Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 21.34: Knowing The Distance

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-34-knowing-the-distance

Key Points: Distance, between what you're writing and your readers' context. Inside or outside audience? Distance between the reader and the story. Senses! Layers of abstraction and genre. Think or feel? Include everyday experiences. Familiarity. Grand epic or individual journey. Focus and pace. Tense, perspective. POV. Character interaction and interiority. 

[Season 21, Episode 34]

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

[Season 21, Episode 34]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Knowing the distance.

[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 want to talk about the physical metaphysical distance between the thing that you are writing, the setting that you've created, the work that you're making and the context, the environment of your reader. The best example that leaps to mind for me is if you've grown up on the coasts, if you know that your readers have grown up on the coasts, then you can freely drop the terms wharf, pier, jetty, key, dock, and they will know what you're talking about immediately. You don't need to define it. You don't need to describe it. But most people, myself included, actually have to go to a dictionary to find out what those mean. And so understanding the distance between your reader's understanding of this world and your understanding of this world is key to writing it correctly.

[Mary Robinette] There's a lot of different things to be thinking about with this distance issue. So, one of the things that you're essentially talking about is the question of whether you're writing for an inside audience or an outside audience. This is something we run into a lot in science fiction and fantasy because we're dealing with invented worlds, but it's also a matter of thinking about who your audience is. And for me, I... because I've got this background in puppet theater, there's the difference between my audience, which was children, and the people who had to buy the show, which was adults. So, I had to be thinking about that. It has to play for this group, but it has to be accessible to this other group. At the same time, there's also this other use of the word distance, which is part of how you're controlling this distance between the reader and the story, which is the narrator's distance from the story. Sometimes you're narrating from an omniscient point of view. Sometimes you are creating a deliberate distancing. Sometimes it's tight third. And I think it's basically getting into, the why of it is, well, what story are you trying to tell, and for whom, is a lot of what we're talking about here. Some of the tools that I use when I'm doing that are thinking about the difference between filtering words. If I want to create more distance, I'm going to use more filtering words. If I want to tighten the distance, I use less filtering words. That's an easy one. But then when you're dealing with the outsider insider, it's also the when am I going to define something and how.

[Howard] I love looking at distance in this way, in terms of our senses. Generally speaking, I can see it before I can hear it. I can hear it before I can smell it. I can smell it before I can touch it. And I can touch it before I can taste it. And so the closer I want the reader to feel they are to the setting, the closer senses I use. If a character can smell something, that to my mind draws the reader much closer to what's happening than if they happen to see something or hear something.

[DongWon] One general note I want to make at a meta level is as a literary trend or storytelling trend really over the past, I don't know, decades at this point, we've seen a real collapsing of distance. Distance we... in general, the default storytelling mode is much closer in than it was midcentury, or early 20th century, right? And there's a lot of theories as to why. Some people say it's social media, some say it's the way movies and video games are, but since, like, '70's realism rose in cinema, we've seen just, like, increasingly shorter and shorter distance narratively from where the perspective of the narrator is to where the experience of the character is. This is the rise of, like, first person perspective in so many novels, to the extent that sometimes there'll even be push back on third person. There was... I think we're moving out of that moment a little bit. But for a second, there was like a lot of push back if you did third person, especially if it was third person present tense, there was like... you would get real friction in reader feedback, and it was very interesting to sort of see that collapse happen, and you can still play with it, but just something to keep in mind, that there's a real expectation now of being very close to this perspective and experience of the characters.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think that... two things. One, you made me think... start thinking about tense, which is interesting because I've heard people say that present tense is more distancing because you know you're not doing the... like, as the present tense character is, like, saying like, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, you yourself, the reader, know that you are not. And so it's different than the way that a lot of us tell stories to each other, which is in the past. And so like, it makes you more conscious of the fact that you are reading a story. And so therefore, oddly, creates more distance, despite it feeling in the moment of the story like it's more present, which is just, like, mind-blowing to me. But also, I've been trying to make a box in my head. And in that box, it's sort of thinking about outsider and insider and then close and far. And I wonder if part of the reason that we are seeing more... like, less distance between where we're right on top of the narrator is because we are open to more outsider perspectives in our fiction. And when someone is telling you their story, you don't feel like you need it to be your story. Like, if you're telling me your experience of doing Writing Excuses as a podcast, I'm not going to disagree with you because it's your story. but in a much more, like, if you're doing third person omniscient, you're telling me how everyone is feeling in the moment, which can feel alienating if you're not part of the group or you don't share that perspective as a reader.

[Howard] This raises a question that I'm going to pose to all of you. How do you decide? I mean, I believe that it's better to consciously decide than to just accidentally have done it, although the vast majority of the things I've created, I have accidentally done stuff...

[DongWon] [garbled] Feeling matters. Right?

[Howard] How do you decide the distance that you want to have... the distance that you want to place between the reader and the narrative, between the narrator and the setting between the characters and the environment? How do you make that decision?

[DongWon] It's interesting because, you know, for me, this decision happens at game system level, right? Because it's layers of abstraction, right? Something like Dungeons and Dragons is modeling very... in a very detailed way how... it's like a physics engine for the world. Here's how things move through space. Here's how characters move through space. Here's how they interact with each other. Versus something like Blades in the Dark, which is very abstracted, where you're making cinematic moves. The dice roll represents a series of things that's... here's how this fight went, and you can describe a set of things, versus I swing my sword once, I swing it a second time, I swing it a third time. Right? So there's different layers of abstraction there. And there are genre implications in that as well. Not necessarily in terms of fantasy, science fiction, but in terms of are we doing something really cinematic and broad in that way, and abstract in that way, or are we doing something that's, like, very in the details nitty-gritty, where we really want to think about the mechanics of this world, right? And those are two different slightly different genre questions in terms of how much abstraction are we using. And in games that is sort of that close farness.

[Mary Robinette] I think that with that, there's kind of also the question of do you want the charact... the reader to think about this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Or do you want them to feel it? And often we want them to do both. I will sometimes use this kind of distancing as a tool within a story that is not particularly distanced, if a character is going through shock or something like that. There's a novel that just came out. When you are listening to this, as we are recording it, it is not out yet. But when,,, it will have come out in June. It's called Sublimation by Isabelle Kim. And it's fascinating because she is creating deliberate distance in three different ways. The first is that parts of the story are told in second person and it is... the premise is that when you cross a boundary, a border, that you instance. That there is a person who stays behind and a person who goes and that these are actual physical people. And so then you can reintegrate later. And so she uses you... she has two different you POVs for the different halves of this person who later integrates, and it is a deliberate distance because she is thinking about this is how this other me did things.

[Howard] I want to have read this book now.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This is... it's a fantastic book. But then when they integrate, we switch to third person. and it's a different kind of distancing and disorientation, because there's an immediacy to it, but it's always the Rose did this, so Yong did this. It's this back and forth between which half of this reintegrated person did this thing, which you could only do by going into this third. It's not omniscient, but it's showing the contrast. And then there's this third distancing thing, which is that in the middle, like, there will be a scene, and then in the middle of the scene, we suddenly go to this kind of academic text about, like, how instancing happens in Odysius, because it's... in this version of our world, it's always happened. It is just a fascinating, really good use of how you can create this narrative distance, contrasted with places where we get very close to the characters. It's phenomenal. You should...

[DongWon] This book sounds so cool.

[Mary Robinette] It's so great.

[DongWon] I have been dying to read it ever since I heard about it. 

[Mary Robinette] As we record this, I will say I have not finished it. I'm about halfway through and I have been want... I have been recommending it to everyone, like, basically since chapter 2. 

[Howard] All right, we're going to take a quick break and then I'm going to come back and quote Mel Brooks.

[Howard] Mel Brooks, and boy, I sure hope I've got the quote right, famously said that, humor is you falling into an open manhole, tragedy is I have a hangnail. I love this, in this context. because it talks directly to proximity to the events. It's easier for me to laugh at it if it is distant, even if it's a disaster. It's easier for me to be pained by it, if it is close to me. And that's one of the tools that I think I unconsciously use when I am shifting between humor and horror in some of the darker things that I've written. 

[Mary Robinette] I think that using familiarity or... can really be one of the ways that you can bring a reader in close. There's a thing that Jackie Chan does when he's... someone gets thrown through a plate glass window.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] None of us know what that feels like, but he can make it understandable by then having the character stumble back and hit their head on the shelf, which we all understand.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So often when you're... when you've got this insider versus outsider, one of the ways that you can invite people closer in, is including things in there that are things that probably everyone has experienced, mixed in with all of the things that are unusual and unfamiliar.

[DongWon] Well, you can use distance in that way for such impact as well, right? So, if you think about, like, a Marvel movie, there's an incredible amount of violence happening on screen of all different types, versus a horror movie which is usually one person experiencing violence rather than hundreds of people experiencing violence. But because you're so close into it and this thing of familiarity, you're using that tool of familiarity where often they're being attacked with household objects, rather than a laser gun that doesn't exist in reality. Right? Even if that laser gun incinerates 50 people, it's not as impactful as one man with a hammer, right? And I think you see that visceral intensity comes from familiarity. And when you get close to the subject because you want that feeling to be relatable to you. It's why home invasion fiction works. It's why, like, certain types of horror are so unsettling to us.

[Erin] Yeah. I think, like, getting back to what you're trying to accomplish with distance makes me think about the concept of killable bodies, which is the idea that, like, in large war scenes and large, like, fantasy fight scenes, there's often a group of people who are basically considered to be, like, no one cares if you, like, got rid of the entire... the red shirts. Like, you got rid... you blew up the entire ship, whatever. Like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Oh, well. Like, I mean it's sad, but nobody really stops to, like, think about those people and there's like a trope among, like, GMs in TTRPGs that, like, after your party goes and, like, kills the horde of whatevers, you find the sad, like, art from the kid...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Of, like, the head goblin that's like, "Daddy, have a great day at work." Which makes it feel small... like, that, like, all of a sudden narrows that distance. It's actually a horrible trick because you as the GM set your characters up to do the murder...

[DongWon] It makes them insane.

[Erin] And then made them feel bad about...

[DongWon] And by horrible, you mean useful.

[Erin] It's like [laughter] I hope you feel bad about the thing I told you to do.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Erin] Which is an interesting thing, but I think that talks about how there are reasons for distance. Maybe you're not telling a story in which you want to pause...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And think about how bad it is for the people on the USS Red shirt that they blew up. You really want to talk about the broader war that's happening, or how it's affecting the characters on the ship that you are writing. And in those moments, zooming out allows you to kind of tell the kind of distanced, more thinky version of the story, the strategy of war or conflict as opposed to the impact, the emotional part.

[DongWon] Well, there's a great example of classic fantasy fiction that plays with scale in this way, and plays with distance in this way, which is the Lord of the Rings. Where you have two sides of the story. One is grand epic battles where thousands of people are dying on screen constantly, and then the other side of the story is two people walking through the wilderness for a long time, having an incredibly bad time of it, right? And I think one... the story of Frodo and Sam and and Smeaggel is so close in to this tight interpersonal drama, and then the other is all the broad sweeping things that are happening that add weight to their individual journey, right? And so the the relative distances in these two stories of here is Aragorn, the heir to the throne, versus here's these two simple people that are incredibly relatable to our own lives and experiences, trying to do a thing that is in a story that's too big for them, right? And using the contrast of that scale, I think Tolkien ends up sort of inventing an entire genre of fiction in that friction there, right? In that space there.

[Howard] Gandalf, between the two groups, saying, "All right, well, we got to do this big thing. I hope Froto's having a nice hike."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And what we're talking about here, I think, as we're talking, I'm like, "Ah, this is just, in many ways, another way to control reader focus."

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And also, it's another way to control pace.

[DongWon] Yep. Weird that it's all about focus and pace.

[Mary Robinette] Weird, huh? Where do I want you to look and how long do I want you to look at it?

[DongWon] Is that all structure is?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] So, in the last...

[laughter]

[Erin] The season's over...

[Howard] Well, okay, I'll just send us to homework.

[laughter]

[Howard] Okay. No, in the last couple of minutes before we go to homework, what are some tricks in your toolbox for changing the distance quickly?

[DongWon] I think...

[Howard[ I mean, we may have already covered all of them.

[DongWon] I mean, tense and perspective are some of the easiest ones, right? And you know the Isabel Kim is doing such interesting things with it, as you're describing it, of moving deliberately from POV, in terms of first person second person third person. We saw this in the Fifth Season as well, the way Nora Jemisin... N.K. Jemison plays with that... the narrator perspective, I think, really shifts closeness and far, and when you suddenly realize the narration is much closer than you thought it was, it's a really startling shift, right? And you can... I totally lost my train of thought. I'm sorry.

[Mary Robinette] But you can... I was following you and I unders... I was on board that train.

[laughter]

[Howard] And it's still rolling...

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because the thing that they're doing is they are creating a sense of immediacy by having the character interact.

[DongWon] Yeah. 

[Mary Robinette] Like it's the thing that Howard was talking about, about the senses, that when you are... when you don't realize who that narrator is in the Fifth Season...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's because they are not interacting with the scene. They are reporting on stuff, there is a distance there. And as soon as they interact with the scene directly, that's when you're like... when everything snaps in very close. So when people talk about this character feels very distant, a lot of times it's because there's no physical sensations.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it is because we don't have any interiority. We don't know what they're thinking. We don't know where they're feeling it in their body. Which means we don't know what they're planning, which means we are separated from them. Sometimes it's because they aren't taking any actions. They are static. And so there's this distance. And sometimes they just... in one of the failure modes, they are all over the map. They aren't focused on anything in particular. So I think if you're thinking about those kind of sort of four areas, that... what are we focusing on? What actions are we taking? I always go back to this thing that Erin said, I think last season, about identity as a verb. How are we interacting there? What sensations, what are the thoughts? Those are the things I think that can really bring you in close.

[DongWon] Well, one example that comes to mind as you're talking about that in terms of the difference between being close in with sensation and things like that versus more out in the world, I'm thinking of Severance, right? Where the Outie's are experiencing the entire world. They have their whole life history. They have all this context. And then you get that transition moment, of that incredible dolly zoom into... that has this, like, crushing collapsing effect, where now you're in the Innie's perspective of the world which they don't know anything. All they have is the immediacy of their experience in this inside life, right? And so you're so much closer to the Innie characters than you are the Outer characters, which is why in a lot of ways their emotional journey is the core of the show. Even though we are also deeply invested in what's going on outside, but the the experience of the Innies is really the heart of it and we sort of see it at the end of the last season in really exciting ways.

[Erin] And what you talked about with the dolly shot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which I have never seen one second of Severance, but it sounds awesome, is...

[DongWon] It's an incredible show. You have to watch it. I'm sorry, but yeah.

[Erin] All right. That's what I'm doing. Bye, guys. No, but before I go, the dolly shot, the thing that I like about it is that I think tracking an object...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And tracking physical space...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Is a great way to bridge distance. And I think it's because, Howard, of something you said, which is that, like, how sight... I can't remember how far out that was. Is that the furthest out or the...

[Howard] See, hear.

[Erin] Yeah. So seeing is like one of the furthest things. We can see the furthest. And so a lot of times, you'll see, like, an object, an arrow fly, the bouncing basketball, you see the whole basketball game, like, in a movie and then you follow the basketball as it rolls against one particular person's shoe...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And now you're in that person's perspective.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And in terms of books, actually, one of the ones that I think about is, like, the earlier books in Wheel of Time, because Wheel of Time starts every book with, like, the wheel turns and, like... I'm sure this is not what actually happens. A tumble weed, like, tumbles across the world, and it tumbles past this guy, and it tumbles past this guy. And they usually... there's these small scenes that are meant to show how the larger stakes of the entire world impact people we will only see for this one scene, who are just, like, trying to take their wheat to the next town as the world falls apart around them. And I love that because it uses an object as a way to connect us. So anything you can use physically is a great way to do it.

[Howard] In the course of this discussion, I realized something that probably should have been just incredibly obvious. The reason that we have all the songs and all the food in Rivendell is so that we can get in close to the Lord of the Rings because it's a really big story.

[Howard] I have homework. I have homework for you. Y'all, this is going to be fun. We talked a little bit about Marvel movies, about action scenes. I want you to write an action scene that feels like an action scene where the heroes are violently dispatching their enemies. And now I want you to rewrite it with a perspective shift and a distance shift. So, it is a horror scene about the enemies of our heroes being so miserably dispatched.

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

Writing Excuses 21.32: Barrier Breaking - Time Constraints

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-32-barrier-breaking-time-constraints

Key Points: Prioritization, circumstances, brain. Time blocking. What's the shape of the time constraint? Strategies. Acceptance of the circumstance. Write to deadline or without deadline? Burnout! My writing self is a good friend. Things change. Micro sessions. Pomodoro. Breaks. Life turbulence. When is your best writing time? Learn how to carve up your tasks. Signals! Delegation. Systems. 

[Season 21, Episode 32]

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

[Season 21, Episode 32]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier Breaking - Time Constraints.

[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 on the clock.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] There's this science fiction novel that I read when I was in high school that I have never stopped thinking about called Beggars in Spain...

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] And it's about a group of people who have science done to them. I don't remember why or how...

[Mary Robinette] Their parents.

[DongWon] And then they never need to sleep again. And...

[Howard] I want that so hard.

[DongWon] I think about this every day as my deepest wish... maybe not deepest wish, but of many things that I would like to be able to do, not sleep is one of them, because I have too much to do and there's not enough hours in the day. And I say this, full well knowing that if I had 24 hours a day, I would still have too many things to do and not enough time to do it in. Because tasks fill a space, right? And then they overfill it because I will always find more things I need to do, more work to be done, more hobbies, more games, more things to read, more things to watch, whatever it is, right? So, time constraints are inevitable and I think recognizing that and dealing with that is certainly one of the big challenges in my life and I suspect everyone in this room has this issue too. So my question to you all is when your barriers are the constraints of you only have so many hours you can devote to writing, you only have so... I mean, even when you are a full-time writer, there's all these other tasks that I think of as authoring, right? Answering emails, travel, going to events, doing marketing, doing promo, all of those things...

[Howard] Sleep.

[DongWon] That take up an enormous amount of your time professionally, and then family, sleep, hobbies, whatever it is, so...

[Mary Robinette] So, this is hard, right? And the answer for this is going to be different for everyone...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because what we're talking about is a combination of prioritization, circumstances, and the way your own brain works. So, for prioritization, one of the tools that I will use is I will use time blocking, where I basically make an appointment with myself. And then circumstances. For me, I'm now in a place where I have, I have a lot of travel. Previously, I was in a place where I didn't have a lot of travel, but I was doing elder care. And so, those are two different states. And with each of those, I have to make decisions about like when I'm going to write and the fact that I don't get a regular schedule, the whole write every day fundamentally doesn't work for me. And then the way my own brain works, write every day has worked for me, but it doesn't work for me all the time. So for me, I have to look at... I'm looking at those three basic areas, and then I have tools, because they also shift for me, as well, over time, like, my priorities shift, my circumstances shift, my brain shifts. So for me, having a bunch of different tools is very useful.

[Howard] I carve this up differently. The first skill is knowing the shape of the time constraint. How long does it take me to do a thing? And how long do I actually have? Most of us, I myself included, when we're spitballing, we estimate wildly incorrectly. We don't know how long it'll take and we don't know how much time we have.

[DongWon] [garbled] project management.

[Howard] Developing that... oh, my gosh. But just developing that skill, understanding that time is a constraint and knowing the shape of that constraint. That's skill number one. Skill number two is the whole raft, the whole slew of strategies for working within the constraints that you've identified. And skill number three is arguably the most important one for your own well-being. And that is acceptance of the circumstance. Because at the end of knowing the shape of the problem and trying to deal with the problem, there will be failures. There will be grief over not having accomplished enough. And I have to give myself permission to accept that it is okay to be sad that I didn't do as much as I did. I have to allow myself to be happy with what I did accomplish. And... that might sound silly, but with that third piece in place, when I come back around to counting the minutes and looking at the strategies for working with things, my fear of the outcome goes away and I actually relax a little bit into being productive.

[DongWon] It's not silly at all. I think the hardest part of this entire process is accepting reality.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Both in terms of what my constraints actually are, what my throughput actually is, and how much I have accomplished, but also being realistic about how much I do have to accomplish and on what timeline. I think it's hard in both directions.

[Erin] Yeah. I think I love the idea of sort of also giving yourself credit for what you have done...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that works on two levels. One is I think it helps you keep you realistic about what you can do and have done, but also, I think we have a tendency to... you can overestimate how much you can do because you judged yourself as lacking. So it's like you climbed a mountain, right, and instead of being like, oh, my gosh, I climbed this mountain, you're like, I was so slow, but future me will be so much faster, because it was a personal failing, not just my pace. You know what I mean? And because, if you judge it...

[DongWon] Stop reading my brain!

[laughter]

[Erin] If you judge it as a personal failing, then you often overestimate what you think you can do...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because you optimistically project your future self as being faster, fitter, more productive than you actually are. And I think it's better to be like, okay, this is the pace I go. Let me adjust my expectations to that pace.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then let me judge myself and then always set myself up to fail by thinking I'm going to get there faster.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think that one of the things about this, about like knowing the pace and how fast you write and setting goals is that know whether it is better for you to write to deadline or for you to write without deadline...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the things that can make a time constraint feel like a constraint. Instead of, oh, I have time to write, it's like, oh, I only have this much amount of time, because I... and that feels pressure because there's a deadline. Like, I was talking with a friend who has long Covid and her books no longer have deadlines attached to them. She writes when she can write, and when she can't write, she doesn't write. Whereas I with my ADHD, when you remove a deadline for me, that is never going to get written. Like...

[DongWon] The hardest time for me to get stuff done is when I don't have that much to do. When I have two tasks, those tasks are going to take me forever to get to. If I have a 100 tasks, I'm going to knock all of them out. You know what I mean? And it's the thing of I need sort of that accumulation and that pressure in a certain way. But with all of this, I do want to also bring up that this topic is very deeply connected to the idea of burnout as well. When you get bad at time management, when you get bad at recognizing your constraints or like not able to see clearly where you are in all this, that leads to a state of constant pressure, constant stress, and then that results in burnout.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I think one of the things... this is why I said that for me one of the questions was one of priorities.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That it's really easy to prioritize everything else except writing, especially if you are early in your career and you're doing it just for fun, or if you don't have a deadline or if it's a passion project, it's really easy to push it to the back burner. So, the thing that I would say is one of the ways that you can... I have a relationship with burnout because I have depression and now, looking back at the times when I had burnout in the past, I'm like, "Oh, I think that was actually just situationally triggered depression." >> That it's the overwhelm, it's the too much, you've exhausted yourself. So, one of the things I just kind of want to say to you, listeners, is that it is okay to take up space. It is okay for your loyalty and your priority to be to yourself and your writing. That doesn't mean that you get to have the entire day for it, but some of the day gets to be yours.

[DongWon] I also want to flag it from the other direction, though, right? Which is it can also be all consuming.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? And that both extremes are a problem, right? And for me, pre 2020, pre pandemic lockdown, I had let work truly become 95% of my life, right? It had sort of taken over everything for a variety of different reasons. And that led me to a state that when things got very difficult in lockdown, I was completely tapped and I had no resources and was at a place where I really needed to shift how I was doing things. And so I started putting more constraints about what is work and what is not work, and learning to clock in and clock out in a more deliberate way of I'm not responding to texts right now, I'm not responding to emails right now. This is when I'm working. This is when I'm not working. Right? And so I think I've seen this happen with writers too, where they get this feeling of, oh, if I'm not putting words down on the page, then I'm failing in some way, or I can't take time to watch that TV show, I can't take time to go for a walk, or whatever it is, because they feel such pressure to get the work done or such need to get the work done, whether that's external or internal pressure, right? It can come from yourself, or it can come from deadlines, and the world. So being realistic and setting those boundaries in both directions is just incredibly important in my mind, to keep your long-term mental health and productivity.

[Erin] Yeah. I think one way that I think about this is to treat my writing self like a good friend. And what I mean by that is that, like, I love to work. But, if I have a friend in town, I will think from my future self's perspective, will I rather have gotten this extra hour of work done or will I rather have seen my friend? Like, because, like, ultimately in the long term, I like my friend and I want to see them. And that could be an actual person, it could be a walk, whatever works for you. But like, I need to take time away because I do need to nurture the self underneath. And thinking of my writing self as like that type of friend is really nice, because. like. at some point you want your friend to go home, like, so you can't spend all day every day with your friends, like, whoa, okay, like, I need a break, dude, but also, like, you do want to leave room for them, and I sometimes in thinking of myself, my writing self, as a friend, it allows me to leave enough room in the way, because they're important to me and that time is important to me, without letting it dominate to the point where that's my only friend, which is also can be problematic for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, sorry. I just had this entire thought that I will unpack, after the break.

