Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/11/13/17-46-monstrous-awakening/

 

Key Points: What does it mean to wake up monstrous? Body horror and body humor play with our fears of losing ability, of losing agency. That could be me? To be scared, to be horrified at helplessness, rope and duct tape could do it, too. Watch out for the sideswipe at disability. Think about ripple effects. Consider the metaphor of apartment life as a disaster! Pay attention to the point of view, and authorial empathy. Make sure your character keeps their humanity and agency. Don't grab that wheelchair, don't just help without asking.

 

[Season 17, Episode 46]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Monstrous Awakening.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are here to talk about this idea of monstrous awakening. One of the things that I'm going to ask you all to do before you listen to this episode is actually to pause and to go read an essay that Fran wrote that's called You Wake Up Monstrous. We will be here, and it's fine if you don't have time to listen to... to read that before you listen to the episode. Totally fine, you won't be lost, but if you have time, it will give you some important framing, I think. So, let's dive in and talk about this idea of body horror and body issues. Fran, and you kind of sort of for those who have not had time to listen, sort of sum up what we're talking about with body horror and body issues, using some of the metaphors that you use in your wonderful essay?

[Fran] Um… Yes. I can. I… So, body horror and body humor as well, and even a little bit of inspiration for it, all use these sort of there but for the grace of whatever universal entity is out there, that that happens to me. You see that in movies like The Fly, you see that in Kafka's Metamorphosis where the character wakes up and they are transformed into a bug. Or they are… They lose their… Not just their ability to speak, but their mouth disappears. In The Matrix, for instance. Those are all forms of body horror that play with and on sort of vestigal fears of losing ability, agency. They also play with the discomfort that we see each other go through when we become either ill or disabled.

 

[Mary Robinette] So when we're thinking about these things, a lot of times, we see authors reach for disability as shorthand for evil or helplessness. But it doesn't have to be that way. What are some other choices that a writer could make?

[Chelsea] I have a slightly different angle for how to get ahead in advertising. I'm thinking about like the body thing. I was kind of just forming a thing in my head about Neil waking up with no mouth and that helplessness. Like, I was trying to connect it with something else. I was trying to connect it to, like, you can wake up and you can have no mouth and stuff, and all of a sudden, everything is very different and there's a bug on you, and all those other horrible things. It's like you're doing this because you want people to be scared and you want people to kind of be horrified at the helplessness. But I'm also thinking about like… If you want people to be horrified by the helplessness, that's fine. There's always like rope and duct tape. Then nobody is like missing a mouth. There isn't like this kind of this weird symbolism about other disabilities going on. But they are helpless, and it is scary, and that maybe thinking, "Do I need to do this in this way specifically or can I do this and not kind of take a sideswipe at disability?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. What you're talking about there is thinking about the area of intention, like, why are you making this choice? It's not that these choices are always forbidden and you can never make one of these choices. Because there are times and places where it's appropriate. But you have to think about it and not just default to it because it's something that you've seen in media, because you're not thinking about the larger ramifications of it. That's usually where people run into problems, is that they don't think about the ripple effects, and they don't think about those areas of intention.

[Chelsea] I honestly believe that if you take something like that, and you're like, "Okay, I saw it on TV," and you think about the stuff that is lying underneath it, and if that causes you to go, "Mm, no. I need to do this because this has entirely different things lying underneath it," you're actually going to end up with a story that you actually want instead of one that winds up going astray because you didn't think about, like, three layers of implications about a device that you're using.

 

[Howard] Let me approach this real quick from a different angle. If you totally un-ironically tell a story about a disaster in someone's life where they can no longer afford their mortgage and they have to move into an apartment and that is just a terrible disaster. You're playing it not for humor, absolutely un-ironically. Everybody in the world who already lives in an apartment and gets by just fine looks at this story and says, "Why is my way of life horrible or evil or whatever?" You've othered an enormous portion of your audience. I bring this up not to say that we should all live in apartments or we should all live in houses. I bring it up to say that this is how you need to think about these things so that you don't come across as age-ist or ablest, when you are trying to accomplish something else with your story.

[Fran] I think what Chelsea was talking about, too, about that implied helplessness, the lack of mouth, the lack of things, it does depend, in the story, on (a) the point of view, and also a certain level of authorial empathy. Not sympathy, but empathy. Because what a lot of horror tropes rely on is a sense of that other is not part of the human pattern anymore. They've lost their humanity, because they've lost their mouth or, to go back to a previous episode of Writing Excuses, they've lost their hand, and it's been replaced by another body part. But we have this opportunity to explore the fact that in… And this is something that actually Kafka does pretty well, is that because the point of view is internal, you don't see that character as, Gregor Samsa, as helpless. He's rationalizing how to get through this situation and just to have… Take a moment to think… When you're writing body horror or body humor, and think about what it feels like to be that other person and acknowledge their personhood, acknowledge their humanity, and the fact that they have agency in the situation as well, whatever the horrific situation is, they still have choice. They still have the ability to maneuver in different ways. And so does the audience who's reading this. Just like, to go back to Howard's apartment metaphor, in the essay I wrote a little bit about what it felt like to be wearing a back brace that was exactly the same as the back brace that was being joked about in the movie that I was watching. There's a character in Say Anything who's trying to get a drink of water out of a water fountain while wearing a Milwaukee-based brace with a neck support. I didn't have a neck support, but it's impossible. It becomes this long-running joke in the middle of the movie. I just sat there and felt like, "Wow. This… I was enjoying this movie until just this moment." Just like the apartment metaphor that Howard gave us, it really does not necessarily do service to your story to have a whole bunch of your audience suddenly feel like you're operating against them.

[Howard] Done well, it's R-rated for language and so much language, I Spy with Melissa McCarthy… I think. Maybe it's just called Spy. But Melissa McCarthy plays the chair guy, the chairperson, for a spy who is suddenly pushed out in the field. She is very competent, but she is very inexperienced. At no point in the show do we make fat jokes about Melissa McCarthy.

[Fran] I love that [garbled]

[Howard] People make fun of her clothing sometimes, because maybe the clothing choices are weird. But it is never about her being overweight. It is daring. It is a daring movie to make that choice. I love it because of how well it does it.

[Fran] Also, she's a fantastic actress.

[Howard] Oh, my goodness.

[Fran] Her entire use of every inch of that screen is amazing.

[Howard] Yes.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we pause for our book of the week. That book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monstrous… Monsters and the Monstrous. Fran, you want to tell us a little bit about that?

[Fran] Sure. This is a collection of horror stories edited by Ellen Datlow. It came out in the late spring of 2022. It came out from Tor night… Nightfire. It contains a whole range of ways in which monsters, both familiar and new, interact with the world. A lot of them are intentionally horror stories, because that was the purview of the book. But some of them actually do some really interesting examinations of what it means to be monstrous in a human world. I really like that as well.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So that book is Screams from the Dark: 29 Stories of Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Ellen Datlow.

 

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, as we come back in, let's talk about some things to do that are a little bit more interesting. One of the things that I have noted in stories where I feel like it's done a little better is that the person's disabilities are not the source of the horror, it's the people around them and the environment that they find themselves in. So it is someone else grabbing the wheelchair. That's the removal of the agency, it's not the chair itself, it's someone else trying to take control.

[Fran] Helping.

[Mary Robinette] Helping.

[Chelsea] Oh, it just gives me the shivers. The angry shivers.

[Fran] I had somebody without asking help me off of I believe it was a bus. I was just… I was moving slower than they thought I should be, and that I needed help. They pulled me by my arm and dislocated my shoulder. Which I then popped back in right in front of them to the most disgusting degree I could, because I wanted to let them know that they had not in actuality helped me at all.

[Howard] See, if you had a sword cane, you could have just [garbled] at them.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Fran] [garbled] say, why does no one let me have a sword cane?

[Howard] The drubbing.

[Fran] But it really does… People think of themselves as providing assistance without asking. The grabbing of the wheelchair… The maneuvering of someone… It is a lack of agency is horrific. In… Again, in the point of view of someone who is experiencing a lack of agency, whether it is through cosmic horror or the deep and abiding horror of someone like Steven Graham Jones's stories where every house sort of seems to build out horror around his characters. I think that there are distinctive shifts in point of view and authorial empathy that can avoid some of the pitfalls and really build some… Like Chelsea was saying before, really interesting layers and depth in there. That's only going to make your story better and scarier, or, if you're doing body humor, funnier.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Howard] A lesson I learned from Mary Robinette, gosh, eight years ago. It's one of the best ways to introduce that horror is not to make the removal of agency related to someone's weakness, you make it related to their strength. Their strength can serve them… It can do nothing for them in this scenario. The wheelchair is not a weakness, the wheelchair is a perfectly good mobility device. In fact, you're a Paralympic basketball player in that wheelchair. Then you are in a situation where that agency is removed.

[Mary Robinette] The… In The Spare Man, my main character's a cane user. She has chronic pain from an old injury. One of the scenes that I am… The day where she's like, "Oh, this is definitely a cane day," and she has to grab that, that's just part of her life. She grabs it, it's no big deal. When she gets to the set of stairs that is built to go up a centrifugal well, so they change angle every single step, and she has to climb them, that's when she's like, "Oh. No." That is the problem. It's not… It is coming from the environment and her need to interact with that environment.

[Howard] That is one spoon per stair. That's a…

[Chuckles]

[Fran] One of the things that I think about is… This is sort of elevating out of body horror a little bit, is something like Pat Cadigan's The Girl Thing That Went out for Sushi, which has body augmentation which we talked about last time and a little bit of body horror in it, in that these are people who are working in space and have augmentations done so that they can better work in space, so they become starfish and they become… They have… Different ways of gripping or different ways of appreciating which way is up that is really phenomenal. So I think that's an interesting thing to look at. Horror, especially, tends to end up with the characters and the reader trapped in a situation or trapped in that like depth of imagination where you're not sure if they're ever going to get out. Whereas sci-fi and fantasy find a way out quite often. Howard, you were going to say something there?

[Howard] Oh. Yeah. It's just I… For those of you not benefiting from the video feed, sometimes I raise my hand to let people know that I'm ready to talk when they're done.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was not trying to interrupt. Lois McMaster Bujold, I mentioned her in a previous episode, the novel Freefall. In which there is a whole race of people who have been engineered so that their lower legs are arms and so that their hearts and metabolisms and everything function really well, just fine, in zero gravity. This group of people, genetically engineered, and they have their own little space station and everything's cool. Then, artificial gravity, energetic artificial gravity is introduced, and they are sort of this little evolutionary dead end. They're still perfectly awesome in their own little world. When, in one point of the story, a couple of them end up on a planetary surface, yes, there is our lack of agency, there is our body horror, and it is from people who… Or it is experienced by people who, in their own environment, are perfectly suited and beautiful and wonderful and awesome. I like the way… I really love the way Bujold handles that.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been a great discussion. Let's go ahead and talk about our homework. Chelsea, do you have our homework?

