Writing Excuses 21.09: Grounding The Reader

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Writing Excuses 21.09: Grounding The Reader 

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-09-grounding-the-reader

Key Points: Grounding the reader? Make them feel fully engaged or immersed in the story.  What are you grounding the reader in? Place, time, emotion? Emotion. Where, who, genre. Tale-telling style. Voice-driven versus action-driven spectrum. Grounding in the storyteller.  How do you ground someone in the story? Sensory details. Context. Action and flashback. Details that catch the eye. Embodiment and emotion side by side. FAST reactions: Focus, Action, Sensation, Thought.

[Season 21, Episode 09]

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

[Season 21, Episode 09]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Grounding the reader.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Erin] And today, we are going to be talking about how to ground the reader in the story from the very beginning. And what we mean by sort of grounding the reader in the story... At least what I mean, is making them feel like they are fully engaged in, fully immersed in the story. And I think that's true whether it's a short story or a novel. A lot of times we talk about novels as being more immersive. But even if you're only reading a 300 word flash piece, you want to feel like in some ways you are in it and you understand where the character is in it. But, I have two questions to start y'all off with. One is what are you actually trying to ground the reader in? Is it the place, is it the time, is it the emotion? What do you think is the most important?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Okay. Good. Love that.

[DongWon] Emotion. I think starting with how the character feels is the most important for me. I mean... But I'm always, like, very emotion forward in how I think about storytelling. And then, if I know how the character feels about the environment they're in, feels about the situation they're in, then starting to build out all of that around them... That comes secondarily to me. But, you had a different opinion.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I think that there's three basic things that you want to establish at the beginning. Where, who, and genre. And I think that you can do those in the first three sentences. And I think you do where with a link to sensory details about the location. I think you do who with their attitude or their emotion. But also what their role is and what action they're engaged in, if you're doing an action-driven opening. And then the genre, you do with the genre specific details. I'm going to use an example. And I'm using an example, this is an action-driven opening from one of my own stories. From Ghost Talkers.

"The Germans were flanking us at Delville wood when I died."

Ginger Stuyvesant had a dim awareness of her body repeating the soldier's words to the team's stenographer. She tried to hold that awareness at bay, along with the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army.

So, the first thing I start with is not actually character. Right? "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died." What that tells you is we're talking to a ghost. So we get our genre specific detail up right at the front. We get a sense of where, she's someplace that's large enough to hold dozens of other spirit circles, and it's some sort of military thing. And we have a sense of who she is, because she's the one who is repeating. You may not know the word medium yet, but that is the action she is engaged in. And you also know from the dim awareness of her body and trying to hold that awareness away, that for her, this is an everyday occurrence. This is her job. So I'm doing all of those things, and that's one sequence. But I could have tried to... I could have flipped that. I could have started with,

Ginger Stuyvesant tried to hold the awareness of her body at bay, along with the awareness of the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army. She repeated the soldier's words to the team stenographer. "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died."

So I'm hitting those same things. The sequence doesn't matter. What I'm doing with that, the choice to start with that opening line was I'm going to give you a question, and I'm going to answer it, coming from the previous thing, of building the reader trust. But I don't think that the order that it comes in matters.

[DongWon] I would agree with that. I also want to add a little bit of extra thought to the thing I was saying earlier about emotion. I think the emotion can also be trying to establish a reader emotion...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] In addition to... Or a character's emotion. Because I think what was interesting to me about both those examples was I had an emotional state in hearing both of those that was very evocative in both cases, but different. Right? The first was almost a sense of immediate panic, of, like, oh, the Germans have surrounded us and I died. Right? Then it's like, oh, that's so bad. The other is a professionalism, a person doing a job and trying to channel a thing under extreme stress and circumstance. And so I think the emotional state communicated about the character and then therefore my emotional state was both really different, but really grounding in both cases. Because I was immediately felt... Not necessarily embodied, because it's a spirit, but, like, I felt in the scene. In a very immediate way, because you were controlling my emotional state really, really effectively.

[Erin] Yes.