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[Mary Robinette] So before the break, Erin was talking about meeting the writer friend and unpacked a whole bunch of things that I should probably talk to my therapist about...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But one of them was that, oh, that's part of, I think, why going to a coffee shop works for me so well, is I'm going to go meet my writing friend, and that writing friend is me. And it's like, oh...

[Howard] I was pretty sure your writing friend was going to be coffee, but I'm glad to have been wrong.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes. pastries sometimes... 

[DongWon] Coffee is a writing companion.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But that is... I'm like, that is part of why time blocking will work for me. But also sometimes while it... why it fails for me, because I... it is when I'm thinking about... when I'm not thinking about it as this, like this external. It's like, oh, this is time that I can use to get these other things done and I disrespect my writing friend.

[Howard] I could literally lecture for 90 minutes about the way I managed time in order to produce Schlock Mercenary, a daily web comic, for 20 years without ever missing a day. While having the usual spate of real life intrudes. What I'm going to say instead is that it was incredibly serendipitous that the planned ending of Schlock Mercenary only overlapped about four or five months with the long Covid disability. Because the state that I'm in right now, none of the tools that I used before would give me enough time to produce a daily web comic. And that circles me around to the third part of my three skills, which is I just have to allow myself to accept that and to grieve and then to move on. And yeah...

[DongWon] I think you bring up truly one of the most important points here, which is things change, right? Your life will have seasons. There will be seasons of busyiness and there'll be seasons of relative rest. And your job circumstance could change. You can move cities. You could get into a new relationship. You could have kids. Your availability to work is different when your kid is between the ages of zero and three than it is when they are between 10 and 15, right? And it may not be better or worse. It just is going to be different, right? If you have pets, if you're traveling, if... there are a billion different factors. If the world is on fire for a variety of reasons, your capacity to work and your time available for that will change, because you will be needing to be doing different things, right? And so I think being able to be grounded and realistic and kind to yourself and generous with yourself in those moments is very important, right? And I've seen writers have a kid, and then really struggle emotionally with the lack of time that they could have for writing, even though they knew intellectually things were going to change.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And some of this goes back to stuff that we were talking about with interruptions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You've got time set aside, and then something interrupts you. So, one of the skills that I've learned for time management is to embrace what I call the micro session, which is, like, I was in the car going to an event. I'm like, I have 20 minutes in this car, Someone else is driving. So I can write for 20 minutes. Sometimes it... you only get three sentences down. Sometimes all you get down there is just, like, part of a thought, but it's still something where you're making progress. So, going back to things we talked about before, celebrating that... the victories, it's like, oh, I made progress. It's not I hit X word count today. It's like, I made progress and celebrating that every time it happens.

[Howard] Back in the penciling and inking Schlock Mercenary days, I was introduced to the Pomodoro time management method...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Which is... it's named after an Italian or maybe Spanish tomato timer, for... I don't know what the recipe is and it doesn't matter.

[Mary Robinette] No, it's just because it was a... the timer was shaped like a tomato.

[Howard] Shaped like a... Okay.

[Mary Robinette] That's why. Yeah.

[Howard] Anyway, the point is... it was... I can't remember if it was 20 minutes or 25 minutes.

[Mary Robinette] It's 25 minutes and then a 5minute break.

[Howard] What I realized is that if the writing has been done, if the script has been printed out and is sitting in front of me, and if I have time to think about it, if I've had time to think about it, if I only have 25 minutes, I can pencil an entire four panel comic strip in 25 minutes, well enough that I can come back to it and begin inking. And I... recognizing that meant that when I saw, well, I only have 20 minutes. I only have 25 minutes. I only have... I only have 35 minutes. That's not enough time to get any work done. Well, actually, Howard, you know enough about how you work that that is exactly enough time to perform a task that will move the progress bar forward. And that made a huge difference for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it's also having... recognizing with the Pomodoro technique, the importance of breaks.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think, going back to sort of the... all the external things that can be messing with your time. Two thoughts I had is, one, getting back to, like, sort of treating yourself as a friend is that... one way to think about it is, like, if you and your friend always got together and made, like, five course meals. Like, that was your thing, and then your friend had a kid and was like, yo, I really love you, but, like, I have this kid and there's a lot going on. Like, maybe we could just order in. You would not say to your friend, "You failure! How could you not spend as much time on this task as you did?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You'd be like, oh, man, I'm so glad we spent any time together. Like, I know you've got a lot going on. If your friend was like, "I read the news today and it totally, like, messed with me, and, like, it's going to take me a little bit to, like, get in the right mindset for us to hang today." Like, we might, like, need... I might need a little time to unpack and only have 20 minutes to talk. You'd be like, "Okay, great. That's fine." But when it's ourselves, I think, like, we always think, like, this should not affect me. This should not be part of it. So part of treating myself as a friend is thinking about. like, I would... I am often kinder to my friends...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And more understanding of the things going on in their lives than they are... than I am with other people, except when I'm on a plane.

[laughter]

[Erin] So, something that I found to be, like, a really fun technique is I like to try to get work done when I fly, but I hate working during turbulence and I have given myself permission. So I'll be, like, okay this is the work I'd like to get done. I know what the project is. I've got everything set up for my little seat. But if turbulence hits, I'm going to game, because turbulence is distracting and I don't like it. And I'm going to use a game to, like, refocus my attention. And when the turbulence ends, I can decide, okay, can I get back to what I'm doing? And it occurs to me that maybe this is, like, something to think about, like, in the broader life. As life turbulence happens, there are times you just got to set the work down and deal with that moment, and then trust that when it ends, you're not going to forget that you liked writing or forget what's going on. You're going to come back to the work, but at the moment, plane shaken.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I am 100% on board with this. I do this periodically, like when there's big stuff going on, I'm like, "Okay, writing is not happening." And also recognizing that as someone with ADHD, that I'm often a binge writer. It's like it's really head down in a big burst. But the other part of that is thinking about when your best writing time is. Like your writing time, your best writing time is not during turbulence, but on a macro to micro in your day. There's a part of your day that you are your most creative, that you have the best problem solving skills. Because this is one of the time management issues that I'll hear people talk about, and they say, "When I get home at the end of the day, I just don't have the energy to write." Like, okay, well, when do you have the energy? And a lot of times, what we're doing is that we are taking our prime time, our prime creative time, and we're giving it to tasks that don't require it. Like, if there's a job, a thing that you do at your job, especially if your work at home and no one's looking over your shoulder. But if there's a thing that you do that you have done so often that you can do it by rote, you don't have to... it doesn't take all of your brain power. Why are you doing that during your writing time? Because that's our habit. So maybe, figure out, okay, I'm most creative here. I'm not going to be able to take a two-hour block off during this prime time, but I can say, I can gift myself a half hour of writing time, during this bright spot of my day.

[Howard] That was one of the things that I loved the most about making Schlock Mercenary, is that I got very good at carving up the tasks, and I knew at full pace, it took about 10 minutes to script one day's comics. because I would script a week at a time. And when I say one day's comics, one row of comics. It took me about 90 minutes to script an entire week of comics, and then it took about 20 minutes per, to pencil them. And that was all very thinky. That's writing. That's composition. Inking for me was chop wood carry water. And if... once I realized, no, don't try to write it and then pencil it and then ink it and then do the next one. Write a bunch. pencil a bunch and then when you hit... when you hit brain is tired but hand can still work and the day is not over yet, chop wood, carry water, ink, ink the comics. I loved that. I don't have a similar structure now, which is one of the challenges I'm facing, but knowing how to carve up your work into those sorts of things is incredibly useful.

[Erin] Yeah. I also find, like, once you recognize this is your most creative time, like, I like figuring out, like, ways to signal to myself that this is the case or that this might be a good opportunity to write. Especially if I can't fully time block it, like, if it's not something where I can absolutely, like, leave the house. And the analogy I always think of for this is when I was working out a lot and I can... I'm not a morning workout person. I'm not a morning person in general. I am an afterwork workout person. However, it's really easy to just leave work and go home and be like, "Oh, well, I didn't work out again," for years. And so, I would always change into my workout clothes at work and then say, "Okay, well, you just have to walk by the gym. You don't have to go in the gym. You just have to walk by it. And if you feel like going in, you're here in your gym clothes. Great." And like, nine times out of 10, I would go in. But the 10th time I'd be like, I have no pressure, like, actually, like, really hungry, or I have something to do at home, I'm going to walk by it. But what was nice is it signaled in my brain, okay, this is the opportunity to work out that we've carved out for ourselves. Take it or don't, but it's like a nice thing to do. And so similarly, like, when it's creative writing time, thinking about what are things I can do to signal to myself, okay, I feel like this is a good time of day. I feel like this is the thing I know I need to do. Let me set myself up and say, okay, like, is there a song that I always play, which I do, like, at the beginning of writing sessions? I don't have to write, but, like, this is a good way to, like, at least put all the pieces into place, and then I can either say yes or no to that.

[Howard] If you don't do that, then you have decided in advance not to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I have a great tool for you, which you're going to love because I know that... Yes. Because I know that you're playing with the whole smart house thing and the smart bulbs. When we were in Chattanooga, the house was set up in such a way, we had a lot of smart bulbs because mom couldn't get out of a chair. So it was just... and then I was like, oo, a new toy. I had a smart bulb over on my desk, that would turn on during my prime writing time. So, if I'm in another part of the apartment, I would see... and it's like this architectural design that's like, look, this is a warm cozy spot that's right here that could... you could be writing right now. It was great. It does not work in the setup that we currently have in the apartment that I'm in. But, it's so good because I couldn't always rely on my brain to remember, and an alarm, like, the alarm would go off, and I'd be like, "Oh, there's an alarm." and I would turn it off, but the bulb stayed on.

[Erin] What I love about this and I.. what I love about sort of all of these, is one of the things that I always think is that we are not always good, but we try to find ways in our lives to work with things. Sometimes it's like, how do you get your kids to do a thing, like, when you need them to? And a lot of times I think back on what are the habits that I have used...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In any part of my life, to get me to do things or to work with time constraints, because time constraints are a part of our lives in all ways. In some ways they are the thing that, like, once you're over the age of. like, seven that you have to deal with the most over the course of your life other than, like, eating. And so we have a lot of routines around them. And I think we often learn a lot about what works...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And what doesn't work.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But we think of writing, or I have thought of writing, as, like, this grand mystique, this, like, thing outside of my life and I forget to use the strategies that work...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In the rest of my life there as well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of which is delegating, which I'm a big advocate for. You can't always delegate your writing, but you can delegate all of the other time things. Many of the other time things.

[DongWon] Everything we're talking about here in this sort of, like, back section has been about systems, right? Systems you can put in place to help you accomplish your goals. Whether that's Pomodoro, whether that's me sort of setting boundaries about when I'm working and when I'm not, the light, what a great idea, putting on your workout clothes, right? Like all of these things are just incredible tools to help you do the thing. But before you can put systems in place, you have to do sort of the self-discovery of what you need.

[DongWon] So, my homework for you this week is I want you to make a calendar for yourself, but not aspirational, one about what you're actually doing with your time. And I need you to send should out of the room for this, right? No guilt, no shame. Just be realistic. Here's what I did today. I woke up at this time. I went to bed at this time. I ate my breakfast at this time. You know what I mean? Just like go through and, like, make a list of what it is that you're doing. As much as you can, do not judge yourself for how you choose to spend your time. And then with that realistic picture of that week, sit down and think, okay, what are systems I can put in place to help me achieve my goals, while being realistic about what it is that I do with my time?

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

Writing Excuses 21.30: Chapter Breaks Soon

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-30-chapter-breaks-soon

Key Points: Chapters. How long? When do you need a break? Pacing. Audience. Norms and genre expectations. Grouping. Beginning, middle, end, satisfying. Reason to open the next chapter. Episodic with a cliffhanger. Why haven't we reached a chapter break yet? I wasn't ready for that chapter to end! Why is that chapter here? 

[Season 21, Episode 30]

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

[Season 21, Episode 30]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Chapter breaks soon.

[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 today we're going to be talking about how do you use chapters? So, we've been talking about scenes and narrative transitions. We wanted you to have kind of those building blocks before we dove into chapters. A lot of times... I get this question a lot and I wanted to know when I started, like, what is the ideal length for a chapter?

[Howard] And it's a funny question, because if you read Terry Pratchett, there are no chapters.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] It's just scene breaks.

[DongWon] And if you're reading James Patterson, it's about two pages.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I've seen chapters that were one sentence long.

[DongWon] Yeah. Basically, what we're getting to is there's no hard and fast rule here...

[Mary Robinette[ Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Unsurprisingly, given our general theme, but you know, I think chapter breaks can be really useful. We've talked about scene breaks, we've sort of talked about transitions, but when do you want to bundle up a group of scenes into a defined section, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Which is effectively what a chapter is. We're not going to have one specifically around like section breaks or act breaks, but I think in thinking about what makes a chapter a chapter, how do we feel like you have enough scenes together to make that break?

[Mary Robinette] So, I go back to the thing you've been talking about all season, which is the microcosm macrocosm...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That there are times when a chapter is actually a single scene, or, as we've said, a single sentence. And there are times when I want to group them together. For me, when I'm thinking about the chapter break, I'm thinking about it in terms of pacing. The things we were talking about when we were talking about transitions, about whether or not I want to frame or group a set of things together for the reader to kind of think about them as a contextual. If I'm trying to use a chapter break to interrupt action, to really underline a moment, then I will often group stuff so that the chapter ends after a scene that has been a dun-dun-dun.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, one thing to think about is readers read in chapters, right? Often they will get to the end of a chapter and finish a reading session at that point, right? Whether or not they had planned to, but sometimes they will be like, I'm going to read till the end of this chapter, right? I... when you came in to record this morning, you had said that very thing...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of like, "Oh, I meant to read until the end of this chapter and then I realized, so on and so forth." And so I think part of the reason why a James Patterson or a thriller writer uses very short chapters is their audience is generally one that's reading in smaller chunks, right, than say an academic reader who is used to very long, very dense chapters, right? And so I think for you, one way to think about it is in terms of audience and the audience experience. It's not... can be difficult to think about that at the drafting stage, but as you're getting into editing, sort of thinking about that experience can be a useful one.

[Erin] I'm wondering how much of the chapter is a sort of a thing we would naturally do if we were, like, writing in a world in which chapters did not exist? Like, and how much of it is the way that we are used to reading stories at this point? And the reason I asked that is not because there's any way to know but because it makes me wonder, should you be writing with chapters in mind or are chapters something that, like, you've written and then you go back and look for dividing lines and think this makes a good chapter?

[Howard] When we had our discussion with Margaret about three-act structure, specifically how it applied to writing for TV, there are norms, there are expectations, there is a meta. If you are writing to a genre that is... that typically has 4500 word chapters on the average and the editor you are sending your manuscript to edits for this genre, I would argue that you should have 4500 word chapters, That you should force yourself to work within that form because that's the expectation that you are publishing into. And, I mean, to your question, Erin, would chapters exist, if we just invented writing out of whole cloth and decided... I don't think they necessarily would, until we reached a point where someone said, I would like for reading to have break points in it.

[Mary Robinette] I think that they would have because you see chapters arising independently in multiple different cultures. And to your point about writing to... it's like this is genre expectation. There's genre expectation, but then there's also playing against expectation so that you stand out. The chapter length, like, I stressed about this so much when I was starting out. It was like, oh, my chapters all need to be about the same length. And now I realize that I was very wrong about that. It is in the same way that repetition can become boring on a sentence level or a tonal level. The same thing can happen with chapter lengths. And I'm not telling you that all your chapters need to be different lengths. What I'm saying is that you're doing that variation as a way to control pacing. And when you're thinking about chapters, I think about it as a way of controlling pacing.

[DongWon] I agree that I think chapters emerge organically, kind of going back to this point, because readers need breaks, right? A book is long, and at some point, we need a point to stop and take a breather and think, right? Terry Pratchett in some ways can get away with not having breaks because of the propulsive nature of his books. And you can find natural break points where it's easy to set it down, of bigger scene breaks than others. Right? But one thing I also want to point out is that the existence of the chapter in English language western publishing is very tied to the history of print publishing. Right? A lot of novels in the 18th and 19th centuries were distributed as serials. They were distributed in segments. Right? The printing press has a thing called a signature, which is a certain number of pages that are bundled together. I think it's 32 pages...

[Howard] 16.

[DongWon] 16 is a signature. because of the way paper is printed and then folded and then cut, right? And so the size of the signature was also very relevant to the size of a chapter for physical distribution, right? And so all of these things do kind of align to put some constraints in the origins of printing that are now kind of present, right? But I do still think thinking about white space... I'm sorry to constantly be on the negative space conversation here, but like the white space on a page is really important, and a chapter break is a way to sort of visually give your reader that breather and that momentary break.

[Erin] I am curious... that all makes sense to me, like that we would have... chapters are inevitable like the rising of the sun. But the... I'm wondering, like, is there a length, like Howard mentioned, like, the 4500... you mentioned, like, things that were set based on the printing press. Has that continued forward where there is something, even though you can have those variations? Do you think there's something that, like, readers are kind of used to in terms of, like, a general chapter length, and then things that are outside of those windows, like, really stand out?

[Mary Robinette] I do think it is genre specific...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And demographic specific within a genre.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Like YA... And audience, young adult...

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] specific...

[DongWon] Yeah. Versus if you're publishing for retirees, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And also like how old the book is. But I think the thing that signals to a reader that a chapter is coming to an end, again, macrocosm, microcosm, it's grouping stuff, right? And so when you feel like, ah, this grouping is coming to an end, this arc that I'm on is coming to an end, that's when you can feel that chapter break coming. And that, I think, is kind of one of the things you're looking at. At the same time, having said all of that, like when we were talking about interruptions in transitions, sometimes, like, I have had the thing where I've looked at my other chapters, I'm like they're all around 2,000 words and this is 8,000. So what's going to happen is this chapter is going to feel slow, even though there's a lot of stuff happening in it, because my reader is spending more time reading it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I will put in a deliberate break as a way to make it feel... as a way to speed up the pace, which is why I keep going back to I think... it's a way of grouping things. Yes. But I primarily think about chapter breaks as a way to control pacing.

[DongWon] Yeah, I really like thinking about it that way. And I think it's an excellent point that, if you have a series of short chapters, inserting a long chapter can be very tricky to do because of reader expectations. Doing the opposite is very easy. If you have long chapters, throwing a short one in can feel very impactful or surprising in an interesting way, where the opposite feels slow or feels... or just define reader expectations. They're like, I have 20 minutes to read before bed. Oh my god, how much is left in this chapter? I think that can be very disruptive.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think that you can... in much the way when we were talking about like... the long run-on sentence...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That feels incredibly breathless. I think that you can do that with a longer chapter, like a big action battle scene that is enormous and has a lot of impact. I think that you can do something like, say, "All right, this chapter is just going to be long." Because you know that there's enough other stuff going on. That the reader doesn't have time to be like, "How long is this chapter?" Because they just keep turning pages.

[Howard] I think that we should probably have a chapter break.

[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 Bradbury 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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[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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[Howard] And we're back. I love the idea that chapters are for pacing. I find that in my own writing, I will often think of chapters almost like TV episodes that get their own title. And I will try to tell the overarching story in ways that a chapter is a satisfying beginning, middle, end chunk of that story. Because if I want the reader experience to be a chapter is a satisfying place to put the book down and pick it up again tomorrow, I want it actually to feel satisfying.

[DongWon] This is kind of why I brought up the idea that chapters were sort of serialized in some earlier fiction, or 19th century fiction, because I think that set an expectation for the modern reader of that beginning middle end. Not that they should be short stories. I don't think they should be that, but they definitely should have a beginning, middle, end kind of flow to them in a certain way.

[Mary Robinette] I think, yes. And I think that there's a place for that. The one thing that I want to caution is the danger that I ran... or the problem, the failure state of this.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] When I was making the transition from short stories to novels, I was also thinking in terms of beginning, middle, end. And what happened to me, is, because I was used to short fiction, I would have chapters that ended and there was absolutely no reason to open the next chapter. And so I think when you want the reader to be able to take a break... like our friend Brandon, who writes... you may have heard of him, I don't know. Brandon Sanderson, someone...

[DongWon] Known for his very short books

[Mary Robinette] His very short books. Brandon says that he will deliberately put... that's one of the reasons he puts interludes into the Stormlight Archives so that people have a spot to put the books down because he knows how long they are.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] What I was doing as an accident was that I was creating these places to put the book down at the end of every chapter, which made the book very slow and very easy to abandon. But when you look at Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, he sets up the ends of his chapters. He's a master at this... despite my other feelings about,,,

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] He's a master...

[DongWon] [garbled] work.

[Mary Robinette] He's a... Yeah. at making you reach the end, and you still have to turn the page. So, what I've learned is that I do the beginning, middle, end, and then essentially that reaction shot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That we were talking about previously, the did I leave the stove on, I tack one of those on at the end or something that says there are still story questions open.

[Howard] It's episodic with a cliffhanger.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's episodic with a cliffhanger, but it's also... it's not always a cliffhanger, because that again...

[DongWon] Yeah. Right.

[Mary Robinette] Can become very repetitive, but it is a reminder that there's still more story. [DongWon] Yeah. And when I say end, I don't mean coming to a conclusion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I don't mean that falling action. Like, going back to what we were talking about scenes, I think having a chapter start with a slow rise and a drop off does mean that you put it down and don't pick it up again. I think that's a really big risk. When I say beginning and ending, I really kind of mean, going back to the example we used when we did scene, of like that one sentence of here's what we're encountering in this scene and that one sentence of here's what we have encountered. And what we have encountered can be that oh no did I leave the stove on feeling.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And I think you should have that. You want momentum from chapter to chapter. You want them to make the jump across the gap, because you are intentionally putting a gap there. So finding a way to bridge it, finding a way to catapult them, whatever it is...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is I think really important.

[Erin] It's funny. You, Mary Robinette, said the thing that I was going to sort of pose as a question, which is the difference between a novel as just like a series of short stories that you put, like, a title on the front of, like a short story collection and an actual chapter. And I think you run into this on both ends. I often will see students bring in stories that they're like everyone always tells me to write a book about this. And part of the reason is that their short stories feel like a chapter...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] In that I feel like there's always something that, like, hasn't been addressed. Often something, like, small has been addressed, but there's some larger overarching question that just is introduced and it doesn't go anywhere. So it feels like, oh, a future chapter will deal with this bigger arc, and this chapter is dealing with this small moment within that arc that actually answers something or gives you some sort of feeling of having... it's like some sort of bite within this meal.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I see that happen too when people go from novels to short stories. And a lot of times I think it happens because they just haven't read a lot of short stories and so their model for what something of that length looks like is a chapter. And chapters end with this promise of more, which a short story typically does not. Because it does lead to this frustration.

[Howard] To DongWon's earlier point about signatures dictating the length of a pamphlet. Boy, back in that time, you did not waste paper. There were words on every page. And so you learned to write to 16 or 32 pages. That is a skill set and it's a very, very valuable skill set. If you want to, for instance, write for comics, you are writing for a double signature staple in the middle book that has 20 to 22 content pages and some ads. And if you cannot write a beginning, middle, end story that can be broken into panels on that page, you don't get to work in comics. You have to be able to do that. And that's why I said earlier, if you're submitting to an editor who consistently writes to an average of 4,500 word chapters. If you're submitting to like a Harlequin or some factory publisher who... and this is great work if you can get it. Having that skill set, being able to take your story and carve it into same-sized chunks skillfully, so it doesn't feel like you shoehorned things into the chunks. That's a really valuable skill to have.

[Mary Robinette] It can be, but also... I agree with this, that, like, being able to learn how to fit your work into the space that it needs is useful. And I just want to remind people that when you are drafting, especially when you're early in your career, don't think about this stuff.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Mary Robinette] Just don't think about it. Like, I actually, when I am planning my books, because I do at least a loose outline usually. It just helps me keep all of the pieces in my head because I have so much disruptions. I usually have what I call my holding area, which is all of the scenes or beats that I need to hit. And then above that I have the chapters. And I will move things into chapters. Sometimes I move them in quite far before I get to that section because I know it's like, oh, I really want this kind of ending there. But usually I don't move things out of the holding area into the chapter area until I get pretty close to it, because it is... there is so much... one of the joys of writing novels is that there's so much flexibility.

