Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-18-the-art-of-teaching

 

Key points: Teaching as a writer forces you to think through your process and what you know. Also, how do you communicate that to someone else? It helps you be more creative and challenges you. How do you get it across? Start with humility. Examples! Difference between workshops, retreats, school visits, and regular classes? Punchy, big points, not minutia. Opted in, or apathetic? 8000 jokes! Be flexible. Safe creative space. Lovely ugly alien babies. Treat them as equals. Take them seriously. Advice if you are thinking about getting into teaching? Think about a teacher who created a safe space and challenged you that you remember, and put yourself in their place. Is this something you want to do? Be enthusiastic about the subject. 

 

[Transcriptionist apology: I suspect I may have confused Marshall and Mark at some points.]

 

[Season 20, Episode 18]

 

[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 18]

 

[Marshall] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] The Art of Teaching.

[Marshall] I'm Marshall.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mark] And I'm Mark.

 

[Erin] And we are here on the Navigator of the Seas. This is another one of our recorded on the cruise episodes in front of a live audience. Live audience makes a noise.

[Whoo Applause]

[Erin] Amazing. They're real. Or good sound effects. We are going to be talking today about teaching, which is perfect for this cruise, because we've all been teaching the whole week, and wanted to talk about all the different ways you can come to teaching, and what teaching means and how it can help your writing, and all that jazz. But to start, we should probably actually say what kind of things we teach and how we came to it. So, Mark, remind us who you are and what you teach?

[Mark] Hello, Writing Excuses. I'm Mark Oshiro, the author of many young adult and middle grade novels. And I feel very lucky that I have taught more times than I can count over the years. Primarily to young adults and middle grade students, though I have taught at a few adult workshops. My preference, no offense, Writing Excuses, is teaching to kids because I think about how much I wish that… Some of the people in this audience are very horrified when I say that, by the way. But I prefer, because I am so lucky that I had adults in my life when I was in high school who fostered my love of writing, and I want to show them the possibility that not only can you write and do it for a living, but that you can be a big ass weirdo and not have to edit yourself and be yourself and still be a creative person.

[Erin] What about you, Marshall?

[Marshall] I second the big ass weirdo thing. I'm… I call myself out all the time when I'm teaching kids, because it's just… I'm just being weird.

[Mark] Yeah.

[Marshall] And it's fun. But I got into teaching 17 years ago. I teach high school for the last 15 years. I've taught middle school. I was a sub for middle school for a long time, and I kind of decided, I don't know, a little later in life, like I always kind of wanted to teach, or know I could teach, and then I just went and got my credential and have been doing it for a long time now.

[Erin] Nice.

[Marshall] Like, a long time, it feels like.

[Erin] So, I am probably then the newest person to teaching. So, I… My father is a teacher, and so I feel like I come by it honestly. But I mostly teach college students. So I love that we actually have, like, a wide range of folks, and teach adults as well, as we do here on the cruise. But I teach at University of Texas at Austin, and I teach creative writing there, and have a blast. And I love students in college, I think because it feels like there right on the brink of kind of figuring out who they are, and creativity is a great way to do that. And writing can be an amazing outlet, whether the person wants to go on and become a best-selling author or whether they are an engineering major who just does this because it's something that they love and they want to put time into it.

 

[Erin] So, I'm curious, all that being said about how amazing we all are, what you think you get out of teaching as a writer?

[Mark] I actually think the primary thing I get out of it is actually forcing me to think about my process and what I do actually know. And I remember the first time I got asked to teach, I was like, "What? I've only had…" At that point, I think I'd only had two books out and I was like, "That's not enough." That's not enough knowledge, that's not enough experience. Which was wrong, because I did actually know a lot of things about writing. But, first of all, it forced me to stop and think, well, what do I know? What is knowledge that I… Or wisdom, I can impart on another person? And even throughout the years, even what I've taught was new, I've never taught that specific lecture ever in my life. And it forced me to sit and think about I taught voice and how I use it to guide my story. So I love that it makes me have this very introspective deep dive first and think about my process, what it is that inspires me and motivates me. And then the second half of it was, well, how do I communicate that to someone else who doesn't know me, is often meeting me for the first time, and they have no way in and has never read anything that I've written. So how do I communicate that to someone else, and communicate it in a way that is both entertaining and engaging, but, hopefully, that they take something away from it? I love teaching that just causes a reframe and allows you to just, oh, this thing I'm doing, I now have this chance to think about it a little bit differently.

[Marshall] I never told… I never said what I teach. I teach English, I've taught Digital Media for a bit, and now I have a creative writing class for the first time. I feel like just the actual what I'm going to do, like, in front of these kids, each day, is… Helps me be more creative and it challenges me. And I really do… I really like seeing what kids can create and how they can challenge themselves, even though they really hate English class, most of them, and they don't want to read, they don't want to write, they don't want to be there. And I say, okay, that's fair, but… I don't know, let's talk about movies for a little bit and write something. And share stories. That's my favorite part of teaching is getting to tell stories and hearing their stories. Yeah. So, I get out of it… And then, when I come back to the page, hopefully, theoretically, I am more creative. But usually, I'm very tired.

[Erin] Yeah. Teaching can take it out of you. It's very… Like, there is a perform… There is an aspect of performance. Like, some of teaching is at about actually making sure the thing lands. Like, you can be the best expert in the world on something, and actually quite horrible at teaching it, because you don't know how to, like, get somebody who's not at your level of expertise up to where you are. Like, I think, like many people have that experience of having a teacher where you're like, I wish I understood what was happening and I'm not quite there. And we all try not to be that teacher. Whether or not we succeed… Ask the students.

 

[Erin] But I'm curious, like, some of what y'all are talking about, just like unpacking all the parts of that process. So, like, how do you think about, like, how you convey something well, like, how do you teach people who are, like, not really there, how do you figure out how to get something across in a way that actually, like, works for the person that you're talking to?

[Mark] I mean, primarily it was messing up. Like, doing my early lectures, my early talks, and having those moments… The personality changing moments of silence where you're like, oh, this didn't connect, this didn't land. This joke is unnecessary. So, I have learned from having those moments and accepting, like, okay, that was embarrassing. That sucked. But it's like, oh, now I know that I can do something different. So I do something, actually, at the beginning of all of my lectures, in whatever form. If I'm teaching multiple times over a week or if I've done some short residencies before, which is… I know personally that if I'm just being taught rules, these are the rules, don't break them. I'm out. I don't do well with that kind of where… It feels very top-down. I know these things, these are the way to do it, you need to do these things. So I actually start… Or attempt to start from this place of humility. And I did hear, we, which was saying, hey, this is not about the rules of voice, with the rules of guiding your story, or whatnot. I have some information and what I think is knowledge. I hope to give it to you. So, starting from that place, and then even though I care deeply about what I'm teaching, I don't want it to feel so self serious that it's boring. I'm not giving a place for people to come into it. And I also found, as many of you saw here at Writing Excuses, like, examples. You can explain, hey, maybe think about voice in this particular way. And for me, I'm also a visual learner, someone, if you demonstrate the thing, I am attempting to learn, it helps me a thousand times more than just saying do this. So I've learned over the years that examples are so, so helpful. I have a lecture I've taught multiple times on how to write compelling dialogue, and we have a whole section in which to demonstrate how to use… How to actually utilize some of the rules, what it is is, I construct dialogue about the class I'm in in real time. And then show them, and then we create an argument and we show how it goes back and forth and just watching people open up because… It's a little bit of improv, so, of course, especially the little chaos goblins in the room are like, I'm going to say all sorts of wild things…

[Chuckles]

[Mark] And you use that to sort of guide people through this is how you create a scene. Oh, we just noticed it got confusing. Who's speaking this time? How do you write people speaking over each other, because that happens in real time in real life? So, yeah, that's how I found my way into teaching.

[Marshall] Yeah, I've found that with the age group that I teach asking them early on to write about themselves, I get them… One, I get to see how the writing is, because I love writing, but I like sharing stories, so if I can connect with them on anything, like, just the posters in my room… I have a bunch of geeky Star Wars and Marvel posters on my wall, and the kids are like, oh, what do you think of this? That's… I find that that is the best way to help those kids who really would rather not be there, there. It's not necessarily about the grade or about what I teaching, although I think what I'm teaching is awesome. I think just getting them to buy-in is a huge part of it, especially when you're teaching 15, 16-year-olds who are just like, "Bro, this guy?" You know what I mean? And I love what you said about dialogue, too, like, listening to kids talk to each other and making them talk? It's a really kind of fun way to… When I go back to the page, if I'm writing a teenager or something, like, that, like, this is what they would focus on, this is what they would… How they would communicate their day to there buddy. You know what I mean? They wouldn't share with me. But I'm just listening.

[Erin] Yeah. Like, the more of humanity you get to know, the better you can portray it on the page in some ways. And, like, how often do many of us, like, speak to kids of all ages? Like, you might have your own kids and speak to them, but a lot of times, you don't have necessarily an opportunity and, like, to really see folks in an environment where, while you do have some power over them, they sort of are able to fly free, and you can just observe the flock of wild teen birds as they go around [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Erin] That sounds bad. As they go around, and do their thing.

[I like garbled though. Yeah, that's good. Garbled]

[Erin] There you go. We are going to now take a break for our thing of the week.

 

[Erin] I have the thing of the week, so, just I'm going to keep, like, just throwing the mic to myself. And the book that I want to call out, which… Whose name I am going to forget… No. Is All This and More by Peng Shepherd. And one of the reasons I'm especially excited to talk about this book is that Peng was actually an instructor here on the cruise a couple of years ago, working, I believe, on this novel. And so it's just very meta-. Like, and I am living in the meta-cruise moment of it all. But this is a very cool book for me specifically… I mean, it wasn't written for me, but it was written for me because it is a choose-your-own-adventure novel. And the actual conceit of the book is that someone goes on a show where they're able to change parts of their life based on, like, what the show decides. So they get to, like, decide if they want to blow up their marriage or choose a different job. And at the end of the chapter, it actually gives you the opportunity to flip to whatever chapter you want. So if you want them to blow up their marriage, flip to chapter 8. If you want them to do a new job, flip to chapter 10. And it's a really interesting way of going through a book that takes a novel and a game and puts them all in one. So, definitely check it out. All This and More by Peng.

 

[Erin] And we're back. We are still on the cruise, still moving, still talking about teaching at all levels. And something else that I love that you were saying, Mark, about figuring out how to, like, convey things is using really good examples and using tactile materials. Do you find, because, I know you do school visits, like, you're not there for very long, like, you're having to, like, get in, get out, engage and go. And, like, is there a difference between that and, like, what I think Marshall and I do, where we're teaching the same folks for, like, years and years and years?

[Mark] Oh, yeah. Absolutely. My teaching technique and speaking technique is different for a workshop or a retreat than it is for a school visit. Generally, in kid lit, the school is actually how you're going to meet your readers. You might get lucky to be at a book festival that is geared towards young adults or middle grade readers, but the majority of the time I am meeting my readers, it is through school visits. So you're doing a presentation that is as long as a class period. Sometimes you're lucky, you get, like, the auditorium style where you therefore, like, an hour or two. So in those, I tend to be much punchier. I am trying to make grand big points. I'm not delving into, like, the minutia. And a lot of times, you're meeting kids who may have an interest in writing, or may have an interest in reading, but you're probably going to meet a few kids who are also deeply apathetic about it. Whereas when you're at a retreat, when you beat… Teaching a workshop, these are people who have already opted in. So they're here for that. So I tell 8000 more jokes. I think one of the best compliments I ever got was doing a school visit, and afterwards, the teacher came up to me and was like, "I've just never seen my students that energized. You're like their weird gay uncle." And I was like, "Yes!"

[Chuckles]

[Mark] That's the energy I want. And so I'm coming into these spaces, one, to as I said earlier to demonstrate that I have not had to edit who I am or edit my personality to be a professional creative person. And I'm not… In those instances, I'm not thinking I want to inspire this person to be a writer. I just want to inspire them to do the thing that they want. So I'm often surprised how often I get questions that have nothing to do with writing at all. Is to maybe someone who wants to do something creative, but the thinking of a completely different field. So then the questions tend to be more about, like, motivation, how do you keep doing this? Did you have parents who supported your creative endeavors? How did you get to the point that you are? What did you study in college? Those sort of questions. So I think the biggest advice I give as well to other people who are joining the kid lit field is you have to be flexible. You cannot go into any of these settings, especially the ones where you're there for one hour max and assume that this is how it's going to go, everything is going to go how I want. Also, children will say something to rip your soul out of your body and then move on, because it's Tuesday.

[Yup]

[Mark] So you also have to be… I mean, don't be afraid… You should be very afraid! But don't be afraid of them, like, they're going to ask the questions, especially if they feel safe. And these questions sometimes might be wild, you might have to say, "Mind your own business." But I want to foster that sense as well of, like, yes, maybe I'm only here for an hour, but I want this hour to be as impactful as possible.

[Erin] I love what you said about safety there. It makes me think about, so, before I started teaching college, I actually did, like, public writing workshops that you can do in libraries or in, actually, like, places where folks are living after coming out of, like, prison and are, like, trying to get back on their feet and they have writing classes as a creative outlet. And there's a book called Writing Alone And with Others, which was developed for prison writing workshops that we used their methodology. In the big thing there is, like, in a prison, you, like, depending on what it is, because our system is no bueno and we're all about punitive, people, like, can't actually keep pen, paper, stuff with them. So you have to do the writing exercise at the time, like, you basically walk in and you're like, here. I'm going to give you, like, a few images, and, like, an idea, and one prompt, and, like, you're just going to go. And then everyone shares their writing that they just wrote. And it's really hard. Because it is terrifying to share writing when you have a long time to write it. And if you just found out about it five seconds ago, it's really hard. And one of the big principles that we talk about in that group is that we're going to make this… This is going to be a space about safe creative expression. Not about perfection. It is… We often use the analogy of, like, having a baby. If somebody has just had a baby, you say what a sweet baby. Many babies look like aliens, but…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Just after birth is not a time to tell the parent, "Your alien looking child is freaking me out." You have to say, "What a sweet baby. I love its wide eyes." or whatever thing you can come up with that seems affirming. What I love about that experience is that, like, it has helped me to really see the good in everyone's writing and to create, like, a safe creative space for all of our lovely ugly alien babies.

[Mark] The safety thing, I think, is so important when it comes to teaching. Like, they're not going to open up, they're not going to create or create what they… If they don't feel like, if you read it, you'll betray them in some way. You know what I mean? So I really try to foster, like, the most… The safest space I can for students so that they can actually just express themselves and write something and have fun while they're at school.

[Marshall] I love that you said that as well. I'm very lucky also that I'm one of the few authors whose been able to do visits and teaching at juvenile delinquent facilities, and the biggest thing I run up into in those environments is adults who don't take the kids seriously at all. So in those spaces, it's… Someone starts talking about their writing and you treat them like a peer, on your level. So they start telling you about, like, oh, I have this story or whatever, and they're used to people dismissing it or assuming they're not going to have a future to tell that. So what I do always is, like, well, why do you want to write that? Why is it that thing? And ask them, like, essentially… They don't see them as craft questions, but I'm asking them craft questions to show them I am interested in the thing you're doing and I take it seriously. So, that's something I think in any situation, but particularly in those situations where the kids actually aren't safe.

[Erin] Yeah. I'm, like, looking for things… The thing is there is beauty to be found in all writing. And I think it's really exciting to see if somebody is really pouring their heart out. I think something else that can be hard, depending on the environment, is when people put a lot of themselves on the page, like, a lot, and you realize… You can tell sometimes, when this is someone's first opportunity to work through something, and, like, it is often just as messy as a therapy session on the page, and you are trying to react to it both as a human being, but also like… Your purpose at that point is to be affirming, but also to actually treat it as writing and not to treat it, I find, as therapy. To be like, okay, a lot happened in that piece. Like what I really thought was interesting was, like, how you kept referencing, like, the color blue. Like, that was really, like… Why did you… Why did that happen question because then it takes the person into talking about craft, and it allows them, I think, a chance to process at their own pace as opposed to being, like, oh, my gosh, did that really happen to you? One thing we do in this, in these settings, is we'll say you actually are not allowed to act as if it is about the person's life. You should always pretend that they wrote it about somebody else, because otherwise it derails the conversation into the person, and not into the prose that they put on the page.

[Mark] Yeah, I know, and I… One of the first creative writing assignments I give my student, because I'm co-teaching sort of the class with another colleague and we had them, like, recall a memory from when they were younger. And that kind of platform… Really, they hit the page with it. And so sometimes… Whenever I was talking to them and giving them feedback, I always made a point of saying, oh, the character did this, the character did this, or what do you think of that about this… And one of the students said, well, it didn't happen that way. And I said, yeah, but we're also writing fiction. So I know this is based on a memory you have, but it can be… It's fiction. I don't know the story. So…

[Erin] And I think the things that happen… I think one of the nice things about teaching, at all levels, is that some of the things that we don't talk about in writing, like, as we get older, some of the things that we like take for granted, like how much of ourselves is in our writing, become much more clear… Become clearer when people are newer to it, and so they can't hide it as well in some ways. And so some of the things that you see when you teach are things that you're like, wow, I should remember that from my own writing. Like, I should remember to think about how much of myself and my bringing to this writing experience. Or, wow, am I using… In my thinking broadly enough about dialogue? Or am I thinking about how to make things exciting in a way that aren't just the ways I've been taught, but the things that work for the story? And we're starting to run out of time. 

 

[Erin] But before we get to the homework, which feels very apropos…

[Right]

[Erin] For the topic that we're having, I'm wondering if you each have, like, one sort of piece of advice you would give if somebody is really interested in thinking about getting into teaching?

[Marshall] Think about a tea… No, in…

[Erin] I love the facial expressions that are happening.

[Marshall] That question's amazing. I think… I would go… I would suggest, think about a teacher that you had that created a safe space, that challenged you, that you remember, and put yourself in their place. Like, is that something that you want to do for other young folks? Maybe they reached you at a time where you really needed that teacher and that class and that time. You know what I mean?

[Mark] My thinking was very similar, along those lines. It was a moment where not only you were inspired by the teacher, but they did something that had you then writing and it didn't feel like homework. Because, to me, there were the moments that now I look back and I was like, you gave me more to write, and I wasn't even… I was doing it, but it didn't feel like work. And those, to me, are like the transformative experiences… Is why, at that age, when I could've been doing 20 other different things, did I choose to write more or write a different assignment or read this book? Why was it that thing and what was it that that teacher or librarian or educator did to get me to forget that I'm in school. Like, that's… And so, if you can imagine that. So, yeah, if you have that empathy or understanding, like, what was it that helped you get past that point?

[Yeah]

[Erin] And I would say for me, like, it is be enthusiastic about the subject matter, about the people your teaching. If you teach enough, you will have a day in which you are tired and you are not at your best. But, even so, I think, the enthusiasm really comes through. If you want the person to… When you want someone to learn, that really, I think, comes through. Even if you're tired, even if you're hangry. Like, that wanting someone to learn is what's important because it means you're able to be flexible, and you're thinking about the things that you brought with you from people who wanted you to learn and who were successful in getting you there.

[Mark] And they know… They know if you're excited about it. They know that you're passionate about it. And even if they might not be, they'll get there with you. Because they know you're stoked about it. So, is it homework time? [Garbled you looked like you were?] about to say one more thing.

 

[Mark] So, the homework is very similar to what we kind of just talked about, but I want you to think, if you're even kind of considering teaching, your homework is to think of something that you're very passionate about. It doesn't have to be writing, it could be knitting, it could be whatever. And create a lesson in your head or write it down that would work for you, your younger self.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-16-second-person

 

Key Points: Second person, aka you! You the reader, you another character, epistolary letters written to you. Social media and conversations. Second person forces you into the story. Problems when the character does something that the reader would not. Marginalized perspectives use it to grab the reader and say you don't get to look away. Second person in game writing! Biggest risk in second person is the audience bouncing off it. In game writing, you tell players what they are experiencing, but they decide how they will react. Agency! Use senses, not emotions. Buy-in. You get one or two buy-in's for free, but the more you use, the harder it is to sell. Writing trust falls, here's something you know to be true, so you can trust me. Meta-textual? LitRPG is often second person. Recipes! Influencer videos. VR. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 16]

 

[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 16]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] Second Person.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I thought about trying to do those intros in second person, but it would be really hard.

[chuckles]

[Howard] It would be very hard.

[Dan] You're Dan...

[Howard] Yeah, the best I could come up with was and you're not Howard. I am. But that's still first person.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think I could say you're Erin.

[Erin] Chaos would reign. And I think that, like, second person... sometimes feels like the chaotic proximity. So we're talking about perspective, we're talking about proximity, and now we're getting into second person, which is when you use you. That is sort of the kind of very baseline level. And I think there are a few different varieties of second person that I like to think of. The most sort of, I guess, purest second person is when the you you're addressing is the reader. But you can also use second person to address another character in a story, and I often think that letter writing, epistolary, is like you, because when you write a letter, you do, like, I'm writing to you, Sir Mixalot...

[laughter]

[Dan] That's usually who I write letters to.

[Howard] He got her letter back...

[laughter]

[Erin] Oh, great, it's doing things. But… So, what do you think? I feel like you have very strong opinions about both Sir Mixalot and second person.

[Howard] Let me say this about second person.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] It is easy to forget that you… And this is me speaking to you, fair listener, have probably used second person quite a lot on social media or conversationally. So, imagine this. You're driving, and all of a sudden… You know, you tell a story that way. Sometimes. Not all the time. But you slip into second person very naturally, because it is a way to draw the reader into, or draw the listener, draw your conversational group into the experience that you personally had in a way that… No kidding. So there I was, doesn't.

[DongWon] We think of first person as the most intimate voice. Right? We think of first person as the one where you're right next to the interiority of the character. But there's a weird way in which I think second person is actually the most intimate in a way that can make people really uncomfortable. Because you're sort of forcing the reader's subjectivity into the fiction itself. You're integrating the person who's reading the story into the experience of being in the story in a way that can be a little disorienting or really fun for the reader. Right? Like, we've been talking about second person epistolary. Part of why I think This Is How You Lose the Time War hit so hard is that the romance is built over a series of second person direct address letters. Right? So the reader is the one who sort of feeling romanced by these characters talking to each other. Even though we know Red and Blue are talking to each other, but that's all being passed through the reader's experience.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that that is… There's a distinction between second person where you're addressing another character and the reader can participate…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And choose to be part of that character and second person where you're addressing the reader, and there, I think, sometimes we… Or where you're attempting to make the reader be a character. And where you run into problems with that is when you have the character do something that the reader would not, but you are addressing the reader. So you wind up breaking the relationship. Like… And then you felt like you were really angry. I'm like, no, actually, I think this is fine. I'm not mad at all. Or… And then you went down the long, dark stairs. I'm like, no, no I did not…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Go down the long, dark stairs. Absolutely a hundred percent no. So I think it is… It's one of the challenges of how can you make the reader into a character when you're doing that kind of second person? Without making them… The actions cause an artificiality?

[DongWon] Well, I still think that this is what led to the silent videogame protagonist for so long. Right? Was they wanted to make sure that they weren't taking the player out of the experience of being the character. So if the character spoke for you… This is why, famously, Master Chief didn't talk for so long, this is why Gordon from Half-Life doesn't talk. Right? Like… And then over time that's evolved as people developed a little bit more sophistication around being able to participate in the story, even though you're being told that this is what's happening to me. But it can be a really tough balance when it comes to prose. Right? Because there's an interesting thing where I see second person deployed a lot, and it's deployed only sparingly in fiction. This is not a common technique. Certainly not a common technique to tell your whole story in. But the ones where I find it really interesting, I noticed a wave of fiction at one point that was all being told from marginalized perspectives that was all using the second person in really challenging ways. And it was a little bit of grabbing the reader and saying you don't get to look away from this. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right. And I think part of why Fifth Season works really well is that it's doing that to some extent. The second person in that is a little bit of no, you're part of this. You don't get to walk away. You don't get to say, "Oh, that happened to those people over there," because of the way the second person creates that immediacy, even though you're like, I didn't do those things. You know what I mean? And there is something really interesting about disrupting that layer between the reader and the narrator.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the things that's going through my head when you're talking about that is the Fifth Season starts with a frame, a little bit of a frame.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's not there very long. Where it is, let's talk about where we are. It is omniscient voice, it is plural we, and then… Plural we? As opposed to singular we, which is…

[DongWon] Royal.