[Chelsea] I do. Your homework, if you should choose to accept it, is to rewrite a scene with body humor or body horror. It can be one of yours or it can be somebody else's. So that the character with the disability is not the butt of the joke or the source of the horror.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great homework assignment. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/30/17-44-bodies-why-part-ii-working-through-disability/

 

Key Points: Working through pain, through marginalization, through it all. Scheduling craft around illness. Physical and mental aspects. What is normal? Pushing yourself is a choice. A diagnosis may help you tap into a community and borrow tools. What are your coping mechanisms? 

 

[Season 17, Episode 44]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies, Why? (Part II: Working Through Disability).

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, this week, we're going to be talking about writing through disability. Fran, tell us what that means.

[Fran] Well. One of the conversations that has been happening of late is writing while disabled and what that means, particularly for writers who have either previously not talked about disability because they did not want to meet the terrible fate of being told that they shouldn't or couldn't do something that they really wanted to do. But also, people are talking a lot more about what it means to be creative and to work through pain, to work through being marginalized, to work through the… All of the attendant… Even just the medical appointments and how do you schedule your craft around doctors, or not doctors, as sometimes the case is, how do you schedule craft around illness. In this day and age of post-pandemic, we are… A lot of us learning more and more about how to operate in the world using different methodologies and different schedules. I think that it's really important to talk about writing and health in general, but writing and disability in specific, because it can impact both creativity and how your work is scheduled within the profession. So it's worthwhile talking about that. It's also important to talk about how, in some cases, different kinds of disabilities can impact how you perceive different things at different times. So we're going to talk a little bit about pain. We're going to talk about mental aspects as well. And we're going to talk about agency, because a disability and autonomy and agency are sort of the same topic a lot of the time.

[Mary Robinette] For our listeners who are thinking but what does it… How is this episode going to be useful to me, I am not disabled. There's two things that I want to say. One is you are not disabled currently. The second thing is you know someone who is. This will give you a better frame for being a better friend to that person. So…

 

[Howard] Can I open with an anecdote from… Gosh, I think it was just the day before yesterday. At Gen Con, I drew eight hours a day for four days straight, and cramps, exhausted, bruised, whatever, the interstitial tissues in my hand to the point that I couldn't hold a pen anymore. This is not the first time I've done this, because I'm an idiot. But we decided we're going to take a week off. Took a week off, it wasn't getting better.

[Fran] I'm going to… Actually, Howard, I'm going to walk you back on I'm an idiot because you did this because this is your job and this was a choice that you made for what you wanted to do. Which is a legitimate choice.

[Howard] Oh. Yeah. It is. And it's… I was being humorously self-deprecatory, not genuinely self-deprecatory. If that helps at all. The point is, I went to the hand clinic. Okay? There's a specialist for hands and elbows and shoulders. I check in on my phone, I get to the front desk, and they say, "Oh, new patient. Here." They had to be a clipboard with a page full of checkboxes and little fine lines to… "Can you fill this out, please?" I held my hand up and said, "I can't currently write. No." She said, "Well. Just do it left-handed." Now, the rest of the story is me showering myself with praise for not unloading there at the counter. Because I had big thoughts. I did, however, unload on Twitter. But, circling back around, I'm at the hand clinic and they have a clipboard that they expect people to write on. All patients! Hey, if it's shoulder pain, maybe you're fine. But if it's hand pain, it's not. How was I supposed to work through this? What the nurse said was, "Well, can you just do it left-handed?" So I did it left-handed with a Sharpie and definitely made an enormous mess of it so that they'd have to cope. But me discovering that I needed to get medical care, I was up against a thing, up against a hurdle that was difficult to clear because of the very thing I was trying to get care for. Ouch.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. It sounds like me trying to get ADHD medication. So, Chelsea…

[Chelsea] I had a thing that I wanted to say. That was… It's to both. Like, this doesn't apply to the not disabled, and then the idea of the cram where you do a lot of work in a short time, which is not bad. It's not bad. I'm not going to say that anybody was bad for doing it. But what I want to point out is you don't know, a lot of people don't know what low mobility is. Because our culture pushes us to work to exhaustion and calls that normal, and it should not be. Basically, we are always talking about how if you aren't pushing yourself 110% every day, you're kind of a chump. No. Let's do a… Let's do a [garbled second-degree?] kind of job for a little while and see if this actually balances our lives a little bit better. Because if you are maximum thrust all of the time, you're going to need a break. If you don't schedule that leisure, your body will do it for you.

[Mary Robinette] This is why we have supply line, is because…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Of things running at maximum capacity with no room for anything to go wrong. When that happens, when your body is the supply line, supply chain, things, you have some follow-through issues. Yes. Fran?

 

[Fran] I'd like… I'm like dutifully raising my hand. I really want to second and echo Chelsea's point about people not knowing what normal really is. This is something that disabled people and able-bodied people can share that experience. In some cases, quite literally. My anecdotal story, lots of people see the braces that I wear on my hands and their silver rings. I am one of those people that firmly believes that accommodations and devices should be allowed to be beautiful. We shouldn't be trapped in the ugly medical world of gray and plastic. But I wear braces on my fingers. They're made by Charlottesville Ring Splint Company. They're outstanding devices for people with rheumatoid arthritis as well as EDS, which is what I have. But when I was being treated for two dislocated shoulders, and I had pinched a nerve in one, I was seeing an occupational therapist. She noticed that I was bracing oddly with my hands, and suggested these rings splints for me. I tried them. I tried a basic model first, and came back in a couple weeks later, and said something is wrong with my hands. She looked at me and she broke out the pins, and she started checking to make sure that I… My nerves weren't damaged. I said, "No, I can feel that just fine." She said, "Well, what do you mean? Something's wrong with your hands?" I said, "Well, I just can't… They don't feel right." She looked at me, and she looked at me again, and she said, "You mean you're not in pain. Because these braces are supporting your fingers and keeping them from dislocating." I hadn't realized that. I hadn't realized that I had been navigating my entire life, most of my life, especially when I had started drawing and been practicing art, by sensing where my hands were in space by where the pain was. Once I started using the braces, I actually had to teach myself how to draw again because I couldn't figure out where my hand was related to the page without that pain. So that was one of the things that I… One thing that I considered absolutely normal that turns out was not. At all. That was pretty amazing. The other thing that Chelsea said that Mary Robinette seconded was that aspect of pushing yourself 110%, and something to go with what Howard was saying about working all weekend. We talk about the crunch, we talk about fitting in work. I want to reiterate something that I started to say before, which is that pushing yourself is a choice. A choice that you make. It's not something that someone can say to a disabled person, "You shouldn't be doing this because X." I mean, that's a conversation between you and your doctor. But in many cases, I will choose to push myself for a goal, knowing that I will then have to rest later. That's something that I really feel very strongly is a decision that is given to able-bodied people all the time and should not be taken away from disabled people for the same reason.

[Mary Robinette] 100%.

 

[Mary Robinette] We're going to pause, having said that…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I am going to ask you to pause…

[Chelsea] [garbled] collapsible [garbled] box right there. Just…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Wait. Do I get a nap now? This sounds awesome.

[Mary Robinette] No. No. No. We're going to pause for book of the week. So no one gets to stop working. We're just going to work on something else. So, Fran, actually, you have the book of the week this week.

[Fran] I do. It is a fantastic gender bent retelling of the Three Musketeers, called One for All. It is by Lillie Lainhoff. It came out this past spring. It is an NPR favorite book, it has Junior Library Guild's recommendation. It's got starred reviews all over the place. This is a disabled author, Lillie Lainhoff, who rewrote and retold the Three Musketeers from the point of view of Tania de Batz, who is 16 and trying to sort through a world while experiencing chronic dizziness, vertigo, and fainting spells that can incapacitate her at inopportune times. Meanwhile, she's an amazing sword fighter and wants to take her father's place as a musketeer. So this is just action scenes, great fight scenes, without eliding or erasing disability from an author who is herself disabled. I just think it's fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Ah. I'm very excited about this book. I want to read it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said before I forced us to go to break was about the idea of trade-offs. So one thing that I have is… And I've talked about this some… Is I have an essential tremor. It's pretty mild. Most of my day-to-day life, it… The way it affects me is that thumb typing on my phone is a disaster. But otherwise, it's largely invisible. However, I'm also a professional puppeteer. There are styles of puppets that I can no longer do, and I didn't want to talk about it at all. About having this, because I knew that people were going to write me out of all roles and not trust me to turn things down on my own. But, in addition to that, there's a medication that I can take that knocks the tremor out. But when I take that medication, my asthma medication doesn't work. So I have to make a choice.

[Chelsea] Do you want to breathe or move?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Right. Fortunately, I am at a place where I can make that choice and still be functional. But… And still do my job. But that's not the case for everybody. So when we're talking about working through disability, there are going to be days where that trade-off between which thing are you going to do, which choice are you going to make, are you going to make kicking your deadline or being able to go and do a thing. Are you going to… What trade-off are you going to make? Also, what trade-offs are people going to make for you?

[Fran] Part and parcel of that is that there is an assumption when you are disabled, especially as a creative, that you have one disability. When many of us work through multiple disabilities. And work with multiple disabilities. I think that's an important preposition, with. We have found our own ways to make this work for us. This is one of those big your mileage may vary situations where certain things work for us, but might not work for you in the exact way that we're describing, but it may work for you modified. That's totally legitimate. 

 

[Fran] But one of the things that I want to talk about is that there are… We've talked a lot about physical disabilities, but I do want to talk about mental aspects as well. So I'm going to kick that first back to Mary Robinette, asking if you can talk about both depression and ADHD. Then Chelsea, if you'll pick up from there, if you would be willing to talk a little bit about anxiety.

[Mary Robinette] So, this starts with what Chelsea was talking and Fran was talking about, is that we have no idea of what normal is. So, I was 45 when I was diagnosed with depression. In hindsight, I'd had it my entire life. But there were so many things that I just thought was… Like, of course, you work really hard and then you… I thought burnout was what was happening to me. Turns out that is not the case. It was in hindsight, it's like, "Oh, I have always had depression." So learning how to deal with that as an adult has been fascinating. I realized it by listening, because I was hearing other people talk about it. The other one is ADHD, which I was just diagnosed when I was 50. I am, for those keeping track, I am 53 now. Again, in hindsight, it has always been there. But it also, one of the reasons that I didn't realize that I had it, is that my dad has it, and has never been diagnosed. My brother has it. My niece, my nephews, all, to varying degrees. Actually, I think my niece does not. But my two nephews do. I just thought that that was the way brains worked and didn't realize that all of my problems with time management, all of my problems with five different thoughts colliding into my head at the same time, all of my problems with just… Where I cannot work on a thing for unknown reasons, were all tied into the way my brain was built. So, for me, but having a diagnosis is done is that it's allowed me to tap into a community and borrow other people's tools. I've built my own coping mechanisms over the course of my life. It's also very clear… It's like, "Oh, this is why theater works really well for me." Because you've got a short time span, you've got urgency. But a lot of what I have been having to learn to do now is figure out ways in which to work with my brain instead of against my brain. Because most of my life has been trying to make my brain fit into the boxes that society has put around it. This is how a brain is supposed to work. What I'm trying to do now is work with my brain. It's like this is what my brain is good at, this is what my brain is really not good at, learn to maximize that. It's tricky. But the first part of it is acknowledging that it exists and then [garbled] deeply about it. Sometimes I do hyperfocus on research about that, I'm just going to say.