[laughter]

[Erin] I agree with that 100%. No, I was thinking... I was trying to, like, recall those in my head and I think one thing that is in there that you didn't mention in, like, the three things, or maybe it's a part of the who, is also, like, the culture and, I guess, tale telling style...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Of the piece. Like, is this a more... Like, what we learn in that section also is there is dialogue, even if it is dialogue of the dead. There's, like, reported dialogue and action. Like, we know that we're in... We know what POV we are in. We understand, like, whether we're going to be getting something that's distanced or close, some of the things that we talked about last season. So there is also kind of the grounding in the way the story is told.

[Mary Robinette] I completely agree with that. So, something we're going to talk about later is this idea of a voice-driven opening versus an action-driven opening, and I think of them as two ends of a spectrum. Most stories are a blend of them. So, in a voice-driven opening like the... At the far extreme of it, I think about, like, the aesthetic voice of it. And that's some of what you're talking about, which is encapsulating both the author's ideas, but also the... Sort of the voice of the character, their history... A lot of the things that we talked about last season about how to make a character feel live.

[Erin] Yeah. I often think of it as, like, for me, grounding in the storyteller, because I am more voice focused. It's kind of like is this an interesting person from whom you would like to hear a tale? Like, is this person... It's like the person coming up to you and being like, you'll never guess what happened to me at the grocery store yesterday, and you're like, well, okay, I wouldn't... Like, all right, let's hear about it, and something about the way in which they say that makes you feel like you're in good hands. Because even if you don't understand everything that's going on, you don't understand all the action, you understand who is taking you through it, and you feel confident that that person is going to do it in a really interesting way.

[DongWon] It's the difference between the Ancient Mariner stopping you versus, like, some guy at the bar. Right? Like, there's a difference in tone and vibe between those two things, and one of those is just really grounding you into different kinds of stories.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Although I would not go any place with either of those, just to be really clear.

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] Ancient Mariner at...[fubar]

[laughter]

[DongWon] The problem is you can't go anywhere with the Ancient Mariner. He's stuck with going into the wedding.

[Erin] Now that we have a sense of, like, what are we grounding in, how are you doing that? Like, what are the tools that you use in order to ground someone in the story?

[Mary Robinette] So, sensory details are a big one for me. I think that's one of the things that we're asking the reader to do is to sort of build pictures or words... Like images, sensations... We're asking them to carry part of that with them and to do some of that work. So, if I can tap into a sensory detail that is going to be something that the reader... We talked about this with All the Birds in the Sky. When we were talking about... There was a point where one of the characters sat down in the slushie ground... and we've all experienced that, where you sat down on a bench that you didn't know was wet. And so I think anytime you can use a sensory detail that is... That a reader can relate to, that's going to immediately make people feel more grounded, even if it's not something that they could have experienced. Dan talked about this in his... In a class that he taught on the cruise, about fighting, Jackie Chan will have a character thrown through a plate glass window, then stumble back and hit their head on a shelf, because everyone knows what hitting your head on a shelf...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Feels like. And so I think that if you can...

[DongWon] Hopefully we don't know what getting through...

[Mary Robinette] Most of us don't know...

[DongWon] A plate glass... Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think that if you can find a sensory detail that is... That we can link to, that that's one of the things you can do to help the reader feel grounded.

[dong wall] Yeah.

[Erin] That makes a lot of sense, but I have a devil's advocate question that I will advocate for the devil after the break.

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[Erin] All right, we are back. My devil advocacy is ready. This is for you, DongWon. You talked about how difficult it is, in a previous episode, sometimes for action...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To really grab you. But when Mary Robinette was talking about sensory details, I mean, what's more sensory than the spaceship blowing up around you, and, like, all the sounds and the feelings and the noise. So if that has so many sensory details, is there a reason, like, does that help, or does that not help, in terms of getting grounded in the story?