[Dan] Royal.

[Mary Robinette] Royal we. Thank you. I was like… Who knows what's happening in my brain right there…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But then it narrows into… It immediately pretty much goes into you are doing this. And it is that imagine how you would feel if you were here for the reader. And then you just stop noticing at a certain point that it is in second person. I read, years and years ago, when Shimmer magazine was still going, we accepted a story that was second person because I was like three pages into it before I realized it was second person. It was about someone coming home for Halloween, and it… But it starts with a little bit of this very voice-driven opening and then it drops into second person. You get home and you can smell all of these things. But it's starting with common experiences, things that it's easy to relate to, to kind of lead you into it.

[Erin] Yeah, I think there's a couple thoughts. One is the thing about the marginalized folks using second person. It's funny because I see it… I love what you said about it, and yet I was like, oh, I saw it in a completely different way. Which was that sometimes the experience of being marginalized can be that someone else gets to decide what you… Who you are, what you are doing, and how you are perceived. And I always viewed it as a way to force the reader into that same feeling of us… Of the lack of control. Like, you actually don't get to control even what you are doing in this story…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, therefore, you should feel what this character feels, or what I, the author, feel…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When I don't feel in control of my own.

[DongWon] No, that's what I was trying to say. So we're…

[Erin] Oh, there you go. But you also said another awesome thing, which was that it's also about you can't look away.

[DongWon] Right. Right, right.

[Erin] So, sometimes I think it's you're participating, you're feeling marginalization. Sometimes it could be, like, you're feeling the horrible things you did.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think of… I'm going to take liberties with this, because we do it was Star Wars all the time. But there is a great episode of Star Trek: Voyager where a whole bunch of people participate… Feel that they are participating in a massacre. And it turns out that this is actually a memorial to that massacre grabs you and put you in the place of the soldier that panics and kills a whole bunch of people, and that's the way that they try to ensure that it never happens again. Because if you feel like you did it, you have to live with the guilt, and that… hopefully that stops you from doing further atrocities.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which is a really interesting, like, putting you in the mind of it. I had something else to say, but I have completely forgotten. And so you, listener, are going to wait while we take a short break.

 

[Erin] All right. So, more second person. So I was thinking about it, right, before we actually started this episode… I was asking everyone, like, have you written second person? In one thing that came up again and again, was game writing. So, I'm kind of curious, from those who have written games or played games, do you feel like it works… You sort of mentioned this earlier, DongWon, like you feel like it works better in games than in prose? What do you think is the difference there?

[DongWon] I mean, it's funny because my… Of the people here, my primary creative output is in games. So most of the writing I do, sort of, is second person, because just as a GM sort of live feeding back to my players what's happened, I will say, you did this thing, you said this, you… There will be a lot of, like, I'm telling you what it is that you just did based on the rolls that you made and what you've given me in the narration that you've set up. So there's always this really interesting delicate balance between honoring their intent and making it fit the story that we're all telling together. Right? So, like… The use of the second person, because you're taking control of someone else's experience, does require you to think about their experience in a really different way than I think just straight up narration does. I really love that dance. Obviously, I'm doing that dance kind of live with the players in the moment. There's an improvisational immediate feedback aspect to it. But I think it is… The reason I love second person so much, the reason I find it so interesting to talk about and so exciting for all the things we're talking about is because you cannot escape thinking about the audience and you cannot escape thinking about the writer and they are in direct relationship when you're using you.

[Howard] Um… I was playing a role-playing game in which one of the players decided to introduce themselves in second person by telling all of us how we were reacting to them walking into the room. And to the last player, we rejected that. Because it didn't fit.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Because we were being told a thing that was not true…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And we actually had to stop the session…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And say, okay, no, the other players have as much choice over what they do as you do. If you want to tell us what you're feeling, we get to have contested die rolls. But when writing game fiction, you're not telling the players necessarily what they're experiencing, you are… It's like you are giving them instruction. And it… When I wrote technical manuals, we would slide into second person all the time. But then we do have editors tell us, hey, if you know what, it's starting to feel a little too personal, let's slide back out into the third person. So, for me, what I've arrived at over the years is that the single biggest problem with second person… And I don't want to say that it's problematic, but the biggest risk is that your audience may bounce off of it in a way that you can't recover from and that makes it really difficult to use.

 

[Dan] One of the reasons that I think second person works so well for game writing, specifically, is… I'm going to tweak Howard's wording slightly. With second person, you often are telling people what they're experiencing. You're just not governing how they experience it.

[Howard] Yes.

[Dan] When you're in a game situation, you can say, I walk into the room and you see this, and you see this, and you smell this, and… I hope smell is not the primary sense that you experience when I walk into a room. But…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Or when you listen to a podcast.

[Dan] Yeah. But then the players get to decide how they react to that information.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's about agency.

[Yeah]

[Erin] Yeah, I think one of the biggest, like, things that you will find if you end up, like, writing for tabletop games, when you write read aloud text that the GM is meant to read, is that people often say only use senses, don't use emotions. Like, you cannot say you are frightened by the giant monster. You can just say, like, the monster has 8000 teeth and, like, each one is razor-sharp, which… But if somebody's like, that just doesn't… I love that [garbled]

[laughter]

[Howard] It presents a career opportunity.

[Erin] Yeah. Then that's something that's, like, is sort of allowed to happen. And I think what you're saying about agency, it's like agency and buy-in. Like, I think a lot of what we're talking about is like that you… When you're using second person, you have to get much more explicit buy-in or think about how you are going to get buy-in. And, I'm curious, like, what you think are ways that people can get buy-in to second person, like, is it by setting the frame, Mary Robinette, as you were saying, is it something else?

[Mary Robinette] Just buy-in made me… A couple of things click in my head. There's a thing in… When you're writing for film, television, and what we do, the science fiction fantasy, that you get one or two buy-in's for free. People can live under the water and have fish tails. We buy-in. Witches can steal your voice. We buy-in. Storms arise out of nowhere… Nah. Like, the more you asked them to buy-in, the… To things that are off from their experience, the harder it is to sell. And I think that that may be also… I wonder if that also plays out in second person that you can do one or two, like, I'm going to have you… You do this thing that you would not do, and you give me one or two of them for the sake of the story, but the more I do, the more disconnected you feel from the story. The more often I take your agency away, the more often I tell you how you are reacting…

[Howard] There's a worldbuilding trick that I've come to refer to as the trust fall. Trust fall is a group exercise where you build trust quote unquote by catching someone who's falling. As a writer, the trust fall is the simple and easy I am going to tell you a thing that you already know to be true, and I'm going to state it as truth so that you trust me to be a writer who tells you things that are true. By doing that, you build tru… I mean, you shouldn't trust me as a writer, because I'm a liar who's going to lie a lot. But by building that trust early on, you can purchase for yourself maybe a little extra buy-in for when you need it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It looks like you were going to say something before, DongWon? But…

[DongWon] If I was, I have forgotten it. I'm sorry.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's an example of using second person to try to force someone to do a thing that they don't want to do.

[Howard] Your face says that you want to talk. Your heart says…

[Mary Robinette] You know something else that… Oh, you do have something now?

[Chuckles]

 

[DongWon] One of the things I really love about second person, while we're on this sort of how to get this buy-in component, is the way second person allows you to use voice in a really different way than other formats, because it's a direct address. Because somebody is speaking to somebody. Even if it's an unnamed narrator, their… It demands a more consistency of voice, than you would get in other… Than in third person omniscient, for example. Where you can slide around from different thing to different thing. Because now that I'm talking to you… Somebody is talking to somebody, somebody is writing to somebody, and so there's a difference in… It forces the narration into a character in your story in a really different way, as well. Right? There is a storyteller. If there is a you, than there is an I. So I think it allows certain things… That probably one of my favorite things to see in stories is when the narrator is suddenly revealed to be a character, and I am suddenly revealed to be an audience to that character's speech.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Or someone in the story. Right? Which is, as we talked about with Fifth Season, as we've seen in other things, the sudden reveal of what I thought was just narration as actually a character is a thing that I always find truly delightful and exciting.

[Mary Robinette] You reminded me of one of my favorite books, which is The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust. It's… Throughout… It's two stories that appear to be completely unrelated. It's third person. But at the end of each chapter, he says, "Bones?" That's the last thing in it. And it takes a while before you… Deep into the book, the narrator says that… It's first person, actually. I take that back, it's first person. Before the narrator says that, they always tell this Hungarian folktale to their friends, and they end each section the way their mother did, which was by saying, "Bones?" Which was a way… Indicator to say, "Do you want me to keep going?" So you suddenly realize that you have been active participants in ways that you didn't realize you were an active participant. And… And it's I guess…

[Howard] You were asking me if I wanted to turn the page…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I turned the page. So I guess I said yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I guess it is a very interesting thing to play with.

 

[DongWon] I guess this all leads me to one question as we're talking about things. We've talked about game writing, we've talked around, like, direct address and epistolary. Is second person always meta-textual? Is it… Does it necessarily require a meta-textual relationship to the text? And is that why it is so difficult to use well?

[Howard] At risk of being slightly prognosticative, I think that that will depend entirely on whether we see a massive market busting breakout work in second person. Because if that happens, it'll shift the marketplace and we may, 25 years from now, look at second person as the new normal.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, we did see a massive market busting thing, which was the Fifth Season. I did just finish another book where I realized at the end of the book that the entire thing had also been doing this. I'm not going to tell you which book it was because there's a reveal, but it is the meta-textual thing again.

[DongWon] A ton of litRPG is second person. Right? Like this entire genre is a sort of…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] [garbled] fiction that's sort of using second person as a default voice at this point.

 

[Mary Robinette] You know what is also second person? Recipes. Recipes are often second person. They don't always put the pronoun on the page…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But it is.

[Howard] [garbled] for the recipe blogs that are third person and begin with a long essay about…

[DongWon] It's very unsettling when they say, "Howard Tayler mixes the flour."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Between bouts of leaf keeping.

[Dan] Even when you get the big recipe blogs section, the recipe itself is very second person, where it's saying do this, now do this, now add this.

[Mary Robinette] And they're often doing direct address during… I want to actually… I hear some disdain for the essay at the top, and I just want to say you are not the audience. That does not mean that it is bad. It is there to provide context and…

[Howard] Oh, no. I'm…

[Mary Robinette] Yes?

[Howard] I recognize…

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Howard] That I'm not the audience.

[Mary Robinette] So… But that essay, for those of us who read them, are often in second person. It's like, let me tell you about this. It's… I guess those are still first person. But it is that direct address to the reader. Sometimes it's you were asking me about this. I'm like, I'm not. This is my first time I've been here. But I can see that you are excited about it.

[Howard] Part of what they're doing is building trust. They're telling you a story about how the food affected them, and if you want to have this effect, you will now do this.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And it drops into the instruction set.

[Erin] Interestingly, I think I was like why do I dislike these things, and I think one of the reasons is that because of the demographics of who does recipe blogs…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] It often feels like an experience I am very distant from. Like, I don't do leaf keeping and so, like, it just feels…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, it often is very like suburban if that makes any sense.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like. I was like… I feel like if I wrote a recipe blog and someone was, like, I found this on the subway or something that felt more to my experience, like, I'm not buying in, because I'm… This is not the kind of experience I would be having. So I can't relate to it. And so it sort of comes back to what we're saying it's just that they're… I'm not the audience for that particular use of second person.

 

[DongWon] Late into this episode, my brain finally connected two dots, which is, in the same way that I was talking about how one of the dominant languages of our modern world is this third person close because of the video games and film, one of the dominant languages of our world is second person because of influencer videos, Tik-Tok, and [sometimes?] reels, YouTube… These are all second person addressed, these are all persons talking straight into camera to me, and me feeling that relationship and that connection. So when that gets fulfilling and when that gets disruptive, I think, is really, really cued to all these social contexts.

[Mary Robinette] I see Dan has something, but I just want to clarify that I think that those are first-person, but often… The point of view shifts…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That we get influencer videos where you never see the person, what you just see is their hands chopping something or the let me walk you down this trail with my dog and you never see the person who's doing the walking, so it's like you are having that experience. Outing. I am… It's… Video is a totally different media. What were you going to say, Dan?

[Dan] I was just going to expand the kind of… The Internet communication beyond just influencer videos. Because a lot of it… For example, with the recipe blogs, a lot of that is framed as a you… You've been asking for this because it is in conversation with their comments section. And I feel like we get that a lot in the Internet. You've been talking about this. I've been saying this, your response was this, and… It's much more conversational, which, to a point, does have a lot of second person in it.

[Mary Robinette] And also has a lot of that meta-textual thing that you're talking about, which is an awareness of the story and the frame.

 

[Erin] And I think that one of the things that's interesting, I just thought of VR as you were talking about this. VR is interesting because in VR, you, like… It's all you. Like, you can… You're doing things, you're moving in a certain way, it is the most embodied view I think you can almost be other than maybe immersive theater. Where, like, you're in the center of something and everything is happening around you and you get to have control. And it comes back to agency, which is, I think, the more agency we feel we have in the you, the more comfortable that you feel, the quicker we're able to buy in. So when you're using it as a tool, either you can have a more… You have less agency as the you, and therefore I'm going to put the work in to make you buy in by starting with a frame…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or making sure that you understand that there's another character, or something that, like, helps you to get in there. Or I'm going to give you maximum agency, in which case, you do feel like you control what you're doing.

[DongWon] There was that short story a few months ago that was the riff on Omalos that used Internet language and deprived us of agency by using the second person through that is making it clear that we are all complicit in the walking away from Omalos. Right? Like… And I think part of that… Not walking away from Omalos, but we're all complicit in the exploitation inherent in that story. And that was such a devastating story to read because it uses second person to disrupt my sense of agency and force a sense of complicity. And I'm blanking on the name of the story and the author. But it's wonderful. You should look it up. It's very upsetting.

[Erin] We'll put it in the show notes. And we will send you off now with some homework.

 

[Erin] So what I'd like you to do is to actually take… Write something in second person. You can decide whatever you want it to be, you can take a scene that you already have, you can write a recipe blog and second person if you want, write a bit of a lit RPG read aloud. But what I want you to do is try it in a couple of different ways. So I want you to think of something that you're getting across in the scene and try it is a you that's directed to another character. Or a you that's a letter. And then try again, where you… The you is the actual reader themselves, the person whose experiencing the text. And look at how that shifts things, and what that gives you an opportunity to do.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-14-third-person-limited

 

Key points: Third person limited. First person, I. Third person, he, she, names, pronouns. Metaphor, the camera. Limited versus omniscient. Moving POVs, head hopping. Slide, don't hop. Inner thoughts or not? Threshold between first person and third person very close, very limited? Internal thoughts. Third person offers separation between narration and character. Third limited close is the default for commercial fiction. Third limited allows shifting POVs and distance more easily than first. First may be more visceral. Distancing words. Some books jump between third and first. Perspective shifts can be useful!

 

[Season 20, Episode 14]

 

[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 14]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] Third Person Limited.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I'm really excited to talk a little bit today about the third person limited point of view as part of our little mini-course, mini-set of episodes on proximity. One of the reasons I'm like most excited about this is I feel like this is one of the terms in writing that is used the most and understood the least.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like Othello, a moment to learn, a lifetime to master. So I'm...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Going to attempt to explain, like, at its very basic, like, what do we even mean when we say third person limited, and then I'm going to invite all of you to tell me what I'm missing and why I'm wrong.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I figure… So, on its, like, very basic level, when you use first person, you are using I, you are using, like, the pronoun I to describe everything that is happening. When you use third person, of any type, you use he, she, somebody's name, they… You're using a pronoun that is the third person, that is why it's called third person. So instead of saying, "I watched as all the podcasters stared me down, waiting for me to finish speaking," it would be, "Erin observed the other podcasters as da da da da…" And limited is that you are limited to a specific point of view at any one time. Unlike omniscient, which we will get to in the next episode, you can't see everybody's thoughts all at once. You're sort of following one particular person at any distance that you want. We'll get into that later. But that's what I think of at the very basic. What am I missing? Why am I wrong?

[DongWon] I'm not going to tell you why you're wrong, but I am going to ask you a question.

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] Which is, do you think third person limited and third person close are the same thing or is there a distinction between those two things?

[Erin] I would personally say that there is a difference. So I think that you can be at any distance and still be limited. I mean, it's…

[DongWon] I see.

[Erin] At a certain point, it's hard to be limited. Like, if you get… a lot of times, the metaphor we use for third person limited or third person close is the camera.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] So it's like you're the camera behind the shoulder of whatever character. But you can be right up on their shoulder or you can actually get a little bit of a distance away. Like…

[DongWon] It's like third person action game versus Mario. It's like that…

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly. [Garbled]

[Howard] Third person limited contains third person close.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Exactly.

[DongWon] But you could be third person limited, but have this 10,000 foot view, where I have no access to Erin's interiority. I can just see her moving through the landscape and…

[Mary Robinette] Right. Raymond Chandler does this a lot.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Like, where your… You're with one character, you only see the things that they see, and the movements that they have, but you have absolutely no access to their thoughts.

[DongWon] Because the interiority of people is a mystery to his… In his books.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Howard] The example that I use… When I'm trying to explain the difference between limited and omniscient. Erin sat across from the podcasters and Howard looked like he had indigestion. Okay? That's limited because Erin can tell that I'm making a face and she's passing judgment on what my face is. Omniscient would be Erin sat across from the podcasters. Howard was thinking about… And then you state my thought explicitly. Now, we were in Erin's head and then suddenly we're in Howard's head. That's not something Erin can be. We hope.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yeah. Another example of that… Not necessarily a good one, but it's, like, though Erin sat there, looking at Howard's face and thought that perhaps he'd had indigestion, Howard had had 16 eggs this morning.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] As they worked their way through his system, he hoped that no one would notice.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] He was wrong.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Right. Oh, this is going to make a noise.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I'm looking forward to when we talk about…

[Howard] That's third person omnivorous.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh… Howard. I am looking forward to when we talk about omniscient. But one of the things that I will say with third person limited is that you don't… I think one of the things you're missing potentially is that you can do third person limited and move to different characters' POVs in different scenes. Arguably, you can also move to their POVs within a single scene. It's when you move back and forth that I think you've shifted over to…

[Howard] It's the head hopping.

[Mary Robinette] Omniscient. Yeah. Which is not a flaw. It's just a different mode. But I'm thinking specifically of a scene in Ender's Game where the camera arrives with Ender into a scene, and then Ender leaves… We're still in the scene, there's no scene break, but we stay with Bean's character. So it's a through scene, there's no scene break, but it is still third person limited even though we haven't done that hard break.

[DongWon] I love when you do a little bit of that sliding from one POV to another and then back without dropping into omniscient…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Without dropping into the head hopping. There's an example, I think, of… From one of Robert Jackson Bennett's books, the first… Foundryside. Where a character is like sneaking into a facility, and we just slide into the guard's POV for a minute and see them sneaking past from the guard's POV and then slide back to the protagonist again. It never feels omniscient, it never feels like we're knowing more than, like, what the individual characters experience. But that fluidity that you can have in limited I think is really, really fun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that in that case, for me, what's happening is that he has gone to a different scene…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But has chosen to do what I call a through scene as opposed to a scene break.

 

[Erin] So, follow-up question on this, because I think, like, head hopping… A lot of times when people say head hopping, they're talking about being in omniscient and going from one character to the other in a somewhat frantic way in which you don't know who you're even following or what's happening. But head hopping can also be used if you switch, like, abruptly from one limited perspective to another. I've seen that critique used for that as well. How do you make it feel like a slide and not a hop? Like, how do you actually make it feel like it's been passed off in an effective way that you can follow versus that you're like jarring the audience?

[DongWon] I really think about it in filmic terms, and I think about sightlines. Right? So the example I just gave of moving from the thief to the guard and back is because you have the thief, the thief's looking, sees the guard, now we're in the guard, guard does their thing, thief sneaks by, guard notices something has passed, and then now we're back in the thief. Right? So you need a handoff transition every time you're going to make that slide as literally thinking for me about the camera moving with the perspective of the reader.

[Mary Robinette] I have a similar framing. For me, it's about thresholds.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is, I think the same thing as the sightlines that it is about. For me, the distinction between that and omniscient is that there is a reason that both characters are not actually in the same place at the same time. Like, the example that I gave where one character literally leaves the room and the camera stays with where we are. Whereas in omniscient, you would be able to visit everybody's head within, who's in a single room. And you would be sign posting, and now we're going over to this person. Jane Austen does this… I mean, she was extremely good, which is why her works are still classics. But there's this one scene where two characters believe that they're having the same conversation and they're having different conversations. You only know that they're having different conversations because she goes from one character to the other and she sign posts by telling us whose head she's going into before we get the thought, but it is all within one thing, and then she also comments on other things that are outside of that room that none of the characters would have access to. So, for me, it's all about what the characters have access to and the thresholds that we cross.

 

[Dan] I'm wondering as well if… This goes back to our discussion of close and far perspective. But the closer the perspective is, the more it's going to feel like head hopping, because you are getting more of those inner thoughts. You're getting more of that internality. Whereas in this case with the guard watching for the thief, you're not getting a really deep examination of who they are as a person.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I want to say that this is going back, this is a fashion thing. In science fiction and fantasy, it is in fashion to either use first person or third limited. But when you go over to romance, often you do get POVs… You do get back and forth between the two POVs. I'm going to back away from what I had said earlier about that not being third limited, because it usually only two characters. The hero and the heroine, or the hero and hero, depending on the… Which slash we're in. But often you do get both of their POVs within a single scene. It's just that in science fiction and fantasy, at some point, people decided that this was bad and they put a label on it called head hopping as opposed to controlling point of view, even if you are limiting yourself to only two people. It's still a limitation, it's still not an omniscient because you're not giving the reader access to any information that those two characters don't have.

[Dan] Well, I think it's worth pointing out that this is one of those cases where anything you can make work, works.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Yeah.

[Dan] Right. Like, just because the label has been given that certain aspects of this are good or bad, if you can make it work, then it works. If you can just… Excuse me… If you can jump between heads, between characters, even if it's head hopping, as long as the reader is always very clear about what's going on and they know whose head they're in and they know what perspective they're getting, then it works.

[Howard] Yeah, I don't… I don't personally use head hopping as a way to denigrate anything. I say… Unless I'm saying you're trying to do third person limited, third person close, and I think you may be unintentionally head hopping, just to describe what's going on. But I think you can head hop on purpose and make it work very well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We'll talk about how to do that when we get to omniscient for sure.

[Erin] Erin had another thought, but realized that it was time for the podcast to take a break.

 

[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.

 

[Erin] All right. Back now, because one thing we talked about earlier… I think we're talking a lot about… In talking about head hopping and the difference between limited and omniscient, we're talking a little bit about, I think, slightly more distanced…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] One of the questions I now have is what is the difference, like, what is the threshold, other than the use of pronouns between first-person and third person very close, very limited? Like, is there something that for you distinguishes it or could you take a first-person piece, turn all the I's to she's and not have to change anything else in order to make that story work?

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Laughter]

[Erin] All right. Well, there we go.

[Dan] Next question?

