Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 21.41: Barrier Breaking: Physical Fatigue

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-41-barrier-breaking-physical-fatigue

Key Points: Too tired? Plan ahead., and do it later. Take a break! Craft: placeholders, lists, iterations. What makes it easier? Challenges, rewards, praise? Lists, smaller pieces? Satisfaction goals! Have fun. Spellcheck madlib. Don't push to failure. Spotters!

[Season 21, Episode 41]

[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 21, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier Breaking - Physical Fatigue.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] And I'm here to talk to you about being so tired you can't even, can\t even. And what you do in order to can even maybe just a little bit. I'm going to begin by sharing an anecdote I\ve shared in the past. My good friend Dave had a coding technique where in the morning, he would go in and he would look at all the test reports and look at all the project spec documents, and he would sit down then and instead of writing code, he would look at each of the tasks and write down what it was, what libraries needed to be accessed, what code calls likely... And he would stick it to his monitor. And then all morning, when he was fresh, he would work like that and surround his monitor with sticky notes. And then he'd go to lunch, put himself into a predictable food coma, come back to work, sit down at his desk, stare at the monitor and think, "I don't know who sat here this morning, but they're really smart." "I don't know how any of this works," and he'd stare at the Post-It notes and he'd pick one up and look at it and he'd think, "Oh, I can do that."And he\d stick it next to his keyboard. And then he'd just start typing, go get the code library, go get whatever else, finish it and think, "Okay, I did a thing. Ah, there's more junk on my monitor. What's this?" "Oh. Oh, I cab do that." And he would make his way around his monitor. Sometimes he'd finish the day and there were lots of sticky notes left. But he never finished a day without having made a list of things that maybe a future smarter version of himself could come back and fix. And I've applied that in my workflows. And now that I have chronic fatigue, I have learned all kinds of things about how important it is to queue up stuff for tired "Howard."

[Mary Robinette] And I think that's really an important thing to talk about here is that you are not the same writer every day. And whether you have chronic fatigue or whether you are just dealing with situational fatigue, you're a different writer every single time you sit down to write. So having a wide variety of tools to acknowledge the brain that you have when you sit down. It's very easy to have said, "Oh, boy, that was a really great writing day. It'll always be like this because I've figured it out now." And that's not the way it works.

[DongWon] Totally. I mean, I'm very guilty of running into these problems. I don't have chronic fatigue , but I do have "chronic" doing too much. I'm always adding extra projects. I'm always trying to do too many things, fit in too much social stuff, fit in too much travel, all the work, taking on too many projects. I know we're here spending a week recording Writing Excuses. We do a bunch of these in a row. It's going to be a very intense week. And in my head, I'm like, "Well, I'm driving back on Sunday. And on Monday, here's a list of things I gotta get done." And it's a very long list of complex tasks that need to be addressed. And I make... I can see myself making the mistake I always make, which is I'm going to be fine. I can push through, I can show up. But you're right, I'm not going to be the same person I would be if I'd taken a few days to rest beforehand. I don't know what to do about this because, for me, there's a lot of pressure to address all the things that are on my list. There's a lot of things that need to happen and I'm doing too much.

[Erin] This reminds me of, like, what I like to call, like, "four or five A.M. Erin"...

[laughter]

[Erin] Who is usually, like, let's say, very tired at this point, and there's a point where  I'm trying to push through getting work done, whatever it is, but I 'm like falling asleep. I'm extraordinarily slow. The work isn't that good, but for some reason it's like I can't stop, because if I stop, then like I haven't accomplished the tasks that I wanted to do for the day. So it's like I have  to push through, push through, push through. And what I've found is that, honestly, half the time just saying, "Okay, I'm going to go to sleep for two hours," and, like, I will wake up, and it will still be very early, 6:00 AM. But in that two hours, I will actually get enough brain cells regenerated that I can actually push through and do this work better. And I will do... In the two hours, if I'd stayed awake, I would have gotten very little low-quality... very little work done and low quality. Yes, those two hours are away, but I needed that to rejuvenate. And it could be two hours, it could be 12 hours, it could be six weeks, whatever it is for you. But I think, we can often, when we're in the "push through" mindset, believe that we can like out-game fatigue, but fatigue is  physical, and, like, you can't beat it just by thinking your way through it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We talk about this in theatre a lot: about the point of diminishing returns. And It's like I am doing poor quality work slower than if I took a break. And sociologists have studied this for people in the work force: that actually shorter workdays, fewer workdays, you get more work done . But we don't do that when we're writing, and there are a lot of times we don\t... we also don't have a choice sometimes. If you are someone who is dealing with chronic fatigue or any other form of chronic illnesses, you have to be able to push through it. If you're doing caretaker stuff... if you want to be able to write and do caretaking, a lot of times you do have to be able to push through. I think, the thing I would counsel though, is that if you can take a break, take the break. That's going to be the best thing for you.

[Howard] I want to offer another example. I love to cook. And the way our kitchen is currently laid out, the... I have to walk around one end of the counter in order to put things away, in order to get things out. And, so, planning for cooking always begins with "mezze-en-place," always begins with getting all the ingredients, all the tools, all the everything into one spot. But I recognize that when I'm cooking, I'm also making a mess. And somebody\s going to need to clean this up. And doing the dishes is a huge effort. Putting things away is  less of an effort, but it's still kind of an effort. So while I'm cooking, I'll think to myself, "Alright, am I done with this spice? I'm done with this spice." It\s eventually going to need to be carried all the way to the other side of the room, but instead, of doing that, I'm just going to shove it to the far side of the counter. To tell myself, at some point, when you're on the other side of the counter, maybe just pick this up and put it closer to where it goes. I don't even need to put it away, I just need to put it closer to where it goes. And I will finish with the cooking project, and I've made food for myself that's delicious. I'm happy. I don't want to put anything away, but everything is a little bit closer to where it needed to go. And maybe on my next pass through the kitchen, there will be enough of me where I'll walk in and say, "Oh, those things. I didn't..." and it's only three steps. If you have chronic fatigue, you know how expensive three steps can be. But I have the three steps now. I will go ahead and move them. And so, planning to be tired, planning to only have one nerve cell left. Only one firing neuron. And queuing something up so that that one neuron is all that's required in order to do that one thing, that skill has saved me.

[Erin] That makes me think about, Mary Robinette, what you said about, like, sometimes you can't take a break. And so, I think it's figuring out what is your... what is the best condition that you can give for your tired self? Like, what is the thing that works best for you? For me, when I cannot take breaks, I find often that physically standing at the computer... it's harder to fall asleep when you're standing. It's possible, definitely, but it's harder for me, at least. And so, sometimes I'll just stand over my keyboard, because I'm like, "Okay, at least this way, like, I will be awake-ish to get this done, and maybe that will get me to, like, the point that I need to get." And for somebody else, it could be something completely different. But the way I did that was like, when I was really tired, I would be like, "Okay, let me try this." And this didn't work. Okay, next time let me try something else. And eventually, you end up sort of figuring out how to game yourself a little bit for the person you at least are in this moment.

[Howard] Hmm, you know what? That queues us up nicely for what I want to discuss after our mid-role break.

]Howard] All right, we're back. Years ago, Mary Robinette and I were talking about something, and I forget exactly what it is, but we talked about the fact that the inspiration had fled. The brain was just too tired, and we had to fall back on craft. And I want to talk about what that actually means. When your brain is just too tired to be inventive, what does it mean to fall back on craft?

[Mary Robinette] So I do a ton of placeholders, and lists, and iterations. So, I know how a story is built. And so, sometimes it's like, "Bad thing happens here." And I can mark that down, and then later I can be like, "All right. Now I can do like a list of 20 possible bad things that can happen." Sometimes it is, "I can write dialogue today, and description is not in my wheelhouse." Other days, it's like I can describe a room, but I'm not going to be able to do any plot. And so, I will use the craft that is available to me that day to do the work that I can do that day, with the energy that I have. And that's one of the things that, for me, falling back on craft is about. Is that... It's not I have to write and it all has to be perfect the first time. It's like, no, on a bad brain day, that\s not how that works.

[Howard] That's one of the most important things that I need to remember when I'm that tired is good writing is rewriting. And not writing is not good writing. And so, if I'm... if there's just enough of me to write a few really clumsy, ham-fisted words that kind of say what I was thinking....

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'll write a few clumsy, ham-fisted words and come back and rewrite it better later.

[Mary Robinette] I'm... I've been... For the past couple of weeks, I've been dealing with a lot of fatigue that is largely self-induced because I have to narrate audiobooks, and teach, and supposed to be writing. So, it's all self-induced. Like, this is a scheduling issue, but I have to work through that scheduling issue. And, so, my work in progress right now has... really bad argument goes here, and one of the lines is, "You suck." " No, you suck." It's not going to be that later, but it gets me my emotional beats. And it's the same thing...

[Howard] That's good enough for a lot of TV scripts.

[Mary Robinette] No. I mean, you know...

[Howard] You could work for the CW.

[Mary Robinette] But it is... I think that if you look at the rest of your... if you look at your non-writing life, the tools that you use in your non-writing life to get work done that you don't have the energy or don\t want to do, you can apply to your writing life. Like, knowing what makes it easier for you to work., Queuing things up. Is it, like, challenges? Is it rewards? Is it praise? Like, you can queue those things up. Is it making lists? Breaking things into smaller pieces? You can use all of those for writing.

[DongWon] Well, I think one of the toughest things in all of this is shifting expectations. I do not have the same capacity to operate on low sleep that I did when I was in my twenties. I'm in my forties. It is way harder to do that. If I push myself or if I have insomnia, or if I've been traveling, it just... I can't do the things that I used to do. And so my benchmark is still set from when I was twenty-five and could do all the things and operate in certain ways. And now I simply can't, right? But my brain has been slow to adapt to that, slow to shift my expectations, right?

[Mary Robinette] Wait until you're in your fifties. You'll have a great time.

[DongWon] I can't wait. I can't wait. But here's the thing: as your life moves and progresses, these things change. As the structure of your life changes, all of these things.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I've realized within the past couple of years was that I... all of the writing advice that I had heard, and much of it that I had regurgitated, was around productivity.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And realizing that there's a difference between a productivity goal and a satisfaction goal. And that what I'm writing to feel satisfied, to be, like... to create something that makes me happy in some way. And that the productivity goals are in service of the satisfaction goals. So I started doing two things. One was making a list of satisfaction goals that would make me happy before I sat down. So, shifting that expectation. It's not I'm going to try to do 2,000 words. It's, like, I'm going to try to get them to kiss today. And then the other thing that I did, and this is just within the last couple of... last month, maybe, maybe two months, I was talking with one of my writing students about the fact that she had forgotten how to have fun with the writing. And I made a bingo card. And when we... this is not going to be your homework, but I'm going to put it in the liner notes. It will generate a new and different bingo card for you every time, which includes things like "open the document" or "a smell," so you can use it either as, "Hey , I did this thing," recognizing a thing you did, or you can use it as a series of prompts. But it was just this external reminder of: "We write because it's fun," and if you are writing through fatigue and it's not fun, take a break. If you want to be able to write and it is fun for you and you are fatigued,, that's when you reach for the tools that we're talking about.

[Erin] Yeah, and I was actually thinking of a very small version of this, and like ways to put joy I think is the way I'm thinking about it. Ways to put joy in the writing is.... you were talking about placeholders earlier, and a colleague of mine was telling me a very cool thing, which is that you can, in Microsoft Word, make spell check take anything you write and decide... like, spell check basically is like, "hey, you did this very common misspelling; I will correct it with this common spelling." But you can train it to take any series of things that you write and replace it with whatever you want. So you can be like, every time I write XXXX, it's going to replace it with "Insert cool place here" and highlight it blue, which is, like, a very fun way if you're typing things a lot and you know that you're going to replace them. But a lot of times, I'll use that to put really fun placeholders in. So, I'll be like, "a dude," but when I write "a dude," it will replace it with like "fun guy," and then, like, I'n like, "Oh, fun guy,  it's like mushrooms." Like, whatever thing it is that I think will make me smile at 4 in the morning when I'm writing it. And then when I go back and look at it, it's not like, "oh, I failed to put this in," it's like, "oh, look at all those silly placeholders that I put in that I get to replace," and it makes it feel like more like "what do I get to do versus what I have to do." But that's also just a really fun thing is to use spell check as a tool that you are putting into the world, versus one that is being imposed upon you.

[Mary Robinette] I love that you just turned your entire manuscript into your own madlib. 

[laughter]

[Howard] I want to take a moment for... only term I can think of right now is a PSA. When we were younger, and I know when I was younger, it was critically important to find out what my limits were and to learn to push past them. And you work out until failure; that was really common. And healthy and helpful for me when I was younger. If you suffer from chronic fatigue, that approach is deadly no matter what age you are, because every time you push to failure, you make the next failure worse. Which is why, when we talk about working through fatigue, if you suffer from diagnosed chronic fatigue, or suspect that it's actually chronic fatigue... any CFS, do some searching and figure out if this is you. Figure out where the failure point is, and always fall short of that. Never push to failure. I've heard  "spoon theory," described as, oh, no, I'm out of spoons. Chronic fatigue is when the final spoon is attached to the pin of a grenade, and if you use that spoon, you've destroyed the next day or the next week.

[DongWon] Well, it's a really important concept in working out. If you are doing heavy lifting, if you are lifting to failure, it's really, really important to understand that that is under controlled conditions. You're doing it very deliberately, very specifically with a very specific form/ And my problem with things like CrossFit, for example, is you're pushing to failure under uncontrolled conditions, right? And that is what leads to injury. The other thing I'm going to point out is a lot of people like to talk about the brain like it's a muscle. Like our internal mental energy and fatigue is... has the same kind of adaptability as our physical muscles. This is not true . They are different systems that operate differently. Sometimes that metaphor can be useful, but it can also lead you down very dangerous roads because even if you don't have chronic fatigue, pushing your mental limits over and over again doesn't lead to hypertrophy and growth, it leads to burnout , and those are really different things.

[Erin] That is very true, but I will say thinking about gyms and CrossFit and all these things makes me think that it's really important when you lift heavy, to have a spotter.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think in life it's good to have spotters as well. People who will recognize when you are burning out, who are not you and can help you, because a lot of times when you're in the moment, it doesn't feel like you're burning out. It feels like I could just push through and use that last spoon. What could happen? And it's good to have somebody who is able to say, "Okay, this is... like, you're going too far." It's great if you can have that externally. If you don't have someone externally, sometimes, it's good to write down, like, a list of, like, lies I tell myself right before I burn out. You know what I mean?

[laughter]

[Erin] So that if you put it on your fridge, so that if you feel yourself telling yourself one of those lies, go, "Oh, wait. Maybe it's time for me to take a break and see if this is a lie and if I am pushing myself too far." But like whether you spot yourself by setting up things ahead of time or have somebody else spot you, sometimes it's hard to get outside of your own head, and it's good to have a way to do that 

[DongWon] That to me sounds like it 's time for a new tattoo. I gotta get that where I can see it.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah, why don't I listen to those signs?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, one of the most important things I learned was actually how to spot my symptoms before they become a real problem, which is another thing that you can actually do. So the people who have, like, these spradsheets and it's like, "I do this and it turns green when I hit my threshold goal." So, I use a thing called pacemaker.press. Love it. Which is probably did learn from you, Erin. But one of the things that I like about it is that no matter what you put in on that day, it gives you confetti and congratulations and it turns green. And the other thing... the extra piece of that is that what I can do is I can look at it and go, "Oh. My actual pace is this." My actual pace during something like a really busy time, is like 200 words, good day, get anything done. So, instead of saying, "Okay, I'm really going to have to make up for it by writing 10,000 words because I only did 200 the other day," I can say, "Well, what happens... what does the schedule look like if I write 200 words a day?" If I shift my expectations based on my actual capabilities. And the other thing that it does is that on the days where I do have like 1,500 words, I'm like, "What was different that day? What did I... Was it that I knew where the story was going? Was I not fatigued that day ? Like, what was it? And are those conditions that I can set for myself on another day?

[Howard] I run an app on my phone that monitors my health. I have a Polar always-on heart tracker on my arm. And the app and the service serve to help me see when I'm overdoing it. And I have learned some amazing things. Standing up and giving a presentation, for me, spikes my heart rate hard , and my exertion numbers, according to the budget that the app and  I have decided I have, are... I'm spent for the day. And I  learned that. And now I know that. And now I can plan for that. And I think we're ready for homework.

[Howard] And the homework is going to tie right into what we've been saying. I want you to write down five things. The first three things are things, are writing tasks that you think you can perform when you're just really tired. When all you've got left in you is ten words, if that. What are the ten words you can type? Can you take Erin's trick and write "dude" and it gets replaced with "fun man with glistening abs" or whatever? Those weren't Erin's words. I know, but that's what I was thinking. So, three things that you can do and two things that you recognize are symptoms in you of when you're about to burn out, or like, again like Erin said, the lies you tell yourself that are going to make you keep going when you can't . Write down those five things and just keep them close at hand, and see if they will help you get a little bit done when you can't even, can't even.

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

Writing Excuses 21.39: Write What You Feel

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-39-write-what-you-feel

Key Points: Reflecting your personal history in your writing. Events, emotions, places, people. Take your feelings and wrap words around them. Specifics appeal to a broad audience. How do you think it through? Somatic feelings. Feelings wheel. Make notes! Using experience as is, analogous, exaggerated, what if. Feelings, thoughts, actions. Belief. Reactions. Obfuscate. Flip POV. Journaling. 

[Season 21, Episode 39]

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

[Season 21, Episode 39]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Write what you feel.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm feeling stuff.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It's good that you're feeling stuff because...

[Howard] The alternative would be terrible.

[DongWon] The alternative would be terrible. This episode we are talking about how to take your personal history and reflect that in your writing. A thing I think about a lot is Connie Willis once wrote, I think in an introduction to a short story that she published about how you don't need to have gone to alien worlds to write about them. That nothing is stranger than your neighbor's Tupperware party or something along those lines, right? That your lived experience can truly inform anything that you want to write, no matter how speculative, no matter how much of a reach it seems initially, you can take the experiences that you have in your life, which I promise you are interesting. I know a lot of people think their lives aren't that interesting or think that they're boring. But the internal emotions that you feel, the experiences that you have are translatable and legible to other people through fiction in ways that I think are very affirming and joyful and fascinating. So, I kind of want to talk this week about how do you do that? How do you take your lived experience and put that into your work?

[Mary Robinette] I find that there's a couple of different ways that I can approach that. One is that I can take an actual event that has happened. I can take emotions that have happened. I can take a place that has happened... that I've been, a person that I know. That...

[Howard] Why did you look at me when you said that?

[Mary Robinette] Howard, you're definitely not in any of my stories at all...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Anywhere. I have... would never do that. And that these are all things that are accessible to me and, as Connie Willis says, that they are things that are... my normal is somebody else's weird. Like, my family has a Christmas Eve talent show. That... with, like, fourth cousins that are there, and growing up that was completely normal to me. And the older I get, the more I'm like, "Oh, no, that's really weird, actually." It's not something that most people have. And so, I can take that. I'm like, "Well, what is it like to have a big family get together?" That is, we're having our... I think it's... this year will be our 70th annual Christmas Eve dinner.

[DongWon] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah. And that's weird, as you heard from the reaction.

[Howard] Yeah. I take a different approach. I look at the actual things that I'm feeling, and I try to wrap words around them. My back hurts. Well, that's not enough. Use your words, Howard. Describe the pain. Describe how it makes you feel about what needs to happen next. I don't want to get out of this chair. Not because it hurts to stand up, because it hurts to twist. Just putting that much effort into describing what I'm actually feeling. Now I have a whole bunch of words to help the reader feel what I'm having the character feeling.

[DongWon] One thing you see a lot in media, whether it's movies, books, games, whatever, is this idea that you need to appeal to the broadest audience, that you want to reach every reader that's out there. However, in my personal experience and what I find interesting in fiction, and what I see succeeding as a narrative experience for people is specificity. The more specific you are, the broader you can actually be in your appeal. Because when you're specific about an experience in an emotion, a relationship, that is legible to people, because people are also experiencing similar things all the time. And that's what lets you write about fantastic worlds or unusual situations is the very normal relatable feeling that somebody's having over experiencing pain. That might be because you threw your back out getting out of your office chair or because you got shot by a spy, right? Like, the emotion you feel is going to be somewhat similar. There's things you can find there that are relatable and the dynamics you have with the people around you are legible.

[Erin] Yeah. A lot of times I like to think about, like, the specificity of, like, how not just what I'm thinking or what I'm doing, but how I have thought through things at a specific moment. For example, if I'm writing about a character who is deluding themselves about something, I love to kind of re-seat myself into a moment when I had a crush on someone and convinced myself they were like in love with me, but they weren't, kind of thing, which is, like, an experience many people have, where you're like, "Oh, they, like, shifted in their seat two inches towards me. It means something." It means nothing. But I, like, thought that... in that moment, I was very caught up in it. What happened? I was hyper aware of them. So that hyper awareness of another person's physicality is something that then I can take, whether or not they're aware that the person next to them is an alien or whatever is happening. It's about the, like, the specificity of the emotion. What is the way in which I have experienced this? What is the way in which I'm feeling this? And how can I put this on the page?

[Mary Robinette] One of our guests in the past, Desiree Burch, who's a phenomenal stand-up comedian, said exactly this thing, which is the more universal some... the more specific you are, the more universal it is. And so with emotions, I do the same thing. And I will... like, since we are very much tools, not rules, let me give you some things to think about consciously. The next time you're actually experiencing a big emotion, this is how you can tell you're a writer is that you're going to sit there and go, can I use this?

[laughter]

]Mary Robinette] But think about, like, what are your muscles doing? What is your heart rate doing? When you think back to that emotion, how does the temperature... that moment when the room is suddenly, you're blazing hot or you're suddenly cold. That those people record those because that's a thing you experience. How sensitive do you become to sound or touch or lights? What is your breath doing? And then, like, your thoughts, what are you paying attention to? Is your... are your... do your thoughts feel smooth? Are they skipping around? Is how is your memory attached to this?

[DongWon] I think all those somatic things are really, really wonderful and that's such a way to render the experience of having an emotion. I think it's also important to understand what the feeling is. And so there's a tool that's called the feelings wheel that can be very very useful here. And that will... it is sort of three concentric circles or maybe two concentric circles. I can't remember off top my head. But the feelings wheel is very useful because it has the broad feelings of, like, anger or disgust. And then it... as you narrow down, you can get to more and more specific slices of what those feelings actually are. and you get to be able to be incredibly concrete and specific about it. So, honestly, when I'm playing D and D, I have the feelings wheel on the table for anyone to look at. And that can be a prompt for people to be like, "Oh, this is what my character's going through right now. Here's how I can be specific about that." And I think you can do that with your characters, with your writing, or even... I'm, honestly, it's a therapeutic tool. If you're having... struggling with understanding your emotions, keep the feelings wheel around, keep it pulled up on your phone. It can be really, really helpful.