[Fran] Thank you so much for sharing that, and talking about it in terms of working with, because I think that's really… It's helpful to me to hear that from you. So thank you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Fran] Chelsea!

[Chelsea] Hi. Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my [garbled] in the Venn diagram because I also have ADHD. But my big thing now is anxiety. So I have all of the ADHD toolbox things. A lot of the reason why I can do [garbled] is because I accept that this is how I do it and there's nothing wrong with that and I don't need to fix that. I just need to do it the way that I naturally already do it, and that's fine. The modifier is that my first impulse for just about everything is fear and the worst case scenario. This is fantastic when I'm writing a plot of the book, but it's not so great when I need to go to the grocery store.

[Laughter]

[Fran] Were we in a conversation once where you had to give someone, not an editor, explicit instructions not to ask you what the worst possible thing could possibly be?

[Chelsea] Yes. Yes.

[Fran] I think about that all the time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have to…

[Chelsea] If you asked me what is the worst thing that could possibly happen, I will be like, "I will be walking down the street minding my own business when I am suddenly hit by a bus."

[Laughter]

[Fran] I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with you, because that was…

[Chelsea] I know. I mean, I said it to be funny.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have to tell people, don't tell me that I can get to this whenever. It's like, "No. You have to give me a specific deadline. If you tell me get to it whenever you have time, I will never have time. It will not ever happen."

[Chelsea] Never. Never.

 

[Fran] Howard, I want to get back to you. Because you are dealing with something right now that is impacting your ability to not only work, but to fill out those important medical forms, and probably hold a very important cup of coffee, and all of these things are not necessarily new, you said you have done this before, but it's impacting your life right now.

[Howard] It's… The thing to recognize is that since early 2020, I contracted Covid, and developed what I call LCCFS. It is the chronic fatigue syndrome set of symptoms that some people get with long Covid. It is possible… I'm going to leave the medical explanation as to why for another day. It is possible that that has impacted the healing process in my hand. Because when I push myself too hard at Gen Con, I knew this is going to hurt, I'm going to be miserable, and I'm not going to be able to get any work done until Wednesday, and then I'm going to force myself to rest all the way until next Monday. That is how hard I am pushing myself. Then I came out of Gen Con and realized this hurts a lot more than I was expecting it to hurt. Then I took a week off and realized this isn't getting better. So the conversation that we have about our coping mechanisms and about our choices, push, but then plan to rest… I got ambushed. I pushed, I planned to rest, and realized, "No. I did some serious damage." I have a large litany of coping mechanisms. My very favorite one has been a guest on this podcast before. Sandra.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Chelsea, when you talk about anxiety, there are things that will trigger anxiety for me. Things coming in via email. Sandra screens my email. She doles out tasks to me based on her understanding of when I'm ready to hear about it.

 

[Fran] Actually, Howard, that's a really good segue into the homework this week.

[Howard] Then let's segue. Because I could talk about Sandra for an entire three episodes, and [garbled] everybody would love it except Sandra.

[Laughter]

[Fran] We'd love to hear you. But I'm going to do the homework.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Good.

[Fran] All right. So today's homework is not writing homework specifically. This is about exploring your writing space and schedule. This is about process, not product. So, for this week, I want you to look at, we want you to look at what tools do you have in place to take care of your physical needs and your physical self while you are writing or being creative. Just as you set up your workspace with a laptop or a pen or a pencil and paper, think about where you work. Is this chair supportive to your posture? Is this a place that has good lighting? Think about how often you stretch. You see a lot of writers shaking their hands out after a couple of hours. This is a good idea for lots of different reasons. But think about how often you stretch. How much you hydrate. Do you have check in points or times or people that you can check in with to see if you might be in physical or emotional pain and not know it? Just take stock of what you have and then take stock of what you would like to have. I know several of us, Chelsea in particular, they run an amazing occasional reminder on Twitter if you want to follow them. You will get regular reminders to hydrate, which is hugely useful to all kinds of writers. But just make a list this week of what you have in your writing process that supports you physically and emotionally and what you wish to have. In part, because this is about finding ways to work with what you have to keep working for the long-term.

[Mary Robinette] Great advice. And good homework. So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go study your workspace.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/16/17-42-eight-embodied-episodes-about-disability/ 

 

Key Points: How do you work with disabled characters in multiple genres, across age ranges and media, and incorporate them smoothly into your fiction? Bodies, augmentation, body horror, second person narrative choices. Be aware of disability as a part of existence. Disability is not something to overcome. The medical model says anything can be fixed, and is embarrassed by chronic conditions. What kind of story do you want to tell, one about a disabled character in the everyday world, or in a world where disability is perceived differently? The social model locates disability in how society is constructed around it. Consider a two-armed person in Barsoomian society, with every door requiring four arms. Try to speak to disabled readers and readers who are not disabled, and let people understand what being seen really means. It's a knotty problem.

 

[Season 17, Episode 42]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Eight Embodied Episodes About Disability.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Will] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Will] And I'm Will.

 

[Mary Robinette] You might notice that we have three special guests with us this week. We are going to be exploring eight episodes with… Led by Fran Wilde about working in multiple genres, across age ranges and media, with disabled characters and how to incorporate that smoothly into your fiction. So, I'd like to start by having our guests introduce themselves. I'm going to start with Fran.

[Fran] Hi, everybody. Thanks to writing excuses for having me on. I'm Fran Wilde. My pronouns are she/her. I write fiction for adults, children, and teenagers. I write nonfiction for all of those same groups as well. My novels have won some Nebulas and been best of NPR, as well as short stories have been nominated for a bunch of things. I teach at Western Colorado University's MFA for Genre Fiction, and Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program for writing for children and young adults.

[Mary Robinette] Chelsea?

[Chelsea] Hi. I'm Chelsea. I publish books and self pub, generally a fantasy novelist. My first book won the World Fantasy Award for best novel, and my [Dav?] book starts a trilogy that is maybe but probably not Hugo finalist for best series. I have four books published. And I'm [part Indian?]

[Mary Robinette] Okay. And Will?

[Will] Hello. I am William Alexander. I write unrealisms for kids. Best known for Goblin Secrets, my first novel which won the National Book Award. Mostly when I write about disability, I use metaphors. But on two notable occasions, I didn't. That was the anthology… A story I have in the anthology Unbroken, which is YA, and Uncanny Magazine's Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. My contribution to that was later read by LeVar Burton, which is clearly the pinnacle of my career.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well, we will all just enjoy a moment of jealousy about that. Hah. Okay.

 

[Mary Robinette] Now that that's done, Fran, why don't you tell us a little bit about why you pitched this idea to us, and what you think is like… If people are only going to listen to this brief moment in time, like, what's the thing you want people to know? Then we're going to dive in and unpack all of it.

[Fran] Sure. Well, I was talking with Dan Wells about possible topics and this one hit… It's very close to home. I've been talking about and very publicly writing about disability for almost a decade now, and existing in the publishing world while disabled, as well as putting disabled characters on the page in ways that allow them to be protagonists and allow them agency. So this is something that's near and dear to me. Will mentioned disabled people destroy science fiction, but I really think that there's been a lot of work done in the industry and in publishing to bring the narrative of disability to the fore. Nicola Griffith has talked about how disability on the page is sort of behind the curve and bringing… Making things more visible. Making… Talking about bodies in all different kinds of ways and all different points of access is very, very important. So I'm really pleased that so many people could be on this call and on this conversation. I think that what we're going to do is talk about working in multiple genres and bringing disability on the page in all of those genres and age groups. We're going to talk about bodies. Why are they, how do you depict them, how you work with them in… As a creative. We're also going to talk about augmentation in various forms. How that can help depict characterization. How that can get in the way. We're going to talk a little bit about body horror and what that means in the disability community, and we're probably going to get into a conversation about second person narrative choices. I say probably because I'm definitely going to be steering it that direction.

[Chuckles]

[Fran] We're going to talk a little bit about linguistics and then get back to bodies, why, as far as what happens when your character isn't… Doesn't have the typical character set up, but is a different kind of character in the books. I think I talk about why dragons are sometimes preferable. Then the last episode is right now going to be a Q & A among all of us. But we've also got some homework for everyone and some different books to read every week. So I hope you stick around because I think this is going to be a very good conversation and a very important conversation. I'm so glad Writing Excuses is having it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That was a syllabus, not an introduction. But I love it.

[Fran] Thank you. I prepared it so specifically for that purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Fran does teach things.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I wanted to start to think about is… I want us to start with the kind of baseline that this is important. So we're not going to really dive in immediately to why it's important, we're just going to take it is assumed for the moment that it is important. So when we talk about disability representation in different age ranges, why… Like, what differences do you find when you try it? Are there differences in how you approach that in different age ranges?

[Fran] I think that's a really good question. There have been a couple of recent articles including in the School Library Journal about representation in picture books and how to center a disabled character in a picture book rather than using them for didactic or educational reasons. That is part of the discussion that has been happening in YA and children's literature for a very long time. But it's also a question for… That has been going on in adult speculative fiction, especially. So I was on a panel a couple of years ago that was called Unexpected Heroes, and the topic… Question came up, how do you make a character unexpectedly heroic? Someone, I have no idea who said this, but what they said was memorable. "Well, you just give them a disability." I pretty much flipped the table upside down and origamied it into a shape that was pointed right at the speaker and said, "No, that's not what we do here." But I think that's an interesting door, because that idea of disability as a tool rather than a part of existence is something that is important across the board to disrupt and to look at how we depict being human in a world where people are vastly different and have different experiences and how we open the door to more of those experiences and more of those discussions on what is good representation and what is damaging representation.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Will, it looked like you had a thought there?

[Will] I did have a thought. Mostly it's about how writing with different ages, especially very young ages, there are dangers of compounded infantilizations that you just see all the time. Here's a place where language breaks down for us, because… I mean, what does the word infantilization even mean with, in the case of picture books, as Fran brought out, we're talking about actual infants. So there's… The word juvenile, the word infantilize. They're pejorative. But we're also talking about actual juveniles who, in particularly juvenile readers are… Don't like being condescended to and will not stand for it. So there are… There are many, many layered ways to condescend all at once when talking about disability for young readers, and an ethic of respect that has to be the first step when writing anything whatsoever for a literally juvenile audience.

[Howard] I think, based on what Fran said a moment ago, the speaker who says, "Oh, give the main character disability." It's probably appropriate to say you can make the main character seem heroic by giving them something difficult to overcome, but that's not the same as give them a disability.

[Fran] Yeah. [Garbled – honestly?] I wish that is what they had said.