[Mary Robinette] Yes, because I've done it. I've had pieces that I wrote, originally in third person and moved to first, and I've had pieces that I've written in first person and moved to third. The biggest thing for me is that in first person, the degree to which I get the character's thoughts is significantly higher than it is in third. I have… Like you can get away with it for part of a scene, sometimes even a full scene, but there are times when, in first person, if I do not get the character's full emotional reaction, I will feel cheated as a reader. Because that's one of the things I sign up for when I'm in first person is to be all the way in that character's head. Whereas third person, I am okay with selective access to their head. Sometimes I get a direct thought, which is either written in quotes or italics. So these are the words that exactly are what the character is thinking. Sometimes it is free indirect speech, which is where the character's thought has just been transported into being part of the narration. So, like, instead of saying Mary Robinette sat in the podcast and thought I have to remember I have to pack my luggage during our break, I would do something more like Mary Robinette sat in the podcast. She needed to remember that she had to pack her luggage during her break. And I would just put it into part of the narration. But, it does create a little bit of a… More of a distance, and that form is one of the differences between first and third is that being all the way into the character's head.

[Howard] For me, one of the big differences between first and third, beyond… I mean, everything that you've said tracks beautifully. But if I'm in third limited, it's usually because I want to follow two or more characters. And the high bar for me for third limited is for each of those narrative voices to sound different. Whereas, in first person, your narrator should sound fairly consistent, unless the character undergoes some really huge change that reaches all the way into their voice. Whereas in third limited, I like to be able to tell whose scene it is. By halfway through the book, I want to be able to tell whose scene it is without you telling me their name. Because the voice… I'm now familiar enough with that voice that you've telegraphed it to me.

 

[Mary Robinette] I will say the other thing that I thought about as you were talking is that one of the tools that third limited offers me that I do not get from first-person is that I have a contrast between the narration and the character. Which can be an extremely powerful tool sometimes. Especially when you've got a character that is lying to themselves or lying… That… Or is on a journey that they haven't yet figured out that they're on. That sometimes I can let the reader in on what that is in ways that I cannot do in first person.

 

[DongWon] So, I think third limited close is sort of the default voice for commercial fiction these days. Right? In a lot of ways… There's a ton of first-person, that's rising in certain sectors, you still see third omniscient, but, like, what we think of as transparent prose, what we think of as like the dominant voice in adult commercial fiction tends to be this third limited perspective. Especially fairly close in. I think this is kind of driven by a lot of the visual media we consume. Movies are like this, videogames are like this, it's just like your… Because we don't actually know what the character's thinking, you're just like write up on them, and sort of observing the world as they go through it as the camera follows them, literally in the case of a TV show. I think that has really sort of shaped how we think of it. And because of some of the things you're saying, of having the ability to have the narration come in and the narrator have a different perspective than the character, but still be very close to one or a very small number of characters, kind of gives the easiest lift in terms of communicating a lot of information to the reader using the fewest tools possible. That requires the least sort of, like, mental weights. There's always a… I talked about this a little bit on the last episode, but there is a little bit of a mental lift when reading first-person for a lot of readers. That, I think, is a very small threshold that people can cross, but they're sometimes reluctant to. But it's… The use of third person limited close, I think, if you're looking for where's my default starting point, it's a really useful one to at least try that and sort of see if that solves any perspective problems you're having, and then expand out from there into, oh, wait, maybe this should be first-person. I need more interiority, or I want that deep subjectivity of the character or I'm feeling really claustrophobic, maybe I should step back in omniscient and expand out more from their. But starting with third close, really, I think, is a great default position to start from.

[Erin] I love all that, and I think it's interesting for me to hear, because I think one of the reasons I asked the question is I actually find when I write that my third person limited is fairly close to first. Like I…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I believe, I do a lot of third person limited that has, like, full interiority… And in case we've never said what we mean by interiority, it's, like, how much are you getting from inside the character's mind. My third person limited often uses the same cadences of thought that first-person would use. Like, the same… There's usually not a lot of distinction. So I was like, well, why do… What is the difference? For me, and I love everything that y'all have said and I also… For me, I'm thinking that some of it has to do with is there something… Like, is there ever a time when I'm going to want to go into another character, which I cannot do in first easily. For some reason, I find it harder to switch from one character to another in first, because first is very immersive, until I come out of it. It's like… Feels like a lot of work, like it's something you can do maybe chapter to chapter, but it's harder to do, like, scene to scene. Is there ever a time when I'm going to want to pull back the distance to explain something or note something even for a moment that the character wouldn't fully get into? Or is it, like, my intent is for you to feel like the character is being observed versus experienced? That one's a hard one, because I feel like it's very like… I, you just… It's like… You just know, like, when you know… Like pornography… When you know it when you see it. But… The infamous Supreme Court case said that. So it's, like, I'm thinking about, like, is it… Yeah, it's like is it sometimes when I want you to feel like you're within this character's mind or do I want you to feel like you are just a fly on their shoulder being like, oh, my gosh, what is this character getting themselves into, even if you're close enough to hear them whisper every thought to you?

[Howard] And to eat the crumbs off their shoulder if you're a little [garbled]

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] Like the one that I took from third into first, one of the things that I was playing with in that one was… I had a character who had PTSD and I knew that I was going to be dealing with some flashbacks and not, like, a brief insertion into the middle of a scene, but a full on, like, confusion dementia sequence. Being all the way in their head so that I wasn't… As they are disassociating… It was just… It was conveying the sensation of disassociating in first person is significantly easier than it is in third. Because that distance, that narrative distance, already exists because I'm observing the person, distancing it further… It's not as visceral when you distance it further. So when I got to those scenes where he's disassociating, I wrote it as if it was third person, but used the I, so… And I used all of the reporting words that we try to avoid in third person… Like, I noticed that I was, I watched my body do this thing. And that was a technique and a tool that I could only use in first person.

[Erin] I love that you called out the… Those distancing… I call them distancing words, like watched, looked, she looked at versus just saying, like, what the person actually saw. Because I think that's a really interesting… They have their absolute place.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, there's a time in which you want to be calling attention to the act of seeing. Whether it is disassociation or somebody who is, like, at the wall of a party and all that they are doing, noticing, is the action that they are taking.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. A spy is going to be… I watched this.

[Erin] Exactly. But somebody who's not a spy, you might be, like, well… The watching brings one more layer between you and the actual thing that's going on. Which I think is such a fun thing to play with. And another thing where I think, like head hopping, sometimes people will say this doesn't work, and I think what they really mean or should say is this has its place. Is this the place for it?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Dan] I just want to jump in really quick and point out that I have seen books, very successfully jump between third and first.

[Yes, yup]

[Dan] One of my favorite books is House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, which is about half and half. The way that she makes that work and makes it always obvious what you're hearing and what you're listening to is, it is… The first person is one specific character. Every scene that does not have that character in it is third person.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. In general, when it comes to these POV conversations, again, we're giving you tools, not rules...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is the thing to remember. I think a lot of people get so prescriptive when it comes to talking about whether using third person limited, are you… It's like your third person limited close, and then you go, you come out for a second, and they're like, oh, no, you broke POV. You can't do that. I'm like, what are you talking about? If it worked in the scene, it worked in the scene.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know what I mean? I'm not going to remember two chapters later that, like, you stepped 10 feet away from the character for one moment. Or, like what Dan's saying, in terms of mixing first person and third person, that's absolutely a thing that you can do. You can even jump to omniscient for a second, and then drop…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Back to third person limited. I think what we're giving you are ways in which you can use proximity to your character's perspective as tools. I encourage you to find exciting ways to use those tools, moment to moment, rather than book to book.

[Erin] And… I know we're running a little long, but I just want to… I love this point, so I just want to underline it, that some of the things that I've seen that are extremely effective in scenes are when perspective shifts.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you suddenly pull back the camera, like, all of a sudden, you're saying something. Like, if you're doing it on purpose, you're doing it intentionally, there's something you want us to see from further away. If you're a little bit further away and you suddenly, like, kind of zoom in to one character's perspective, maybe it's because they're having a moment of deep emotion where that's the only thing that the story can contain at that moment.

 

[Erin] And that brings us to the homework. Which is to take a scene that you've written and write it in the closest third person limited you can possibly stand. Get right up in there. Then write it again at a slightly more distance, but still limited third person. Look at those two scenes side-by-side, and then say, what did I do differently in one than the other? What did I emphasize? Figure out from that which perspective you want to use when actually writing the scene.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-12-fashion-as-a-writing-metaphor

 

Key points: Howard is wearing clothes! Fashion and writing or storytelling: you do it every single day. What you wear is how you present yourself to the world. Fashion is instant language. What do you put on the page without thinking about it? Fashion is where the personal meets the cultural. Make one element interesting. Pick one thing, and make that interesting. Experiment, and ask for help! You don't have to do exactly what they suggest. Develop your taste. Take one thing off! Howard, put your pants back on! Know what your go-to items are, and why. What do you want people to feel at the end of your book? Use your tools with intent to build something exciting and dynamic.

 

[Season 20, Episode 12]

 

[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.

 

[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 12]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Fashion as a Writing Metaphor.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm wearing clothes.

[DongWon] So...

[Mary Robinette] Thank god.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] We all are grateful for that fact. So, this episode, we are returning to the little mini-series that we're doing throughout this season of different personal metaphors for how we think about the process of writing and storytelling. I was excited this episode to talk about how I think about fashion and why I think that's a useful metaphor for approaching writing. So there's a few things I want to hit here. But the first thing I want to start with is I think fashion and writing, or fashion and storytelling, are very similar in one very specific way. Which is that whether you know it or not, you are already doing this every single day of your life. Right? It's… You are writing emails. You are sending text messages. You are al… Communicating with the people around you. You're telling stories to your family, to your friends. You are also getting dressed every day. Now, this doesn't mean necessarily that you are putting on an outfit and participating in the general broader culture of fashion in an intentional and deliberate way. In the same way that sending an email to your boss is not you writing fiction or telling a story in the same intentional way that you would be if you were pursuing this for publication. There's lots of reasons to put clothes on your body. There's lots of reasons to put text on a page.

[Howard] Kind of the difference between ordering a pizza and standing up and reading a poem. There's… Ordering a pizza on the phone. Okay, as anybody done that in the last 10 years? I don't know. But, I mean, you have that conversation and there's a base minimum of information that needs to be transmitted and you're just going to transmit it and be done. But if you're standing up at open mic night in the poetry club… I've never been to one of those. Are those even things?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But there's a lot more intent in what's… What you're saying.

[DongWon] Yes, those are real things, for the record, but… Yes. People do do exactly what you're saying.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But it's kind of going back to the episode about cooking as well. The difference between doing it for subsistence, doing it for everyday purposes, versus doing it for… With intention, with a reason why you're engaging with it.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about that for me is that whether or not you intend something, you're still communicating.

[DongWon] Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] There is this quote by Miuccia Prada which I have loved for years, which is, "What you wear is how you present yourself to the world. Fashion is instant language." One of the places that we see this most is actually in the area of privilege. That somebody who is, like a CEO, can come into the office in jeans, but somebody who's angling for a raise cannot. So, if you're getting up and saying, yeah, it doesn't matter what I put on. It doesn't matter to you because it doesn't affect the way you move through the world. But someone else who does not have the same standing, the same other societal pressures on them, cannot make the same choices. So whether or not you're intending to make a statement, you're still making a statement.

[DongWon] Well, one of the reasons I wanted to bring fashion as the metaphor for this episode was I truly love fashion. I love designer clothes, in terms of, like, seeing what's going on in the fashion scene, what's going on in the world of design. But how I dress myself is also a point of interest, but also difficulty and pain. Right? One thing I do want to emphasize is just because we're talking about fashion, a lot of us have very different relationships to clothing at different points in our lives for different reasons. It is hard to dress yourself in a way that makes you feel good and excited to go out the door. It's hard to find a thing that feels natural to your form of expression and meets the expectations of all the people around you. Right? I just really want to emphasize that as were talking about this, that there's an easy and fun to fashion, it's also very challenging. I am someone who's made an interest out of dressing myself for a lot of reasons. Some of those were about assimilation and blending in. And as I've come out as queer and as I've transitioned, having to learn a whole new language for how to dress has been a particular challenge for me and an ongoing one. Learning how to speak those languages, learning how to approach that, made fashion into a thing that I… Instead of something that I was doing by reflex, to something I was doing by intention and deliberateness to figure out how to communicate certain things that I wanted to communicate.

[Mary Robinette] For me, what you're saying about the… Something that I'm doing out of reflex. I want to bring us to how this works extremely well as a metaphor for prose. We talk about transparent prose. Transparent prose is a fashion. Like, right now, transparent prose in the United States is that you sound like you're a 30-year-old white guy. Jane Austen was riding transparent prose in her day. But if you drop one of her books down in front of most people, it's… There are parts of it that are impenetrable. When I was writing the Glamorous Histories series, one of the things that I would always do is I would put, just to amuse myself, I would put an unaltered sentence from Jane Austen in every novel, and without fail, my editor, my copy editor, and the proofreader would all flagged that sentence as awkward. And, beside the great satisfaction of saying stet…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] To Jane Austen, it highlighted for me the fact that even though I was trying to write in Austenian English, it was still… I was still… My fashion was still rooted in the 21st-century. When you put something in another time period, that was transparent prose in her day, it is awkward now. So, for me, when I'm thinking about writing, I am thinking about what things am I putting on the page without thinking about it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] If you don't read the language, you'll struggle to speak the language. If you don't understand the language, it's very difficult to use the language. As we're recording this episode, just today, we got off of Navigator of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean cruise ship, and you might think, well, all the passengers are wearing clothing that's… Some of its fancy and some of its casual and whatever, but there is a very specific language being spoken among the crewmembers where there are very small indicators of rank and position. I could tell that, wait, the ones in the white shirts are generally the bosses of a given area, and the ones in the colored shirts are the ones who are reporting to the bosses. But I didn't know where to look for pins or stripes or whatever to tell rank. But for them, that fashion really is instant language. At a glance, they know where a person stands on the ladder of rank in the ship.

[Mary Robinette] We do this all the time. I mean, if anyone has ever gone to a convention, you can immediately tell who the science-fiction people are, and it's hard to explain why. I mean, sometimes it is because there wearing a shirt that, in the Star Wars font, that says Metal Fours Be with You.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Metaphors be with you. It's just amazing. Sorry, I did actually read that as metal fours.

[Laughter]

[Erin] We were going with it.

[Mary Robinette] But when I'm thinking about fiction, it is again, like, what are the signals that I'm sending? I often think about the fashion of it. Like, is this a dressy occasion?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think that evolves over time, and those can be sort of genre indicators as well.

 

[Erin] One of the things I really like in thinking about fashion is that it's where the personal meets the cultural.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah…

[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, your… There's your own expression of identity, as we go through the year, one thing we've been talking about is the lens of who, and we will be getting to the lens of setting. In some ways, fashion is right where those two hit. Because there is… Fashion is influenced by the cultural norms around you, but also the cultural norms you bring with you. What you may believe to be a formal dress is not… For some reason, I'm thinking of Downtown Abbey and, like, all the shame of wearing a… What we would consider to be a very formal tuxedo, because they only wore white ties, where it was like an all white outfit, and wearing a black dress coat was, like, who would ever do that?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I believe… You're looking at me as if no.

[Mary Robinette] No. White tie means that literally your tie is white.

[Erin] Sorry.

[Mary Robinette] But it was with tails. It's okay. Sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I just…

[Erin] I do not know the language of what we were just talking about, as we can tell. But, like, I think what's important is that, like, what does that culture has shifted.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Someone who comes down in a full tuxedo right now, you're thinking they must be at a wedding or going to a particular type of special occasion in a particular culture as well. So, in stories, even when you're not thinking about the character's fashion, how is the way that they would express themselves constrained, redefined, or experienced by the culture around them?

[DongWon] Well, it's also how your personal is reshaped and changed by what you are wearing to the occasion. Right? So if you show up in a T-shirt and shorts to the wedding, then that's going to communicate a very different thing about who you are and what your expectations are in arriving at that event. In the same way that if you're trying to write a horror story and you're putting bunnies and ponies in it that are all lovely and fluffy, that everyone's a little bit like, hey, this… You may not be bringing the correct language to this particular genre expectation that you're meeting here. Right? So, the expectations that people have around what the event is and what clothing is appropriate are kind of useful to think about as you're thinking about what story you're trying to tell and how you want to tell it. And with that, let's take a pause for a moment, and when we come back, we'll get a little bit more into how you can begin to dress yourself with intent.

 

[DongWon] So, before we started recording, I made all of my fellow podcasters watch a TicTok with me that is a TicTok sound that I very much enjoy because it mostly is just people cycling through a bunch of great outfits, and I learned a lot from it and get a lot of inspiration from it. But the sound itself is talking about ways to think about putting a good outfit together. Right? And the sound goes, if it's not interesting by color, it needs to be interesting by shape. If it's not interesting by shape, it needs to be interesting by texture. If it's not interesting by texture, it needs to be interesting by color. Right? So it's sort of highlighting how you have these different elements that you can pull from, that whenever you have a story or piece of fiction, it needs to stand out in one of several different ways. Right? The voice needs to be interesting, the thematic elements need to be interesting, it needs to be hitting a certain genre expectation. Right? Understanding what your broad tools are that you can use to pull a reader in is really, really important.

[Howard] Years ago, I was the toastmaster at a couple of conventions. I realized that the most important tool in my toolbox for being a toastmaster was a tuxedo. Because when… And, yeah, there's a measure of privilege in here. When the white guy in a tuxedo steps on stage and picks up the microphone, I didn't need to say anything, everybody just went quiet. Because it signaled to the whole room that something was about to begin. I don't speak fashion very well, but I knew that piece of syntax and I knew how to use it.

[DongWon] It was interesting by shape in that case. Right? The silhouette you're presenting communicated something very clear to us, which is, fancy person in charge. Right?

 

[Dan] One of the things that I loved about that little TicTok clip that you showed us is that it uses the word interesting instead of the word good.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] It's not saying that you have to be perfect in any of these areas, it's not saying you have to be good in any of these areas, just be interesting in one of them. Obviously, your writing needs to also be good. That's what people want to read. But being interesting in your voice, being interesting in your perspective, in your technology or your magic, whatever it is that you're talking about. Find something that is going to grab attention and be interesting.

[Mary Robinette] It doesn't have to be interesting in all of those things.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The… You can pick one thing that you love, that you are fascinated by, and set it against the relatively neutral background and it'll pop. So you can focus things that way when you're building. Whether it's building an outfit for yourself or thinking about a story that your writing. It doesn't have to be an original voice and an original plot and original characters. It can just be one of those things.

[DongWon] Well, what I also like about it is… One thing… When I see people start to dress themselves, and they're trying to figure out how to be interesting and distinctive and how to have intent in presenting themselves, the first thing they reach for is color. Right? So, often you see teens, young people, when they're first starting to figure out how do I look like a person, they'll be like bright colors, dark colors, whatever it is. Right? That's why we see, like… We talk about, like, teen Goths so much because they learned that if I dressed all in black, I can appear a certain way and be of a certain community and have certain expectations versus neons versus pastels, all of those things.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] the eighties was rough.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. Describing all those things is really useful, but then what I really love is thinking… Reminding myself and reminding other people that there are other tools in your kit, too. Right? You don't just have voice. You don't just have character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You don't just have this, that, and the other. I'm currently wearing a monochromatic outfit, I'm wearing all black, but in three different textures. So I think about that when I get dressed. I was like, oh, if I'm having this linen top, then I want sort of something a little more billowy flowy on pants, and then I want those leather boots to go with it. Right? So, learning to think about the different tools in your kit and reminding yourself that, oh, this scene isn't working because I'm just trying to lean into the action of it and it's falling flat because all I have is a single note of action. What else can I lay into it? Where's the texture, where's the color, where's the shape?

 

[Mary Robinette] I think this is also something else that happens to people is that they are afraid to experiment and they're looking for someone to tell them what is correct, and also afraid to ask for help. So it's this weird thing that will happen to people. I went through. Where I had… My body had changed shape and I didn't know how to dress myself anymore. So actually went to a… And again, it was at a point in my life where I could afford this, I went to a shopper and asked for help understanding what looked good on my body. That was all I needed. I didn't have to keep going back to that same thing. I think when you're writing, that this is what workshops do for you. Like, how does this work? And you don't have to always… You don't have to do exactly what they tell you, like, sometimes she would show me something and I'm like, no.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's sending a signal that is very not me. Even if it looks good on my body, it does not match my personality.

[DongWon] Yes. Well, that's why when I showed this to everyone, Howard, you had a really interesting response where you said this keep saying interesting. And we had to flag that is a good thing about this, but your reaction was I don't know what interesting means in this case.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] And one thing I want to emphasize as we're talking about how to dress yourself with intent, how to engage with fashion, and how to engage with writing, the most important thing you have to do in all of this is to develop taste. Right? Not necessarily good taste. That doesn't mean that you have to be agreeing with the high arbiters of… Who award the Pulitzer Prize. But it does mean you have to have a taste. And that is a personal perspective that you're bringing to what clothes you're putting on your body, what words you're putting on the page.

 

[Dan] I want to change the topic just slightly. I teach a class about how to write thrillers. Which is a very small kind of spare style of writing. I use a Coco Chanel quote all the time when I teach it, which is, "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off." This idea kind of goes back to what we're talking about texture or shape or color… What are the tools in your toolbox? You don't need to use them all. You probably don't want to use them all. Trim back. Be a little spare, a little lean. Especially when you're writing something like a thriller.

[Howard] I have two reactions to that. The first reaction is Coco Chanel looking at me and saying, "No. No, no, Howard! Put the pants back on!"

[Laughter]

[Howard] Take something else off. But the second response is that when we were studying… When I was studying music and we were looking at arrangements, we were told the sound of one violin is very, very interesting. The sound of two violins is fighting. You want one violin or you want several. If they're all going to be playing the same note. A string quartet, yeah, that's another thing. But it was this idea that if it's too interesting into many ways, then the things fight and we lose focus. So, yeah, Coco Chanel, look in the mirror, take one thing off.

[DongWon] It's the power of editing. Right? Is what she's fundamentally talking about. Right? Editing in terms of removing the one to many things that's on the plate, removing the one to many things in the outfit. It's the… Where the idea of kill your darlings comes from. Right? That may be your favorite ring that you're wearing. But it's a different metal tone than everything else you're wearing, and it's clashing. Or it's a different shape, and it's clashing. You take it off, it'll just look so… That much cleaner. And take it from something that feels costumey to something that feels fashion.

[Mary Robinette] It also helps you focus. It helps you say, this is the thing that's important.

[DongWon] Right.

 

[Erin] I also think it's interesting to think about, like, what your go to… Maybe this is just me, but, like, I have things in my closet that I wear all the time. Like, you know what I mean? It's like… I got like 20 things, but, like, these three are, like, if you see me, you probably see me in one of those. Because I like them the most, they feel the most comfortable. They're the hardest, I think, the same, like, to get rid of, if I'm like, oh, these don't fit the occasion. But, like… But I love them. So I'm thinking similarly in writing, like, what are the things that you go to over and over again, and then what is it about them, so that if you're… Like, if I decide, like, I love all these casual T-shirts, but I have to go to a formal event, they will not work. What is it that I like about them? Is it the shape? Is it the color? Do you know what I mean?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is it the texture? If it's the texture, how can I find texture in a different form? So, thinking about some of the tools that you use, like, even if it's not the tool… If your darling won't work for this particular piece, maybe it will work… Like, maybe something about the reason that it is your darling can be found elsewhere in that story.

[DongWon] Well, that's why I like talking about taste. It's like… Taste is almost this taboo thing to talk about in a certain way, because there's so… That's… It's so loaded with a certain valence of, like, good taste, bad taste. It's just like…

[Howard] In poor taste.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. But really, all taste is is having a point of view. It's having a perspective. It's coming from a place in how you think about your dress, how you think about what you're interested in. Or which kind of stories you're interested in. The only way to develop your taste is to find out what you like. Right? And, like, read more, consume more books, consume more stories. Look at more people wearing clothes and think about why did they decide to dress that way?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Going back to the thing that we were talking about at the beginning with that Prada quote, that it is about how you present yourself. Often, fashion as it changes… Because fashion appears in clothing and music and architecture. It's often about that communicating this is the community that I belong to, and also, this is where I am in a power structure. It's frequently driven by a [garbled hierarchical?] story in some form or another, which is one of the reasons that you'll see people, I think, when they are like, well, I write literary fiction. I will discard all of the pieces of science fiction unless I put them on as costume. That's one of the reasons that I think science fiction writers get so mad when they see a literary person whose using science fiction tropes and does not understand how they work. It's one of the problems when you're seeing people putting on another culture as a costume. It's because they don't understand how it communicates to… And it's saying, I belong to a community that they don't belong to, whether it's in fiction or real life. It's also not understanding how things connect.