[Mary Robinette] This is completely bizarre, but you just reminded me of something that Elsie, my talking cat, does. Which is, she does not have a word for excited, and she will say scared, happy...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, yeah, that's actually...

[DongWon] That is...

[Howard] Yep, that is excited.

[laughter]

[Howard] Making notes about the things that you're... the things that you're feeling and how you're feeling them. The refining of the feelings wheel. I haven't actually looked at the feelings wheel, but I remember that... discovering it, decades ago, that I had two kinds of anger. There was an icy anger that was. like. deep in my heart and there was a hot anger that was in my... the heat was in my forehead. And they were... those were very visceral feelings for me. And just that refinement. It's not just the emotion you're having, but there's a metabolic aspect to it. We had a conversation at my house a couple of weeks ago about trauma and how trauma isn't a thing that happens to you. Trauma is a metabolic state. And describing the traumatized in terms of what their metabolism is doing is one of the ways where... I mean, maybe you've never had PTSD, maybe you've never had a full-on panic attack, but you've probably had your heart race. You've probably felt worried that someone was going to jump out and get you. And so by using some of those things, a person who's never had the experience can read what you've read and can assemble that experience for themselves.

[Mary Robinette] When we come back from the break, I would love to talk about the experiences themselves, how to reuse those.

[Mary Robinette] All right, now that we've had a little bit of a break, I want to talk about when there's like a really cool experience that you have had or an event and you're like, "Ah, this would make a great story." Or you don't... sometimes you can use it, sometimes you can't. Like, sometimes you think about it immediately. But I think there's kind of four modes and I'd love to get what your opinions are on how to use an experience. You can use the exact experience. Just import that entire thing exactly as it happened into your story. You can use an analogous experience. So, for instance, I have never done... I've never been in an actual space suit in the neutral buoyancy lab, but I have been in a swimming pool. I have done puppetry, and I know analogously what those gloves feel like. You can do an exaggerated version, which is, like, you drop one plate, your character drops 15. And then there's the what if, which is what if, that those... especially with the woo that was a close call.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] What if it went the other direction?

[DongWon] Well, I really like that framework in terms of those four sort of different outcomes. The other way I think about it, and I think these work together really, really well, is there's a difference between feeling, thought, and action, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Those are the three layers that kind of go into any decision you're making, any any moment you're experiencing. So, you can also play with those levels of where the similarity is. They could feel the same things. They could think the same things, and make a different choice. They could feel the same things, draw a different conclusion from what you did in your moment, and then make a choice based on that thought, right? And if you separate those out and in your moment when you're experiencing something, if you can look at your feelings wheel, find where you are on the feelings wheel, and then decide, okay, what thought am I having now? What conclusion am I drawing from this? And then what choice am I making? What action am I taking? That gives you leverage to play with to draw on your experience, but have your characters end up in different analogous situations, like you're talking about Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I think action is one of the really interesting pieces of this, because I think there is a lot of, like, cultural beliefs about how we act in specific situations that are like the way that characters have acted. So it's like, I just got dumped, I'm going to go eat ice cream. Everyone does this. This is a thing we all do. And it's like is that true? I don't know. Maybe you just eat ice cream on Sundays and it has nothing to do with your emotional state. And I think something that's fun, and that you can get to if you're journaling, or just if you think about it are, like, what are 10 weird things you've done when you were mad? Like, what are just like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] What are six odd things, or normal things, whatever... what are six things you do when you are sad? Because I think sometimes, in the moment, it just feels like it's hard to parse it, but later you can look back and figure out what those actions are and then you can use those actions as you're talking about, to connect the feelings to the actions. I feel like sometimes those get disconnected in a certain way, because we don't always act the way we wish we had, especially when feelings are high. And so we revise back what we think we did and we will actually erase the real human truth of how we acted in that...

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[Erin] That moment.

[Mary Robinette] You just made me remember a thing that you said many episodes ago that I always go back to, which is identity is a verb. And that's very much I think in this... what we're talking about with this is that the actions that your character takes because they have a different identity may be different than the ones you took in that moment.

[DongWon] Well, and you talking about this has reminded me that there's also a fourth layer that you can think of which is belief...

[Mary Robinette] Oh, God.

[DongWon] And is belief or instinct kind of... if you think of it as a stack, it's like belief/instinct is below, feeling is above that, thought is above that, action is above that, right? And the belief or instinct, whatever this ingrained societal expectation is, which could be as concrete as you eat ice cream when you're sad, is a thing that your character is going to instinctively respond to, and then they're having the feeling on top of that and then thought. So, when you're playing with the belief layer, what you're playing with is your world building, your societal level, and your cultural level, right? The fundamental belief of an East Asian culture is going to be different in some cases from a western culture. So how somebody responds to a stimulus is going to be a different feeling, thought, and emotion. The feeling might be something that you can relate to, but then think about how does thought and action differ.

[Mary Robinette] So using a very concrete example from some of my writing. Elma in The Calculating Stars is a mathematician, and so her comfort thing is to reach for math. Math is very far away from being my comfort thing. It is like zero. So what I would do is I would think, okay, here's my comfort thing, and then I would swap it for something that made sense in hers. I think that when you're... I would also do this because she is Jewish and I'm like, and I am not, and so here is my comfort based on my... the lens that I grew up with. What comfort would she be reaching for in a similar thing?

[Howard] And I think that if you've ever read or watched something and felt like some of the characters, secondary characters especially, were two-dimensional, spear carriers, cardboard cutouts. You apply this exercise to one secondary character and... someone who did this really well, and it was in... it's been so long... Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy. We POV switch a lot and we get people who are functionally spear carriers who are only on the page for... only in the book for a page and a half, but we get to see how they feel, what they believe, what they're experiencing. And it makes... one of the reasons Clancy was such an effective novelist is because his entire worlds felt real. Not just the one or two people we were following, but everybody else. And you don't have to write this for all of the characters. Just let us focus on somebody that we might not be coming back to for a while and show us that they feel.

[DongWon] Stephen King is a master of this...

[Howard] Yep.

[DongWon] Is what I would point out. Anyways,

[Erin] Yeah. And I think this actually gets to the point that you actually... you can write what you feel into anyone and everyone and any part of your story. It doesn't only have to be your protagonist. Though you are the protagonist, I would... hopefully of your own life. Like, that doesn't mean, like, you could have a character that's very different from the way that you do things as your lead, but put some small element of yourself. I think it's really fun to give, like, secondary characters something in common with you...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] In the way that you might have something in common with a friend that's very different from you, but you're like, "But we both like knitting for very different reasons." Like, or we come to it in very different ways. Our action is the same, but our feelings, our motivations, our beliefs that brought us there are different, but there's something in common. And there's something that then you can have as a nice touch point when you are re-creating that character or having that character do something. And that could be any of those levels. It could be a feeling touch point, an action touch point, a belief touch point.

[DongWon] Well, one thing that's really simple to do that I really like, and, again, this is an improv environment, so it's a little more blunt than you might do in a novel, but just give... just have a reaction. Give your... and if you're introducing an NPC or your playing character, react to something that is completely unrelated to the main action, right? Just have your NPC like something or not like something in a way that is kind of unreasonable because it's not connected to anything, but it makes them... it humanizes them and it lets you access a perspective that they have that is rooted in... and often, because I'm the one playing it and it's instinctive. It's something I like or dislike. It's like, oh, I don't like that character because they're like this and I'll just react to that. And then that gives everyone else something to bounce off of. And so having characters do that in a moment when you introduce them, give them an emotion, a feeling, a perspective, I think, can really flesh out a scene very, very quickly.

[Mary Robinette] I do something similar to this. When I have a character... when my character walks into a scene that is already in progress, I will often gift a secondary character with the tail end of a story that I've heard someone else tell or that I have told. And it implies this whole larger world. Like, I have a friend who is clearly... her life is clearly haunted because she keeps moving into places where there are bees in the walls. And so I have a character who...

[DongWon] What a bad curse. That's a bad one. That's a really bad one.

[Mary Robinette] It's amazing. Really, also. But it is so consistent too. So she, so I have this character who is not based on her, but one of my characters walks in on the tail end and all you see is the character saying, "And the walls were full of bees." And everyone else is like, "No, not again." But we don't... I do no explanation of that.

[DongWon] One thing I want to talk about, and you telling the story kind of reminded me of this, is in drawing on your own personal history, where do you draw the lines? How do you obfuscate from pulling on your difficult relationship with your mother, let's say, and putting that into the text in a way that she's not going to be mad at you forever, right? Like, how do you find ways to draw on those emotional things that are important to you and that are your lived experience, without exposing yourself or the people around you in ways they did not consent to?

[Mary Robinette] So, I have a toolbox that I use when I am... when I'm drawing from a person. And again, you can exaggerate all of the things we talked about previously, but what you're looking at is, how much of the person are you taking? So, there's mannerisms, their appearance, their motivation, their opinions, their action, their history, their skills, and their relationships. So, thinking about if you don't want... if you want to obfuscate it... I'm a professional narrator.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] If you want to hide it...

[DongWon] There you go.

[Mary Robinette] Perfect. Editing. Then you use as few as... you swap as many of those as you can. If you want them to know, you swap as few of those.

[laughter]

[Howard] And if you want the satisfaction of just having them in a book, dead, let a friend write it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. There's also that. Howard killed someone for me that was a problem for me, and then in one of the purest acts of love I can describe, brought him back to life and killed him a second time.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Fantastic.

[Howard] I am a lot of things. I am occasionally a good friend.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I was going to say, I also think that, like, especially people who are difficult, like, people who you're putting in your story not because you're like, this is just my, like, love letter to how great you are. Which I think is a different issue. We... any character you... I think you should be able to see a little bit of where they're coming from and understand them. So when you put someone who's difficult to you in a book, in a story, it's an opportunity to try to figure out why are they like that and try to understand what is driving their motivation. Because few people wake up every day thinking, I'm going to be a difficult jerk. They think, I want things, or, like, I... whatever the thing they're thinking is, it's very personal to them. And I like to think about, from writing what I feel, what might get me to the point that I would take these actions? Because when you're talking about somebody else, you only get the actions layer. So what are the feelings? What are the beliefs? What are the experiences that might get me to take those actions? Let me try to humanize them a little bit for myself. And in that way, like you, if you highlight someone's humanity, I think they're less likely to be upset with you, because on one level, you're trying to understand them. And most humans want to feel understood.

[Mary Robinette] And I think something that you can do as a writing exercise or therapy, depending, is if you're having trouble with that, you can flip the POV character for that scene, write it from their POV, and then flip it back to the POV character that you're going to have for the actual book. And oftentimes that will have the effect of having you put in smaller actions or reactions that are more humanizing even if you don't put their interiority on the page directly.

[Howard] Mary Robinette, you said writing exercise or therapy. This entire episode... if you are being mindful of your feelings, your experiences, in the ways that we describe in this episode. That's going to be therapeutic.

[DongWon] Oh, basically all I've done is say things from my therapeutic process that were very helpful to me as writing advice.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's all I did this episode.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] So.

[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about, like, how...

[Howard] This episode had a twist.

[laughter]

[DongWon] The twist is you're in therapy now.

[Erin] No, I think like... I'm thinking about journaling, which I think is also... like, journaling can be a great way to, like, access some of this stuff...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] In ways that you are not... you're doing it for personal reasons, but later you can use it for art. One of my favorite things to do is journal after... is journal after a breakup, because when you go back, if you ever get a second breakup, woohoo. You can go back and be like, oh yes, I felt just this horrible, but then if you look forward, you'll be like, oh, 6 weeks later, I was better. And, like, you don't feel better at the moment, but you can actually see, like, there was a way out that I... there was a light at the end of the tunnel that I am in. And so now that I'm back in this tunnel, I can see where the light is. And then, if you want to bring a character through that tunnel, you can actually, again, go back and look at what you have written and use that as a guide. So not everyone should... you don't all have to journal, but I think it can be a really great way... [garbled]

[Howard] At least one of you does.

[laughter]

[Erin] Hey, you, listening right now. Just kidding.

[Mary Robinette] With all of the pretty notebooks that you've bought. But along the journaling lines, the... even if it's not... let me journal all of my emotions, I find that banking sensory details...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Is a great way to just capture things. I have literally reused sensory details from an experience 10 years after I wrote them down. And when we were talking about previously in the World Is On Fire episode, banking those sensory details, of journaling how you are feeling, your emotions, the things you wish you could and couldn't do. Journaling feels like a great way to...

[DongWon] I was going to say you... everyone is just teeing me up for our homework this week. So in spite of what Erin said, I am going to make all of you journal. What I would like you to do for your homework is to journal about a significant emotional moment in your life. Pick something that was high intensity emotion, and then think about the tools we've given you. Write down the somatic details, which is what Mary Robinette is talking about. What did you feel in your body? What was that experience? Think... write... look at that feelings wheel. Write down what feelings you were feeling. What thought did you have from that? What conclusions did you take from that? And then what choices did you make? Then once you've done all of that, rewrite this as a scene, but write it from the third person and give your protagonist different biographical details from yourself. Take all the emotion that you put into your journal and then re-render it as a third person scene.

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

Writing Excuses 21.37: Barrier Breaking: The World Is on Fire

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-37-barrier-breaking-the-world-is-on-fire

Key Points: May you live in interesting times? Ouch! Setting boundaries. Give yourself sequel time, take a break and process. Put your feelings into your writing. Who is feeding you catastrophes? What are your coping mechanisms? Log off! Make space for boredom. Containers. Be kind to yourself.

[Season 21, Episode 37]

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

[Season 21, Episode 37]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier breaking: The world is on fire.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week's episode might be a little bit of a heavy one. But I think it's important. So, I want to dig in a little bit into a thing that I'm sure we have all experienced. Whenever you're listening to this, I think this is probably going to be relevant. For context, we're recording this in 2026. However, this has unfortunately been fairly true for most of my adult life, which is, there's a lot of chaos that happens in the world. There's the too often quoted proverb about may you live in interesting times, and boy, have the times been interesting. Without getting into specifics, there have been a lot of events that happen globally, locally, within our comm... writing community in many different ways. I think this applies where there will be something happening that will be distressing to you and the people around you that can be very overwhelming to take in. Whether that's you watching the news, looking at social media, listening to your friends talk about it. Things can feel incredibly urgent, very intense. And, as we talk about this, I just want to underscore that none of this is about the fact that these issues aren't important. They are vitally important. They are existentially important. However, you are a person that lives in the world. You are a person that has your own goals, and things that you are trying to accomplish. So, what we want to talk about this week is how to navigate all this. How do you continue to work? How do you survive? How do you be a person when everything around you is on fire without turning into the dog that says everything is fine? So I think the thing I want to start with is how do you set boundaries around this? How do you frame this so that it is part of your life but doesn't overwhelm all of your experience to the point that you are no longer functioning?

[Howard] We've talked about the Swain method, scene-sequel format in writing numerous times. I love it. The idea that you have to give the reader time to process things that have happened. Boy, the narrative of the world. If you've... if you stuck your face into the river to watch the fish, at some point you're just going to drown. You gotta... you got to come up for air. You got to come up for air. And as a writer who understands scene-sequel, just that metaphor is a tool in my box, to where I'm feeling overwhelmed and I realize, oh, wait, it's time for sequel. It's time for sequel. You know what? I'm just going to turn it off and I'm going to process. And weird, how the writing tools sometimes...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. 

[Howard] Work in the other direction.

[Mary Robinette] I think that the point that... that it is okay to take a break is valid. But if you don't want to take a break, if you want to try to write, one of the things that I actually got from Sandra, one of our dear friends, is that everything takes some form of narrative energy, and that when you are looking at the things that are happening in the larger world, you are spending narrative energy processing that. And often you're processing something that you can't affect. But sometimes you are processing things that you can affect. Sometimes it's not just the bigger world is on fire. Sometimes it's something that's happening in your personal life. Like, writing was real hard in the last year of my mom's life. So... but I wanted to write. So, things that I would do is that I would recognize I'm already spending this narrative energy. Can I put... can I take that narrative and put it into the fiction? This was often gifting my character with my emotions, without necessarily gifting... taking the, like, increasingly fascist government and putting it into the story. But I could put in feelings of frustration. I could put in those kinds of things. And when you read Relentless Moon, which I wrote during pandemic... actually not during pandemic... doesn't matter. I wrote during situations. Pre-pandemic, it came out during pandemic, that was exciting. But there are pieces of it that you can see, or I can see, were my frustration at some of the political stuff that was happening at the time and... but the politics aren't in there. My character's emotions are, like, I'm gifting them with that.

[Howard[ No, we joke sometimes about filing the serial numbers off of a thing in order to put it in our thing. And this is a case where you haven't filed the serial numbers off of the pistol. What you've done is you set the pistol on butcher paper and traced the negative space around the pistol. And that negative space, that's what's in your story. It's...

[DongWon] Well, there's a quote from Andor that I want to quote here because it's something I think about a lot in the current state of the world, right? That I think is relevant here. I mean, the entire show is very relevant to the current political environment. Which I think is a great example of how to take all of this energy and channel it into something. But there's a character, Caris Nemik, who says early on when we meet him, he's like a little political theorist. He says so much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. This idea that there's so much happening all the time. One thing I do want to emphasize is this is an environment that is being manufactured for you by a number of competing influences in the world around you. If you are feeling outraged, confused, and overwhelmed, that is because there are incentives in the world that are making that happen for you. And that is how the technology companies that are in our lives benefit and profit from your engagement with their product. The way they do that is by showing you things that will engage your brain. And one of the easiest ways to do that is show you something that will completely outrage you, that will feel incredibly urgent. And then on a political scale, and on a news scale, there's a lot of incentive to create catastrophes to distract you or engage you in different ways. Whether that is to motivate a political base, see every email I get in my inbox from the Democratic party saying, "Now is the only time. Everything's too late." And it's like, okay, you're trying to get me to panic, so I'll donate. And this is not me saying to not take these issues seriously and not support causes you believe in, but also be critical of who is telling you, what they're telling you, and why. In the emotion you're feeling, it's helpful to recognize that a lot of the world we live in is trying to generate that in you.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think what's interesting is you... if you cannot control or, I don't know, if you can, awesome. But if, in general, I cannot control the narrative, like, of the world around me, what is happening? What is going wrong? I can only control my response to it...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And so I think it's interesting. This actually comes from, weirdly, on a much more personal scale. One of my favorite advice columnists, Carolyn Hacks, always talks about if you have a bad relationship with, like, a relative, like, let's say, like, every time you go home for Thanksgiving, X relative talks about your weight, and it's, like, super harmful and super super upsetting. She's like, "At a certain point, you have to know that that's going to happen." And sadly, like, it'd be great if you could change that person. Sure, go for it. But often, you have to just decide, like, what is the coping mechanism I'm going to activate...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When this upsetting thing occurs? Because if it surprises you every time, then you're living in like a shock, and you can't really respond well. And so, I think a lot about, like, how do we create the environment of our own lives?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] An example from covid is that... at one point during covid, I would wake up every morning and look at how many people had died. That was like the first thing I did when I woke up, and I was like, I want this information, but do I want this to be the first thing that enters my brain when I wake up in the morning? This is just... I have created a habit and I think it's partly because it's like, okay, if I can understand this, maybe I can control it or feel a certain way about it, and I thought it was helping me, and then at a certain point, I was like, I don't think this habit is actually helping me. I think I'd be better off waking up and doing the crossword puzzle first...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And doing something that engages my mind differently, and then later in the day, maybe I will take time for this, figure out how I want to respond to it. but figuring out what is the way that works best for you, because oftentimes your initial reactive impulses aren't necessarily the best ones. They're just the first ones.

[DongWon] There's a real conflation in how we talk about things in terms of online activism of looking at the thing is action is what a lot of people argue. That if... you have to be aware of exactly what's happening and look at it unflinchingly in a... watch these videos of people dying or watch these awful situations, and that is, in some way, action in and of itself. And I could not disagree with that more, right? I think it's important to be aware of what's happening, but you inflicting trauma on yourself by looking directly at the thing, to a point that you are unable to take actual action, to protest, to write about it, to whatever it is in your life. Is doing... is not serving anyone, including yourself, and I think you need to make sure that you are in a healthy place first, so that you can act in the world and live your life and find joy where you can, even when things are hard.

[Howard] One of the things that you... you said earlier, just talking about the monetization of our attention. One of the ways this works, and I present it to you as a tool. One of the ways that this monetization works is that you're reading a thing on the web, and it's... yeah, outrage and you want a break. You want sequel, but you can't look away from scene. And as you keep scrolling, you get an ad. And that ad, well, now you didn't have to look away, but you got sequel. You got to relax and kind of process. And now you're feeling friendly about that ad, and you're going to spend money with them. That's heavily simplified, but I present it to you as a strategy. If you're reading things and you discover yourself relaxing and hitting the ads, find a way to do that without scrolling. Look left off the screen. Go touch grass. Something, because you needing that is how you're being exploited by advertisers.

[DongWon] I talk to a lot of my clients, or a lot of writers in general, who are struggling with deadlines, struggling to write, given the state of the world. And the advice I give them every time, and I stand by this as loudly and as firmly as I can, is log off. Stop looking at BlueSky, stop looking at Instagram, or limit it to a certain amount of time. The reality is social media is nowhere near as useful for career building and marketing as it was 10 years ago. And a lot of people are operating still under this assumption because they haven't caught up yet. And it's all... one of the few active things you can do as a writer to, like, try and build your brand and promote. I think there are times where it works. The vast majority of the time, it's not going to get you what you need. And if it's keeping you from writing books, which is the actual important part, then it is truly hurting your career, right? And so finding ways to log off and limit that, I think is so important.

[Erin] Speaking of logging off, I think this is a perfect time for us to take a break.

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[Mary Robinette] So the advice about logging off is something that I have been doing for the last year or more. I'm almost never on Blue Sky these days. Most of my social media time is hanging out on Instagram on my cat feed because then I just look at adorable kitties and puppies. But I want to use that as the other downside to everything is on fire is that when you start to use social media as a soporific in order to avoid thinking about things, that also prevents you from writing. So something that I want to encourage you is to practice being bored.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That practice being... this is not necess... this is not meditation. This is just like, you know what, I'm not going to do that thing. I'm... and try to retrain yourself to reach for your writing. So one of the other things that I did this last year was that I got a new... it's not... it is technically a new notebook. I do like a notebook, but it's a little tablety thing, because I realized that pre-social media when I had quiet time, when I was standing in a grocery store line, when I was at the doctor's office, when I was whatever, I would pull out something and I would write, and that I'd stopped doing that. I was scrolling instead. And that I was often scrolling for comfort, and that that was as unhealthy as scrolling for outrage. So now I reach for this tablet, most of the time, and I try to jot things down, and often it's like one sentence, but that's still a sentence that I hadn't written.

