Writing Excuses 21.19: Getting Everything Connected

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Writing Excuses 21.19: Getting Everything Connected 

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-19-getting-everything-connected

Key Points: Causal chain. Everything has a consequence, and actions lead to the next problem. Unity of effect. Kuleshov effect. Geese plague. Engage the reader's pattern recognition. Emergent narrative. Pineapple reticule. Trick the reader into believing everything is connected.

[Season 21, Episode 19]

[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 19]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Getting everything connected. 

[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 I'm going to be talking about getting everything connected. Which gives me the opportunity to use a phrase that I did not learn until I started, like, taking writing classes, which was the causal chain.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Which is the idea, I believe, that each thing in your story links to the next thing, with some sort of... I don't know, chaininess in between it, that perhaps one of you has a better way to describe or explain that than I do?

[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that... There's two things when we're talking about a causal chain. One is the idea that everything has a consequence, and that each thing that your character does leads to the next problem. So that there is this continual link and if you pull one thing out of the story, that the whole story collapses, and that if you can't... If you can pull something out, then it's not connected and you should pull it out. Then there's another thing, which is not exactly the causal chain, but that Edgar Allan Poe called unity of effect. Which is that things are thematically connected...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Together. Or tonally.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, one thing I think of... Causal chain is one of those things that I think of as an artifice of fiction. Right? It's one of the places where fiction is different from real life, because in real life... Not that, I mean, things are causally connected because we live in a universe. But also, it often doesn't feel that way. Right? What... The world is complex enough that what happens to me now feels very disconnected or impossible for me to predict based on what happened 5 minutes ago, because some event will happen overseas or on a national political scale that affects me personally that I truly had very little control over. Right? But, in fiction, when something is happening on the page that feels really disconnected from everything else, it will feel random, and it will be an unpleasant narrative experience for your audience. Your reader wants a causal chain. They want everything to feel connected, either in a plot oriented way, in terms of action A had a consequence, that consequence leads to action B, or in a thematic way of somebody's dealing with personal strife at home and they turn on the news and war has broken out...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Overseas. Right? So, I think there's ways to do it, of having that randomness, but that randomness needs to feel integrated in a... The bigger why of the book. And if that's missing, it will feel purely random and unpleasant.

[Erin] One of the funny things that... This is not a writing thing exactly, but it occurs to me that when you hear people talk about their writing careers, to sort of connect that part, you will see people attempt to create the causal chain out of the randomness of life.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Oh, boy. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So it's... They'll be like, well, obviously, I took that one class on a Tuesday that day, and therefore... And, like, and this and this and this, and it all led to why I'm a best-selling writer today. And in truth, life is a lot more random than I think we want it to be. I think also a lot of conspiracy theories are built out of the idea that we want things not to happen at random, that we want there to be a causal chain. And so, I think, one thing I'm curious about is do you think there are ways to exploit the human desire to create cause even where cause doesn't exist, in order to create momentum in a story?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's... In life... I tell my clients all the time, don't narrativize this. Right? Just because this book didn't work, doesn't mean that the next book's not going to. Or just because this book did work had nothing to do with the previous book. You know what I mean? And it's like there's such an urge, because we are creatures of pattern recognition. Right? I talk about this all the time. We want to find story, we want to find patterns everywhere. And so when you encounter events in life, you will build a story out of them. It's impossible not to. It's important to resist it sometimes, so you don't take away the wrong lesson from it. But, when you're writing fiction, you can... You should be using that against your reader. Right? You should be letting them draw the connections. Right? And so going back to what we were talking about, contrast and juxtaposition, in our last episode, the reason that works is because of the urge to narrativize, is because of the urge to draw... To make A and B connect, even when A has nothing to do with B. Right? So if you show me two different things, I'm going to try and connect them reflexively. And if there's truly no connection, then I will realize that later and be annoyed and it will feel like you made a mistake. But if you make me connect those two different things, that feels like magic. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's a thing they say about, I think Philip K Dick, that... Maybe it was Harlan Ellison. Who knows? Some... One of them had a list of titles, random list of titles, and when they wrote a short story, they would just slap a random title on it...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And the reader would draw a connection and be like, oh, well, that's why it's called this.

[DongWon] I haven't heard that. I would believe that about both of them, though, given their titles.