[DongWon] If you haven't taken the time to develop your taste in that thing, then you'll show up in costume and everyone'll will be like, oh, you don't go here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And we can tell.

[Erin] And, I think, on the other side, like… I'm reminded of a sort of comparison is the thief of joy. Which is, I remember finding out a while ago that, like, every famous person has their clothes tailored, and also just a lot of people in the world, like, their clothes are tailored to fit their body exactly after they buy them. So when you have bought something off the rack and walk out and are like, how come this is not flowing to my body the way it is when I see other people walking through the world, you don't know what they've done to their clothes between the moment they acquired them and the moment that they're actually out there. I think that, similarly, to like if you compare somebody's tenth book to the thing that you just wrote today, and you're like, well, why is there thing so perfect and mine is so messy. It's your at a different point, you haven't done the same things, you haven't tailored in the same way. Maybe you are still developing your taste and they've had longer to think about and develop theirs. So when you do that direct comparison, it isn't… They're not better, they're just using the tools differently.

[DongWon] And also, pro tip for the audience, it takes so much less money to get stuff tailored than you think it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You probably think it's hundreds of dollars. It's like 15 to 20. Like, it's worth it in a lot of times. But, kind of going to what you're saying, I've seen people be so incredibly fashionable, the coolest outfits I've ever seen, and they have assembled that for under 30 dollars at thrift stores. I've seen people who are incredibly stylish, incredibly cool, and that's a 5000 dollar outfit that they're wearing. There's, like, a leveling effect to that, because their ability to bring their perspective to what clothes they're putting on their body is the thing that's equating them, not how much money they're able to spend. So, you can be a completely self-taught writer who grew up doing fanfiction and be delivering some of the most impactful narrative experiences out there or you could have an MFA and a PhD under your belt and be delivering the same effect. Right?

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When I see people, I'm interested in what they're communicating to me about themselves.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes I see people and I think what you're communicating to me is that you are expensive.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes I read books, and I'm like, mmm, you're communicating to me that you are expensive. You just feel, you want to feel fancy. I see this… unh, sometimes it's in published stuff, but a lot of times in early career writers, I'll ask them, like, how do you want people to feel at the end of this book? You can tell that what they want, and sometimes they actually voice it, is they want the reader to think that they are clever. I'm like, that's not…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That is almost never going to work out the way you want it to work out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.

[DongWon] That feels like somebody wanting me to know that this is designer, not that I thought about how these lapel ratios work with my shoulders.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Like, I think, those are a different type of conversation that you could be having.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Someone recently asked me if I liked her sweater, which was weird. But then I was like, yeah, it seems… They then proceeded to tell me the providence of the sweater, instead of telling me what they liked about it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, I don't actually care where it came from or what line it's in. I am interested in the textures and why… What I had asked was what do the numbers mean on it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] They then proceeded to tell me about the providence instead of like, why they had a personal connection to it. Like, why did you pick this?

[DongWon] I think that really comes back to the core reason I wanted to talk about fashion is, for me, what clothes you put on your body, what stories you tell, it all comes down to intent. If you're approaching whatever it is you're doing with the intent, you can take any of the tools available to you and build something really exciting out of it and do something really dynamic with it. If you are going for the easiest off-the-shelf option, just because everyone else is doing it, then that's always going to be a little less interesting to me. Right? Learning to develop your taste for what's exciting to you and learning to develop that sense of intent toward your craft is very challenging, but also, I think, really, really rewarding once you start figuring out how to do that.

 

[DongWon] With that, I have a little bit of homework for you to start figuring out how to do this. That is, I want you to go to your closet and take one article of clothing that you love. It can be a T-shirt, it can be a pair of pants, it can be a belt, whatever it is. Take a thing that you love from your closet. Now I want you to build three different outfits around that. Build an outfit that you would wear just out on the street, going to the grocery store, going to the coffee shop, whatever it is you do on your day-to-day. What's an everyday version of that? Now, take that same article of clothing, and think about going to a family dinner at your parents' house, that all your aunts and uncles and cousins and everybody is coming to. What does that look like? Now, take that same article of clothing and incorporate it into an outfit that you'd go out for a night out on the town with your people, whether that's your friends, your date, whatever it is. Think about how that same article of clothing, that same tool, can serve you in these different genres, these different audiences. Then start thinking about what in your fiction works that way?

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Thanks. It has pockets.

[Chuckles]

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-10-interview-with-chuck-tingle-breaking-the-rules

 

Key Points: Any number of ways to approach art. Failure is a learning opportunity. Capture the truth of the moment that it's written. Try punk rock writing. If you can't fix it, feature it. Message first, then character and plot. Be the slippery slope you want to see in the world. Take the road less travelled. Come at them as an equal. Art is more than just the words in the book. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 10]

 

[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 10]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Interview with Chuck Tingle: Breaking the Rules.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are joined today by our special guest, Chuck Tingle. Who... Let me just say, as we start off, I'm so happy to have you here because love is real.

[Chuck] Oh, wild. Do you know... Want to know why I'm happy to be here, along with that? I think there's some buckaroos that believe we are one and the same, or at least...

[Laughter]

[Chuck] About a decade ago did. I guess this kind of clears it up unless you have a little soundboard and you're flipping between sound modulations. But actually this is pretty good evidence that we are two separate entities.

[Howard] That would be...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] Impressive to fake.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Very talented performer. So...

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes. It's amazing. You're actually my cat. But...

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] For readers who are unfamiliar with you, would you mind telling them just a little bit about some of what you write and who you are?

[Chuck] Yes. So I started off self-publishing erotica. I still do that. I have about 350 erotica shorts called Tinglers, and then I recently have signed a deal with Nightfire, which is part of Tor, part of McMillan, traditionally published horror novels. The second of which just came out. And then I just announced that I've got four more coming. So, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [This is… Garbled]

[DongWon] That's awesome.

[Mary Robinette] This is very, very fantastic. I became aware of you first because of your erotica. Then when I started seeing that you were going to be doing traditionally published things, one of the first… The assumption that I made was that it was going to be similar to what you were doing. The reason that we have you in to talk about breaking the rules is that your path to publishing traditionally is extremely unconventional. But the other thing is that you are ignoring a piece of conventional wisdom, which is that you are supposed to put yourself into a niche and stay in that niche. If you're going to do two different niches, that you need to have [garbled] for those.

[DongWon] Yes. So…

[Chuck] I think pretty much everything about my career has been pretty untraditional. Unconventional. The writing itself, I think there's a lot of rules that I break. It is something that I like to talk about. Because I think there's a lot of buckaroos out there who are creators, not just writers, but in any sort of medium who kind of get discouraged if they don't fall into a specific path of kind of traditional creativity. There's a reason for a lot of those paths. I mean, obviously, like, there is a system to getting a publishing deal and everything. But I like to talk about my own journey, because there's some really incredible things that happen if you kind of chart your own path. Sometimes that can lead to astonishing failure, and sometimes that can lead to something really beautiful. Not just beautiful, but kind of push mediums forward sometimes. I mean, it's… That's such an important role out there. So, I just think it's important to talk about it, and not discourage those that think, well, that's not how I think. Because there's any number of ways to approach art.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This is… Any number of ways to approach art is something that is like a flag that I will ride to. You have my sword.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that we are fond of saying here at Writing Excuses is tools, not rules.

[Chuck] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's one of the things… When you're talking about art, that there isn't a right way to approach it, because we're all coming from a different point.

[Chuck] Yes.

 

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to pick up on in there, too, was, Chuck, you mentioned the possibility of astonishing failure, I think is how you put it. What I… One of the things I love about you bringing that up immediately is it such a possibility in any creative endeavor, in the artistic endeavor. Learning to not be afraid of that failure, but to also embrace it as an opportunity to learn more and explore and discover what works for you, and what doesn't work for you, for me, I think, is incredibly important. But to start out almost, like, on the negative, the downbeat note, and, like, what are those moments of failure that you've run into that you found instructive for you in terms of figuring out how you wanted to move forward? What were the paths that made sense to you?

[Chuck] That is a great question. You've caught me, a little bit, because…

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] I use that… Well, I use that word, because we're communicating through words. It's semantics. We're just… We are speaking, we need a word to put value to an idea. But if you were to really, like, dive deep, and I guess that's what we're doing here, get philosophical about it, I kind of think an art failure doesn't actually exist. I'm using the word to make a point, but in reality, when I look at the process of any career, but I'm just going to talk about my own. Anything, anytime, let's say I had a Tingler that came out that I thought was going to do really well and didn't, I just… Failure's the best word for it, because we all know what that means. But if you actually look at it, that is literally just a… That is a learning opportunity. It is an experience. It is, honestly, the stuff that life on this timeline is made of. It is so beautiful, in fact, it's equally beautiful to success. So I… It was… If I'm really going to get in touch with the depths of my feeling about it, I just… I don't think that it exists, it's part of the process. Making great art is not just some trajectory upward into the sky like a rocket. It is a river that flows in various directions, and all of that is important. It's equally important, I think.

[Howard] To paraphrase badly Mahatma Gandhi, be the try-fail cycle you want to see in a good book.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Absolutely.

[Howard] We see this in all of the things that we consume as entertainment. We see this idea of a try-fail cycle. As long as the failure is not something that stops you completely, it can be part of a process that leads to the success that you were aiming for.

[Mary Robinette] This is… Yeah. This is a thing that I love, is the part of a process. There's a thing in film and television where you only need to get the perfect shot once. Right. When you're watching the Muppets, they fling puppets all the time. There is this outtake reel that I love from Emmet Otter's Jug Town Christmas… Err, Jug Band Christmas, where they need a drum to roll out of a store.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It rolls out of the store and fails so many different times in different hysterically funny ways. This blooper reel is now one of my very favorite things. But they only need to get it right once. I think one of the wonderful things about writing is that you can try something and you don't have to put it out into the world until it's… Until you have successfully gotten the drum to roll the way you want it to roll. Then, even if someone is like,, whatever, that drum is not perfect for me. It's like, well, that's fine.

 

[Chuck] Yes. I also tend to believe that the quote wrong way of the drum to roll is actually more perfect than the quote perfect one. I think that with art, a lot of the things… Like, for me, it's not about capturing the perfect story. It's about capturing the truth of the moment that it's written. That's the goal for me. So, Tinglers are a perfect example of that. I think of my writing, specifically with Tinglers, as, like, punk rock writing.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] If you look at other mediums, if you look at, like, music for instance, if you have a song and you play it a little too fast and it's a little out of tune and it's a little sloppy, someone will listen to that and say, wow, that's a perfect punk rock song. If you do that in painting, you can say, oh, that was something like, oh, you really captured the movement and the emotion or something, if you don't fix those mistakes. In writing, for whatever reason, I have just found that there's a strictness that I kind of like to push back against. So the mistakes, like, spelling errors or things in my erotica shorts, I don't… I don't even see those as errors, I see them as punk. It is capturing the moment that it was made. A lot of those I wrote in 24 hours about a news item, and the idea that I should make it seem like it wasn't written in 24 hours just seems silly to me. I… It's a piece of art and I'm capturing the moment. So I kind of like to look outside of the conventions of any sort of genre, but specifically the medium of writing, and think, well, what do these quote mistakes actually mean if we're actually just trying to capture the moment?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's a thing they say in puppetry… I think other places too, but… If you can't fix it, feature it.

[Chuck] Oh, beautiful. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] As a cartoonist, I'm fond of saying that art for art's sake is allowed to take its time. Art for money has to run like it stole something.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] That's a great one, too.

[Howard] It's… Because the mistakes… Mistakes isn't the right word. That first stroke you throw down with a pen as an energy to it, and enthusiasm to it, that repeated strokes trying to get it right won't have. So, boy, sometimes you just gotta roll with the first take.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like there's a joke right here about repeated strokes and Tinglers, but…

[Chuck] Oh, there you go. [Garbled] Just wait until this episode comes out and you see a fresh Tingler…

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Directly referencing Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness. Any time we're talking about things coming out, it's always exciting for me.

[Chuck] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] But before we do anything more on that, I think we're going to take our pause. As I break my [garbled] podcasting.

[We're fine. We're all fine.]

[Mary Robinette] We're fine. So let's take our pause for a thing of the week.

 

[Chuck] So, going with the theme of this episode of breaking the rules, and as a Writing Excuses fan myself, I listen all the time, I have yet to hear anyone recommend food. So I have… I would like to recommend the Franken stand, which for anyone either living in Los Angeles or visiting Los Angeles, it's a vegan hot dog stand that serves horror-themed hotdogs.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] So, every week, you show up and you're not sure what you're going to get. Maybe the Mummy with a nice pale alfredo drizzled across the top, wrapped up. You could get the Swamp Thing, which is more like a chili dog. There's all kinds of things. It's just really incredible. It's the… You have to follow them on Instagram to find out where they're going to be. Normally they are some days in front of a horror shop called the Mystic Museum out in the big valley. Yeah. So my thing of the week is a delicious vegan horror-themed hotdog at the Franken stand, and their Instagram is the hotdog_franken.

[DongWon] As a new resident of Los Angeles, I am excited to go and track this one down and see what they have to offer.

[Mary Robinette] And I am thinking that anyone who is coming on the Writing Excuses cruise that is cruising out of Los Angeles in September is probably also going to make a slight detour too.

[Chuck] Oh, there you go. You've gotta get a haunt dog. That's what they call them.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Not hotdogs. Haunt dogs.

[Mary Robinette] This is amazing to me.

[DongWon] I've had some hotdogs that I felt haunted by. So…

[Chuck] Yes.

 

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. So, as we come back in, I want to talk about some of the rules that you feel like other people get trapped by that you just kind of stomped over with great joy and enthusiasm.

[Chuck] Wow. I feel like there's two categories of that. There is… There are the rules of kind of the business side of things. There's the rules of the creative side of things. I think that… I mean… Part of both of these is that while… I am a masked buckaroo. It's funny. In the introduction, we didn't even mention that, but for those listeners not familiar, I am anonymous, and I wear a pink bag over my head. I would say that… I mean, just to list a few, actual… Well, the way I do book tours is certainly different. I don't do readings. Because, really, they didn't make sense to me. I thought if you're trying to get new readers, what are you going to do? Show up and talk about a book that nobody's read and have spoilers? I found it to be kind of fundamentally broken, so, like, I do my own thing with some shows. I think that in the creative side of things, I kind of disagree with the idea that you should only show, never tell. I think that you need to do both.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuck] Which you've actually done an episode on that was pretty wonderful. So [garbled] your listeners, go back to that one. I also… There's this whole discussion of sort of should you write with character or plot, is the big thing, or, well, who's in the driver's seat? I think most of the time you're supposed to say character. I would argue that that… I like to write message first. I always put the message in the driver's seat. Kind of the what am I delivering to the reader, what is the gift of this, and then I would say probably character second and then plot third. There's all these things that I come out it with… And that come back to the anonymous thing. Many buckaroos have tried to guess my real identity.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] All the time I have kind of… I'm breaking off… Breaking down the layers. But I will say, for those listening, because I have said this before, that many assume that I am, like, a writer under this [garbled], but I am not. Which I think becomes apparent. I mean, I'm a writer now, but coming into this, I did not know this industry at all. Which I guess moves on to the… Kind of the business side of things, which, DongWon, my agent, who happens to be here…

[Mary Robinette] Shocking.

[DongWon] Amazing coincidence.

[Chuck] Experienced firsthand, which is just kind of… I think that my path… I used [garbled] since about the querying and all that stuff. Actually, I just… I wrote the book, I wrote Camp Damascus, and then I went on Twitter and said I have a book. I think I'd like a traditional publisher. Does anyone want to put it out?

[DongWon] Literally, just tweeted it out.

[Laughter]

[Chuck] Yes, I just tweeted it, and then old McMillan said, I guess that's a good one, let's do that. That is the short version. It's more entertaining. You could also look at it like I spent eight years building my fan base, writing erotica, creating kind of this whole thing outside of the books itself. I prefer the short version because I think it's funny. But…

[DongWon] I love the short version.

[Chuck] The short version is very fun.

 

[DongWon] But I have a question, which is, you came into this, you're saying, that you didn't know much about the publishing industry. Yet, years ago, you started writing the Tinglers and putting them up is self published. What was the thing that led you to that choice? Right? Like, when you were starting, before you knew what the rules even were, before you knew that you were breaking any what was the thing that got you to say, hey, I want to write these. I'm going to put them up here. Here's how I'm going to do it. Then, you developed a very distinctive style since then, of course. But…

[Chuck] Yes.

[DongWon] What was that inception there?

[Chuck] So, I always have… I've been a creator my whole life. So… I just thought, as a medium, that the fact that you could self publish something and kind of work through an idea and it could be out in 24 hours and have an audience, I found to be pretty fascinating and also kind of underused in the sense of, like, hey, if this works, I could talk about current events, I could express myself in this way. I would say that there was a sort of a personal kind of version of that, and a political version. The personal version was that I am on the autism spectrum, so I am [garbled] typically masking all the time. The idea of being able to create this art in, like I said, a punk rock way where I said, well, I'm just going to… My autism really shows itself in how I organize things. I'm so strict about things, and I thought, well, if I have 24 hours, I want to write these quickly. I'm not going to have time for that, and it's going to be kind of therapeutic, which it very much ended up being. Then, also, my queerness as a bisexual buckaroo in a hetero presenting relationship… Actually, I thought, I don't get to express my queerness [garbled], so, actually, kind of therapeutic personal reasons that I suspected would be very helpful for me, and ended up literally changing my life. So that was a good guess. Then, politically speaking, the kind of crux of the idea was that I was always fascinated by conservatives… There was this line a long time ago, kind of the gay marriage line was, well, if we let two buckaroos marry, what's next? Are we going to marry free trees? Are we going to marry a sentient automobile? I always thought…

[Howard] They're already marrying their cars.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] Well, there you go. I always thought that kind of slippery slope argument… It was always kind of trotted out like this dystopian landscape. And every time they said it, even back then, I thought that sounds wonderful.

[Chuckles]

[Chuck] What a utopia. So part of writing a Tingler, as, like a larger piece of all of these books was that if I just wrote about this world where that conservative nightmare was kind of just you let it run wild and show that that's actually more of a utopia than a dystopia. So… Those were the two pieces where I thought, okay. Writing these quick shorts is going to be an interesting way to do that. Let's see if it can work. And it did.

[DongWon] You gotta be the slippery slope you want to see in the world.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] It's fascinating to me that your path to publishing… Yeah. You broke rules. But now we look at self pub to trad pub and that's not really rule breaking so much as it is a road less traveled.

[Chuck] Yes.

[Howard] 25 years ago, when I started putting Schlock Mercenary on the Internet, it was the same sort of thing. It was very rule breaking. Web comics were the new thing. Now you look at them and, oh, it's… Everybody knows what that is. Oh, it's a web comic. So in part I think some of the pattern here may be that if you break rules or if you break from a form, if you break from a process, and do something in a new way and succeed, the next generation is going to treat that as an accepted form, an accepted pattern, an established way of accomplishing things.

[Chuck] Oh, yes. Absolutely. I hope the lesson that they can take… That goes one step beyond that, too, which is I hope another generation, listeners to this, thinking, well, how am I going to break into it, not only could you say, well, I could trod the path that Chuck did, but the broader idea of I could just come at things from a totally different angle. Something that I have that Chuck has never thought. It's like that is the beauty of art right there. So I just I would love to encourage others to do that. I'm so proud that it has kind of worked out into a career that supports itself by kind of trodding this outsider path. And, thank you, DongWon, for being a part of that.

[DongWon] Thank you for letting me be a part of it. In terms of… You spent all that time building up your profile, having a career, doing the Tinglers, building that audience. You built… What you built outside of the traditional rules of publishing, even outside the rules of like indie publishing. Right? Like, even on the indie side, people work doing what you were doing in terms of the, like, punk rock methodology of writing in terms of, like, doing it in 24 hours, embracing the medium itself as part of what your message is. What then made you pivot again into sort of breaking through all of those rules now into doing something with a traditional publisher? Right?

[Chuck] Yes.

[DongWon] Like, in terms of making that move… Why put yourself back in all the boxes that traditional publishing creates and loves to reinforce and loves to build around all of us?

[Chuck] So, this is kind of, I guess, that's a great question. Why I encourage others… Like I… You can trod the traditional path, but, like I said, you can break off… The one thing I think breaking off really has going for it is that if you get the opportunity, if it resonates with this timeline and means something to buckaroos, then when you do want to reach more through a traditional means, you can enter that conversation a completely different way than most are used to. Because you come at it as a sort of equal. I wanted to do traditional publishing because I knew that I had the ability and the strength because of my own situation that I could come in and make sure I only signed a deal with someone who would also let me do my Tinglers. Who would listen to exactly what I say and kind of treat me as sort of like an hauteur author almost where it's… I am very involved in every aspect of it, where I think some other authors might not be, as far as, let's say, cover decisions or edits or things. Because at this point in my career, it's like, why would you sign a deal with Chuck Tingle and not want him to write a Chuck Tingle book?

[DongWon] Yep.

[Chuck] So I'm allowed to basically do whatever I want as if I was self published, but with this massive company behind me because I've already proven it. I think there's something with… Not just with publishing, but with all types of mediums where the hopefuls who want to be career artists almost see it as a lotto ticket. I think that's a very unfortunate way to look at it, because you're essentially, like, begging someone to notice for you. Never come to the big record label, the giant film studio, the big five publisher saying please, please, notice me. Come to them as an equal. I always think back to the show American Idol where everyone was competing for a quote record deal. It always blew my mind because I would see it and think, well, what's the deal? What is the record deal? Is it a good one? Is it a bad one? Why are we competing for this nebulous idea that is not a good thing inherently? I feel like in book publishing too, you see that as, like, if I could only get this big five publishing deal… What big five publishing deal? Is it going to be a good one or a bad one?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuck] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think one of the things that you said about coming to the table as an equal is something that… That people just don't… They get hung up on the dream. It's something that you don't have to have a huge platform already to bear in mind, that publishers exist to publish things. They do not exist without your work.

[Chuck] Yep. Absolutely. Yes. It's almost a mentality.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuck] It doesn't have to be. You just have to go and be willing… Go into it and think if I don't like this deal, I'll say no, because I'm a great writer.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Chuck] So few buckaroos seem to do that.

[DongWon] The way I frame it is you have to be undeniable. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Because if you are deniable, they will deny you. Right?

[Chuck] Yes.

[DongWon] Part of being undeniable is being willing to walk away from a thing that may be what you've dreamed of, but is on bad terms or isn't with the right partner or at the right time. Right? All of those things, we all… All of us here we know too well can really derail you in a variety of ways. So it's not just reaching for a literary agent or a book deal or a opportunity, it has to be the right one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The way you get the right one is by manufacturing it, by creating it. Like, playing within the boundaries of how people expect you to behave won't always get you there. I mean, now you have to be respectful, you have to treat people…

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] With courtesy and respect and on the terms that they are requesting for a variety of different reasons. But, provided you're living up to civility and treating people like people, you don't have to conform to the expected channels. Like, most of my clients did not come to me through the query process. Right? Most of my clients in one way or another didn't end up in the same sort of set of traditional rules that we talk about in terms of how you get a book deal. Right?

[Chuck] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Well, what publishers are looking for a lot is the thing that Chuck is delivering, which is a book that no one else could have written.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] I think that when we get hung up in rules, when we get hung up in the this is the way things are done, what we're doing is that we are putting ourselves into boxes, and that we're trimming off the pieces of ourselves that don't fit into those boxes, and those pieces are often the things that make our work the most interesting. [Garbled] Howard was using the metaphor of that first initial rough sketch, and then you draw over and over and over again. I see early career writers editing themselves out of the story in an effort to meet all of the rules.

