopher Schwarz

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] And today, we are very lucky to have a special guest with us. We have Christopher Schwarz. Would you like to introduce yourself for us?

[Chris] Yeah. I'm Chris. I am a furniture maker and writer and publisher and I clean the toilets at Lost Art Press.

[DongWon] Multi-talented, for sure. I'm very excited to have...

[Howard] I'm feeling it because I'm the toilet cleaner here at our house.

[Laughter]

[Chris] I'm the corporate toilet cleaner, so, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Sometimes that's what it takes when you're in that publisher role, you know?

[Chris] Yup.

[DongWon] Anyways, I am very excited to have Christopher on with us today. As I've talked about on the show at various points, I'm an amateur woodworker, and one of the ways I think about what we talk about here in terms of the craft of writing is sort of filtered through that craft as well. So when I first started getting into woodworking as a hobby, one of the first books I read was… Or actually, I think the first book I read was The Anarchist Toolbox by Christopher. And then I just sort of learned more about what you do as a writer and as a publisher and as somebody who obviously builds incredible furniture. And when we started doing this more of our interview series, looking at the craft of writing through the lens of other things that we do in our lives, I just thought you would be a really perfect guest to have on the show. So I couldn't be more excited to have you here.

[Chris] Well, thanks for having me, Dong.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. So, just to get into it, we were chatting before, you obviously make furniture, that's been a lifelong practice for you, but also, one of your early entrances sort of to this industry was as a writer. So how do you think about that divide between what you do as a craftsman and as a writer?

[Chris] I started as a newspaper journalist. That was my training, and so I was the dead body of the week reporter in newspapers. No, I love and miss the smell of a good trailer fire. But…

[Laughter]

[Chris] I eventually sort of the need to build furniture kind of took over which came from my background with my family as hippies in Arkansas, and so I tried to find a way to meld those two things. So I could write because that was something I could do to make a little bit of money and then I could build furniture which is also something to make another little bit of money. And so combining two really well paying professions, that's sort of how it happened. And I got a job with a magazine, woodworking magazine called Popular Woodworking, was there for 15 years, and then decided the corporate publishing was really messed up and started my own publishing company, which I've run for 18 years now.

[DongWon] Was starting the publishing company something that you did immediately after leaving or was there a time where you were trying to figure out, once you decided to lower longer be at Popular Woodworking?

[Chris] I'm not brave enough to just jump off the cliff, so I had started the publishing company in 2007, and then kind of figured out how to do things there, and I quit in 2011. So I really… It was about four years where I was doing both, which I think is the best way to quit your job.

[DongWon] Yeah, I…

[Howard] That is a nice window. I was a corporate software middle manager from 2000 to 2004, and I had started cartooning in 2000. It was 2004 when we went ahead and took the plunge. You don't just decide on a new career and throw the switch when you're working for yourself. It's… Takes a lot of courage. I like the jump off the cliff aspect of it, because, yeah, that's what it feels like.

[Chris] It does. And if you have something going, even if it's a little, that gave me a lot more courage to make the step. So, I encourage people to keep their day job when they want to become a full-time whatever for themselves. Keep your day job for a while. As long as you can, until it just absolutely destroys your soul, and then leave.

 

[Howard] One of the aspects… Sorry, you mentioned journalism. One of the aspects of writing for newspapers that I think fiction writers need to wrap their head around fairly quickly is the idea that in a newspaper, you're not allowed to write your way into the thesis. You have to say what you are going to say upfront, and then start supporting it. There are a lot of times when I look at the prose I've written and I realize, oh! Oh, the paragraph is upside down. The chapter is upside down.

[Chris] Yeah.

[Howard] I just gotta reverse the order of things. And it's not that I want it to sound like newspaper writing, it's that I've forgotten that certain things you just need to say something big and clear and important upfront so that people will follow you for the rest of the page.

[Chris] Yeah, I mean, you just say it, and then you need to support it.

[Yeah]

[Chris] You need to have the underpinnings to it, and that's what makes for good writing. Even if it's not written upside down or right side up. There's… It can all be quite hidden too, if you're good at it. But, yeah, that's the underpinnings of I think a lot of really good writing.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, just getting that message across as clearly as you can. When it came to leaving and starting the press, what were your goals in starting an independent publisher and what was the thought behind that? I mean, I'm someone who comes from 20 years of working in corporate traditional publishing, and so I have some guesses as to what those frustrations were and some guesses as to what your goals were, but I would love to hear from you sort of, like, what did that look like for you and what went into that decision to sort of really build your own path there?

[Chris] Well, I knew that corporate publishing was not what I wanted to do, because that's what I had been doing [garbled] medium, and pretty much what I did for the first 10 years of Lost Art Press was do everything that was the opposite of what corporate publishing did. Everything we do, we make everything in the United States. The books we make are beyond the library grade, as far as, like, how they're made, as far as having… We don't do perfect bindings, we do [Smyth stone], we do case bound, we do hardbacks, we try to make books that look like they're a 100 years old and that will last forever. That's really expensive and hard to do. It's not that expensive. Like, surprisingly, only a few dollars more, which is a lot in corporate America, but not a lot in real terms.

[Howard] There's a reason why you don't see that in the quote mass-market unquote.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] Well, it's just that…

[Howard] It's not easy.

[Chris] It's just a few pennies. It's not easy, because the factories aren't there. I mean, it's hard to do that in the United States because we don't have the… We've lost a lot of that.

[Yeah]

[Chris] Most of the good publishing is in Korea or in China or in Italy. But we've managed to do it, and do it well, but… And it was also that I saw that authors were getting screwed. I was an author, and I was getting screwed, and I was also a publisher and screwing other authors. Sort of, like, this human millipede or whatever.

[Yeah]

[Chris] And so, yeah, we decided to, like, give… Pretty much double or triple the royalties that we give to authors. And to make it worthwhile for them to spend two or three years on a book so that he… We wouldn't get rich, I mean, that's why I still build furniture, is because I still have to make… Do that to make ends meet, even though we ship out 60,000 books a year. That's just the way we're structured.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] So that the authors get a really good cut. And we get really good books…

[Yeah]

[Chris] As a result. Our first book is still in print from 18 years ago.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I own several of your books. I have the Anarchist's Workbench sitting right here in front of me, and I… It's always been remarkable to me how beautiful the additions are, and the amount of care that you guys put into making what you make. So it's really nice to hear what that process is like from your end. I can sort of see a connection in between you as a furniture maker and you as a bookmaker, as a publisher. How do you think about making objects in that way? I mean, how do you think about the intersection between those two things, whether you're building a chair or making a book?

[Chris] It has to last 200 years. That's really the baseline for me, and I don't know how many perfect bound books that I've owned and just been so disappointed in that they fall apart after the first or second reading. So when we design a physical book, we're going to use everything in our power to make sure that the book can survive floods, babies, dogs, locusts, whatever you can throw at it. But also that the writing itself is worth having around for 200 years. That these are things that haven't been said in the craft, things that have been hidden. That's a big thing in our craft is that a lot of stuff has been squirreled away or most of the knowledge of woodworking is in the graveyard. And so our job has been trying to tease that out through a variety of archaeological research and other kinds of methods. So we're trying to find stuff that's worthwhile to carry the craft forward and then put it into a time capsule, which is the book, that will make the journey.