[DongWon] Well, and one thing I do want to raise at this juncture is, again, I don't think the thing that you as a writer should think about that much, but I'm adding it for context of what's happening, which is we're in a moment of dramatically rising printing and paper costs, right? And so, the design and layout of books is becoming more significant. And there's part of the downward pressure on lengths of books right now just because the more pages it has, the less money publishers will make on it because it's more expensive to create, right? And all of this is just a note to remember that, at the end of the day, if you're doing traditional publishing, a book is first and foremost a physical object that needs to exist in the world and the decisions you make will descend to that. Now, can you control that in a useful way, because so much depends on font choices, layout, design, and all these things? Not really. But it's something to be aware of and, at a macro level, think about that publishing is still kind of a physical goods business in a very real way and that the materiality of your book will matter at the end of the day.

[Howard] I think in terms of failure modes a lot and for me there are two failure modes for chapter breaks and one is, well, why haven't we reached a chapter break yet? And there's a lot of reasons why that can fail, and half of it is probably what I as a reader brought into the book. And the other failure mode is I wasn't ready for that chapter to be over yet. I don't want to read the next chapter. I want to read more of this one. I bring those up because when I'm writing, I really want to avoid them. Do y'all think about this? Do you...

[Erin] I don't exactly, but I think I've... you talking about the two failure states made me think of a third one, which is...

[Howard] There's a third way to fail?

[Mary Robinette] So many. There's so many...

[DongWon] Oh, my.

[Erin] There's eight types of failure. No, just kidding.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Which is that there are...

[DongWon] None of them are fun.

[Erin] There are three... like this one is where it feels like the chapter is just there because somebody thought it needed to be there.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I feel like this happens a lot with two POV... like, novels...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Where they're like, you can feel the writer thinking, you know what, I really think I need to check back in to so-and-so, or I committed to having every other chapter be this person and so, like, I have now finished person A's chapter. Guess I got to do person B's chapter. even though I don't have a lot to put in there. And I think. like. my guess would be that the answer is you are less constrained by chapters. Like, you control the chapters. The chapters don't control you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And so a lot of these failure modes have to do with when you're trying to force a chapter break, at a time when you think it needs to happen, because. like. the publishing world will make it happen...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or this is how long your friend's chapters are, versus when it actually feels like it makes sense for the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I would agree with that completely.

[DongWon] And just to re reiterate, that matters way more than anything I said about, like, publishing in print size. It was... I just had an interesting...

[Howard] Yeah. And my comments...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Howard] My comments are aimed specifically to the writer who wants to sell into a specific market where there are constraints that you don't have control of, and you probably aren't shiny enough of a writer to violate those rules yet.

[Mary Robinette] So, when we're thinking about how to to go in and out of a chapter, I just want to take us back to our transitions, which is that you're still thinking about the same kinds of things that you're thinking about with a scene. That it's still... you are still moving people in time and place, but when they come back into a chapter, they need to be grounded and thinking about how you're manipulating those. It's the same tool set. it's just using it in a different place. And I'm also going to call back to something we've talked about in other episodes, which is the recency primacy effect. That, in much the same way that you can complete a circuit by hitting a point, talking about some things, and then hitting that point again. The thing... what was the thing you were saying? Tell the person, tell them again.

[Howard] Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them. [DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] That you can use that in a chapter as well.

[DongWon] 100%.

[Mary Robinette] And also because the chapter is an artificial thing, it's okay to, like, do all of those things in a scene, and then kind of have a through scene attachment at the end of it, which is sort of the reaction shot that is moving you on to the next thing. So you're thinking about all of those things, but because chapters are longer than scenes, you have more words to do it in. So basically what I'm saying is if you've learned a tool at one level, the proportions are going to stay the same. It's just like the difference between going from making a cake to a cupcake. Same proportion of flour. You just use more flour in one of them than the other.

[DongWon] And it's a nesting doll, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The cupcake lives inside the cake, which lives inside the... I don't know.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] What are you cooking?

[laughter]

[Howard] And can I eat it now?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] One of my favorite things...

[DongWon] Sometimes metaphors don't work.

[Mary Robinette] No. It's like a layer. It's like layer cakes.

[Erin] I never metaphor I didn't like.

[Howard] Oh dear.

[Mary Robinette] It's a scene-wich.

[DongWon] It's a scene-wich.

[Howard] All right. I... chapters versus scenes. One of my favorite things about chapters is that, for me anyway, I treat a chapter as another opportunity to deliver a great first line.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I don't look at scenes that way because that's exhausting. But I feel like anytime the page has turned, there's a white space in between, that opening paragraph of a chapter is an opportunity for me again to shine at the beginning of the thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Part of the reason this works is something we've talked about way long ago, is the power of breaks. We talked about the white space on the page, but when I'm narrating, commas, periods, all of the punctuation exists to encode pauses. And so for a period, you... sorry, a comma, you count for one. This is very mechanical. This is just when you're learning. A comma, you count for one. A period, you count for two. A paragraph break, you count for three. And chapters and scenes are just bigger pauses. So, a lot of times you can build more of a punctuation by where you place that chapter break, which means that when you're coming back in, you've also got that ability. And also, again, the danger of this is that because there's been this pause, you have to re-ground the reader. And sometimes you need to ground them more thoroughly by, like, where are we? When are we? Who are we dealing with? Like, what is the connection of this to the last? Because it's also possible, especially when you're doing the changing POVs for the reader to come back in and completely have lost the thread.

[DongWon] Yeah. Don't think about it as a short story, but do recognize the very real possibility that your reader has not picked up this book in a week.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And with that I think it's probably time for us to go to homework. 

[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, what I want you to do is I actually want you to go and look for a book. It's going to be a little bit hard to find, but it's called Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the 21st Century. And it is a history of chapters. You don't have to read this book. Honestly, it will not enormously impact the way you write, but I do think it's really interesting to think about, oh, this is this is how it developed, and these are all the different variations of the ways chapters exist.

[Howard] I wish I'd read the book before I tried to answer Erin's question...

[laughter]

[DongWon] Before I said a bunch of stuff about the history of publishing that I hope is right. [Mary Robinette] Like, they had chapter divisions in scrolls.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is why I was like, "No, no, it's risen. It's risen across multiple cultures." Anyway, this is just a fun assignment because we've been giving you a lot of homework that is, Oh, I have to go write a thing. So this one is just for funsies. See if you can find it in your library. The Chapter: A Segmented History From Antiquity to the 21st Century by Nicholas Dames.

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

Writing Excuses 21.28: Narrative Transitions

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-28-narrative-transitions

Key Points: Transitions. Through scene, break, interruption. Underline what happened or launch next scene. Question, bad, okay. Common tone key or match cut. End of a scene? Stop writing, then fix the transition later. Eight types of fun: sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression, submission. Transitions as pacing. Edit pass techniques. Bracket notes. 

[Season 21, Episode 28]

[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. 

[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 28]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Narrative transitions.

[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.

[DongWon] So, this week, after having dug into what makes a scene last week, we're going to start talking about transitions. How do you move from one scene to the next? How do you move across that shift in location, POV, energy, whatever it is? And that can be moving from scene to scene. It can be moving from chapter to chapter or section to section, right? And so, what are the elements that you think about when you are trying to figure out how do I get from here to over there?

[Mary Robinette] So I think about what kind of transition I'm planning on using. And I think of them as sort of coming in three modes. There's what I call a through scene, and then there's a break, and then there's an interruption. So a through scene is where you use narration to transition us from one place to another. Like, we walked for many miles before arriving. And so it is technically the... you're just summarizing all of the offstage stuff is what's happening there. And then a scene break is the hashtag and you jump in time and space. And an interruption is where we stay in the same time and space, but interrupt the action in order to punctuate a moment. This is  often the dun-dun-dun...

[DongWon] The knock at the door.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, the knock at the door. Yeah.

[Howard] I...

[dun...]

[Laughter] 

[Howard] Years. That was...

[Erin] Figure that out.

[Howard] That was... that was easy. Years and years and years ago, I wrote a movie review for the movie Blood Rain, which was not good. and which did not advance from scene to scene very cleanly. And I described them moving the plot forward. Instead of it, like, flowing like a river, the cast all ganged up behind this boulder and manually pushed it down a dry riverbed. And it's the difference between something flowing smoothly and something looking like it's just too much work. It... you... it shouldn't look to the reader like you worked really hard to move between these scenes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] It should feel, to my tastes anyway, it should feel like like running water.

[DongWon] It should feel deliberate, right? First and foremost. And I think one of the big risks in transitions is if you have too much falling action at the end of a scene and then too much rising action at the start of the next scene, you end up in a valley where it's very easy for the reader to put the book down, right? You can have a disjunction between the scenes, but this is a little bit just another way to talk about get in early, get... or...

[Howard] In late, out early.

[DongWon] In late, out early. Thank you.

[Mary Robinette] I think about it as do I want to underline what has just happened or do I want to launch to the next scene? And sometimes you do both.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, an underline is like a reaction shot, which I describe reaction shots through what I've learned from Nathan Fillian. Have I done the Nathan Fillian? Okay. I couldn't remember if I had talked at length about this before.

[Erin] Is this the Nathan Fillian soap opera...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Thing? I love it. Remind us.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, he said that at the end of a scene in soaps, the camera is going to push in on you. And this older soap star said, "You are out of things to do. So you do... there are three faces you make. Did I leave the stove on? Oh, I did leave the stove on. No, I turned the stove off." And that basically what this says is...

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have questions. Things are bad. Things are going to be okay. And it helps the reader understand what is ha... and contextualize what has happened before. So I sometimes will get to the end of a scene, like, when it's not working. I'm, like, reading back through it and, like, why is this not working? And I'll look at it and go, is the stove on or off right now? Or do we have questions about it? Is this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And sometimes just like adding a single line about that. It doesn't have to be like this entire big thing. It's just that single moment can...

[Howard] Okay. I have a quick personal question to ask.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] When you reach that moment, do you make the face? Do you make the stove on/ stove off face?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes. Yeah.

[Howard] I... because I've... I have caught myself, when I am writing, when I am drawing sometimes, I am stuck until I make the face my character would be making and feel what the character is feeling and then I can put the thing on the page. And that probably has no bearing on the conversation, but it fascinates me.

[Mary Robinette] No, but I do... I think it does to a degree because I think for me it is like I talk about these mechanical things, but it really is about chasing the vibes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And like the... for me the stove on or stove off is like this is kind of the underline. It's the but is the stove on or off is often the launch into the next scene because you're raising this new question. Which was one of the problems that I ran into when I was starting to shift from short stories to novels is that I kept ending everything with a solid sort of, ah, everything is fine now, or, everything is terrible. And it's one of the reasons that you sometimes use a through scene, or you want to end with a question. Because otherwise you are giving the reader a chance to leave. In theater terms, one of the problems with a blackout is that it's an opportunity for an audience member to escape.

[Erin] Wow. And you don't want that.

[Mary Robinette] You do not want... You want to keep them.

[Erin] I'm thinking a little bit about songs again, which is that... have you ever been listening to a song, I don't know why, but the wobble is coming into my head. The wobble is a song where you think that song has ended because they go into a long repetition as many songs do where things get quieter and you're like, "Wow, that was great. I had a lot of fun doing the wobble dance." And then they're like, "Just kidding. There's still three more minutes of song."

[Laughter] 

[Erin] They just, like, come back and you're like, "Wait, there was no... Why? I don't understand. You, like, prepped me, like, to exit the song."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And I'm thinking, like, scenes are similar. Like, what you said, DongWon, about not wanting falling action and then too much rising action, is like a fade out in a song...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which telling people, like, this is the end, and then, weirdly, a fade in into the next verse and you're like, wait, that's an odd thing. In songs, a lot of times where you go from one scene or one part of a song to the next, it's after a strong moment. It is a long belt.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin[ It is like the moment of emotion in the song and then you're like, okay, quiet down, let me tell you the next part of this story. And so it carries the listener through.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think similarly, like, having an ending that's really strong, allows you to then start in another place, because that strong thing... the audience is still thinking about during the blackout, oh, my gosh, there was a gunshot, and then it went to a blackout.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Who could have shot it? By the time they think, oh, and also maybe I have to pee, you're already in the next scene...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And they don't have a chance to escape.

[Howard] The movie Corpse Bride, the song Remains of the Day by Danny Elfman has a crazy key change between the verse and the chorus. And there is what we call a common tone modulation between it. He sings, our jubiliciously lovely corpse bride. And the note that he's holding on bride is the same note that he begins the lyrics, die, die, we all pass away. But the whole key change has modulated around that one note. It's what we call a common tone key change. In cinema, there's a similar technique where very similar actions or very similar colors or whatever are cut between, it's called a match cut. And in prose, the technique is... I don't know what to call it. I would call it a match cut or a common tone modulation.

[Mary Robinette] I mean reaction shot comes out [garbled] ...

[Howard] Yeah, reaction shot. She cried into her cupped hands, at the end of a scene, and the next scene begins with he sipped his cup of noodles. And that transition to me is so... it's such a useful trick because I can have two scenes with completely different moods, completely different rising falling action, completely different settings, completely different characters, but that one common tone, that one match in the cut is enough to stitch them together so that it feels like the river is flowing instead of I'm sisyphus-ing a rock down the dry riverbed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think what a lot of this comes down to is, going back once again to the idea of macrocosm and microcosm, which I think about a lot when it comes to books clearly, like the fractal structure of things is a scene needs to have a beginning and an ending, right? And when you move from your ending to the beginning of the next one, whether you're looking for an interruption, whether you're looking for the match cut, building a bridge for the reader across that break, what you need to be communicating is intention. I meant to end the scene here. I mean to start the next scene here, and I'm going to grab you by the collar and move you from one to the other in a way that I think feels very deliberate and communicate something to the reader of A, how am I supposed to feel about the thing that just happened? and B, how should I feel about the scene that's about to happen?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And this is one of the things that makes ending a scene so hard is because you often don't really know the next scene, especially if you are discovery writing. Sometimes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You end it because you're like, "Oh, I've got that, it's good vibe for ending here, but I actually don't know what I'm aiming people towards."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the the hacks that I have learned in the last 2 or 3 years, and I'm pretty deep into my career at this point, is that when you've accomplished everything that you need to accomplish in a scene, you can actually just stop writing it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then come back and fix the transition later.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, don't like... don't let all of our, like, you have to do these things or this is very useful to do. Like, don't let that make you feel like you can't end a scene. If you're having trouble, it's probably just you don't know what the next one is yet. Figure that out and come back.

[DongWon] Exactly. And speaking of abruptly stopping a scene, we're going to transition into our break.

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[Erin] So, I have a theory... now that we're back... about... I don't know if you all have ever heard of the eight types of fun.

[Mary Robinette] I've heard of some types of fun. I think when we...

[Howard] I've only heard of two.

[Erin] Which... what two have you heard of?

[Howard] Whee, this is fun, and Okay. No shit.There I was.

[Erin] So, this is a thing that comes out of games and they said like, why do people play games? And there are eight types of fun that you can actually be having when you're playing a game. And the reason... you might be like, what does this have to do? This transition is real... is real rough.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] But the reason is that when you were talking about the match cut, I was thinking, what is it that people like about that, especially in prose? And part of it is, I actually think it allows you to come outside of the story with a small part of your brain and be clever. Because you see the... like, even on some subconscious level, you're like, oh cup and cup, I get it, and it's not anything that's happening in the story on the page. It's... but it allows you...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To make a bridge yourself, and I was thinking, well, what is that exactly?

[DongWon] It's a meta participation in the story. Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly, and a lot of times, games think about how do you meta participate...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In the play. So the eight types of fun, I'm wondering if some of these are things that could carry you from one scene to the next. And I'm making it up in real time.

[Mary Robinette] I am so excited by this.

[DongWon] Yeah, I love this idea. Go on.

[Erin] But they are sensation, so the engagement of your senses.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] Fantasy, just like escapism. Narrative, drama and story. Challenge, which is an obstacle to overcome. Fellowship, which is feeling sort of a social framework or feeling like you're with these characters or with this thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Discovery. Expression and comfort and repetition.

[Mary Robinette] I love this so much. I love this like... when I think...

[DongWon] I play games for all those reasons. That's all.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like...

[Howard] I eat food for all those reasons.

[Mary Robinette] I just exist for all of those reasons. This is like... and this is literally one of the things that I love about games and about writing is that the reason it works is that it mirrors stuff that we do in the real world.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm sitting here thinking about the way... I talked in the previous chapter, previous chapter, sure, the previous episode about my my little to-do list...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] My prompts and purpose of scene. Like, I love the idea of adding that in as like, okay, but what is this... is this scene...

[Howard] What kind of fun?

[Mary Robinette] What kind of fun is this scene promising? And then using that as a kind of framing tool to pull you in, to suck you into the scene a little bit faster, and then probably lie to them if we tell them it's comfort.

[Chuckle]

[Howard] And in the interest of meta... in the interest of metataxonomy, I think your eight types of fun are almost all type one fun. Except maybe challenge will sometimes fall into the type two category.

[DongWon] Narrative can be type two, challenge can be type two. Fantasy, even if you're playing Resident Evil 4, you know what I mean? Like, I think type one, type two is a really useful concept that I use constantly. And again, type one fun, it's fun while you do it. It's fun when you think about it later. Type two fun, which comes up a lot in backpacking and hiking and other outdoor sports, is it was not fun while I was doing it. I was cold and wet and miserable, but it's still... it's fun when I think back on it, and I'm glad that I did it.

[Erin] Well, one of the things, like, the comfort one type of fun is partly what they use to describe when people are grinding in a game...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When you're repeating something...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] Over and over again in order to get the item. And it is like the hiking.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, it's like in some ways, you're doing it and it's not fun at the time, but actually the ritual of doing it over and over again becomes a weird kind of comfort.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] It's a thing you know you have to do. Like if you could, like, fast forward through all the hiking and just be at the spot, maybe you would do it. But you might feel like I missed something because in some ways the, like, struggling to get there is what makes the reward. It's that contrast...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Between like oh the slog and oh my gosh like I got the item or I got to the place I wanted to.

[DongWon] Well, and comfort.. Oh, go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] Well, when you're hiking, there's a whole bunch of those micro moments on the way to the place.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like, this is pretty, that's pretty. So, a whole bunch of small rewards on the way there. Because if you were having to do that same slog through like a... the same length...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And the same ups and downs through a featureless concrete obstacle course, none of that... that would not be fun to look back on.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, this is why people talk about a roadwalk or desert hiking as some of the toughest hiking because it's very repetitive with very little distinction from moment to moment. But yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. And so I think one of the things for the transition of it all is that, like, you can maybe use these feelings or these things to figure out how to bridge the gap. So you can be like, I'm going to bridge the gap with sensation...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] With like a sensory detail that will focus. I'm going to bridge the gap with discovery. Oh my gosh, something new is here. And then you can change everything else, the people, the vibe, the etc. But something about that type of fun...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or that type of emotion that's happening from the reader is actually carrying you across.

[Howard] I was rereading the final books of Schlock Mercenary in preparation for putting them into print and realized... I actually realized it just now from the memory of having reread it that I used the match cuts, the common tone modulations, much more commonly in act three when I am making scene changes while everything is more intense. Because the way the match cuts worked there, it was a pacing tool. It and... I hadn't thought about that until right now, but the kind of transition you use can be a throttle for accelerating the pace or for pulling back on the pace.

[Mary Robinette] That is exactly why I use the difference...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Between a through scene and a scene break. Like, the thing about it... So, if you think about... if you've ever gone to see a musical or a stage show, Hamilton does this a number of times where they don't do a blackout as they move from one scene to another. The dancers and the actors are still on stage. They are the ones moving the scenery. There's still an action that is happening. And so, you keep this sense of forward movement. Even though it actually takes longer, it doesn't provide you with an exit point. And so it's one of those things that you can use when you do a through scene like, we traveled for many miles. It is both slower and also keeps you more engaged than if you do a scene break and come back.

[DongWon] Well, one thing I think about too along those lines and kind of connecting back to this idea of eight types of fun is you need that difference from beat to beat for your reader to also process what just happened, right? Not to continue too much on my risotto hating, but when one bite is exactly the same as the bite before, at some point that repetition becomes hard to bear and it's hard to process what makes each individual bite exciting and wonderful, right? So if you go from an action scene directly into another action scene into another action scene, and I see people trying to do this because, like, oh, I'm writing an action book. This is a thriller. It needs to be fight, fight, fight. When you do that, I can't enjoy any of the fights, because I need that moment, that sort of transition moment, of the actors are on stage moving things around. It gives me a breather...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To process the emotional thing I just experienced.

[Howard] Well, that's the principle we talked about at the very beginning of the previous episode...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The conflation of the word scene in scene-sequel format, where sometimes we are transitioning between action and action and sometimes we're transitioning between action and hey let's take a breath and process the action that just took place.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And this is also the thing, for me... like when we were talking in the last episode about flashbacks and if those were two... if that was a scene-wich...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Or if those were different scenes. And, for me, the reason that they're a scene-wich is because you're using these through scenes to transition... these small, very small, micro transitions to move in and out of those. But it is... it's the same idea as when you are, I'm in this place and then we travel and then we're in this other place. Those are two different scenes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But we stitch them together with this through scene text.

[Erin] Yeah, that makes sense. I think... I was actually thinking about, like, because I love, like, scenes where there's a slight memory or we move a little bit in time, but we're still in the same scene. And I think, like, what's interesting is thinking about how the difference... what the difference is in the transition technique between the two of them. And I feel like it's like same technique, softer hand. You know what I mean? Like, if you, like, land like... if every single memory overwhelms the scene that it's in, then it feels more like a flashback...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it's like that memory is, like, punching you in the face. Whereas, as often happens in our own lives, if you're remembering something while still doing another action, that memory is a lot less like it didn't stop you from doing what you're currently doing. It's just something you're noting often because it informs what you are doing. Like, and I think the way... I was actually thinking about that going from one action scene to the next to the next to the next, to randomly transition in the middle of my thought, which is that one of the things I love about fight scenes is what you learn about the fighter...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] From the way that they fight and what happens. And having a second to process I'm not as good a fighter as I thought I was. Oh no, the next fight is beginning, is... makes that next fight more resonant than if it's just like I'm not even going to think about that. I'm just going and going and going. And I think that a lot of times when we use a memory, it's to add that additional context...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Without having to h... you don't have to show the whole my last fight showed me I was quite bad at this. You actually just do that with a small memory of being hit...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or a flinch that happens within the character and they're thinking, "Oh my gosh, like, this is just going to be like another... this is going to be like last time." This is adding extra depth and extra context...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To the current scene by having that small transition that brings the rest of the world of the story into the scene that you're in.

[Howard] If our listeners are anything like me, this episode contains a whole bunch of new and exciting thoughts about how to stitch scenes together. And I just want to present all of you, fair listeners, with the strategy that I'm giving myself, which is I'm going to apply these cool new transition between scenes techniques as edit pass techniques. I'm going to let myself...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Write the scenes first and then I am going to go back and look at the order of them and then I am going... once I know they're in the right order, then I'm going to worry about the prose that stitches the scenes together.

[Mary Robinette] I have... which I will put... we'll put in the liner notes on the website. I have examples of what it looks like when you do the same scene with a through scene versus a break. Because it is an edit pass thing that you can do later.

[Erin] Actually, to build on that, I am a big fan of using transitions, which I often struggle with because they're hard and that's why we're doing a whole episode about it, by making myself fun bracket notes as I'm writing. Like, I'll be like, and then she goes to the bar to confront that woman in a much more interesting way than I've got right now. And I'll put it within brackets so that I can find it and it doesn't end up in the final version of the story. But what I love about that is it allows me when I'm going on my edit pass to like almost have transi... like, give myself a little note of fun and a little giggle that makes the transitions feel like something fun that I get to do...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to something annoying that I have to do.

[Mary Robinette] I do this too. I actually picked this up from C. L. Polk that they will write in brackets at the beginning of a scene or the end of a scene sometimes. Amazing closing line goes here that summarizes everything that's happened and sends us into... makes us excited to go into the next thing. I'm like, so just leaving a placeholder for yourself. It's like this is what I want to happen. I just don't know how it works right now.

[DongWon] Wow.

[Howard] My brackets are all self-nagging. My brackets are tell better joke here. This was cool. Write it again.

[Mary Robinette] You're like positive self talk is very...

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's super important.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, and all this kind of points to... I mean there's a thing that they say in film and TV which is... and this is especially true in documentary work, which is you find the movie in the edit bed, right? You... the shooting process and the script process is kind of your intentions but what actually emerges at the end is what happens in the editing process, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And I don't think books are that extreme in that way. But I think everybody's really spot on here in terms of as you're writing your first draft, as you're drafting as a process, don't worry too much about these transitions. These transitions can be layered in later. If you're somebody who does it as you go through, fantastic, right? We're not telling you not to do that. But if you're stressed out by hearing all of this, being like, I'm barely able to, like, write the scene that I'm in. I don't want to think about how do I get to the next scene yet? You can do that later. 