[Howard] Oh, yeah. I'm not suggesting that's what they meant. I'm not suggesting that's what they meant. What I'm saying here though is that in our heads, and I confess to a large measure of able-ism because that's the world I grew up in. In our heads, we often conflate disability with challenge. As writers, we need to recognize that words are tools that allow us to be really specific and avoid certain kinds of problems from the word go. As you were saying, Will, about compounded infantilization. We need to choose our words carefully early on so that we don't alienate the audience, so that we don't cause injury where none was intended.

[Will] There's much to unpack in the word overcome there, too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Will] Where the narrative arc of disability from an ablest point of view is to with pluck and grit transcend and walk again through sheer… And rather than living with a disability. Okay. Superfast. I think it's worthwhile defining the social and medical models of disability. Like, the quick 10 second version is that… The medical model is that anything can be fixed. Yeah, it is appropriate sometimes. I mean, you break your leg. The medical model of addressing this injury is to then repair your leg. But if you have some sort of chronic condition that medicine cannot fix with a quick pill or a quick surgery, that is in anyway ongoing or permanent, then from the medical model, you're an embarrassment, you're unfixable, you're permanently broken and that's a horrible place to be. Whereas… Fran, you want to take the social model?

[Fran] I do want to address the social model. I also want to see if Chelsea has a jump in thought because we're…

[Howard?] Ooo, yes.

[Fran] Running away with the floor.

[Chelsea] A little bit. I was just thinking about how… Maybe this is a little bit too much of a technicality, but when you're writing a story about a disabled character, one of the things that I'm always thinking about is the environment that the disabled character is in. Because it depends on what it is that you want to tell the story about, whether it's about them being a disabled character in the world that we all kind of contend with or if you want to visualize a world in which disability is [cheered?] or perceived very differently. I think that comes from interrogating the medical model of disability and social model of disability, which I think probably we need to explain right now.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let us actually explained that after we pause for the book of the week, because…

[Will] Suspense.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to let this episode run long because it's our first one for this. But I do want to make sure that we get our book of the week in and I know that is soon as we define these two things, we will have so much more to talk about. So… So… The book of the week is Invisible, which is a series of anthologies edited by Jim C. Hines and Mary Anne Mohanraj. There's actually a boxed set of it. This e-book explores various types of invisible states. A lot of it is disabilities, but it's not just disabilities. It has wonderful representation. It's lots and lots of own voices fiction. The proceeds from it also benefit the Carl Brandon Society. So book… As I said, it's a three book series. There is a boxed set. They're short stories. So it's a very low buy-in. It's got essays, it's got poetry. So we are highly recommending that you pick up a copy of at least one of the Invisible series about representations of all sorts and kind of read along as we go through the next several weeks.

 

[Mary Robinette] Now I'll let you do your definitions.

[Fran] Will, can you drop the social model on us and we'll go from there.

[Will] Sure. That is… The social model locates disability more in how society is constructed around it. The best metaphor I have for that for just very quickly explaining what that means and how it might be lived is a science fictional one that I read in a blog probably 20 years ago by someone who blogged under the name of Kamikaze Wheelchair. It was… I have no idea who they are out in the world, and the blog has disappeared. But if you're listening, it was a great blog. The metaphor is imagine that you're on Mars. Specifically a Barsoomian sort of Mars. So everybody there has four arms. Every door to every building in that place requires four arms to open and close. You, as you are, are fine. There's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing broken about you. But the world around you was not designed for you to move through it, and it will only reluctantly accommodate you. You get stuck in every doorway because you don't have four arms. So that tiny science-fiction example gives you a sense of the social model of disability. There's nothing wrong with you. But the world was not made for you, and would prefer not to notice you as you try to move through it.

[Fran] Thank you. That is a really, really good example. It also speaks to something that I think we're going to be addressing shortly, which is sort of what aspects of disability are considered acceptable right now to discuss and what are not. How you interact with the world and how that is impacted by your allergies, your mobility, your ability to hear or see, in all sorts of ways, are things to consider when you are talking about disability, when you are writing a disabled character. This is not necessarily to be confused with either plot or character motivation. I think that goes back to the sort of the medical model of disability. One of the things that seems to happen in a lot of disability stories is the magical cure, or this character overcomes something, instead of just existing and going about their protag-y ways with protagonist impulses in ways that carry them through the story and address their current motivations as who they are. Rather than applying a disabled character goes here label to them, I really want to advocate for that. One of the things that… When I wrote a very angry disability story a couple of years ago, and Nalo Hopkinson just let me know that she's teaching it once again in her fiction class this year…

[Mary Robinette] Nice.

[Fran] Which astounds me. But it is… It's called Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand. It was… I have written disabled characters into every story, every genre, but you don't necessarily notice that they're there. Because they're busy protagging, they're busy doing things for the story. But Clearly Lettered was narrated by a very angry CG mermaid in a cabinet of curiosities that is mostly drawn from a medical facility that I was in as a child when they were trying to figure out how to fix me. That was braces and all sorts of other things. They didn't ever look at the whole of me. They just looked at the pieces of me and fixed each broken piece. I think that that in some ways is how some of the representation that I see in fiction when someone tries to write a disabled character, they just write this piece of the person, and say, "Look, there is the character." I really wanted to talk about that experience of writing Clearly Lettered and the pushback. People who are like, "Wow, that was really angry. I didn't expect to hear that from you." Or "I'm so uncomfortable that you wrote that as a direct address with all of these second person commands to it." When I was writing a disabled… A disability narrative for disabled people. The people who read that and said, "That was my experience. I hear you. I'm so used to being told what to do and pushed around and told who I am. And you put that on the page in a way that let me feel seen." When I got that, I started thinking about how if we do this correctly, we can be speaking to readers who are disabled and we can also be speaking to readers who are not disabled and combine that experience in a way that lets people understand what being seen really means rather than being cured or being… I… Being seen in itself is an abilified term, but being heard, being seen, is how we talk about characters and experiences in fiction. So I'm just… I'm throwing that out there in a safe this is a very knotty problem. It's not something that is easily solved with a tweet. But it's something that is solved over time with lots of different experiences brought to it. So…

 

[Mary Robinette] That is something that we are hoping to do over the course of the next several episodes is give you the tools to unknot these knotty questions. So that brings us to our homework. For the homework this week, what I want you to think about is I want you to think about this Barsoomian model. I want you to think about something that is completely normal to you, but a situation in which your normal becomes a disability because of the way society is structured. For instance, everyone on this podcast is wearing glasses. That is not a disability in today's society. But if you drop us… Drop any of us nearsighted people a thousand years ago, our degree of vision becomes a problem. So, what is something about yourself that in one society is not a problem, and in another society becomes an absolute problem? Think about the social model of disability. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/10/02/17-40-questions-answers-about-structure-with-special-guest-peng-shepherd/

 

Q&A Summary:

Q: How can I avoid putting too few or too many plot threads into my story? How do I know when I have the right number of them?

A: Put them in priority order. Big overarching storyline, big B story, then... Every MICE Quotient major thread makes a story roughly half again as long. Practice. If you lose track of the plot threads while writing, there are too many threads.

Q: How do you spread the structure of a plot line over several books? How do you know when to split it structurally in order to get the right payoffs?

A: Beware publishers splitting books. Each book, and each section, needs a satisfying ending. 

Q: How do you ensure that smaller plots or smaller POVs don't make the reader lose sight of the main plot or feel like the subplot is an unwanted diversion?

A: Character attention can direct reader attention. Watch out for repetition. Make your A plot your shopping trip, and any subplots are impulse purchases that need to be attached to the shopping.

Q: What are some strategies or lines of questioning we can use to better align the character goals, the villain goals, and the overall problem of the story?

A: The character and villain goals should come into conflict. Think about why the character and villain want these things, and how those come into conflict. Often the character needs to give up the want for the need, and you need to tie that to the greater need. 

Q: Besides studying successful story structures for guidance, are there clear do's and don'ts when it comes to story structure? What are they?

A: No. Whatever works for you and keeps you writing. Watch out for characters that do what's in the outline, but it hasn't been motivated or signposted for the reader. 

Q: What methods of assembling structure do you use? 

A: 3x5 cards laid out based on plot thread elements. Cat plotting. Scrivener notecards. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 40]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Questions & Answers About Structure, with Special Guest Peng Shepherd.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We have our special guest with us, Peng Shepherd.

[Peng] Hi, everybody. I'm Peng. I'm very glad to be here.

[Mary Robinette] Remind our listeners a little bit about who you are. You did a wonderful master class with us about structure, and we wanted to bring you back to do a questions and answers. So can you just remind folks a little bit about who you are?

[Peng] Sure. I am a novelist. I am the author of The Book of M, and most recently, The Cartographers. I'm very excited to be back, because I just love… So we did the whole master class about structure, and I had said many times in many of the episodes, "I am such a structure nerd." I went away and I thought about it and I wondered, why am I such a structure nerd? I think that because I'm also a discovery writer, structure is kind of my outline in a way that an outline is an outline for an outliner. So I think I might… I depend on it the way that a plotter might depend on an outline.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Howard] I loved the structure master class. My only regret is that I came away from it a day later with all kinds of epiphanies about microstructures, and ended up deploying brand-new techniques that I didn't even have names for through the current project, my current work in progress, as a result of having a podcast conversation where we're all supposedly knowledgeable and stuff. I just learned things and didn't say any of them into the microphone.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that listeners who listen to that podcast might remember is me having a moment where I said, "Oo, I think you just solved the next novel that I'm working on." I am pleased to report that the… That is true.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And that I did use the calendar structure. I am using the calendar structure that we talked about for The Martian Contingency. Now you might be wondering where these questions are coming from and how you can ask questions on a podcast. The answer is that we are doing this podcast live in front of the attendees of the Writing Excuses workshop and cruise.

[Cheers]

[Mary Robinette] So, these are their questions. Dan, what's our first question?

 

[Dan] Our first question is very basic, but it's something that a lot of people have. This is a common one. This comes from Corinne Flynn. How can I avoid putting too few or too many plot threads into my story? How do I know when I have the right number of them?

[Peng] That's a good question. I would advise putting them, I think, in priority order first. Because you've got to have one overarching storyline that's going to carry you through. Then there is usually a pretty big B story. Then, after that, there's not necessarily a lot of room. I mean, how many plot lines have you had in a…

[Mary Robinette] Well, it depends on the story. The thing that I… Because you all know that I talk about the MICE Quotient incessantly. But the thing that I say is that every MICE Quotient ele… Like, major thread can make a story roughly half again as long. But not every plot thread is a major plot thread. So. How do you handle it, Brandon?

[Brandon] My last Stormlight book first draft was 400… 520,000 words long. I have a lot of plot threads going on…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In one of these books. But I would say, early on, practice is just what got me there. Unfortunately, that's the answer to so many things. My first book that I tried writing when I was a brand-new baby writer, I got like 200,000 words in, and I'm like, "That feels like an ending," and then just had a fight.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Didn't resolve very much at all. I'm like, "And it's book one!" I didn't know I was writing book one, but there it is. Over time, the more I wrote, the more I came to understand what a plot thread requires from me to do it in a way that I find a satisfying narrative. That's why I can now, decades later, right 400+ thousand word books with a lot of different plot threads, because I know how much they each take.