[DongWon] Yeah. And I think it's something that's easy to forget, and one thing I've realized over my years in publishing is that we're in a physical goods business in a lot of ways. Right? Like, the physical book as an object is still the absolute core of what our industry does. E-books and audio are very important as well, and… But, at the end of the day, what we're mostly doing is making and distributing books to thousands of bookstores throughout the country. So it's really nice to hear that you're putting that front and center and thinking about the book as an object first and sort of the leading…

[Howard] Michael Stackpole once said… Chris, I'm pretty sure this will offend you on two counts.

[Laughter]

[Howard] He said that writers… Publishing is the business of shipping blocks of wood all over the country.

[Laughter]

[Chris] Yeah, he's not wrong. Stackpole was…

[DongWon] He's not wrong. Yeah.

[Chris] He's not wrong. Yeah. It's a different form of wood, for sure. But the physical media is hugely important to me. And… But I love digital this, that, or the other. I'm not discounting it. It's so portable and allows so many other things. But I think that, like, albums and like cassettes… My kids are into cassettes. What is wrong with them?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] They're back.

[Chris] Yeah. What… Didn't we get into eight tracks yet? So, physical media is going to have its day, I think, fully, because you can't take it away from us. My phone, all the time, is losing this song or that song or something from years ago. It's like, no, I want to carry this around, it's an object that I revere. I have Susanna Clarke's first novel that I just carry around with me, like a… I don't know, a love letter. So that's important.

 

[DongWon] That's really wonderful. Yeah, I mean, speaking of Susanna Clarke, I… You as a reader, like, what kind of things do you like to read and engage with on your own time? I mean, we were talking a little bit about, before this, that you see a connection between science fiction and the work that you do, and I'm kind of curious to hear more about that.

[Chris] Yeah. I'm a science-fiction nerd to the core, and I don't get to read it as much now because when you're a publisher… Well, I spend all day reading, and so sometimes the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is pick up a book, which sucks.

[DongWon] I feel that. I don't know when the last time I read a book for pleasure was.

[Chris] Oh, it's so hard. Because when I was a kid I… I mean, I read the library's limit every week. And that was me. So my pleasure is just few and far between. I mean, Susanna Clarke, that book, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I don't know how many times I've read that book, and some of the follow-ups, the little small novella she did. I mean, I'm reading… I, like you were saying, I read the whole series. I pick my battles, because I only have so much time, because I read mostly stuff on JSTOR, archaeological stuff about eighteenth century apprenticeships and stuff like that. But you were trying to… We were talking a little bit about the intersection between science fiction and what I do. And what I feel like I do is that I feel like I am kind of living in a post-apocalyptic society right now. Like, all of us right here, as far as woodworking goes. And 100 years ago, hundred and 20 years ago, the level of knowledge about how things were made out of wood is that everything in the world was made out of wood. It was this advanced civilization that existed before us. Literally everything. People… Everybody knew how to sharpen tools, then… Our baskets were made of wood, everything around us was made out of wood, little pieces of metal, and some stone. And almost all of the good knowledge about that was lost. I mean, there's a… Because of the Guild system in the eighteenth century, there… We look at these pieces of furniture from the eighteenth century and the seventeenth century and we're standing here and we don't know how they're made. We can't understand how they did them. Like, what tool… We don't understand the tools they used, we don't understand the methods, we don't understand how quickly they did them. It's that we today are this retrograde society, this kind of… These kind of cave creatures…

[Howard] And yet…

[Chris] And we get to go back… No, go ahead.

[Howard] And yet we feel so incredibly advanced because we can make things digital.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And on that note, we're going to take a quick break.

[Chris] Oh, sorry.

[Howard] While our engineer checks to see if we have a digital problem.

 

[Chris] So, hey, the thing of the week? I'm reading a book right now called The Bookmakers by Adam Smith which… Basic Books, came out in 2024. And if you like books, if you're interested in the physical book, this is like a mind blowing book. It's like 18 little nonfiction vignettes of the history of bookmaking. And if you thought you knew who Benjamin Franklin was or who William Morris was or how paper was made, it's just going to blow your mind about what books were before, and they're not like… They've changed so much to what we have today. So it's just a delightful little read about how we don't know anything.

[DongWon] That sounds incredible, and it sounds like essential reading for me in particular.

[Chris] It's awesome. I mean, yeah. I hate Benjamin Franklin now, but that's okay.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Pretty much everybody should go into the reading of a book with the idea that they don't know anything.

[Chris] Yup.

 

[Howard] I love… Love, love, love learning new things. On the woodworking front, I just need to share this anecdote real quick. We decided to do some finish-it-yourself cabinetry. No, we can't build cabinets. We do not have that skill set. But we figured we could learn how to sand and varnish. And we just could not get what felt like a furniture grade finish on what we were doing. So I did a little reading and realized [gasp] there's a stage of sanding after you varnish.

[Chris] Yeah.

[Howard] You sand and you buff the book… Who knew? And we started doing that, and now the cabinets that… Sandra has to get all the credit, because she's done all the work. All I did was find the information and say, hey, guess what? I found a step that we didn't think existed. And I guess, circling back, it's just so cool to learn something that flies in the face of everything you thought you knew, and then you try it, and you realize, oh, I was so wrong, and now I can do a thing.

[DongWon] I was going to say, my little exposure to it I find that finishing can be an infinitely deep rabbit hole. And this kind of connects to what you were saying, Christopher, about so much of what you do is archaeology. Right? So much of what you do…

[Chris] Right.

[DongWon] Is going back and trying to understand how they did it in ways that we've lost for a variety of different reasons. And that puts you in this post-apocalyptic mindset. Right?

[Chris] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, it's really cool to sort of here how those things connect. What does that process look like for you? When you're doing that archaeology, when you're trying to get back to understanding not only what did they do before, but how to explicate that to a modern reader?

[Chris] Yeah. This is… So, a good example is the first workbenches that we know about were drawn on frescoes in Pompeii. And they look totally different than the workbenches we use now. They're really low and squat and simple. And I'm thinking, how did these things work? There's no manual. Nobody's ever written down how the Romans used these workbenches, but, they built furniture that is just like ours. Frame and panel. Just really high-end stuff. So, after a lot of research, I found there was this old Roman fort in Germany, [on the lemus] that still had three original Roman workbenches that they had dug up from a well. So, I got to go there, and had a full period rush where I got to hold the workbench. Pick it up. And measure it and examine it very closely. Then I came back to Kentucky, and I built the thing. And it's just like the Romans had it. And then I tried building furniture with it. And then I invented… Invited all my friends over who were furniture makers, and I was like, how would you build a cabinet on this? And we kind of worked it out. So it's a lot of experimental archaeology, but it's not just like, oh, what… It's not random. It's stuff that we have a long history of doing this stuff, but… How do you adapt it to this really foreign way? And try to get in their shoes. Use their tools, and produce that work. And it's really just kind of… You get this [garbled] you don't feel like a Roman or anything, but you're just like… The deep connection to somebody 2000 years ago that knew more than you. A lot more than you.

[DongWon] Yeah. A thing I run into fiction, in fiction, all the time, that really frustrates me is when people kind of don't think about the material design of the world that they live in. Right? When you have… When you introduce and object into your fictional world, there's all these implications that descend from it about how people exist in that world. Right? If you have a workbench like this, then you're going to operate in a different way. I mean, I remember the first time I saw a video of a Japanese woodworker working on a workbench, which was, like, very low to the floor. They're usually operating barefoot in those studios and using their feet to hold the workpiece and things like that, and it really just had all these different implications about how Japanese society operates, the physical environments that they're in, what they value and all of that. And so, I love that your sort of doing that process in reverse. Right? You're taking the object and rebuilding the lived experience of these people around it. And I think that is so applicable to thinking about fiction and thinking about worldbuilding and the kind of work that we do on our end.