[DongWon] And on that note, I have a little bit of homework for you, which is to kind of do the thing that Mary Robinette was talking about. I want you to take two scenes from your current work in progress and think about different ways to transition them and then try them, right? I want you to transition from scene to scene as a through scene, as a break, and as an interruption. Try all three of these and deliberately go through, reread them, make some notes about what worked better, what didn't work as well. Why was that happening? Why does that work for this scene and not for this other scene? So, that's your homework for now. Try some different transitions and see how it goes.

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

Writing Excuses 21.26: Setting the Pace

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-26-setting-the-pace

Key Points: Controlling pace: Cadence, transitions, tone. Dialogue. Informational beats. Rubber banding. Short period of time, but great detail. Contrast.

[Season 21, Episode 26]

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

[Season 21, Episode 26]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. Setting the Pace.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] And I get to set the pace. For this episode, I am sitting in the driver's seat of the pace car with my foot on the virtual gas or maybe the virtual brake. And I'd like to talk about how we find those pebbles in our fiction. How do you make the pace car go faster? How do you make it go slower? How do you swerve it out of the way so that they can have a race? The metamor... metaphor may have fallen apart 

[laughter] 

[Howard] at this point. Um, but where's the gas? Where's the brake?

[Mary Robinette] I find that there are so many different tools that you can use to control the pace. Like a lot of what we've been talking about already through the season are just secretly different ways of controlling pace. And I want to go ahead and say right up front that fast does not equal good. Slow does not equal bad. But the three kind of big umbrellas... and then we can if anyone wants to drill into them deeper. The three sort of big umbrella areas that I use when I'm controlling pace are the cadence, like fast versus slow scenes, transitions, how I move from one thing to another, and then tone.

[Erin] That makes sense to me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I mean, I would not want to put holes in any of those umbrellas.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. 

[Erin] Because then they won't function as well. 

[laughter]

[Erin] But I'm curious when you're talking about cadence, like, it's interesting. Cadence is such a word to me that's speech associated.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] How fast you speak. I have the fast cadence of somebody who grew up in New York City. Other people have slower cadences and some of that has to do with where you're from, how your family speaks. But a story's cadence is determined by the writer. And so I'm wondering, like, what kind of tools are you using in sort of creating that cadence?

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad that you said that you think of cadence in terms of speech, because I always go back to the fact that writing developed to convey the spoken language. Like, the whole idea of storytelling began when people were just telling stories. So, for me, it's the same things that I use when I am trying to control dialogue on a page. But you can do it on a macro scale. There's, like, the length of a sentence, the length of a scene, the length of a paragraph, the length of a chapter. Punctuation, punctuation or white space. That exists to control breath and pauses. So it's how long you talk, how long you pause, and then the contrast between things.

[Howard] I love the... just the statement that writing developed to convey spoken language. Because one of the things that is really useful for controlling pace, and then within it there are lots of pacing elements, is dialogue. If you have... if you want it to sound like people are interrupting one another as they speak, they are stepping on the ends of each other's sentences as they talk, there's the double dash that commonly gets used in comics. I don't know what they use in prose?

[Mary Robinette] M-dash.

[Howard] Yeah, m-dash. Where you... instead of a period or a question mark, you get interrupted with an m-dash and then the next line of dialogue begins. And that's... I mean yes, that creates that pace, but if you throw in a said bookism, that so and so interrupted, then you've dragged the pace back because you added words for me to read. And so in order to use that tool effectively, you have to have established ahead of time for the reader the voice of each of the characters so that it is very clear who is talking without you having to drop those cues because you want the conversation to go fast. You have to leave those bits out.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and part of what happens there also is that when you're doing that, you're leaving more white space on the page. So the reader is literally reading less and that's one of the things that you can control that if the reader is... I mean they are literally spending more time reading words, it can often slow things down. Like if you want to do a slow-mo moment in a book, you can describe, like, the way the bead of water dripped down the side of the glass, each pebbled indentation in the glass catching it... And it's like, oh my god. But you can slow it down that way and you're just literally spending more words on it.

[Erin] What I think is really interesting is that can work both ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. 

[Erin] So if somebody is freaking out, like, about something, they will speak quickly in long run-on sentences. But the thing that you're talking about, which is also more words on the page, feels slow. And I actually think a lot of it is about the speed in which new informational beats hit the reader within that. So you talked about the bead of water, but everything else you're saying is, like, more about the bead, more about the water, and so it feels slow because it's long, but it's all one thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Whereas somebody who is having, like, a panic attack or really excited about something will skip from topic to topic very rapidly in that long period of things, which then feels like information is hitting you faster and so therefore it is a faster paced moment for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I am so glad you brought this up because this is one of the things I always think about Flounder and Little Mermaid. There's this moment in the movie where he's like, "So, there was a shark and then he chased us and we went into a hole and we came back out and it was and then, then we were safe. Whew!" 

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And there's no punctuation in that. So, like, it is... You can do that on the page. Like, I think that that's such a good observation about the jumping from topic to topic as moving you through things faster. Which. again, if you go to a macro scale, also happens if you do a montage, like the training sequence. You hit a bunch of different things, but each one is just like five sentences long, and then you go into the next one.

[Erin] It's almost... It reminds me of driving. Now, I don't drive...

[laughter]

[Erin] But I love driving.

[Howard] It reminds me of this thing that I don't actually do, but I've heard a lot about...

[Erin] But I'm often in the car while other people are doing it very successfully, and I have time to look at the scenery around me because I don't have to look at the road. And I think a lot of times, if you are in, like, a not exciting scenery place, where everything is, like, flat. There are, like, those places in the US where it's, like, flat and no crops are grown and there's no interesting geological features and you're just going and you're like in desert land.

[Howard] I drove through those from Utah to Los Angeles. 

[laughter]

[Erin] And it's, like, there's no change, and I think that's what the difference is.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Whereas if you are driving that same distance, but you're in a city and there's, like, thousands of different buildings and there's billboards and there's a mountain and there's a valley. All that stuff makes it feel like you're getting somewhere faster, even though you are not, because there's so much to distract you and to bring you along.

[Mary Robinette] And I think this is also what happens when you put too much information into something. We're going to talk about exposition next week, but I do want to flag that I think there is a limit to how much new information a reader can take in. And if you try to cram too much of it into a moment, that it feels rushed, even if nothing is actually happening in the scene. You can lose the reader because they're like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't have enough time to take everything in."

[Erin] This makes me think of a montage. I'm so sorry. And then I'll be done. This makes me think of a montage, which is... A montage is a way of taking a lot of information and creating a boundary around it, like driving through Vegas and seeing casino after casino after casino. After a while, they just become the casino part of Vegas...

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] As opposed to you noticing necessarily each one. except for maybe one that stands out. And so I think that in order to not make it feel like it's overwhelming, the montage tells us, we're going to get a lot of rapid things, but it all's going to take place in one really cool box that you... The only thing you have to pay attention to is that box.

[Howard] So there's this experience that I had numerous times back in the days when I commuted, which is that I would start my drive and arrive at work and realize that I didn't remember the drive. The drive was about 15 minutes long. And at first, you know, I was very afraid. Did I fall asleep? Was I not paying attention? What happened? And I developed a pet theory which may or may not be supported by actual neuroscience, which is that short-term memory has to get committed at some point to long-term memory for us to remember things. And there are anesthesias that will prevent that from happening. You communicate just fine, but you have no long-term memory of the conversation. And the pet theory is this. If my short-term memory is being filled up with things that I've seen a thousand times before and short-term memory compares to long-term memory and says it's the same stretch freeway as it was yesterday. Nothing interesting has happened. There were no threats. We don't actually need to remember the details. We just need to know what we got there and it doesn't get committed. And then I arrive. And the point here is that for readers with the pacing, sometimes we don't want to commit things to the long-term memory. We just want to get them there.

[Mary Robinette] You will be happy to know that your theory is actually backed up by science. They have studied this.

[Howard] Yay.

[Mary Robinette] And basically what happens is that we will put similar things into the same box. So if you've done this thing, your memory will be like, "Oh, I know this. This gets filed here with all of the other drives." Which is why when you're writing, that if you... If everything is fast or everything is slow, that the pace is going to feel off. It's going to feel rushed as opposed to I'm excited, when you're in the failure mode of one of those." And that's also why having contrast is so important. And one of the contrasts that we personally can do is a break.

[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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[Erin] I'm going to be a horrible person right now and refuse to contrast because I'm so excited about something... 

[laughter]

[Erin] That Howard said before the break that I'm just going to drag us back there.

[Mary Robinette] I love this.

[Erin] Which is that I've always thought of that thing where you, like, something feels like it took a lot of time when it was happening, but then it snaps into one small memory as rubber banding. And I thought about this when I trained for a marathon, and, for context, I'm extraordinarily slow and so, like, I would go on these 4 hour runs. And it's like... Actually they were, I guess, different every time, but I don't really enjoy running, I was just doing it because it was on my bucket list. So I'd just be like, man, I'm running, and then during the run, I would have lots of really small micro thoughts that were interesting and kept me upright. But as soon as I got back home I was like, oh, I did that thing, and I just put it all in the box, unless, to contrast with my normal run, something particularly interesting happened that caught my eye. Something that stopped me from doing the thing that I would always be doing. And so I wonder if kind of thinking about our structure and something you said earlier, Howard, we kind of establish this, like, cadence, this feeling like you said with dialogue of what the thing is normally, so that when we have that moment of contrast, it actually does stick out...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because we've established this is the pace, this is the pace, ah! This is different.

[Howard] One of the most commonly deployed pacing mechanisms... applications of pacing is when the things that are taking place are happening across a very short period of time, but we are describing them in great detail, which mirrors a thing that I've seen happen in my own brain, which is that I had an experience which couldn't have lasted more than 10 seconds. But the description of it takes 5 minutes. It was an icy road thing, where I discovered that the car in front of me had the brake lights on, but it was accelerating away. And I realized, oh, there's black ice on the hill. And I looked down at the bottom of the hill and think, well, I'm going to have to find a way to go around this person because they're in trouble. And... but there's cars that are turning on either side of the road down... No, wait, they're not turning. There's piles of cars down there with hazard lights on. And, oh, no, there are like three traffic accidents at the bottom of this hill. I need to make a decision. And the decision I made was I'm going to drive on the wrong side of the road. And I slide over to the wrong side of the road, and realize, wow, there's not even any traction over here. And the road bends a little bit. That driveway, I bet, doesn't have black ice on it, and the yard doesn't have black ice on it. And so I'm going to drive through this person's yard while oncoming traffic passes me, and then I'm going to cut back onto the road. And the whole thing worked. This was on my commute...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] One morning in Utah. The whole thing worked. I've driven past that location countless times and looked at it and I cannot understand how I had time to think all of those things, in time to do any of those things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] But I know that it happened. And as a fiction tool, the ability to take a fight scene and to take the compressed time of a fight and to taffy it out into a description and make it believable that everybody's actually reacting and thinking in this way.

[Mary Robinette] It is. I've had similar things where I come out of an accident and it's just a series of snapshots. Or when something goes wrong backstage. My tour partner and I will have entire long paragraphs of conversation, that are basically, in real time, us looking at each other and going, "Yeah, okay." And then we both know what to do. And I think that one of the things that is happening there is, as you say, it's unusual. It's different. But that takes me back to this tool of contrast. So when I was an art major, my teacher told me that if I wanted to make something brighter on the canvas, that I needed to make the area immediately around it darker. And that... I think it works in text, too. You see varying versions of it. When things go terribly wrong on the page, then it's... or you're watching a film and it's like, oh, they're all laughing right now and it's a horror movie. Well, we got a jump scare coming up. Sometimes it's predictable. But it doesn't mean that everything has to contrast. Like the way I think about it is that when I'm writing, there's high contrast and then there's low contrast. So low contrast is where I want to group similar scenes to do what Edgar Allen Poe calls, like, unity of effect. If you want to create a creeping sense of dread, then whoo... things just... you just keep piling that on. But then you also have high contrast scenes, which is like having a fast scene and a slow scene next to each other, or having a happy moment and a sad moment next to each other. Sometimes in the same scene, sometimes butting up against each other. And that contrast causes you to experience time differently than when you have low contrast. Both I think are useful. It's just kind of where you want to where you want to push the audience.

[Erin] I really like when you can find that contrast also between, like, the... I don't know why I'm always wanting a difference between what the reader's experiencing and what characters experiencing, but when characters are in one emotional moment and the reader is in another. So, for example, if the reader knows that one love interest, like, was unfaithful to the other, but they're having this, like, amazing moment of, like, coming together, or actually there's the musical The Last Five Years, which is about... or, I think it's called The Last Five Years, which is about a couple basically going from loving each other to the divorce and they go separately in time. So, you start when one person is happy and the other person is sad and you end with the woman singing this amazing song about like, I'm so excited. I met this guy. He's the best and we're going to be happy forever. And he's singing the song that where he's leaving her, which will immediately lead into her like fir... first song that we experienced at the very beginning. And I think it's one of the most, like, beautiful and tragic things,,,

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Because you get that contrast at the very beginning, because it's always happening in the show, but by the last moment you fully understand why she is so wrong to be so happy in this moment. And that knowledge as the person watching makes it feel like the fast pace of her thing is, like, also feels like the creeping dread of the rest of the show.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Probably the most powerful application of contrast... of pacing contrast in what I've read was the three shakes chapter in Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears. We end the chapter previous with a nuclear weapon has just been set off at a football stadium. It's a huge disaster. Okay. And there's a lot of tension building up to this and as the reader you're like, oh my gosh, a thing... it's, wow, what's gonna happen? And then the three shakes chapter is all about physics and it describes at a minute level what happens... the first wave of neutrinos, the first wave of high energy neutrons, the first wave of electrons, the fact that these electrons... that there are TV satellite antennas aimed at the stadium, where the because the TV trucks were there, and that those were like one of the first things that gets hit by these antennas, causing an information blackout over the stadium. And all of these details, and as I'm reading it, I'm fascinated. I don't know how long the chapter is. I think it's only like three or four pages. But it totally puts the brakes on. We just set off a nuke. And the aftermath of that doesn't happen until after I've gotten three pages of physics level aftermath describing the consequences that are going to unfold when the next chapter begins. 

[Mary Robinette] You have just reminded me that two days from now... as in two days from when you all are listening to this, as opposed to two days from when we are recording it... a new book by Hilder Nut... Knutsdottir is coming out which I translated and it has one of the best examples of this that I have ever seen.

[Howard] Ooh.

[Mary Robinette] It's called Dead Weight, and I can tell you about this without doing any spoilers. But a really horrific thing happens, and she slows down and gives you every, like, deep description of the really horrific thing. And then there are also places in that same scene where time for the protagonist moves so fast that she doesn't actually realize that she has moved or not moved because everything... it's really upsetting and she takes her time. She does this beautiful thing and then the next chapter the entirety of the chapter is, I made the tea. And it is this... the contrast of this complete mundane experience with everything that happened right before it. You know... there's so much white space around that moment. There's so much stillness that you are like, oh yeah, that is what shock feels like. You can only concentrate on this one thing directly in front of you. And it was like, experiencing it as the translator, and hitting that moment for the first time. I was like, hoh, and then I have been desperate for people to read it. So I'm so excited that all of you can.

[Howard] So the book is called Dead Weight?

[Mary Robinette] Dead Weight by Hilder Knutsdottir. I just went... I was like, as we were recording, I was like, hang on, I think this book is about to come out. Yes.

[Howard] Outstanding. Well, really the next big subject here with regard to pacing is the tool of exposition. And that is such a big tool, we're just going to put it in its own episode. So, I think it's homework time. 

[Howard] Here's your homework. Take a scene, take an event, and write it in two ways. Write it so that it is paced so that the reading of the event takes about as long as you imagine the event itself taking. And now, write it so that the pace is... the amount of time it takes to read it is like 20 times what the event took. Like someone was seeing photons moving in slow motion. Write it in both ways, and have that experience for yourself because it'll be fun. 

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

Writing Excuses 21.24: Deconstructing the Seven Point Plot Structure 

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-24-deconstructing-the-seven-point-plot-structure

Key Points: Hook: introduce the characters. Plot point one: call to action. Pinch one: add pressure to the characters, forcing them to act. Midpoint: change from reaction to action. Pinch two: more pressure on the characters. Plot point two: I know how to win. Resolution: I've won! Hook, reason to care. Hook mirror to resolution. Hook, spiky bit and barb. Story question, story problem. Plot point helps on journey to resolution, pinches get in the way. The lie the character believes. Try-fail cycles and pinch points. Losing your mentor. Pinch narrows options. 

[Season 21, Episode 24]

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

[Season 21, Episode 24]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing the Seven Point Plot Structure.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And we have been talking this season about different forms of plot structure. I asked Dan if he would come in and talk to us about the seven-point plot structure, which is one of my favorite plot structures. But I have to go back and look at my notes every single time that I use it...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And Dan is the person who introduced me to it. So...

[Dan] So I deigned to come back...

[laughter]

[Dan] No. I'm very excited to be here. Glad to be recording with you again. So, seven point plot structure, that's my name for it. I don't know if it has an official name. It is essentially a TV writing formula for writing TV episodes. Which I found through a Star Trek RPG and turned into a class, which turned into a YouTube channel, and arguably more people know me for that than for my actual books. But it is a system that I still use. As a very quick overview of it, because we're going to spend the rest of the episode, I assume, taking it apart, it is seven points. It starts with a hook, and then a... Which is basically introducing the characters. Plot point one, which is more or less the call to action. Then there is pinch one, which is adding pressure to the characters. Forcing them to act. The midpoint, which is where things change from reaction to action. Then there is pinch two, which is another put pressure on the characters. Plot point two, which is, like, I've figured out how to win. And then the resolution, in which they win. And I've got a whole YouTube series you can look up. It is so old that it's back in the day when YouTube videos were limited to 10 minutes. And so it's actually broken into five pieces. There's obnoxious intro and outro music. It was just filmed live at a con. But it gives a very good overview of what the system is and how it works. And if you're not familiar with seven points, go watch those videos and then come back and listen to the rest of this episode.

[Mary Robinette] So, the thing that I love about it, is that when I use it, it helps me spot opportunities. But I wanted to dig into kind of the why it works aspect. So, in a lot of things we see some form of hook. I have been attempting to relabel this for myself, because I... I'm always like what's the difference between pinch point and plot point?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which one? So, hook. I find that a lot of people think that the hook has to be really flashy. And for me, I've been relabeling it in my own head as the reason to care. That sometimes people are like, well, we're going to establish the characters and their starting state, and so either you wind up with something that's in media res, and you don't have any idea what's going on because they focused on the hook part of this, or you find something that is actually pretty boring because nothing... It's like just the character waking up and going about their day. So, when you're thinking about hook, what are you thinking about when you're shaping that?

[Dan] I think of hook as a mirror to resolution. It is a starting state, and it is an ending state. So, really what you're doing with the hook is you are setting up a character arc. Where is this character going to start, because that lets me know where the character's going to go. I actually usually think of the resolution first. I build stories... I build the story backwards when I use this. Where do I want my character to end? What's the opposite state of that? So I want Luke Skywalker to blow up the Death Star and become a hero. What's the opposite state? Well, he is not a hero, he does not have a lot of agency of his own, we're going to set him on a farm in the middle of a desert where he has to do chores all the time. But he's dreaming of something else. And that dream is the key part. Because like you said, if it just started with here's a kid on a desert planet, that would be boring. And it's worth pointing out, that's not how the movie starts.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] The movie starts by showing you here's the big villain that we need to defeat. And so then you get to the kid, and, like, the first thing we see of him, he buys the droids or whatever, but then we see him staring off into space and he's looking at the two suns setting. He wants to do something more. And it is that desire that is really his starting state. Not so much living on a farm, not so much doing chores, but dreaming of something bigger. And that's the hook that pulls you in. It is, is this kid going to be able to fulfill his dream?

[Howard] I really like the term hook, because I feel like the beginning of whatever it is that I'm making needs to have hooked people. They need... A hook has a couple of components. One of the components is the spiky bit, the bit... The Star Destroyer is that spiky bit. It's got your attention. It is telling you a thing and you can't not pay attention to that call. And then learning about Luke and seeing this contrast between Star Destroyer and farm boy... That's the barb on the hook, for me, that says, oh, there's a conflict here and I need to see how it turns out and I can't get this hook out of me, I have to finish this movie. Or this book, or whatever.

[DongWon] I think of a hook having two stages. Right? The first is like the first... Yeah, the initial sort of like hit, and then when you're fishing, you need to set the hook. Right? Like, there is that jerk, that like gets the hook in a position that is going to be long lasting. Right? I don't fish. Don't yell at me if I'm wrong.

[laughter]

[Howard] But you are established, and your writing is violent.

[Dan] True.

[Mary Robinette] I have to confess here. And I probably... I can't believe we are this deep into writing excuses before I confess that for years, I thought a hook was referring to a shepherd's hook. And...

[DongWon] There's also, you need to get the shepherd's hook in position and then you need to yank them off stage. So...

[laughter][yeah]

[Mary Robinette] I think we... It's specifically about steering the sheep to where you want it to be.

[DongWon] That's interesting. I've always thought about a fishing hook.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it is, like, as a metaphor, these cause you to do different things.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] It's... So. Anyway. I'm just like, huh, all of these things don't have the barb. I... Like, I had realized at some point that people were talking about fishing. Anyway.

[DongWon] Yes, I think when we talk about the hook, there are the two parts. Right? There's the initial sharp bit, and then the setting of the hook. And I think the difference between what Howard was talking about and what, Dan, you're talking about are the two stages of that. The first stage is to mirror the resolution of the, like, Death Star plans attack on the Alderaan and all that, and then, when it's set, it's the character. Like, the thing that you're saying about what do we care about. We care about Luke's journey, we care about how Luke sees himself and the journey he's going to go on to become this epic hero. Right? And so, the two stages there I think are really important to that also.

[Dan[. Yeah. Very much so. And Howard hit it on the head when he talked about conflict, because I think that... To me, that is the most important element of fiction is conflict. And that's what I believe gets people hooked into a story, is not so much here is a kid in a desert, but here's a kid in a desert who doesn't want to be in a desert. Suddenly you have a conflict, suddenly you have something. And what you're talking about, I think of as the difference between a plot conflict and a character conflict. Which is not necessarily a part of seven-point structure. But you can kind of see it. And I think of the hook as this is where we begin our character arc, our character conflict. Luke is one thing and he wants to be a different thing. Will he succeed in that journey? And then the next step, plot point one, that's where we start our plot conflict. That's where he finds the message from Leia and he talks to Ben Kenobi, and he's like, there's this big adventure out there that is waiting. There's a princess that needs to be saved, there's a giant evil fortress gun that we need to blow up. And that's what starts him on his adventure. But we only really care about the plot adventure because we care about his character arc and who he is.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that when... That we see when we're talking in fiction is the issue of when these things happen. With movies, with TV, a lot of times these are rigidly described as the number of pages into a plot... Into a screenplay. The number of minutes. When you're looking at the call to action into the... When you're looking at the call to action, is it... Is there a specific distance that it has to happen from the hook? How do you decide when you make that transition?

[Dan] I think it depends very much on the genre that you're writing in. If you are writing a thriller, it needs to be paced very quickly. You need to get the thrill out soon. If you are writing horror, you can wait a long time. Because part of what makes horror work is we get to see this person and live in their life for maybe several chapters, and we have to really love them before we start doing genuinely horrible things to them. If you're writing epic fantasy, just the pacing in general is much more stately and we don't have to rush through things. And so I don't... If you are writing a Hollywood script, there's incredibly specific rules, down to what page the call to action needs to be on. But for books, I think it's a lot more fluid.

[DongWon] I think one thing that I find frustrating in modern media is actually how much the ability to be different depending on the genre has changed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Like, I'm looking right now, you're wearing a Jaws TV shirt. The time to shark in Jaws is so long compared to time to monster in a contemporary movie. Right? Predator, we're like halfway through the movie before the actual, like, horror stuff starts happening in a lot of ways. Right? And so I think the ability to have that slow burn pacing... Now, those have to be paced more like thrillers and action movies where stuff is popping up very fast, faster, which has this consequence of flattening the landscape. Right? So, being able to have that flexibility of when that plot point one and when that pinch point comes in, I think is really important for telling... For effective storytelling.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The way I have been reframing it in my head from call to action is here's the question, that this is the point where we introduce the first kind of story question, because I tend to frame things using the MICE quotient. It's like what is... What is the kind of problem that we're going to have to solve? So, with Star Wars, there's a disruption. And then there's also, the big disruption of, hello, here's our capturing of Princess Leia and all of that. But also, Luke also starts with a disruption in his world. That these disruptions are small, they aren't yet the big thing. And, like, that for me is one of the things with the call to action is it's the first thing that says you, character, you're the one who's going to participate in this. That there's often a place where the character could have nope'd out.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] How does that fit with your understanding?