[Mary Robinette] I just want to double check. Was that 400,000 words in addition to the five secret novels?

[Brandon] So this is the Stormlight book I released before I launched into those.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. Great.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Brandon] So…

[Mary Robinette] I just wanted to know where to…

[Brandon] Sounds cooler. Each of the secret novels were between 90 and 110,000. I'm sure it's kind of the same with you folks, that as you write, you get a feel for how long a story takes you. So you're like, "I know that this one's going to be around 100,000 words," and you just launch towards that, whether you have an outline or not, and you are consistently in that same range. This is an experience thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] If I'm losing track of the plot threads while I'm writing it, then structure notwithstanding, that's too many plot threads. Maybe I'll get better at it and be able to do more, but for my own part, it's what fits in my head and works for me.

 

[Dan] All right. I want to have a follow-up question, because something Brandon just said is right in line with another one of our audience questions here. This one comes from Roy Radien. How do you spread the structure of a plot line over several books? How do you know when to split it structurally in order to get the right payoffs? Now, Brandon, you said when you first started, you just kind of stopped when you were done. But how do you know when is the best place? How do you do that now?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, I can tell when an author has done this. These days, I don't know if you've had this experience, but it happens more often when the publisher's like, "Yeah. Split this book." Then it's just… It's always unsatisfying. Okay. I say always…

[Mary Robinette] No, Brandon…

[Brandon] Mary Robinette's like, "Wait. I may have done it once."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But for me, I'm always looking at each book needs a satisfying ending, and each section of a book needs something satisfying. So when I'm building a novel, I'm asking… When I'm building a series, I'm asking what is the satisfying part of every installment. We've seen a lot of people try to launch, in movies recently, big long series where the first one wasn't satisfying. This is, I think, a huge misstep, a huge mistake, and a huge mistake I made in that first book that I tried writing, where I just kind of ended it. So, if we're talking structure, knowing what your book is trying to do, knowing what's going to make a satisfying ending, and knowing that's your primary job. Then you can start saying, "All right, these sub threads I can raise, hang a lantern on the fact that I'm not going to answer them yet, the characters are too inexperienced." Then that will be sort of the passes, the balls I'm throwing to myself to catch in a future novel.

[Mary Robinette] So the… The reason I raised my hand, like wait, was that I… Calculating Stars was originally supposed to be one book that we split into two. The reason that I knew I needed to split it into two was because I was having to jump important emotional beats…

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In order to save them for the second book, or the second part of the story, in ways that were going to be unsatisfying and frustrating.

[Brandon] Yeah. I should define that better. When it's poorly is when you turn in the book and the publisher splits it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Brandon] I've split books before, as I've been working on them. I've been like, "No, no. This is a trilogy," and expanded them. That works just fine. It's when you turn them in and the publisher's like, "No. Too long. Here's the halfway point. Now you've got two books."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because when I split mine, as you say, I had to unpack and expand.

[Dan] The most egregious example I can think of of the publisher quote unquote splitting a story partway through is the end of the second hobbit movie, which is named after Smaug, the entire thing is about Smaug, and the movie ends five minutes before they kill him, which happens in the third movie. It's shockingly incompetent.

 

[Dan] Here is another question. Once again talking about subplots and how many plots you have. This is from Sarah Hippel. How do you ensure that smaller plots or smaller POVs don't make the reader lose sight of the main plot or feel like the subplot is an unwanted diversion?

[Brandon] That is an excellent question. I would say one quick tip is character attention is something that often directs reader attention. When the characters care about it, particularly in books we can show from their viewpoint how invested they are, if you can take that character and have them spin it into the larger story in some way, this helps a ton.

[Peng] Yeah. They also have to be… I love writing multiple perspectives and I often end up with far too many. So I do have this problem where I've got like 15 people and I need about four, and I think it really is as you go back, you can see when you've got too many people, some of them are repeating each other in some way. Like they're both looking at the same thing with the same mindset. So you want… You only want that one mindset or from that one perspective or only that one person has that knowledge. So that has helped me clean it out, to make sure there's no repetition and that everyone has a reason for being there.

[Howard] I layer it and I think about it in terms of the impulse purchase on a shopping trip. The shopping trip is the A plot. The impulse purchase is the C, D, E, whatever plot. But because it is attached to the shopping trip, we haven't lost sight of things.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's take another question.

[Dan] All right. So this one comes from Daydream. What are some strategies or lines of questioning we can use to better align the character goals, the villain goals, and the overall problem of the story?

[Mary Robinette] Well, you know my favorite thing about the MICE Quotient…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Is that it helps you define kind of the process, the types of conflict that they're doing. So one of the things about a character goal and a villain goal, is that they… That these goals come into conflict. The character has the simplest possible goal, the villain has the simplest possible goal, and then their actions mess each other up.

[Peng] One of the ways I really like to think about character goals is what makes it unique, and it's usually the why. So, a character and a villain, they both want something, and they both get a cost to not achieving what they want. But it's always the reasoning behind it. Like, the mis-belief they've got about the world or about themselves that is preventing them from easily getting the want, and coming into conflict with their opposing party.

[Brandon] Yeah. On those lines, a lot of times, what the character is doing is revising their own goals as they go through the plot, mature, see what's going on. In this case, showing the character giving up the want for the need, which is kind of a classic story archetype, you are very easily able to spiral that into the need is the greater need, the narrative's need, the world's need. The character then giving up the want becomes a great tie-in to that when you do it right. That one isn't that hard, if you're looking at the scope and expanding the scope of your story through the middle.

 

[Dan] So, I want to talk a little bit more about what Howard said, of making sure that the different plots A, B, C… The impulse buys are connected to that central thread. Because of the pop cultural medium we exist in right now, superhero movies are the examples that are leaping to mind. So, for example, Amazing Spider-Man 2 brought in so many villains. None of them had anything to do with each other. They were people who were causing problems. They each had their own plans. But they were not related to each other in any meaningful way. The story of Electro did not really connect to the story of Green Goblin, etc., etc. Compare that to the Dark Knight. The Christopher Nolan one. Where we have multiple villains, the two main ones being Two Face and Joker. In that case, the writers used Two Face specifically as a linking element between the other stories. So the goal of Batman was to get Harvey Dent on his side. The goal of Joker was to ruin Harvey Dent and turn him into a monster. So they did the same thing, they had multiple villains in the story, but they were very deeply connected because the goals were so close.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are going to pause for the book of the week. We are running long for this episode because we've got so many great questions. The book of the week this week is actually my book. Whee hee! It's called The Spare Man. It's basically The Thin Man in space. So if you have not seen The Thin Man movies, they're amazing. But this is a happily married couple, their small dog, solving murder mystery on an interplanetary cruise ship, which is definitely not at all inspired by the boat that I am on right now. There's a small dog which lives because I know the rules. Banter, cocktail recipes, including [Vera approved] cocktail recipes, and did I mention murder?

[Brandon] Not of a dog.

[Mary Robinette] But not of a dog.

[Dan] Not of the dog.

[Mary Robinette] Not of a dog.

[Howard] And a conference room with really uncomfortable chairs.

[Mary Robinette] Really uncomfortable chairs.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So that's The Spare Man, available from fine bookstores everywhere.

 

[Dan] All right. This question is from Dorinda. This is much more of kind of a wide-angle question. Besides studying successful story structures for guidance, are there clear do's and don'ts when it comes to story structure? I guess the follow-up, what are they?

[Howard] Two answers. Answer number one, no. Answer number two, what works for you and keeps you writing is the right answer.

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, that's the very… It's the truth, right? Every… You can find an exception to every rule, except that rule.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? I… Now, I can give some pitfalls for me, personally, right? Like, I can say, "Hey, here's things I've run into that my writing style… When I find that I've done something wrong." With me, that is usually comes down to me knowing what needs to happen in the outline, so the characters know what needs to happen in the outline, so the characters do what's in the outline, and that's not properly motivated and/or signposted for the reader, and a lot of times what I'm fixing after beta reads is things like this. I've kind of noticed that that's a thing that sometimes I do. It's very common for outline writers. Right? You've got… There's the joke a lot of… You see this in criticism of movies, where characters do things and the joke is, "Oh, they have the scripts, so they know what they're supposed to do." The characters know what they're supposed to do, they have the outline. That I want to avoid, and I watch out for it.

[Peng] Can I ask you a question, Brandon?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Peng] These days, how often do you ever get surprised and then deviate from the outline that you've written? Does that ever happen anymore?

[Brandon] So, surprised never happened to me. The way that my just psychology works, I'm always searching for the better answer. The outline is a guide to try to get there, that's what past Brandon, the best that past Brandon could do. Without the experience of having written the book. As I'm writing the book, I'm always saying, "What can be better?" I'm working on the next Stormlight book right now. I hit a thing where I'm like, "This just isn't good enough." Right? It just isn't good enough. So I dig back into it, and I dig deeper, and I'm like, "Let's try something else." That happens a ton. It's not that I get surprised, it's more that I get disappointed. I'm like, "No. This is… I need more." Then I dig. Once in a while, I'm like, "Oh. This is a better connection." But I don't even see it as a surprise. I see it as current Brandon can take what past Brandon did, but has more experience now, is older and wiser.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] By a few weeks. I can now change that up and go forward with something new that is going to work better.

[Dan] I do have an example. This was a question for Brandon. I'm going to answer it. I do have an example of something that surprised me. This was a book, a horror novel that I wrote a couple of years ago, which none of you have read because of this thing I'm about to tell you. I realized at some point in chapter 4, five, six, whatever it was, that it would be a much stronger story if abruptly the monster ate the love interest.

[Hah-hah-hah-hah]

[Dan] On the one hand, I was right. It was way better, it was much more interesting to turn that obvious love interest into a red herring, then he gets eaten, and then we move on. The problem that I had not properly dealt with at the time was, well, what do I do about my ending now? Because the love interest was part of the thread that was going to lead their. I didn't take the time to properly recalibrate the trajectory of the story to account for his absence which left a very unsatisfying ending. Even though he wasn't in 80% of the book.

[Brandon] I've got an answer for you after the podcast. It might be too spoilery.

[Dan] Oh, I'm excited.

[Brandon] I've seen this happen really well. [Garbled] to say, "Oo, have you thought about this?"

 

[Dan] All right. I have one more question. Okay? This one was written to me about a role-playing game that I ran earlier on the cruise. But I think we can apply it more widely. It says, "Dan Wells, after playing in one of your homebrew games, I was intrigued on how you prep or colorcode the different pieces of the game." This is something that I do when I run games in person, is, in order to streamline certain things, I take a lot of the rules of the game and a lot of the elements of character and I put them onto cards so I can just pass them out. Then that makes decision-making much easier and we get into the story much more quickly. But if we can put that into a broader question, what methods of assembling structure do you use? I've seen people on this cruise arranging Post-it notes in different orders. Mary Robinette, I know you do 3 x 5 cards that you can shuffle physically.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Different people use different methods of organizing the tools that they have so that they can see the story.