[Chris] Yeah. I mean, starting with an object that you don't know how it was created. It's like finding a laser gun in a desert, and you're like, where did this come from? That's really what I do. That's what gets me up in the morning, is, like, just thinking about these weird things and how to explain them to people. And then make it applicable. Because, like, who cares that the Romans had a workbench this way. But this workbench actually turns out to be something that's great for apartment woodworkers. If you want to start making furniture you don't have a shop, this little bench looks like a coffee table. So you can do it in your apartment. You could do it if you are in a wheelchair. You could do it if you're disabled. This workbench opens up the craft for a huge swath of people that were restricted to this mindset of I need a garage with the tablesaw and the planer and all this other crap. So that's the value that you get from going back and doing this archaeology, is, you build a bigger world today.

[Howard] The value is actually… It's actually bigger than that. There was a… I can't remember the documentary, but I've seen a documentary, I've read a couple of articles about it. Roman concrete…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] Oh, yeah. Roman concrete. Yeah.

[Howard] They did some stuff with their concrete that makes the concrete heal when it cracked.

[Chris] [Gypsum] water. Yeah.

[Howard] And I don't remember the details of it. But the modern engineers who were looking at it were saying, okay, we need to figure out how to apply this. Because it will make our concrete better. It will make our buildings sturdier. This is a secret that's been lost to us for 2000 years and we need to employ it now.

[Chris] Yeah. And that's science fiction is undiscovered worlds. And our… I mean, it's just writing about this undiscovered world that is just all around us.

[DongWon] And the technology is not linear. Right? There's things that we understood that get lost over time, and we have to reinvent or rediscover them. And I think we have this idea of history as progressive and it just keeps marching forward. And I think there's a lot more ups and downs and cycles to it.

[Chris] Absolutely.

 

[DongWon] One thing I've always loved about your writing, Christopher, is that you really managed to put your point of view into the books that you're writing. Right? It's never just ABC, here's how to do the steps of the thing that you're making. I always can feel your worldview and perspective coming through that. How do you think about that design process, the writing process, and how you as a creator tie into those things?

[Chris] Well, how to has got to be as dry as a popcorn fart. As a…

[Chuckles]

[Chris] Way of writing. It's just slot A, tab B, blah blah blah, like an IKEA instruction manual. So when I came to it, I was like, I want to look at it… How to through a different lens. I know you guys are talking about lenses this season and… So the lens that I look through how to in this case… It could be science fiction in one case. In that case, it's social commentary. So, how do you critique modern society through a how to book? And I do that all the time. The Anarchist Toolchest is about consumption, and about how we consume too much. And so, if you build this chest and you fill it with good tools and if you don't have room for another tool, that should tell you something. That you don't need anything more. So it's a way of making a critique without… But also giving them something that they really need. Which is, what tools should I buy?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's what made a book that I thought was just going to be about how do I build a toolbox kind of life-changing for me in a lot of ways. It reframed how to think about this craft in this hobby that I was getting into, and really gave me a lot of perspective on that. So thank you for that.

[Chris] No problem.

[DongWon] And I love hearing sort of, like, how your approaching that in terms of how to make a how to more engaging. Right? And also… So there's, like, the practical component, but then there's also you, as a writer, are [accentuating] your worldview and engaging with the world around you.

[Chris] Yeah. There's a lot of ways to do that. I mean, you can take how to and look at it through a variety of lenses, and it's all fun. I mean, it's a fun way to… And that sort of the homework I'm going to be talking about.

[DongWon] And I love hearing you talk. I mean, you're talking about approaching writing from a journalistic perspective, from this how to perspective, from the research and archaeology perspective. Is there a key to sort of combining those different aspects into your work, or do you see it all as the same practice, or are these different lenses that you're bringing to how to think about your writing and how to think about the publishing work you do?

[Chris] Well, I'm… [Garbled] I'm a journalist, and so…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] That's the lens that I look at the world through, is, like, how can I present what I think is true? What I think is true. I know that there's always subjectivity. But it is, like, trying to shine a light on things. So that's always the most important thing to me. But I also just think it's important as a writer to take on other perspectives. Even though I don't write fiction, I try to slip into other perspectives. Like, I try to write something like a recall letter, like for your car. And… But do it in woodworking terms. Like somebody was… Your something was getting recalled. How will I write like a corporate memo? Can I write this like an obituary? As an exercise to try to get my head out of writing just the way that I always write. So I'm always messing around. And that's my blog, is messing around with different writing forms.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] And… To experiment. And without any consequences, other than trolls.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chris] But…

 

[Howard] I've got a question, and it's one of my favorites to ask. Has there been a really memorable failure for you that you've learned from? And has there been a really memorable triumph about which you justifiably feel incredibly smug?

[Chuckles]

[Chris] I've had so many failures. I started a newspaper with a partner before I started Lost Art Press, before I worked in woodworking, and I just had my butt handed to me. I knew nothing about finances, I knew how to write, but it was a complete failure on so many levels. It ruined so many people's lives, including mine. It was just… It was terrible. I ended up beating up a paper folding machine with a table leg. There a lot of bad stories that go with it. But I got up after that and I started another business and this time I knew what I had done wrong. Or I thought I knew what I had done wrong. And, so far, 18 years, it's doing great. So I'm glad that I failed.

[Howard] You keep the loose table legs away from the paper folding machines.

[Chris] Yeah. I… There are no table legs in our whole factory here.

[Chuckles]

[Chris] No, I'm… I won't allow them.

[Laughter]

[Chris] But, the triumph, I think, that I feel smug about is, sometimes I can poop out a book and people think it's not going to be a good book and then it runs away. Like, sometimes you spend two or three years making a book and then you write it… Like, my most recent book. It's not going to sell. But I've worked two or three years on it, and it's going to just be fine, whatever. But I wrote a book a few years ago called Sharpen This, which is about sharpening, which is a dumb topic, but… It's an important topic. And I wrote this book in two weeks. And we've sold like 10,000, 12,000 copies in the last couple years. Which is a lot for a little press. And… So, yeah, I feel pretty smug about doing two weeks of work and having something that has just broken a lot of sales records. But that's lucky. You don't get to poop out a book every… You have to eat a lot to poop out a book.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] That's for sure, and I'm familiar with the things that you have no reason to think is going to take off suddenly blows up, and it's always those little passion projects that just sort of catch you by surprise.

[Chris] Oh, yeah.

 

[DongWon] And it's always… It's such a delight when that happens. Yeah. Publishing is an always evolving landscape, and I'm curious to hear from you, as an independent publisher, running a small press, doing the kind of work that you do, what are… How have you seen that change over the last few years and do you have any thoughts about where we're headed in the years to come? Like, advice for writers as to thinking about getting into this space, for new writers, even people who are more established, how to navigate and survive this ever-changing landscape?

[Chris] Yeah. Well, don't be afraid to self publish. I would say that. That's really becoming a good way to make a good living is that if you can reach an audience through social media, through a blog or sub stack or whatnot, you can sell a book, and you can make a really good living, and there's no stink on publishing yourself. Sorry, I know you work for a corporate publisher, but…

[DongWon] [garbled] I'm very clear eyed about the business I work in.