[Erin] Yeah, I would say, like, I agree with that. And then also I think it's... the thing about being bored is I often... I will say, sometimes I'll take spaces of boredom and use them to create a container for the things that I want to do. So if it's like... I'm like, I am washing the dishes. That is a set amount of time. While I'm washing the dishes, I will take time to, like, scroll or listen to this podcast or do this thing that, like, is something that I really want to limit the amount of time I'm spending doing this. So, like, while I'm in line, I will do it, but then I can't do it when I'm not here. Like, I cannot continue the activity once the container has finished. I think the thing that's weird about having all this information on your phone is you can carry your phone from activity to activity to activity without a break. So sometimes I'm like, if there's a break in my day because, like, I was like, oh, I went to do lunch or I went to do whatever, that is a time to say, should I continue the activity that I'm doing or should I switch to something else?

[Howard] I may have mentioned this before, but a guy who was my boss 30 years ago, Eric Schmidt, I always respected the things that he had to say and he was recently asked, how do people... how do you be more productive? What's your productivity hack? And he said, make space for boredom.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Learn how to be bored again. And this is from a guy whose billions come from capitalizing on the fact that we don't like to be bored.

[DongWon] Well, the thing I want to say is I think there's an analog to being... I think boredom is one of the most powerful things and I fully endorse everything you all are saying. I do think there's a counterpoint to this as well, however, which is to be intentional, right?

[Howard] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] You can be bored, but then when you go to have your time where you're actively engaging with the world, I really... I'm begging you to be intentional about how you do that. Instead of passively consuming your news from scrolling through Blue Sky, take an hour, take two hours this week, sit down. This isn't your homework, but maybe it should be, but like, sit down, make a list of news sources that you actually trust, that are actually observing the world in interesting ways. Talk to your friends. Find out who should I be reading right now to get my news and information? I have a small curated list of newsletters, independent news outlets, things like that that I follow either in podcast or newsletter or social media accounts that I follow. And that's where I get my information from. I'm not relying on the passive fire hose of outrage to inform me about what's going on. I'm actively seeking it out. And then I say, "Okay, I've been doing XYZ. I'm gonna sit and listen to this podcast and find out what's happening in the world of tech this week. What's going on with AI? What's going on with this and/or what's going on with politics, what's going on with global conflicts? And containing it, also putting boundaries on it. So I'm engaging with it when I want to engage with it and I'm doing that with intention. And then I have the information I need to act. And then when I spend time on social media, I spend a lot of time on Tik Tok. I like to scroll. But what I've done there is very carefully curated my feed to be things I'm actively interested in. I am learning information when I'm on TikTok. I'm learning, you know, exercise information, hiking information, woodworking information. I have my list of things and those are the ones I engage with and follow to make sure that my feed is actually giving me... I learn a ton when I'm on TikTok. It's active experience for me. I'm not just doom scrolling, right? I think you can be on social media in ways that are really intentional that serve you and your interests and goals. And so I think cultivating boredom and then balancing that with active intentional consumption of information, I think, can really balance things for you in a helpful way.

[Howard] It's important to note that our thresholds are different.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] None of us should, and I'm going to just use wild metaphor here, none of us should try to subsist on a diet of exclusively ice cream. But lactose intolerant people maybe don't get any ice cream.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] It is entirely possible that the thing you've been getting too much of, you dial it back and you dial it back and you dial it back and it feels like too much until you dial it all the way off. Not everybody's like that, but there are some people who are. And hey, if that's you, acknowledge it and dial it all the way off so that you can have a life that's yours.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to once again say that one of the most powerful tools that I've also found is trying to use all of this in my fiction. And one of the things that I will do is I will shift it to the side. I'm like how do my characters, like, in this world, what does political outrage look like? Donald Moss talks about dichotomies, and that there's multiple aspects of anything, and one of the questions he asks is what what are they right about? And so... and what are they wrong about? Like, so sitting there and going what is my character wrong about and what is my character right about, and what are the bad guys wrong about, what are the bad guys right about? Also, how does my character find comfort in this, how do they manage their outrage? All of those things are ways for me to often come up with strategies that will work for myself. Some of the... my best coping mechanisms have come because I needed my character to have a coping mechanism, and then I was like, "Oh, actually that's really good. I should do that."

[Erin] I also...

[Howard] Emotionally, you're acting as a therapist for your character and you turned out to be pretty good at it.

[Erin] I like looking at these things also in, like, really big systemic levels.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, what would I... how would I fix the world? How would I break it? Is, like, something that I like to think about when I'm doing my own world building. Like, is there an aspect... is there something going on in the world that I don't understand why people are drawn to it or what they like about it? If I create a world that has that, like, why would I... like, what would draw people towards it? What would draw people against it? Can I destroy the thing that I don't like? Can I often build the thing that I don't like just to understand it better, so that when I'm confronted with it in real life, I feel like I understand the monster. Like, I've circled around this thing and so I have a better understanding of it when I am confronted with it. And I think that, like, just to circle back a little bit, boredom can sometimes help with that. But I think the word boredom is... can be difficult for folks because it sounds bad, like it's, like, not a good thing. I often think of it as single track activities, activities in which you can only do one thing. So like a walk outside...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is like... could be, maybe it's boring, maybe it's not. Outside's really fun. If you can go out and walk around, it can be really great. But you can't do that many other things, because you have to pay attention to your physical space and you can't also... please do not read your phone while you're walking. That's how you found... fall down an empty open manhole. So that does happen sometimes.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Erin] Things like doing a jigsaw puzzle. It's very single track, in that you have to actually just be putting all your energy into this. But I often find that I can use that time to sort of, in the background, think about a story problem because it doesn't require my full thought. It's just lurking there in the background. And in the middle of trying to figure out which is an edge piece and which is a centerpiece, I'll come up with that coping thing for the character or an interesting thing for the world.

[DongWon] Yeah. 

[Howard] When I think about boredom, I think about it as allowing my brain to not be filled with stuff that I didn't choose. My... let my mind wander, let myself get bored, and the moment that becomes... but the moment I'm like, man, I'm bored, I want to do something with my brain, now I'm ready to go sit down and write. That's... yeah... I like the way Schmidt said it, but I think it's better to say, allow yourself to get bored, and then have the path out that can be productive.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing we talk about in theater and in writing which is leaving space for the reader to engage in the story. And I think that when we're talking about boredom, what we're talking about is leaving space for yourself...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] To engage with your story.

[DongWon] I want to return to a thing that you were talking about, Erin, at the... before we went back into talking about boredom, which was... having this... your world building as interrogating what is wrong with the world or how to break the world in various ways. Austin Walker, who's a critic and a GM, talks about this as critical world building. Which is using your world building to critique the environment around you. And I just want to have one thing... just end on this note of talking about what Mary Robinette was talking about, which is writing through this, right? Take all this and you can put it in your stories. Now, I think there's this idea that if you do that, your work becomes polemical or becomes a bummer, not fun to engage with. And I want to push back on that idea very, very firmly. I think Andor is a great example. That show can be an incredible bummer. There's moments in that show that I was, like, truly in tears. But also, that show is very thrilling. It's an adventure story. It's a heist. It's, like, all of these things. Whenever I'm starting a new campaign as a GM, I'm engaging with something explicitly political. I'm doing stories that engage with topics of war or AI or whatever it is that I'm finding difficult in this moment because I'm trying to find a way to process that. But that... but those games aren't bummers. They're fun. They're adventure stories. People are engaging with it. This is the background texture. And also, it's really great to be able to tell a story where your heroes go out and resist the thing that's terrible and engage with it and have victories over that, right? Tell stories that show how you want the world to be, how you wish we were engaging with it, but also tell stories that reflect your experience. And I think that can be very important and very healing. And I think to do that work, you need space from the thing that's happening. And that's where we're saying take boredom, put boundaries on your social media content, engage with things in intentional ways so that there is room for you as the... as sitting at the table with yourself, right? Make space for you to process and engage.

[Erin] And just the last thing, I know we said that was the last thing. Be kind to yourself. It's a rough world.

[DongWon] Yes. Yeah.

[Erin] Like, maybe you do these things, maybe you don't. Maybe you scroll for 52 hours and you never leave, you make toothpicks, keep your eyes up, whatever. Like, I think sometimes it's like just getting through the day is... when the world is on fire, it's hard to get through a fire. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of strength. And I think that, like, while we have a lot of advice for you, however you take it and however you are able to use it to get yourself through the world is valid and is awesome and we're excited to see you continue to push through.

[DongWon] I think leaving on a note of be kind to yourself is really wonderful and really important. However, I have some homework for you. 

[laughter]

[DongWon] And I think this homework will be kind in a broad sense, but not the immediate. I think this is going to be very difficult for a lot of people. And my homework is to log off. Go touch grass. What I want you to do is take this week and put yourself on a strict social media diet. That can be zero. That's pretty tough. It could be an hour a day. Whatever it is, make sure you are really limiting. Go to your calendar. I'm... be as concrete about this as possible. Say from 5 o'clock to 6 o'clock, I will look at BlueSky and Instagram, and then I will not do it after that. I will put my phone down. Here's what's going to happen. You're going to feel itchy. You're going to feel a physical sensation of discomfort, of not reaching for your phone, not opening whatever website you're looking at. I want you to sit in that discomfort. And when you feel that, don't turn on a podcast. Don't go watch a TV show. Don't play a video game. I want you to sit there and force yourself to sit with it for at least 10 minutes and see what that feels like. Let that boredom develop within you and see what thoughts emerge as you do that. You can do this by taking a walk, go take a shower, go on a hike, go on a long drive, whatever it is, whatever your way is of reconnecting with yourself and logging off, try and engage with that in a really intentional way. Do it over the next week and see how that feels and then make some choices about how you want to incorporate that in your life going forward. 

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

Writing Excuses 21.35: The Four Acts of Kishotenketsu

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-35-the-four-acts-of-kishotenketsu

Key Points: Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu. Intro, develop, twist, conclusion. And lots of examples and discussion of this structure.

[Season 21, Episode 35]

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

[Season 21, Episode 35]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The four acts of Kishotenketsu.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And we are talking about a different narrative structure that we're going to be deconstructing. We've done some things like Save the Cat, Hero's Journey. This time we are deconstructing an Asian structure that appears under different names in China, and Korea, and Japan, and Vietnam. It is not a conflict-based structure, which the Western three-act structure is. The pieces are introduction, development, twist, and conclusion. There's a fair chance that if you think you haven't seen it, you probably have. If you've been watching anime, if you saw the movie Parasite, this shows up in a lot of different places. Yes, anime can be definitely conflict-driven, but a lot of times what we're looking at is this change that happens over the course of the story.

[DongWon] I love Asian cinema very, very deeply. It's very important to me, and there's a lot of stories that I love. I read works in translation as well. And I think there's a criticism I see leveled at particular Asian movies quite a bit. I mean, they're also known for being very violent and very dramatic in certain ways. Like, we see that with sort of the rise of Korean cinema more recently, but there's also these groups of like Wong Kar-Wai, who's one of my very favorite filmmakers of all time. Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, these are two of my favorite films of all time, and people always say that they're incredibly slow, right? They're very often referred to as very slow and meditative, whereas I find them very tense and quite thrilling and engaging in a lot of ways, but they don't follow this Western three-act narrative structure, right? They don't follow this rising and then falling, they don't follow sort of the steps that we've talked about in terms of Save The Cat. They have their own structure, which feels very distinct and unique, and I find it very satisfying to move through these steps in a way that there is tension, but not conflict, in the same, right, way, right? If you're looking at the movie In the Mood for Love, the tension is that these two characters have a deep connection to each other. She is married, he is not, and there is a will they, won't they, but by God, that thing never resolves, right? And a lot of people find the movie very unsatisfying because it doesn't resolve, but in their commitment to the lack of resolution, there is stuff that you learn about what it is to exist in a modern society, what it is to be a person, what it is to be in love, all of these things that make for an incredible experience, but you have to go in with the mindset of this isn't a rom-com. You're not going to get a romance structure out of this. What you will get is a very human story that is about experience.

[Mary Robinette] There's a novel that I read, Tatami Galaxy. And the first part of it... like, I know Kiki's Delivery Service exists, and I also forget that it exists, and so the first part of it, I'm like, this was recommended to me, but why was this recommended to me? Because it's just this whiny college kid who's, like, making stupid mis-choices. And then it resets, and I'm like, oh, that was our normal establishment. And he goes through... there are... it's literally four acts, where he's like, I could have made this other choice. And so you see him develop as a character, having made this other choice. And then there's this twist where you realize, oh, nothing about this... I thought that it was, like, a parallel universe, but this kid is actually resetting. It's fascinating. And once you... once I kind of realized... reminded myself of this, it takes the story in different ways. And it's not the same kind of conflict-driven story. There's conflict that happens in it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's not that. It's just that's not the driver of it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I was going to say, I think also it's what engine in some ways is driving your storytelling. So I... One of the things that I really think is interesting about Kishotenketsu in a really traditional... my understanding of it traditionally, is that often the ten in it is another story. So you'll have like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Establishment of, and, like, a world, movement through that world, something outside of the world of the story that you're currently in, and then something that gives you an understanding of how these two things are actually, like, part of some greater narrative.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And so in some ways it is a journey of understanding. And it puts a little bit of the onus on you as the reader, watcher, listener, player. Some people argue that Super Mario... that Mario is actually Kishotenketsu. But, like, I don't know why, but I'm just saying it.

[DongWon] Excuse me while I blue screen for 40 minutes over here.

[laughter] 

[Howard] I just gotta say, I'm now... I'm now replaying that game.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And, actually, I will find the article that explains that and we'll put it in the show notes so you could know why.

[DongWon] I do think a lot of JRPGs do follow Kishotenketsu...

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] Model in a way that feels very distinct from, say, how BioWare does a RPG.

[Yeah.] 

[Erin] Exactly, because I think that a lot of Western storytelling is very catharsis-based.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, I will follow an emotional journey, and at the end I will get an emotional release. Whereas this is more, okay, I will follow a knowledge journey, and by looking at different stories, I will understand my world differently. And if you're expecting one and getting the other, you're going to end up really disappointed.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to... yes, all of that. And I want to give an example that's shorter, which is a little bit of poetry, which is... this is a Japanese poem, and I'm reading an English translation. So, Ki, daughters of Itoya in the Honmachi of Osaka. Okay? So, there's our establishment. Sho. The elder daughter is 16, and the younger one is 14. Ten. Throughout history, daimyo killed the enemy with bows and arrows. There's a big twist there. What do we do? Ketsu. The daughters of Itoya kill with their eyes. And it's like, oh, I see how all of these things go together now. And that I think is when you talk about this journey of knowledge and understanding, it's not information, it's understanding the connections and seeing a new network that you hadn't seen before.

[Howard] One of the challenges for Westerners like me who love structure and want to understand Kishotenketsu is that, for instance, the word twist... when I think of twist, I think of a plot twist. But in Kishotenketsu, twist can mean plot twist, but it can also mean a contextual shift that forces us to learn a completely new thing, that invites us into a completely new place, so that when we get to Ketsu, when we get to the resolution, everything that we've been told flows together. And there's this temptation to look at the four acts of Kishotenketsu and say, "Well, wouldn't that just map onto a three-act structure where the big fat second act just gets carved into two bits?" And the answer is, well, in terms of carving a pie into four pieces, sure, you've made four pieces, but the reason this is a separate structure is that those things are... They have different jobs. The twist that you described, the kid is actually resetting. That's the sort of thing in a superhero film that would be two acts sooner. That would be our inciting incident. That wouldn't be our twist. That would be the setup for a completely different type of story. And that's why I think it's so important to look at this structure... look at this structure as its own thing, because it tells different stories than the kinds we... and I say we, speaking for Western dudes like me, are accustomed to telling. [DongWon] In Korean, we call this gisungjeongyeol. I say that as if I didn't look at the Wikipedia right before we started recording.

[laughter]

[DongWon] But that is what we Koreans call it. And I want to talk about it and break it down a little bit in terms of the film Parasite, which I think is a thing a lot of people have seen that's relatively well known in the West, but perfectly follows this structure, right? And so the thing I, in particular, wanted to hit was the jeong stage, which is the twist, which is, Howard, you're right that it doesn't have to be a plot twist. In Parasite it is a plot twist, right? So the gi is the meeting of the characters when we see them in their home, they're like folding pizza boxes, right? The sung is them starting to infiltrate their way into the family, right? Getting this job as the caretakers to these kids. And then the jeong is the incredible shocking reversal where they discover there's an entire house under the house and there's a man living down there, right? And that completely inverts everything we've come to understand about this movie, about the role that this lower class family is playing in the story of trying to infiltrate their way into this upper class family. When actually there's an entire other family literally living beneath it, right? And it is this contemplative thing that is a deep critique of both capitalism and post-war Korean society in this way that it's a complete reversal. And then, I think one thing that people really struggle with, when watching Asian cinema is a feeling at the end of what the hell was I supposed to get from that, right? Because Parasite ends in this, like, orgy of violence, of this incredible very violent scene that happens at this child's birthday party. And I think there's a desire to take that and say, "Oh, so this should... What's the moral lesson we're taking away from this?" And there isn't one. There's a process lesson that you're taking away from it. There is... you are drawing connections between the four parts of this movie that almost operate as stand-alones, right? I would actually argue that the movie Sinners, which came out last year, follows a kishotenketsu structure more than it follows a traditional Western three-act or Save the Cat structure, because it has a similar thing at the end of where you're like, "God damn, what do I take away from this thing? I've experienced so much." But it has the normal at the beginning, where you sort of meet the smokestack twins, you meet the young musician who's the preacher boy. And then you sort of, like, the story starts when they get into the speakeasy or into the juke joint. And then you get the reversal, which is the vampires, and then the conclusion, which is bonkers. But each of those things feel really distinct as phases of the movie, and I think that movie maps much more onto that structure than it does onto a traditional Western one, and I think that's part of what makes the movie feel so dynamic and generative.

[Mary Robinette] These are all fantastic. We should take a break and then come back and talk about some of how we can apply this if we want to play with four-part structure.

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[Mary Robinette] All right. So, coming back into this, I'm going to... I'm going to, again, using Wikipedia, thank you to whoever has done the work of this. Kishotenketsu, we've said that most cultures have this in Asia, and what's interesting is that each of these syllables actually has a meaning. These are... it's basically... these are just the words. The Japanese characters for Ki, Ki can also... that character can also mean to rouse, to wake up, or to get up. Which is, I think, a really interesting way to think about what is happening at the beginning of the story. We... if, in Western terms, it is the call to action, but it doesn't have to be that. Sho comes from shoku which can mean... which is development, but it can also mean acquiescence or hearing or listening... it can be informed or receiving. Tenko can be... the Ten is twist, where it can mean... but it can also mean, like, revolve or turn around and change. And then Ketsu comes from the character for that. Keku can also mean result or consequence, outcome, effect, coming to fruition or bearing fruit. And so, I think, when you actually think about, like, I found looking at those to kind of help me unpack that a little bit more. When you... if you were thinking about, oh, I want to sort of play with this. One thing that I would, like, approach myself is the same way that I approach adding... trying any new tool, which is to deal with it in micro. Instead of saying, "I'm going to write a novel that's using this format," say, "Let me try this just in one scene."

[Erin] I agree.

[Mary Robinette] Great.

[Erin] I think we... Oh, go for it.

[Howard] I... in Extreme Dungeon Mastery second edition, we talked briefly about Kishotenketsu. We talked about each of the story structures and analyze it as if Star Wars had been written using that structure. And we kind of remap, retell a little bit. With Kishotenketsu, what we decided to do is, well, it ends... the story ends with Obi-Wan being struck down by Vader. The twist happens earlier, and this is the story of an ordinary world and a little bit of development and then a twist, oh, no, bad guys, and then a resolution, which is the master is vanishing and Luke will become the replacement. This is not a perfect mapping, but it helped me understand that by telling it in this way, by slicing this out of Star Wars, Star Wars was no longer about Luke versus Empire, Rebels versus Empire. It was now about the journey of one person. And it occurred to me, I bet I could write individual character arcs, aside from whatever novel, whatever piece I'm working on, using that form, and then thread them into the form that I'm working with and that might end up as a very satisfying way to tell those stories.

[Mary Robinette] I think this is a thing that is a great idea is to just write the thing you're going to write, and then, in the same way we've talked about using other plot formats as a diagnostic tool, layering it on afterwards, just to, like, if I group things in a different way, does that offer me any opportunities? But also remembering that one of the things this has in common with the other structures we've talked about is that there is a beginning and an end. There is an establishment of normal and then there's the consequences, the results of whatever exploration that we've been in.

[DongWon] Just one thing that I want to point out about the [Gyeol?] stage, the Ketsu stage is that it is not conclusion...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It is not resolution, right? In Western structure we have that conclusion or climax or something along those lines. Instead, it is an ending of the story, right? And those are different things because you can end in a moment that is inconclusive in a different way. That's not just, like, Inception, does the top fall over or not? That's inconclusive, but that story has a resolution before then. In a lot of Eastern media, you will see an ending that is much more ambiguous. It is a stop to the action because this particular story has reached an end, but it's not a resolution or conclusion in a sort of either moralistic or thematic way.

[Mary Robinette] I think...

[Howard] I misspoke. I said resolution and I meant to use the word reconciliation because it is... it is the part of the story where I must reconcile the twist with the...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Normal world and the development that happened beforehand.

[Erin] And I would say, you got me thinking about, like, how I would move Star Wars into this specific structure, which is interesting as somebody who doesn't really know it very well. But I always... whenever I think about Star Wars, I'm, like, most interested in, like, how that map got in that droid. Isn't there a map in a droid at some point?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That just...

[DongWon] There's a whole movie about that. It's very good.

[Erin] Okay, great. Well, I didn't see it. So, pretend...

[laughter]

[Erin] So, sorry about that.

[DongWon] There's a whole two-part mini-series, that's one of the best things ever made that leads into that movie.

[Erin] Love it.

[DongWon] There's a lot of information about how that droid got that map.

[Erin] Definitely, right after Severance, getting on that. But what I think is interesting is, I think, for me, what I would do is Luke, the character, keeps receiving basically the hero's call. Like, Luke is being called into action, he refuses. Luke is being called into action in a different way, he refuses. Maybe he meets the pilot dude and that guy is very active and that gives him an example, but he still refuses to do anything. And then I would actually do like the last moments of... I don't know why he dies in this process. The person who put the map in the droid, like, taking the last steps towards something, and then I might end with Luke flying to the Death Star. So, to me that's really... it's, on a conceptual level, it's about do you take the hero's call?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] What does it mean to be the person who makes something happen versus the person who things happen around, which is a completely different story.

[DongWon] This is going to mean nothing to you, but you... I just had this incredible brainwave that actually... because in my head I was like, oh, the Andor story is a trilogy. It's a Star Wars trilogy inside of it, but really it's a Kishotenketsu, where A New Hope is the fourth step in it, right? The first three, the twist is Rogue One.