[Mary Robinette] So I am going to mention, because I can't remember if I have mentioned this on the podcast before. With the 3 x 5 cards and The Spare Man, I laid them out based on plot thread elements that I needed to include. I was re-jiggering because I had made a change about who the villain was going to be. Then my cats ran across the notecards. I looked at it and was like, "That's actually a better sequence."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, technically, part of this book is plotted by cat. Which I highly recommend is a plotting method.

[Peng] See, I would even say the opposite, because I start… I'm very visual and I like to be able to see the plot visually. I started with notecards and I also have a cat, but it didn't go that way.

[Laughter]

[Peng] It did not. So now I use Scrivener. I think, it feels to me like the same thing, because you can drag notecards around on the screen, and my cat can't type.

[Chuckles]

[Peng] So it really works for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Can't type well.

[Brandon] I want to… Yeah. My cat walked across my laptop when I was working on the Wheel of Time, and I kept the letter E. So my cat typed one letter in The Wheel of Time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] When you're reading those books, you can know that it was partially cat-produced.

[Mary Robinette] So what you're learning here, dear listeners, is that if you want to be successful, you need a cat.

[Brandon] Yeah. Preferably multiples, who are trained as well as your cats, Mary Robinette. I use a Word document.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Even still. Just a single document that is my outline that I have built using my tools for outlining. No notecards, no fancy Scriveners, even though I've had a lot of people tell me that I should move to Scrivener. I believe them. I'm just old and stubborn.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Everybody's looking at me like I have a solution here. I love the cat thing because that's how natural selection and evolution works is the random introduction of mutations. If it's a mutation that is successful, then we keep it. So go team random cat.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, as Elsie would say, we are all done. So, if I can get a homework assignment?

[Peng] Yes. Your homework for today is to try writing a piece of fiction outside your usual length. So if you're a novelist, try to write a micro fiction story. If you are a short story writer, try to write a chapter or two of a novel. Something that doesn't end is long. See how the size of the idea and the length of the story influences how you end up structuring that exercise.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much for joining us.

[Peng] Thank you for having me.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Thank you to our lovely live audience for your questions.

[Cheers]

[Mary Robinette] You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/09/18/17-38-oh-no-i-lost-the-thread/

 

Key Points: After a break? Try rereading the last writing session. Do minor edits. Then see if you can pick it up again. Play with the characters again a bit, just free writing to get to know them again. Understand that you are a different writer now. Pick up a different thread. Take it apart and use it for parts. When you know a break is coming, or someone interrupts you, drop yourself some breadcrumbs to help you when you come back. Remember, there's always another thread. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 38]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Oh No I Lost The Thread.

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Marshall] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Marshall] I'm Marshall.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

 

[Howard] I pitched this topic because I lost the thread. Prior to Gen Con Indy, I was 90 miles an hour making my way through the manuscript of a murder mystery… Cozy murder mystery comedy novella. Then I had to stop because I went to a convention. Then I came home from the convention and had injured my hand, and I had to copyedit, so there's a bunch of other things. It's now been almost… At this point, it's been almost 5 weeks, and I have lost the thread. I… What do you do? What… How do you even…?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Right.

[Howard] What is the process?

[Mary Robinette] So when Howard pitched this, we were all like, "Ooh. Yeah. Me too." So I have… I've got a couple of thoughts on this. There's a number of different reasons that you will lose the thread. Sometimes it's because you took a planned break, sometimes it was a forced stop. So what I find is that it helps me to come back and kind of… Usually I'll start with the lowest possible buy-in, which is that I'll just reread what I wrote in the last writing session, which is a trick that I learned from Dan Wells. Then do minor edits on that, just to kind of exercise some muscles. Then I'll start writing again. If it hasn't been a long break or if it's a shorter work, that's usually enough. But, oh my goodness, the days when that does not work are months long.

[Howard] The days when that does not work are months long is hurtful and I feel seen. Marshall?

[Laughter]

[Marshall] No, so, it's funny that we've started this topic. I have been forced to take a break from my current work in progress because I decided to go to grad school. So I started grad school. I'm going… So I'd put my novel down. Now I'm working on a brand-new novel. I've outlined it. Everything is great. That other novel is still sitting in the back of my head, and I real… I cannot go back to it. It's going to be over… Well over a year before I can even think about going back to it. So I appreciate this conversation. I don't know what the heck I'm going to do when I go back to this other project. But somebody that I… Someone else in my writing community suggested playing with the characters again a bit. Like, doing some free writing around just getting to know them again. I think that's what I'm going to have to do. Because after a year or more of taking a break from this book, and writing a whole nother book in between, I'm going to have to do something.

[Howard] Chelsea?

[Chelsea] That's absolutely solid. I'm having kind of the same thing. I have been attempting to write a book for literally a couple of years, and what keeps happening is, I keep not being able to work on it for months and months and months at a time. I got frustrated with this way back in May, and it was the same ideas. Like, I have to like get into this, I have to write some no pressure stuff, I'm going to explore the characters. What I'm going to do is I'm going to write about their lives the day before the first page of the story. Honestly what happened is that because I had spent so much time with the characters, what I wrote as kind of like a nothing burger writing exercise is now actually the opening of my story, because it's way better than what I had before. One of the things that I have to accept is that I have this huge chunk of text that I wrote when I was a different writer who wasn't as skilled as I am now. I have to go back and fix it, and I don't want to.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's really hitting it on the head for me, is that one of the things that I have realized when I take a really long break is that I'm a different person than when I wrote it. So kind of a novel called The Dragon Question, and for long listeners, longtime listeners, you've heard me talk about this before. This is The Dragonriders of… Alfred Hitchcock does The Dragonriders of Pern. Well, I wrote like three quarters of the novel and then had to put it down for years while I wrote the Lady Astronaut books. Then had a break and went back to it. I'm like, "What is even this novel?" There's two things. One is my skills are better, and the other is I'm fundamentally different… Interested in different things than I was when I wrote it. I'm not the same person. So there's stuff in there that just… Like, some of the questions that I was noodling on, some of the stuff like that, those aren't things that are interesting to me anymore. So it makes it… Part of what makes it hard to pick up is the thread is… It's not a thread I'm interested in tugging on. I want to pick up a different thread that's attached to the same tapestry.

[Howard] So maybe, and this is going to be a really stupid idea, the way to tackle this is to do your nothing burger writing epi… Writing exercise where you write about the Mary Robinette Kowal who is interested in writing that book.

[Chuckles]

[Oh]

[Mary Robinette] But that's only like if I want to go backwards.

[Howard] I get… I totally get what you're saying, and I only suggested it because if someone had offered you money for Alfred Hitchcock does Dragonriders, then, hey, we fall back on craft and we learn to write the things that don't interest us as much anymore.

[Mary Robinette] I did finish the novel and if someone would like to offer me money for it, that would be delightful.

[Chelsea] You heard it here first.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] Sweet. Hey, Marshall, do you have a book of the week for us?

[Marshall] I do. So I read a book a couple of weeks ago. I'm actually going to work with this author in my grad school program, which I'm really excited about. His name is Ayize Jama-Everett and the book is The Liminal People. It's the first… I haven't read the whole trilogy yet, I've read the first book. I don't want to give too much away. But, essentially, the main character has a power to heal himself and others. He's working for basically a crime Lord, and his ex calls him asking for help. He ends up having to help her daughter, who also has powers. It's kind of got touches of The Matrix, a little bit of X-Men, a little bit. Some people have power, some people don't. But I don't want to give away the plot. But it is absolutely phenomenal. It is fast-paced. It took me like… I think I read it in two days. So definitely pick up The Liminal People.

[Howard] Awesome. Thank you.

 

[Howard] I want to pose a question for this august body. What are the times when you've tried to pick up the thread and failed the worst? Do you have an example of that? Because our listeners learn from our failures.

[Chelsea] I had this idea. I wanted to write a book, and I had the idea and I wrote like enough to basically get away with a proposal. To have a book accepted with an outline and some sample pages written. Where I had a art historian specialist looking at a work of art that basically to her trained eye was the work of a particular artist in her history. But there was one problem. The actual materials that were used were… They were too modern. They had actually been developed after this person had died. It led them into a mystery. That was like really cool. I had written like the best fight scene I had ever written is in this. I put it aside, and I came back, and I had to go back and say, "I'm sorry. I can't write this. I can't. I can't. It's no good. It's not a good story. I'm sorry, I have to do something else."

[Mary Robinette] So, mine. I'm… Mine is a story that I kept picking up and putting down. Every time I pick it up and put it down, my idea of what the story is changes. I'll put it… It is such a mess that… It's like five different stories that have the same characters in it. And sometimes different characters. Because I've changed my mind about who's in the story and I've changed my mind about where the setting is. I've just kept writing it as if I've fixed the things. But I haven't fixed any of them.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's so bad. But I really… There are pieces of it that I really like, and I want it to work, and I'm stubborn, so I keep picking it back up and I'm like, "Surely. Surely, I will be able." I have an outline for it. It doesn't help. It doesn't help at all.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Every time I pick it up, I'm like, "Oh, no. This is bad." I write a new outline for it, and just keep writing with the new outline. But this is… I'm really tempted to… You know what, I think I may… I will have to look at it, but I may… I might share it in the liner notes, because it is just… It is very instructive in like what is even happening here.

[Howard] In the 1980s, there was a jigsaw puzzle… A line of jigsaw puzzles. I don't remember which one it was. But all of their 500 piece puzzles in this little series used the exact same cut template for the pieces. Which meant you could shuffle the puzzles together and have Mary Robinette's novel.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes. I mean, it's a short story. A novella, maybe, by now. I don't even know.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's… Yeah. No, it's terrible. It's really bad.

[Howard] So it's a 100 piece puzzle, not 500.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a 100. Maybe 25 pieces. I don't even know. It's…

[Howard] Marshall?

[Marshall] So, I guess for me, it's a little bit different. I wrote a novel… Fantasy novel, years and years ago. Even printed it out and everything. I was very happy with it. It's horrible. But the upside to it is now that I've been tinkering in other genres and stuff like that, in grad school and in my writing community, I actually took part of that world… Because, like Mary Robinette was saying earlier, there's something about my level of writing then in my level of writing now. Right? So I've actually taken part of that, basically a character and a concept from that, and turned it into a short story for the end of my last semester that I was in. Now this semester, I get to turn it into a novelette. So I've picked up the thread, but it wasn't… It's not that novel. It's a different thing. I'm sorry, Mary Robinette, for your thing…

 

[Howard] Okay. Your solution is a really, really good one. I want to come back… I hope I typed this correctly. I took notes. Your pull quote. "I was very proud of it. It's horrible."

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] Yeah, that's accurate.