[Chris] Yeah. I mean, you don't have to have that big organization behind you to… If you are not trying to sell a million copies. If you just want to, like, get your ideas out. And… There's a lot of scams out there that will try to take your money. But there are a lot of other good organizations that can help you work through that and get your novel self published. But I would say try to do everything yourself as much as possible. I mean, we do our own distribution. We don't do… We don't go through any… We don't go through Ingram, we don't go through any of the traditional distribution channels, we don't sell through Amazon. The only people that we sell through our people I've had a meal with who sell woodworking tools.

[Chuckles]

[Chris] The closer that you can keep it to the chest, and the more real, the less you… You'll make a lot more money, but you won't get a lot of glory, I guess. And I'm much more interested in making good things that a few people enjoy, and I don't care if I'm not a household name among every housewife in Schenectady, New York. So…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I mean, I think that's a good way to approach this business. I think that's a good way to approach a writing career. And so, I just want to say thank you so much for your time and for joining us here. If people want to find your work, where should they look online?

[Chris] You just go to lostartpress.com or some people will say Löst Art Press, and all our stuff is there. Links to our blogs and our substack and our whole world.

[DongWon] Fantastic. And before we let you go, I believe you have some homework for us.

 

[Chris] I do have some homework. I think that a lot of writers, and I do this with some of our people, is I assign them a little piece of homework, which is, like… Go to wikiHow.com or one of the other how to things and pick out one of the weird how to things and use it as you do a writing prompt for a way to explore one of your characters. Like, if you got on wikiHow… I went on the wikiHow page today, and there was how to use a belt as handcuffs.

[Laughter]

[Chris] And I'm like, come on, that is a writing prompt right there. I mean, you can… You should… Or have a character encounter that. On one side…

[Howard] That's a great dialogue moment…

[Garbled]

[Howard] You're wearing a belt.

[Laughter]

[Chris] Right. But you can see being on either side of that equation, that it would be really interesting. Or how… There was a wikiHow on how to make a [prism writer] from a battery. This stuff writes itself. So if you just go to this wikiHow, you could… Like I was… I did one once for myself, where I was a white supremacist making wood bleach to turn wood whiter.

[Chuckles]

[Chris] And going through the mental things of why would a white supremacist do this? He doesn't like walnut, it's too dark? But, yeah. Use wikiHow as an enormous source, and it also like… It's how to do stuff. That's… You've got a structure there to work from that you can just pile some meat on, some narrative meat.

[DongWon] Excellent. I really…

[Howard]. Summarizing your homework. Go to wikiHow, learn a new thing, and then work it into a story.

[Chris] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] I love it.

[DongWon] Thank you again for joining us. It's been a real pleasure having you here.

[Chris] Thanks, guys.

 

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go learn to do a thing and then write about it.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-15-third-person-omniscient

 

Key Points: Third Person Omniscient. Where no character can go? Deploy it carefully. Dealing with complex dynamics. Narrators. Prologues. Omniscient can have a voice. Be careful of headhopping, make sure your reader knows whose head they are about to get. Use your turn signals! Beware the paralysis of choice.

 

[Season 20, Episode 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[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 15]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Third person omniscient.

[Mary Robinette] She's Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] They're DongWon Song.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] He's Dan.

[Erin] She's Erin.

[Howard] I'm confused.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] We are continuing our section talking about proximity. We're talking about how close the perspective is to the characters of your story. We are finally to my favorite of these, which is third person omniscient. I love omniscient because I feel like it gives the author so many tools to play with as they're telling the story that they want to tell. I think there's been a real drive in the past few decades of getting closer and closer and closer to the character, getting that perspective really locked into the character's emotions and interiority. There's been a real drive towards first person. I was talking last time about there's sort of a default toward close limited. But I do love it when we get to step back, zoom out, see what everythings happening in the room, find out what's happening next door, what are the neighbors having for dinner, which Joe down the street thinking, what's the gas station attendant thinking. Like, being able to get the broadest perspective of what everyone is experiencing in the moment, to me, can sometimes be such a rich and filling and exciting narrative experience.

[Howard] One of my favorite examples of third person omniscient as a tool that is doing a thing that no other POV/proximity tool could do is the very short chapter in Act III of Tom Clancy's, I think it's The Sum of All Fears. Where a nuclear device is detonated in a football stadium. The chapter is called Three Shakes. We step into omniscient and we describe the quantum effects, the particle effects, the EMP effects. Because part of what happens is the blast hits, electromagnetic blast hits the TV antennas, satellite antennas from trucks, and results in shorting a satellite out in orbit. He describes all of the electronics of that happening, and, you know what, there isn't a single character on scene for whose point of view that works. Because they're all dead.

[DongWon] That's the thing is you can do so many things within omniscient that you can't do if you're limiting yourself to a character who's in the scene. You can get into the subatomics. Right? You can get into spaces where no people are, or get into the heads of people that your protagonist doesn't have access to, like the villain characters, like side characters. But, because of the free range you have, I also think that third person omniscient is the most difficult of these three sort of basic…

[Mary Robinette] Yes…

 

[DongWon] Ones we're talking about. Like, first person, third limited, those and third omniscient are, like, the three most common that you see. I do think third omniscient is one to be deployed very carefully. So, for you guys, what are the pitfalls? Like, when have you tried this and how has it worked out for you?

[Mary Robinette] For me, I'm not actually sure that I've tried to write anything in omniscient.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's pretty rare.

[Mary Robinette] For me, I haven't had a story yet where I felt like I needed that extra distance. I think about novels like John Scalzi's Collapsing Empire, when we're looking at a more contemporary example of this. Or Dune. Where it's trying to look at these very, very broad things. But then I'm also thinking about, like, Liza Palmer's Family Reservations, which is, again, a more contemporary example. It just came out last year. Of third person omniscient. What all of these are doing, for me, is that they're dealing with big complex inter-dynamics where you're jumping… And I just haven't written that kind of story yet where I'm dealing with that sort of complex relationship dynamics, whether it's empire spanning or family spanning. So, yeah, I haven't… I don't think I've used omniscient yet.

[Howard] Back in 2008, during the very first season of Writing Excuses, there was an episode which was particularly memorable for me, because it's one in which we were talking about these tools, and I knew what exactly zero of the terms meant.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That was a good time that was very much Howard gets to be the every person character who is educated at a much faster rate than any of the listeners could hope to be educated. But it's the point at which I learned that the POV that I was usually writing in for Schlock Mercenary is what we call third person cinematic. Because we're not looking inside people's heads, and we're not following a character around so much as we are following a camera. But the existence of the narrator, who would often express an opinion or state a fact or there would be footnotes meant that I was doing third person cinematic with dips into and out of omniscient. In 2008, I was doing, I think, a pretty good job of writing and illustrating Schlock Mercenary. But once I had names for these tools, once I knew what I was doing, I… It's not that I knew what I was doing. Once I knew the names for what I was doing, I was able to start figuring out what I was doing and how to switch. I guess I wrote third person omniscient for close to 20 years on and off. Recently, I sat down and tried to play with it as a tool, and I'm realizing, "Hum. This is not as easy as it was when I was drawing pictures."