[laughter]

[Dan] We are going to take a break. This is our cliffhanger. We're going to let you all hang on that question, and we'll answer it when we come back.

[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.

[Dan] One of... And this is such a bizarre title to bring into this particular discussion. But one of the movies that I often think about when I'm noodling around with 7 point plot structure is Horrible Bosses.

[DongWon] That is a weird pull.

[Dan] It is a weird pull. It follows the structure very, very well, but it does it in some interesting ways. And kind of the main through line of it... If you're not familiar with Horrible Bosses, it's three friends who all have horrible bosses who decide they're going to, I think, murder Jason Bateman's boss or something like that. Who's played by Kevin Spacey, so he probably deserves it. And the hook is we all have horrible lives, and the call to action is when Jason Bateman's boss refuses to give him time off to go to his grandmother's funeral.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] And that is right in the beginning. It is part of the hook. It is right up front as an illustration of how terrible my life is. But it gives us the call to action in the beginning, because suddenly there's a conflict he has to do something about. And then, his decision is, well, let me get my friends together, we'll kill my boss. Which is a terrible way to solve that problem. But some movies have those really close to each other. Like, in this case, they're right on top of each other. In a more Hollywood formula way, you would call that the big decision moment which usually comes much later. But that's a movie that kind of breaks the formula by moving it up really soon. I don't know if that's a good answer to your question.

[Mary Robinette] I think...

[Dan] But it's what was going through my mind while you were talking.

[Mary Robinette] I think it is. Because it's an illustration of this is a... One thing that is wrong, but then we move on to the next phase, where we put the real pressure on the characters and we force them into action. Which is... Plot point? No...

[Dan] Pinch point one.

[Mary Robinette] Oh my God. I can never remember these.

[Dan] So, the way that I differentiate plot points and pinches is that a plot point is something that helps them on their journey toward the resolution...

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Dan] Something that is going to get them closer to that endpoint. Whereas a pinch is something that gets in the way. And that can be an odd way to think about it, because obviously their character arc depends very heavily on those pinches, but it is something that is impeding them that they have to overcome.

[DongWon] So, just to break it down, going back to our Star Wars example. Plot point one is Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen dying, because that gets him out of Tatooine. Pinch point one is we need to find a pilot who will actually take us somewhere.

[Dan] Maybe. I think that there's a couple of examples. Usually what I do when I'm teaching this is I use the Tie Fighter fight in the Millennium Falcon.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Dan] Because it's right at the beginning. It's really kind of a dumb scene.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] Because it doesn't... Some Tie fighters show up, they blow them up, the end. It doesn't kind of lead anywhere.

[DongWon] But was it plot or pinch?

[Dan] That's a pinch.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Dan] The reason that it's there, and the reason that it is kind of a load-bearing moment in the story, is because it is forcing him into action. We need to eventually believe that Luke Skywalker is this incredible fighter pilot who can blow up the Death Star, and so we start off... We need something to get us from farm boy to fighter pilot. And that little scene where he gets in the thing and he blows up some Tie fighters shows us that he has at least some of the skills, and it forces him to act, forces him to step out of his role as farm boy and become something else.

[Howard] Got it.

[Erin] I had a question for you that is not any of this. So, apologies...

[laughter]

[Erin] For taking you off track.

[Dan] No, do it.

[Erin] But when you taught this the first time I heard you teach this, something you said about the lie the character believes about the world, that has always stuck with me. And so I'm curious where that... If you really said that or I hallucinated it, number one, and number two, like, where that falls in here, the idea of, like, the character believing a lie about the world.

[Dan] Yeah. So, the lie the character believes comes from a book about characters by K. M. Weiland. It's a brilliant book. And really great. I think what you are remembering is one of the Writing Excuses cruises. I taught like five different story structure methods over 5 days, and then at the end, we synthesized them all. And so it's a different system, but it does apply to this one. I don't know if they map one to one onto each other, though.

[Howard] One of the things that helps me with the seven-point structure... I've loved 3 act structure for a long time. When I overlay my diagrams of these, pinch point one and pinch point two, for me, often represent the beginning and the end of the try-fail cycle, with the midpoint in the middle. And so I just think about it in those terms. If I'm at a pinch point, and they are trying something and it's wildly successful, I may be constructing the plot wrong. I may have the tension wrong. Because I want to be in try-fail land where we fail more. And at the end of pinch point two, yes, I want things to be bad, but we need to have tried the best thing that isn't going to work. Or maybe the first thing that really does work. And so, for me, framing the pinches in terms of try-fail helps me structure things.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because that combines with something Dan just said, which is the difference between the plot points which are helping the character move... Moving the character towards their goal versus the pinch, which are things getting in their way, is that I recently realized that people are not understanding, when they think about try-fail cycles, I think about them as there's a barrier and you have to do a number of try-fail cycles to get through the barrier, and once you're through the barrier, then there's another barrier and you have to do a bunch of try-fail cycles. And what I will see people do is set up too many barriers, because they want to feel like the character has to really earn it. Using Star Wars as an example, the... Getting off of the ship when they go in to rescue Leia, there's really only two barriers... 3. They have to get past the Stormtroopers, they have to get out of the garbage chute, and then they have to get back onto the ship. Like, there are really only three barriers. But within each of these, there's a bunch of try-fail cycles of how to solve these things. And then there are consequences as they go. But thinking about that, I'm like, oh, okay. So the pinch point is... Like those are often barriers. Like what you were talking about with the Tie fighters. This is preventing the characters from moving towards the goal, whereas the death of Luke's aunt and uncle, that is moving them towards the goal. It's not a success for the character, but it's a push.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So then moving on from there, then we've got our midpoint. Midpoint, pinch point, plot point two, and the resolution. Can you go through all of those [garbled]

[laughter]

[Dan] All of those as quickly as possible. Midpoint, like the midpoint of Star Wars is what you just talked about. They arrive at the Death Star. They are no longer running away from bad guys, they are enacting a plan. Right? They have been... The tractor beam pulled them in, but now they're doing their own thing, they're trying to rescue the princess. One of my favorite midpoints, and I use movies for most of these examples because then I know most of my audience is familiar with them. One of my favorite examples of a midpoint is actually Toy Story. Because it is a try-fail cycle, but its failure is different. So the midpoint of Toy Story is Woody finally gets rid of Buzz. But instead of knocking him down behind the dresser, he has knocked him out of the window into a car, and now the car is driving away. And he... So, on one hand, he succeeded. He did what he wanted to do. But his goal is to eventually become... His goal is to maintain his role as the beloved favorite toy. And part of that is I can't be the kind of person who kicks another toy out of the window and gets them lost. And so in order to maintain his role, he realizes that his success just turned into a failure at the same time. And so the second half of the movie is very active instead of reactive. He's not reacting to this dumb new toy that he hates, he's actively trying to get that toy back into the house in order to be the good guy that he believes himself to be. And so, it's still part of a try-fail cycle, but it is a success that looks like a failure. Which I love.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. And that movement of reaction to action is really important. We are too... I think this is something we see with a lot of superhero fiction, which has taken over so much of media, is heroes are almost always just reacting to the villain. Which ultimately is very weak. I... We could do several episodes of me complaining about what superhero fiction has done to Media. But that's one of the things. You have to have that moment where they start enacting their own plan instead of just constantly reacting to the bad guys.

[Howard] Early days of Writing Excuses, I just started calling that protagging. It's when your protagonist starts being protagonistic.

[Dan] Starts to protag. Yeah. And then, what do we got next? Pinch two. Pinch two is... I mean, the easy pinch two is you lose your mentor. Pinch two is Obi-Wan Kenobi getting killed by Darth Vader. Spoiler warning.

[what?]

[Dan] Pinch two is Gandalf fighting the Balrog and falling and disappearing. And, once again, the purpose of the pinch is to force the characters to act for themselves. They cannot rely on the person who's been guiding them this whole time. They have to strike out on their own. What the pinches have done both times is get in their way, taken away some kind of advantage that they have, all ultimately in the service of turning them into the kind of person who can achieve the resolution.

[Mary Robinette] I find that one of the things that that does, because we see that kind of moment in a bunch of the different plot structures. And I think that one of the things it does is it also serves as a point of contrast. So that we'll see it in the cave, the darkness before the dawn kind of situations. But it serves as a contrast, so that when we get to our victory state, that there is a bigger movement from that moment, so that contrast makes the cathartic release bigger. So I think that that's one of the things it does. I sometimes think of it as there's the... It can be a bunch of different things. It can be the removal of the mentor, which is removing a crutch, which allows the character to become more fully actualized. But I think there's a bunch of different reasons that that particular piece is there.

[DongWon] Yeah. It also feels important that it comes after the turn to action.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? You switch from reaction to action, and then something goes deeply wrong, and you have that, oh, no, what have we done? But then that creates the opportunity for the doubling down, for the push, for the eventual catharsis. Right?

[Howard] One of the helpful ways that, for me, that the terminology works. I think of the pinch not as being smushed or actually pinched, but a narrowing of my options. You have taken away from me some of the paths... You took away my mentor. I can no longer... I no longer have a path that is Obi-Wan does all the work. It just... You restricted my options. Pinch point one. And then we have midpoint, which was everything you said, and then my options got narrower again, leading me into plot turn two, where, depending on the type of story we're telling, I've figured it out. I'm out of my try-fail cycle, and we are now... I have powered up all of the things that I know how to do, and we see if it works in our resolution.

[Dan] Yeah. The... Pinch point two of Toy Story is the moment where Buzz realizes he's a toy and suddenly doesn't care about anything anymore. He's like, if I'm not this great hero I thought I was, then I may as well just stay here in the creepy kid's house with all of the monster toys and nothing matters. And that makes Woody's job harder, because now the person he's trying to save doesn't want to be saved anymore. He can't just drag him back up the side of the house and through the window. But it's a good example of that I have lost more of my options. And now the single only option left to Woody is that he has to genuinely become friends with this person in order to save him. The one thing he hasn't wanted to do at all. Which goes back, if we had time, and we're already overtime, goes back to what you were talking about, Erin, with the lie the character believes. And that hinges on the thing the character wants versus the thing the character needs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] What Woody actually needs is to become a good person, rather than just be a respected person. And so, that's... The purpose of pinch two is to take away all those other avenues. And then we get to plot point two. We've been talking so much about try-fail cycles. Plot point two is really the try-try moment. The try-succeed moment. Where you finally get it together. You know what you have to do in order to win. You are able to... Luke turns off his targeting computer and he uses the force. That's what is going to help him succeed. Woody decides, you know what, we're just going to break the rules and we're going to talk to this kid and freak him out and that's how we're going to succeed.

[DongWon] So where is the line between plot two and resolution? Right? If plot two is the character resolving the want and need conflict into one thing. Right? Then how does resolution come into play? At that point?

[Dan] I think of resolution as a state rather than an action or a decision.

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Dan] And so, plot turn two is this is where...

[DongWon] [garbled] would call denoument in a different structure.

[Dan] Yeah. Yeah. Plot turn two is some kind of fuzzy combination of I know how to win and I actually carry it out and I win. And then resolution is here's who I have become now that I'm at the end of this story.

[Mary Robinette] And in mystery, what we see, I think, with this is we understand who the villain is. That's the... We get the clue that gives us, in plot point two, we get the final piece of the puzzle. This is the thing that gives us the clue, but then the resolution is we still have to apprehend and take them to justice.

[DongWon] Yeah. In the horror movie, this is the final reel, driving away into the sunrise, where you finally... From whatever happened.

[Dan] So if we were to break this out into Hollywood formula, for example, there would be a much bigger difference, like you say, Mary Robinette, between I know how to do this versus I'm actually going to do this. You have to carry it out and make it happen. And different stories will have those moments very close to each other or very far apart from each other. Again, it depends on the pacing that you're going for and the effect you're trying to create.

[Howard] I honestly believe that if you can write a story that follows this seven-point structure, and then you look at it and you realize, oh, but the minutes are wrong for it to be a screenplay, I need for it to be a screenplay, you've already done the hard part. Shaving things to move these points around is going to be easy. And it's one of the reasons why I feel like the seven-point structure is so useful, because it can get you from word zero to draft complete quickly and sensibly in a way that lets you easily edit for whatever effect you really want.

[Mary Robinette] And one of the things... We'll say this, and then we'll start... We'll move over to homework. But one of the things that I hope that you were hearing as you're listening to us is that this is a plot structure that, like the other plot structures we're discussing, that you can apply to a lot of different stories. But it also, like a recipe, still makes a specific kind of thing. Like, this is going to be really good for character stories, for action-driven things, for places where you want someone to succeed. But if you are doing something that is more experimental or literary, this particular recipe may not be the recipe that you work with. So, having said all of that, what homework would you like to give people for playing with seven point plot structure?

[Dan] So, the main way that I use this plot structure today in my writing is to figure out subplots. I know what my big overall plot is going to be, but I need to figure out how these two characters are going to fall in love or something like that. I need to figure out how this betrayal of a side character is going to work. And seven point is a good way to flesh that out. And it... Without just saying, well, there's going to be three tries and two fails, and then they'll succeed at the end. It gives you a nice up and down with the plot points versus the pinch points, and it helps me assemble side plots really well. So what I want you to do is take a book that you're working on or a story that you're working on that has a side thing. Don't worry about turning your entire novel into this. Just take that side plot, that subplot, and sketch it out in seven point. Let's say you want two characters to fall in love. Well, that's your resolution. What's the opposite state of that? How are you going to express that as a conflict we want to see resolved? What is the midpoint, where they move from hating each other to loving each other? How are you going to set up the pinches and the plot points to give texture to that relationship? And that will give you a really good sense of how this works.

[Mary Robinette] And we'll have a link in our show notes to the seven points that go in the seven point plot structure. So...

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

Writing Excuses 21.22 : The Order of the Telling

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-22-the-order-of-the-telling

Key Points: The order in which we present information to the reader, versus chronological progress. Police procedural. Non-linear storytelling. Flashbacks. Use time to create tension. Storylets. Start in the middle, then go back. Parallelism, dual timelines. Order of telling as mechanism for characterization. What's the connection? Don't depend on time or date stamps. Sensory detail. Index cards, notes. Twine. Aeon Timeline. Spreadsheet. Write your scenes, then come back and write transitions.

[Season 21, Episode 22]

[Howard] The cruise ship sailing up to Alaska this summer is completely sold out, except for the cabins we'd reserved for Writing Excuses attendees. These cabins are only available until June 4th. On June 4th, any cabins not reserved by Writing Excuses attendees will revert to the cruise line, and will be sold to the general public. If you want to join the Writing Excuses hosts and 100 new friends on our final annual cruise as we read, write, critique, and learn while reveling in the stunning scenery, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. Don't delay. We're holding the very last unreserved cabins on the entire ship, and they will not stay unreserved for very long. Again, that's writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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

[Season 21, Episode 22]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The order of the telling.

[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 we are joined again by special guest and occasional house guest of mine, Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] Hello. You had me back.

[laughter]

[Margaret] Yay.

[Howard] Well, this week we are talking about the order in which we present information to the reader, as contrasted with the order in which events chronologically actually progressed in the universe of this story. And why those things might be completely different. One of my favorite examples of this is the standard police procedural, where the order of the telling is we discover a body, we start investigating, and we slowly begin revealing what happened. But in so doing, we begin telling the story chronologically about what led up to that body appearing at the beginning of the telling of the story. But there are plenty of other ways in which this, like... In which this might happen. And plenty of other reasons to do it.

[Mary Robinette] So, in addition to things like that, I really started thinking about this when we were talking about this episode as thinking about non-linear storytelling, because I read V. E. Schwab, and she uses this non-linear structure all the time, where we're jumping back and forth in a timeline. Which will happen sometimes in the structure, where you're talking about where we'll get a flashback. Sometimes it's the book that starts with something, and then jumps, and it's like 22 hours earlier.

[DongWon] The wreckers crashed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How did we get here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] A classic TV and film device.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So sometimes it's those, sometimes it's just there's a piece of backstory as in the example that Howard was giving us, that we don't get until later. Like, when I talk about the  MICE quotient, I say it's not about the timeline. That's the order in which things happened. It's the order in which we present it to the reader.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I too am interested in why we do this, why we do these nonlinear things. I think it's about using time to play... To create tension for the reader. Does that seem like how it's working for other people?

[DongWon] I mean, I think there's a bunch of different reasons. I think that's a big one. I mean, one reason is the order in which things happen is often very boring.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? A to B to C. Like, if you're thinking about your daily life, you went to work, stuff happened at work, you had lunch, you did more work. Right? Like, that's not an interesting way to tell that. What's a more interesting way to tell it is, this awful thing happened with Frank, and then... But that was also due to the thing that my boss did that morning. You know what I mean? And then, like, you tell it... You give the information in the order in which you need it, to set stakes, to establish tension, and then fill in information when it's necessary. Right? I talk about this a lot when I talk about worldbuilding, infodumping. About the idea that you can tell anyone anything, so long as it's relevant to what's happening in the moment. Right? And so I think people get very rigid about timeline and what the character knows and when they know it. And this is one of the real limitations of having a specific POV that you're locked into that often locks you into a linear timeline, without the ability to jump to future knowledge, past knowledge, things like that. So when you start layering in more timelines, it gives you so much more opportunity to build drama, to build tension, and then also just to give the reader exposition in chunks that feel relevant to the story rather than modeling the reality of the situation.

[Erin] One way I think about this a lot is actually in... When I write interactive fiction. Which is... A lot of which is nonlinear. And there's a concept of interactive fiction which is storylets. And it's basically taking a story and kind of breaking it down into individual chunks that I've often seen described as, like, a hand... Like a card in a hand of cards. And so what the program does behind the scenes is it looks to see if you've met the conditions to get a specific card. And it will then offer you, maybe, like, one of three cards. So, like, if you fought with your boss and you saved the cat and you went to the grocery store, this card is relevant. This one is relevant anytime you went to the grocery store, no matter what else happened. And it offers things to you. That is something that you can't really replicate in prose, but what I like about it is it actually does make you think about what are the conditions for having this piece of information in front of the reader. And those conditions may not be just that we are later in the day, but that this other relevant thing has happened that makes this piece of content the best one for you to experience at this moment.

[Margaret] Yeah. I was sort of... When I was thinking about this topic, and I think, like Mary Robinette, the first place my mind goes is on the sort of, like I was saying, on the TV side of things. The action show, where, like, that the start might be a little slow, so what do we do, we start in the middle and then go back to the start. And now we have introduced the sort of suspense of... I think the Alias pilot does this fantastically.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where you start out with Sydney Bristow being drowned by who knows who, who knows where, who knows why. And then we go back, and she's like at UCLA taking classes. So we're like, this is interesting, I would like to know more about this.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where we're talking about the Act One setup. It's a way to keep it from being slow, is by saying, no, no, there's stuff coming up. And so it increases tension and stakes. But trying to reflect on other ways that we can use nonlinear storytelling, I was thinking about a movie that came out in... I believe this was 2024, We Live In Time. Which is Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh playing a couple, and there's... If it were told in order, this is a very melodramatic story. It is a bog standard, in some ways, romance of, like, boy meets girl, they have a very weird meet cute, but they meet, they get together, she has... And I mean, great, I'm spoiling something that comes out in the first minutes of the film, is that she has cancer and they're trying to have a baby and will they have a baby? And so, like, if this were told in order, our two questions hanging over the entire film are: is she going to get pregnant and is the cancer going to come back? But because they tell it, and there's no chyrons telling you where we are in the story, you're just going from moment to moment to moment throughout it. A minute into the movie, you know that she has a baby and that the cancer comes back.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And in a weird way, like, it deflates that tension, but because of that, it allowed me as an audience member to just sort of relax. It's like, okay, I don't have to worry about whether or not the cancer's going to come back. I don't have to worry about whether she's going to have a baby. I know that happens. And so now I can just sort of watch the moments happening. And that deliberate deflation of the kind of classical dramatic suspense...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Is only possible because they are telling it in this sort of out of time order.

[DongWon] It changes it from the question of what if to okay, what do we do in the face of inevitability?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right?

[Margaret] It's the how's.

[DongWon] Yeah. Which sort of leads me to think about one of my other favorite structures when it comes to playing with time which is the use of parallelism. Right? So a book I worked on, which is Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home, has two timelines in it. One is the character as an adult, as she goes home to care for her ailing mother, and the other is a timeline of her as a child, and her relationship to her father. Who, in the present timeline, we know has gone to prison for doing terrible things. Right? And so the parallelism of both those plot lines developing about her relationships with these two parental figures is part of the engine that drives that book. Right? Or there's a movie from several years ago that you talking about We Lived In Time sort of reminded me of, called After Sun, which is about a woman going back as an adult to a resort that she went to with her father as a child, and trying to understand her relationship with her dad, and you get these sort of parallel timeline structures of her as an adult and her as a child as we understand more about who she is in both timelines reveals more information that contextually cross-pollinates in really exciting ways.

[Mary Robinette] What I like about that is that it's, in both examples, this non-linear thing causes you to recontextualize scenes that would otherwise feel fairly ordinary, because it... You bring dramatic weight from the other timeline to it.

[Howard] There's a classic application of the repeated flashback structure where the current story that we are telling, we will flash back to a prior experience that was formative or similar, and we are running that story and the current story forward at the same time in order to mirror... Not just in order to provide context, although it certainly does that, but also to mirror and to echo voice, tone, emotional content, the emotion of the flashback event is ramping up to its own climax as we are ramping up the main story. And the flashback may have had a tragic ending which set up the beginning of the current story, which may have a triumphant ending. Which provides a wonderful contrast, and at the end of the story, you sit back and you look at it and you say, oh, well, that was a perfect use of flashback, because if you told me tragedy up front, I would have been miserable and wouldn't have wanted to read the rest of your book. Let's go to a break, and after the break, I want to quote William Faulkner.

[Howard] In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner famously wrote, the past is not dead. It isn't even past. I love that line, because what it says to us... And it's... The theme, kind of the whole work there, what it says to us is that everything that's happened to us is kind of still happening, because it's in our memory. It colors who we are. It shapes what we do. It's formative, it's contextualizing, and it exists. When we talk about non-linear storytelling for the writer, it exists as a tool for shaping the story, giving context later on.

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's really interesting about that is, I know for me, when I think about timeline and linearity, it's very... The default, my default mindset is, this is something that relates to plot. Right? It is the order that events happen, events happening, it relates to plot. But what I think you're really underlining is that the order of telling is also a mechanism of characterization. And it allows you to show contrasts between who were people in the past or before they knew something or after they knew something. Because we are all shaped by those experiences and fictional characters included.

[DongWon] That goes to one of my favorite examples of a way in which you can play with time on a micro level. Right? A lot of what we've talked about are macro structures, but in Shonan anime, for example, you will have a fight scene that takes like six episodes to resolve. Like, 10 seconds of action that takes six episodes. And one thing that you'll... The one thing that's extending that is the sort of microflashbacks or playing with the length of time as these characters have monologues or conversations or moments that reveal deep things about character. Right? Shonan anime's all about the melodrama of the action of violent conflict as illustrating character growth and development. Right? Like, the recent anime Frieren is incredible at this. It's not really Shonan, but still, it does this very, very well. And it's a way to play with time to sort of do the thing that, Howard, you're talking about, in terms of past is not even past, and sort of what you're talking about in terms of using it for character.

[Erin] Yeah. I think one of the things to think about when you are doing something non-linear is what is your connection? Like, what is the thing that is connecting one thing to the next, if it's not time? And sometimes it's character development, sometimes it's emotion, sometimes it's theme. But it is something to think about, because, I think where nonlinearity can get a little, like, tricky and something I think about a lot in interactive fiction is smoothing through transition points.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because we have a lot of language to go linearly from one point to the next. So you can say, like, 3 hours later. You know what I mean? There's like a thing that exists that we know about. But if it's like three emotional revelations later, it doesn't feel like it has exactly the same ring to it. So, like, how do we move through, and part of that is knowing what is the connective tissue from one scene to the next. If it isn't time, and it's character development, how do you end your scene in a way that there is something that the character is about to learn or is about to know about themselves or the world that you can then pick up in the next...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Scene so that even though it happened 16 years before, it feels like you're actually still on some sort of through line.

[DongWon] Linear timelines are not always the most interesting way to get from point A to point B. Right? So...

[Mary Robinette] With those transitions, one of the cheap tricks you can do is to have a visual link.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even in prose, if someone picks up a coffee cup in one scene, and then in the next scene, someone is putting down a coffee cup, even though they're separated by a giant span of time...

[DongWon] In film and TV, that's called a match cut.