[DongWon] Which is why the rawness of the Tinglers works so well. Right?

[Chuck] Yep.

[DongWon] You mentioned that you lead with message, not with character or plot. You lead with message. But then you also made the medium itself the message. Like, for you, how is leading with message driving what you choose to work on and how you write and how you publish?

[Chuck] Yes. Well, I've always looked at art as more than what's between the… For the example of writing, it's more than just the words in the book, and I think it really drives. I have found authors do not like this. But I'm going to go with it. There was a sort of thing of, like, well, I just want to write the books. I don't want to have to be a brand. I'm sure you probably have 10 episodes of the same podcast about it. Fortunately, for me, I have always loved that because I don't think that there is a difference. I don't think that art ever stops when the medium ends. I think when you read the last page of the book, that the art is in what you dream of that night when you go to bed.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Chuck] It's in what you eat for dinner. I think that the song doesn't end when the track stops. It's everything that you know about that singer. It's everything that you don't know about that singer. It's… So this idea of art in a vacuum, I think is really held onto tight by a lot of writers who are thinking, well, I don't want to have to be anything else. Being something else… Not being something else, that in itself is a statement. But, fortunately for me, I always thought, wow, how many different ways can I find to make art more than just the product, more than just the book? How can I make it everything that surrounds it? How can I show it's not in a vacuum? So I just spent a lot of time doing that because I love it. I kind of just got lucky in that fortunately for me… In an office, they call that branding. For me, I call it art.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like…

[DongWon] For me, I call that just being alive.

[Chuck] There you go. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think this is a great opportunity for us to go ahead and move to our homework, because otherwise we will be talking for several hours.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Chuck, I think you have some homework for us.

 

[Chuck] I do have some homework. So, whatever your work in progress is, find a section, whether it's a chapter or just a page, and think of the writing rule that you believe is kind of the North Star of sort of not necessarily your personal rule, but the writing at large, the English department would hammer into you. Take that rule, whatever you think it may be, and try to rewrite that section either without that rule or doing the opposite. Then look at it and see what change does that make? Is there a version of it where you can use this as a tool, not a rule?

 

[Mary Robinette] I love that homework. Thank you so much for joining us, Chuck.

[Chuck] Oh, my gosh. Thank you for having me. And before I go, I've just got to say, it is truly an honor. This is… I came to this, like I said, not knowing anything about writing, and actually, listening to this podcast taught me a lot. So I am so honored to be here and I just… I love it. So it's really wonderful to be here. Thank you so much.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Well, you all have heard that here. So, now you are out of excuses. Go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-08-identity-3-stakes-and-fears

 

Key points: Stakes and fears. Relationships? What will make the character feel less about themselves? A friend might die? Your parent will be disappointed? Stakes often are what will I lose, rather than what will I gain.  Sometimes stakes are small. Low stakes sometimes become important. What is the worst thing that could happen? Sometimes big stakes aren't as important as small ones. What fears do you give a character? There's a hole, an absence in the character. Do we fear the unknown, or do we fear knowing it? Be obvious. Courage is picking up a flashlight and looking in the dark corner. Trauma points, along axes of safety, connection, and empowerment. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 08]

 

[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.

 

[DongWon] We're excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you'll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We'll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining your writing. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you'll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Season 20, Episode 08]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Character stakes and fears.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] This week, we're continuijng our conversation about sort of the lenses of who, talking about character. The thing that I wanted to focus on this week is talking about how the fears that a character has and the stakes that a character faces help move them through the story, and help create the story that exists around them. Right? So, last time, we talked a lot about motivation and goals. The way I think about motivation and goals is very internal. Right? That is how the character's relating to themselves. When it comes to stakes, now we are getting to the parts where we're starting to feel tension, where the audience is relating to the character, we understand what their goals are, but now are feeling the pressure that they're facing and how that's moving them through the world. So when I think about stakes, I don't necessarily think necessarily about failure or danger, because we are all… Your readers are all people. As people, we tend to care about other people. So, what we care about are relationships more than we care about physical danger. Right? So, starting in an action scene can sometimes feel a little flat. But if you put a relationship under pressure in that, that's where a little bit more of that juice can come from. So, how do you guys think about creating stakes, especially initially when you're jumping into a story?

[Mary Robinette] I usually think about something that makes… Will make the character feel like less of themselves. So I find that early on, and then I say this with early career writers, that I would say, well, this… The goal is to have the eight gems of Rovisla…

[Laughter]

[Erin] We got a C in it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry. I do pronounce…

[Howard] That letter's supposed to be an apostrophe.

[Mary Robinette] I do pronounce the apostrophes. It's a regional variation. So… If they fail, then they don't have the eight gems. An inverse of the goal is not… Like, that's not compelling. Or they're like… And then they might die, which is actually, like, the least compelling…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Thing. I think, then, a friend might die. But that's…

[DongWon] Or your parent will think you're a failure because you didn't bring the eight gems back.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. That's significantly worse for most people.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You do not want someone to be disappointed in you.

 

[Dan] Yeah. I think a lot of stakes often come down to what do I stand to lose rather than what do I stand to gain. It's not so much about gaining those gems. This is how the D&D movie starts, is look at this great life that I had before everything went wrong. We see him throughout the movie trying to get back to zero. Just trying to struggle back to regain the things that he lost in the first place.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes the stake can be really kind of small. Like, when you look at… Back at, This Is How You Lose the Timewar, that initial stake was if I don't check this, I'm going to be curious for the rest of my immortal life. Just that, oh, what am I going to miss? It's a small thing, but it is the thing that also is the catalyst.

[DongWon] Then, the stakes of that so quickly become what does this other person think of me? They might think I'm not a worthy competitor. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Not think I'm a worthy companion by the end of it. The evolution of that stake is the thing that gives so much of the tension to that little novel.

 

[Erin] One thing I really like is when something feels low stakes, and then it turns out that it was worse than you thought. When the thing…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, oh, I'm just, like, trying to, like, get my cup of coffee so that I can make it through the day. But actually it turns out that there's something about… I cannot think what that would be… About getting that cup of coffee that is, like, suddenly the most important thing. Because when you're doing something low stakes, like, if you're doing a low stakes mission in life, you're not super prepared, you're just, like, I need to do this one thing. I'm only bringing what I need to get this small thing done. If that small thing becomes huge, then, all of a sudden, you are unprepared, you're afraid that you will fail, you feel like you have not brought your best self maybe to the table. Then it taps into those deeper fears about who am I, what will people think of me. It's sort of the same thing that gets people to often… When I go to karaoke, people will talk about how bad their voice is today. You don't want people to think that you're doing your best and you failed. You're either…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's like, I could have done better if things had been set up differently for me.

[Mary Robinette] I see this in critique groups. I actually have my critique or's do a ritual apology before we begin where everybody apologizes all at the same time. Because all of them are afraid that people will think that they're not a good writer, and that they are lesser. I… When I'm sometimes talking to a student who's having a little bit of a meltdown, I'm like, okay, but what is actually the worst thing that could go wrong if someone doesn't like your story? They're like, it doesn't get published. I'm like, and what's the worst thing that can go wrong if it doesn't get published? I write a new story? I'm like, great.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Is that a bad outcome? No?

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] Yeah.

[[DongWon] For an example, I'm going back to your sort of coffee thing becoming bigger stakes. One of my favorite escalation of stakes scenes in a movie is in The Devil Wears Prada. Where, early on, and he goes to get coffee for her boss and brings it back, and, kind of like is in a meeting about… I can't remember exactly what it's about… And she kind of snickers at something. There's this incredible speech that Miranda goes through about the color of the sweater that Andy is wearing in this scene, the periwinkle blue speech, and it's like this thing that goes from the stakes of my job are absurd, I'm getting coffee for someone who runs a fashion magazine, to understanding the perspective of the people who run this magazine and why clothes and fashion and aesthetics matter in the world and the context of that, and her realizing that, oh, no, I want the positive regard of this woman who is now yelling at me because I didn't take this seriously enough. So that slow escalation as we understand the terms of the movie and the stakes of everything that's going to come in the rest of the movie is just a masterfully done scene.

 

[Dan] At the same time, one of my favorite tropes is the complete opposite of this. Where we realize that what we thought were the big big stakes really aren't as important as the small stakes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] The Perdiem Chronicles does this really well.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah.

[Dan] Throughout, where… For the several books, they don't need him to be a hero. They need him to be an assistant pig keeper.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because the pig's the hero, and they need him to do that. In book 4, this kind of comes to ahead with one of my favorite lines where he's trying to work with the witches, and they say, "Any hero can soar with the eagles. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." Like, learning how to be a person, learning how to fend for yourself, how to survive in the world is so much more important than one or two acts of heroism.

[Howard] I got to thinking about the stakes and the fears in the very first Iron Man movie. Because the movie begins and Tony Stark wants for nothing. He can afford to blow the deal, he can afford to… He can afford to screw up because he's so rich. It just doesn't matter. Then the very first set of stakes he's presented with are now you might die. Now you need to invent or die. Those aren't the big stakes. He invents, he saves his life, and then he puts the whole company at risk. Now it is… Now he might not have money. Then we find out what was really happening here is someone's trying to take the company from you, and they're going to find another way to kill you. The final battle in the movie is because Tony doesn't want them to hurt Pepper. It comes back to a personal thing. It is not I need to where the Iron Man suit to save the world or to save the company or to save my life. It is because my friend might die.

[DongWon] So, while we all contemplate what we're all afraid of enough to make us a hero, let's take a break.

 

[DongWon] Welcome back. So we've been talking sort of about character stakes and how that relates to relationships. Right? One of the things that comes into that idea of stakes is the concept of fear. Right? We often have seen fear in stories as a negative to be overcome. But when you're thinking of how you're constructing character arc, how you're constructing a character, how are you thinking of what do I want to make this character afraid of? What fears are you putting into your characters that will help move them forward through the story?

[Mary Robinette] So this is why we wanted to tie these episodes together, because I will often look at their goals and motivations. What I find is that there's something that the character… There's a hole, there is an absence in the character, there's something. They are either rushing towards things, which are their goals, to try to fill it, or they are running away from the goal. So the… Having to confront, oh, this is a lack in myself is something that a lot of people are afraid of. Like, no one wants to confront their failings, their… No one wants to confront the fact that they're vain. Or no one wants to confront the fact that they're insecure. No one wants to confront, like, people want to be self-sufficient. So if I can create a fear and a reason to trigger that fear in them, that causes them to have to confront that or, to, like, flee from it. It's like I don't want to believe that I'm selfish, so I'm going to help these people. But they're constantly, like, but maybe I don't help them…

 

[Howard] We talk a lot about how people tend to fear the unknown. I don't think were actually afraid of the unknown. I think were afraid of knowing it. I… There's a thing out there that I don't know anything about and I would prefer not to. It may be a truth about me. It may be the fact that layoffs are coming. But there is a dark corner out there that I don't want to peer into, because it has information in it that is going to force me onto a new path, and I would rather continue to live with ignorance as bliss. Ignorance isn't actually bliss. But it's not the fear of the unknown, it's the fear of learning a thing that will now force me to change.

[DongWon] I would say it's even more than that. It's the fear of how other people see you changing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

 

[DongWon] Right? That in encountering the unknown, you will be forced to change in some way through that encounter and what your partner thinks or what your children think of you, what your friends think of you, what your boss thinks of you, all these will change when that layoff comes. The thing you're afraid of is how do I survive that? Is that a survivable encounter? So I think that tapping into that fear is going to be the thing that will drive your characters forward. The thing I want to emphasize about when we talk about character fears like this, there's an instruction in the game dialect that's a player instruction that I love a lot. The instruction is very simple, it just says be obvious. As a player, when you're making choices, make really obvious choices. That will lead to complexity through the interaction of everyone at the table making obvious choices. Not overthinking it. So leaning into what your character's afraid of in a Broadway will lead to specificity because of all the other stuff we've talked about in this section when were talking about the lens of who as they bounce off the other characters in your plot. But don't be afraid of them being afraid of a really broad thing, of, oh, my partner's not going to like me, my parents won't love me anymore. My sister will hate me now. Right? Like, those are really juicy, really powerful motivators that I think drive most people as they move through the world.

[Dan] Well, it's not just those choices that can be really obvious. But the resolutions, the ways of dealing with them, can be really blunt and obvious as well. Going back to a previous episode, we talked about Toy Story… Or I talked about Toy Story…

[Laughter]

[Dan] His… What he really fears there is that he has no value. Unless he… And he… Once again, he misinterprets that by saying, I will have value if I am the favorite toy. That all comes to a head when he gives the huge speech to Buzz. You're a cool toy. That is not only the moment where he convinces Buzz that it's okay to be a toy instead of an actual spaceman, that is very clearly and obviously the moment where Woody is convincing himself, being a cool toy is awesome even if I'm not the favorite toy. I don't need to find external validation. I can just love me for who I am. Whether I'm the favorite toy or not.

[Mary Robinette] It's occurring to me that what we're talking about here is basically give your character imposter syndrome.

[Laughter]

[Howard] One of the thoughts that I had just a moment ago, after talking about the fear of the unknown, the fear of knowing the unknown. Courage, to me, has always been defined as moving forward despite fear. Not an absence of fear, it's moving forward despite fear. I love the idea that if were not afraid of the unknown, we're afraid of knowing what's there, then courage is picking up the flashlight and looking at what's in the corner. That, just as a metaphor for me feels like an easy sort of litmus test, lens if you will, for looking at what my character's doing and deciding, well, in act one, they're staying away from the corner. They're not peering into the shadows, and things are coming out of the shadows and they are reacting. In act two, Act III, they're picking up the flashlight and they are staring at what they were afraid to stare at before.

 

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes look at really primal fears as a thing to give a character. But I was having… I was talking to my therapist and she started talking about trauma points. I'm like, I'm sorry, sorry, can you repeat those? I'm just going to start taking notes right now…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, stop doing a therapy session and started being a… This is really useful.

[Howard] I no longer need therapy, I have a professional interest in the information you're providing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So she said that most people have these trauma points where something bad happened in childhood. Most of the time, you are not actually aware of what that is, because it happened when you were fairly young. But it was a long one of three axes, safety, connection, and empowerment. When we are looking at our Tony Stark example, the thing for him, his trauma point was connection, because of his damaged relationship with his mom… With his dad. You can see that. It's, like, how does he handle that? He makes Jeeves, who's in artificial intelligence… Boo, hiss… Artificial intelligence connection. He buys friends, essentially. Then when he realizes he has genuine friends, that then becomes the most vulnerable thing for him, because it's something he absolutely cannot lose.

[Erin] I think that doesn't necessarily mean that every… I mean, we can traumatize every character, and we should…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But we don't have to actually, because sometimes I think some of that is based on traumatic experiences, but also some of it's just a staying alive lizard brain, like, human response. Like… Safety, like, every creature has a desire to stay alive. Like, as a species, like, they do things that will help to keep them alive.

[Howard] Whether you're a mother or whether you're a brother…

[Erin] Exactly.

[Howard] Staying alive…

[Oo, oo, oo…]

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, I think of, like, my cat… Like every… Cats want to get high. Like when I…

[Laughter]

[Erin] There's a tornado warning… Yes, they do, in every sense. No, but whenever… When there's a tornado warning…

[DongWon] I've lost many a spider plant to cats, so, yes.

[Erin] Yeah, like you're like… I'll be like, no, we have to, like, get it in a lower part of the house.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] Because there's a tornado. But the cats, just, like, something is weird in the air and the best way to get away from weird things is to get as high as possible where I cannot possibly care anymore. No, to get to like a higher elevation where I can keep an eye on everything. It's just kind of baked in. We have our own thing with that. We are also safer in numbers. Humans as a species have, like, not very good, like, actual personal defenses. Like we don't have, like, really tough hides or really sharp teeth. We've got these opposable thumbs and the ability to come together in a group and build tools that help to keep us safe. So all of these things are things that are very baked in, I think, is very primal fears.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Empowerment, being able to take action to change the environment around you, because we don't necessarily physically adapt to our environments the way that, like, a reptile might.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So I think it's really nice to think about, like, those primal fears. I also just wanted to say that… I love to write, like, horrible people as characters. So I'm, like, they don't do that, like, when they… They let their fears get the best of them. So, a lot of times, I love thinking about what happens if the character does not overcome their fears. What if they do the thing… They're like I'm afraid that no one will love me so I won't let anyone, or, I will put up a wall. That's just going to be my character arc is becoming a worse version of myself. So it can be something that drives your characters positively or negatively.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's something that, like, as you were talking, was making me think about Sour Milk Girls, and how, like, the fear absolutely takes over that character. For listeners who are just joining us, you can hear a deep dive about that in season 18.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's what makes a truly relatable villain pop off the page…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is understanding where they're coming from, understanding where what their fears are rooted in. It's also what allows you to give a hero a truly believable low point. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The low point of them giving into a fear that you've seen them grapple with and understand intimately over the course of the series, that let you buy into the moment where the hero does fail. Because so often we see those moments and they fall flat, because it's not connected to anything. There was nothing actually at stake for the hero when things went off the rails. So, giving them things to care about, giving them goals and motivation, but then giving them fears that go alongside those, that is the thing that I think really can juice your story and get it to that next level.

[Mary Robinette] I will say also that going back to the idea of the traumas, the trauma does not have to be a big trauma.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, my… I don't know what some of… Like, what my trauma triggers are. But knowing the axes that it's on can really help clarify how a character reacts to things. Which again can help you shape the plot when you apply that lens to your story.

[DongWon] Exactly. On that note, I think we should go to some homework.

[Mary Robinette] I think that sounds like a great idea.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[DongWon] To traumatize our listeners a little bit more.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] So the first thing I want you to do is to make a note of all the major things that your main character is afraid of. List out those things, the fears that they have. Then, take your MC and draw a little map of all the characters that there connected to, and describe their connections to these other characters in one sentence or less. Now compare the list of relationships you've made to the list of fears that you've made for that character, and see if those two lists are in conversation with each other. Are they supporting each other, or are they completely disconnected? If they are disconnected, start thinking about how do I bring these two closer together to sort of get that feedback loop between relationship and fear?

 

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

 

Writing Excuses 20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-06-lens-2-identity-1-history-and-community

 

Key points: The lens of who, by history and community. How much do you need to know about their background before the story to tell it effectively? I discover as I go, and then layer it in for continuity. Backfill! Beware the statement without narrative weight, without effect on the character. Consistency! History and identity and community are opportunities, not burdens. Make your identity verb-based. Where are they on axes of power? What stakes are driving the plot? What are their idioms? How does the character relate to their communities? Can anybody solve the plot problem, or does the character solve it because of who they are? Use pieces to imply a larger community or world. Make sure they have enough context. Build your net, drop something into it, and then tell us about the three or four threads that caught it. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 06]

 

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events 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 06]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] History and community.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] Today, we are going to continue our discussion of the lens of who by talking about what your character brings with them from who they are. Their identity, at its core, the communities that they come up in. Like, how much do you need to know… Question for the group… About who your character was before they entered the story in order to tell it effectively?

[Mary Robinette] I find that I often don't know the answer to that when I start writing, but sometimes, I will be writing and will discover a thing later as I go. But then I have to go back and layer into the early part of the story before I have made that discovery in order to have my character make sense and have them have continuity. In a beautiful, perfect world, I will have sat down and I will have figured out how old they are and how many siblings there are. But a lot of times, especially when I'm doing short fiction, I just… I just start writing.

[DongWon] You can backfill all that information in as you go. I think, in a lot of ways, like you're saying, it's not that you have to have prewritten the document ahead of time, though knowing that here's the town they grew up in or whatever. But be prepared that when something comes up, to find the answer in that moment, and give them that context that they're missing. Right?

 

[Erin] I actually think that layering and backfilling that you're talking about are actually the key things that I really want to talk about in this episode. Which is, how do the ident… Like, how does the lens of identity and community… How does that lay on the story? The reason I mentioned it that way is because sometimes I'll read people's work and they will have a fact about their character, they grew up in this neighborhood or they suffered through… They're an orphan and they grew up eating from a trashcan on the streets. As people do in fantasy worlds often. And it's like, I hear that. Then, when I read the story, if you had never told me that about the character…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I would never know it. It doesn't feel like it has any actual narrative weight. So how do we give the identity of our characters narrative weight in the story?

[Mary Robinette] I think it is a lot of the… It winds up affecting the choices that you make. For instance, if I am… If I have to walk down a dark street at night, I am going to make different choices than a six-foot white guy who lifts. I will be evaluating things extremely differently. So, for me, this gets into something that we'll be talking about later, it gets into some of the reactions that the character makes, and also the language that they use to describe things, the internal reactions that they have. All of those things are informed by their history, their experiences.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, as we're talking about this, I can't stop thinking about a meme that already feels dated, and by the time this comes out, will feel truly fossilized. But the whole, like, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree yesterday. Right? You exist in the context of all that came before. Right? Like, the thing is, is when a character feels like they fell out of a tree yesterday, that's when it feels like a failure state. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon], like, you're saying, like, you can say the detail out loud of, like, oh they grew up on the street. But then they walk into a restaurant and, like, order all the food and, like, feel like so comfortable in that. It's like a diff… It's like is that really a character who just came off the street? Right? Or, like, what is the context that led to that? So, it's not that you have to prewrite all of the context before, but you do need the consistency of it. Like, when you introduce something, you need to make sure that that feels felt in the choices, in the wor… And how you're describing it, and how they speak and what they do.

 

[Howard] This is a microscale version of the game that I'm always playing with the macro of worldbuilding. Where I have to look at the implications of the thing that I've put in my world. If this character is someone who grew up during the Great Depression, or lived through the Great Depression, they have behaviors that don't make sense to me. Lot of hoarding of things that don't necessarily need to be hoarded is something that you'd find from that generation. So I'm always asking myself, are there implications that I need to examine of whatever this back story is. Sometimes I invert it. I have the character do a thing, and then I ask myself, this is an implication… This was implied by something in their back story that I don't know yet. What is that thing? Should I write that thing now, or should I just put a pin in it? Maybe have another character put a pin in it for me? Hey, why are you hoarding Mason jars? Why are you keeping Mason jars? And nobody answers the question. But now my readers aren't going to pester me about it. Because another character asked the question, and now we know that it's obviously justified, because someone else wondered why it was there.

[Mary Robinette] Can I offer a very specific example from something that I wrote where I had to backfill character? So, I have this whole Lady Astronaut series, and it started with a book… A novelette called The Lady Astronaut of Mars. In that, my character Elma, who in the novels is Jewish, is not Jewish. That's not a decision I had made for her. I'm not even certain that she's Southern. I think she probably is. But there's a line in that, in Lady Astronaut of Mars, in which she talks about eating crawfish as a child. Which is not something that most Jewish kids who are observant would do. So when I went back to write Calculating Stars, and I had made the decision to have Elma be Jewish for a number of different structural plot reasons, I had to come up with the back story that would have allowed her to have that experience as a child. That then informed every decision that she made going through the story. And then every subsequent thing. And it… So it is something that I have both discovered, but also that I had to shape the lens through which she was viewing the world in order to have that be a… Make sense and have a consistency for the character. That her family grew up secular, because her father was in the military and they were trying to mask the fact that they were Jewish to outsiders.