[Laughter]

[Dan] I think I've only written omniscient once. It was in what was essentially a prologue. The third Zero G book, the plot hinges on a bunch of nine-year-olds, because it's middle grade, understanding how extremely fast travel works. Because we already learned in book 1 that it took almost 100 years of travel for the spaceship to get from Earth to this other planet. Then I needed them to understand that another ship left later but got there first. So the prologue is essentially, kind of like Howard was saying with the Tom Clancy stuff, it's a scientific explanation of how the speed of light works and how extremely fast travel works. There is no perspective, there is no character that we're getting that from. But it had to be there. Now, you asked about what are the pitfalls of this. One of the major pitfalls of this was trying to write this without it sounding didactic. Trying to write this in a way that sounded like it was part of the book. Every writing group that I ran this through, which I guess was only two, but to writing groups completely rejected it at first. Because, like you said, third person limited was and is kind of a default for a lot of people. So getting this scene that's not let me give you a textbook first, that's aimed at nine-year-olds to explain what…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] FTL is really kind of didn't set right with them. I had to fine tune it a lot before readers were able to kind of accept that it should exist.

[Erin] So, I was… When you initially asked the question, I was, like, I've never done that. Then I realized I did it a ton.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Recently.

[Yup]

[Erin] So I wrote a series of posts… This is an interesting sort of… To give a little context. So, for Pathfinder, for Paizo, for the Pathfinder setting, I wrote a series of short fiction pieces about the deaths of various gods. They were setting up for an actual God dying in their worlds. So I got to write a bunch of what if stories of, like, what if this other God died, what if this third God died. All of them are as if it was like a seer saw the future and was like… So it's like an omniscient unnamed seer is, like, here's what happens when the God of farming dies. So for each one, I wrote, like, about the specific death and then the implications for the world. So I was going to, like, what actually happens in the death scene and then looking at this other character's affected this way and it makes all the crops die and this other thing happens. So it was a bunch of very small things for different characters and it was all omniscient. But what it makes me think of is two things. One is, like, I was thinking about this earlier with that Tom Clancy example, is that a lot of times, omniscient is the perspective of the world. The reason, like, that it can be used… There are many reasons to use it, but I love it when it feels like this is the world telling a story, and the world is bigger than the people in it. So one person cannot contain the world, it's only by looking at multiple people in the spaces between people that you can really understand what the world is doing. I think one of the first times I remember seeing it is in The Wheel of Time book openings…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Where it's always that section that's like…

[Mary Robinette] The Wheel Turns.

[Erin] The wheel turns, and a whole bunch of people, like, here's this farmer and his affected, and here's this whatever…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And they're affected, to give you a here's the state of the world as of… We've been following these characters that shape the world, but to remind you, here's how the world is affected and here's how ordinary citizens are seeing their lives change as a result of everything that's happening. Then… But how to, like, then make it interesting is something I thought about is for each God, like, they have a specific domain, and I actually tried to let that change the rhythm and style of what I was doing. When I talked about the God of hunts being hunted, I went for shorter, more like reporting on…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, this is happening, that is happening. The way you would in a hunt or a fight scene almost, but, like the world is fighting. When it was the goddess of beauty, I went for longer sentences that had, like, a longer cadence, like the soft feel of beauty. So that way, the world changes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And the world's perspective changes, and it changes the way that I was able to use omniscient in those places.

 

[DongWon] I do think that's, like, one of the pitfalls, is that people think that just because you zoomed out, you lose the voiciness. It can still be as voicy in omniscient as you can be in close limited. I want to talk more about that and the use cases for it. But before then, listeners around the world looked at their podcast apps and realized it was about time for a break.

 

[DongWon] Okay. So we've been talking a little bit about the cases where we've tried to use omniscient in the past. For me, I think these are often the very cinematic moments like Howard was talking about in terms of, like… I think of, like, disaster movies where, like, you suddenly see the asteroids falling from a dozen perspectives of people who are about to die in a variety of ways…

[Aeeeee]

[DongWon] That you have met for five seconds. Right? When it comes to these scenes, we talked a little bit about head hopping in the third person limited episode. But what are the things that you find yourself needing to do when you reach for omniscient to keep it from being unmoored, keeping it from being overwhelming, whether to you or to the reader?

[Mary Robinette] So, I can really only speak about it from a reader's perspective at this point.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But I love reading omniscient. What I find when I'm reading omniscient is that I'm given direction about where I'm headed. So that I don't just arrive in a character's head. There is narration that precedes it that that then drops me into the characters head. So the narrator, the author, is directing my attention so I'm already focused on them, and then I get their thoughts. So it's like… It is that zooming in, and then zooming back out again, without that sign posting, that's where I think we get to the flaw of head hopping, which is, I suddenly have someone's thought and I don't know who it belongs to. I thought I was with this person, but now I'm over here and I didn't see it coming. That's, for me, where it falls apart when I'm reading it in student work. But when I'm reading, like, Jane Austen… She's extremely good at directing my attention. Some of my favorite works are also things where sometimes there's not a character on stage. Douglas Adams does a really great job of this with Hitchhiker's Guide. It's like this is where we're headed right now. Now we're going to spend a little bit of time in this person's head, and then we're going to come back and talk about Babel fish.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Humor is one of the places we see omniscient the most.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Actually. Because Pratchett uses third person…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] Omniscient all the time. Where you kind of need to step back and point out the grand irony of whatever's happening here. So, I mean, it makes sense if you were using it for Schlock, both because it was comic, but also it's very much the humorist's voice is that omniscient voice.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I often think of it as, like, being in a car with somebody and they don't signal when they change lanes.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You can get away with that…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Once or twice, but if you're constantly going, someone's going to be like, are you okay? Do I need to take the wheel from you? But, like, a good driver, even if it's just for a moment, even if it's… Maybe it's sometimes it's a really, really explicit signal. They actually, like, put on the signal light. Sometimes it's the way they look over…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you see them and you're in the car, you're like, oh, okay, I understand what you were doing there. So I think it's figuring out how are you signaling to the reader that the changes happening, so that if you do change without a signal, there's a reason for it. Like, oh, we were about to hit a boulder. Then it makes sense to them for the re… Like, the reasons that you were doing it.

[Howard] There's an argument to be made, yes, for creating without deliberation or conscious access to the tools you're using. But that is not the way I prefer to make art. I always like to deliberately deploy the tools. If I'm going to signal a turn with just my head, I'm going to know that I'm doing that before actually doing. For the record, though, I always use my turn signals.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I don't just use my head because I don't want to be hit by another car. And I always…

[DongWon] [garbled] sticking your head out the window of a car…

[Laughter]

[garbled] [Who drives that way?]

[Mary Robinette] We've got somebody… Someone that we know in Chicago, my husband was like [garbled] with Chicago drivers that they don't use their turn signals? This person replied, "I ain't giving nothing away for free."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But I do feel like sometimes we see that with writers, that they'll think…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, the reader has to work for it. I… That they won't give information because they feel like somehow it cheapens the experience, which I do not understand.

[Howard] Not a fan. Not a fan.

[Erin] I think it's the same reason that sometimes people feel like everything that happens in the story has to be a surprise.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, holding back the twist is where the power is. Because I think it's like once readers realize that, like, I've done something really clever or I surprised them, they will value it more. But in truth, a lot of times, the twist you can see coming… It's the car wreck in slow motion, so to speak…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is actually really compelling, because it's like you know it's there and yet you… They don't avoid it, and it really draws the eye in a way that I think people don't realize sometimes.

[Dan] Yeah. That calls to mind what's actually one of my very favorite uses of third person omniscient, which… There's a scene in The Lions of Al-Ressan by Guy Gabrielle Kay, where a huge disaster has just happened, a character has just died. But we don't know which one. We know that there were three main characters present, and some horrible thing happened. I can't remember what the horrible thing was. But before he tells us who died, he goes and checks in with every single other character in the story. All of the side characters, some random people, and is very slowly kind of circling in. I do believe that he uses linebreaks every time that he jumps ahead. Which is…

[Mary Robinette] I do… No… Because… He may not. Carry on.