[Margaret] Yeah. And I think another trick of very prose-y way to explore that is, if you're thinking about a writer like Virginia Woolf, and that very stream of consciousness style and... Orlando. Centuries pass in a paragraph, but you always do have that action that carries us through, you have the theme that carries us through. And I was thinking that this actually sort of dovetails with what we were talking about several weeks ago about the perils of Act 2 in a three act structure, of nonlinearity can be a way to sort of force yourself and your reader to be thinking in those process sorts of terms, maybe. Like, if the outcome is known, or the outcome has already happened, it forces us back to that space of progress... Of process.

[Howard] I now have the rubber meeting the road question. What are some technical tools that you use in order to keep things straight in your own head when you are running the telling in a different order than the worldbuilding, the actual events? What do you use? How do you do it?

[DongWon] One thing I want to flag is people will love to display at the start of each individual chapter the date or the time or something like that. That doesn't work. People don't read those and people don't remember those. I mean, there's some percentage of readers who do, but a lot of readers, enough readers, will be very confused because you're relying on just that to communicate the order in which things happen, and, boy howdy, me personally, it never works.

[Mary Robinette] I can tell you that the number of times that I've had people say, when does this story take place? And at the top, it says, 1952.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, yeah.

[Margaret] Yeah. No, it's like the slug lines, even. As a screenwriter, submitting this to other people who read screenplays, nobody is reading slug lines.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like, they're useful when you want to go back and clarify.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But for me, the thing that I try to do is grounding the reader with some sort of sensory detail that is thematically linked to the story, but also tells you something about the time and place, preferably something that the character's interacting with. So if I want to indicate that one story was in springtime, then I'm going to be having them cutting tulips. And if I want to indicate that another story is... Another part of the story is in winter, they're putting a scarf on.

[Margaret] For my own head, I'm... It's like keeping track for the reader, and also just for me as a writer... And, as tempted as I am, it's like I'm a screenwriter. My solution to all things is index cards. Which is sometimes true. But actually, if I'm just working on something for myself, I tend to leave myself a lot of, like, notes. And whatever program you're in, there's some ability to leave yourself that sort of marginal note. And so, I'll go through, it's like, hey, remember to set this up in the earlier scene, or it's like, this shouldn't get mentioned in the next scene, because to them, it hasn't happened yet. And so I just leave these flags for myself, if I can see the pitfall of I might be messing up my continuity, I will try to just leave these flags, and then do a read through later of making sure that my plants are where I want them to be, so that I can pay them off later on.

[Howard] That's an extremely relevant question, because as we are recording episodes, we're often recording them out of order, and we need to remember not to refer to episodes that we've previously recorded, but that you haven't heard yet.

[Margaret] I don't know what you're talking about, I love risotto.

[laughter]

[Erin] Love it. I will say, one way that I do this that is totally unhelpful to anyone who's not me, but I will share anyway, is that I actually sometimes, in terms of figuring out what order I want them... If I'm like, I want this to be non-linear, but I'm actually not 100% sure which nonlinear order I want to go by, what is my connecting thread? Do I want to follow a character, a timeline, the violin that's in every scene, and, like, the... Which we haven't talked about, the lawn linear where there's not much connection...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] From one to the next, the connection is all thematic and, like, the characters change completely, I will put it in Twine, which is a program people use for interactive fiction, and I'll basically create index cards in there that give a summary of, like, what the scene is. And then I will connect them with each other, and play it like a game. And be like, okay, if I go from scene 1 to scene 5, here is the order of things people will get. One, five, three, two. That works that way. Okay. Now. What happens if I went one, two, four, eight? Okay, that's going to be this different story. Which of those is the story that actually I wanted to tell? Because with enough craft, theoretically, I can make any of them work. But it's like what am I trying to have the reader walk away with, which is something I always think about when I'm telling a story. What is the end thing that I want them to, like, take away?

[DongWon] I will say that there is one edge case where it can be useful or interesting to deliberately confuse your reader, for them to not know when things are happening. One is that can be misdirection, of they think something happens in the present timeline, and you later realize it was happening before. And the other is, maybe just an aesthetic one. Right? You mentioned Virginia Woolf. A lot of times in her books, it's very unclear when something is happening. Is this a memory or is this happening now? Or is this something that's going to happen? I don't think it's ever going to happen. Anyways. Whatever. It's often very interesting, and there's... She does make clearly signal to the reader, don't worry about this, it doesn't matter when this happened. What matters is the character feels this, and the emotional quotient of it. And you can use that as a writer in specific circumstances. Obviously, don't overuse it, because confusing your reader on purpose is often a very unpleasant experience.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to flag one other version of the nonlinear timeline, which is the nonlinear timeline between works. So when you're doing prequels, when you're doing interstitial materials where you, the writer, are writing it non-linearly, but you know that someone at some point is going to stack them up linearly. Aeon Timeline is a really useful thing for tracking exactly when something happened. The Lady Astronaut books... I wrote those non-linearly. So if you read them in the sequence that they came out, you start, like, at the end of the story and then you go back... It's like... It is all over the place. And so I use Aeon Timeline now, but I did not originally, which is why, if you actually try to stack them, the times don't line up. And fortunately, most people don't actually notice. The other thing that I'm going to say is, going back to something that Erin talks about, which is the idea of the information arc, that tracking the information that you need when you're moving things around is really extremely helpful. Thinking about when does my reader need to know this information. And sometimes, when you are moving things around, you'll think, oh, I can't move it because they need this information that they haven't gotten. But you can also look at it and go, okay, well, what happens if they don't have that information yet? And that can be kind of a fun thing to play with.

[Howard] I have a... Talking about the tools and multiple works. I have a spreadsheet of the chronology of the Schlock Mercenary universe which I created in order to create the 70 maxims annotated book. Because there's this in universe artifact that got passed around to people, and as  the people... As it was passed around to people, chronologically, they made notes in the maxims that pertained to their life. So as you're flipping through, you will have a page that's got four notes on it, and those notes may have been written 50 years apart, and I had a spreadsheet to keep track of that. And once I built the spreadsheet, first, I looked at it and realized, oh my goodness, there's a story here that I need to tell, because these two people were on different sides of the same war. Wow, that's interesting. And the second thing was, I want to expand this spreadsheet to cover the entire chronology of my story, because I appear to have lost track of some things.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I need to stop doing that.

[Margaret] Were you... I'm curious, as you were doing that, were you also tracking... Because some of the characters you're annotating are characters in the Schlock Mercenary stories. Were you also tracking, like, when in the timeline of the other comics they would have been in possession of this book, making that note?

[Howard] Yes. Yes, I was. And it was... Yeah, it...

[Mary Robinette] Choices were made.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] Choices were made. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun doing that, but the big value of it, for me, besides the fact that I sold a lot of those books...

[laughter]

[Howard] The big value for me was that I learned how important it is to track chronology even if you think it's going to be linear.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Just tracking it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And a spreadsheet is a great tool to start with.

[Mary Robinette] So we've been talking a lot about this non-linear thing, and there is one other piece that I want to talk about, because it's the experience of writing something non-linearly. When you know that you want to write something non-linearly, one of the hard things is the transition from one scene to the next. And that's hard anytime. But I want to give you permission, if you're doing something non-linear, when you've accomplished everything in that scene, that you can just stop writing the scene, and not worry about the transition until the entire thing is done, and then come back and do the transitions. Because those transitions exist to move you from one scene to another, regardless of whether you're doing something in a linear timeline or not. And so it can be very, very hard to figure out, well, how do I get out of this scene when you don't actually know what scene will follow it. So you do have permission to just stop writing it, and do the transitions later.

[DongWon] And then, one thing I wanted to say as we head towards the end of this particular timeline of this episode, is if this is all sounding very newfangled and complicated to you, a very contemporary technique... I just want to point out that nonlinear writing has been in fiction since the origins of the novel. The first novels were using epistolary as a frame or throughout the book, and epistolary is one of the classic forms of nonlinear storytelling, because they were presenting them as found journals or found letters or all of these different framing techniques. So when we think of the novel, from the very start, it was always non-linear. And actually, strict linearity... Linearacy... Is a very modern construction. And so when you think about playing with time and playing with perspective, I encourage you to think broadly and explore and have fun with it.

[Howard] I think that brings us to homework. Margaret?

[Margaret] Well, if we're taking things in a linear order, I believe that does come next.

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] So, for your homework this week, what I'd like to encourage you to do is find a story, a TV episode, a movie, some contained story that is using... Experimenting with some form of nonlinear storytelling. And enjoy it, go through it, and then go back through and track the gaps. Where is the... Where are character knowledge things changing, and where are we seeing characterization because of our knowledge spaces have changed, and where is audience information changing, and how does that affect where and how we are reading or experiencing what's happening next. Give yourself a little kind of universe outline. Unpack it there.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Great. So it's time now to pause for our book of the week, since we're in the middle of the episode. And that book is The World Wasn't Ready For You by Justin C. Kay. He's got this great story with the same title, which is a nonlinear story, and it totally recontextualizes. And I want you to be thinking about it as you're listening to this entire episode.

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

Writing Excuses 21.20: Sequencing from Mega to Micro

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-20-sequencing-from-mega-to-micro

Key Points: Sequencing. Why do we put things in the order we do? Broad to narrow, funnel. Deliberate or instinctive? The more you know, the more deliberate it is. Broad to narrow, or reverse. Recency primacy. Cause and effect. Sequencing in sentences. Turn noun into adjective. Garden Path sentences. Set up patterns and break them. Readability. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell it to them, and tell them what you told them. Important things! Cognitive psychology. Turn the paragraph upside down. Gossip!

[Season 21, Episode 20]

[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 20]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Sequencing from mega to micro.

[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 talking about sequencing and why do we put things in the order that we do. And I thought I would actually start by... It's funny, the first thing I thought of when I was thinking about how to lead off this episode was our actual tagline. That we've changed, because we could say, for writers by writers, tools not rules, or, by writers for writers, rules that are bad and tools that are good...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But instead we say, tools, not rules, for writers, by writers, because I think we just think it sounds better.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so one of the things I'm wondering about sequencing is how much of it do you think is, like, things we absolutely, like, can figure out by like dialing them up and having rules, and how much of it do you think is, like, some sort of intrinsic thing that we know. Like, having rhythm.

[DongWon] A thing that I think about a lot... I mean, I do think the rhythm is really important. Right? And I think we're going to dive into that in even more detail in the next episode. But I do think part of why that tagline works so well is the rhythmic beat of it. But then there's also a narrowing funnel of the concepts, as you start from the broad statement of why do we do this show. Right? What's our core principle? And we worked a lot on this tagline, and we did a whole exercise last year of all of us trying to come up with what is this show's mission statement at this point. Right? Like, Writing Excuses has been around for a while. Sorry, I don't know why we're doing [garbled a beat around the curtains that we are right now] and...

[Howard] I find that... Sorry.

[DongWon] Trying to drill down into what is our goal with this show. And then, tools, not rules, just really emerged as a core principle for us. Right? Of this thing of we're not trying to be prescriptive about writing. We want to give you a deep understanding of as many different aspects of writing as we can, so that when you're confronted with a situation, you can... You have some things to reach for. Right? So, to start with the broadest aspect of what we do and then narrow down even further into why you and then why us. Right? So there is, like, this mega to micro, to borrow the show's title, in the tagline itself. Which I think is a really good microcosm of the macro thing we're talking about.

[Howard] To speak more specifically to the question, how much of it is deliberate and how much of it is instinctive, the more you know about the things you do, the more deliberate it becomes. A great example of this is the order of adjectives in the English language. Most English speakers don't even think about it. But if you order adjectives weirdly in a sentence, English speakers will be like, wait, what... You did that wrong. We don't know what the rule is, but there appears to be a rule. But once you think about it, and once you really look at it, you realize, oh, there are... And I can't recite the rule. All I can remember is my favorite social media post about it, which was from the fake AP style book, which said the order of adjectives is increasing order of awesomeness. The blue Italian rocket-propelled monkey-piloted motorcycle...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Is the correct order of adjectives. And I love that, because it made me laugh, but I also loved it because it made me think about a thing that I hadn't thought about before in a way that forced me to create a rule for it, so I could be more deliberate about a way I was writing.

[Mary Robinette] This is... I think this is one of the really interesting things, that a lot of times there are rules that we have internalized and we don't know. And this is a good example. You can go look this up. I also don't remember it, but I remember being blown away because it was like, oh, oh, yeah, there actually is a thing with this. But, it's not just that, like, you've been honing your tastes your entire life as a reader. So there are things that you know intuitively about sequencing that you wouldn't be able to articulate. For me, the things are... When it's not working, that's when I kind of step back and I start thinking about, okay, well, why isn't this working? What are the rules? Or, the tools that I have? So there is the large to narrow, but sometimes you do want to invert that. And when you do, you want to do it with deliberation, while understanding, like, what it does. So if you start very broad and you funnel down, you're bringing the audience's attention to a single point. And then that point takes on a lot of emphasis. But sometimes you start with an important point, and then you broaden outward in order to take them out into the larger world. So it's a lot about where you're trying to direct the reader's attention, and sometimes it's broad to narrow, and sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes it's the thing we talk about, the recency primacy effect, and sometimes it's cause and effect.

[DongWon] Well, there's also an emotional quotient to it, too. Right? There's this really important principle in architecture, popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright, that's about compression and expansion. Right? So in... If you walk into a Frank Lloyd Wright House, you generally walk into what, to modern audiences, feels like a very compacted space. The hallways tend to be quite short, the [garbled] aren't wide, there's not a lot of space to put stuff in them, and then you... What you do is you walk through that and then you walk into a large open space. Right? We think of open concept when it comes to Frank Lloyd Wright, but really, there's a lot of compression and then that expansion, so that then the living space feels like this huge airy space, even when by square footage, it may not actually be that big. Right? And then part of the sin of the McMansion is it's just all open space. You walk into a huge foyer, you walk into a huge kitchen, you walk into... And everything feels the same. Right? You get this... I'm back on my risotto issue here, but everything... There's no differentiation from room to room. And so without that compression/expansion, you don't have the emotional, either relief of, ah, I'm now in a great space. I'm now in this next emotional sort of scene as you go from narrow to broad. Or you don't have the sense of I'm leaving this space and focusing down back onto a single thing. And then I'm getting set for the next expansion. Right? So that's sort of, like, funneling in and out of the compression/expansion. It's something I think about in fiction as being very important for giving the differentiation between scenes, and then, therefore pacing as you're pulling people through.

[Erin] Yeah. It's interesting, I was like, there are other... They're both directions...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, they both have... Feel like they have... Some sort of, like, intentionality. You're going from one to the other. I often think about, like, the broad to small. I think it's why the adjectives getting increasingly cool works, because each one... We love details, I think, as humans, and so each detail usually, each cool thing is more specific than the last cool thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, the coolest thing about this is that there's only so many monkey-propelled... What was it, rocket launchers? Sorry.

[Howard] Rocket-propelled monkey-piloted motorcycle.

[Erin] Yes. You know what I mean? So it's like, there might be many rocket-propelled, but only so many are going to be...

[DongWon] That poor monkey.

[Erin] Monkey-operated. So, each one gets more and more specific. I really like the broadening because I feel like what it does is what a camera does a lot of times when it pulls back on a scene. Which is, you assume a certain amount of context when you give a specific detail, and when you broaden outward, it turns out that that context is different than you anticipated, it gives you a little bit of a shock and it's like, oh, wow, I never would have thought that this is where this happened. Or this is where this person was.

[Howard] One of the things that we talked about... Oh, gee, a decade ago in Writing Excuses... Is sort of a pyramid theory of giving information, in terms of description. Where you begin with lots of description as you're setting things up, with less and less as you get to the top of the pyramid. The reason being, I think, twofold. One, it sort of accelerates your pace through the scene or through the chapter. And second, it draws focus away from the details and toward whatever the specific events are. And, again, this isn't a rule, it's just a way to think about when to use description and when not to use description.

[Mary Robinette] Well, it's also a more basic mechanical thing, which is at the beginning of a scene, the audience knows less about the space...

[Howard] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And less about the people at the beginning of a book. That's one of the reasons that the ends of books are shorter than the beginnings, is that they often just take less description, because we've already done that load-bearing work for the reader. Which is, again, going back to the sequencing question, it's like when do you do these things? And why, and how do you make those decisions?

[Erin] Yeah. We've talked a little bit about the broadening, like, why might you broaden, why might you narrow in? But, Mary Robinette, you actually mentioned two others, cause and effect, and I can't remember the last one.

[Mary Robinette] Recency primacy.

[Erin] Recency primacy. Like, why... Is there a reason that you would use... I mean, cause and effect feels like this is something we generally understand, like, first you say why something is happening and then what occurs after it has happened. But, like, why would you focus on that as opposed to broad and narrow?

[Mary Robinette] So, a lot of times what we're dealing with is an order of information thing, where the reader isn't getting information at the time they need it. And even if it's just in a single sentence, it can cause a little bit of confusion. So I just did an exercise with the people in the Writing Excuses Cruise. At the time that we are recording this, we have just gotten off the cruise ship. And I showed them a piece of fiction that I'd written in high school. And it's not good. It's not terrible, but it's not good. And one of the sentences in it is something like, Agony seared her hand as the wood slapped into it. And, like, just flipping that, like, you know that she's experiencing pain, but you don't know why yet. And just flipping it, As the wood slapped into it, agony seared her hand, you understand there's a stronger connection. There are times when you want to invert that, because you want the surprise. Like, if someone opens a door and gasps, you don't yet know why they gasp, and so delaying that moment gives the reader the same surprise that the character has. So that you like [gasp] I'm gasping too. Why am I startled? And so you get to make those decisions about when you want the reader to have the same information at the same time the character does, when you want them to experience the cause and then the effect, and when you want them to be surprised and experience the effect, and then the cause. For instance, one of the effects of this is that we should probably take a break.

[Erin] But wait, what's the cause? No, I'm just kidding.

[DongWon] Time.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The cruise ship sailing up to Alaska this summer is completely sold out, except for the cabins we'd reserved for Writing Excuses attendees. These cabins are only available until June 4th. On June 4th, any cabins not reserved by Writing Excuses attendees will revert to the cruise line, and will be sold to the general public. If you want to join the Writing Excuses hosts and 100 new friends on our final annual cruise as we read, write, critique, and learn while reveling in the stunning scenery, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. Don't delay. We're holding the very last unreserved cabins on the entire ship, and they will not stay unreserved for very long. Again, that's writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] For many writers, worldbuilding is also an opportunity for world breaking. A shattering of existing norms and assumptions of what is and isn't possible. If you've read the work of NK Jemisin, author of The Broken Earth trilogy, and 42nd Grand Master for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, you'll know what I mean. This June, in Chicago, you can meet NK Jemison yourself and attend a master class on worldbuilding and world breaking at SFFWA's 61st annual Nebula Awards conference. I'll be there too, along with other powerhouses in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. This year, for the first time ever, SFFWA's Nebula Awards include top prizes for poetry and comics. We are excited to welcome these mediums into the fold. The Nebula Awards conference is an annual opportunity to gather as professionals and professionalizing writers. Have you bought your tickets yet to join the conversation in person or online, and to celebrate our latest stars at the Nebula Awards banquet? If you're in Chicago already, you can also freely attend our mass autographing session on Friday, June 5th. All details are available on sfwa.org. So tell your friends, nod to your fellow creators, and reach out to fans. Let's break down some old worlds and build new ones together in Chicago.

[Howard] Thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. Sandra and I have been homeowners for 30 years, and it's been wonderful. Of course, it's our biggest investment and we have to literally live inside it without breaking it. We'd been in our house for 2 weeks when the water line to the EVAP cooler on the roof broke, destroying 64 square feet of ceiling and almost 200 square feet of hardwood floor. Regular homeowners insurance usually doesn't cover that kind of thing. And that's where HomeServe comes in. You don't want to be on your own for things like plumbing failures, HVAC breakdowns, or electrical issues. You could be searching for a contractor in a panic, or you could already be on the phone with Homeserve's 7x24 hotline scheduling a repair. They've helped homeowners like you for over 20 years with a trusted national network of over 2600 local contractors. Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just 4.99 a month. Go to homeserve.com to find the plan that's right for you. That's homeserve.com. Not available everywhere. Most plans range between 4.99 to 11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply for covered repairs.

[Howard] They call it the best 4 days in gaming, and I am disinclined to argue. Gen Con Indy is my favorite convention. There's a symposium for writers, and it might well be the best 4 days in writing. Will you be there? I will. As will Mary Robinette, Erin, Dan, and Sandra. As you're putting together your Gen Con schedule, be sure to look us up by name so you can sign up for our events. There will be a Writing Excuses podcast Q&A session, a Thursday night networking party hosted by Writing Excuses, and a session with Howard Tayler... That's me... And Maurice Broaddus called A Conversation With No Chaperones. I can't believe they're letting us do that one. You can also visit me and Sandra, along with Jim Zubb and Stacy King, at booth 1349 in the exhibit hall. Along with our usual racks of merchandise, we will have some Writing Excuses loot. Gen Con Indy runs from July 30th through August 2nd in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can buy a membership right now, and then you can start creating your wish list for panels, workshops, and other events. On May 17th, event registration goes live, and your wish list will have you pre-registered for things. Get your tickets today and reserve your spot. We would be delighted to see you at Gen Con.

[Erin] All right. Now that we are back from our break, because time is a straight line, most of the time, I'm curious about talking about this on, like, a little bit more at a micro level. Because I think a lot of times where I like to play around with it is in actually sequencing words within sentences. Not like thinking about the order of adjectives and playing with surprise. I think one of the most fun things about talking about sequencing is that once you understand that there's a way that a lot of times people expect sequencing, cause and then effect, a lot of times broad and then narrow, if you play with it, you get the surprise, you get something really interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Something that I like to do a lot of times with sentences is think about a noun that I would put later in the sentence, and turn it into an adjective that modifies the thing. So instead of saying her voice which had been roughened from too many years of whiskey, I will say her whiskey voice, or her whiskey rough voice. Which is a way to give the same information, but because it moves it over, it feels like it's more laden with meaning. And also, as a short story writer, I've saved three to four words that I can then bank for later in the story...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] When I truly need them.

[DongWon] But you're almost using surprise in a certain way. You know what I mean? By that reordering, you're like shifting expectations, but still giving us the information.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] A really useful tool for this. Study Garden Path sentences. Garden Path sentences are sentences where you begin reading the sentence and it is leading you to a place where the rest of the sentence is not going. The classic example, the old crew the boat. Oh, the old, and crew is a verb.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Not the old crew, it is the old, are crewing the boat.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Understanding the principle of a Garden Path sentence, one, helps you to not write them accidentally, and helps you to create Garden Path-ish things where you send the reader down a Garden Path you want them on in order to button hook them into something else.

[Mary Robinette] There's a good example of this that I was already thinking about. Sorry, thank you for queuing this up for me. Douglas Adams uses this a lot.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] The ship hung in the air, exactly the way bricks don't. Like, you are not expecting... You're not expecting that turn. But, sequencing wise, he's putting the surprise at the end. If it had been, bricks don't hang in the air the way these ships did. Like, there's... That is a plunker of a sentence...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're not... There's so many reasons that that doesn't make...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That doesn't work. But it does show you how important order is and sequence, because it's all the same content, it's just entirely wrong because the important, the fun thing, the surprise, comes at the beginning.

[DongWon] Well, I think one thing that is also really important at a line level, or basically at any level, is mirroring. Right? And repetition. Right? I know that when I write, especially nonfiction, I tend to over rely on repetition, but I do think it's really useful to set up a pattern and break it. Right? And that's something that you can do on a structured level in a sentence, of giving us, like, this list of things through repetition of, like, I walked a long way... I don't know, I can't think of a good example off the top of my head. I'm sorry. But, like, I think having a thing where you have one beat, second beat, and then the third beat you break the pattern, can set up that surprise in terms of using simple checks like rule of three, but doing it in a very deliberate structural way.

[Erin] Something that's really cool about patterning, too, it's like you're creating your own sequencing rules. You're telling people, oh, we are in a new... In this particular set of sentences, you're going to get this word over and over again, and each time, it's going to be slightly different.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because a lot of times when we use repetition, we might use the same word, but, like, something different is on the other end of the verb.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or we might use, like, the same general sentence construction, but the length changes. And so each time you're getting something slightly different. And then just as you teach us the sequence, you rip it out from under us. Which is great. It's sort of like a pact with the reader.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I feel like a lot of sequencing is, like, you making promises to the reader about the way that they will be experiencing the story, and then being like, haha, no, or, yes, and like using that to actually... Not control reader emotion, but to take readers on a journey that makes things not feel flat.