 

[DongWon] What I love about this story is… there's a little bit of a language we've been talking about this so far that almost makes it feel like a burden. Like, how do you keep track of it? How do you have this consistency? But what I love about it is the way in which history and identity and community are opportunities. Right? Like, you found a thing and that gave you an opportunity to make the character feel more interesting and nuanced and three-dimensional. Right? There… All of these elements of introducing aspects of the character's context, of their history, of their connection, are storytelling prompts for you to then fill out your role more, to find plot in it. Right? It's what I love about characters in role-playing games is that you don't just say a thing or introduce a thing, then it's suddenly, like, oh, the whole character's descending from this one prompt that… Or turn of phrase that he used or an attitude that they had. Erin, you and I were in a game together recently, and I introduced a character who was extremely cantankerous…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And fought with everybody. So then the question kind of became a little bit, why is she like this? Then we developed a whole relationship of, like, oh, she was sibling with your character, and, like, all of these other things. The joy for me is finding that opportunity and letting that be the seed for character, story, conflict, all the things that we want to make the story work.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that, to me, like, identity is such an important thing. It drives a lot of things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Trying to figure out, like, why a character is the way they are, and all the things that they carry with them, is a huge part of writing for me. I think it's why I love voice so much. I think that one of the… A lot of times, we think of identity as noun based. It's about the things. Like, this person carries this item or eats this food or goes to this place of worship or what have you. But I think that, Mary Robinette, you sort of alluded to this earlier, to me, the interesting thing about identity is identity as a verb. The way you make choices, the way that you, like, take action in a situation is going to be… Hoarding is like, that's the verb. Do you know what I mean? Like, the Mason jar isn't the important thing. It is the collecting, the keeping, fear of things being taken away from you. I think that really thinking about how can we take identity from feeling like a noun, which I think can sometimes make things feel more shallow, like, I added all the right nouns, how come this person doesn't feel like they embody this identity? It's because their verbs haven't been changed.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Only the nouns have.

[Howard] There's a nineties sitcom… I can't remember the name, I don't think it ran past one season. But it had Jenna Elfman in it. At one point, she is very upset that she's going to this place and she's not going to identify with anybody, she comes from lower income or something, I don't remember. And her brother says, "You'll be fine. Y'all were raised by the same TV." I remember loving that line because in the nineties, we were kind of all raised by the same TV. But that's no longer a thing. That's… There's a different set of com… We weren't all raised by the same YouTube, the same cnn.com. The disparity of pop-culture background or the diversity of it is so significant now that you can't all be raised by the same TV. So I now ask myself often, rather than what are the implications, or what is this… How is this one character different in terms of background, I ask myself how is everyone the same on any point, and why? What is it that they would all have in common? How could they possibly have all that in common?

[Erin] Which is a great time to say that something that all of our episodes have in common is a break. And we'll be right back after it.

 

[Erin] All right. Thinking a little more about identity and community. So we've talked a little bit about what you do with it, but how do you, and I feel like I've said this in earlier episodes, how do you actually figure out, like, what your character's identity should be? You talked about making a character Jewish for specific story reasons. Is it, like, when we're picking the identity of the community of our characters, what are the things that we should be looking out for so that we can find those opportunities to make our stories richer?

[Mary Robinette] I have talked about this in previous episodes, the wonderful book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? This introduced me to the ax… The idea of axes of power. Which is why when I needed with Elma, I made her Jewish, was that I tried to think about where my character sits in axes of power. Where do they have power, where do they not have power? I try to make sure that all of my characters have at least two areas where they do not feel like they have power, where they feel subordinate in the larger society. Because that introduces vulnerability, but it also often introduces some of their strengths, some of the ways that they defined themselves. So that was one of the reasons that I did that with Elma, was that in Lady Astronaut of Mars, she's older, she's a caretaker. Both of those are sliders on that axes of power that are farther down. But when I move all of the way back to Calculating Stars, she's young, she's beautiful, she's smart. And I didn't have enough sliders that were lower on the power structure, and it was 1952. So I made that choice. But, for me, that's what I start looking for, is where do they feel like they are lacking in power and where do they have power that they are unaware of.

[DongWon] I love axes of power as a framework here. I think kind of ties into how I think about it. Which is about stakes. Right? When you have a character… Plot derives from character in my mind, because of stakes, because of a character's… How they relate to other characters, how they feel about them, how they feel about themselves. Right? So when you're looking at what stakes do I want this character to have, what relationships are at risk by choices that they make, or what pressures are put on them by the world that puts these relationships at stake? That leads you to the point where you're now asking questions about history and community. Right? Who are they connected to, what history do they have with that person, and why is that relevant for the story I'm trying to tell? Right? You get to plot by developing these stakes. But as you're asking questions of what is this book about, why am I writing this book? I think that's when you get to that layering in these pieces of history and identity and a sense of self.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that… When we were talking about community, one of the other things that I have begun using as a shorthand since we did the space economy camp is thinking about the idioms that they grew up with. Because those shape the opinions that we have. They are parts that we don't… We often don't interrogate because it's like, well, everybody says, no such thing as a free lunch. But that's extremely different if you grew up with that as your truism, that's extremely different than somebody who grows up with their core idiom, their core truism, as a rising tide raises all boats. Like, those are two different ways of interacting with community. So I will often think about how the community defines that. Where the community sits with that. Like, if my character embraces that or if they push against it.

[Erin] One thing I really like to think about axes of power is who's aware of them. So, one of the biggest things that, like… There are many definitions of privilege, but one of the definitions is the ability to ignore the axes of power, because you're really high on it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So why do you care. Because I always think about… I know the book you're talking about, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I remember talking to friends, black friends, about it at the time, being, like, well, why isn't it called Why Do All the White Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria, because they do too. So, but it's, like, no one ever asks that question because there's a… An idea that that's a default.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, that… Why wouldn't they? That's… They're just… That's just Jimmy hanging out with Jen versus, like, if I'm hanging out with somebody, then that is… Something is wrong there, something is off. So being able to recognize the axes of power and what your relationship is to them. Do you understand where you are in the world? Like, do you understand the axes of power that you're on, or is it one that you either can ignore or that you're in denial about? Like, what is the relationship? I also think it's interesting to think about, like… I love relationships between individuals and structures.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] You know what I mean? So it's, like, you and an axis of power, or you and community. Are you someone feeling, like, you're in the midst of your community? Well embraced by them? Do you feel on the outskirts of one community, but the in in another community that you think is very core to who you are is also one that you feel at odds with, that's a very different character than one who comes from the exact same community but who feels like they are the absolute, like… I am that community. We view things exactly the same way, we use the same idioms, we do the same things. So I think thinking about how your character relates, not just to other people, but two other structures, is a really fun way of looking at it.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One piece that I want to come back to is the idea of these lenses as a way to examine… Or a way the audience experiences the story. We're talking about who these characters are, what their history, their tradition, their influences, so on and so forth. Sometimes I'll have to ask myself whether the plot, mcguffin, action, the whatever it is that needs to happen to resolve things, could that have been done by anyone? Or can it only be done by someone who comes from this tradition? Because those are actually two very different stories. I like the story where anybody could have solved the problem, if they brought tools to bear and tried to solve the problem. But this character solved the problem in this way because of who they were. And that… For me, those are the stories that feel the most real. Those are the stories when I read them, I feel like I could have been that person. I'm experiencing the story as if I were there.

 

[Mary Robinette] You're making me think of something, just tying it back to something that Erin was saying, which is that you're using the tools that you have available, because of the experiences that you have. One of the things that I enjoy doing is thinking about this community, this connection. When you're looking at how to bring that to life on… For the character on the page for the reader, I often think about the pieces of the community that imply larger pieces of the community. That if you say, oh, yeah, I had to do that on my Naming Day. It's like that suddenly implies this whole… That there's a whole thing about Naming Days. That then implies this bigger ripple, especially if your character's like, oh, oh, my God, I had to do that on my Naming Day, my parents made me. It's like, okay, so there's a difference. It's implying these levels of… That there's more than one way to view the thing, there's more… That then implies that there's multiple groups within a larger group. Which I think is fun. I love that, but I also think that only works… You can't do it with something that is existing in isolation. Like, you can't just say, "Oh, yes. Oh, Naming Day, we all do this." It's gotta be tied to the emotions of the character. It's the connections.

[DongWon] I mean, this to me is like the flaw of, like, a certain type of dystopian YA. Right? Like, that was way popular, was it was so focused on just, like, the one thing that was different and existed in isolation and just didn't feel like there was other connections to that. Right? There wasn't further context. So when a character came from a place or had an identity or any of those things, it felt very reductive in a certain way. Right? Like. So without the further context and complexity, it didn't feel rich enough. Right? I think the ones that succeed very well, something like Hunger Games, does a great job of pulling in those other details, pulling in those other contexts around the central thing, and then ones that, I think, did not do as well were ones that failed to ask the further questions, failed to look at intersecting axes of power, failed to look at the ways in which this event connects to all these other events that happened in a person's life. Right?

[Erin] I think that's what makes it work when somebody uses a tool in an unexpected way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If there have been all these connections, you understand how they got there, and how something that character A sees as an oh, my gosh, an obvious tool I can use, character B would never recognize as a tool at all. Do you know what I mean? I love that type of thing where one character's like, yes, it is… The answer is so obvious, and another character is like, I don't even understand the question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And that is like such a beautiful moment of character, because even if we don't understand that culture, that identity, that context, we do understand that there are things that we know that others don't and things that we don't understand that others live in.

 

[Howard] When you look at these connections between characters and society and traditions and economies and po… There's this enormous network of things which as a writer, you can become very very oppressed by. Because drawing a matrix in which you have defined every point and drawn every line is nightmarishly difficult. The tool that I use… You treat that matrix as a net. Drop something onto the net. Where did it hit? You only need to define the threads where it landed. Those are what caught it. By defining those threads, those three or four threads, you have now implied the existence of the entire net, and the reader will believe in the entire net. Now you have to describe those three things well. You have to describe them in ways that make sense for the character, that imply the actual history of the character. But you only need three or four things to get us to believe that that whole web of your society, of your world, of your universe, from those three pounds of wet stuff between your ears, that whole universe you've created, we can believe it's real. You just gotta give us three threads.

[DongWon] I think about it as a GM, I think about it in terms of [paduke?] the game of go, where you are not defining all the connections between all the things. But what you will do when you're playing go is, as a strategic move, you'll put a piece out at a distant part of the board from which you are right now, and it's communicating I'm interested in that. I'm going to be making moves around that in the future. Hey, opponent, just so you know, we're going to be fighting about that in the future, so whatever's happening here, think about that, too. So, when it comes to worldbuilding a lot of times, I will just make a lot of stub documents with nothing in them, just a title of like this culture, food here, geography over there. I won't fill those in until they become relevant, and as things start becoming relevant, then I'll go and, like, okay, I need to think about this now because my characters are going over there now.

[Howard] Gotta tie this thread off.

[DongWon] Exactly. So, like the net you that you're talking about, you have this disparate web, but don't lose your mind trying to fill in all those details.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Take big swings when your character does interact with something. Define broad things. Reach for whatever their cultural contexts are and use those to keep building as they connect.

[Erin] To come back to something we talked about at the very beginning about weight, I think weight can often sound like a burden, but, to me, when you talk about building a net, it's making people feel like your worldbuilding has enough weight to catch the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Erin] With that in mind, we're going to go to the homework. Which is to identify something from your character's life from before the story begins. Identify… Especially if it's something, a community, an identity, some way that they interact with the broader world. Write a scene in which that element of the character weighs heavily on the scene but is never explicitly mentioned.

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-04-metaphor-1-puppetry

 

Key points: Puppetry as a metaphor for writing. Focus, breath, muscle, meaningful movement. Voice means different things. Puppetry has mechanical style, aesthetic style, and personal style. Genre! Meat actors and puppet actors. Lots of styles of puppets, lots of genres and subgenres and mashups. Space opera, horse opera, and horses can't sing! Building a puppet. What kind of puppet? Some key questions, what size is the audience, what's the budget? Then do a drawing, a rough sketch, a thumbnail sketch, what is the vibe? Work in layers. Pitches. Found object puppets. Focus for thoughts, what is your character looking at. Breath, emotion, pacing. Muscle, internal motivation. What is driving your character? Meaningful movement, actions and body language. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 04]

 

[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 04]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Puppetry as a writing metaphor. 

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] Today we're going to be talking about my favorite subject, puppetry. So the idea that we've got for you with this, and we're going to be doing this all season, is that the lived experience that we all have affects the way we think about writing. You've heard me talk about puppetry for basically 17 seasons now, since I first appeared on season 3, episode 14. But I wanted to do kind of a deeper dive into actually thinking about it as a metaphor, as a way for you to also begin thinking about things in your own life you can use as writing metaphors. So. This is going to be a lot of me talking, but...

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Everybody else is going to chime in at some point.

[Dan] Eventually.

[Mary Robinette] Eventually. So, in season 13… Season three, episode 14, I talk about the four principles of puppetry. Focus, breath, muscle, and meaningful movement. I talked about those as a way to think about character. What I also want to talk about is the way to think about puppetry as thinking about… How it informs the way I think about genre, how it informs the way I think about the lens that the… The voice with which we write. So I actually want to start by talking about voice. Since we're talking about lenses. I think that there's this wonderful thing in puppetry that writers can use. So you've heard people say, oh, it's very important to develop your voice, and, don't worry about developing your voice, your voice will come naturally. I love the voice of this. So we use the word voice to mean three different things. When you're talking about puppetry, you talk about the style of puppetry and that means three different things. There's the mechanical style, there's the aesthetic style, and then there's the personal style. So, the mechanical style is literally are you using a marionette? Are you using a hand puppet? Is it a giant body puppet? With writing, that mechanical style would be the like first person third person, YA, which has a different mechanical style… Middle grade, in particular, has a different mechanical style than adult. Gaming has a different mechanical style than prose. So what style of writing are you doing? Then, aesthetic is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like something that's handcarved from Appalachia? Does it… What does it look like? For writing, that is… Does it sound like it's Jane Austen? Does it sound like it is from the Bronx? Does it sound like…

[DongWon] Elmo Leonard.

[Mary Robinette] Elmo Leonard. Then, the personal is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it looks like a different character. Which is why when Steve… After Jim Henson died, and Steve Whitmire took over Kermit the frog, everybody kind of freaked out. Because there are just subtle differences, even though it's obviously hitting the same mechanical and aesthetic, because there's these subtle differences that affect the choices that the performer makes. That… That is the same thing that means you as a writer are the only person who can write the book that you're writing.

[DongWon] Which is such an important thing to remember. Because we all kind of tend to freak out with this horrible burden of influence that we feel from other authors and other versions of stories that we've read. But my Kermit is going to be different from your Kermit. My monomyth coming-of-age story is going to be very different from your monomyth coming-of-age story. Or whatever it is that we're writing. So, remembering that you are an important ingredient in your work I think is really vital.

[Howard] There's a flipside to this. The fear that people are going to read what you're writing and just hear you. If you've ever watched a puppeteer on stage sitting visibly right next to the puppet and performing the puppet. They vanish. They vanish completely. It's surprisingly easy for us, as writers, to vanish into our prose. It doesn't make our voice go away. But we can disappear.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's really important about having your own personal voice. Right? The thing that is really intrinsic to how you write, how you think, how you speak, is… There's a term called anxiety of influence. Right? This is when you are so concerned of, like, oh, no, I've replicated a plot from Star Wars. I've replicated a beat from this, or a worldbuilding element from Tolkien or whatever it is. The reason why it's okay to do that, the reason why… Not just because it's impossible not to, because you absorbed the things you've read and there's only so many stories and so many things, but because it's all going to be filtered through your natural voice. It will be transformed into something that feels different. Right? So when we say that you want to lean into and enhance your voice, this is the [thing] we're talking about, this natural style that you have that will… Everything will be rendered through it and therefore feel different if you allow yourself that kind of distinctiveness of the way you think and write.

[Dan] So, bringing this back to puppetry, I just watched a documentary about Jim Henson called Idea Man, which was wonderful. One of the interesting things in there is when they were talking about how he and his wife were just barely getting started. The reason that Kermit as a character took off was in part because the hand was so visible inside the puppet. Not only did it make it more malleable and you could do a lot of facial expressions, but the… You watched those early things and you can see the fingers inside of Kermit's head. That was something that they liked about it. That it made the puppet so particularly expressive of the puppeteer, that that personal style came through really strongly.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that it… It's difficult to remember now, because all of us have grown up with Sesame Street and with the moving mouth, hand and rod style being the predominant style. But when they started doing that, the predominant style was marionettes. The huge puppeteer at that time was Bill Baird, who was a marionette-ist. You've seen his work if you've seen Sound of Music. He built those marionettes, although the children did actually do the performance. But the… That look was the look that everyone was influenced by and mimicking. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, those were also these rigid, rigid figures. Then Jim Henson comes along with these incredibly malleable figures, and almost all of puppetry you see now on television is moving mouth puppets. But you can see the difference between, even though they're all using the same mechanical style now, and they're all… Everybody has been influenced by Henson, you can see the difference in different designers as they're working. I think that that's really exciting, like, when we get so wrapped up in the idea of the original idea. It's not that, it's the execution of it.

[DongWon] Well, what's interesting there is you have an intersection of mechanical voice and sort of your natural voice. Right? Because the mechanical voice in this case is allowing for different emphases on natural voice.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] You can see the performer in a different way than you can in marionettes. I mean, in marionettes, you will still have that natural voice, I'm assuming. But, as you're saying, in terms of being able to see the hand in the puppet… Very unsettling way to put that, by the way… Letting the mechanical enhance the natural, I think is a really wonderful way to do it. So, when we talk about fiction being voice-y, it is because you have this intersection of these two elements.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, all of these things are one of the reasons that I love using puppetry as a metaphor. So, now we're going to talk about a different aspect of puppetry to use as a metaphor. That's talking about the genre. So, for puppetry… Puppetry and science fiction and fantasy I feel like have a lot in common, in that we are both sort of the redheaded stepchild of our parent genre. So, puppetry is a form of theater. Puppet actors are actors. We think about ourselves as actors. The disparaging thing we talk about people who are not using puppets is that they are meat actors.

[Dan] Nice.

[Mary Robinette] Because we're performing with puppets, they're performing with meat. But the thing is that underneath that, there's this umbrella. So, there's this umbrella of puppetry, like we have an umbrella of science fiction and fantasy. Then, within puppetry, we have hand puppets… And these are all the mechanical style that you used to move the puppet. So you have hand puppets, you have rod puppets, you have shadow puppets, you have body puppets, and you have string puppets. Hand puppets, Kermit the frog.

[Howard] The Muppets are hand… Mostly hand puppets.

[Mary Robinette] The Muppets are hand puppets. But so are the puppets on Mr. Rogers. Those are also hand puppets. So anything you put your hand inside. Rod puppets are any puppets that's worked with a stick. That goes from Sicily and rod marionettes to [way angolek?] You guys can look these things up.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] They're amazing and beautiful. But the one you've probably seen, Slimy the Worm on Sesame Street. And also Rizzo the rat. Those are both controlled with a literal stick up their ass.

[Dan] And you thought I was making…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Bad metaphors here.

[Howard] Oh, Rizzo, I'm so sorry.

[Mary Robinette] Anyone did not deserve it, it would be Rizzo. Then you've got shadow puppets. Or screen puppets, they're sometimes called. That's anything where the… You've got… You're looking at an image on the screen. If you…

[DongWon] [Parawalkers?] is one example.

[Mary Robinette] Perfect. If you've got… You've probably done a shadow puppet where you've done the dog with your hand. It's one of the oldest forms of puppetry, but you can also do it with overhead projectors. There's a… So, like, within each of these, you get to drill down again. Then we got string puppets, which are marionettes, but they can also be cable control, for instance, in the original Little Shop of Horrors, the giant puppet is a cable controlled puppet. Those are mechanical cables that people are actually moving. That's also a string puppet. Then, body puppet is any puppet you put your entire body inside.

[Howard] Jack not name, Jack job.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Big Bird, Snuffy. So, within all of those, again, you can drill down further. It's the same thing with science fiction and fantasy, where you have science fiction, but then you also have space opera, you have near future, you have far future. What's interesting is the mash ups. So, we just mentioned Kermit the frog. Kermit the frog is actually a mashup that had never happened before. It is a mashup… Well… Shouldn't say never happened before. But it's the mashup of two styles that are not commonly mixed. Which is hand puppet and rod puppet. Rod puppets did not exist in the European vocabulary of puppetry until the early 1900s. That… They were brought over from Asia, from specifically Javanese puppets. Without that, that mingling of, that conversation between these two different cultures, these two different styles of puppetry, we would not have Kermit the frog, we wouldn't have the type of puppetry that we experience today. I think it's the same thing when we're talking about science fiction and fantasy. Like, steampunk. Is steampunk fantasy or science fiction?

[DongWon] Um… Who cares?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly. It's a mashup.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is the Swedish chef a hand puppet or hands? Because he's got a pair of human hands.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] He's got a pair of human hands.

[Howard] And… Who cares?

[Chorus of yeah]

[Howard] I just want to watch him.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But it's also… What I love is you talk about the lineages of puppetry too, as you're talking about new genres. Right? If where the rod puppetry comes from and it goes back to… Space opera. The reason it's called space opera is it comes out of a genre called horse opera, which is a type of Western. Right? So, the dominance of westerns as pulp fiction in the early twentieth century then transitions into spaceships and ray guns as technology evolves, as we enter slowly the atomic era, and then the horse opera becomes space opera.

[Howard] My brain… Oh, my gosh. You said horse opera, and the first thing I thought was that's ridiculous, horses can't sing.

[Laughter]

[Howard] And space can?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Anne McCaffrey made it happen. Yeah, we've got The Spaceship Who Sang. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But, that goes farther back into opera tradition. Right? It literally was called horse opera because it was taking the high stakes and melodrama from opera, translating it into the American West, and all of this. So, all of this is… Genre is about legacy and tradition as well, and the ways you can combine them is so novel and exciting.

[Mary Robinette] I think that this is a good opportunity for us to pause. When we come back, we're going to talk more puppets.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Do we want to move on to more puppet things.

[Yes!]

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So we're going to…

[DongWon] I just want to pause and say this is so delightful and so fun to dig deep into this topic. I mean, it… You brought this up over and over again throughout the show, but, like, to get it all in one place, I'm finding very delicious to go through one of the host's minds and how they think about it and approach it and all these things.

[Howard] The thing that's missing from the whole legend, the whole mythos of Writing Excuses, is video of Brandon, Dan, and Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Slack-jawed as Mary Robinette who we'd never had as a guest before guests, and talks about puppetry, and all of our minds explode at once. It was delightful.

[Mary Robinette] It was, I have to say, pretty satisfying.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But it is… Like, the reason that I brought up puppetry was… In that episode was that you all had asked me about… Something about the way I thought about writing. In my background in puppetry has affected everything about the way that I move through my writing career. So, the next thing were going to talk about is actually building a puppet. It affects the way that I think about writing. So, I see a lot of writers who get very hung up on, oh, I can't get my opening right. So, when I'm building a puppet, I sit down and I first have to think about what kind of puppet I'm going to build. I have to answer these questions about the style of puppet. I have to answer those questions first. And those questions are informed by a lot of different things. They're informed by what size is my theater. They're informed by who my audience is going to be. They're informed by my budget. And that affects… And this is before I actually get to the building part, which we will also talk about. But that affects my conception. For me, as a writer, when I sit down and think, oh, I'm going to write. Sometimes I do just free-form and right in the same way that sometimes you just doodle as an artist. Sometimes you just say here's some stuff, I'm going to slap it together and see what happens. But when I'm building something for a show, in the same way that I'm writing something for a themed anthology or for a contract, I think about what is the size of my theater? Am I writing a short story or am I writing a novel? Because that's going to affect all of my proportions. I think about the audience. Because that's going to affect the stylistic choices that I make. And, I think about my budget, because my budget for writing is my number of words. If I have a really small budget, which is, like, a 3000 word story, I cannot afford to have a lot of sets. Because every set costs words.

[DongWon] This is… So when I often talk about publishing advice and writing advice, one thing I say frequently is you have to hold to opposite ideas in your head at the same time and learn how to live in that contradiction. So, the reason I bring that up is in this case when it comes to writing your book, I firmly believe that you should not think about the market, you should not think about the world, you should just focus on the story you want to write, the book of your heart, all of that. Also, the contradictory advice of what you should do is think about the market, think about the industry, and think about what you want your book to look like in a certain way. Exactly, who's your audience, what's your target word count? If you're writing space opera and you write a 60,000 word novel, sorry, you didn't write a space opera, you wrote a short science fiction novel. Right? So to hit certain genre markers and to hit certain expectations of your audience, you do kind of have to frame things up in a certain way to set those expectations.