[Howard] Yeah. But it felt like he did because of how clear it was.

[Dan] Yeah. He made it very clear every time we came into a new perspective. So whether or not it looks like limited, he was very clearly doing omniscient thing of just making sure that we got this character's reaction to the big disaster, and then move on to the next one. Part of the effect of clearly sign posting which head we're in is that we are... in our own heads, we're mentally checking off, okay, this person's safe. Okay, this person's safe. Then, by the time we finally get into that… We get the perspective of the two or three characters that were actually present and we learn who died, it's devastating.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, he's very good at using that. There's a… In, I think it's Tigana, he has the scene where we go… Someone dies with an arrow… From an arrow. We see the scene, and then he effortlessly takes us back in time to someone who had been… To how the shot was fired and who it was with… Who fired and how it happened. That's, I think, one of the other things that you can do with omniscient is… We've been talking about moving from person to person, but I think you can also move us around in time in ways that are significantly easier than when you're trying to do third… Where you have, like, okay, here's a line break, and there's a header. It's like seven months previously.

[DongWon] I mean, that's what's so exciting about omniscient is the range of possibilities is just vast. Right? Because you can… I've seen people just like dip back into we're going to talk about the creation of the universe for a second now. You know what I mean? Like, that can be such an exciting narrative move because it allows you to build momentum, allows you to set things up, it allows you to put things in context in all kinds of fun ways.

[Howard] One of my favorite bits of my own work is the beginning of book 20, which is called Time for a Brief History, which is a play on the Steven Hawking… I'm going to read it very briefly.

 

A little under 14 billion years ago, there was nothing. That early nothing is surprisingly difficult to draw. Not drawing anything is easy. But these blank panels upon which the lazy, lazy artist hasn't expended any effort still occupies space and still experience time. The nothing at the beginning of the universe did neither of those things. In point of fact, it only did what it was. Nothing. Until suddenly it didn't.

 

It was so much fun to write that, and it's an omniscient voice. But it's an omniscient voice that has voice. It has an opinion.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] It sets a tone for the book. It sets the tone for the story. And it tells you what you're headed for.

[Mary Robinette] It also has a very clear relationship with the reader, which is, I think, one of the other things that omniscient can do that you get in first person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But omniscient can reference the fact that it is a story in ways that third person limited fundamentally… You can… Technically, I do this at the beginning of Shades of Milk and Honey. Because I start with this voice-driven opening. Since we're quoting work…

 

The Ellsworths of Long Parkmead had the regard of their neighbors in every respect.

 

It's like this is this very, very distant thing.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Then I come into one character, which is the Honorable Sir Charles Ellsworth. But then the rest of the series is Jane. It's the only spot that I pull way back like that. I use that a little bit at the beginning of the others, because I'm trying to do the Austenian nod. But I never do the omniscient thing that Austen does. But it is that… Is offering the reader that, hello, here's our relationship.

[Erin] The thing that keeps coming into my mind as I'm listening to all this is this phrase, like, even God has intentions. In some ways, God has to have more. So one of the things you hear when people are inventing things are that constraint actually helps creativity.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because you can't do everything. So it helps you to like focus in on the things you can do. I think that gets back to what you're saying about why omniscient can be so tricky is you can do anything. So how do you know what you want to do? So I think one of the things if you're writing omniscient is to think about what is the intention of what you're doing? As all… If you're reading your lovely works, like, you had a really… You both had really clear and very different intentions in mind, and the circling in of the people that died… Like, there's a very clear intention there of what that omniscient is on the page to convey to the reader.

[Mary Robinette] That makes me realize that I think that part of the reason I've never written omniscient for anything besides the, like, barest touch of it at the beginning of a book is the prowess of choice. There's so many choices that, like, I don't even know… I also have not had a work that needed it. But I've been sitting here as we've been podcasting, thinking maybe I should try omniscient, and the thought of trying it fills me with such existential dread…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because there are so many more choices…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That are available to you that you now have to make.

[Howard] Yeah. That's what I'm struggling with in the omniscient work in progress right now.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Howard] I identified it almost immediately. I was like, oh. Oh, this is paralysis of choice. Okay. Well, I choose to come back to this later.

[Chuckles]

 

[DongWon] Well, as the omniscient narrator of this particular episode, I… Unfortunately, we are out of time, and I'm going to take us to our homework. So, what I would like you to do is to describe a street scene. I want to have you describe a scene where your main character is walking down a street and I want you to move us through that scene of the character moving through this street seen through the perspective of 5 to 6 bystanders observing this happening. Focus on sensory details. What is everybody seeing? And how can you use that to say, oh, the smell of this, the sound of that, the look of that, is establishing where your main character is in the scene, and be clear about whose perspective are we seeing this from?

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-13-first-person

 

Key points: First person. What does it do well? Direct address to the reader, the aside. Subjective unreliable point of view. Intimacy. What is first person not effective at? Clarity, complex scenes. Multi POV ensemble cast! Mirror moments, what does the character look like? Tools for first person? Avoid navelgazing by adding a activity. Multiple senses! Cadence. Why use first person? Proximity, emotion. Genres of the body, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Tapping into emotional subjective experience. Plot reveals! Character change. Coming of age stories. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? When character's goals shift. What is the lie that the character believes? 

 

[Season 20, Episode 13]

 

[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 13]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] First person.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are beginning today a small cycle of episodes in which we're going to talk about the lens of proximity, how close you are to a character and how much you get to know about that character's reactions and motivations and so on and so on. We're going to begin today by talking about first person. First person feels as if it might be the most natural way to tell a story, because that's the way we talk about ourselves. Though obviously, the other persons that we will discuss in future episodes are also and equally useful, just useful in different situations. So I want to start by asking what is first-person good at? What kinds of situations do we love first-person? What does first-person do well?

[Mary Robinette] I think the direct address to the reader, the aside, where it's like, this is what I'm thinking. This is how I'm feeling in the moment. It's not just about the internal thoughts. It's one… It's a… The thing that I've found that first-person can do that kind of nothing else gets to is hang on, let me just explain this one thing to you. So that kind of direct address of here's some exposition. I think one of the things that it has is that it immediately connects it to why it is important to the character and that is it's sometimes harder to surface things.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about first-person is it's a thing that you can do in text, in prose, in a way that's incredibly difficult or artificial to do in other media. You can have first-person asides, like the aside in theater, being… Or a soliloquy, and you can sort of fake it in films through voiceovers and things like that. But in a novel, you can have it in direct access into the interiority of a character in a way that you can't in almost any other medium. So there's something really special about the ability for prose writers to use that first-person perspective to say explicitly here's what the character's thinking, here's what the character is perceiving. And when you want to root someone very much in a subjective unreliable point of view, first-person is the go to in your toolkit.

[Dan] Well, that unreliability is so fun to play with, too. Talking about this direct aside to the reader… You could do that in third person. But in first-person, it feels like there is no artifice there. It feels like you're getting it much more directly. But… Of course there's artifice there. Because you are telling this through some other person that you've invented. It's the first person. It's not actually me, it's John Cleaver or whoever I'm writing about. So there's still a lot of artifice, there's still a lot of kind of artificiality about it, but it feels truer, it feels more direct, and that allows you to be unreliable and shaky and shenaniganry.