[DongWon] Sensory can help, and I think sensory details are really, really important. I mean, to be really clear, I said start with emotion, but also, like, that emotion is often embodied and grounded in a specific way. What we smell, what we feel, what we hear. But sometimes I find starting in a quieter moment lets me learn more about how a person is experiencing sensory details in a really different way. So I think about Arkady Martine... I use this example all the time, but there's this moment in the novel where a bomb goes off, and the character experiences it. The way the character experiences it is by removing sensory detail first. Right? She has very little sense of what happened and is very disoriented, and then, one by one, the author adds back sensory detail, and that grounds me in that character's experience so much. Right? There's this description of, like, learning what the word for bomb was because that's what they were yelling that wasn't any of the other words that she knew. And so, like, that thing of, like, being able to lock into I can't process everything that's happening, so I'm going to focus on this one detail, feels really grounding and real to me, even though there's an overwhelming amount of sensory detail. I think part of the problem with starting with an action scene is there's too much information. I think oftentimes in an action scene, I need to know who my antagonists are, I need to know what kind of technology level's happening, I need to know what the physical space looks like. I need to know why I'm being shot at. I need to know what my goal is. Right? It's so much information to get across very, very quickly while also trying to heighten the stakes, in terms of, like, this fast paced action scene, that it's very overwhelming for me as a reader. Which is part of why I think it's hard to do well.

[Mary Robinette] I think what you're pointing at is context.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That often the reason that it's not working is because the reader lacks context. So, for instance, let's say that I'm at home and I have upstairs neighbors and I hear footsteps. Contextually, that's fine. Let's say I'm at home and I hear footsteps upstairs, but I know that my upstairs neighbors are out of town. Let's say I'm at home and I hear my cat, who uses buttons to talk, and I hear my cat say, hurry, stranger, and then I hear footsteps upstairs and I know my neighbors are out of town. Like, those are contextually several different things. That last one did happen by the way.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Very unsettling.

[Mary Robinette] Extremely unsettling.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, those are very, very different contexts. And I think what happens with an action... With the fight scenes is we do not have the context, we don't know what we're supposed to care about, what we're supposed to root for, what the objective is. And it doesn't take a lot to give context. Honestly.

[Erin] That's funny. It makes me think of how often you see in films and television, but sometimes books as well, the one big moment of action, and then the flashback. Like, 24 hours earlier, like, oh, I was just waking up and it felt great.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because in that case, it's like... It gives us the anticipation of context. The thing that just happened is going to have all this context that you're going to bring out, and this is a big promise. And you're making it and we will actually get to see it fulfilled on the page. Which I think is really exciting. But thinking about that bomb scene, the thing I remember is... I believe that's a scene that comes right after they're having a meal.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And the character's looking at the person drinking all the water, and is like... Or eating meat...

[DongWon] There's...

[Erin] There's something where they're like...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] They're eating meat, which is, like, insane to them because they grew up on a space station. They're just eating, like, a big slab of meat, and there's a fountain going behind her, and she's like, that is such an insane waste of water. And it was just like this complete moment of disorientation, followed by physical disorientation.

[Erin] Yeah, and I remember that moment.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, I remember the bomb, but I remember the like, oh, my gosh, the water is gross, and the meat, like, how could you be doing that, because it's such a different perspective...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Than I am used to, and therefore, that's a detail that catches the eye. I think one thing that's just interesting with action is we see a lot of action...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think there's just like a lot, like, in film and television, we see a lot of things blowing up. We see a lot of people, for better or worse, getting shot and dismembered. And so I think sometimes we tune those details out because they don't feel new or different. And so... But seeing somebody, like, freak out over a fountain is new and different.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So maybe part of the answer can be that when you're grounding, find a detail to ground in, a sensory detail that is going to catch the reader's awareness in a way that they might not be used to.