[DongWon] Yeah. One thing I also think about with this is the idea of readability. Right? There's a thing in commercial fiction that we talk about in terms of windowpane prose. Right? Prose that is invisible in a certain way because it's so readable and you just read very quickly and you can absorb very quickly. And so, something like your Garden Path sentence is sort of very anti-readability. You have to slow down and think about it. And you're sort of putting the brakes on your reader as they're moving through it, and they have to, like, stop and parse what you're saying, versus sometimes doing something that is maximizing that speed of reading, can be a really effective technique. And there's just as much technique that goes into doing that as writing the beautifully crafted sentence.

[Mary Robinette] I just want to flag for readers that windowpane or transparent prose is a fashion based thing, because Jane Austen was writing windowpane prose in her day.

[DongWon] Yes. 100%.

[Mary Robinette] So when you're thinking about these things, like, don't think do I want to write transparent prose or not? Think about where am I putting my embellishments and why? Because the transparent prose, the window pane prose, if you're writing stuff that feels natural to you, you're probably writing something that is currently fashionable in some ways.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yes. Exactly. And one thing... One really useful thing for getting that sort of like quicker comprehension and building sort of towards that sort of speed of reading for your audience is honestly using, like, high school composition essay techniques. Right? of... there's a thing I think about a lot, of tell someone the thing you're going to tell them, then tell it to them, and then tell them what you just told them. Right? This is really useful for an action scene, for example. Where you kind of frame it up in a way of here's the thing that's about to happen, and then you go through what happened, then you tell them what happened at the end. When... A lot of times, I find when reading a scene, if they don't do that, I will not be quite sure what I'm supposed to take away from the scene or what to expect when I'm in the scene. And so having that sort of, like, intro and conclusion short of sentence, or, like, hint, can be incredibly helpful at a scene level and at a sentence level, in terms of how am I supposed to ingest this.

[Mary Robinette] So this goes back to the question of repetition and cause and effect and sequencing...

[DongWon] And recency [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] And recency...

[Erin] And everything.

[Mary Robinette] And everything. But specifically, that you don't want to do that all the time. You want to do that for the important things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And what that does... The repetition causes people to pay attention to it. We typically notice repetition because we are wired, as animals, to notice things that are important, and repetition is unnatural. So you hear repetition in the wild when something is walking towards you, potential predator. You hear it when it's water dripping, and that's an important piece of information. So once you've identified that information, then if it's not important to you, then you discard it. You're like, okay, I can tune the repetition out. So when you're using repetition in fiction, you want to make sure that you're using it to catch the reader's attention, and that you're not doing it accidentally.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And what DongWon is talking about with this you tell them, you tell them again, and then you tell them what you told them... That is a form of repetition to draw the reader's attention to it. But if it's not an important thing, like, again, in this workshop, I was showing them some of my earlier prose, and I had this thing where I described the same action three different times and it was... I did this multiple times in a scene. But only one of the actions that I was describing was plot relevant. So, as someone who was editing it as an adult, I took out the other two repetitions where I was describing the same motion multiple times because what that was was me figuring out the right way to describe it.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think there is the repetition aspect. There's also a fractal aspect of it, too. Right? Sort of at an individual moment level, there is that tell them, tell them again, and then tell them what happened. But then there's also sort of the scene level, and then literally the book level. Right? The introductory scene of a book, that opening scene, really should mirror the structure and sort of genre flow... Not should, but can, in a useful way, mirror the structure and genre and beats of the book. And then your conclusion sort of tells us what are we taking away from this. Right? So in that sort of, like, fractal microcosm, macrocosm thing, you can sometimes either show in micro what the book will be. One great example I think about this is the opening of The Haunting of Hill House, which has this sort of long rambling sentence at the beginning that really encapsulates the entire experience of reading this book. Right? And it sets you up so well, both plot wise and linguistically, for what you're in for in this very specific way of, like... We're going to be doing some weird psychological stuff, here is some big things about the world, here's a description of the very normal house. The house is really scary. Right? Like, that's sort of the beats of that opening line, and then that's the beats of the book. Right? So, this sort of fractal microcosm macrocosm kind of thing can really play into a version of this mirroring, repetition, and all these different aspects.

[Mary Robinette] And I think one of the reasons that this works, and this goes back to the sequencing thing, is that recency...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Recency primacy effect. Because we... We like symmetry. Humans respond really, really well to it. So, recency primacy effect... We've been tossing those words a lot around in this episode, and we do talk about it in other episodes, but I'll redefine it here. It is that you notice the first thing and the last thing. Those stick the most. So when you've got this outer frame of... On this fractal macrocosm, you're completing a circuit. Because the recency and the primacy are both the same thing, and so that completes a circuit and it enhances them. And you can do that on a scene level, you can do that on a sentence level, at a paragraph level, where you hit something a little bit harder at the beginning and the end. Like, I've used this example when... In other episodes. The difference between... And it's a subtle difference... The man walked into the room. There was a blonde in the chair. Versus. The man walked into the room. In the chair was a blonde. But then I can complete this by doing... By lingering on that. The man walked into the room. There was a blonde in the chair. She had hair to the base of her spine, and, like, it didn't stop. So I'm hitting the blonde and the hair... Like, I'm hitting the blonde twice in that. Yet... I see your face, Erin.

[Erin] What are you talking about?

[laughter]

[Erin] Go ahead, hit me some more.

[Mary Robinette] You're right, I should have just stuck with the metaphor from the previous one of chasing balls.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the point of that is that, like, I can do the same thing with a man walked into the room. In the chair was a blonde. The chair was a fine bit of hardwood, probably from the early 1800s. And at that point, the woman in the chair becomes unimportant. The chair is the important thing. Because of this... This balance. And it is this... It's a question of sequence.

[DongWon] One thing that is standing out to me as we talk about this is a lot of things we're talking about are concepts in cognitive psychology. Right? There's the idea of the recency bias, you're more biased to say your favorite thing was something that you saw recently. Right? There's a framing bias, which is the first person who states, like, the frame of the thing tends to define the field of play. This is a tool in negotiation, where you say this is worth a million dollars, and then someone now can't be like, this is worth $20. Right? Because you framed it in a certain way. And so, I think the microcosm macrocosm thing that I was talking about is a framing thing and a recency thing. Right? So you can use your understanding of the way people's brains work and how we process information as these narrative, like... Okay, I hate to call them hacks, but you're also kind of hacking somebody's brain.

[Erin] These are tools.

[DongWon] These are tools and techniques to get information across in really efficient ways that are very impactful and meaningful.

[Howard] One of my favorite tools, and it shortcuts all of the thinking about why and how and goes straight to the mechanics, is turn the paragraph upside down. Just reverse the information in the paragraph and see if it works better. There are so many paragraphs that I've written where I look at it and I think, man, what is wrong with it? Wait, Howard, you have a tool for this. Turn it upside down. And I just reversed the order of information and realize, oh, now it's right. Do I know why it's right? No, but I know that tool worked.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah, it's funny. One more tool before we wrap up here is, like, I also think that it's... Some of this stuff sounds really complicated, but as we've been talking, one thing that I've been thinking a lot about is gossip, and also, like, how we convey information. People... The tell someone, tell them again, and then tell them what you told them is also like, oh, my God, I hate John so much. Okay. So today he, like, came...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And he poured water in the copier, and it was horrible, and he burned my house down, also.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And that is why I will never speak to him again.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And it's like we tend to do this, this is how we convey information. And a lot of it is because a lot of what we understand about writing comes from old... Like, at some point, you had to catch someone's attention verbally and say like, hey, this is why you should pay attention to what's going on. Okay, now I'm going to explain it. And, like, don't forget, this is the thing that I just told you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because if you're listening to somebody say something, you can't... There's only so much you can hold in your head about, like, what they just said.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so the thing that caught your attention first, and the thing that they left with, are the things that you're going to take with you.

[DongWon] You gotta tell me how you feel about the person before you tell me the story. Right?

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly.

[DongWon] If this story is about, oh, it's so sad that my sister-in-law had to go through all these terrible things, or if this story is I hate my sister-in-law and here's all of the things that she did... Those are... Can have the same facts, but be very different interpretations of the story. Right? So, if you want to, like, learn a lot about storytelling, honestly, go look into the podcast Normal Gossip, which is one of my favorite things in life. And it's just... The rhythm of how they tell stories is so important and you can learn so much from that.

[Erin] Yeah. In fact, I was going to say, like, if I'm in love with John, I'm like, John burned my house down. That's a very different story.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think it's a little bit of the cause and effect, again. It's like you don't want to give someone an answer before the question exists.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] And with that. we are going... This is jumbo sized... We are going to wrap up with homework. And this homework is worth $1 million.

[gasp]

[Howard] It's only worth 20 bucks. Guys, it's only worth 20 bucks.

[what]

[DongWon] I'm very confused by this framing.

[Erin] No. All right. So, take something... This homework's probably unsurprising, but take something either that you've written or something interesting that you've heard recently. Something somebody's told you that you're like, wow, what a juicy story. And go ahead and write it down in the order that you currently have it, or the order that you received it. And then I want you to rewrite it two ways. One is to take Howard's beautiful example that he stole from my brain which is to do it upside down. Do it backwards. Figure out how that would work. And then I want you to find some very unexpected way to sequence it that feels wrong to you. What is the worst way you could possibly sequence this information? Write it that way and, I don't know... See what happens.

[Howard] You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Writing Excuses 21.18: Deconstructing the Three Act Structure

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-18-deconstructing-the-three-act-structure

Key Points: Three act structure: setup, confrontation, and resolution. Describing normal: establishing the main characters and their relationships and the world they live in. The ordinary world. What's going on, who are the characters, why should I care about them, why am I invested in this story. What is the status quo? By page 5, what story are we reading, what is going on? What is the main action, what are the stakes? Pose a major dramatic question. KPop Demon Hunters. A reason to care. Ground the reader. Set up the overall theme, who we're going to spend time with, where we're going to be, and genre/mood. Stakes. 

Act 2: rising action. The protagonist attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point. Where your try-fail cycles happen. The meat. Act 2 commercial break: dark night of the soul, big crisis, big reveal. The solution that creates the next problem. Purchasing the frame before you know what the painting is. Traversal and transformation.

Act 3: resolution. Climax. Confluence. Punch the reader, then give them a moment to breathe. The scene of aftermath.

[Season 21, Episode 18]

[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 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing the Three Act Structure.

[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 I'm very delighted to have a long time friend to the podcast back with us, Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] It's delightful to be here. Thank you for having me.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the reasons we wanted to bring Margaret into these is that, besides writing prose, Margaret is also a screenwriter working in Hollywood. And today we're going to be talking about the three act structure. Which is a classic structure. One of the ways that it was popularized was by a book by Sid Field in 1979 called Screenplay, The Foundations of Screenwriting. So the way he describes it is that the three acts are the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution. Act 1, Act 2, act 3. I would get very salty about the whole idea of a three act structure, because I'm like, three acts, three act breaks, came from theater, and you need them to move scenery around. So, when you said that you have actually read this book...

[Margaret] Oh, I have indeed.

[laughter]

[Margaret] I am aging myself by admitting that, but, yeah. No, when I was first coming up, taking my first screenwriting courses, that was like... That was the Bible of the time.

[Mary Robinette] Can you talk to us a little bit about what you think it... Like... The... Let's... I guess...

[Howard] No, what is the three act structure really, Margaret?

[laughter]

[DongWon] You also said that in a way like you had no opinions about this book whatsoever. So, yeah.

[Margaret] I also want to clarify that, like, it came out in 1979... I was not reading it in 1979.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] It just took a while for there to be a lot of popular screenwriting books. Like, that market was wide open for a long time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So as I understand it, the first act is about establishing the main characters and their relationships and the world they live in. Sometimes this is called describing normal. I've seen several failure modes of describing normal in early manuscripts, early career manuscripts. Can we talk about, like, what... Why we want to do that in that first act?

[Margaret] Yeah. Sure. We can do that. I didn't mean to cut you off there. It's a... No, I think, we talk about the failure mode, if it's like the ordinary world, if people are familiar with Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, which was also very big at the time, of, it's like, oh, it's the hero's journey, and we've had many discussions on this podcast about the hero's journey and the strengths and weaknesses thereof. But there's this idea that you're starting in the ordinary world. Like, to get the audience on board with what's going on, who are the characters, why should I care about them, why am I invested in this story, you have to let them know what the status quo is. And, I think, for writers who are early in their own Journeys, it can feel like, well, nothing's allowed to happen starting out, because I have to set up what's going on and where things are. And it's a... And you do have to set up what's going on and who are these people and what does their day-to-day look like, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that things can't be starting to change or starting to be in flux. Exciting things can still be going on. But I think there's this idea of, like, okay, in a screenplay format at the time, the first 25 to 30 pages were just sort of tooting around to find the plot as it were. And that just... there was also a time when pacing was slower on these things. And now that's... If you are a writer of a spec screenplay, that's not going to fly. Like, you've gotta let your reader know...

[Howard] You need to do something a little more interesting well before the 22 page mark.

[Margaret] But by... Honestly, before page 5, like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] You've got to let people know, like, what story are we reading, what is going on. And that's just the way that storytelling, American storytelling specifically, and I think this is also somewhat true on the fiction side as well, has just evolved. There is an expectation of you're going to let me know, like, what is this story going to be about, what is... At least an idea of the main action that might evolve, but, like, what are the stakes. Because that really is what gets your reader invested, of knowing, okay, what am I worried might happen and what do I hope will come to pass instead?

[Mary Robinette] And as I understand it, in the original idea, that this establishing of stakes is basically posing a major dramatic question. Like, is the boy going to get the girl? Are they going to stop the terrorists? And that the answer is going to be either yes or no. When I'm dealing with openings, and as I said, I bounced very hard off of the idea of the three act structure, but I... When we've been doing the deconstruction of it, I'm like, oh, okay, I see the elements that are common in other things. But I do have, like, a thematic problem, even if it's not the big problem, and it usually escalates from there. Like, if it's a story that's going to be about a haunted house, there's a squeak and they can't figure out where the squeak is coming from. And so there's that disruption of normal, but it's not the big one yet.

[Erin] As you were saying that, it made me wonder if this is why so many, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like so many rom-coms start at a wedding that is not the protagonist's wedding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it establishes, like, this is the thing. Like, we are all about love. But this person doesn't have it. But, by the end, they will. And like therefore you know, in that first five pages, exactly the realm that you're in, at least.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. It's like my sister's getting married, and I'm stuck at her wedding without a date. And it's like that sets up that dilemma.

[Howard] And by the same token, when we've started... When we talk about cold opens with action, we have an action scene that resolves in some sort of success, typically, and that describes to us what normal is. This is an action movie that will end with a heroic resolution of the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes when we talk about establishing the normal, it can sound kind of flat. Right? It can sound kind of like, there's the character going to school and experiencing his normal life or whatever it is. But I think a recent example of an action cold open that establishes the new normal, or the existing normal, in a really effective way is KPop Demon Hunters. Right? We start with this incredible physical fight scene on an airplane that they jump out of, and then they perform their concert and we get all of the stakes that are being set up in terms of establishing the Honmoon, like all the big global stakes, the worldbuilding, but then also the personal stakes over that opening sequence, of what do they stand to lose, what do they stand to gain, which ends in a reveal of the true stakes for the main character of her needing to keep her secret, and then accomplish this stage thing so that she can go back to being normal, or... Also, because we're talking about how pacing and expectations for storytelling have changed, but also, even if you're looking at some sort of classic Hollywood examples, which is the sort of movies that Sid Field was talking about when he did this sort of structural breakdown for screenplays. You look at a movie like Chinatown or Citizen Kane. Like, Chinatown starts with our lead character, he's showing photos of the wife having an affair to his client and his client being like, I'm going to kill her. You're allowed to do that, it's an unspoken thing. And you think you have that kind of money and class, you jerk. Like, no, rich people are allowed to kill their unfaithful wives, you, you are not. And that sort of... It sets up his job, it sets up the theme, we know immediately what he does. And it's not long after that Faye Dunaway shows up. Or that... It's been a while since I saw Chinatown. But, like, since he gets... Gets involved in what's going to be the main case of the film...

[Erin] Your mention of KPop Demon Hunters made me think that, like, musical theater is like this is... Most music, not all, but...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Many, many musicals start with this sort of like here is the world and let me know...

[DongWon] It's a thing we do. Yeah.

[Erin] It's a thing, and it's interesting, because it works on a couple different levels. One is to literally tell you, like, here's the setting, here's the general vibe. But also musically, it gives you a sense of if you're at Les Miserables or if you're at Hamilton, you're going to get very different opening songs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If, like, Les Miserables began with a hip hop opening, you would be really confused for the rest of the time [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] And people are like, when are they coming back?

[laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled what garbled name is garbled worst nightmare garbled] I feel very torn.

[Margaret] I'm 100% in. When you said that, I immediately thought of Bonjour from Beauty and the Beast...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Which is literally let me run down this whole town for you...

[Erin] Can we talk trash about the entire town? That's really pretty...

[DongWon] He has a beef with everybody, that Baker, on sight.

[Margaret] Make a different bread and rolls.

[laughter]

[Erin] My question for this is, like, what is the version of that that we're doing on the page? Like, How do we let people know whether they are in Hamilton or whether they are in Les Mis... What's the kind of story that they're going to be getting?

[Mary Robinette] Like, I talked about this a lot, and from a purely crass commercial, you have to help the editor when you're starting out, that within the first 13 lines, you need to have some reason for us to care. That... Like, my first three sentences, I'm attempting to ground the reader, because sometimes people just don't read past those first three sentences. Sometimes it is setting up the overall theme of the thing, but I want them to know sort of who we're going to spend time with, sort of where we're going to be, and the genre/mood that we're in, which is what we're talking about establishing with these. It's just... I think we're talking about establishing the same things, it's just the metrics that we use for marking how and when we get them in are somewhat different.

[DongWon] It's all about stakes. All of it.

[Mary Robinette] So we're talking about all of these things that were supposed to happen in act 1, and one of the things that is confusing about it, I think, was confusing about it for me, was thinking that act one had to be a third of the book, and that is not the case. So, you can do an act one that is very fast, and then get into the middle of it. And that, I think, is going to take us to our break. And then after the break, we're going to talk about Act 2.

[Mary Robinette] One of the challenges of writing is finding a subject matter expert, right? Particularly when you are still in the early part of your career. So, I'm going to give you a hack. Masterclass. For instance, Chris Hatfield's course on space exploration feels very much like sitting down across from him. And I've met him. His class covers training, Mars In situ resource management, what it's like to launch. It's pretty great. I was also reassured to hear him talk about his first day in the office as an astronaut candidate, AKA as-can, because he had imposter syndrome too. So, it's not something that just hits writers, apparently it hits astronauts. And one of the great things about Masterclass is that it fits into real life. Audio mode, short lessons on your phone or TV. You don't have to carve out hours. You just have to start. Unlike other learning platforms, Masterclass puts you in the room with the people who define their fields. Not just experts, but the best in the world. They have 200 plus classes across 13 categories. Business, writing, cooking, creativity, wellness, and more. With plans starting at just $10 a month billed annually, it really does fit into any schedule. Audio mode turns your commute or workout into a classroom. Download lessons for offline access. Learn on your terms. And it actually works. Three oj four members feel inspired every time they watch. 83% have applied something they've learned to their real lives. It's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. So if you're trying to research something and don't know a subject matter expert to reach out to, you can always take a class. 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 yearly membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. Go learn about space from Chris Hadfield or apply the principles of improv to your life with Amy Poehler. Go to masterclass.com/excuses to see the latest offer.

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[Mary Robinette] All right. So we're going to talk about Act 2. As we've mentioned, these things don't have to be proportional.

[laughter]

[Margaret] Act 3 is going to be 1 minute at the end. So brace yourself.

[DongWon] Acts 2 and 3...

[Mary Robinette] So in Act 2, according to this original, Act 2 is the rising action, and typically it's describing... I'm honestly looking at Wikipedia for this. Typically, it's depicting the protagonist's attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point. The turning point is often like an inciting incident or something that causes or forces the protagonist to get more active. So now they are. Now they're dealing with this, they've got this big problem, we're doing some more character development, and they're attempting to deal with the... Confront the problem. In this confrontation. So what are some of the pieces of this act 2 that we've got to juggle and look at?

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's interesting about that description of Act 2 as the rising action, which... Looking back with experience, like, oh, yeah, I can see what that's going towards. But it's also in the filled in analysis, Act 2 is about half your screenplay pages. So, at the time, you thought of a screenplay as 120 pages, Now if you're writing a screenplay, 120 pages is probably too long. But you'd have like 30 pages in act one, 60 pages of act 2, and then 30 pages of act 3. And act 3 is clearly where the big exciting climax happens, the quick resolution happens, like, that's all going to be very exciting stuff. And it's like so what the heck do I do with this vast 60 page desert in the middle of my screenplay that is described as rising action. And I think... I was talking to Howard one time when I was visiting you guys and you were talking about who is it described Act 2 is where all the fun exciting things that are going to be in the trailer happen. Because it is the bulk of...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] The movie or the story or the novel, like, this is actually where the process is the point. It's the...

[Howard] It's where your try-fail cycles typically land.

[Margaret] It's where your try-fail cycles happen. It's... I frequently would break down for my students, talking about Shakespeare on a kind of five act model, and that's... You look at Romeo and Juliet. They meet very early. They get married in Act 2. People forget how quickly that happens in that play. Like, there's that idea of like, oh, it has to be rising up to the big thing. It's like, no, other things can be happening. It's as Howard said, the try-fail cycles...

[DongWon] It's one thing I think about a lot when I'm reading pitches. Right? Because the pitches will often be very good at establishing act one information of who are these characters, what are the stakes, what are the world. And a lot of times, I'll come back with, okay, but what are they doing in this book? Like, what's the actual, like, meat of the book? Like, cool concept, love the concept, love these characters, the vibes through the roof, but what are we actually getting into? And I think being able to give some indication of that and having a sense of that. And sometimes when you hear about what the meat is, you're like, oh, that sounds actually very boring. Never mind.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? And so, I think being aware that the bulk of your book is this act two place, and that needs to be interesting and dynamic and engaging is actually something that's quite difficult to do. This is when we start talking about soggy middles and things like that.

[Howard] The classic, Margaret, correct me if I get the numbers wrong... 47 minute TV episode... Is it 43? I've...

[Margaret] Yeah. 47 [garbled] 47's good enough.

[Howard] But the classic application of 3 act structure there is act one, commercial break, half of Act 2, commercial break, the other half of Act 3, commerc... Or the other half of Act 2, commercial break, and then act 3.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And it's really useful for me in thinking about three act structure, to deconstruct it in that way and to carve Act 2 into two pieces. Because in a lot of... In a great many TV shows, that act 2 commercial break is your Dark Night of the Soul, it's a big crisis, it's a big reveal, it's a big something, and just being able to put a pin in that and say, hey, about halfway through Act 2, I'm going to start the other half of Act 2, and I'm going to start it with something big.

[Erin] That's what... Thinking about it that way makes me wonder... I think a false solution... When I was thinking about what's happening at like a... I also love this where there's only like four... with commercial breaks in a show. I'm like, oh, that was beautiful. Those days...

[Margaret] Those halcyon days.

[DongWon] Indeed.

[Erin] Now they're like every 3 seconds. Jump scaring me with RSV.

[laughter]

[Erin] But like the... Sorry. You can cut that. But like it's the false solution. Like, I think about, like, Law and Order episodes, for example, where it's like the act one that you're talking about, it's like finding the dead body and they're like, aha! We've caught the person. Like, and then it's like, but for blah blah legal reasons, we can't just throw them in jail. We have to do the other half. And, like, figure out... And do all of our legal shenanigans to get something happened. Or, in Star Trek, when you solve the first thing, but then it breaks something else on the ship.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When you reverse the polarity and now you're like, oh, no, now negative is positive and positive is negative. How do we deal with that?

[Margaret] Yeah. When I was teaching screenwriting and I would frequently teach the writing the television pilot class, and most prestige TV that stays these days is in a format where you don't necessarily have that network commercial breaks...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where you don't... There were three, there were four, there were five. However many we can put before we get in trouble with the FCC. And I would always say, like, write your pilot with act breaks ...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And then pull them out. Because what these breaks do, it's like when you're writing to the break or to the turn at the end of the act, it's that thing that's going to propel us forward into what's happening next.

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes describe this as the solution that creates the next problem.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to flag as we're getting deep into this conversation is, I think there's a lot of failure states of this three act structure. Right? You can have soggy middles, you can have boring openings, like all these things. But, to return to the KPop Demon Hunters again, that movie is one of the most classic examples of an application of the three act structure. Literally, the first... I think it divides very evenly in terms of the percentages that we're talking about, in terms of 1/4 being act 1, half being act two, 1/4 being act 3. And, part of the reason I think that movie is... Hits so hard, is because of its adherence to really classical storytelling structures. And it does it in a really dynamic, fun, contemporary way. But I think that's a great example of when you can see this working. Right? And when it hits, by God, it hits. You know what I mean? Our brains love that structure. It's very satisfying to have that normal, Rising, conclusion.