[Howard] Okay, you've now blue screened our entire audience.

[laughter]

[DongWon] 100 percent. The new normal is Andor season 1. The beginning of the action is Andor season 2, where he is a revolutionary, the rebellion is beginning, and then three, the reversal is them getting the plans, and then four is the entire arc of A New Hope, which is just the end of Andor's story.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. This is amazing. Everyone in the room is kind of staring at each other. Marshall, our engineer, is rubbing his head and looking like we've all lost.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Completely broken. So, we're going to wrap up. The one thing that I'm going to flag is the same thing that we flagged with the three-act structure is that in a four-act structure, the structure... they do not have to be of equal length.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Most of your time is probably actually spent in Sho. Even though we... this is definitely show, don't tell, I guess, in this case.

[laughter]

[Howard] Oh, no.

[Mary Robinette] So, but just bearing in mind that if you're trying this, that it doesn't have to be equal parts.

[DongWon] I've also seen it done where most of it is Ki, actually, where you really spend a lot of time in the normal world, and then the back half is a little compressed between the other three steps. But, I think that the main takeaway is, like three-act structure, it doesn't have to be quarter, half, quarter. It can be very flexible in how you apply it to your fiction.

[Mary Robinette] And you can have smaller twists within the larger twist, just like we've been talking about microcosm and macrocosm, that you can do that with this, too. You can have smaller iterations of this within the larger story. So, with that, I think it is time for us to go to our homework.

[Mary Robinette] And our homework is actually something that I talked about during the show, which is to take something that you've already written, and then group it into a kishotenketsu structure to see what opportunities you might have to add something.

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

Writing Excuses 21.33: When To Shift Gears

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-33-when-to-shift-gears

Key Points: When to shift? What is each piece doing? Seat of your pants. Win state! Faces. Links and mode switches. Signalling. Music, lighting, chair. What's your intention?

[Season 21, Episode 33]

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

[Season 21, Episode 33]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] When to shift gears.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] And something that I've been wondering about is we've got all these different tools, not rules, that, you might use one structure or another, you might use one technique or another. And sometimes I think about them, probably the short story writer in me, as like one tool per work. Like, this is the work where I will do this structure. This is the work where I will do this technique. But, especially in longer works, I'm assuming that you're going to need to use different tools, and you might have to use different structures or different techniques. So, in this episode, we want to talk a little bit about how do you know when to shift, and then how do you do it effectively without it seeming like you're careening across 10 lanes of traffic in the middle of your work?

[Mary Robinette] I think this is a great question, because, like, when I was going from short fiction to novels, it was one of the problems that I had. In short fiction, I could usually hold the whole story in my head. Early on, I didn't understand how to end things. I would just stop writing, and it was not good. Or I would have an ending that had nothing to do with the story. But, this is a thing that happens in novels. It's more visible in novels, often in the saggy middle, where the writer knows that they need to start wrapping things up, but they don't actually know how to switch gears. And so, what I do is I look at, okay, what does this part do? What does that part do? How do I blend them? And this is whether I'm going from middle to end or whether I'm going from conversation to action. Like, or narrative introduction. Like, here's a voice-driven opening. How do I move into actually things happening instead of saying and navel-gazing? So I look at how each... what each thing is doing and then I try to sprinkle it together. This is my when I am in failure mode and it's not just happening naturally, I should say.

[chuckles]

[Howard] In the interest of overextending the metaphor, I've driven a manual transmission for decades, and when I first started, I was told to watch the tachometer because when the needle gets between 3500 and anything above 3500, it's time to go up a gear, unless you're trying to really accelerate. And for a long time I did that and then I realized that the noise the engine was making told me when to shift. And then I realized that with my hand on the stick, I could actually feel what was happening in the engine and it just became instinctive. And for writing, yes, when I am shifting between I am writing something very thinky or I'm... the characters are talking and I need them to be clever. I need this to be bantery and clever. And then I'm shifting into, oh, no, everything's on fire, we're all running. I know that I need to shift. I have some tools that might help me just change the environment I'm in so I write that way. I might change the music that I'm playing, but I immediately know I need to be in a different headspace in order to put the right words on the page for this next bit.

[Mary Robinette] So what you're talking about, I love this example because it gets to the... to a thing about pantsing. Like, we talk about pantsing, but the root of pantsing, as in I don't plan my things, is the seat of the pants. And the root of that is flying by the seat of the pants because in the early days, pilots, when they didn't have instrumentation, would fly by the way the plane felt. They could literally feel the plane through the seat of their pants. But, in order to do that successfully, you have to be an experienced pilot.

[Howard] You have to put your pants in a lot of planes.

[Mary Robinette] You have to put your pants in a lot of planes. And before that, in order to acquire that skill, that's when you're working with instrumentation. That's when you're reaching for these tools that we're talking about. So, that's... the whole season we've been talking about, we're going to give you a toolbox, but none of these are rules. Except keep your plane, like, not dropping out of the sky.

[Howard] Do not stall.

[DongWon] I mean, there are failure modes, whether or not you have rules, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] There are failure modes. And I think what Howard is... or actually, sort of like over the course of this season, so much of what we're saying is here are the specific tools, here are the specific structures and details, and we're talking at a high level, in a way that, I think, it's very easy to hear what we're saying and be like, I don't know how to apply that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I don't know what that means. And the thing that we're reassuring you of is, as you do this over time, you will develop these instincts. Like Howard learning to listen to the engine, like feeling the plane through the seat of your pants. You will also learn to ingest these concepts and tools and be able to apply them.

[Mary Robinette] Well, let me give a concrete example of moving from one thing to another. If you've got a character that's going to a goal, this is a try-fail cycle, right? You've got a character that's moving towards a goal. There's... I talk about the question, will they succeed? And then you've got yes, but or no, and. But there's two other things that you also have, which is yes, and. So, yes represents movement towards a goal. No means moving away from a goal. And is a continuation of motion, but is a reversal. So, yes, I'm getting closer to my goal, but something happens and I get farther away from it. Or no, I'm getting farther from my goal, and I get farther away from it. And you use that in the first part of the story. I didn't... even though I had used those tools for a long time, I didn't understand that the reason I was having trouble shifting into the latter part of the story where I was giving my character a win state is that I had to change those up to move my character closer. So, that's yes, I'm getting closer to my goal, and I get to take another step towards it. Or no, I'm getting farther from my goal, but something nice happens and I get to move closer to it. And so once I realized that, once I understood that, on days when I was having trouble, I could mechanically look at it and say, "Okay, I need to stop stalling and I need to move them forward. What win state can I give them?" And so, I could still use my instinct for the yes or no, but I could kind of subvert that and use that one instrument to say, "You have to give them a win state right now in order to get closer."

[DongWon] Um to talk about this in terms of games for a second, a thing that gets discussed a lot in gaming spaces is the idea of railroading, right? Of putting your players just on one track and they have to do this thing and if they don't do this thing, you punish them for that, right? But I think there's an opposite failure state, which is... and you see this a lot at transition moments when they arrive at a new location and nobody knows what to do, right? If you've given them an or instead of an and or a but, right? And if you're not giving them parameters to engage with and a clear goal to be moving towards, or the goal is so far away and abstract, then you'll end up with all the momentum dying and a lost session where nobody knows where to go or what to do, right? And I think I see this a lot in fiction, too, where, as you're trying to shift modes, you sort of end up in this dead space in between, where there isn't enough of that sense of direction, there isn't enough of that sense of here's what I'm trying to do at a higher level, and you can sort of lose that momentum in the shift.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Several episodes ago, we were talking about narrative transitions, and I joked with Mary Robinette about, do you make the did I leave the stove on face when you were writing the did you leave the stove on passage? I make faces when I draw, I make faces when I write. I am experiencing, at some level, what it is that my characters are experiencing. And I found that there are some passages that are just so emotionally draining, that I remember writing a story and Sandra came home and saw me, and was like, "Oh, my god, what is wrong? What happened to you?" I said, "Oh, I wrote a thing and I felt what was in it." Understanding that that happens is both... it's both predictive and it's a way to recover from it. If I know what kind of a passage I need to write, I will emotionally tool myself up as if I have to go have a difficult conversation with someone, because I'm going to be feeling those emotions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And at the same time, if I know that I am... later today, I will have written that, I will plan later today to recover from having written that, because I understand how that part of the engine of my particular vehicle works.

[Erin] Speaking of being in a vehicle, I think that one of the things that can really get me stopped in the middle of doing all that is if I don't know exactly where I'm going.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If there is a lot of or. Like, I think this is... this can be because you're flying by the seat of your pants, but it's also can be just because there are a couple of routes in the story that you could take. Like, you know maybe, like, what you're trying to get to at the end of a scene or a chapter or story, but you're like, "Oh, I could have them do this try fail cycle or that try fail cycle. I could go with this type of structural change or I could go with that one." And it can feel very much like I don't know what to do and therefore I won't 100% do anything. I will try to do a little bit of everything. And I find that a lot of times it's easiest if I go back and just try it two ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Try it three ways. Like, there's no... having things that don't end up in your final manuscript is not a failure. It's just part of the process. And so I will say, "Okay, well, what happens if I shift to..." I don't know how driving works. What happens if I shift to second gear? What happens if I shift to fifth gear? Is there fifth gear?

[DongWon] There can be. It depends on the car.

[Erin] What happens if I shift to ninth gear?

[DongWon] No.

[Erin] How many gears are there?

[DongWon] You've gone too far.

[laughter]

[Howard] Driving a manual transmission in Los Angeles traffic is a little bit like what you've described, because, I'm in third. I've gotten onto the freeway and I am ready to shift into fourth and maybe into fifth. But traffic might slow down. Do I really want to be in fifth already or do I want to be in fourth so I get... That's why I... We have an automatic transmission for the road trip that took us here, because manual transmission in that kind of traffic, I don't know what's ahead. I will let the mechanics of the vehicle do the shifting for me.

[Mary Robinette] And when you're doing a shift, like, one of the things in a car or a bicycle, which more people will have experience at this point in this century with shifting gears on a bicycle...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Than they will with a car. The reason you do it is to make the work easier. It's to match the conditions that you're approaching. And so you'll shift down to make things easier when you're climbing so that the bike is assisting you. You'll shift up when you're... when you've got, like. you're going downhill because you can go faster and all of that. So you shift for modes in order to make it easier, and that's the same thing when you're writing, you shift for the mode that will make the writing easier, make the story go. Speaking of shifting...

[Erin] It's time for the break. 

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[Erin] We will now shift into ninth gear...

[laughter]

[Erin] I believe it's real.

[Howard] I had a Schwinn 10-speed, so, you know what...

[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah, 10-speeds, yeah, bicycles, yes, you can shift to ninth gear on a bicycle.

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] I have a single speed because I'm dumb and I live in a very hilly city, it's a problem. 

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That is a choice you have made.

[DongWon] It worked in Brooklyn, it does not work in Los Angeles. Anyways, continue.

[Erin] But, a question I have... what you said about shifting making it easier is do you shift to make it easier for you, the driver/writer? Do you shift to make it easier for the reader? Like how do you know who the shift is serving and whether or not you're doing the right thing that you need to be doing on the page?

[Mary Robinette] Again, this gets into I am weird and I always think about my reader as a collaborator. And so, for me, the shift is to make it easier for both of us. Most of the time, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer, because I am doing something, like... when I'm doing it very consciously, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer. But the shift is happening because that... I'm following the terrain of the story. And if I don't want the story to feel... if I don't want the ending to feel rushed, I have to shift modes so that I'm making sure that I'm allowing time for things. My instinct as the writer is to just have the thing done. But that doesn't make it better for my reader. And so that mode shift and being conscious of that, it's like, okay, this is the part where we're wrapping things up. Sometimes I go back and fix it in post. I am just like, I'm going to be done with this. And then I'll go back and slow it down. But that is often... that is the place where the writer experience and the reader experience are, like, wildly out of alignment. But the same tools can make it easier for both of them.

[Howard] I have a pretty good idea when I'm putting a story together of what I want the reader experience to be like from the thing that I am sitting down to write next. And so that's the known terrain in front of me. Therefore I know what gear or what gears I need to be in. And so when I think about... when I think about this gear shifting, it's really all about me putting myself in the right frame of mind, in the right context in my studio or in my office, in the right head space, the right health space to do the thing the way, at least in my mind's eye, I believe it will best be done for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] So let me talk about this on a... We've been talking about this very philosophically. Let me talk about this in kind of a more action thing. I talked in the first half about how you can kind of sprinkle things in. And I mentioned if you've got a very voice-driven opening, how do you move into something that is more action? One of the things that you can look for are the links. We talk about when you're going from... when we're talking about transitions, the transition episode, we talked about the idea of a match cut as being something that you use going from one scene into the next scene. You can also do this when you're doing a mode switch, from a tonal mode switch. So, if in a voice-driven opening, you have a character who's ruminating about a thing. So if I were doing, like, this opening about a character who has a pebble that's on the headboard and how they think about it, and they've had that pebble there since the night their father died. And it's going to be this whole thing. And now I have to get into action. I can do something like, I shifted the pebble on the headboard and then turned around to face my mom. And so that is an interior version of a match cut that I can use to transition. And I can also layer in a little bit more if I want to kind of bounce back and forth between those, I shifted the pebble on my headboard as I turned around and faced my mom. We never talked about my dad. I asked her, and then start into dialogue. So that's the kind of thing that you can do very mechanically if it's not just like flowing.

[Erin] To give another, a different mechanical example. So I have a story that I'm working on that has, like, sections of poetry in the middle of it that are, like, telling the story, but they a are completely different mode than the rest of the prose, which is prose. And the way that... I think what helps me at first is to think about what do I want this shift to feel like? And so, for me, this particular piece in general feels very like sitting at a jazz club, as different acts come and go. And to me the poetry part is like having a smoky drink in the middle of the act. So it happens... like, it happens while the scene is continuing, but it's this, like, interesting break that happens.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Versus, for example, like, there are other things I've written where the shift feels like a palate cleanser in between courses, which is a lot more of a stark change. But in order to do that mechanically, one of the things that I do is all of the poetry pieces have a certain amount of musicality in them in that they use musical terms. They're about songs. They're about the way that you talk about music. And so I often have a sentence that has a little bit of a musical element to it, uses a word that has to do with music, and then move into these, like, poetic musical parts because what I'm doing is almost like in a car when you signal that you are going to the next lane. And once you teach your reader that this is the type of signal, like every time you get this signal, you will be shifting into this kind of thing. I'm going to mention music, and then we're going to sit back. We're going to have this moment of smoky drinks, and then, like, we're going to shift out of it back into something usually that's very concrete in the setting to say, I'm moving out of poetry, which is a lot more emotional, and back into the world of the concrete, what's happening physically. So, I will use an observation about the room that the person is in as a way to come back out. So, it's like, here I am shifting back. But, I think a lot of it is about those signaling, like saying I shifted the pebble.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's a way to actually subconsciously tell your reader get prepared, a shift is coming...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So that it doesn't feel abrupt when it happens.

[DongWon] It's hitting the clutch. It's disengaging the gears for a second as you move. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There are three, I think, key tools for me, for just controlling the environment that I'm writing in. The first that leaps to mind is music. It's really helpful to me to have music that doesn't have words, orchestral or movie soundtrack or atmospheric or even techno dance beats playing while I write. I have a very long playlist of atmospheric music, and there are some tracks on there that have, like, creepy baby voices or something in them, and I keep meaning to yank those out because those break the gear shift. Those put me in the... I can't have those while I'm writing. They were fine when I was drawing, but I need to fix the playlist. The second is the lighting. If I'm writing on an illuminated screen and there is enough light or maybe there's a backlit keyboard for me to see my hands, I am free to change the lighting in the room completely because it's not... the lighting in the room is not about me seeing other things. It's about establishing an ambiance for what I'm doing. And the third really is which chair am I in? Am I sitting upright? Am I in my zero gravity chair? Which mode do I want my actual physical body to be in when I type? And I recognize that all of these are variables over which I have full control. I should be consciously controlling them rather than just throwing them down and and expecting myself... expecting me to be in the right frame when I start typing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I think that's a good point, that making sure that you have the right mindset. One of the lower lifts that I do because I'm often writing while I'm traveling. So I don't have control over my environment. Playlists, yes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But I will often start a scene by just writing down my intention. And this can be an intention, like, an actual plot beat that I need to hit, sometimes, but most of the time, the intention is more about how I want the reader to feel. This is a cozy thing. Next time, I'm going to start trying to use the eight types of fun that we talked about in a previous episode. Going to start trying that. It's like... because that feels like a really good focusing tool. But that helps me, it's like, start winding things up. This is the scene in which... and I think that that helps me keep it in the front of my brain. This is what I'm aiming for.

[Erin] I think those two things combined are a perfect way to lead us into the homework. So what your homework is, is to take a scene that you are writing, and you know what a scene is from our previous episodes. And write down what is your intention for the scene, and then think about a physical thing that you can do that matches that intention. Is it a playlist? Is it the chair? Is it the light in the room? And write the scene. Then go back and set yourself a different intention for that scene and change something about the physicality of the space that you're in and see how it changes the gear that you use when you write it.

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

Writing Excuses 21.31: Deconstructing Save the Cat

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-31-deconstructing-save-the-cat

Key Points: Save the Cat: The Last Book of Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. Blake Snyder beat sheet. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Opening image. Theme stated. Setup. Catalyst. Debate. Break into two. B story. Fun and games. Midpoint. Bad guys close in. All is lost! Dark night of the soul. Break into act three. Finale. Final image. Recipes, ingredient swaps, and improvisation. Mapping structures. Diagnostic tool. 

[Season 21, Episode 31]

[In the podcast, not the video]

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

[Season 21, Episode 31]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing Save the Cat.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And we are joined once again by our friend Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] Oh my goodness, I find myself here once again.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, it's as if no time has passed at all.

[Margaret] It feels very nonlinear to me.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, for listeners, we are recording this immediately after recording the nonlinear timeline one just in case you couldn't figure that part out. What we're going to be talking about today is Save the Cat. Save the Cat is also called the last book of screenwriting you'll ever need. And it was published in... this is not true that full title, but it was published in 2005 and became extremely popular. The idea of save the cat is referring to something that happens in Alien, which is literally saving a cat, but it's an action that the hero takes. Yeah, that's why.

[DongWon] Challenging.

[Mary Robinette] So, the book itself by Blake Snyder covers a bunch of different things like how to write a log line and all of this, but one of the things that it's known for and what we're talking about today is the plot sheet for... that goes with Save the Cat. Blake Snyder called this the Blake Snyder beat sheet or the BS2. So. It follows our three-act structure, which we've talked about previously, and Snyder refers to these as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which...

[DongWon] Everyone loves a little Hegel.

[Margaret] That's classical.

[Mary Robinette[ Very classical. And he has it broken into 15 beats, and he actually does page counts for it. I'm going to skip the page counts. We've got the opening image, which is kind of your first visual image. And that gives you the tone, the mood, that sort of thing. Then we have the theme stated, which is, sometimes it's a secondary character, but someone actually says, straight up, this is what the movie is about. Then we have the setup. And this is the hero's world before the change. So, this is our normal, and we get to meet all the people. Then we get the catalyst, which is often called, in other forms, called the inciting incident or the call to action. Then we have the debate, and this is where the hero tries to decide what they're going to do about the catalyst. In other forms, we'll see this the reluctant hero phase. And then break into two, and this is where the choice... the hero makes the choice to go on the adventure and that goes... takes us into act two. So other times we call this the pinch point. Then we have the B story. And here I will say that according to him break into two happens at page 25 and B story happens at page 30.

[Margaret] Sure. Sure. Why not? 

[Mary Robinette] But it's a break from the main story, but it also carries the themes of the movie. So this can be a love story. We can get new characters, that kind of thing. And Snyder apparently says that the role is to give the audience a breather. So, it's a way to control tension and pace. Then we have fun and games as our eighth beat. and... which is the... it's not as concerned with fun forward progress. It's just like we're going to have a little fun here. And then the midpoint, and he says that the midpoint is either a false victory or a false defeat through which the stakes are raised. Then we go to the bad guys close in, so things get worse for the hero. Then we get to the all is lost moment, which is the lowest beat of the story. This is often inversely related to the midpoint. So if the midpoint is a false defeat, then the all is lost moment is going to be a false victory or vice versa. Then we have the dark night of the soul. So you have all is lost, all is lost, and then you have the dark night of the soul. And again, I'm going to give you page beats for this one just because I think it's useful to see... when you just get to hear the list, you're like, "Oh, all of these are equal."

[Erin] Is this... is there still in movies a thing where a page is about a minute? Just so that I understand like what... like is this, like, 30 minutes in when you say 30 pages in?

[Margaret] That's about the convention. It's the rule of thumb. It's not as... in my experience, it can be highly dependent, but as a general rule of thumb, you're thinking like about 30 minutes in, we're about 30 pages in.

[Erin] Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I just wanted to give myself some context.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, useful context. So the all is lost, he has happening on page 75, and the dark night of the soul is 75 to 85. So just as an awareness that all is lost is part of the dark night of the soul.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then break into act three is page 85. So that is part of the dark night of the soul. Basically, the A and B stories come together and they help the hero figure out what they're doing. And then we begin the final act, which is the finale, which is page 85 to 110. But the journey is resolved, as the hero applies the lessons they have learned. That is Wikipedia. That is not out of the book. So we've got a new status quo established, bad guys been defeated, hero feels better about themselves, all of those things. And Snyder actually thinks that it's actually not enough for the hero to just win. They also have to change the world. That things are not the same as they were before. And then the final image, which is your very last page, which is... mirrors the opening image, showing the change that has occurred. So there's a bunch of beats there.

[DongWon] Yeah. Remember the halcyon days when movies were under two hours?

[Howard] As I look at the page counting and the rigid description of things for Save the Cat. I can see why novelists would push back against that because the structure doesn't feel...

[Mary Robinette] And yet...

[Margaret] And yet, like. and I will be very frank here. I have not read Save the Cat. I actually wrote Save the Cat Writes... I read Save the Cat Writes a Novel, but it was a while ago and not a ton stuck with me. But I do think that it's an interesting analysis and, like, reading through those beats as somebody who works in this medium, it's like he's hitting a lot of key things. Like. what is that B story? In a feature or even in an episode of television, you're always going to have that secondary plot running. Off the top of my head, the things that strike me... I'm like, "Oh, this I think is useful, maybe not so much as a, I am planning my story thing, but, like, I'm looking at a draft I've done and it's not quite working." I like the way it emphasizes that you have to have those tonal differences. Like, if you have a story that's going to end on an up, there've got to be downs along the way. or, and I think this is probably more frequently a thing, you're telling a really grim story that ends down, you have to remember to give your characters those ups. Because, the relentless patrol of failure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] It's a bit much for an audience or for a reader to sort of like, oh, okay, this is just a slog and they're going to put it down. You have to remember to mix things up that way. The characterization beats that it's reminding you that it's not just mechanical. It's how's the character changed? How's the relationship changed? How has the world changed? And world, I suspect, could mean how have the family dynamics...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] In this family story changed? It's not necessarily, you know, the fall of Sauron.