[DongWon] It's kind of like the thing you were saying about the Jackie Chan thing of you need to have him hitting his head on a shelf, too, because I know what that feels like. I don't know what getting shot feels like.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It seems bad, but I don't have experience with it, so I don't have a visceral reaction to it. Right? And so this is, again, returning to the idea of the microcosm, where I find the microcosm to be really, really useful. To jump media a little bit, as a GM, and it's sort of an actual play setting, one of the things is the players are my audience in addition to the people who are experiencing the story. Right? You have sort of two layers of audience. But one thing I need to do, one thing I've really learned to do, is when starting a campaign, starting a game, I need to put my players in a small relatable situation to ease them into the character. I need to give them a small stakes goal. And so when I'm introducing the characters, I'll do little vignettes that are actually like pretty quiet moments, but that sort of give them a way to figure out, okay, if I'm this person, how do I solve challenges? Right? How do I figure out who I am? So it's not just like a bombastic opening of, like, I'm so and so, and here's my thing in the tavern. It's like, okay, if you are trying to get across town to make it to a meeting on time, how are you doing that?

[Mary Robinette] And this goes back to the thing you were saying before, about grounding starts from emotion.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That, with that, and also the example that you brought up from A Memory Called Empire, that you could have described that scene in eating at the restaurant and made that food seem totally normal and ordinary. But the character's attitude, the lens through which the character's viewing the world, is one of the things that we're trying to introduce the reader to in most fiction, not all fiction. And so thinking about that lens, why are they doing that?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Why are they experiencing things this way? I also think about it as what is their attitude, their opinion about things. You mentioned a thing in a previous episode about sometimes... Last season, about how sometimes you'll write a character having a big emotion, that's a scene that won't actually appear in the story.

[Erin] Yeah. And it's funny, I was thinking though... I think earlier you were talking about embodiment. And so I think in some ways it's like you want the embodiment and the emotion side by side. So if you're leading with, like, something physical, you want enough emotion so that you understand, like, why is this physical... How do they feel about this physical thing happening to them? If six people get slapped, they will all feel it probably the same way, but they won't all, like, emotionally feel it the same way. It depends on who's doing the slapping, what's happening...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Where it's going?

[DongWon] Why did he get slapped mattered a lot for how you respond to that, and that's the emotion I want to be grounded in.

[Erin] Exactly. Is it a stranger slapping you, is it your mother? That's a very different thing that's going to be happening, even though the feel of the hand on the face is probably very similar. And then on the other  side of things, like, if you start from emotion, how can you embody this emotion?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So that you're not, like, floating around just being like, I am sad, but like... Or I don't understand this culture around me, there's something in it that is an embodied sense, so that that emotion has somewhere to live. Because I think sometimes I don't feel grounded in a story when it's so emotional that I don't understand, like, what is even happening. Like it's gone to just, like, feeling the feelings, with no understanding of why they're happening, where they're happening, or, like, to whom they're happening.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've been using a... This acronym recently, FAST reactions. Focus, Action, Sensation, Thought. That these are the places that we feel reactions. The things that we notice, Focus. The actions that we take in response to the thing. The sensations, where we feel it in our body, and then the things we think about it. And it's not that a character has to have all of those all at the same time. But when they're having reactions, they're probably going to have at least one of those. When I want them to have a really big emotion, I'll like clump them. But for me, it is thinking about where does this character hold tension for the sensation? Where does this character hold tension, what things are comfortable for them, what things are uncomfortable? Using the slap again, if we add one more possible person, if this is someone who's into BDSM, they're going to have a different reaction, they're... The action that they take, the sensations that they have, are going to be different on that slap if it's a consensual slap then it would be if it was a non-consensual slap in a totally different... Even if it's the same character... Those reactions are going to be different.

[Erin] I love that. And we're going to now ground you in some homework. And I promise, it's not go slap people. That is not...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Or be slapped. Don't be. No.

[Erin] Don't slap or be slapped. Or at least if you do it, don't do it because we told you to.

[Mary Robinette] Unless it's consensual, and we love you very much.

[Erin] But I think what I want you to do for the homework is to take something that you're opening and just write the actions. Just write, like, what is physically happening, where the person is, what they're doing, if they're being slapped, what is... What are the sensations that are happening? And then go through and actually figure out, like, write yourself little annotated notes. What is the emotion that you want to have associated with each of those actions? This is how they're going to feel, this is what getting into it. And finally, once you've done that, try writing the scene where it's integrated, where they have the emotions that you annotated mixed with the actions that you've already described, and see what happens.

[DongWon] I love that. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.