[Mary Robinette] So, what's interesting is that when I'm thinking about audience, I'm not thinking about markets. Because, specifically, because I come out of children's theater, my audience are not the people who are buying the tickets. So I'm thinking about will this be funny for a third grader? Will they get this reference? Will they be worried about this? Is this too scary for them? Then, later, I have to think about how do I get their parents to buy a ticket?

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But I don't think about how do I get their parents to buy a ticket when I am designing a book.

[DongWon] Right

[Mary Robinette] When I'm coming up with a show.

[DongWon] Maybe that's a useful distinction between thinking about audience when you're starting to craft versus thinking about audience when you're getting ready to pitch. Right? Because those are two very different stages of the project.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With two very different mindsets and approaches. When you start thinking too much about the marketing and the publishing framing, I think that can infect…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Your work in a way that can be limiting. But I do think it's important to think about who do you want to read this book. Who's this book for, on some level.

[Howard] I think one of the challenges that many writers… New writers, old writers, established, published, whatever… Many of us face is the discovery right about the time, and I'm going to lean into the puppetry metaphor in ways that may not work, right about the time that you're hot gluing the last bits of whatever to your hand puppet, and you realize, oh, wait, this hand puppet actually needs to be eight feet across and be driven by cables, and I need to now go rewrite my whole book, because I've discovered something about it that says this structure isn't right, and I didn't know how to build Audrey 2, but then I saw a book or read a thing or learned a thing, and now I know, oh, my goodness, there's this whole structure that I didn't know how to use that's the structure I really needed for my book, and I just finished hot gluing a thing…

 

[Mary Robinette] We are 100% going to talk about this. And I'm going to actually, unless someone else wants to talk about audience, I'm going to use that as my segue. So, I've been talking about the decisions I have to make before I start building. When I start building, the first thing that I do is I do a drawing of what I want it to look like. This drawing does not include what it looks like on the inside. But after I've got this kind of general, like, this is the vibe that I'm going for, then I have to sit down and I have to start thinking about the interior structure. And I work in layers. So I will draw the body parts that are going to be there. I will draw, like, where does this have to fit? I will draw those things, and then I will start putting layers on top of that to figure out what I need. Then, after I've got that sketch, that's not the puppet. I've got that sketch, and then I have to build. Most of the time, if I've got a puppet that's like a papier-mâché or something, often, I have to start with building an armature. Then I put clay on the armature, and I do additive and subtractive sculpture, where I'm putting clay on and then pulling it off, and I'm slowly refining it into the shape that I want. Then I do a mold. Then I papier-mâché into that. Then I have to send it. Then I get to do my painting. Then I get to glue all of the details on. If I just jumped straight to the sculpture, frequently it would collapse, frequently it wouldn't have a spot to put my hand. So, when I'm writing, what I often start with is that I start with… You'll hear me talk sometimes about a thumbnail sketch. Which is a term that comes out of my art background. Which is just a little drawing, just a little bit, like, this is the vibe. That, for me, with writing is sometimes it's a log line, Jane Austen with magic, this is the vibe. Sometimes it is a paragraph of asteroid slams into the earth in 1952. There's a lot of chaos. Then ladies go to space. It's just a very rough sketch. Then I will unpack that, then I start to move towards my armature, which is my outline or my synopsis. But the thing that… The thing, for me, is that at every stage of that, I am discovering something new, and I know that, I'm going to discover something new in every stage. So, having gone through that with puppetry, when I'm doing that with writing, it gives me this freedom, because I know that I don't have to be locked in. I know I'm still going to be making discoveries. And particularly as a writer with ADHD, it gives me a bunch of, oh, you did that, now you get to do this next thing. Knowing that there's still going to be discovery.

[Howard] I have never… Not even one time, while writing, given myself third-degree burns with a hot glue gun.

[Mary Robinette] I… Um…

[Dan] You're missing out.

[Mary Robinette] Missing out. Yeah. I have two different spots from puppets. Two different third degrees from puppets. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things that I do like about writing is that it is significant… I am injured significantly less.

[DongWon] I mean, we could consider carpal tunnel to be a form…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of a hot glue burn. So…

[Dan] One of the… Sorry, go ahead.

[DongWon] Not at all. [Garbled] more joke.

 

[Dan] One of the great things about starting with that thumbnail sketch for me is that it helps me pitch the story later on. If I have a really succinct starting point, if I know what the core framework or skeleton of this story is, I know what the vibe is, then it's so much easier to tell it to people. And I know… I can pitch a John Cleaver book or I can pitch one of my cyberpunk books really easily, whereas my Partials series, I didn't start with that, I started from a completely different direction. And to this day, what, 15 years later, it's hard for me to summarize in one sentence or even one paragraph, what that book is.

[DongWon] Yeah, and when I work with a client, my… One of my favorite stages is this first stage, where were coming up with the pitch. Right? There pitching me on ideas, a couple sentences, a paragraph, whatever it is. And then we just start, like you were saying, like, accreting more and more layers on to that as it develops into something richer. But you gotta have that pitch out of the gate, for me, at least to feel really confident that this project is going to work at the end of the day.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I want to say that just because I tend to work that way, there are also times and joy in working the other direction. Where you're like, here's a bunch of ingredients that I have, is a bunch of materials, what can I make out of that? There's something in puppetry we call a found object puppet, where you make a puppet come to life with… Using the mechanical principles of how puppetry works. If anyone has ever seen me do the puppetry demonstration live in person, you've seen me do scarf dragon, where I take a… Just a scarf, and turn it in. But we do this with, like, newspaper, shoes, water bottles, whatever it is, we just like, well, put these objects together.

[DongWon] There's a photo on the Internet somewhere of Mary Robinette menacing me with a napkin puppet that is very delightful to me. But, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a… I also have fond memories of that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Any time he gets to be menacing. There's a wonderful puppeteer named Paul Zaloom and I think you'll be able to find some of his work on YouTube. But he does found object puppetry where he will glue different pieces together. So, sometimes that's fun. Sometimes you do the drawing and then you're like, okay, but what structure has to be under it to support that? So it's not that you have to always start from the inside, but it is the what is the vibe, what am I going for, and that I can work in layers.

[DongWon] Well, there's one last element of this and I know we're running long, but I kind of wanted to bring this up. As you're talking about building, there's a thing that, as I've been in the industry longer and longer, one of the things that has been most useful to me is to step back and remember that a book is a physical object.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes.

[DongWon] That we… A lot of the time. Not always. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But, like the core of what the publishing industry is is a physical goods business. We print books, we ship them to thousands of stores around the country, and then those are sold by hand to a customer.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Yes, there are e-books, there are audiobooks, there's a million other things that branch off from that. But the original business…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Is stuff. The commercial heart of the business is the physical business. Right? So, sometimes remembering that what you're making is a physical object in the way that you are thinking about building a puppet and what that means for the space that you're in, the shape that you're in, the materials you're using. I think there's a very, very useful metaphor to remember that a book is a thing that you want to hand to a person at the end of the day.

[Mary Robinette] When I did the translation for the Hildur Knutsdottir, the Night Guest, one of the things that she was very specific about is that there are some chapters that are only one sentence long, and she was very specific about which side of the page that sentence was on.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] Um… When we're talking about physically building puppets, I'm remembering another thing from this Henson documentary about Rowlf the dog. He was, for a long time, the breakout Muppet. Before Kermit, before Sesame Street, he was the big one. That was pure experimentation. Their guy who was their main Muppet maker cut a basketball in half, more or less because he wanted to see what he could do with it. And he ended up… That's why Rowlf has this giant kind of spherical looking head with this enormous mouth, because he was built from a basketball cut in half. That kind of experimentation, where you don't have a plan in advance, you just have stuff, and you have ideas, and you want to see what you can put together… Some of my best writing I've ever done comes from that kind of let's see what happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm going to… Because I just need to hit the focus… Those things… Because in episode 3-14, I did not have a good way to talk about muscle and I do now.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, focus indicates thoughts. What your character is looking at is what your character is thinking about. It's whatever they notice. Sounds, scents, touch. That's what is important to the character, that's the thing that is in front of their brain. Breath indicates emotion. So, breath and rhythm are closely related. If you walk into a room and you are breathing rapidly, it reads differently than if you walk into a room and take a very big sigh. But those are both mechanically breaths. For on the page, that your sentence structure. How long your sentences are, along your paragraphs are. Those affect the way your reader… The pace in the way the reader feels about it. Muscle, which is the idea that the puppet moves itself… In writing, I've started calling this internal motivation. What is moving your character? What is making your character make choices? Because you want it to… You want all of those things to appear to originate from inside the character as opposed to having the puppeteer's hand reach on stage and move a prop. And then meaningful movement. When your character moves, when their doing body language, that body language is as important as the dialogue. So those are the things. Everything else you can… Most everything else we talk about in 3-14, if you want to go back and listen to that. Thank you all so much for joining me on my let me talk about puppets.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I could actually keep talking about it. But those were… Those are the things that shape the way I approach writing. Because it was such a huge part of my life for so long. So we're going to be talking about this kind of thing all season. We've got other metaphors that other people are going to be bringing to you.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right now, I have a little bit of homework. And oddly, I just want you to watch a puppet show. If you can find a live puppet show, in person, that would be amazing. Go to puppeteers.org if you're in the United States. That's puppeteers of America. You can look for your regional guild. Most of the time, they will list shows that are happening. If you're not in the United States, you can look at unima.com. There's a… unima is the oldest continually operating arts organization in the world. It's Union de la internationale de la marionettes. I'm saying this very very badly. But you can again find a puppet show near you. And if you can't do that, check YouTube. There's so many fantastic amazing puppet shows. But look at… Watch a puppet show, and I specifically want you to watch something that's not the Muppets. Just so that you can see how many different amazing styles out there… Are out there.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-02-qa-aboard-the-writing-excuses-cruise-with-mark-oshiro-and-kate-mckean/

 

Questions and Answers:

Q: How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

A: Is the character redundant? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Is this a more interesting character, so I need to make them the star? If you take the character out, does it affect the story? Are they filling a role that nothing else fills? Is this a protagonist, main character, or hero?

Q: If the story is very plot focused, how can you make it more character focused?

A: Who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Why is this character staying in this plot? What ability do they have to participate in this plot? Why is this character unsuited to solve this problem?

Q: Say you have some cool thing that doesn't quite fit the story. How do you decide whether to rip it out or find a way to shoehorn it in?

A: Is it going to baffle readers? Save it for a later opportunity. Can it do some other things?  Don't buy cool solar powered lights for your garden path if you don't have a garden path. Does it fit with the characters? 

Q: What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline when there are other fun things to do instead?

A: Money. Fear. Think about what you will lose if you don't finish it. Don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. Reward yourself with joy. Break it into small pieces, and use checkboxes. Think about why you don't want to do this. Write the ending first, and then use it to remind yourself where you are going. 

Q: When do you call a manuscript done?

A: Everything can be made better. Can this be more of the thing that I want it to be? Art is never finished, only abandoned. Realize that there is a lot of refinement afer the point where you say it's done. First, is there a little voice saying, "Chapter 3 is really weird?" Second, make it hard for the editor to say no. You get more than one chance.  

 

[Season 20, Episode 02]

 

[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 02]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Q&A on a ship.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

 

[Howard] And we are joined by Mark Oshiro and Kate McKean here on Navigator of the Seas. Hey, Mark, tell us about yourself real quick.

[Mark] Hello everyone. I am a young adult, middle grade author of some books that I've won some awards and been on some lists and I'm trying to pet every dog in the world.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Short and to the point. Kate! Tell us about yourself.

[Kate] My name is Kate McKean. I'm a literary agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm very excited to be here.

[Howard] Well, we're excited to have you. And our students here at WXR right on the Navigator have been excited all week to learn from you guys. This has been awesome. But they still have some questions. So, let's turn it over to our students and have someone ask a question.

 

[Someone] Well. How do you know when a character is taking up so much space in your book that they need to die and possibly never have been in your book at all?

[Howard] Restating the question, how do you know when a character is taking so much space in your book that they need to die and maybe never come back?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things I look at is… The same things that I look at… I evaluate the character in many of the same ways that I evaluate a line. Is it redundant? Is the character doing things that other characters are doing? Is the character related to the general themes? Does the character fit the tone of the book? Those are the things that… It's the same kind of metric. But you're just applying it to a different sort of experience.

[Dan] There's a… One of the things that I do in this case and in many other cases, any time the outline goes off track, is ask myself, do I need to get this back on track or is this a better track than I had in the first place? It could be that the character's taking up so much space precisely because you love them and they are more interesting than what anything else is going on. So you might need to just retool a little bit and let them be the star.

[Mary Robinette] Also, then, in some cases, where those two guys should be one guy. And you can just give all of that stuff to one guy, and then cut but you don't need.

[Mark] Yeah. Any instance I've ever had, where I've had to completely excise a character, the question became, if I take this character out, does it actually affect the story? If the answer is no, bye. Goodbye. Throw them overboard.

[Laughter]

[Mark] To fit the metaphor where we are. Please don't throw anyone overboard.

[Kate] No crimes.

[Mark] No crimes. No crimes on this ship.

[Erin] I actually… It's funny, because I was just thinking about the other side of that, which is it's possible that the reason that this character is taking up so much space is that they're filling a role in the story that there's nothing else there to fill. Like, they're the one who is advancing the story, at a time where no one else has that plot information. They're the one representing the characters back story, because there's nobody else to talk about. So maybe the answer could be that you could either add other characters, give part of what that character is doing to other characters, or figure out if there's a way that this story can hold it. Because you don't want to, like, knock out the supporting wall of your house, because you don't like it, and then be like, oh, no, it all fell down.

[Howard] I come back to the tripartite definition, the protagonist, the main character, and the hero. Who can all be the same person, but they can also be three different people. If someone is taking up a huge amount of page space in a story, and they are not fulfilling the role of protagonist or hero or main character, then I am well off outline, I'm now writing a different story, and it's time to figure out which story this character actually fits in.

 

[Someone] So, if you're writing a new book, and your plots tend to be very plot focused, what are some tricks to making the book more character focused?

[Howard] Restating. So, if you're writing a book, and the story is very plot focused, what are some tricks to making it more character focused?

[Mark] A question I ask myself, actually, because I'm also an outline or as well, is, very early on in my process of developing an idea, is who is the most interesting person for this plot to happen to? Instead of just creating a character whatnot, think of possible… Not just possible conflicts, but, like, what's a contrast? What's a very interesting contrast of this happening to a specific person? That often can help me find a way into a much more character driven story, still within the very plot heavy story.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I… Similar to Mark, but one of the things that I will specifically look for within that is why the character can't just nope out of the plot. So that, for me, then means that being on that plot fulfills a lack, a hole in the character, it's doing something for them. That can usually allow me to find out what it is that they're missing, what it is they're lacking, that they can be on a journey for, separately from the plot, but that the plot is intersecting with, and that that's part of why they're moving forward.

[Kate] Exactly. Like, if they are on the plot because it fell in their lap, it is… They can easily nope out of it. But they have to want to be there for a complex reason. If the reason is too simple, you can make it more complex and that will deepen their… At least that character.

[Erin] I also sometimes think about what is the… What is it about this character that gives them the ability… Not only the desire, but the ability to participate in this plot. What is it that lets them take the action that moves this plot forward, and what is that rooted in? What is it that they're bringing with them to the plot that makes them an interesting person to be advancing it forward? Then, for that interesting thing, what's a way that you can work in… Somewhere where we see that area of interest outside of the plot? Where can we see it on some… In a side scene, or something else that's not necessarily plot focused?

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something that… One of the other tools that I'll use is to look at the character and ask why are they uniquely unsuited to solve this problem? That, again, opens up a lot of tension and just… A lot of juicy, juicy stuff.

 

[Someone] So, say you have some really cool, awesome worldbuilding thing that you wanted in your story, but it just doesn't quite do it. How would you balance just ripping it out and just saving it for another story versus trying to find an excuse or a place to fit that into the story?

[Kate] Does it pass the smell test? So, if you're trying to shoehorn it in there, and you can find a way to make it work, but you're the only one who recognizes why that works, the reader's going to be like, "What? Why? Huh? Where?" So you're better off saving it for something else, which is an opportunity. You have this cool thing, you get to use it later. Not that you don't, like, use it now.

[Mary Robinette] I had this thing in Martian Contingency that I was extremely stubborn about. Which is that in the real world, when you're looking at time on Mars versus Earth, you use Sol for Mars, and Earth… Day for Earth. That's so that people who are talking back and forth can tell whether they're talking about next Sol or tomorrow. Because they're not lined up. I was extremely stubborn about including this. People were not getting it. But it did a bunch of things. It helped… I actually needed it, technically, to be able to talk about those two concepts. It also did, like, this is a really cool worldbuilding thing that actually did a bunch of heavy lifting. But it was so hard to explain to people. So I took an opportunity and I took another scene that was a little bit flat, and used that seem to just explain it to the readers as a point of conflict between two characters. So it was… It… Looking for what else can this do. If it's doing only one thing, you probably save it for the… Look, everybody, here are my extras. Here's my acknowledgments, which is where the Mars speed of sound went, because I couldn't fit it into the book.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I think…

[Mary Robinette] It's different.

[Howard] I think about that one time I was shopping and saw some just really cool solar powered garden path lights. I was like, oh, these are amazing. They're so neat. I mean, you can program the… I don't actually have a garden path. This is one of those situations where no matter how cool it is, it doesn't belong in my yard, because it's just going to end up as, like, a fairy ring or something. See, that would have been awesome.

[Dan] see, that would have been amazing.

[Howard] Oh, well.

[Dan] For me, this comes back to character. Which is kind of what Howard was just saying. Howard, as a character, had no plausible interaction with a garden path. So there was no point in putting extra time and effort into one. Because one didn't exist. If my characters can plausibly interact with and be harmed by and make interesting decisions about the cool thing that I'm struggling to include, then it will be fairly easy to include. Whereas if it's just some neat bit of worldbuilding that I made up that doesn't actually affect the characters in any way, then, yeah, it needs to go.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear my cat say, we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[DongWon] Heading into the new year, we're all thinking about what our intentions and goals are. It's hard not only to set your targets, but to live up to them. Especially as writers and creative's in a world that doesn't always seem eager to support you financially. That's why building your financial literacy and starting to work towards a stable financial base is an important aspect of developing your writing career. We talk a lot about the creative tools you need, but peace of mind about your bottom line will give you the space to pursue your goals and develop the career that you want. Acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing, so your money has a chance to grow for you, your kids, and your retirement. You don't need to be an expert. Acorns will recommend a diversified portfolio that fits you and your money goals. You don't need to be rich. Acorns let you invest with the spare money you've got right now. You can start with five dollars or even just your spare change. Head to acorns.com/WX or download the acorns app to start saving and investing for your future today. [Garbled inaudible]

 

[Someone] What are some strategies you have for finding the willpower for finishing a project that you have a deadline on, so you have to finish it? But you don't want to work on it, you've got another cool thing… [Garbled]

[Howard] What are some strategies for finding the motivation to work on something that has a deadline, but there's… There are other fun things to do instead?

[Mary Robinette] Money.

[Unknown] Spite.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fear.

[Laughter]

[Dan] They're very primal urges here.

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to give them actual useful information, Erin?

[Erin] I'll try. I don't know. But I think part of it is not thinking of it as motivation. You know what I mean? Because I think there are certain things in life we just do because we have to. But because writing is so personal, sometimes you think, like, I will always write when, like, the moment is there and when I want to. But as somebody who does a lot of deadline work, ultimately, it's about… It is a little bit about fear. Like, I'll lose this… I will lose this next opportunity to write something cool if I burn this bridge by never getting back to this person when I said I would. I will lose the money that I was going to receive from this project. But part of it is thinking, like, I don't actually need to be motivated to work, you just have to work to work. If that makes sense.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Sometimes it is just putting down one sentence and saying that's all I'm going to do for today, but at least it gives yourself a small goal to get through that doesn't require motivation, just action.

[Howard] There's an aphorism that I come back to all the time that I think applies to just adulting in general. It is, don't trade what you want most for what you want at the moment. I come back to that all the time. In my doing this thing now because it's just what I want to do now or am I doing it now because it's leading me to what I really, really want.

[Mary Robinette] I have a similar thing, which is what gift can I give to my future self? But the other piece that I will say is that one of the tools that I use is coming from dog training. We're having… We're working with a dog trainer on Guppy and while I said money, the fact is that my dog gets a form of payment for doing the things. It's a joyful form of payment. So, for me, the thing that I have to do… That… I shouldn't say that I have to do. The thing that I've found that is most effective… I can force myself to work. But that just makes work worse. It makes me resent it, and it starts to bleed over into the writing that I'm doing for fun, when I'm having to force myself to write. So, if I can make it more joyful, that helps. One of the things that you do with dog training is you do a lot of small sessions. So I will break things into smaller pieces. I will give myself ticky boxes, because the joy of watching a ticky box turn green is like… Um… Like… It should not be that effective. It makes me mad that it is.

[Howard] Our episode spreadsheets… I went to great trouble to program our episode spreadsheets so that all the little checkboxes are red until you check them, and then they turn green. That gives us joy every time we finished recording.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, it's like oh, when I finish this, then I get to do the next piece of it. And I get to cross something off. Like, I have literally given myself gold stars before.

[Kate] I have also done that. And I love a checkbox that I can physically do…

[Chuckles]

[Kate] What I do is turn it around and say why do I not want to do this? What am I scared of? If I'm scared to take the next step on this project, or I don't know what scene I'm writing next, or when I… I have to do the big edit when I finish this task. So when I… Even just say, like, I don't want to do this because I don't know what I'm doing after. Saying it out loud makes it less scary. It doesn't mean that the actual fear goes away, but you're like, oh, I'm just afraid. Great. That's easy to be afraid.

[Dan] That's so much better than the technique I got from dog training, is I wear a shock collar.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then, anytime I get off of the main document, it buzzes me. Don't actually do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You actually need a different trainer.

[Laughter]

[Mark] If I can add to this too. I… A thing… So I do actually something before I'm drafting. Some of you have heard me speak about this. Which is it's very important that when I'm about to start a book, I know how it ends. And I want to be absolutely unhinged and feral about that ending. Because then when I'm in those moments where I'm stuck, I will actually turn to the end, because I actually write my final scenes, final line first, and remind myself, like, that's where I'm going. Which often sort of related to you will help me figure out, subconsciously, why am I stuck in this moment? Why does this moment feel unmotivating? I will also say if you do just really require motivation, often, for me, it's I want to get this done so I can go to the shiny new object over here and work on the other thing that is also making me slightly feral and unhinged.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. Sorry. One last last thing which is, like, what I love about all of these different answers is I think what they remind me is we're also different in the ways we handle this. I think one way that's good is how have you ever forced yourself in your life to do anything else? Like, if you are like I always… When I don't want to go to a party, make… Say, I can get a pizza on the way home, then maybe you're, like, reward, like, focused. If you're somebody who… Like, whatever the thing is that works for you in other areas of your life can also sometimes be repurposed for your writing life.

 

[Someone] When do you call a manuscript done, because it seems like you could be stuck in each [garbled step of the process?]

[Howard] You had me at when do you call a manuscript done.

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing. Everything can be made better. There is not anything in the world that can't be made better. I think if… Some people have heard me talk about this when we've been doing office Hours where you've come to me for one-on-one. So I know I've said this multiple times on the ship. When you're… If you talk to someone who worked on the Princess Bride, which is a perfect film, I am certain that they would say, "If I would've just had one more day." So, for me, the question is not can this be better, but can this be more of the thing that I wanted to be. Like, if I got a chair, if you look at the chair, listener, that you are sitting in right now. There's probably a scuff on it. Could you fix that scuff? Yes. Would it make it more of a chair? Would it make it more useful, would it make it better for you? No. So, when the thing is doing what you wanted to do, then it is done. Can you make it better? Yes. But you don't have to.

[Howard] I think it was Picasso who said, "Art is never finished, only abandoned." And I have taken that as a gospel truth. I never finish anything, I decide to abandon it. Which is very emotionally liberating.