[DongWon] Exactly. One thing I wanted to... just to zoom out to a meta level for one quick second here. When we talk about things like Save the Cat or when we do, basically these deconstructing episodes we do, this is really us getting to the core of tools not rules, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And I think Save the Cat in particular is a little controversial because it became sort of a tool at some point that was, like, kind of used against writers in terms of, oh, if you're a screenwriter and you're not conforming to Save the Cat, then this isn't making it through, right? You're going on the blacklist. You're not getting through.

[Margaret] Not the good blacklist.

[DongWon] Not the good blacklist. Yeah. Exactly. It's like you had to sort of conform to it to get through the process of getting your story on screen, right? And so when any tool becomes prescriptive, that's when part of what we're trying to accomplish here with this entire season of this show is to be like, hey, whoa, you don't have to do that, but there are interesting things here that we can take from it, right? And so, most of our audience are novelists, not screenwriters. There are things here that are really useful and interesting and we can see the ways in which it mirrors conversations we've had from Hero's Journey, mirrors conversations we've had from three-act structure. And so what I want you to do is to approach this and sort of think about what's interesting here,what can I take and what can I leave?

[Howard] The point that I wanted to arrive at earlier is that if I were writing a screenplay, which is not something I've ever done, I've written scripts for comics. I've written short fiction. I've written longer fiction. But if I were to sit down and write a screenplay, one of the very first things I would do is attempt to map my screenplay onto this to see if I can, because the tool is exceedingly valuable in that way. If I became a screenwriter, would all of my screenplays adhere to it? Almost certainly not. But I feel like there is a lot of value in a tool like this, to, at least once or twice, treat it like a set of rules to see if I can.

[Mary Robinette] This is for me very much like learning how to cook. That when you start cooking, you want a recipe and you're going to follow that recipe. You're going to follow it religiously, because you don't know how it's going to break if you make a change. As you become more comfortable with it, you start doing ingredient swaps and then you start doing improvisational cooking where you're just like, "What's in the kitchen today?" And then you start making up your own recipes. As your skills get more and more. The problem with something like this is also the thing that's beautiful about it is that this gives repeatable results, but it gives repeatable results for one type of film. And so if I was talking with someone who was talking about the dark night of the soul and that they... they're like, I've got the dark night of the soul and I don't enjoy books with the dark night of the soul. I don't like reading that moment. I feel like people are often just real assholes during that and I don't enjoy it. And so I'm like, well, look at what it's doing structurally here. What it's doing structurally is it is providing a distance and a contrast between states. It is providing a struggle. So, is there something that the hero can struggle with that isn't their own personal psyche that can give you that contrast, those stakes? Do an ingredient swap. And sometimes it's also like, leave an ingredient out. Like, if you don't like an ingredient, you don't always have to put it in. Sometimes you can get away with leaving it out.

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's useful for this sort of thing is... it's often having this sort of skeleton to look at is a way to track the forest for the trees.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Like, even as a professional writer, working with other professional writers in a television writer room and we'll break down a story, we'll have a plan for the episode, and then, if I'm the one writing it, I'll go... I'll be working and realize like, oh, we really got to give our characters a win early on just to show that they are making progress, to show that they're competent. We have to let him save the cat basically, to sort of have that sort of moment. And when you're into the kind of minutia of what we're doing this episode, what we need to make sure we're establishing for next episode, what we're picking up on that happened last time. And this is one way to step back, and if it's not something that's yet built in your own head, you don't have your own cooking algorithms yet, to follow Mary Robinette's metaphor. This is a way to sort of look at those things and think in terms of what are those levels. Like, dark night of the soul can mean the... it's like, okay, we've hit rock bottom. We're there. Like, what's Ted Lasso's dark night of the soul look at? It's probably not that dark, but he can still have the moment, that isn't... it's like you don't have to, like, change everything about the character, but it's like, oh, I really thought I was the best shortbread maker in this country and I just bought this store bought shortbread and it's making me question everything I think about myself as a baker. That could be a dark night of the soul for a character. It's... you have to think in terms of your perspectives and how broad your canvases are.

[DongWon] What genre are you in, what tone are you in, right? And that's the useful thing is you can extract the structure and apply it across a bunch of different categories.

[Mary Robinette] And speaking of structure, this is the time when we take our break.

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[Mary Robinette] Now that we're coming back, I want to look at some of the ways... since we've done a couple of these deconstruction things. I want to look at some of the things where we have overlaps between this and other structures. So, he says that he is looking at the three-act structure. So this is... in many ways, does feel much more like a more detailed three-act structure. We've got the theme setup, the theme stated, the setup, and the catalyst. And that feels very much like, hello, act one. Act one.

[DongWon] We kind of even remarked when we were talking about three act structure that the names of the different acts were kind of flat. You know what I mean? And I do think one of the reasons this is so popular is the names of each beat are quite dynamic and...

[Margaret] It's evocative.

[DongWon] It's evocative. Dark night of the soul. You get something. Like catalyst. You get something from that. You kind of like, oh, this is what this is. Even like, themes stated. It's like, got it. Okay, we can do that. You know what I mean? So.

[Howard] It is pretty easy to... I mean, once you have definitions for things, it is pretty easy to map Save the Cat onto Seven Point,  onto Three Act, and even onto, like, Hero's Journey or something larger than that. The caution that I'd give is that those tools separately they serve as frames for how we approach building a thing, and if you look at them all together and try and treat them as the same thing, I feel like you've stripped all the value away from the tools and presented yourself with something more encyclopedic. But it is still useful to be able to say, wow, dark night of the soul maps pretty clearly onto, like, pinch point two.

[Erin] I was just going to say that, like, this is very true, and one of the reasons I know this is there is a Writing Excuses student who, a few years ago, made this, like, master spreadsheet that has like 15 different plot structures on it. 7 point, 3 point, 5 point... I can... I will find it and we will credit that person and put them in the show notes. But it's interesting to actually see them all lined up and see, like, which each thing adds. And I think what is really interesting is, it's like looking at a recipe, like, certain things like bread, like, there are some key ingredients that you will often find in bread but you might be like, my bread is made with almond flour. That is the big difference between my bread and your bread, or my bread adds this ingredient. And so looking at them side by side, it's an interesting way to say, what does this particular format use that somebody else doesn't? Or what does it use in a different way? What does it add to the recipe?

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite things about this is doing the ingredient swaps and doing stuff when you're deconstructing to be like, let me take this. So this... Save the Cat is very much... and Hero's Journey, they're very much a, there's someone who has a problem. They're trying to solve it. But if you do a swap and say, "I don't want to do that." Like, what if I'm doing something that's more covert? What if I'm doing something that is about, these are people who want to set up a society and they all want to get along and there's no bad guys? Can you still use these beats to do that? And it's like almond flour, which is not normally an ingredient that goes into bread. How do... what compensations do I have to make because it doesn't have gluten? Like, this is the kind of thing that's fun.

[DongWon] One thing I want to say to possibly overextend the metaphor is there are ingredient swaps and then there are technique swaps.

[Mary Robinette] That's fair. Yes.

[DongWon] Right? I cook a lot across a lot of different cultures. And if I try to apply French technique to Korean cooking, the flavors get wrong, right? Because you're solving for different things when using one technique versus another. Now, there are ways in which I can use elements of that. I'm like, oh, the French knife technique, really useful when prepping anything, right? And so learning to... what works for you and think about what your goal is, is the thing I would encourage you to do. Think about what story you're trying to tell and then figure out what toolkit works best for that rather than saying, "Hey, this is my toolkit that I always use. Therefore, I can only tell this kind of story." And I think that's where the critique of Hollywood really comes in.

[Margaret] I am not going to touch that with a 10-ft pole. But...

[DongWon] Yeah. Even that I'm like, I'm leaving that one there.

[Margaret] One of the things, I am not required to apologist for anybody, but I think one of the things that... circling back a little bit towards all... how these different techniques are the... or how these different structures are both the same and also they're each individual. I think a lot of it is just sort of personalization of tools.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And so like, if you are someone who has ever been to a writing class that talked about structure or you are somebody who has ever taught a writing class that talked about structure, like, when I'm teaching, I'm teaching from the tool set that makes sense for me. I'm picking up the examples that resonate with the way my brain works for making story. And one of the things I try to make sure I'm passing on to my students is like, look, if this clicks for you, that's great. But if you've read another book in another class or you have another professor and something they're saying is more resonant for you, or it just sort of... it works in a way that what I'm saying isn't landing quite yet, use that. Because I think a lot of the process of learning writing is... I had an early teacher whose big line was always story is character and it's like story is character. I can accept this. It makes sense. It works. And numerous times as I was writing more and doing more things, I just have the moment, "Oh, that's what story is character means." And then I'm like, "Now I understand it." And then two years later, I'd be like, "Oh, that's what story is character means."

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like it's a process of always relearning the stuff that you thought you already understood.

[Mary Robinette[ Yeah.

[Howard] There's when the student is ready, the master will appear. And then there's, when the student is ready, the student will remember what the master told them four years ago. and now see what it really meant.

[Margaret] Right. Exactly.

[Erin] And one thing to remember about that is that the master and the student... in some ways we reinforce the story structures that we know. While I love seeing that table of all the different story structures, where I actually think it can... it worries me at times is that you'll have like the person who learned the three-act structure is like, "Oh, I came up with the five-act structure, which is the three-act structure plus these two other things."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And then it just keeps going and for some reason they're always odd numbers. And then you're at, like, the 27 plot point structure, which sounds horrible. But I think part of the thing is, like, there are other structures that exist outside of those frameworks that maybe aren't... would not fit on that table in a million years, but are still very valid reasons and ways that we tell story, just not the way that we have really codified storytelling in a Western storytelling novel environment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And so one of the things that I'm going to say is that it's fine to use it as a recipe when you're getting started, but I think it's better with most of these if you think of it as a diagnostic tool. You come up with the story that you want to tell, the beats that you want to tell, and then if it's not working, you slap one of these on as looking for opportunities. It's like, is there something that I can add, that I can take away? Is this showing me? Is this highlighting something that... where I have a structural problem and you grab the one that you're interested in. It doesn't have to be... sometimes I slap more than one on there. Like I've got a story where I have laid down the seven-point plot structure, the character arc structure, and the mystery structure, and I've, like, broken them apart because it makes sense for that, but it doesn't... wouldn't make sense for something else.

[Howard] When I was studying music composition, one of the very first things I did, first pieces I wrote for my composition class, I took a star chart and mapped it onto stacked clefs because I wanted to create music of the spheres. And the bigger the magnitude of the dot, the longer the duration. And I made a terrible, terrible mistake in that I added measures. I forced the whole thing into four four without thinking about it. And I'm thinking about this in terms of trying to align the different plot structures. It's built on a spreadsheet which forces a linear alignment across the board. And if you don't think about the fact that you forcemapped something onto a straight line, you lose some of the value of the structure. That's one of the very first lessons I learned, and I have to keep learning it, is don't force map something onto the structure because you'll lose value.

[Margaret] Yeah. One of the words of wisdom I got from one of my screenwriting professors when I was doing my masters that I pass along... I think about this often and I passed on to all of my students. I've probably cited it on this podcast in the past, but it was a while ago. We'll go for it again. And he told us in a screenplay structure analysis class, where we are watching movies and then breaking them down and what are the eight sequences and where can we find them, and he was just like, look, the only unbreakable rule of screenwriting is you are not allowed to be too boring for too long.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Margaret] You can be boring, just can't be too boring. You can do it for a bit, just not for too long. And the game is figuring out where those lines are. And so I think, the takeaway of, like, of all these structural things, if you're doing something that doesn't fit any of these structural sort of paradigms that we've talked about this season or here, if it works, great, go for it. Like, but if, as Mary Robinette says, you can use it as a diagnostic. If something isn't working, then it's time to go into the toolbox.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because if you do something out of sequence sometimes, then you wind up with like a croissant which was created by accident because somebody had forgotten to put butter in and they folded it in and that's how we get croissants for the first time. So sometimes like as Erin and Margaret were saying, like, don't play by the rules. This is why we're saying here are the things, here are the pieces, and this is why it does the thing.

[DongWon] Well, one thing I wanted to say to all this, also, is audience is important, right? When you're thinking about what techniques am I using, what am I applying, right? And what genre you're in and who you're writing for... I'm even thinking about this one unbreakable rule of don't be too boring for too long. Well, what does boring mean, right? For if you're making a MCU movie, boring is very different than if I'm watching a Vim Bender movie about a man cleaning toilets for three hours, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, and nothing happens in it. It's the slowest thing. It's like watching paint dry but endlessly riveting in certain ways. And so, think about what genre you're in, what category you're in, and then how the toolkit is applied also evolves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret[ That's why the rule isn't you can't be boring. The rule is you can't be too boring.
[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] There you go.

[Howard] For too long.

[Margaret] For too long. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of too long, I'm afraid it is time for us to wrap this episode up.

[Mary Robinette] So, for the homework, we're going to repeat the homework that we did for the three-act structure, which is that I want you to take a classic fairy tale, probably the same one that you did previously, and see what happens if you take that classic fairy tale and you map it onto the Save the Cat plot sheet. Like, what happens? Where is Cinderella's Dark Night of the Soul?

[Howard] Who even has a cat?

[Mary Robinette] She is probably driving the carriage.

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

Writing Excuses 21.29: How to Make a Scene 

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-29-how-to-make-a-scene

Key Points: What's a scene? Scene-sequel, active happening and processing what happened. Sequence of continuous action. Beats and scenes. RPG scenes. Narrative constraint. Shifts in time, person/POV, or place. Framing. Editing. Scene prompts: Purpose, what are they doing, Who, where, when, mood, goal, afraid of, consequences. Vibe. Ground the reader, and start the action. Flashbacks. Scene-wich. Memories. Troubleshooting. 

[Season 21, Episode 29]

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

[Season 21, Episode 29]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] How to make a scene.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] And I'm really excited about this particular episode because I feel like the word scene is... you ever say a word so many times that it loses all meaning and you have no idea what the heck it even is anymore. That's how I feel about the word scene. We say it a lot, but I'm not 100% sure I 100% grok what it is other than sort of a feeling. So...

[Howard] Having seen the scene full of scenery, I... Yeah, it's a very overburdened.

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard[ I'm so sorry.

[Erin] Before we get into how to make a scene, let's go with what the heck a scene first.

[Mary Robinette] I...

[Howard] Let me briefly say that I cite scene-sequel format a lot. And in that terminology, scene-sequel might better be defined as portion of story where stuff is actively happening and portion of story where we are processing what has actively happened. Scene-sequel, that pattern can happen within a scene. It can happen multiple times within a scene.

[Mary Robinette] And when we say within a scene, typically speaking, in theater, in cinema and other places, the definition of scene is basically a sequence of continuous action. And that's it.

[DongWon] Do we think of a scene as separate from a beat?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Because you can have multiple beats within a scene. You can have multiple beats within a sequence of continuous action.

[DongWon] Can you have multiple scenes within a beat?

[Mary Robinette] Yes, I believe you can also have multiple scenes within a beat.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] For instance, if one of your character beats is the long dark... the dark night of the soul...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That is a character beat that can sometimes... you have the scene where the character is sobbing into their drink in a bar. You have the scene where they are talking to their BFF and they're trying to encourage them to go back out and kill the evil overlord. And then, so you can have all of those within a single beat.

[DongWon] The reason I was asking is a really common technique is to lay out the plot of your project, whether it's screenplay, novel, whatever it is, on note cards, right? And there's two different ways to approach that. One is beat by beat, so like dark night of the soul kind of moments or the character conflict moments or things like that. And there's other ways to do it that are scene by scene, right? And so I was trying to wrap my head around the granular differences between those two things, right? And so... I think I tend to think of books more in terms of beats rather than scenes. But that makes sense for me coming at it from a more 10,000 foot structural view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think that if you think about the beats as a folder that you're putting the scenes into...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] That... brought to you by me using Scribner a lot.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That I think it's easier to kind of wrap your head around how both can happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But like I don't think... a scene does not require an arc. I don't think it requires a conflict to be a scene. And I think that you can have a scene that is a letter.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Or so it's just... it's a sequence of continuous action. That's it.

[Howard] In tabletop... in like tabletop roleplay. The game master in some systems I've worked with, we talk about adventure design in terms of scenes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The characters are going to come into the tavern. The ta... this is going to be a scene. Here are the pieces for the scene, and now we roleplay it.

[DongWon] And just on that note, I had an interesting challenge this year of... I recorded a many, many hours long campaign in basically one session in a week. We did a recording camp where we did 30 some hours of recording. And so going into that as the GM, I had to sort of have enough framework that on day three I wouldn't be caught out even though the players would make a lot of decisions that go different ways. And so the way I did that was each session note was a beat basically. I would write, here's the dominant emotion of this session. Here's the vibe. So it comes with an evocative title like Into the Wilds or something like that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And then I let individual scenes emerge more organically, and then think about, okay, what's the next beat emotionally that I want to flow into for the next episode in this campaign?

[Erin] I hear you.

[Mary Robinette] And also.

[Erin] However, when you said a scene is a sequence of continuous events, I thought life is but a scene. I mean what I... what makes like my entire life from birth to death, not, I mean, in the sense that it is a sequence of continuous events. Something then it feels like continuous is the thing that stops one scene... like, when one scene stops and another one starts, what makes it no longer continuous within the theory...

[Howard] Bedtime.

[Erin] That you're pitching?

[Howard] Bedtime and scene.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But this is a... this is a really good point that... that real life is continuous action. From birth to... I mean, yes, sleeping, but a scene is a narrative constraint. And what it does is, it has an artificial beginning and it has an artificial end. The character's life continues outside of that scene theoretically. What we're doing is that we are... we're doing one of two things when we decide where to start and stop. We're either using it as a frame or we are using those breaks to move us in time, space, or change POV.

[Erin] I think that's the thing that I was really in some ways asking, which is like, then it sounds like what stops something from being continuous is a shift in time, a shift in person or POV, and a shift in... or a shift in place.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] That's what means it's no longer continuous. Therefore, a scene theoretically has ended at that moment.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But you can also do it as a frame, where you break continuous action. Like the scene where something shocking happens, and there's a break, and then you come back and you're still in the same moment, but it is a new scene because it's serving as a frame.

[DongWon] I would introduce one other frame element that you can use which is simply a shift in mood or energy. Right? So you can have a scene that continues to take place immediately after, but you have a scene break or even a chapter break between those, because some revelation has happened and now you're in consequence rather than a sort of ascending tension, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So you can have a fight, the fight can... there's no time gap. There's no location shift. Often shifting those things is very useful as a signal to the reader, but it is possible to do it with just an emotional shift.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. 

[DongWon] But the thing is there needs to be some disjunction is what we're getting at.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] When I was studying music form and analysis a bazillion years ago, the instructor was grilling us and he was... he was hard on us. He was grilling us about where does this next movement begin? And somebody said, "Well, it begins right here at the double bar." And he says, "Yeah, but you can't hear the double bar. You're listening to music. As somebody who's reading the music, sure you can see that there's a double bar there, but what can you hear?" And I raised my hand. I said, "Well, at the double bar, the key changes and the very first note across the bar line is... would be an accidental in the previous movement, but now it's part of the new key signature." And so the very first note we hear is something that is reflected with that change. And that has stuck with me. There are things that you do on the page that,,, the way the book might flow in an e-reader won't be noticeable, but the tone of the words that you use can completely change and make it obvious, oh, we've changed scenes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that it's... what you're talking about there is, for me, a form of framing because you're saying this is the tone or the mood that we're going to have with this. And in a lot of ways when I think about scenes... I will flag that we are going to talk about transitions in the next episode, but when I think about starting a scene, whether it's the scene at the beginning of a work or somewhere later, I am thinking about what am I setting up here? That in the same ways that I'm thinking about what promises am I making at the beginning of a story? It's a micro version of that. It's like here I need to ground you so that you know where you are. I need to give you a sense of the mood. And then likewise at the end of a scene, you also need that frame that helps with understanding. So, can I do an example?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, this is an example of a frame from Calculating Stars. The opening line is, do you remember where you were when the meteor hit? And the closing line of that, and it's all one scene straight through, is, later when I saw where he had been standing, I was amazed that he had been able to speak at all, But of Washington itself nothing remains. So this frames all the action that happens in the scene. And it serves to contextualize everything that has happened for the reader. And that's one of the things that you can do when you're thinking about these scenes, is like, what... why am I doing this as a discrete individual unit?

[Howard] I want to point out that... I mean, we have talked a lot about defining what a scene is and why scenes exist. And it can be daunting at first and I think a lot about when I'm trying to tidy my office. There's a million things in here. There's a million things you want to put in your book. It's full of ideas and I can't even see how to organize this. At the outset, it's really not that important to label all of the boxes. It's just important to know that I have boxes and I will start putting things into boxes as I go, and as I am doing that, it begins to make sense. And so in many cases, for me, how to make a scene is... it starts with, look, I don't know the exact shape of this, but I'm going to start putting things into boxes kind of chronologically, And then halfway through the writing, the organization makes sense...

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] And some of these more complex, more fascinating structures emerge, and I get to explore those in an edit.

[DongWon] Well, I think one thing that really emerges from what you're saying and also kind of going back to Mary Robinette in terms of your framing, this goes back to a conversation we had a few episodes ago about microcosm macrocosm, right? Because a scene functions with a lot of the same rules that your entire story does, in terms of it needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. You need an introduction and you kind of need a conclusion. These are very short because it's a scene. I think your one line there at the opening and at the end kind of do that, like, essay introduction of, like, I'm going to tell you about the thing. Here's the thing that we're talking about. Here's a topic sentence, and then here's a here's what you take away from this, which is DC is gone, right? And so I think giving that framing really allows the reader to experience the middle and know very clearly what it was that we were accomplishing by that middle section.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. 

[Erin] And I think as I'm sort of dividing myself, like, instinctively between scene and another scene, a lot of it is if I start telling myself the events of my story... like, if I'm like, okay, and this happens and that happens and that happens, a lot of times I will naturally say, like, and then, like, across town she did this and this and this, or, and then after everybody had taken a breath. Like, I feel like I naturally... that's not the way that I would actually put the scenes together or transition between them in my head, but at some point I feel like, oh, something has changed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Let me mark that in the way that I am explaining to myself. Like, what do I actually need to put in this story? And each time that I kind of naturally have some sort of break in the way that I say it to myself, that feels like where a scene break...

[Howard] Yeah.

[Erin] Should go.

[Howard] Time to drop it in a different box.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And speaking of, it is time for us to take a scene break. and then we will be back.