[Erin] Well, it's the Kuleshov effect. A chance to talk about the Kuleshov effect! The... Which is, like, a film thing from the early days of filmmaking, where a guy, he would show a picture...  let's say it would be, like, a grave, and then a man's face. And then he would show an apple and a man's face. And then he would show, like, a wedding and a man's face. And he would say, okay, well, what is being shown here? And they would be like, in this first one, you can see how sad he is, in the second one, you can see how hungry he is, and then you can see how joyful he is. And it's the exact same clip of the exact same man...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Making the most neutral face ever.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And... But because we want to make the things connect, we will actually say... Like, see in someone's face an emotion that is not there. And I think that's just such a fun thing. I think it's used a lot more, to be honest, in games where people...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Will take something that's, like, a visual and associate it with an action that is happening and use that to make the player fill in the rest of the gaps of the story and find space for themselves within it.

[Mary Robinette] And I think... As you were talking about that, I was thinking, oh, you can also use this... The reader, like, making those connections, you can also use that with the logical causal chains of worldbuilding. Also, that's like, well, if it's like this, why isn't it like that? Or, they've done this, ergo, that must be the way it works. And the author's like, no, no, not what I planned, but...

[DongWon] I mean, I talk about worldbuilding as playing a game of Go sometimes. Right? And the thing is, when you play Go, or Baduk as we call it, is you're trying to capture territory on a board. Right? And so one thing you will do at one stage in the game is start putting pieces down in random open parts of the board, where you haven't had a big fight about it yet. And what you're telling the other players, I'm interested in this area, but we're not dealing with that right now, I'm just letting you know that we're going to have a fight about that later. And so sometimes when you're doing worldbuilding, it's in game principles, we call this [draw maps?] simply playing spaces. Right? Where you will put a marker down somewhere and be like, yeah, there's something about how magic works over here, or there's some geographical feature over here, and then we'll come back to that and build out that detail. But sometimes you can just do that for your reader, too. Let your reader fill all that in.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] No need to tell them the thing, let them do the work of drawing the connections and building that out. And that gives them participation in buying into the story in a way that is hard to get otherwise. I think this is... Going back to video games, part of why FromSoft fans are so feral about their games, because in the Dark Souls games, there's no... Very little, like, narrative that's told to you, you're forced to assemble it all from the two line descriptions of items. But when you start piecing it together, it feels really magical to feel that world cohere, even though what you're getting is a bunch of random little points on a map.

[Mary Robinette] What I love about that analogy is that we can go from that back over to plot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Where you can put a little... Something that looks like a little random point on a map that later leads to something huge that you deploy. And so that link is still there, and it is a fun thing to play with as a conscious tool.

[Erin] Yeah. And it's interesting because I think in novels, you see that more. In short fiction, I love the random outside world building point as a way to make the world feel bigger.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] In a pl... And, say like I'm not going to explore that in this story. Like you're playing the game, you're like, in another story perhaps, we would talk about what's going on there, but today we are not. Like, it's like, you're, like, talking about, like, I suddenly met this orphan whose parents were killed in, like, the geese plague of 2028, and you're, like, not going to ex... I've given you just enough.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And what I think makes these work is they usually have a chain or two within... They have a couple of links within themselves.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Usually, they have like a word that tells you something, like a geese plague, you know what a geese is, you know what a plague is, that sounds bad together. Who knows, do they cause it, were they the victims of it? But it gives you enough that you can create a couple links of chain, and then store them somewhere else and think, hum, that's a chain that's a causal chain of another story. Or, in a bigger story, eventually these links of chain will connect with the links that I already have, and it'll be this amazing moment of revelation that, oh, my gosh, that's why that is suddenly important. What else is important is our break, and when we return, we will talk... DongWon has a hand up and we'll talk about something.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[DongWon] If your anxiety, depression, or ADHD are more than a rough patch, you don't just need another medication. And Talkiatry makes it easy to see a psychiatrist online using your insurance in days. Talkiatry is a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more. Unlike therapy only apps, Talkiatry is psychiatry. That means you're seeing a medical provider who can diagnose simple health conditions and provide medication when it's appropriate. All of their 600 plus clinicians are in network with major insurers, so you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly prescriptions or out of network fees. You'll meet with an experienced, licensed psychiatrist who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and can prescribe medication when it's right for you. Your care stays consistent, and evidence-based. Getting started with Talkiatry takes just a few minutes. Complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your needs, and schedule your first visit in days, not months. More than 300,000 patients have already found high quality psychiatric care through Talkiatry. Head to talkiatry.com/wx and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes.