[Dan] Yeah. One thing that I did not realize when I was very early career, when I was still trying to break in, is how much refinement there still is to do after that point when it is done. Right? The agent is going to help you make it better. Your editor is going to help you make it better. The copy editor, the proofreader, like every step of the process will continue that refinement. It doesn't need to be completely perfect. It never will be. But it's good to remember this is good enough right now, and there's a whole army of people that's going to help me make it better later.

[Kate] I did two kind of litmus tests, both as a writer and as an agent. The first thing I do is I ask myself, whether it's my book or somebody else's, is there, like, this little voice in the back of your head going, "Chapter 3 is really weird." The quieter it is, the more I need to go back and look at chapter 3 or whatever part. The loud voice that's saying, "This is horrible and you're a blah blah blah blah blah." That's not your intuition, that's just fear and anxiety and all those things. It's the tiny little bit, like, yeah, this scene doesn't make that much sense. Then you go back and fix that one. When I'm in… When I have my agent hat on, and I'm editing a client's manuscript, my goal is to make it really hard for the editor to say no. But that goal is not make it perfect and ready to go to the printer. Because that's not my job and I don't have the power nor the time to do that. But when I look at a manuscript and say, okay, well, the beginning's a little slow. That might derail an editor. Let's fix that. Let's address that, and then not worry about some hand wavy things in the middle. Because by the time they get there, they're invested and they'll want to know the end.

[Mark] Most of the time, I'm teaching to young kids who haven't written at all, or very interested in it, have never even finished a short story. So a lot of their questions are around, like, well, how do I know it's done? Like, when do I know? Is it just writing The End? Which, often times, I'm like, yeah. Actually, yes. Then you're done. It's done. But I also like to talk to them about how those of us, especially here in the States, we have been raised in a system in which we are taught you have one chance. Right? You write an essay, you take a test, you get a grade. The end. That's it. So they often approach writing the same way. I see adults then struggling with that in adulthood, of I only have one chance to do this. So I love how all of us can sort of dispel the notion of, like, the thing you're writing is… You don't have one chance. It's not you write this manuscript, it's done, and that's the only chance you're ever going to get. So, for me, at least with my process, I know a manuscript is done initially, just when I reach that ending point that I've already written. It's done. Then I can give it to my agent. I can start having conversations with my editor. Then, even then, as it goes through developmental edits, line edits, and then we all get down to pass pages, where we're reading the proof of your pages. For me, I know it's done when I can read long periods of the book without stopping and going, oh, this doesn't make sense, something here is tripping me up. That's when I'm like, it's done. Maybe five or six things over the course of a whole novel, I'm like, I don't know if I landed this. But if it's very few of them, then I'm like, this is done. Like, I can let this go. Or abandon it, to use that language.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The UK edition of Shades of Milk and Honey is three chapters longer, and 5000 words longer, than the US edition. Because they made the mistake of asking me, "Is there anything you'd like to change?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You made the mistake of answering.

[Erin] I think that just shows the power of time. Because I will sometimes abandon, whether temporarily or permanently, a story because I'm like, I am not where I need to be at in order to make this any better. Like, I have done… All that I'm doing now is… I… Always call it like shuffling, is on the Titanic. All I'm doing is making very minute changes. Nothing is changing at the core. Because if there's something wrong at the core, I cannot figure out how to change it now. Sometimes I send it out anyway, and it's like, I hope that the editor at the magazine is, like, oh, actually it is this, or, you were wrong, it's fine. I accepted it. Then I'm like, oh, well, maybe that was all in my head. But sometimes, it is years later, I'm like, oh, I could have written this different, better story, but the story I wrote was fine for the writer I was at that moment. I think it sometimes nice to, like, acknowledge who you are and what you can do now, and worry about what your future self can do later.

[Howard] So you freeze the document in your trunk cryogenically until you've developed the technology to really fix it.

 

[Howard] We've got time for one more question. No we don't. We do not have time for any more questions. What we have time for is homework.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to give you the same homework that we are giving the participants in the Writing Excuses workshop here on the Navigator of the Seas that is the daily challenge. Asked and answered. Ask someone a question about writing. Either to learn more about what they're working on or to work through a project of your own.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-52-end-of-year-reflections-navigating-speedbumps 

 

Key Points: Life's speedbumps! Career, body, circumstances... Slow down, and rattle and shake over it? Rent a backhoe and scrape it off before driving? Break everything into smaller pieces and celebrate any progress. Sometimes you do it to yourself! Choose to move, and... disruptive, cascading issues. Depression and panic disorder? Brain shingles! In a grocery store without a cart, just picking up items and juggling! Strategies! Self-medicating with sugar? No, talk to everyone about it and talk about how to do something more healthy. Don't go too far with ergonomics, but if something is causing you pain, is there a quick and easy way to fix it? Identify obstacles. Beware, your brain confuses happy off-balance and frustrated or sad off-balance. Having trouble with decisions? Lists! Two hand choices. Eliminate repeated options that aren't working. Pie slices! How big is it, and how many do you want? Think of yourself! Move from triage dealing with fires to sustainable, balanced approaches. Replace "you can't have it all" with "you don't actually want it all!" Focus on what you want most, and ignore the rest. Be honest with people about what you need, and can do, before you hit a crisis. Count, and give yourself time before you answer. Say not to the projects that you don't want to do, because sometimes you'll have to say not to the ones you want to do. Give yourself a restorative.

 

[Season 19, Episode 52]

 

[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 19, Episode 52]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] As the year comes to a close, we've been talking about a lot of things, but one of the things we haven't really been talking about is kind of how you keep going when life has thrown you speedbumps. This can be a lot of different things. It can be a career speedbump, it can be your body, it can be circumstances around you. So we're all going to just kind of talk about some of the speedbumps that we've been encountering and some of the strategies that we've used to navigate around them.

[Howard] You know what, I… The speedbump metaphor I think may have been mine when we originally set this up, because as a younger, healthier man, speedbumps were things that I would just maybe slow down for a little and then just rattle and shake on my way over them. I'll just plow through it. I'll just muscle through this. I will just… I'll put in the extra hours. I'll put in the less sleep, whatever. Over the last couple of years, I've realized that that approach is no longer the option. The vehicle I am driving over the speedbumps is now a 72 station wagon…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That does not have… Well, 68 station wagon, if we're actually talking my model year, so it does have wood panels on the sides, with a bad suspension, and the back of the station wagon is full of poorly packed glassware.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If I decide to hit the speedbump at 30 miles an hour, I am going to break things, and it's a mess. So, my life over the last couple of years has been built around activities that look a lot like, metaphorically speaking, pulling up to the speedbump, stepping out of the car, renting somebody's backhoe, scraping the speedbump off the street, getting back in the car, and then driving forward. If it sounds like I move more slowly than I used to… Yes. Yes I do.

 

[Mary Robinette] I have been dealing with an emotional speedbump. Last year, 2023, is what my family has taken to calling the year of five deaths. Which… I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about that, because as you can tell, it's a little bit of a downer. But I kept… It was… My life is badly paced and badly plotted and maybe that… The author kept reaching for the same trick. It's like, come on. But we couldn't wait two months. My mom was one of the people who I lost last year. Each time, I kept thinking, okay, I just have to get through this, and then after that I'm going to be able… And there was never an after. So what I had to do was come up with ways to be able to keep moving while things were falling apart around me. I turned in Martian Contingency a week before mom died. I had to have my cat put down on my birthday. I mean, it was like… But it sucked. And I had deadlines. So it was… I… The renting of the backhoe, it's like that is a strategy to get around the thing. For me, because it mostly messed with my executive function, making decisions, any of that was just incredibly difficult. And I had competing priorities. I wound up having to break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to make any progress at all, and learning to celebrate making any progress was hugely important. This year, which I thought, ha ha, has been a different set of things. We had an unexpected move this year because of different family health things. And the coping skills that I learned last year have been very, very useful with these speedbumps. It's been… Yeah. So, there you go. I could keep talking…

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Howard] Breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces… Would you like to peer through the boxes of glassware…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] In the back of my station wagon?

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] It's funny, because speedbumps, in these cases that we're talking about so far, can be very hard things, very difficult things, and sometimes they can be something that you do to yourself. So, in my case, I made the bright choice to move across the country this year. I packed up my life in New York and I moved to Southern California. And it's been a really wonderful decision for me. It's been the right choice, and I'm really, really delighted by where my life is at in a lot of ways. But also, talk about a god damned speedbump.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It was so much more disruptive than I anticipated, and it definitely caused a cascade of issues in my life, some of them professional and some of them personal. There's a way in which all of this has been really joyful to do, but also, that doesn't mean it wasn't a speedbump. It doesn't mean that I didn't need to make space for myself, make space for the people around me, and adjust to certain realities of what it was going to be to go through that level of disruption. Right? So, how you plan for, and how you respond to speedbumps is, like, hugely important and I maybe learned a small lesson of I'm not in my twenties anymore, or even in my thirties anymore, and I need to maybe make more space for certain disruptions that I needed to even five years ago. So, it's been an interesting moment of reflection as I'm looking at building a new life here, building a new community here, things like that. But also, how to keep plates spinning, keep balls in the air, while doing multiple things at once.

 

[Dan] My major speedbump this year, and last year, has been a recent diagnosis of depression and panic disorder. Both of which recently upgraded… We'll use that word… To severe depression and severe panic disorder. Which is just delightful. That's… Like DongWon was saying about planning for disruptions, that's the reason you haven't really heard from me throughout the year. I was on a few episodes that we recorded very early on, but I did hit a point, actually and 22, where I realized that my choices were to either back away temporarily from this podcast or quit it all together. Which I did… Absolutely did not want to do. But that's the state that my brain was in and to some extent, continues to be in. I hope to be on, and will be on, many, many more episodes next year. But… Yeah. We call this the brain shingles. I got the brain shingles.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled]

[Howard] And it's not the good kind of shingles that keep rain off of things.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Dan] No. Not at all.

 

[Erin] It's interesting, listening to all of this, because I feel like I… Knock on wood… I, in 2024, like, had not had as a huge, like, speedbump of that kind. Whether unanticipated, whether…

[DongWon] Self-Inflicted?

[Erin] Self-inflicted.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I… Like, so is somebody who does not drive…

[Laughter]

[Erin] I like to think about something that I do in my life where I create my own sort of speedbumps or cracks in the sidewalk to be tripped over. Like, somebody in a grocery store who doesn't get a cart and starts getting items off the shelf. Right?

[Laughter]

[Erin] It works a bit. Like, you're like, okay, I can hold this can, I can hold this soda, okay, what's… Okay, if I just rearrange this, I can put this thing on top. And you never know what will be the either item, obstacle in your path where it's a very small obstacle, but you're holding a lot of things, and it's a very delicate balance, and if something can throw it off, and now, all of a sudden, things are going everywhere and you're trying to hold on to everything and not drop any of the items and create a spill on aisle five.

[DongWon] I feel personally attacked and called out right now.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I don't think you even… [Garbled]

[Howard] It's not so much that you are your own worst enemy as it is that we are all our own that exact same worst enemy.

[Mary Robinette] Erin is, I will say, an extreme example of it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Having been in a bar with her, watching her continuing to work…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] While on a cruise ship. I'm like, no, no. Erin has a bigger capacity for stacking things and believing that she can continue to carry them then I… Than anyone I've ever met.

[Erin] Yay?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, on the plus side, there are things that you can do to, like, learn yourself. You know what I mean? Like, I know this about myself. So, thinking about what are the strategies… Like, to figure out… Like, what are the things that we need to do? I know that we are coming up on a break, so maybe the time to talk about the strategies is on the other side of it? Question mark?

[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what I was thinking. So, let's take a quick break.

 

[DongWon] So, my thing this week is I want to talk about the movie Furiosa. Which I really love. I sort of feel like there aren't enough people talking about it. I feel like it didn't get quite the love that I hoped it would. Mad Max: Fury Road, one of my favorite films, I think we can all agree that it's an absolute masterpiece of action cinema, and finally, they released the follow-up to that which is actually a prequel, but tells the story of Furiosa's childhood and early life as she sort of becomes the imperator that we meet in Fury Road. One thing that's really interesting is this movie is structured so differently from Fury Road. I think a lot of people went into it with the expectation of getting that same hit, getting that same high, and instead, it's a slower, quieter, more traditional drama in certain ways as we watch this person grow up and develop into this… Into the sort of force of nature we meet in the future. And Chris Hemsworth is also in it, playing opposite Anya Taylor Joy. Chris Hemsworth plays the villain, a character named Dementus. It's some of the best performances I've ever seen from him, that he brings a weirdness and a humor to it, but also a deep unsettling menace by the end of it. So, I highly recommend Furiosa. Remind yourself that this isn't Fury Road, it's its own thing. Manage your expectations around that. But just some absolute killer action sequences that I really love, some great character work, and great performances. George Miller is like nobody else out there and anything he does, I will show up for.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Mary Robinette] Strategies are one of the things that actually keep us going. I think all of us have strategies that are probably overlapping and some things that are wildly different. I would love to hear about some of the strategies that you've found that have kept you functional while you have been trying not to drop things in a grocery store.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the strategies that I learned accidentally was, the beginning of this year, I decided, as a New Year's resolution, that I was going to stop eating sugar. Because I was snacking on sugar constantly, especially at work. And the depression skyrocketed over the course of about two or three weeks. I realized that without knowing it, I had been self-medicating with sugar as a way of getting through the day. I'm still kind of sort of trying to do that, but sweeter. The lesson to learn from this, the way this turns from an accidental thing into an actual coping strategy, is, once I realized that that had become an important part of my process, then that became a thing to discuss more directly with my family, with my employer, with my psychiatrist, and say, well, this is what I have been doing. What can I do instead that is healthier than that? Well, what are ways that I can manage this depression without just sugaring up and muscling through it?

 

[Howard] Years ago, we, on this very podcast, we would joke about the… It may have been an April Fools episode… The excuses we make instead of writing. I think one of them was, oh, gosh, I sure need to vacuum my keyboard. I've looked at, this last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time rebuilding literally where my keyboard sits. Where my monitors sit. Where I sit. I didn't get very much writing or much work done, because I was spending so much time paying attention to a very small pain point. Oh, I have to reach for this thing, and I'm reaching further than I think I should. How do I fix that? I'm going to take the time right now to fix it. And I ended up building an entire 2C stand, two big… Three boom rig surrounding a zero gravity chair where I don't have to turn my head much, I don't have to stretch my arms much, but I can do everything I need to do from that chair. It took a long time to build, and the strategy really amounted to, Howard, if you don't make time to move that piece of speedbump now, then you're going to wear a hole in yourself reaching a little extra far or having to get up and do a thing. It's sort of like ergonomics, and I don't counsel everybody, yeah, look at your workspace and go fully ergonomic contextual inquiry. But, at the same time, if something is causing you a little bit of pain, there might be a very easy way to make it stop doing that so you can get more work done later.

 

[Mary Robinette] That's been one of the strategies that has worked well for me, is identifying the obstacle. What is the thing that is causing me problems? I also want to say that, while we're talking about speedbumps, I just want to quickly put a flag in this, that the speedbump can be a happy thing, as DongWon referred to. That sometimes, like, if you just won an award or had a short story accepted for the first time, that can become an obstacle, because your brain is very bad, it will just say, you're off-balance. But it cannot always tell the difference between happy off-balance and frustrated sad off-balance. So I identify obstacles, and one of the obstacles for me, the biggest one, was executive function. That I was just having a hard time making decisions and holding things in my brain. So because of that, I started doing lists. When the lists got to be too much, I backed off of that, and started doing something that I called two hand choice. Which is actually a trick that I learned from… Through animal stuff. When you've got a nonverbal animal, you can offer them two hands, each hand represents a choice. Do you want to go inside or do you want to go outside? I learned that with my mom during her last weeks, when she became nonverbal but still quite present. I could offer her a two hand choice and she could still respond, even when she got to the point where she was only looking at the thing. But if I offered her… Like, if I said, what do you want to wear and I showed her a closet full of things, she couldn't… She had no way of letting me know. But if I held up two things, she could let me know blue dress, then, just looking at the left-hand. With that, the other piece that I learned was that if she never chose the gray dress, I stopped offering it to her. So what I started doing with myself was when I came up on a thing and I'm… I was tempted into procrastinating or having difficulty making a decision, I'm like, which of those two choices has served me before? That would be the choice that I would go with, and I would stop offering myself the choice that wasn't serving me. That got me through some times where things were very hard.

 

[Erin] Yeah, I think… I love that. I think… I'm thinking about pie, all of a sudden, and…

[Dan] That happens to me a lot.

[Laughter] [Yeah]

[Erin] And it's always…

[Howard] The food or the infinitely repeating irrational number?

[Erin] Both. No, just kidding. The food. The food pie. Because I'm thinking…

[Howard] Now I'm sad.

[Erin] Sorry. I think about a lot as like… Thinking back to the past, like, what have you been able to handle also. So, what has served you, and also, like, where… What was the one slice of pie [committed?] Like, when the pie's delicious, you want to eat all the slices. Sometimes, it takes time to figure out. Like, okay, two, and I really wish I'd had more. Like, I actually did have enough room for a third piece of pie.

[Mary Robinette] The dessert pointer.

[Erin] But, like, 10, it turns out, was not good. Was not a good idea. So, somewhere between 10 and three is, like, the right thing. I do that with projects. It's, especially, when you repeat projects, I know, like, sort of how big a slice it is. Like, this thing, if I do this one thing, I'm only going to have room for one or two other things. When I'm teaching a college class, like, that is something that takes a lot of time to prep the lessons and talk to students. So, early on when I started teaching, I was like, oh, teaching. It'll just take a minute. Then, later, I learned, no. That's big. I can only do, like, maybe one or two side projects and teach and still get sleep and still…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Drink water and still work at other things that make me happy. I think… For me, that's a second lesson, which is, like, think of yourself. Like, you are an important part of the equation. If you are not here, you cannot carry the same… True story, you cannot eat the pie. So I think that it can be easy to neglect the you in the equation, and think, like, I will just outwork it, I will out do it, I will under sleep it, I will figure it out. But ultimately, like, when you take the time for yourself, I think it gives you the strength sometimes to be able to do more by taking a pause and putting yourself first. So when I bring work to a bar, while that sounds wild, part of that is me saying if I finish this amount of work, I really like socializing with my friends, and I'm going to get to do that after I finish this. As opposed to doing it in my room and then just working and working and working and never leaving the house.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So it's a way for me to keep myself in mind if only by moving my location.

 

[DongWon] I'm completely in agreement with everything you've just said, and I've been going through a similar process, probably starting in… I'm thinking of the last two years, as whenever I think of as the triage years. Like, starting in 2020, kind of up until sometime this year, has been a real era of, like, me realizing how overbalanced I was in terms of the worklife balance, and how much I needed to keep up with the current treadmill I put myself on. Right? So a lot of it was… That's why I've been closed to submissions for a long time and things like that, of figuring out, okay, how do I rebalance in some way that moves from this triage mode of taking care of what's on fire in front of me to being able to approach my life in a more sustainable and a more balanced way. Right? So the kind of thing which is a little similar to what you're talking about in terms of like now what slices of pie can I actually handle, and how do I make space for the things in my life that are restorative to me that aren't just work focused. Right? How do I have friends who aren't just publishing people, how do I have hobbies outside of the space that I work in, and how do I have other kinds of creative projects that sustain me? Right? So, balancing all of those things has been really important. And, maybe even more importantly than all of that, being patient with myself even as I know that this has been a multiple year process, and that I can say now, coming up on the end of this year, of, like, oh, I moved out of triage, I'm doing this. That's probably not true, there's probably still going to be moments when that comes up, where that may extend further. As I build towards sustainability, that's going to require all of these different kinds of shifts in myself and checking in with myself. How do I feel about this? How does my body feel when I'm working at this level? How, emotionally, in my balancing the needs of my clients versus my own needs versus the needs of the people I care about in my life? Right? So, juggling all of these things has required a lot of therapy, no small amount of medication, and a lot of just work on myself to figure out how to approach that in a healthier way.

 

[Howard] In many cases, for me, I think it comes down to the graduation from the early wisdom, which is you can't have it all, to the later wisdom of dude, you don't actually want it all.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That second piece of wisdom is incredibly liberating. The realization that, hey, you know what, I… A lot of these things that I've been reaching for, if I stop reaching for them and just reach for the things that I want the very most, I will be happier. Because I didn't really want those things. Maybe other people told me I wanted those things. Maybe TV told me… I don't know what the psychology is behind it. I just know that by narrowing my focus a little bit and saying the thing that I want most is the thing that I'm going to keep in front of me, and the thing that I'm going to keep aiming myself at, and everything else, I'm going to let myself ignore if I need to.

[Erin] I think, as you do that… It can be really difficult.

[Howard] Yeah.

 

[Erin] Because I think we're taught that anything we let go of, A) will never come again, B) was the best thing ever, C) that our lives will never be the same without it. But I think a lot of times, like, once that decision moment is past, you move on with the life you have. That is something that's really important, and also, to remember that other people are often much kinder to you than you are to yourself. It can be hard to say, like, I need to step back from this, I can't do that. I think a lot of times you think people will judge you. But, people are kind of, like, if you tell people, hey, I need X. Like, 99 out of 100 times, they'll be like okay, great. Like, let me know what I can do to be a part of that. Let me know how I can help. The one out of 100 is somebody who you don't need in your life anyway.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think telling people that before you hit a crisis point also helps you not need more. Because you are in a healthier place. And it also places less emotional burden on them.

[Howard] The shopping cart teaches us that we are our own worst enemy.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Writing teaches us that we are our own worst critic.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned also over the past year because… That I've been applying from last year. My mom… Parkinson's slows the brain down. So it just takes longer to answer something. The temptation when you ask a question is to fill the gap, to feel that… We're so trained in conversation that there shouldn't be a silence or… So you want to help. What I realized was that I did ask mom a question, and I would have to count in order to give her time… In my head, count… To give her time to respond. I realized that I actually needed to do that with myself so that other people… My anticipation of what they wanted didn't fill the voids. So I set a rule for myself that I've been deploying for 2024 which has made things much healthier for me, that when an exciting opportunity comes up or when I'm getting… Actually, I set the… I do what Erin's talking about, is, I tell people what I need right at the beginning. I sit down to have a conversation with someone about, like, this new project, and it's very interesting, and I tell them at the front, I'm like, you're going to hear me talk about it in ways that make it sound like I want to get involved, and I do, in the moment, but I'm not allowed to give you an answer for 24 hours. Because if I do, my sense of FOMO, my sense of excitement, is going to override my sense of what I actually need. I have been doing that this year, and I have felt like, as were coming up on the end of the year, have felt much, much better.

[Erin] I would say, just the last thing on this, is like… It is, in project terms also, I have been shocked like that a lot of times, people would rather you be honest than it turn out you can't do it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, people would rather you say…

[Mary Robinette] So true.

[Erin] Somebody comes to me, they're like, come on, write 10,000 words of this game. I'm like, actually, I think I've got like 1000 words in me. So many times, they will be like, okay, that's fine. We'll find somebody else...

[Howard] Half of them are bad words right now.

[Erin] For the other 9000. Then, like… Then the next year, they'll come back and be like, oh, can you do 1000 again? Or, hey, maybe you can do more? Versus if I tried to take the 10,000, it's 10 years late, and then they are feeling like they are in a worse situation. So if you can, always be honest. But, yeah, before a crisis point, and really knowing yourself is… You said something once a long time ago, I think it was Dan, at a… On a cruise. You said, say no to the projects that you don't want to do because at some point, you'll have to say no to the ones you want to do. I love that wisdom.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with that, let me take you to your homework. I want you to use this time, the end of the calendar year, the end of the season, to think about what would be the restorative for you. Don't think about what other people think are restorative. Like, if you don't like the beach, beaches are not restorative. Think about something that would be restorative for you. And then take a step to actually doing that. Yes, I am in fact giving you a writing excuses.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Now go rest.

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.