[Mary Robinette] At Gen Con this year, Writing Excuses is doing a new thing. We're hosting something called Network the Gathering along with the Ray Bradberry Center and Maurice Bratis. This is going to be on Thursday, July 30th at 8:00 in Ballroom 4 in the Marriott. Part of this is something you can participate in. I mean, besides networking, we're going to have something called lightning readings, which we do on our cruises. This is like a sampler pack of readers. Each person does a two-minute reading, just enough to get a nice taste. Come listen, network, and then stick around for prizes. You can get a ticket in the Gen Con scheduling system for Network: The Gathering Thursday, July 30th at 8:00 p.m. in Ballroom 4 at the Marriott. 

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[Erin] Okay, I feel like I now have a good understanding of what a scene is. And...

[Howard] I'm glad we straightened that out for you because it's nice that you'll be able to start writing.

[laughter]

[Erin] It's nice. I feel really seen and hurt.

[DongWon] Oh boy.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry.

[Erin] Straight to jail. But I now want to know how to make a scene, which we started getting into. You started talking a little bit, Howard, about, like, putting things into boxes. But, like, if you've decided, okay, I think this is the scene. I think this is, like, the frame that I've got. How do you make sure that your reader agrees with you, that this is in fact a scene and that it feels like a scene or anything else that's required in making it?

[Mary Robinette] I have a series of scene prompts that I use when I'm writing, because I run into this. Like, I will have written down that I've got... that they need to do something like, they go back to the planet, and that's all I've got. It's like I know that they're going back to the planet, but what happens there? Sometimes I know, it's like they find a bunker. Well, okay, great. Where do they find it and how? So, I have these scene prompts, and I'll say right up front that these are not things that you have to have. These are just prompts that I use for myself to make sure I'm thinking about stuff. The first is what is the purpose of this scene? Like, what narrative function is this scene serving? Why is it here? And often a scene will have more than one narrative function. Then I think about what are they doing? So I might have finding a bunker, but what are they doing when they find the bunker? Are they actively looking for it? Are they searching for seashells on the beach? Like, what are they doing? I think about who is present. I think about where we are. I think about when we are. I think about the mood that I'm trying to evoke for the reader. And then sometimes also the character's mood, which is often synonymous. And then what their goal is because their goal is sometimes like not to find the bunker. They need to find it in the scene, but that's not their goal. Their goal is to get like the perfect sea shell for their grandmother. So, what is their goal and what is their action? And then, sometimes, the purpose of the scene is the barrier, the interruption. And sometimes their purpose is to find the... so, like, I think about these things as a series of prompts. And then I have two that I use sometimes and sometimes not. Sometimes I'll use afraid of, like, where is their angst sitting. And then sometimes I'll use what are the consequences of this? Sometimes I decide that before I go into the scene and sometimes I decide it later.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love that thinking about the plot function of a scene, right? And I think that list is incredibly useful in terms of how are we finding our way into that plot function...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Of understanding where this fits in the overall arcing narrative. One other thing I wanted to bring up in terms of thinking about scenes is... this might be a distinction without a difference, but in my head, it's like a book has a mood, but a scene has a vibe, right? And the vibe of the scene does not need to match the mood of your book, right? Your book can be contemplative or spooky or whatever or romantic, but an individual scene can have a vibe of humor, of being scary, of being depressing, like, you can have these moments that are more about what are the characters experiencing in this particular scene that will overall serve the mood of the entire book. But the... if it is consistent throughout, the same vibe from scene to scene to scene, it's going to feel very flat. You want different energy in different moments. Some is like a high energy action beat, some is a very scary beat. I don't know. Just think about that as terms of like making your scene distinct from the scenes around it by also deciding not just what the plot function is, what's the vibe?

[Howard] In cinema and in comics, anytime you change scenes, you have to pull the camera back far enough that we can see that we've changed locations, we've changed characters. I found this a lot when writing Schlock Mercenary is that I couldn't lead with what I called inset panels, close-ups on faces. I can't begin a scene that way. Because you don't know where that face is. You don't... you just have an orange or a red background. That's not enough information. And so when I think scenes, one of the first things that comes to mind for me is what do I need to put on the page in order to ground the reader in the new mood/vibe/beat/whatever? What do I need to do there? And the second thing is... because I watch a lot of movies, I guess... the idea of in late out early... the idea that I don't want to spend... I don't want to spend a whole page writing my way into a scene before things get moving. I might have to because I don't yet know what's happening. But my goal...

[Mary Robinette] You don't want to read it.

[Howard] I don't want to... I don't want to make you read it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Yeah, my goal is to start things as quickly as possible. And so there's those two competing ideas. I have to ground you, but I do not want to spend so much time doing it that you feel punished for me having made a scene change.

[Mary Robinette] And I will say that the rules, I think, are a little bit different on the page because you don't always have to pull the camera back. That often you can start in on a single close detail, but you absolutely have to have it be a grounding detail.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Yes.

[Erin] I think one thing... I love the idea of the vibe, because I think... I was listening to your list, Mary Robinette, and I was like, so organized, much wow.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But I'm like, meanwhile, in chaos zone. Because I think a lot of times I will just... I put a new scene in because it feels like the thing that the character kind of wants to do...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which is the same thing you're saying...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Just a lot less like... well, it's a lot less organized in my head, and a lot of that is I go back and do a lot of reverse outlining and figuring out, okay, I guess I made a scene here. Is it working for me? And so I will... I have a piece that I was working on where this woman wants to confront the other woman, like her boyfriend's other girlfriend. And so she's in a whole scene being really mad about this girlfriend. So I was like, "Oh, I guess she's like, 'I'm going to find her.'" I was like, "Okay, well, I guess I guess she probably does that." So she's like, "I found her." I'm like, "Okay, so this is that part...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Where she finds that woman and then stuff happens." And...

[Howard] So you're literally making a scene about someone making a scene.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Exactly. Exactly. She's going to go and, like, scope her out at the bar or whatever she does. And that scene didn't work for me. As I was going back and rereading my entire story, I felt like the vibe was off...

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] Of, like, this part. I was like, something about this thing where she finds the other woman is just like... it's like dying on the page. Like, I'm reading it and I don't want to read it and I'm writing it. Like, and I really love these characters. So then I'll... I will go back and feel like, what is missing? What, like... what did I really love about this scene? Like, I love the way she sauntered into the bar and that was really cool, but then, I don't know, the other woman's really boring after being built up in her head. I feel like she's boring in this scene.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, I was like, "Okay, let me go back and, like, when I redo it, I will try to make her more interesting." Which then changes scenes down the road...

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I'm like, "If I make her more interesting because... this is not true... she is petting a fluffy white cat and cackling." Then she now has a fluffy white cat that I have to account for in scenes down the road.

[DongWon] Okay. We all love a bar cat.

[Howard] I will... I have run into that exact circumstance where I...

[Mary Robinette] Really?  Putting a fluffy white cat in a bar? [garbled]

[Howard] Okay. It wasn't a bar.

[laughter]

[Howard] It was... the circumstance where I have a scene, an important piece of the story that I feel needs to be told. and I try to tell it, and I don't love it. It breaks the mood. It breaks the vibe. It breaks the flow. It breaks something. And I lean into my humor toolbox and the tool I call noises off, which is the story you tell yourself about that scene is going to be way more interesting than the story I told myself. And so I skip the scene entirely and have... to use your example, she reports back, yep, found her in the bar. And she has, like, toilet paper in her nose. She got punched in the face...

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] And that's all we know. Yep, I found her. We talked. I'm done. Had enough. And then we move on with the rest of the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, one thing I want to also point out is we've been talking about scenes in a very contained way, right? An individual scene is an indiv... a moment in time, a series of actions that happen in this continuous way. There are ways to complicate that...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? There's ways... one other solution you can add to that is, like Howard was saying is skip the scene and then sort of layer in flashback of how the scene at the bar unfolded, inside the action of what she's doing after that. Right? So you can mix consequence and whatever the event was as you're unfolding it, right? So you don't have to think... I mean the spine of the scene is still continuous events, right? The spine of the scene is still what is happening moving forward in time. But you can deeply complicate that in different ways as you're thinking about how to construct a scene.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to be really problematic for this and say that I actually think that flashbacks are separate scenes within a... and the reason is we'll talk about this when we get to transitions because I think there's a difference between a scene break and what I call a through scene, which is where one scene flows directly into another scene.

[DongWon] Question for you. I mean, I know we're digging into semantics, but that's kind of what this episode is in a certain way. If you have a moment where she's walking down the street, there's two lines of her walking, three lines of her thinking about what happened at the bar, two lines of her walking, are each of those individual scenes, or do you feel like you have two scenes layered on top of each other that you're cutting in between? And that's more of a transition question rather than a scene question.

[Mary Robinette] I think it's...

[Howard] Scene-wich.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's a scene-wich. Yes, I'm going to...

[DongWon] It's a scene layer cake.

[Howard] Oh my gosh.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, I think it's a scene-wich. I think it...

[Howard] Do we need to transition into another episode about transitions?

[Erin] Not just yet because I have one pers... more thing, but go with the scene-wich.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I want to distinguish between memories and flashbacks.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So memory is, she's thinking about it. That is part of that continuous action.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] It is part of what is happening in that moment, versus a flashback. Sometimes you see them go into italics. Sometimes it's just like where the character... there's a separate thing that happens that is a moment of continuous action.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, those are two scenes that are happening simultaneously that you're cutting back and forth between.

[DongWon] Right. And I guess I was thinking more about memory in this case, right?

[Mary Robinette] Okay. Memory is memory. Memory is part of...

[DongWon] I guess all I'm saying is you can in... you can play with time in... inside this.. an individual scene, and sort of whether or not...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's a scene-wich or an individual scene. I think it is useful to think about, but also in some ways is a reminder that you can use character interiority to complicate what a scene can feel like in really useful ways for your reader.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think this is kind of pulling back from the scene, which sadly for the moment, but I think one of the things that I will do in figuring out what should be in the scene is somewhat similar to your list, Mary Robinette, but I am a simple woman. And so I will...

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I only use the scene on that... I don't use that list all the time.

[Howard] This is the point where the narrator cuts in and says, "No, she's not."

[laughter]

[DongWon] She was not a simple woman...

[Erin] But I often just... I go with my, like, who, what, when, where, why...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And how, which is like... it kind of what you're talking about. But I will say, like, what is off? Because a lot of times, if I'm thinking about a scene, it's because I don't like it. If I'm... if I like it, I don't think about it. It's just like it's part of the story. And so I will think like, where is the issue? Like I was saying, in that scene, the who was the issue, the who was boring. Therefore, I needed to change...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Maybe what they were doing to make the who more interesting.

[Howard] And in the interest of tools, not rules, the tool there is... a lot of the structure that we're talking about with regard to scenes is a troubleshooting tool for you. You only run into it when your brain tells you there's something wrong with what I just wrote.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think what's really interesting is the scene is such an elemental building block of what a story is that each of us individually have expressed very core ideas of how we approach things. Maty Robinette, you have a lot of structure here. I'm vibe forward, right? Like... Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I just want to stress that I have a lot of structure sometimes. Like that is the toolbox that I...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Specifically I am going to call this out. Specifically that toolbox is something that I reach for when I am having a bad brain day. On good brain days, I'm just going on vibes and following the story. But on bad brain days or when I'm trying to do pre-planning and I don't know the story yet, that's a toolbox, and I don't... even there I will sometimes use it as a troubleshooting thing later. I just need to...

[DongWon] No, 100%. I was just... I'm partially making a joke here, but I do think there's also something interesting about there's something so deeply rooted about what a scene is that we're sorting on very internal structures of how we think about our approach to creating things. Anyways...

[Mary Robinette] I just don't want people to think I'm organized.

[laughter]

[Howard] I don't want people to think Erin is simple.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, also true.

[Erin] Well, with that, now that we have judged ourselves thoroughly, it is time for your homework. 

[Erin] And what I want you to do is to sort of take that index card, do a little bit of looking at scenes in something that you have written. However you define scenes is really up to you, because I can't see what you're doing. So take a scene or two and then look at what sort of are the... take through the list that Mary Robbinet had. Do who, what, where, when, why, how. Mark the vibe. Take everything you possibly can and write it out about those scenes and then change something. Look at those and when you look at it, say, "Is there something in here that I can change?" and rewrite that scene.

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

Writing Excuses 21.27: The Expository Throttle

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-27-the-expository-throttle

Key Points: Using exposition to speed up or slow down a scene. Scene-sequel format. Marinating moments. Asides in theater. Pace and tension. Market scenes. Look for places to remove ambiguity or add emphasis. Emotional response.

[Season 21, Episode 27]

[Howard] Do you want to sail with us for the Writing Excuses Retreat at Sea this September? Well, the ship has sold out, but occasionally there are cancellations. If you want to be able to jump into a suddenly empty slot, you can, but you'll need to join our waiting list. Visit writingexcuses.com/retreats and follow the instructions to join the wait list. You'll receive an email within a few days to tell you more about current pricing and availability. This is our final annual cruise. We would be delighted to have you join us along the breathtaking Alaskan coast, so don't hesitate. Visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. And you can also join our mailing list there to learn about future events.

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

[Season 21, Episode 27]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Expository Throttle

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And as you know, this podcast is called Writing Excuses. Writing Excuses is a fast-paced... Okay. So...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Maid and butler exposition.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, we know about exposition and usually when we are talking about exposition, we are talking about it as a way to convey information and how to avoid boring the reader by putting it in the wrong spot or going on and on too long or telling them things that they already know and everybody in the scene knows. What we're going to talk about now is what I love about exposition is that it is a secret tool for speeding up or slowing down a scene. So. I love exposition, weirdly, and I feel like exposition comes in a lot of different forms. I'm going to give you the definition of it, and then we'll talk about how to use it for this speeding up or slowing down thing. So exposition is a literary device used to introduce background information about events, settings, characters, etc. to the audience or readers. Its literal meaning is a showing forth, but you have to spend words on it. And that means that when you need to slow things down, that you can just kind of introduce a little backstory. If you want to speed things up, you can skip that. Do you all ever use exposition in kind of a conscious way to slow things down or speed things up?

[Howard] I... Okay, I use exposition a lot in the course of 20 years of Schlock Mercenary. And in many cases, I used it... I had to use it in order to tell a part of the story. But in order to deploy it in a way that I want people to feel rewarded for it. I would also use it to tell a joke. And in later books, I got better at this and the exposition would tell a joke and set up a joke that happens later so that people don't just feel rewarded at the time they read the exposition. They get rewarded later for having read it because now there's another joke for them. Did I use it for pacing? Accidentally, yes. because it necessarily slows things down or forces you into... if you're talking about scene sequel format, where scene is where things happen and sequel is where we process, exposition often functions well in the sequel area, because even though you're being given a bunch of new information, you the reader are also now being able to process what happened in the previous chapter. or the previous scene.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I love this, because that's one of the things that I will think about is. like. where are my natural pause points, because those are places where I can put that because I want things to slow down a little bit anyway. And so, since we're paused, I can take a moment to explain something to you.

[Erin] I almost... sometimes I think of it as, like, marination moments in the, like, sense of marinating meat. So it's like you've thrown a lot of spices and juices at your reader. Hopefully not actually. And then, like, this is the moment where I... and it's my... actually often my favorite points, which is where you kind of stop for a moment and let it all sink in. And I find the way... it slows the pace down, but it's also because the pace is slower and because the reader is spending a little more attention on it, a time to throw in my favorite most, like, random spices, my favorite interesting word play tricks and things that won't be noticed in the middle of, like, an action scene, but in a moment where you actually have time to think about the world, I can actually do really fun things with words and rhythm and focus on a page. in a fun way.

[Howard] Speaking as someone who has recently leveled up a couple of times on his fried chicken game, the idea that I can't fry this chicken until I've brined this chicken. That stays with me. That's... I cannot move on to the next bit. I... this will not be good fried chicken until these... until this has soaked in, until this is steeped, until the salt and the sugar and the spices have gotten in deep so that we can get to the next bit and it all works.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and this is extending this metaphor until it breaks. The reason that you're doing the brining is because it's serving a function and it is before the fast thing. And that is one of the things that I think... a failure mode when people are using exposition, that they'll put it in the wrong spot where it's not serving a purpose. It's not connecting to anything else. It's not setting you up for what's coming next.

[Erin] Some of that actually also has to do with order. I'm now thinking about brining and frying way too much. But, like, if you...

[Howard] I've made myself hungry. I hope that I've done that to the rest...

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's only fair that you're hungry too.

[Erin] But I'm thinking, like, if you went to somebody's, like, cookout, and they were like, "Oh man, I forgot to brine the chicken, as I'm about to serve it to you. Let me go do that right now. I'm going to drop it back in." You're like, "Wait, no, the time has passed."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, if you didn't brine it already, please don't brine it right now.

[Mary Robinette] It's just going to be a soggy thing of sadness and cold and slimy. That's going to be so bad.

[Erin] Yeah. So, you...

[Howard] Let me tell you about dry rub and syringes...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Which is interesting.

[Mary Robinette] No, don't. Don't... actually don't.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Don't tell me.

[Erin] But I think, like, a lot of that is sometimes when it feels like this is the... I have accidentally created soggy sadness, you think as you write, oh no. And you don't have any syringes handy. Like, luckily, as a writer, you can actually go back and redo the recipe that you were working on, and a lot of times people blame the brine. You blame the exposition. You're like, the brine is bad. It's like, no, the time that... the place that you did it was not the right place.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But all the spices, etc. might be good. It might just be that you need to pull back and do them at a time when it is the right time in the story to have that happen.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There was a recent movie... well, not recent when this airs. Dave Bautista, Milla Jovovich, and it's sort of a fantasy sci-fi thing and it begins with some voice over narration. I'm gonna tell you a story and you're probably not going to believe it. And there's a little bit of bookending, but there's a whole bunch of info dumping. And then, events start to happen and I realize you've told me things that the characters on screen are now telling me again, just by acting and wearing costume and adopting these roles. That chicken didn't need to be brined. that I didn't need that information at all. It was presented here. And so you unnecessarily delayed the beginning of the story. You slowed things way down right at the middle, in a movie where... the movie... this sort of movie where you really just want to kick it off with some action.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And at the same time, there are also points where moving that piece of information earlier can really speed things up. Like, I just read a book. It's not out yet. And I'm not sure it's going to be out by the time this airs, so I'm not going to mention it just in case. But it had the line in it like... everything is going along at a normal pace. The character is dealing with things. Everything is usual first person. And we get this one line that's like, "If I had known what he was going to mean to me later, I would never have gotten into that carriage." And you're like, "What?" And that's just... it's a very tiny piece of exposition. Something bad is going to happen to this person late... with this person later. And it is... it reminds me of an aside in theater, where the main character, or one of the characters, takes a moment to do a direct address to the audience. And it's always to deliver something that is important. It stops the action that's happening on stage when they do that aside, but it does it to emphasize that moment. And that I think is something that you can play with on the page and it's so cool.

[Howard] Well, I was just going to ask a question. When that happens, does that accelerate the pace or does that decelerate the pace? Because for me, it accelerates the page turn. I'm now more hooked and I will actually engage myself to begin reading faster because you've planted a hook and you're dragging me further into the story.

[Mary Robinette] Well, so this is again the tricky thing, which is that pace and tension are not the same thing. You can have something that has a slower pace but is more tense, and have something that is tense and, like, you can... Yeah, there's this... they're not exactly the same thing, although they overlap. You were going to...

[Erin] Well, I was going to say, like, one thing that I think people often struggle with is when to know when that aside, when that piece of exposition, is for the reader and when it is for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] And sometimes that's because you have figured out something really cool in your research on the story and you're like, "Wow, like, I discovered all this cool stuff and I'm going to now, like, throw it in there because otherwise you'll never know." I complain about this a lot and probably should stop doing it in public, but not today.

[Mary Robinette] There's others?

[Erin] Which is market scenes. Which, when done well, are an amazing way to bring you through a lot of exposition about the world as a character goes from one market cart to the next. I think for the failure mode of a market scene is that it feels like you came up with like 15 cultures in your fantasy world that you had to cut during your revisions and you were like, "Dang it, I really liked the Gleber folks. They were great and I'm mad my editor made me cut them." So, I will put them in...

[Howard] Oh, the colorful tents and the good wagons.

[Erin] Exactly.

[Howard] So, they get this scene.

[Erin] Exactly. They'll be in the market and I'll just stop and describe them. They're not doing anything. They're just there being observed and it feels like it slows things down because you're like, why?

[Howard] The Gleber folks don't even have one of the stones of Rohisha.

[Erin] They do not...

[Howard] Rohisla.

[Erin] They do not in their colorful wagons. There's nothing but brine. What a sentence.

[Howard] And some chicken.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to stop this exposition about these people who do not exist and get to something important.

[Erin] Boom.

[Mary Robinette] Which is our break.

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[Mary Robinette] Have you ever had that moment where you learned something again that you already knew and had just sort of forgotten? So, I talk all the time about how much I learn about writing from narration and how much I learn about narration from writing because writing developed to convey the spoken language. And the other day I was struck by something that Lavar Burton said that just made me unpack everything all over again. He said that the power that storytelling was about consciously creating a moment of community and my mind just went oh yes that is what I am doing whether I am narrating or whether I'm writing, I'm trying to create this moment of community, and then he went on to talk about how often on reading rainbow he would narrow his audience down to just one person. In his case it was Ward his son and that it made the task more manageable. And I do that when I'm writing, that I'll think about one person that I'm writing this story for. It was one of those moments. That's why I keep turning back to Master Class because I find these nuggets that often are things that unpack something that I maybe knew. This one came from Lavar Burton's The Power of Storytelling and it was really amazing. But there's this whole library of moments like that. There's instructors from everywhere, with often people who define their fields, not just experts, but often the best in their world. They have like 200 plus classes across 13 categories like business or writing or cooking, creativity, wellness, and more, with plans that start at only $10 a month. I love this and it works for me. I will listen sometimes in audio mode when I'm cleaning the house. You could do it when in a commute or turn your workout into a classroom. You can download lessons for offline access. And it actually works. Apparently, three in four members feel inspired every time they watch, and 83% have implied something they've learned to their real lives. It's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. And it's something that helps me. I love learning. I love being pushed and challenged and offered new ideas, even if it's something that I knew but had just forgotten. So, MasterClass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. So head on over to masterclass.com/excuses to see the latest offer and maybe listen to Lavar Barton.

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[Mary Robinette] Welcome back from the break. Now, what else can we use exposition for besides making the readers wonder about random characters in the market?

[Erin] Yeah. Or how do we know that it's a moment?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] When is it important to the story and when is it not? And so I think one thing to think about when you're using... if you want to slow down, that's important, but like you said, Mary Robinette, it's important for the moment of the story. It's important for the moment of the characters. It exists within the life of that story where it is and not in the life of you the writer. And sometimes you end up having to cut those things later because you don't realize it. But if it feels like it's slowing down too much, one thing to look at is, does every bit of this exposition need to be in this place, or is this a good moment for exposition, but I've done too much of it or I focused the reader in the wrong way?