[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.

[Erin] We are back. I'm so excited to hear whatever dis...

[DongWon] The thing that I raised my hand to talk about before we went to break... I did not expect to get called out so explicitly.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] My medium of storytelling is through TTRPGs in actual play. Right? And so one thing that I was thinking about as we were having this conversation is the beauty of AP is that it ends up having this really coherent feeling narrative at the end, even though it's all improvised. And so how do you take a bunch of random stuff that comes from worldbuilding and the decisions that players are making and make it cohere into something that is fun and satisfying to listen to? Right? And I think the failure sense of AP is that sometimes they do feel a little random, but when they really work, they cohere into something that felt planned, and I think that comes down to what you were talking about in terms of the Edgar Allan Poe thing, in terms of thematic consistency.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And character consistency is also tied into that. Right? And so, for me, the things I'm looking at early on are establishing really clearly for myself and the players what's the thematic questions we're engaging within, and then they're building their characters in conversation with that. And so as they make character choices, it all is going to be pointing in a general direction until the really magical moment when everything coheres and snaps into place, of, like, oh, here's our plot. You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It is... It's something that... I've been thinking about this since I've been reading a lot of fiction that's coming out of countries that are not Western dominated. Because... Especially when I'm reading Japanese fiction, there's... The plot is often there's this guy in a four and a half mat tatami room and he's fucking up at school and that's about it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But there's this... There are these links so there is this unity of effect that's happening. And... Sorry. My brain made a whole diagram in my head while you were talking. I'm like, that is a visual diagram and I don't know how to translate that into...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That usually doesn't usually happen to me on the podcast.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, oh. But I think it is one of the things that made me start thinking about this idea of thematic links...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And unity of effect as one of the ways that you can have things that are in a story that look like they're not connected, but... Like, that on a surface, or a plot level, aren't connected, but are integral to the... Integral...

[DongWon] Integral.

[Mary Robinette] Integral to the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think you're talking about Japanese fiction. One of my very favorite films of the last 5 years, maybe the best film I've seen in the last five years, is this Wim Wenders called Perfect Days. I've mentioned it on the podcast before. It's a Japanese language film made by a German filmmaker that is mostly about a man who cleans toilets in Tokyo. He goes around... It's literally partially funded by this... The Tokyo Toilet Bureau or something like that.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Amazing.

[DongWon] He literally goes around and cleans these incredibly beautifully designed public toilets around the city, and has a series of encounters with people. It is the most plotless movie I think I've ever seen. There's no A to B to C in the movie. There's no, like, causal connection. Like, sometimes he meets somebody and that person comes back later in the movie, but it's not like that is building to a big conflict or a resolution. It is purely a sequence of events, but each one feels thematically resonant because the movie's deeply interested in character and deeply interested in this central question, which is about communication and connection and suffering. Right? And the question of how did this guy get to be this way, why is his life so magical and special, and why do I want to be him in spite of seeing the ways in which he suffers, is like the questions of the movie. And by repeatedly showing me scenarios in which he gets to express that in different ways, the whole thing feels very coherent. Like, one of the most, like, coherent pieces of art I've seen, in spite of the fact that this thing literally has no plot. Right? And so, I think it's really interesting to think about causal chains and causality in a story that has none.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And so if you want to, like, see how to do that, I would... Go watch this movie. If you don't like art house cinema, you will be like, why did he make me do this?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But go with this lens of trying to understand how to make a plotless piece of art that feels coherent.

[Mary Robinette] I am so glad you started talking about that, because I think I can finally articulate this diagram...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's playing up in my head. That it is, when you're talking about logical causal chains, when you're talking about thematic links, unity of effect, what we're talking about is engaging... Actively engaging the reader's pattern recognition. That all of these things say to the reader, I am making a space for you to link things together in your head, to find patterns where there aren't necessarily ones, whether... And so that when you are doing this successfully, you are kind of more actively collaborating with the reader than if it is all just... If it is only A to B to C. That sometimes those logical causal chains are the thing that Erin was talking about, where you have three links here...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And later three links, and then the reader assembles all of them into a beautiful charm bracelet at the end. And I think that that's... That's a fun thing to think about, like, how am I making space for the reader within this network that I'm providing?