[Erin] I also think it creates a feeling of intimacy, or it can create a feeling of intimacy between the character and the reader. Because it's like… Like the direct aside, it's like somebody has sat down and said, okay, I'm going to tell you something. I'm just going to tell you, the reader, this thing. And nobody else in the story will understand how I feel about this at the core, nobody else will know my internal thoughts except for you. One of the reasons I love writing in first person is because you can really lean into the voice in a way that I think third person can do, especially third person where it's very close, but it doesn't have that quite the same feel as, like, a friend sat down. And part of what I'm trying to do as a writer is to capture that friend's voice and how they would tell the story in a way that nobody else could.

 

[DongWon] There's something really, really interesting about first person, because it is both our oldest form of storytelling, because just the way that we tell a story is I was walking down the street the other day. I was going to the store. The dog jumped out in the street, and I chased after it. Right? Like, that is just how we tell stories, and the way people have told stories as long as they were telling stories. But as a literary convention, as a part of the novel, it's one of the newest forms. At least in a dominant way. Like, there are examples that go back. But in terms of being so dominant in terms of how it exists in the contemporary novel, it is very much a thing that arose in, like, modern days, in like early mid twentieth century. Right? So one thing that I see people struggle with, when people push back against first-person, which I still see kind of a shocking amount. But when I see that pushback, it's… There's like an artificiality to first-person that can be a tough hurdle for some readers to get past. Because you're reading a text, but the text is being told to you as if a person is narrating it. So who is narrating it to you in that moment becomes a question in certain reader's minds. So there's like a… There is both an incredible immediacy, intimacy, and familiarity to first-person, and a layer of artificiality that requires one extra jump for the reader.

[Howard] And… That's weird, because I will accept that there is magic and spaceships and vampires, but I'm really struggling with the fact that there is a book.

[Mary Robinette] I think it's not so much that it's… Like, I can think of a bajillion examples of first-person. Because the novel would often start… When you're looking at the trajectory of the novel as a travelogue. Then you're looking at Poe, who often used first-person.

[DongWon] It's like where does epistolary end…

[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly.

[DongWon] And first-person begin is a we… The distinction that you and I are drawing here. But [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. But… But I think the thing is that one of the reasons it fell out of fashion is that people started to get hung up on the… But really did they have time to write this while they were being dragged away by eldritch horrors?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Yes. Always yes.

[Dan] Yeah. At what point in the story is this account being given? Well, I like you mentioned the kind of newness of it. It is… First person is going through a huge Renaissance right now in certain corners of the market. A lot of book tubers, books to grammars, book talkers… There's a big trend going around. I see where they will just flat out refuse to read something unless it's in first-person.

[DongWon] Huh.

 

[Dan] That's obviously not everybody, and it's not the whole market. But it's kind of having a heyday right now, which I think is really interesting. I want to ask the question what is first-person bad at? As long as we're talking about it, what can you not do very effectively with it?

[DongWon] Clarity.

[Howard] Avoid the capital I.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I think first-person… It can be harder to truly communicate to the reader what's happening in a complex scene. Because you're anchored to one perspective and one understanding of what's happening in a particular moment. So there's an immediacy to that. But when you think about your subjective experience of a large event, you're not getting the full picture because you're only seeing a little piece of it. Right? So I think we think of first-hand experience as the most true, but in a lot of ways, the way we consume information about what happened is somebody explaining from multiple perspectives. So when you're limiting yourself to one POV in a story, you are removing access to a lot of tools that you have that you would have in cinema, for example. You think cinematically, all the things the camera sees are just what the character's actually seeing, what the character's seeing is very different. Right? So you're much more constrained. So if you want real true like grounded clarity about feelings, emotions, what happened in a complex scene, first-person's pretty tough to make that happen.

[Howard] Your multi POV ensemble cast…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] In a heist thing… Yeah, that's difficult to pull off in first-person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I think, first-person… You can cheat when we get to third person, you can cheat to show us what a character looks like even when you're in tight third person, but when you're in first-person, unless they step up and have a mirror moment, which… I was walking down the hall and I stopped to regard myself in the mirror.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I had curly red hair, bright green eyes, and was extremely buxom.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I think that everyone thinks about themselves [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[Erin] Just in that tone. Well, I agree with it. Like, clarity is part of it, and also just knowledge. Like the characters… A lot of times, you have, like, but the reader knows and what the character knows. In first-person, they get… They are the same. Because… Unless… Now there are ways to cheat out of this, but in general, you only know what the character knows about the world, about the situation, about the experience. So if there's something that you really need, like description, self-description, the reader to know, but there's no reason for the character to know that, you're going to have to figure out a workaround. Even in unreliable… Like, one of the things I really like doing in pieces with unreliable narrators is setting up a reliable outsider that is… That can be established, like, because they hold a position of authority or you see them being reliable in several scenes, and can point out through dialogue or through their own actions what's happening outside of the first-person, that character's first-person experience.

[DongWon] They can also…

[Erin] They can then misinterpret what that reliable person does, but the reader… It's clear enough to the reader, like, what happens. I think about a scene I wrote in my story Wolfy Things where the mom is crying and the sun misinterprets it that he's like…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] She's trying to salt the food with her tears. Like… Because no one's going to do that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, you, as a reader, know that seems unlikely. Probably she's just crying over the soup.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But he cannot accept that. But because it's something clear enough to the reader, it comes through. But it requires a lot of work to do that. Where is in a third person, you could probably just say, like, she's crying and then you would know.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You could cheat that also with chapter bumps. You insert in universe material that appears at the top of the chapter, and then the first-person account either accounts for that or doesn't account for that. That can argue with the character just fine.

[Dan] All right. Let's take a moment here to pause, and when we come back, we'll discuss this further.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is yoru opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Dan] All right. So we've talked about things that first-person does well and does less well. Let's talk now about how. How can we use first-person effectively? What are some good tools for using first person as a perspective?

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about one of the traps of first-person is a way of bringing us around to an effective tool. One of the traps of first-person is navelgazing. So it is, I think, one of the things that it does really well is that you can get into the character's interiority, but you can, like, have a character just sit in a room and think about themselves and never move on. So, for me, one of the tools that I often try to use when I'm doing that to combat the navelgazing is that if I have a scene where my character needs to think about something for whatever reason, I try to pair it with an activity that is somehow plot related. So, like, if there's this is a conspiracy, I think a conspiracy thing is happening, I will have them trying to repair a rover. Then, as they're repairing the rover, and having conversations, different things will then trigger for them. It's like hum, I think this is… You just said something very fishy, and what's going on with your face right now? But it is… Having that interaction with the outside world keeps… For me, keeps my navelgazing to a minimum.

[Howard] Yeah. It's the multi sensory approach. Only saying what the character is thinking about is just the navelgazing. But, I'm thinking about this. I'm seeing that. I smell this. I heard that. I'm touching this. My heart is pounding or I have a headache. I have… There's a whole huge spectrum of senses that you can tap into with first-person. If you don't use at least three of them, I feel like you're leaving too much unsaid.

[Erin] A tool that I really like that… To play around with with first-person is cadence. What the rhythm of that person's thoughts are as they're driving things. Because it tells you about the emotions. One thing that's really… You can have a very self-aware first-person character, but a lot of times they're not sure what's going on, exactly. They're afraid, but they may not say, like, I am afraid right now. They may just be experiencing fear. But what you can do is go with a faster Kayden. All of a sudden, like breathing heavy, like the heartbeat racing, when you're afraid. They're noticing things that are fearful, but also, the entire cadence of the piece as that sort of taut feeling to it, and then when they're safety, the cadence slows down. It gives a completely different feeling without you needing to signal it from the outside.