[Howard] If I want to... if I want to maintain high tension but slow the pace down, I used this example last week, the three shakes chapter in Tom Clancy. This is an excellent example of this, because you are... there's very, very high tension, huge questions about what happens next, and then we have a short chapter about physics which is fantastically interesting and it does not make anything better. Everything you learn in that chapter sets up how bad things can actually get. And so the way the tool is applied is we have ratcheted up the tension while slowing the pace, which to me... that's a great way to use the tool.

[Erin] It's like you broaden the context. Now you know more about how bad this thing is. Like, you now understand. You thought it was bad before. Now you really know and now you're going to see it unfold. And so you create that moment of... your held breath becomes even deeper and more held.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I look for, which I think is related to this, is I

look for places where I want to remove ambiguity or add emphasis. And that's one of the things that Clancy does in that is like he adds emphasis to that. There are other places where it's like, I don't know, is it five gems of Rohisla? Is it 12 gems of Rohisla? And there's some ambiguity there. And so that's a place where you'd probably, in a story, you'd want to slow down a little bit and give that exposition, but you don't want to do it in the middle of the fight scene. You want to make sure that we have that information before we get there.

[Howard] The three shakes chapter answers questions you didn't know you had, and explains things in a way that, yeah, raises the tension, makes matters worse. You can also do the flip side of that by using exposition. You know, tension's high. Using exposition to answer a couple of questions in ways that relieve the tension. You know, the exposition says this isn't actually going to be that bad. Or it's going to be bad in a different way, or it's going to be bad, but it's going to be bad for somebody else. And, yes, again, you've thrown the brakes down. You've mashed the brakes, you've slowed us down, but you've relieved the tension in doing so. And there are good arguments for both, for ratcheting the tension up and ratcheting it down while slowing the pace.

[Mary Robinette] We've been talking a lot about placement of this. But I want to talk about, even though we've got other episodes where we talk about, like, how to actually do exposition, I want to talk about one of the other tools of it as it relates to pace, which is the emotional response. So, you've got a piece of information, you need to get it to the reader. This is the right place to put it, but it's still boring somehow and it still slows down sometimes. One of the things that you can do is have the character have this emotional response to it, which then causes the exposition itself to take on this additional weight, so that the exposition actually causes things to... shifts the pace. It's no longer dull. It doesn't call attention to itself as in, like, I have information. It causes you to be like, "Oh, this is important." And you sort of lean into it a little bit more.

[Erin] I love that because I often think of distance as something that really affects pace. So, a lot of times, I often think of filtering words as something that can slow pace down. And that's when you say, like, so and so looked at such and such as opposed to just having them look at it directly...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Or Susie thought, I can't believe it's not butter, as opposed to just, like, having her have that thought within the context of the scene. And the reason that it's called filtering is because it reminds you that you're sort of reading a story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It gives you more layers between the action on the page and you the reader. And what I think is interesting about that is it creates the distance, slows it down. And similarly, sometimes exposition can feel slow because it becomes more distance from character emotion. If you stop, like, from the, like, I'm desperately trying to do X to before the bomb goes off, like, when they're still trying to figure it out, then you slow down and actually explain the entire history of nuclear fission. Not just what's going to happen in the moment, but like it was originally, like, and here are the 25 theories. It's an interesting paper, but we get so distant from the moment that we're in that it feels like it slows down. And so if you want to keep the pace, the closer you get, I think a lot of times the faster that pace feels.

[Howard] It's very important to recognize that the three shakes chapter is told in third person omniscient. There is no point of view character who can see these things. The chapter could have been written as a discussion between a physics professor and a student talking in intellectual terms, in hypothetical terms, about some sort of an explosion that could have happened. And then we could have had the student reacting emotionally to the horror of, wow, nuclear weapons are even worse than I thought they were. In Andy Weir's The Martian, there is a lot of science exposition stuff and it is in first person and it is our main character explaining things to us by way of telling us why things got so bad for him or how he solved this problem. And so his reaction to it, his voice tells us how we should feel about that exposition. And so when you are doing exposition, yeah, you can have the omniscient maybe kind of dry. You can have it delivered as part of a conversation. You can have it delivered from a first person narrator who is actively having the emotions at you as they're describing it. And all of those... all of those are aspects to how hard you are mashing on the brake or the throttle with the pacing.

[Mary Robinette] And with that, I think we should probably mash on the brake right now and go to our homework. Howard, I think you have our homework.

[Howard] I do. I'm gonna lean into the food. I'm so sorry. I want you to look up a very complicated recipe and then in your best expository prose explain the cooking of this as if it is happening. The exposition of the making of this food and do it in a way that makes the reader angry.

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

Writing Excuses 21.25: Follow the Bouncing Ball 

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-25-follow-the-bouncing-ball

Key Points: Focus: How do you get readers to pay attention to the parts you want? Unreliable narrators. POV, what the character notices. Breath, how long does it take, more words. White space edges. Recency and primacy. Specificity. Depersonalized actions. Emotional states. Why focus? Stakes, tension. Information. 

[Season 21, Episode 25]

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

[Howard] Do you want to sail with us for the Writing Excuses Retreat at sea this September? Well, the ship has sold out, but occasionally there are cancellations. If you want to be able to jump into a suddenly empty slot, you can, but you'll need to join our waiting list. Visit writingexcuses.com/retreats and follow the instructions to join the wait list. You'll receive an email within a few days to tell you more about current pricing and availability. This is our final annual cruise. We would be delighted to have you join us along the breathtaking Alaskan coast. So, don't hesitate. Visit writingexcuses.com/retreats and you can also join our mailing list there to learn about future events. 

[Season 21, Episode 25] 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. 

[DongWon] Follow the bouncing ball. 

[Erin] Tools, not rules. 

[Howard] For writers, by writers. 

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette. 

[DongWon] I'm Dongwon. 

[Erin] I'm Erin. 

[Howard] And I'm Howard. 

[Erin] And today we are going to talk about focus. How you actually get readers to pay attention to the part of the page that you want them to pay attention to. How do you get them to follow the bouncing ball in the right place, like you would in a really, I guess, old school karaoke joint. Um, but I have a bunch... 

[DongWon] Just a Korean one? 

[Erin] Oh, really? Do they sing with the bouncing ball? 

[DongWon] They still use the bouncing ball. 

[Erin] Oh, I want that. Okay. We are going to follow the bouncing ball back to the topic.

[laughter]

[Erin] And what I... I think about this a lot because of how much I love unreliable narrators and narratives, which is a lot about misdirecting your reader into paying attention to a thing that they think they should be paying attention to, but in fact you're doing something else on the side. And over time you reveal that the thing on the side was the thing they should have been paying attention to all along. And so I use a lot of small tools to do this, but before I get into the ones I use, I'm curious, how do you make sure that your reader is following what you want them to follow on the page and not getting lost in the weeds or lost in the sauce? 

[Mary Robinette] I do it in a couple of different ways. For me, focus, because of my puppetry background, is always about... Is about directing the reader's attention using things like what the character notices, that I tend to lean into POV for it. So what is the character noticing because then the reader is going to notice it, which also means that I can misdirect the reader by having the character notice the wrong thing or apply the wrong emotional significance to something. Then I also, again, because of the puppetry, I use breath, which is how long I linger on something or the rhythm of it. So I will often, if I want the reader to notice something, literally use more words. Like I will describe something with... more than instead of just saying his hands, I might say his large hands, just even just a single word can sometimes draw their attention to it more. Sometimes it's giving two or three sentences, like unpacking stuff. So I'm very conscious about where I put my embellishments, whether it's a... just a single word or a clause or just larger descriptive stuff. So those are the two major things that I use. I have some others, but those are the two ones that I reach for first.

[Howard] I lean into white space. The first word after a line feed, the last word before a line feed, they naturally stand out because they're hanging there. I mean, I can't always put something important there because the sentence sometimes grammatically I just can't begin it that way. But being aware of that tool is very useful. 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, we call that... I do the same thing but I think of it as recency primacy effect.

[Erin] Yeah, I was going to say, like, recency and primacy, like, people always pay attention to the first thing and the last thing, which is great if you want to hide a detail from the reader and not have them focus on it, put it in the middle. And so a lot of times what I'll do is put something in the middle of a larger paragraph but with richer language. So it brings slight attention to it, but by the time... then they keep going past it and look at the end or the beginning of the paragraph. 

[Howard] You can add weight to it while making it less urgent, less important. And boy, that's a fun practical joke. 

[DongWon] You can also really use pattern and rhythm to keep stuff in. So rule of threes is really useful for this, right? People pay most attention... It sort of dovetails with recency primacy but people expect a three. And so if you slip a third in there or put it in the middle, then people think you're just filling out a pattern but really what you've done is sneak them a really important detail. And then when that bites them in the ass later,  I'm thinking of this from a GM perspective, that  is a thing that feels inevitable in a certain way and they kind of missed it in the moment. It's a very common thing in games where you'll just. like. accidentally over describe an NPC and suddenly now they're the main character of your campaign. It's a thing where sometimes attention and focus will draw your audience's eye to a place you didn't intend them to. One thing I do want to flag though is sometimes it can be really useful as a signal to yourself of oh, am I interested in a thing that I didn't realize that I was in, right? So, and this is from the perspective of doing improvisational storytelling, but one that's still for an audience of when something grows in interest and you realize that there's something here, you can follow that ball, too, right? Like you can follow your own ball and sort of see where it lands and then...

[laughter]

[DongWon] What? We didn't like that?

[laughter]

[garbled children's...]

[DongWon] You can chase that ball and see where it goes, you know what I mean? And like, if you wander way off the track, you may end up having to undo some stuff and, like, go back in the edit, but sometimes exploring that avenue will lead to more exciting places than what you had planned.

[Mary Robinette] What you remind me of is a conversation we just had with one of our attendees on the Writing Excuses Cruise. Rick is an architect and he was talking about intentional design in architecture and it was so much... We started talking about how it applied to fiction. That in architecture that if you go to a restaurant and you have to ask where the bathroom is, that's a failure of design. Because the way you do that is you control where the viewer's eye goes. There's, literally you hang a lantern on something, you put more interesting pictures there. You have a sign sometimes that says restroom this way. But you direct people that way versus where you don't want them to go, where you remove decoration, you make it a little darker, it's a little bit less inviting. And then we started talking about, I think it's Tokyo Disneyland. So, most of Disney, when you start to move out of the public spaces, things become less decorated, less interesting, less detailed and then the colors become muted, and you can tell that you're heading the wrong way, and then they have a color service something, but something... it's a color that says you're in a service, you're heading into a service area. Tokyo Disneyland was like, we are going all in, all the decorations, all the embellishments. So, you don't get any of those cues as you are heading out of the main areas. You don't think, oh, it's more interesting back that way. this is getting less and less interesting. And so, you'll just open the doors.

[Howard] Just walk into the sewer.

[Mary Robinette] Mhm, yeah.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And so, like, when you see someone who's writing purple prose, this is often what's happening to them. They're putting decoration on everything. When you have a scene where you're just like I've lost the plot completely. Everything is getting the same amount of attention.

[DongWon] There's a thing that I like to say about fiction or writing or communication, anything word oriented. And it's a little bit deliberately provocative, but I say words don't matter. And what I mean by that is sometimes when you as a writer are telling people this is the thing that matters, right? When you're like, here's the gem of Rohisla. This is the most important thing and getting this back to the temple of blah te blah will solve the crisis that is looming. But you're spending all your time talking about how the prince is going through this career crisis and really doesn't want to be a prince anymore, wants to go into occupational therapy, then suddenly you're not writing a novel about getting the gem back to the temple. You're writing a novel about someone's journey of self-discovery, right? And so, I think kind of what I was saying earlier about I'm going to make everyone laugh again, but chasing your own ball, is this aspect of pay less attention to the words that you're saying and pay more attention to the structural elements you put in place, right? And this is sort of wayfinding that you're talking about like in architectural spaces, you can put a sign that says restroom and no one will see it. Not a single person will read the sign. They will walk down the hallway that feels like it should go to the bathroom, even if you're... you had a big glowing sign over there that said, "Restrooms this way." Nobody sees it. They're like, "Oh, this is the hallway by the kitchen. that's usually where bathrooms are. There's two doors down there." And then you get there and you're like, "These are two supply closets." And you're like, "What happened here?" Right? Structure and expectation matter more than you telling me something matters. [Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think a lot of times some of that is in the way you... Also, the way you tell it.

[DongWon] Yeah. 

[Erin] You know what I mean? Like,  I think the kind of thing that you end up doing, for example, in a TTRPG campaign is that you will describe a character and you'll give them a really interesting specific detail.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Humans love specificity. If you want to draw somebody's focus, tell them something specific. It could be like... the... I don't know. They have embedded gems on their face. It could be, which sounds painful. It could be that  they always walk diagonally.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the gems of Rohisla is actually a great example of this because you used a specific name for that. That's part of why we keep going back to it.

[Erin] And I also said the eight or however many it was. Which I was going to say the other thing I really love is giving a number to something. Like if you say like, the fifth... They said the fifth war would be the last war. Like, okay, that's interesting because there's a number in it. You got to think, why are there five wars? It allows the mind to do a lot more...

[DongWon] Totally.

[Erin] If you put things behind it. So, like, that's one of the techniques is to use specificity, whether you're trying to draw someone's focus on purpose or whether you're trying to distract them from something else.

[Howard] But you need to... you need to not use it. You need to not use it when it would be wrong to use it. Now, in 1924, Max Fleischer invented the follow-the-bouncing-ball technique. Max Fleischer, also the same guy who invented the rotoscope used for animation. Does that have anything to do with this episode? No. No. But, that information was interesting, and now I've derailed us just in time for our break.

[Erin] You have.

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[Erin] Now that we're back from 1924, a fun detour that we took for the break. I want to talk about a couple more, like, things that I think are very cool techniques that you can use to shift focus. And one is... one of my favorite, actually one of my least favorite grammatical techniques used by the news. This often happens when violence has occurred. People often depersonalize violent acts. Like they will say, "A violence occurred to this person." As opposed to this other person did the violence.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] This person was shot by...

[Erin] Yeah, this person was shot by versus person X shot you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, what happens is it actually, when you use those kind of was X'd by, it actually makes it feel like the whole thing is less important.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It already happened. It's in the past. It takes the focus off of the action. So, if you're looking to create focus, one way is to think about where are you using, like, sort of direct verbs. Verbs are great. We like them. They're active. They often draw focus. Where are you using detailed words, rich, lush words? Don't overdo it like the purple prose, but there are times in which you do want to say, "This is the archway to go through." And so, it's a beautiful balloon archway, and it's going to draw your eye, and that's the one you're going to want.

[Howard] The very simple difference between mistakes were made and I got it wrong.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, and I think this really ties into tension, to go back to an earlier time, right? When you move from one section to the next section, from chap- across chapters, across parts of a book, or in a TTRPG when you arrive at a new setting, a thing that I see a lot of the time is nobody knows where to go. Nobody knows what's happening. What are we following up on, and where is this all going? That's when you lose audience, right? That's when people fall off, stop reading, don't watch the next episode, whatever it is, because you're not creating tension as you roll into the next section, right? So, follow the bouncing ball is a way to think, or one way to make people follow the bouncing ball, is to manipulate their emotional state, right? You need to get them feeling unsettled, uncomfortable, or excited, or interested in something, right? They need to be feeling a thing as you roll into the next section, so that they're like, "Ooh, I don't know, this other love interest is coming into this stage. They just broke up, and so now I'm interested and invested in this other thing." Without that other thing in play, then you're entering into a section where nothing's happening, and all you have is de-escalation, no parallel escalation in the background to keep that thing moving forward.

[Erin] Yeah, and I think one way to do that also is, like, to get people excited and to get people feeling a certain way is to use pattern recognition of words on a larger sense. For example, we use the word see a lot when we're talking about one person looking at another. So, it's kind of like the said, if you don't want anyone to pay attention to what way somebody said something, you just say he said, she said. But, if all of a sudden instead of I saw this person, it's I glanced at them. All of a sudden there's something different there. It's not a word we use as commonly, and so you're actually using, like, overarching kind of cultural pattern recognition and saying, "I've decided to use a different term here. This isn't the same thing that's always happening. Therefore, this look is different than every other look that's happening in this scene because why is this one shorter? A glance is usually shorter and more surreptitious. That means maybe there's some tension, maybe there's some interest here."

[Howard] Big difference between I saw them check out of the hotel and I watched them check out of the hotel. That second one, wow, there's some Why were you watching? Yeah. 

[Mary Robinette] Well, and it's also... it goes into that, the repetition and the pattern recognition again, that if you have one character who you always use the word studied, he studied it. That you're going to start making decisions about that character because of the deliberate, if it's on purpose, sometimes it can be... it is unintentional. And when it's unintentional, you're drawing attention to something that you didn't want the reader to pay attention to. But, that repetition can say, "Look at this. Look at this." One of my favorite lines of Ray Bradbury is this thing from the fruit at the bottom of the bowl, which I know I've talked about on the podcast before, but he looked at his hands and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. And that... It's just like this beat, beat, beat. And each thing gets more important as he goes because he gives a little bit more weight to each of the things. But that beat...

[DongWon] Well, and this plays into microcosm macrocosm, too, right? You can set up a set of things in an opening line and then fulfill that later in the story because you've established the pattern for us as we go. Another trick I really think about a lot when it comes to reader attention and focus is POV.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Being playful with POV in ways can highlight aspects of the story, right? I think about there's a moment in Stephen King's It where a character like... just a random person in the scene shows up for 1 second and then he describes the rest of that person's life in a couple of sentences. I don't remember the details of it, but it is sort of this thing like, "In 10 days he would be dead" or something like that, right? And it's this complete break in the flow of the story. Nothing at this point has been from that perspective, but in giving us that, he has drawn our attention back from the quiet domestic thing that was happening on this street to there's a big threat looming, right? There's something happening here that is bigger than this and we have a perspective that is broader than you thought. So, he's like pulling your attention in a way to create stakes that is wildly artificial and breaks with the realism of the narrative up until that point, but is an incredibly useful and exciting thing suddenly to encounter in that moment of like, "Ooh, what's happening?".

[Erin] I think you're getting to something great before we wrap up this episode, which is why we want to move attention. Why do we want the reader to focus here instead of there? And one reason, like you're saying, is to to move our understanding of the stakes and the tension within a scene. Are there other reasons that you would like want people to focus one place and not another?

[Howard] It's the probably unattainable goal. I want you to read the book that I wrote.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.

[Howard] That is... that I wrote. No, I don't want you to read the story that you told yourself while you were reading the book that I wrote. I want you to read the book that I... And that is a high bar to clear.

[DongWon] Yeah. 

[Howard] There are not very many books that clear that bar for me.

[Mary Robinette] It's so interesting because I don't have that goal. I want you to read a book that we create between us.

[DongWon] It's... There's a thing that I talk about. People ask me all the time what I'm looking for, right? Like it's you talk to a literary agent as a writer, you're like, "What are you looking for? What makes something stand out to you?" My answer is always when I can feel the perspective of the person who wrote it. I want to know why this book can only be written by you, right? And I think kind of you're both are getting at that a little bit in terms of I want to know that you drew my attention to something that matters to you on purpose, right? I think this that being able to move the reader focus from point A to point B smoothly and fluidly and expertly communicates to me that you have something to say here.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] You were trying to show me something that you see and let me experience it. And in that experience, we create something new between us. There is that connection between author and reader that I think is also really important. And we can get into like death of the author and Barthes and all that crap. But like there is utility there in understanding where your perspective ends and the reader's begin, but you need to start with I had something to say when I wrote this book.

[Howard] Yeah. And I... the... I 100% believe in the collaboration. I just want to make sure that my contribution to the collaboration is the part that I meant, is intentional.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] Yeah. And that's the follow the bouncing ball for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and for me, I think going back to the question that Erin asked in the way that you asked it was, what are the other reasons besides tension that we might want to do it? Information. Because information is how we build the stories. I'm giving you a set of tools to be involved in creating the story with me. So, I have to make sure that I'm giving them to you at the time that you need them and in the order and and that I'm not asking you to pick up something that is unnecessary and carry it with you through to the end of the story.

[Howard] Good print journalism will do this. They give you the information that you need when you need it as the story unfolds. They're not trying to spin an exciting narrative. They are providing... they are... you are supposed to follow that bouncing ball.

[DongWon] Yeah. I hate the term info dump, you know what I mean? And it's a thing that gets... a lot of fiction gets accused of. And for me, it feels like a misnomer because it's... the problem isn't that you're giving me a lot of information, it's that you're giving me that information at a time where it is not relevant. If it is relevant to the scene and the tension and the character, you can tell me anything. I have read like pages of theories about time travel or physics or whatever it is because it was relevant to what the character was going through or trying to figure out or trying to solve. And so, if you are... if you have mismanipulated where the bouncing ball is, where my attention is, and you give me a bunch of stuff that doesn't feel relevant to the situation, then I am not in a place where I'm ready to receive that information. [Erin] Yeah, it's like to talk back about focus, it's like I don't know why I should be focusing on this information right now. So, now it just feels like you're assaulting me with information because you want it to be given to me, not because I want it. It's where you don't want to go the other way where it feels like the hand of the writer is so strong that you don't care what I'm reading. You're going to tell me this whether I like it or not.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and it's confusing. It's going into the building looking for the restroom and you... and someone jumping out at you and saying, "Hi, can I tell you about our new specials?" And you're like, "No, no, I just need..." "But we have these all of these specials. Let me tell you about them. Tonight we have this amazing Panama steak. What's a Panama steak? I'm glad you asked." And you're like, "No, I don't, I don't want any of that." 

[DongWon] One of my...

[Howard] What do you want to know about a Panama steak?

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I have no idea.

[DongWon] One of my...

[Mary Robinette] I'm a vegetarian. I don't know.

[DongWon] Favorite books of all time...

[Howard] It's got a notch through it.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You just put beef tallow down the middle of it. And then sometimes...

[DongWon] Incredible.

[Mary Robinette] it's you get it stuck sideways. That's called the evergreen Panama steak.

[laughter]

[DongWon] I would eat that. But one of my favorite books of all time is this book called H is for Hawk. And it is a memoir that is mostly about a woman's relationship with a particular type of bird. It is also a memoir about grief. And it is also a literary analysis of a book by T. H. White. And the way she transitions us from the very thrilling personal story of her relationship with this violent bird that she is trying to work with to this literary analysis of a fairly obscure book by an author who's only really known for writing The Once and Future King is she makes the content of her analysis deeply relevant to the story that she is trying to tell. And by the time we get to the section where she's going to talk to me about this book that I've never even heard of for 30 pages, I'm so invested in her relationship with this bird and the parallels to this man's relationship to the same type of bird. It ends up being this beautiful resonance between these things. She gets away with doing this because she has done the work to make it relevant to me. So, when I say info dumping isn't really a thing, it's a problem of focus and attention, that's what I mean, right? If you set it up, you can get me to sit through anything.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. 