[Erin] And am I ever accidentally making space?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] Because I think you can also, like, accidentally create something you didn't mean to, and games often call this emergent narrative. Which can be amazing when a narrative comes out of nowhere. But... I love telling this story, so I'm sure I've told it before, but my good friend played Dragon Age 2... 3... Dragon Age Inquisition, and went and killed... There were several dragons, and he killed them all.

[DongWon] Yeah, you told this.

[Erin] And he just leveled up to kill more dragons, and then at the end, he was like, I didn't get like a trophy or anything? And I was like, because the game is about saving the world. And he was like, it's called Dragon Age, they had seven difficult to kill dragons.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That was a cool number. It felt resonant. I did it. And I get nothing. And, like, I am very disappointed that this game didn't know that I was going to draw these patterns.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And I kept thinking, like, what would I do other than just make a trophy for that? But, like, maybe you don't call it Dragon Age, maybe you don't make it seven dragons because, like, we love those odd numbers that feel like...

[DongWon] Yeah. If it's six dragons, it might not...

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Have felt that way. We were talking about this a while ago, about the way in which the rule of three and patterns and things like that are part of it.

[Erin] Yeah. So something to think about is, like, are you creating a unity of effect within your story, and if so, is it the effect that you're meaning to unify around or not?

[Mary Robinette] This is... I'm going to also tell an anecdote, which is when I was working on Of Noble Family, I like my characters to be doing something, and so I was like, the pineapple reticule, she's going to be making a... It's a handbag, so she's knitting this thing. And then my readers were like, I love the pineapple reticule. So I tossed it into the next scene, I'm like, she's not done with that, she's still doing this. And they're like, oh, my goodness, pineapple reticule's amazing. And then in the third scene, I'm like, these take a long time, this is only like 3 days later. I get this comment, I love the pineapple reticule, I can't wait to see the payoff. And I was like...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, no, because I had accidentally set up...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] A rule of three...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And they were looking for a logical causal chain that was not there. And, like, I briefly looked, can I have her smack someone or stab someone? And it was like not that kind of book. So I had to pull it out because of that accident.

[DongWon] What I love about this conversation is we started from this point of how is everything connected, and the answer is sort of, it's not, you trick the reader into believing it is. Right? And there's a way in which, I'm going to return to our favorite metaphor, which is a book is an act of hospitality. Right? And there's a way in which when you are writing your story, if you crowd the entryway or every room or the sitting room with so much stuff that there's no space for the reader, they're going to actually have a bad time. If you try to draw all the connections for them, it's... It feels over prescribed and it feels airless. Right? But if you make a space that the reader can move through the space you've made for them, find their own place to sit in there, then they will have a different relationship to it. Right? And I'd add as an extreme, that's making room for fanfiction. Right? But it's also, like, making space for them to draw their own conclusions about stuff, to come to thematic ideas, or those elements without necessarily having to draw it for them explicitly. I think the movie Sinners does an incredible job of this, of making space for the audience to reach their own conclusions about what's happening there and who's right and who's wrong. And I think some of the critiques of that movie is that I think it's very smartly very resistant to a simple reading. Right? And I think sometimes making sure that there's room for the reader to engage with your story and have their own say about their experience of it is the key to making things feel really connected. Right? It's letting them realize who the murderer is two sentences before the detective says it. Right?

[Mary Robinette] And at the same time, not playing coy with them. Like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Not saying I want you to make a necklace, but tell them we're not feeling sorry...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have to give them the tools, you have to make sure that they understand kind of what the goal is, but letting them have some participation in there. It is a delicate balance sometimes.

[DongWon] Yeah. Because the risk is, their necklace is not going to look exactly the way you envisioned it.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] But that's always going to be true. Right? Once it's out of your hands, once it's published, it belongs to the reader in a certain way. And so I think sometimes it is accepting that, yes, their version's going to be a little bit different than what you had in your head, but that's okay. Because it's still all the things that you put in place for them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And with that, we are going to move to the next step in our causal chain, which is the homework.

[Erin] For this week's homework, I'd like you to take a story that you have, and take all the scenes and maybe, like, put them on different index cards. And kind of write what happens in the scene, like, they go to the store, the world explodes, the geese attack, whatever happens. And just shuffle them all up, and pick out two at random. And write a scene that would fall in between them, that would help you create either a unity of effect or a causal chain that would make them work in this random order that you now have them.

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