[Howard] Because… Raising my hand now… I think we all feel seen by this.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] So proud of something we've done, then we realize, "Oh, that really wasn't very good." But the recognition when you go back to pick up the thread and you recognize, "Oh. This isn't good enough. There are two or three pieces in here that are good, but everything that connects them is garbage, so I will take this apart and use it for parts."

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Yup.

[Howard] You just need to… A character, a fight scene, whatever.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have definitely done that. So one of the things that I do want to give people, if you have a planned break coming up, so, like, you know that the thing is… You know that you're going to have to set it down, like, say, you're getting ready to go to World Con or something like that. You know you're going to have to set it down for a little bit. Or if someone just comes into the room while your writing and interrupts you. Because we've also all had that, where you're in the flow and someone breaks your concentration and you come back and you're like, "Oh, I knew exactly where this scene was going and now I no longer do." One of the things that all do is that I will drop breadcrumbs to myself. So, like, I'll just be like, "Alma and Nathaniel canoodling, sexy fun times, interrupted, lights up." I'll come back and, like, when I look at it again, I may or may not remember what exactly those things were. But it gives my brain kind of a Rorschach where it can interpret it based on where I am now and it's got enough connection to what was happening before that I can use it going forward.

 

[Howard] Okay, so last question. It's not really a question, but it is an ask. We have listeners right now listening to this episode this very moment who have lost the thread. Do you have encouraging words for them? After the encouraging words, maybe we'll do homework.

[Mary Robinette] You're not alone.

[Marshall] There's more threads.

[Howard] Here's what I'll offer. I'm so sorry. I know this hurts. It happens to the best of us. Or so I've been told. I'm not actually among the best of us.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah. This is an unfortunate and really annoying part of being a writer. The good thing, and I will say this, the good thing is that it feels like in that moment that you've lost something deeply, deeply precious. But there's always another thread, there's always another story. So, just because you've lost that one, usually it's because you are in fact ready to move on. So it's not always a terrible thing when it happens. It just feels bad.

[Marshall] I like that. There's always another thread.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The brain has a terrible UI.

[Chelsea] I am a knitter and I have dropped a work in progress and come back to it and said, "Now, what was I thinking? No, I can't do this." It doesn't matter, the yarn is still good. I can unravel it, [garbled I can put it in a hank], I can wash all the wrinkles out of it, I can rewind it into a ball, and I can knit it again. That's why I love being a knitter.

[Mary Robinette] Nice.

[Chelsea] This is a metaphor.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Those words are not wasted words. You're a better writer now because you… Because of the words. Right. So…

 

[Howard] Okay. Homework, Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Homework. So, you've lost the thread. You need to start writing again. Before you look at the manuscript, I want you to write down, to the best of your knowledge and your thinking of where you are right now, to the best of your knowledge, what you think the thread is. Like, what you think the book is about, what you think was supposed to happen next, kind of anything… Just brain dump. This can be a sentence, this can be a paragraph, it can be… However long it is. But just what you think is supposed to happen. What you think that thread is. Then I want you to actually reread the thing. Write down what the thread in the old manuscript was. What that old thread was. Then I want you to reconcile the two. Because you are not the same writer you were when you set it down. You are more skilled, you are in a different place, you have different concerns. Reconcile those two things. Then see if there is a new thread that you can write forward with.

[Howard] That is a beautiful assignment that I hate because I did not want to admit that I'm a different person than I was just six weeks ago.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I mean it could be six hours. It could be… Yeah. Hey. Fair listener, we're all very sad that you've lost the thread. We've all been there. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. There's always more thread.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/09/04/17-36-space-for-everyone/

 

Key points: Space for everyone, and how we can send as many people as possible into space. More space companies, new space organizations. Doing it, going up, but also sharing it. Experiences! Making space available for different people makes it safer for everyone. We need to start thinking as a species, as earthlings, because big things don't respect the borders of countries. People want to explore, we need a frontier. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 36]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Space for Everyone.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cady] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cady] I'm Cady.

 

[Dan] We are here in Capitol Reef at the UVU field station for the Writing Excuses retreat. We've got a live audience of wonderful writers.

[Cheers]

[Dan] And we have an absolutely wonderful special guest, Dr. Cady Coleman. Tell us about yourself.

[Cady] I am, I guess, a former astronaut. I'd like to think once you're an astronaut, you're sort of always an astronaut. But I flew twice on the space shuttle and I got to live up on a space station for six months. I've just been having so much fun learning about how to share through writing here at the retreat.

 

[Dan] That's awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This writing retreat has been specifically focused on space exploration and science communication. Our writers are all wonderful. Today we're going to talk about space for everyone, and how we can send as many people as possible into space. Cady, tell us about that. This is something that is kind of a big focus of yours as an astronaut.

[Cady] Well, it has two parts to it. One is that now you see more space companies, more possibilities that more people are going. It's not only people who have a lot of money, it's not only governments. I mean, there's new space organizations popping up all the time. Which, to me, is really exciting, because basically together we really make everything easier for everyone. Everything that each of these companies figures out, it brings all of us ahead. Coming from a government agency, being at NASA for 24, 26 years…

[Laughter]

[Cady] Something like that. Anyways, it's pretty wonderful to have so many more players involved and so many more possibilities. That means more people are going, and also that more people are a part of the planning and figuring out how. I just, that's really exciting to me. So more people doing it. But then, what we get to do, sharing that is another way of making space for everyone. To me, as much as we're great engineers and scientists, we are apprentice storytellers, I would say, in the space program. So I've been really excited to be here and learn more about… Sort of the… Maybe making… The making of the sausage, of how you can compel people to understand the story that you're trying to tell. It's one thing to get to go, but I really… It's really, really important to me to share it and to help people who… It might not occur to them to share, but to share their experiences as well.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that's one of the things that when we're thinking about space for everyone, that was apparent to me when I was doing the research, Cady was one of the people who helped me. The experiences that she had as a woman in the space program were very different than the experiences that male astronauts had. What's interesting, and also for those who are not watching the video feed… Also, for those who are listening for the first time, there is no video feed… But…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] For those not watching the video feed, Cady is at the very… She's the smallest person to ever qualify for a spacewalk. Is that correct?

[Cady] Upon a space station.

[Mary Robinette] To qualify… Tell me what it actually is.

[Laughter]

[Cady] Well, Mary Robinette's trying to be polite about the fact that I'm on the shorter end of things. I'm not the shortest astronaut. We used to have a range of sizes of… Of spacesuits. We had many more women that were qualified to do spacewalks, myself included. But then when we got to the space station, we cut down on the sizes. We got rid of the small suit. So I am the smallest person to qualify in the sort of big suit, and get to go up there. Unfortunately, nothing broke while we were up there.

[Laughter]

[Cady] I mean, fortunately, I was excited about being able to come home again and not having life-threatening things happen. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Cady] But I think you do have a different experience when you're a different size, when you come from a different place or a different culture. Life with your family was different. All these things add up to who you are when you're sitting there on the launchpad, ready to launch, or being that person in space. You bring all that stuff with you.

 

[Mary Robinette] The analogy that I use a lot for people who aren't thinking about this on a regular basis because they're completely obsessed with it, like me, is the history of flight. Like, when… Anyone who's ever flown knows that those seats are not made for everyone. They are made for a specific body type, and if you're not that body type… Like, if you are comfortable on an airplane, that seat was made for you, and nobody else is comfortable on that seat.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm astonished. But the thing is that flight, when it started, was just for the elite. It was just for… You had to have a certain amount of athleticism to do it, you had to have a certain amount of income. Then, over the 50 years between when Orville and Wilbur took off to when we go to the moon, it became more and more available for people, because they could afford to fly, because the seats… The cabins were enclosed, and pressurized. So it's interesting when you think about space to think about it where we are right now is that point where…

[Cady] It's our chance.

[Mary Robinette] Things are. It's our chance. Things are… As commercial spaceflight comes in, we're starting to be able to go even if we aren't special military pilots.

 

[Dan] Well. Yeah. Cady, a point that you made the other day, that I thought was really fascinating, is that you're working with a lot people who have different levels of physical ability. You made the point that making space available for them actually makes it much safer for everybody overall. Can you talk about that?

[Cady] Well, when we think about like something really important for everybody who goes to space is to know that there… When something goes wrong and there's an alarm. So for the space station, I think there's going to be lights that are flashing, there's going to be an audible alarm that tells me what level, is this just like, "Oh, something crummy just stopped working," or is this "Within a minute and a half, go and get your oxygen mask." Right? So those are transmitted to us by being able to see, being able to hear. So what if you don't have one of those senses? Right? Or what if you don't have maybe even both? So the fact that we're looking at some creative ways, because people… Lots more people are flying, they'll be coming up to the space station. This might not be for the national space agencies, but by making sure there's several methods to understand that there's a problem which we already do. But they're not accessible to everyone, right? It's going to be helpful for everyone. What if as I am translating around, flying around the space station… We don't just give ourselves one push and go. We actually kind of tend our way around. We sort of grab handrails, touch things on the way. What if when there's an alarm, one of those vibrated? That that was an indication to us? So it's kind of like down here on the ground when we started designing streets, city streets, to have curbs that sloped down at every corner. I mean, it was at first designed for blind people. But now it's actually really beneficial for so many of us. So, by building a space station, the newest space stations and the newest spaceships to be ones that fit everyone, we really open up the possibilities of who can come and who can contribute. I'm nominating writers, okay?

[Laughter]

[Cady] Now I want to bring writers. Having gotten to spend a couple days here and understand actually how you think about what we get to do and how you open up actually more possibilities about what we could be doing in space has been really fun for me.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be doing another episode where we talk specifically about how to use some of this narrative excitement there. But…

 

[Dan] Let's have our book of the week. Our book of the week this week is actually not a book, it is a podcast. Cady, you have your own podcast. Can you tell everyone about it?

[Cady] Well, it's not just mine.

[Dan] Okay.

[Cady] It's out of Arizona State, and the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State. This is a school that has a school of… This is a college, a university, that has a school of Earth and Space Exploration. Like, when you think about it, if you love volcanoes, you don't just love them on Earth. You don't just love them on Venus. The same person is going to like both worlds. So we bring them together in the school of Earth and Space Exploration. But, more than that, at Arizona State University, they're looking at we are becoming an interplanetary species. I mean, if you acknowledge that the robots that we built did not make themselves, we already are. So what are the big questions that we need to answer? Who's going to decide when we get to the moon? Who decides the rules? Who decides what's okay to bring, what's okay to like put on the moon, take back from the moon, Mars? All these things that involve people. For example, I'll say that we wanted to have an episode about… We have one, and I thought, well, it'll be about colonizing Mars. Then you start doing some research and talking to people and you realize I might not want to use that word because it's actually reflective of an era when we weren't all that thoughtful, put it lightly, about how we did things. So we're asking questions like that. One of my favorite episodes, of course, is with Mary Robinette and Tony Harrison where we suggested the first crew to go to Mars be all women.

[Mary Robinette] We had opinions, and you can listen to…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Interplanetary and find out exactly what those are.

[Cady] I mean, when you think about it, okay, it is probably our turn. Right?