[Erin] And with that, you are done sitting through this episode... 

[laughter]

[Erin[ And it is time for your homework. So, what I'd like you to do is to write a quick... you go to the grocery store or something else that is something mundane that you might do in your life if you don't go to the grocery store and just write it straight. Like, I went here, I went there. Then, rewrite it as if something amazing or horrible or just very, very important happened during the period of that, but you don't want to talk about it. So, write it so that you are focusing away. You are attempting to avoid, like, the white space that's in the middle. Write it a third time then as if it ends with the sentence, "And that was the day everything changed." Nothing's happened yet, but something is about to happen that makes that the last mundane thing you ever do and see how the way you write the story shifts the focus based on what you as the writer know about what the reader is about to experience.

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

Writing Excuses 21.23: Barrier Breaking: Interruptions

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-23-barrier-breaking-interruptions

Key Points: interruptions: family, coworkers, doorbells, cats, power outages. Give yourself permission to only get a tiny bit done. Hyperfocus. Breadcrumbs. Systems: office doors, remove social media apps and notifications. Triage mode. How do I manage myself and how do I manage the rest of the world? Systems, conversations. Phone settings. Know yourself. Retrain others or retrain yourself? Interruptions happen, adjust your expectations to match. Start your day with planning, not triage. Create your own swap file, with index cards or Post-it notes. Beware of systems that you think work, but don't.

[Season 21, Episode 23]

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

[Season 21, Episode 23]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier breaking: interruptions.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] So we're going to be talking about interruptions today, as another form of barriers. When we did the last of our barriers episodes, we talked about the environmental problems that you might run into. This is a very specific environmental problem, which is sometimes your family... We love them. We love them. But they do kind of interrupt us. And it's not always family, sometimes it's coworkers, sometimes it's just something else. Someone comes to the front door. You have to stop writing because you have to go to work. Your cat is adorable, and also very persistent. Power outages. There's a bunch of different things that can cause an interruption. I find that sometimes I don't want to start writing when I have, like, 15 minutes or a half hour because I'm afraid I will get interrupted. So what we want to talk about is how to deal with interruptions so that they are not a barrier to writing. What are some of the strategies that you all use when you are interrupted?

[Howard] It sounds maybe a little trite to say it, but writing 500 words is better than writing zero words. Writing 10 words is better than writing zero words. If I've only got 15 minutes, I... It's a mindset thing. I just have to give my permission, myself permission to only get a tiny bit done. Maybe I'm only going to get 10 words written. Maybe I'm only going to... Lately I've been doing sketch cards. Maybe I'm only going to get one marker color applied to one card. But you know what? That's work that wouldn't have happened if I don't sit down and try to do it. And if I don't get interrupted, hey, maybe I'll get two cards colored.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's interesting you say that, because I've used this exact... I mean, not about cards, but the same conversation with other people and with myself. And I only recently realized that part of what happens with me is that I have ADHD, which I didn't know for most of my life. I didn't get diagnosed until I was 50. And that for much of my life, I would get punished when I dropped into hyperfocus. Because I would miss appointments, I would... Someone would talk to me and I wouldn't hear it, and so I would avoid writing except in situations where I knew that there weren't going to be any repercussions for getting into the zone. So, where I wasn't going to have to get... Deal with getting interrupted.

[Howard] That's fascinating because there's two sides to the consequences there. I mean, side one, if I'm hyperfocused and I get interrupted, I often emerge from the zone angry. And I don't like being angry. And the flip side of that, the other consequence is, if I'm in the zone and I miss something, well, I've missed a thing. That's problematic. Or if I'm in the zone and I'm interrupted and I emerge angry and that spills on to other people, then I've created some external consequences that I don't want. And, for me, by far the most effective tool to dealing with this is being able to articulate the shape of the problem the way that I just did. Because now that I know that that's the shape of the problem, when I think I might be facing it, I'm actually going to emerge from hyperfocus a little less angry, and actually going to take a few more steps to make sure that maybe my phone isn't muted so that the alarms will go off for an appointment. I'm just a little bit more conscious of the fact that the hyperfocus has a downside.

[Erin] For me, I would say, one thing I like to do is think about, like, what is the zone? So, like, am I in the end zone, am I at AutoZone, am I...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Erin!

[Erin] In the strike zone? These are three different zones. So what happens is... What can happen is you can get interrupted...

[Howard] If you're writing romance... I'm not going to finish this sentence.

[laughter]

[Erin] If you are in the middle of something and you get interrupted, I think one thing that I fall prey to is thinking that you'll remember which zone you were in...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] When you return. You may not. You may take a wrong turn. And so a lot of times what I will do is give myself permission... Unless, like, the... If the house is, like, actually on fire, and I have to, like, grab my cat and run. Fine. I have bigger problems. But if it is not that kind of interruption...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I will try to at least summarize for myself, on the thing that I'm writing, in a Notes app to say it out loud, like, this is where I was and this is what I was thinking at this moment. So that when I come back, I can get back into the zone, and it makes me less upset, because I'm just basically saying I can pause this for a moment and get back into it versus it's going to be lost forever.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I do this too, I call it breadcrumbs. I don't know if you have a name for it. But I will jot down, like, 7ish words sometimes about this is generally where I was headed. And then when I come back, and I look at it, because this is the other trick. You come back and you look at it and even though it's like this is where I was headed, you're not in the same headspace. And so I will often come back and start with a sensory detail and a goal. Actually, what I'll often do is start by rereading what I had just previously written, then do a sensory detail and a goal to get in. But, yeah, I do the same technique of dropping a breadcrumb for myself.

[Erin] And similarly, like, to follow that breadcrumb, sometimes what I'll do is look at where I was and instead of immediately going back to write, I will actually, like, go take a walk or something. Like, I'll actually try to, like, think about where I'm like, okay, what was I getting at with these five words that I thought were very deep at the time, but now I don't understand them completely. And I will try to, like, think, okay, what was it? Let me, like, eat something really quick or have a drink of tea while I get back into the right place, and then I can go from there.

[DongWon] Yeah, it's interesting. This is probably my biggest productivity issue, is interruptions. And it's one that I have not, like, solved for myself yet. It continues to be a problem. And any... Whenever I try to put systems around it, in terms of, like, oh, I'm going to contain the interruptions. There's some I can do that with. Like, I have an office door. I can close it. And when it's closed, my partner knows not to interrupt me unless it's... The house is on fire. Right? And that's an easy solution. So there's, like, some simple stuff you can do. Right? Like, I have mostly removed social media apps from my life, and so those aren't interrupting me in terms of those notifications. But a lot of my work life is necessarily oriented around lots of interruptions. Whether that's I have random meetings throughout the day that I'm going to have to hop on Zoom for. Incoming emails of this is an emergency, this is a crisis. Text from people about, like, issues that are coming up, that's coming across by text messages, Signal, Discord, email, all of these things that are actually people calling me while I'm at work, I sort of necessarily need to be open to interruptions, to respond to things. And... So I spend a lot of my life in triage mode of this is a crisis, that needs to be dealt with right now, this can wait, this is a long-term task. The end result of living your life in triage mode is Category 2 sometimes gets dealt with, category 3's a black hole that disappears because it's out of my line of sight. And so, that is the biggest thing that's a problem for me, and is consistently an issue in terms of me staying on top of certain tasks, me getting back to people in a timely way. And it's a thing that I'm constantly working on and struggling with. And the thing that I also want to say is this entire topic deeply, deeply intersects with neurodiversions. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And, Mary Robinette, you kind of brought this stuff up with ADHD. This intersects with people who are on the autism spectrum. This intersects with people who have a variety of different neurodivergences, mental health issues, things like that that cause you to respond to different stimuli in different ways. And one thing that's really common is, task switching has a very high cost for some people and a lower cost for other people. I've spent a lot of my life thinking my task switching was quite low in terms of cost, but I've come to realize it's not true. And, in part, my life requires a very high amount of task switching, which means that there's a lot of, like, churn in my day. And then suddenly I'll be like, how is it 3 o'clock already? And I've only accomplished a quarter of the things I set out to do today? Right? And it's because I've had to do all these little tasks, I've had to respond to all these little emails, and I don't have a good solution to any of these things. Right? Some people suggest you bundle it, you package, like, certain types of tasks together, and that I only look at my email at this time and I only look at it at this time, but if I do that, that causes other cascading problems. Anyways, I'm just complaining at this point, so...

[laughter]

[Howard] You've raised an important point. Which is that there are two sides to the interruption problem period one is how do I manage myself when I'm interrupted, and the other is how do I manage the rest of the world so that it will stop interrupting me?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Which is like, my job requires that kind of interruption. If you have small children, it requires interruptions. If you have a dog, that dog's going to need to get walked and fed. There's all kinds of different things that are unavoidable as part of your life, that will be interrupting you at some point.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think the 'at some point' is also a thing... When you were talking about neurodivergence, it's like, yes, I have ADHD, depression, these things, but I also know that when I am fatigued, I get, like, all these symptoms ratchet up, and I know from other people that even if they don't, if they are somehow miraculously not neurodivergent, that fatigue or other stressors can cause the same symptoms of making decisions in that moment of interruption. So you had talked about having systems, and I think coming up with systems so that when it happens, like Erin's system can be one of the things that can help. So when we come back from the break, we're going to talk a little bit about some systems.

[Mary Robinette] So, systems. The reason I want to talk about this is I find that one of the things that can help is to have an answer to a problem before the problem arises. So that when it arises, you know, oh, this is how I deal with it. Like Howard was saying earlier, before the break, that he knows this is how he behaves when his hyperfocus is interrupted. You can have a system. It's like, okay, this is how it happens. You can also have that conversation with your family. And if you have that conversation with your family, or whoever you're cohabitating with, coworker, why are you cohabitating with a coworker? You're traveling with them on a business trip. Anyway. But if you can have that conversation with people before the problem arises, so, before they interrupt you, you can say, hey, I find that when I'm working, I need X. One example would be, like, you want to spend time with your family, but you also need to get writing done. If you sit down with your family and say, and I realize not everybody has the same relationship with family. I'm using generic terms here. But if you sit down with someone who cares about you...

[DongWon] Family, housemates, whatever...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That... And you say, hey, I have writing done, and I found that I get distracted easily. Can you help me? Can we come up with a system so that you can know when I'm writing, so that I can guard my safe time. Or, I want to spend time with you. Can you sit down with me with a calendar and we can look at when I can write that doesn't take me away from spending time with you? If you can come up with those systems, so that when you get interrupted, it's only emergencies, then it's going to be a lot easier on everyone involved.

[DongWon] And the thing I will also point out is in terms of things like that, there's lots of digital tools that can help you. Your phone has lots of settings that allow you to filter who comes through your messages and who doesn't. Right? Have I done this on my phone? Absolutely not. That would take me spending 10 minutes to figure it out.

[laughter]

[DongWon] For other people, you can set it up so that only your mom can call you in case she has a health emergency or something like that. Right? Or, like, there's things that if somebody repeat calls, it'll break through your do not disturb settings. Right? So there are lots of filters and settings you can put on your phone of, like, I'm in work mode. Then if you have an iPhone, they've added, like, many different layers of focus modes, do not disturb, sleep mode, things like that.

[Mary Robinette] Android does the same thing.

[DongWon] Different layers of interruptibility. And I encourage you to figure out those digital tools and use them as they are helpful to you. Again, have I done this in my life? No.

[Mary Robinette] We'll do it after the episode. It'll take 5 minutes.

[Howard] 1987. Timothy Lister, Tom Demarco wrote a book called peopleware that was about... Basically, it was about how writing software is different than building cars on an assembly line. And they explored this thing, this very thing that we're talking about. Because corporations and large workplaces were not organized well. People didn't know how to build them so that knowledge workers, people who write code, was mostly what they were talking about, could get into the zone for hours at a time and get work done. One of these...

[DongWon] That's the problem with the open plan office. Somehow it...

[Howard] That's the problem with the open plan office. One of the first things that they said that you need to throw out is the intercom. The only thing that should go over the intercom is the building's on fire, please get up and leave. Because the intercom interrupts everyone. So you don't use that. And they drew a comparison between two companies, one of which did all of these things that were cool, but were very expensive in terms of protecting employees' ability to not be interrupted, and the other didn't. And one of the companies, none of us had ever heard of, and the other one was IBM who had gone on to make all kinds of stuff. And I worked in the software industry from 1993 until 2004. Started working there 5 years after this book was published. And the lessons that I learned as a knowledge worker in an office space trying to defend my ability to get into the zone... I wasn't writing code, I was writing product requirements. I was basically filling spreadsheet cells with amazingly good ideas that I had. Right. Said with sarcasm. But between meetings and phone calls and knocks on the door and everything... We all had rafts, truckloads of strategies for protecting our time. And when I left Novell, to be a cartoonist full time, it was so easy for me to be able to defend my time, because I was now defending it against a much smaller group of people who were much more invested in me being successful.

[Erin] It's funny. Like, I love that. I... I was like, ooh, 1987. I don't know. Like, seems like a cool year.

[Mary Robinette] I graduated from high school then.

[DongWon] I was five.

[laughter]

[Erin] So, I was thinking about... I'm going to leave that... We'll leave that in the past. But I think that a lot of it is knowing yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, I've talked before on the podcast about the concept of putting the shoe rack by the door, figuring out who you are, and then hacking your life as much as you can to match it. And what I find really interesting is I live alone, and so I actually am like a reverse, which is I like micro interruptions that stop me from wandering off mind-wise. What I mean by that is, like, if I think maybe an interesting email will be coming in, and I turn off all email on my computer, I will spend a lot of time going back to check...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To see if it came in. Did it come in, did it not come in, what's going on? I got a smartwatch so that it will ping me when an email that's important comes in, and I can, because I know myself, look at it and be like, okay, great, I'll deal with that in a few minutes, but I haven't missed anything. Because I'm alone in the house, and it's like I'm the only one paying attention to things. Same with, like, I had an apartment at one point that had a broken doorbell. And I actually got a little, like, camera that only was on the mat, so that when a package was delivered, I would know. As opposed to going back and checking every...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] 22 seconds...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To see, like, was the package delivered? Was the package delivered? Because I was creating, like, more interruptions for myself than the momentary interruption. And once I knew what the interruption would be, when it would happen, what it would feel like, and how I would deal with it, I was able to make it a part of my zone. It's like occasionally getting a buzz and seeing that there's a package there and then figuring out what to do with it. So, really, like, monitoring when you're feeling interrupted, what's happening in your brain? What's the thing that's holding you up, and then how can you attack that part of the problem?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think what we're talking about here is that you can either retrain others around you or you can retrain yourself. And you have a lot more control retraining your own self. It's nice if you can have a collaborative thing with other people, but, like, I'm going to give two examples. Because I find them funny. So, my dad, when I was... While my mom was alive, we had this rule that he could only call me if it was time sensitive and about Mom. Because I couldn't put my phone on do not disturb, like, I couldn't put it on airplane mode which used to be my mode for protecting time. So we had this rule. We are recording Writing Excuses. This is, unfortunately, you don't get to hear this because we did stop recording, but we were recording Writing Excuses. I'm in the booth. Phone rings. It's my dad. And he says, this is time sensitive and it is about your mom. I'm like, oh, my God. So I'm out of the booth, I'm halfway down the stairs, and he says, I can't find the egg beater.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I got the onions on the stove...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm making her some fried eggs, and I can't find the egg beater. And I'm like, you can beat eggs with a fork! And, you can? So, I love my dad. He's an engineer before he retired. I don't understand how we were having this conversation when he was in his 80s, but... The point is that sometimes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even when you retrain them, even when you have an agreement, even when they want to be helpful, they can still be a barrier. Sometimes you yourself are the barrier. So, coming up with a strategy for how to handle the interruption once it happens. The other analogy... Or other story is my cat, Elsie, the one who uses buttons to talk. Before she got buttons, I would get up and she'd want to play a little bit in the morning. But I would start working. And the morning was my working time. With buttons, I have learned that morning is the time that she most wants to play, and that if I don't play with her for half an hour or 40 minutes, which is not an unreasonable time to play with your pet, by the way, that she is going to be bored for the rest of the day. But if I get up and I spend that time with her, then the rest of the day is totally open for writing. She will go take a nap. So, sometimes it's often about, like, I can shift my behavior much more easily than I can shift hers in that case. But in both cases, like, I have to have a plan and I have to have strategies on what I'm going to do.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, that sort of dovetails with sort of two things I've been implementing in my life that do seem to help. One is, the first is just accepting that interruptions are going to happen, and to adjust my expectations accordingly and how I communicate those expectations to other people. Right? So this keeps me from trying to set unrealistic timelines for myself, and adjust my own expectations of what my day is going to look like. Right? If I'm planning my day around the ideal version where nobody sends me an annoying email...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Nobody texts me, and I don't get a random spam call about some loan offer that doesn't exist, then... If I plan my day as that, the thing that's never going to happen, then I'm always going to be disappointed and frustrated at the end of the day. Right? But if I learn to adjust my expectations to something more realistic and have more generosity with myself in terms of what I'm going to accomplish today, then I think that makes it that much more manageable and lets me be more realistic about how I'm actually moving through the world. And then the second thing is, again, kind of what you're saying is adjusting my own behavior around that. And a thing that I find is that if I take 30 minutes in the morning... The problem with working from home is, like, you wake up, you roll out of bed, and you're at work. You know what I mean? And if I instead say to myself, no, I'm spending 20, 30 minutes not working in the morning. I'm going to make my coffee, I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to sit with my notebook, I'll make some notes about what my plan for the day is before I open my email. Because if the first thing I do is get out of bed and open my email, then immediately I'm just in it. Right? And I'm just in triage mode, and I can't do any of that planning around it that will help me manage my day. Do I do this more than 2 days a week? No. But we're working on it. You know what I mean? And I think that's also something that's just like... You won't be perfect about these things. You have to learn to integrate that into your expectations and your processes.

[Howard] Returning for a brief moment to computer history. Modern...

[DongWon] The year was 1987.

[Howard] No. Modern computers are so much more resilient to being crashed, being interrupted, power outages, whatever. And it used to be, the horror story was, oh, no, the power went out and I lost my entire manuscript. Now, unless you're using ancient software on Ancient Hardware, oh, no, the power went out, and when it booted up, the file was missing the last two pages. The principal here is that computers have gotten much smarter about creating, and I'm going to use old terminology because I'm not in the business anymore... About creating swap files and putting pointers on things. The idea that when you task swap, and being interrupted is a task swap, you don't just drop what you're doing and move on to the next thing. You create a swap file, you store some... It's like the seven words that you write. It's whatever the reminders are. It's the idea that I am caching some stuff so that when I come back to it, I come back to it cleanly instead of coming back and finding out that my memory of it is completely corrupt. I have loved watching computers get better at this. I have despaired at myself getting worse at this as I get older. But I recognize that those same strategies apply. I started surrounding myself with index cards and Post-it notes. And I will create a manual swap file. Was doing this thing. And the note. And then I get up and I go... And I sit back down and I'm like, where the heck was I? Oh, someone left me a note. Oh, goodness. And We're Off to the Races.

[Erin] I will also say that, like, what you said about memory being corrupt, and, DongWon, what you said about, like, going for the ideal day, is also to learn that sometimes you create patterns that you think work...

[laughter]

[Erin] And you just... You're just...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Lying... Lied to yourself.

[Howard] Yep.

[Erin] But for some reason, it worked, like, one time. It's like one day you had a perfect day.

[Howard] It's so rare that...

[Erin] And you were like, it's going to be like this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] From here on out.

[DongWon] Oh, if I do this one thing, that solves it. And then 6 months later, I'm like, that didn't... That's not how it works.

[Mary Robinette] I just need another notebook.

[Erin] Exactly. One that I find is the... Like, I can outrun sleep is one that I often...

[Mary Robinette] I've never seen you do that.

[Erin] And...

[DongWon] Yeah. I've never done this myself.

[Erin] Sometimes, I've learned that there are times in which you are better off napping...

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] For 15 minutes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And getting back up if you really... I wouldn't do it everyday... Then you are trying to press through the sleep deprivation, because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Your brain is just lying to you that, like, oh, any second now you'll be finished if you just keep pressing through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But you never know it in the moment. And so, like, because being really sleep deprived is like being a little tipsy, and like a tipsy person, you have bad ideas about the world at that moment. Or like a hungry person in a grocery store. This is why they tell you, don't go to the grocery store hungry. You'll just start buying stuff. And so sometimes I have to remind myself, like, actually kind of, like, right down mental rules. And so when it is really late and I'm, like, I'm just going to push through for another hour, I will be like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] This is a lie. This is a lie, go to sleep.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Wake up and see if you still feel this way. And I will do it and be like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that my past self is trying to train myself out of the habits...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That I thought were working for me and are not.

[DongWon] Well, this dovetails with a whole other conversation about burnout that we don't have time to get into right now. But it's... That thing of, like, when you just assume that you can keep going, keep doing the thing and not putting brakes for rest into place, lead you to a place of burnout. And I do think this is really tied to interruptions, because it's that task switching, that friction, that I think eats more cycles than you think it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And so again, so much of it is adjusting your own expectations of what is accomplishable and adjusting the expectations of people around you. Now, sometimes, those expectations are your family or your boss or your agent, who's like, where's this manuscript? You know what I mean? Like, they're... Sometimes those are very hard to adjust, but as much as you can, find ways to carve out that space for yourself, and that starts with being able to be self-aware and honest with yourself about what is possible.

[Mary Robinette] So with that...

[DongWon] [garbled] as if I was good at doing that ever.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, aspirations. Right?

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You train towards what you want to be.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So with that, I have homework for you, which actually involves training you to handle interruptions in a low stakes environment. I want you to set a series of alarms for yourself. Ready? So you're going to set an alarm for 5 minutes. And then you're going to have another one that is 7 minutes. Then you're going to have another one that is at 9 minutes. And then another one that is at 15 minutes. [for 2 minute break, should be 11 minutes] So what I'm doing here is I'm giving you some random interruptions. After the first interruption, you're going to take a 2 minute break. That's what happens when we do that 5 to 7. That's a 2 minute break. You're going to get two breaks that are 2 minutes long. So when that alarm happens, I want you to jot a breadcrumb to yourself. Jot a note to yourself, Post-It, whatever, this is what I was working on. And then I want you to get up and walk around. And then start writing again when that...

[Howard] When the 7 minute alarm...

[Mary Robinette] When the 7 minute alarm happens. So that you've got another span where you're going to get a little bit more writing done. It's going to be annoying. But it's a good way to practice it at a time when you have control over the situation.

[Mary Robinette] And then, that means that you are out of excuses. Now go set some alarms and write.