[Mary Robinette] I think the failure mode of that is where we don't think about what happens in the middle.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I often think about the things on the outside as framing what is happening in the middle. Like, as you say, the bulk of the story happens in the middle, and so the beginning and end set it up. But we spend a lot of time thinking about how is it going to start? What's the big thing that's going to happen at the end, the conclusion? And for me, since like... Switching from my background in theater to my background as an art major, it's like purchasing the frame before you figure out what the painting is.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So when we're thinking about this midpoint, one of the things that I find very... The midpoint, the... Or the Act 2 is I find it very useful to think about what problem are they trying to solve and how are they trying to solve it? And those give you things that you can escalate, as opposed to how long do I have to wait until I get to my really cool thing, my climax?

[Margaret] Yeah. Something that I've found useful in working through Act 2 was actually something that I came across in a book I read in college about directing for the theater, and one of the things that this author was talking about was, like, you have a play and it's like everything's going great, and it's a tragedy, so it ends on a down note. And it's like you've been working on act one, working on act one, and then you go and you work on the second act and you're working on Act 2, and then you put it together the first time and all of the energy in act 1 is just gone, because all your actors are thinking about the fact that they know how this is going to end. And I think as authors, we can do that as well. It's like whether you're an outliner or you're going back later to sort of shape things, and you got through this more by the seat of your pants, it is that feeling of, like, well, I know where this is going, so I know that all of this is just marking time to get to what's really going on, and you really have to sort of... For me, I have to force myself in terms of, like, I know, but my characters don't.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] So what are they doing with the best information they have at the time? Because, like, they don't know where they are in the book. We know, the reader knows...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] But they always have to be going, no, no, this is the bit that's going to work.

[DongWon] Sometimes you can really feel that in terms of, like, the writer knows the inevitable conclusion to all of this, so it becomes a real like yada yada yada to the middle point. Right? Of just like... And I've seen people do this on a micro level, too, where an action scene is happening, and they'll just be like, yeah, yeah, some fight stuff happens, and then here's where we're at too at the end of it. You know what I mean? And it's like, I don't know, that's the end of the bulk of it. You can't ignore Act 2. But, with that, should we start talking about moving on to conclusion?

[Erin] One quick thing first, I just want to say, I was trying to figure out, well, how do you not do that? And I think one way to trick yourself into creating small little, like, act 1, 2, 3's within...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Your act 2. Like, because in some ways, like, try-fail cycles are like figuring out what it is that it is wrong, trying it, and then failing, and the fail is the fun act 3...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And then you just build one upon the other. It's sort of like in a relationship, you're like, oh, my relationship is stale, we're going to introduce date night, because we're going to actually, like, create...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] A little mini version of our tomance that's going to happen in the middle of our bigger lives together.

[Mary Robinette] I use that... That idea of the mini things when I'm looking at the big thing in the middle, I will look at barriers or obstacles between the protagonist and the goal. And then each barrier has try-fail cycles that go with it. So the barriers are like a macro version. So, like, in order to get to something, I need to get through this door. But then there's the smaller try-fail cycles that are involved in getting through the door. I try the knob. It's locked. I try the key. It breaks off in the lock. I get a crowbar. I get it open, and now there are bees on the other side of it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is my next barrier.

[DongWon] In a few weeks, we're really going to dig into using microcosms...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To sort of illustrate all this on a macro scale, and I think it's going to be a really fun conversation.

[Howard] Two words that helped me understand why Act 2 has to be there are traversal and transformation. I have to traverse the terrain, I have to climb the mountain, I have to do whatever. There are obstacles. And I have to transform myself along that journey. Those two things have to happen. If the story doesn't require them, then you go from act 1 to act 3 and you're done. If the story does require them, then allow us to enjoy them. The traversal is interesting, the transformation is passionate. And that's why I love having just those two words on tap for me to remind myself of why Act 2 should be there.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because I think that that is an important thing, that these are ingredients of the three act structure. But not every story is a 3 act structure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And this is one of the reasons we wanted to do this deconstruction. So, let's move to our last Act, which is act 3. And act three, according to Sid field, is called the resolution. So, the resolution, according to the Wikipedia of the resolution...

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] He really came up with Dynamic names for all...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Of these, didn't he?

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Margaret] [garbled] this [garbled] is going to be exciting.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I actually really like it, because they're so much more descriptive than the seven point plot structure, which we're going to get to with Dan later, which is...

[DongWon] Like pinching and other things...

[Mary Robinette] I don't know... I don't want that much pinching.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, in the act 3, the third Act, we've got the resolution of the story and it's subplots, but we also have the climax, which is where things are brought to kind of the most intense point, and we answer our dramatic question, according to Wikipedia, leaving the protagonist and other characters with a new sense of who they really are, and thank you to whoever this anonymous Wikipedia person was. So, these are beats that we see in other things. With act 3, that idea of the climax happening there, that's again a thing I think a lot of people sort of struggle with, and then struggle with what to do after that. Because now everything has been solved. So what are sort of some of the, I guess, the nuances of act 3?

[Margaret] Wow. You're saying that and I'm thinking, oh, I should say something smart, and I'm just going like...

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to take a second?

[Howard] If I may...

[Margaret] Go for it.

[Howard] I don't like the word climax, because it's in so many other domains. I prefer the word confluence. I prefer thinking about all of the things that have been happening arriving at one point so that lots of things are kind of happening at once. That's not a perfect description of it, but in my mind, it helps me sort things out a little better. And helps remind me that I have a lot of threads that have to be tied together.

[Mary Robinette] You remind me of when we had Lou Anders on many seasons ago. You all can... We'll link to it in the show notes. But the Hollywood ending. That at the end, the hero reconciles with the viewpoint character, defeats the villain, and solves the problem. Which is basically what we're talking about happening here at the climax. That the, oh, we feel better about ourselves, or not, depending on the type of...

[Margaret] Depending on how it goes. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Depending on the type of the show. Bad guy gets just desserts and whatever the problem is, everything's okay now. Or not.

[Margaret] Or not. Yeah. It's... When I was... My first TV show I worked on, the middleman for the time ABC Family, which was a delightful and bonkers experience, but one of the writers in the room introduced a term of art that has always stuck with me, because we'd be breaking the story, working out what's going to happen, what are the scenes, how is it going, and there'd always reach the point where, like, we're getting towards the end or working backwards, and it's like, okay, we know what the big conflict resolution is going to be, it's like we're confronting the boy band which is actually a bunch of intergalactic dictators trying to get back to their home galaxy, we have located the cursed cue ball of the Titanic and we have to prevent this guy from playing it or else all of us will be drowning in the icy waters of the North Atlantic... Actual episodes. And then, Anne Huntsman would always be there, it's like, and then it's the mad dash for the logo.

[laughter]

[I love that]

[Margaret] Referring to logos, the showrunners' sort of vanity card at the end.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like, we do that and then it's like you've got a little bit of time to, like, if you want to put that nice little button, nice little sort of like... Maybe there's like a B story that you have to resolve, like [Wendy and Lacey] her roommate, has had a conflict and she comes back from saving the world and is like, yeah, here, we're going to have our moment. And then just, boom, you're cutting out.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Margaret] And I think in short fiction, that's really useful...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] To remember because there is that expectation of, like, we're hitting you, bam, and then there'll be a nice little graphic at the bottom of the paragraph to let you know that it's over.

[Erin] It's funny that you said like hitting you, because I... To continue with a lot of violence that I have in my soul...

[laughter]

[Erin] One of the things that I think is... That I sometimes see in writer's work, is that... It's like you punched someone in the stomach, and then you walked away before you actually got to see the expression on their face.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So you do want to linger, like, just long enough to kind of get it, because if you punch the reader and then, like, they don't have a chance to actually, like, process it on the page, sometimes they process it at your page...

[gasp]

[Erin] Which you don't want, and then they hate you and your story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You want to give them a moment to breathe. Not a long moment.

[Margaret] You want that scene of aftermath.

[Erin] Just a moment.

[DongWon] There's a really great video essay that's about Hong Kong action scenes, on every trim, a painting. Where he talks about how you see the punch [garbled] land three different times. Right? Because you see it, and then you see the thing, and then you see the consequences of the thing, and it's really important to make space for that. Right? And one of the nice things about novel versus screenwriting is you have a little bit more space for that denouement. I mean, we talked about this a bit in the hero's journey episode, but the scouring of the Shire. Right? You have time to go back and sort of see who are these characters now that they've gone through their transformation and to close out that arc. I mean, Lord of the Rings has a thousand character arcs that need to be resolved, which is why the ending of that book takes so long. And in a novel, you don't always want to go that deep with it. But, you have a little bit more space and a little bit less of a sprint to the logo, as you put it, then you might have in other media.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of the sprint for the logo, I believe that it is time for homework. So, for homework, what I want you to do is I want you to take a fairy tale. Just a classic fairy tale. Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks, any of those. And diagram it out as a 3 act structure, just to see what it would do. Do you need to add elements to it in order to make it fit that? So, give that a try on something that's already existing out in the world. And with that, you are out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 21.16: Tension and Release as Call and Response 

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-16-tension-and-release-as-call-and-response

Key Points: Tension and release? Conflict, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, anticipation, micro-tension. Conflict resolution, end of the fight (physical or emotional), escape for a moment. Safety versus danger, known and unknown. Movement! Release is pacing. Risotto! Genres of the body. Flow. Leapfrog! Season to taste. Frogs in a bag storytelling. Modulation. 

[Season 21, Episode 16]

[Howard] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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

[Season 21, Episode 16]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Tension and release as call and response.

[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] Today we're going to be talking about tension and release as a way to kind of guide your reader through your fiction. A lot of times we talk about conflict as being a thing that a story must have, but I've been thinking more and more that it's tension. We did a whole thing about tension season before last, last season... Previously...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] On writing excuses. So, we're just going to do a quick kind of reminder about what tension is, and then talk about specifically how you can use tension, but also the release of tension, as a way to control how your reader experiences the story. So, I'm going to start with some of the idea... Some of the pieces of tension that we talked about previously. There's conflict, of course, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, anticipation, and then micro tension, which is small pieces of tension. So those are types of tension. What are... When we're talking about, like, release of tension, what are some ways we can think about sort of the opposites of these?

[DongWon] I think, I mean, conflict resolution being sort of the most obvious one. Right? And the end of the fight scene, whether that's a physical fight or an emotional fight. Right? Like, coming to some kind of conclusion where you have that mini-resolution. Right? And this doesn't have to be resolution of the core tension of your thing. Right? The monster can still be hunting them. But you make it to a safe room, you bar the door. You escape for a moment. Right? Or you have a beat where you think you defeated it. Right? And I think all of these can be small releases of tension that give your story... It adds to the pacing. Right? It pulls you through it. Because, to me, tension and release is controlling pacing, is controlling flow.

[Howard] And part of what you said right there, if you resolve the fight, but maybe not the emotional conflict, well, those are two different sources of tension. It's entirely possible to relieve... To release some of the tension. Oh, okay, good, they're not shooting at each other, but they still need to have the big talk...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And they haven't yet.

[Erin] A lot of times, I think about tension, especially in horror, but I think it works in other places, about safety versus danger, and the known versus the unknown. So if you move... And a lot of that is about tension as movement. So you move from one known state, a lot of times, to another known state. So you go from dangerous and known, I know I have to give a speech and I'm super par... Like, I just... It's just going to be so horrible, I know it. But it's dangerous. To dangerous and unknown. In the middle of my speech, the zombie apocalypse occurs.

[laughter] 

[Erin] Which is great, I don't have to do the speech anymore.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] However, new problem. But it does resolve the emotional tension of the speech.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then you move on to a new place.

[DongWon] And the reason why release is pacing, in my mind, is because... Okay, so, my worst food opinion is I don't like risotto, and part of why I don't like risotto is that every bite is the same as the one you just had. Right? It just continues to be the same flavor going forward, and the same texture going forward. And so, if you have a book that has, or you have a story that has no release of tension, it can feel very same throughout. Right? Differentiation allows us to observe the passage of time. Right? And so, when you let people have those moments of release, it makes them feel like your story's moving forward, even if the main overarching thing is still not resolved.

[Howard] I was just thinking of... I don't know if it was in Alien Earth or not, but there's a moment where the xenomorph has gotten away...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Now we're all tense, because we can have a jump scare at any point, where the xenomorph leaps out. And then, someone says, oh, we know where it is, it just killed so and so. That's actually a release of tension.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because now I know it's not going to jump out...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Right here. And then they go after it. And now I'm tense again, because they are approaching the place where we could again be jumped by the alien. And so it is a very nice rolling forward of tension and release as we make me tense, and make me relax.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and I think it's not just that it's boring, I think it's also fatiguing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] For the reader if things are at the same level of tension. Like, if you think about a set of stairs, there are landings on stairs in order to give your muscles time to recuperate before you do the next set of stairs.

[DongWon] Exactly. That's why the StairMaster at the gym is the worst thing ever invented.

[laughter]

[Erin] Is it worse or better than the risotto?

[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.

[DongWon] It's better than risotto.

[Mary Robinette] I'm so tense about wondering why.

[DongWon] I know. I know. My dislike of risotto knows no bounds. But the reason we keep going to horror, I think, is it's one of what is sometimes called a genre of the body. Right? It's a genre you feel in your body as you have the tension. Romance, erotica, there's a few... Humor, all of these are sort of categorized as sort of rom... Or genres of the body. And so they're great examples of looking at how tension builds. Right? Humor is also tension, as you tell a joke, Howard, what you called the comedic drop, is you're building tension until you have the reversal, you have the drop that lets the humor sort of be resolved. That's why you can use humor in a horror story to get that little release valve of tension before you ratchet it up again.

[Howard] It's why horror is one of my favorite things to write...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because the whole humor tool box applies.

[DongWon] It's the same skill set, it's just a different resolution.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's why Jordan Peele is one of the greatest horror auteurs of all time, because he's also one of the funniest people of all time.

[Mary Robinette] But you can also use it in things that are not particularly funny...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Or overtly horror. The Spell Shop by Sarah Beth Durst is this cozy, and it's just delightful and charming. But one of the things that she does in it that I think is so fascinating is, like, I could not stop turning the pages, she's so good at the tension and release. And one of the things she does is uses juxtaposition and questions to pull you through. So the opening of the story, our main character's a librarian, there's a coup that is going on in the city. We do not actually see the coup, we see smoke rising in the distance. But all she has to do is get out of the library with her sentient house plant. And just the juxtaposition of librarian, sentient house plant, smoke from coup in the distance, and you know that at any moment, those things could intersect...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And even though they don't directly intersect at the beginning of the book, that is still looming over you for much of the book. And it allows you to be like, any moment now, this anticipation, this juxtaposition of this extremely cozy thing with some real horrors happening in the background...

[DongWon] Well, what's useful also about your list of different types of tension is that you can alternate between them to keep flow moving through the story. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So the game Blue Prince is a great example of this, because you have the tension and release of receiving a puzzle, and then solving the puzzle. Right? And that is one kind of resolution. What made me think of it is in the background, there's also this revolutionary narrative happening, and the succession narrative happening in the background. So as you're getting story elements, that is pulling you through, as you want to know what's happening in the world, who are these characters, why is this house the way it is? At the same time that you're getting the tension and release of the puzzle solving. Right? The game Hades uses a similar structure, in terms of the tension and release of doing a very difficult combat and then dying and then getting more story. Right? So if you alternate them too, as you let pressure off one valve, you have the other one still pulling you, and then you release that one, and the other one's... You can alternate them.

[Howard] I think of it as leapfrog.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] The frog jumps, we're tense, the frog lands, and we've relaxed, and now another frog is going to jump over it. And that pattern... I mean, obviously, if that's the whole pattern all the way through the book, it will get a little stale.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] But as a structure for helping you understand tension and release in your own work, that's a fine starting point.

[DongWon] Well, this is...

[Mary Robinette][garbled] more frogs.

[Howard] You just need more frogs, literally.

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] Because I think, like, again like we talk a lot about how humans are pattern recognition creatures, and if you have the exact same type of tension resolution, tension resolution, the reader already sees the resolution when the next tension occurs, and therefore they don't feel tense. They're like, it's when you have like the hero who's played by a really big name actor in danger in the first 3 minutes of a movie and the person's like, I'm not really buying that, like, I doubt that you got Val Kilmer in order to kill him in minute one. And so when it does happen, it's very shocking.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think playing with different types of tension says, okay, we're going to do this a little bit differently. We got a question recently at a live event about how to make try-fail cycles feel different. And some of it's having a different fail to the same try, or a different try, but the same fail. Changing one thing changes the pattern enough that then humans are like, this is new, and yet again, I'm feeling my emotions.

[DongWon] Well, all this kind of plays into a thing that we're talking about with the difference between shorter fiction and longer fiction. And as you go from a short story to a novel, you need to layer in more plots. You need to go from an A plot to an A plot, B plot, C plot, D plot. And that, having those different layers, lets you alternate when you're building and when you're releasing tension to sort of create this movement and flow that we're talking about. Speaking of tension and release, we've got to take a break for a second. But when we come back, I want to hear from you guys about how you decide where to put those releases.

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[DongWon] Okay. So when we went to break, I kind of wanted to hear more about your decision making process. Right? So, when you're putting together a story, what is the thing that's telling you, okay, I need a release here, I need to build tension here? What are those things that are, like, mechanically going into your process there?

[Howard] I'm a big baby.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I do not like being tense. I am not as tense when I'm writing as when I'm reading it. And so generally speaking, I... I like my food much saltier than Sandra does, and so I know that if it's the right amount of salt, I've screwed up. It's reverse for tension. If I feel like this is too tense, then I need to turn it up a couple of notches, and that will be accurate. And that's where my barometer is now. I don't know if that's where my barometer will be in 6 months or 6 years or whatever. But it's... I'm... Life is a moving Target. I just scale things in that way because I've discovered that my tastes are such that I like a little less tension. And so when I'm writing for a wider audience, I'm going to put in more tension than I want.

[DongWon] I like that you're almost, like, checking yourself somatically as you write, of like where am I feeling tension? Is this too much? Then it's like, oh, then that's the right level. Right?

[Howard] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about it... I mean, the challenge in leaning on Howard's metaphor is that it is a season to taste. For me, when I'm using tension, I'm often using it to control pacing, and also to control the effect on the reader. So if I have... If I have a slow scene, it's a quiet scene, it's people in a room and they're having a conversation or, I don't know, making tea. I'm very likely to then try to insert some other kind of tension in order to make that moment kind of tick along, even while giving people the illusion that they're resting.

[Howard] I love this contrast. Because I'm speaking to how am I feeling while I'm reading, and Mary Robinette is speaking to how is the structure of the book working in terms of pacing. And to be honest, I use both tools.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I think a lot of us end up using both tools.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's why it's so important to call out all of them.

[DongWon] Yeah... I...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, this makes so much sense to me with both how each of you individually talk about process, talk about fiction. Erin, I'm kind of curious, like, you write incredibly tense fiction. Like, an Erin Roberts short story has me sweating from line one to the end. Like, how do you think about maintaining that level or increasing it? Do you ever, like, choose to intentionally decrease it? Or do you just make me suffer the whole time?

[Erin] I often go in writing, thinking, how can I make DongWon suffer?

[DongWon] That's... It's successful.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I think that part of it is that I have trained myself... I was thinking, to love tension. Some of this is a lifetime of watching soap operas, which have to create tension all the time in situations that are very familiar. Like... It's a lot of it like who's in love with who and who lied to who about this.

[Howard] So many frogs.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But there's so many frogs [garbled] Like, it's basically putting a whole bunch of frogs in a bag and shaking it...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Is a soap opera. And so...

[Howard] And then you nickname each frog.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well...

[DongWon] The frogs in a bag method of storytelling is what we're saying? Okay.

[Erin] And so I think because I, like, sort of grew up with that as a level of storytelling, I always want more tension. I'm like, they're spending too much time feeling safe. I don't like it. Throw something at them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think also I've learned a lot about tension from singing and seeing other people sing.

[DongWon] Ooh, I love that.

[Erin] When you talked about risotto earlier, I was like, this is how I feel... If you ever go to karaoke or even professional singers who don't modulate...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. 

[Erin] Like they haven't...

[DongWon] Who just belt. Yeah.

[Erin] They have a beautiful belting voice...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But they just belt for 5 minutes straight. After a while, you just tune it out.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And when I'm singing, I like to belt, like, I will watch the audience for, like, when I feel that they're kind of done with it, and immediately modulate what I'm doing in real time to try to, like, do something different, like, oh, that's a perfect time to get quiet. That's a perfect time... Now you know what I can do, like, I'll do something else. And so a lot of it, for me, is very like gut feeling. But in order to do that as someone who's writing a story, I will read my stories to myself, or have the voice of, like, Microsoft Word, read it to me, and feel like, if I'm not feeling tense in this moment, I need to add something else here.

[Howard] Man, if Clippy can make you tense...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You're doing it well.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Clippy makes everyone tense.

[Mary Robinette] You just made me think about a thing about why we modulate in a song, and we do it for emphasis. There are times when we go quieter because we want someone to lean in, and that's also I think places where you have their quieter scenes, where it looks like the tension is dropping, but there's this undercurrent underneath it, that you're like, I have this creeping sense of dread, versus other times when you do belt full out because you're trying to emphasize a different kind of thing. I think thinking about the emotion of the scene is really, like, why you are choosing one type of tension over another, and whether you're doing it as a release or a tightening.

[Erin] Just a yes-and to that. Like, from the singing part of things. When do you... When people sing quietly, they're able to enunciate more, you're more likely to hear the lyrics of what they're saying to actually...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Get a sense of what the words are when someone sings. The louder you sing, the broader your voice becomes, and a lot of times, people don't listen to the words as much, they just listen to the sound of it and the feel of it. And so in writing, I think, in those small scenes, if there's a small detail of tension, like the tension is actually, like, whether or not this person wore the thing on their left wrist versus their right, the small detail that works better in a quiet scene. In the middle of a large fight scene, it's going to be hard to pay attention to, like, what side somebody had something on, because the bigness of it is actually drowning out some of those small details. So having both of them allows you to give both types of tension their demesne.

[Howard] And in the spirit of yes-and, I've got an oh, wait.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] When I was studying audio engineering, I had things exactly backwards, and the instructor in the studio had to come over and tell me, no, you're pushing the faders at the wrong time. I was mixing something where the singers would be really loud and then really whisper, and then really loud and really whisper, as sort of a call and response. And I was turning them up during the loud, and down during the whisper. And he said that no no no no no no no. What you're trying to mimic is the lean in. When people lean in in order to hear something, they concentrate on it, and their brain makes it louder. And so when the soft singing happens, turn it up. Let us lean in. When it's loud, bring down the fader and let us sit back and it washes over us. I do not know how this applies to writing, but it's fascinating to me.

[DongWon] Well, as pattern recognition machines, what we do is recognize edges. Right? An edge will always stand out to us more than the middle of something. Right? So when you have that micro tension response, it gets us to lock in and focus, like, when we're like, oh, wait, what was that punch line? You know what I mean? Even though if the scene isn't overall a funny one, having that little bit of just like friction there lets us refocus and pay attention and lean in, as you were saying, to hear the thing better, and then we can go back to sort of what the baseline of the scene is.

[Erin] Yeah. Thinking of that and the call and response you were talking about, since we put that in the title, is the like... It creates a pattern that you then break. It's like lean in for a hug, this is great, lean in for a hug, this time I stabbed you.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so it's like...

[DongWon] Surprising, yet inevitable.

[laughter]

[Erin] If you know me, yes. So, like, I think that is a thing that allows you to almost lull the reader into thinking that there isn't tension, that we're in a low tension moment, and then allows you to ratchet it up really quickly, which makes that edge that much sharper...

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] To not cut your reader with, but to cut through their attention with.

[DongWon] Cut me, apparently.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And it is that... The thing that we'll see often at the end of a story, that we get this big cathartic snap because of a big tension release.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that's also why you'll see in a lot of places where you get, like in the horror thing where they're about to get out and everything looks great. It's that contrast can provide you with more of a reaction to this new tension.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of new tension, it is time for homework, and I want you, listeners, to consider adding some new tension to your story. I want you to look at an existing thing that you've already written, and I want you to look at it and see if you can spot what in that scene causes the tension. And if there's not anything, that's a good sign that you should add something. Try listening to one of the earlier episodes where we do a whole module on tension that's several episodes long. See if you can add a bit of juxtaposition, see if you can add a question. If there is tension already, what happens to that scene if you change it?

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