[Mary Robinette] Also, that is something that is extremely apparent when I'm doing audiobooks. When I'm narrating and the author is thinking about that, it shows up on the page and you can really hear it. It is much easier to [garbled]

[Howard] [garbled] makes your job easier.

[Mary Robinette] So much easier. I actually think that that's one of the reasons we're seeing the surgeon audio, in first-person narratives, is because they do better in audiobook. But there are times when I have to narrate something and the writer has not paid attention to the Kayden, and attempting to get the emotion into that scene is significantly harder, even though you have the added layer of I do cool things with my voice. It is undercut by the cadence.

[Howard] One of the reasons, Mary Robinette, that your first half of the episode mirrors scene was so humorous is that it breaks the true cadence of that person. That is not the pattern that you would use, that is not the cadence of… At least not of my inner voice. When I look in the mirror…

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] My inner voice… Well, I'm not saying mirrors scenes are bad. I will look in the mirror and the cadence for my mirror scene is, Howard, you gonna go outside looking like that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Yep. Then I'm off. Now the reader has an insight into how I feel about how I look and how much I care. That's all we need.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, most of my mirror scenes would actually be…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] How did you sleep on your hair to get [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like that.

 

[Dan] So, if we are using first person as a lens… Let me rephrase. If are using proximity as a lens, this is how we want to look at our work and we… What are some of the reasons we might choose first-person then? What is going to guide us? What… I guess this kind of comes back to the question we asked in the beginning of what does first-person do that the others can't. But what are some situations where we will say you know what this really needs? First-person.

[DongWon] It's so intimate. Right? We're talking about proximity. Right? First-person is… You're right up on that perspective, you're in their head with them. So when you need anything that is raw emotion. Right? That's why it works so well in YA, why we see it there so much. That's why you see it a ton in what I think of as genres of the body. Right? So, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Right? Like, horror in particular, first-person is just so valuable there because as a person is experiencing disruption, fear, sensations in their body, all of those things, are stuff that you can get to so quickly and so closely as first-person that can take extra work when you're having to do the work of third person limited or omniscient of describing a broader scene. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I think whenever you want to tap into someone's like emotional subjective experience, first person does so well for that. I think that's why it's doing so well on things like book talk right now.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] When you've got a plot reveal that that moment, first-person can do that so well. Because we are right there. The Revelation of whatever it is, the plot twist, the monster, the whatever, the reader is getting that reveal at the same time the character is getting that reveal at the end. Yeah. Immediacy and proximity. And, as a writer, that lens of proximity… You may choose to look at your reveal's pacifically at the reveal you have in mind and say, you know what? This is going to work better in first-person than anything else I can do. So maybe that's the way I need to shape the rest of the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that a lot of times, I think of first-person stories as stories of perspective. Because you've chosen to use this particular… That character is the lens into the story more than anything else. Because you are filtering everything through the way that character experiences things. So, choosing it when you're going to have a reveal that shifts that character's perspective, where they understand something they didn't understand before, that they couldn't understand before, is where something… Where it really appeals to me. Where there is a reason in which that person as a filter is the best filter for the story.

[Mary Robinette] That ties into one of my absolute favorite things that you can do with first-person that you cannot do with any of the others. It's the proximity thing. That you can have the character change by the act of telling the story. Like, some of my favorite stories are ones… It's one of the reasons I love the John Cleaver books so much is that John is not the same person at the beginning is at the end, and the way John is relating to the reader has changed. That is so… I think that's so interesting. It works really… I think, really, really well in coming-of-age stories. I think that's one of the reasons we often see first-person paired with younger protagonists, because you more commonly have a coming-of-age story with them. But it is something that is just so delicious, so intimate.

[Dan] Yeah. I know that we are kind of running up against the end of time here…

[Erin] The end of time!

[Dan] The end of all… Not necessarily all time, but the end of our time for this. I do want to get back to…

[Mary Robinette] As I was sitting on the couch, Dan told me that I was running up against the end of time. I paused to look in the mirror…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Are you really going outside like that?

[Dan] This is part of the lens of where and when.

[Erin] Exactly. At least I'll look good during my final [garbled]

 

[Dan] I do want to circle back to unreliability. Because not only… That was something we mentioned not only as a strength of first-person, but it's one of the things that is… One of the downsides of first-person. Not necessarily a downside, is that it's really hard to not be unreliable with it. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? This isn't really an unreliable narration episode, but it's so closely linked to first-person. You were talking about the John Cleaver books. That's leaning so heavily on that, the idea that what he is telling you is what he thinks is true, not what is actually true. That dramatic irony of being able to listen to him talk about himself and know, oh, dude, you are wrong about so many things. What is the value of unreliability and why might a reader, an author, I mean, choose to put that into their story?

[DongWon] I mean, going back several episodes to goals and motivations. Right? A character's goals often involve them lying to themselves a little bit because they think they want X, but what they really need is Y. Right? So the movement from understanding what your original goal was to what your new goals are is one of that unreliability coming to the fore so you realize that, like, oh, my understanding of the world is shifting. The reason why first-person is sort of inherently unreliable, because character growth necessarily changes what is quote unquote real for the audience experience. Right? So you're shifting… Which is both what makes first-person fun and so challenging is that it's always already moving around you at all times.

[Mary Robinette] There's the idea that we talk about periodically, what is the lie the character believes? There's a bunch of different forms that that takes, but I think one of the things that you can really play with in first-person is that you can reveal character by what the character is lying to themselves about and how they are lying to themselves and the lengths that they will go to to preserve those lies. That's something that's, I think, much easier to do in first-person because of the navelgazing. But because they can do a soliloquy in ways that a third person really can't. Then, that in itself, can become a form of conflict as they are struggling with the fact that all of their reasons are breaking down.

[DongWon] I call that narrative parallax because the slight shift in perspective lets you reveal more.

[Erin] Something that just occurs to me as you asked this question is that the reason because I love unreliable narration. It's like my favorite thing ever. I think it's because I like characters that don't necessarily change or grow. Which means that the forward momentum in the story has to be the reader realization of the truth of who that character is. So, like, if they're not, like, because if they were doing… They externally sort of do the same things, but you… They understand more about the world, you understand more about them. It grows in context, as opposed to in action. Sometimes I think unreliability works well because it feels like you're moving forward as they continue to misinterpret the world, even though they don't do anything different. It still gives it a sense of a forward lean in the reader's mind.

[Howard] I think two of my favorite examples of unreliable narrators are in first-person our books where you don't realize until the very end that this is a single POV that has been telling you a story in multiple POVs. The Fifth Season and Player of Games by Iain Banks. Fifth Season by N K Jemison. You discover late in the stories, oh, this story has a first-person narrator who is part of the action, and they been lying to me about their involvement the whole time, until the very end. That's not really a first-person narrative, and maybe that's a segue into how we mess with proximity later.

 

[Dan] Well, now we finally have arrived at the end of times…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, it's homework time. What I would like you to do is go pick up a book that you love, something that you enjoy. Find a scene that you think is really great that is not in first-person, and take a crack at rewriting it in first-person from the point of view of one of the characters in it. Pay attention to what types of changes this requires you to make, how information comes across differently.

 

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