[Laughter]

[Cady] Okay. This is my opinion. But was that my final opinion? Probably not. But it's also great for things like understanding space debris. I mean, we talk to Mark Brown, an astronaut whose just really good at explaining what's big, what's small, and how all of it is up there, and how now we know more about it. Really, what is the scariness of this? So, we have those kinds of episodes. But we call it asking the big questions. It's myself and Andrew Maynard is the cohost. He's a futurist and someone who looks at people and machines and how they interact and the creator of this podcast is a wild guy that casts robots and other things in plays and shows. I mean, he's just a very creative guy. He designed that, the podcast, and it has a sequence called Sounds of Space which is really cool.

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Cady] So. You asked me a short question, I gave you a long answer.

[Laughter]

[Dan] No, that's okay. The podcast is called Interplanetary…

[Cady] It's called Mission Interplanetary.

[Dan] Mission Interplanetary. Where can people find it?

[Cady] They can find it on all their favorite platforms. Season three is starting up in the fall, and we would love to hear from people. So, look for us. I mean, go… We'd love reviews, but we'd love to know what you… What are the big questions for you? Those are the kinds of things that would really love to understand.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. When we're talking about space for everyone, I think that there's a couple of different ways to be thinking about. We've been talking kind of broadly, but it's basically there's the ability level and then there's the… Which you… There's also the monetary level. The access. Like… So what are your thoughts about the commercial space program?

[Cady] I mean, more people, more better. But I would urge people to listen to the news carefully. Really listen. Listen for the voices of the people. I mean, we can talk about a three… Kind of the big main companies. There's Space X, which is working with NASA, bringing people up and down on a spacecraft where we get to do this from the US. Which is really convenient in terms of the research that we do, not to be carting all that… Taking baseline data on our bodies and things like that. I love launching from Russia. I went to space on a Soyuz, returned home that way. At the same time, just to get a lot of things done, launching from here is great. But then there's the company's like Blue Origin and like Virgin Galactic which are taking people on a different kind of journey. It's still space. I mean, they are going above… I consider the 50 mile mark to be space. That was what was really considered for the longest time to be space. People who go up, either they're going up in a rocket and then the rocket… The sort of capsule gets dropped off, and it goes up, up, up [garbled still up] above the 50 mile like line, and then lands with a parachute on the ground. Or, in the case of Virgin Galactic, they're launching in a rocket underneath an airplane. That airplane is going up, up, up, up, up, let's this rocketship go, and the rocketship then takes that big arc up 300,000 feet or so, and then down. They get about five or six minutes of floating around in microgravity, and they get that view of the Earth. It's easy to say that many people you see… I mean, it's true that many people you see on these vehicles have paid a lot of money for their seats. Right? And that these companies are run by billionaires. But in talking to these people, I see them, each of them, as people who have a different vision, each of them, and resources, about how to pave the road to space for all of us. That's what I see. Not necessarily the sort of like the battle of the billionaires that you… It's so much easier to talk about that. But doing these things is hard. People are not doing this, I don't think, for the money. I think they're all losing a lot of money as we speak. But they have a certain dedication to making sure that we bring people up to space. Different kinds of people. Some with resources and means. Others with a certain background that gives them a unique view looking back at our planet of what we have to do here and also that exploring further… I mean, Earth is still going to be our home. So it's about Earth, it's about space, but it's a whole new world.

 

[Dan] So let me ask you a question. You've said a couple of times, the more people in space, the better. I agree. I love space, almost just for itself. But, what are the concrete benefits of becoming an interstellar people, of getting all these people into space?

[Mary Robinette] Just interplanetary, don't jump ahead to interstellar.

[Dan] Okay. Whatever it is. Why? Why is getting more people into space better?

[Cady] I don't know if I've said… Well, I guess I have said that it's better. That's kind of based on the premise that if we're going to space, we should bring lots of different kinds of people. Because I've been on teams, and the person that you, unfortunately, least suspect sometimes… We all can stereotype… Comes up with some idea. You're like, "Wow, I never thought of that." So having teams that include people who think differently, come from different backgrounds, and also, candidly, having left the planet and looked back, it is… It's almost a non sequitur to think that it's so important exactly what part of that planet that you came from. What country, what borders. Part of the reason that it's important to start thinking as a species, as earthlings, is that when big things happen, when there's a big meteorite strike, when space debris is happening, these things are not going to respect the borders of certain countries. These are things that we, as people who all live on this planet, have to solve together. One of the ways that we've already started doing that amazingly and astonishingly well is the International Space Station. I mean, there are 17 main partners in the space station, many more countries around the world represented. It's not just that there's astronauts from different places and they all get along and do some great work up there together. It's the team on the ground that really is making big decisions every day together. About where will the Mars rover go next. What are the most important targets? We've only got one more flight… I'm making this up, right? Of Ingenuity. What should that flight be? So those are international ventures.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think one of the things that a lot of people forget when you're talking about the concrete stuff is that we use space, all of us use space technology every single day. With GPS, when we check the weather, like that's the… While we're here in Capitol Reef, we are checking the weather obsessively, because of flash floods. The radar imaging that we're getting… Like, you don't get that without space.

[Cady] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Every time you send someone up, they have that different perspective of, "Oh, did you know that you could maybe do this in space?"

 

[Cady] Well, Dan was asking, is it better, why is it better to send everyone? But the other part of that is, I think, that people are just designed and made, going to explore. That's what I see so much of in the writing that I see, in science fiction. I mean, these are reminders of who we are as people, and this is just going to happen, and it's going to happen in a gazillion different ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Michael Collins said, and I'm going to get this a little bit wrong, but it was that he thought that people had a spiritual imperative for a frontier.

[Cady] I believe it.

[Dan] I think that is a wonderful note to end on. Cady, thank you so much for being here for this episode. You're incredible. We're excited to have you. Thank you again. And thank you to all of our writers here.

[Applause]

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. I'm going to give you a writing prompt. So your prompt this week is to think about sending someone to space that is a non-traditional astronaut.

[Cady] Can I just make a note that usually our…  Just like round-trip, so when you're thinking about your teenagers, I mean, they're going to come back.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Good point. You're right. This is not…

[Dan] Dang it.

[Mary Robinette] This is not spacing the people you don't want. Sending someone to space, and bringing them safely back.

[Dan] Okay. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/08/21/17-34-developing-subtext/

 

Key points: Text, subtext, and context. The words on the page, the layer of meaning underneath that, and what's going on around the words. How do you provide the clues to let the reader get the subtext? Body language, character interpretation. The emotional charge in what's being said. On the nose!

 

[Season 17, Episode 34]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Seven, Developing Subtext.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're between the lines.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Awesome. So. We are going to talk about subtext today. I think the very first question I want to ask you, Maurice, is what is subtext?

[Maurice] So, subtext. So, when I think about subtext, so… I'm going to try a math analogy here, so bear with me. So dialogue operates in three dimensions. There is text, subtext, and context. So the way I think about it is text is like the words on the page, subtext is the layer of meaning underneath the words on the page, and context is what's going on around those words. So when I think about subtext… I mean, we all intuitively understand subtext, because if I come home and my wife is on the couch watching TV and I go, "Hey. Is anything wrong?" And she says, "No! Everything's fine!" Like, my Spidey senses are going to go off. Just on an intuitive level. I know something's going on, but the words on the page were "No, everything's fine." Yet I know, because of context and subtext, yeah, maybe everything is not fine. So that's what I think about… That's one way I think about subtext.

[Dan] Yeah. Subtext is very useful in a lot of different ways. There's a lot of things that you can accomplish with it. You can say things without coming right out and saying them. You can have the characters inferring and implying things. You can even get around various censors, is some of the ways that I've used subtext in the past as well. So it's a useful dialogue tool because if you can pack something with a subtext, you can… It becomes very information rich. Right? The same things are being said, but we understand much more than just the words that are being said. So I guess the question is how do you do that? How do you imbue something with this extra hidden meaning?

[Mary Robinette] So I want to use what… The framework that Maurice has already set up, which is that there is the text, subtext, and context. Subtext, and this is important, exists between the text and the context. You cannot have subtext without having context to compare it to. So here's an example which I think I have used before. So I come from the American South, which is what is called a high context region. So high context culturally means that in order to participate in the conversation, you have to have a lot of context, because so much of it happens subtextually. So these are examples like the American South, large parts of Asia, Brazil as I understand it, will have big parts of the conversation that everybody understands, but is not actually said out loud. So, my husband, by contrast, comes from a low context culture which is you just say things directly without much subtext. So here's the actual conversation. My mom says, "There's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." I reply, "Oh, okay, I can have a pie made for dinner tomorrow night." My husband's like, "Wait a minute. Where did the pie come from?" I'm like, "Well, she just said that there's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." Because to me, contextually, this is very clear based on the relationship my mom and I have. All of the subtext in there is "I bought a bag of apples. If you have time to make a pie, it would be really great, but I don't want to put you out." I'm like, "Oh, making a pie sounds awesome. I don't have time or energy tonight, but I could do it tomorrow night." But you only get the pieces of dialogue on either end of that. "There's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." "Great, I can have a pie for tomorrow night." My husband is like, "Wouldn't… Don't you think she was just offering you an apple?" I'm like, "No. Because then she would have said do you want an apple, or, more likely because high context society, she would have just brought me apples to avoid the other conversation which is would you like an apple? No, thank you, I couldn't. Really, they're very fresh. No, seriously, I just can't take an apple. But these are apples that were picked at my grandmother's farm. Oh, well, in that case, of course I'd love to try an apple." So when you're thinking about this, this subtext, you have to think about the context that goes around it. Because… This is the other fun thing, people will read the subtext based on their cultural understanding of how subtext works. They will bring their own context to the conversation. So if I said to my husband there's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen, and he didn't… Well, actually, I would never say that to him because I know that he… Let's be clear, I know that he does not have the context. But, if I were writing a novel and I wanted to make things awkward, then my character would just say that, and then my character would get mad because he didn't read the subtext. Which would be very clear to everyone there. So, thinking about the subtext as the unspoken part that is kind of held in suspension between text and context.

 

[Dan] Okay. So let me follow this up. Let's say that you were going to put into a book that conversation with your mother. How would you provide the right contextual clues to let a non-Southern audience understand what was really going on?

[Mary Robinette] So this is where you have to use the non-spoken… The other pieces of dialogue. So we've been talking about dialogue as the lines that are said out loud. But there's also all of the other pieces. There's body language, and then there's the character's interpretation of the line that is said. So this is where you would deploy something like free indirect speech where the character interprets it as part of the narrative or… So that my character might think, "Oh, I know that mom really wants a pie. So that's why she's mentioning the apples." Or, actually, if it's free indirect, "She knew that her mother really wanted a pie. She didn't have the energy to do it that night. So she made a counter offer. I could have a pie ready tomorrow night."

[Dan] Awesome.

[Howard] Yeah. In thinking about the pie thing, it occurred to me that the way the apples are described tells you whether or not they are pie apples or eating apples.

[Mary Robinette] In a bag.

[Howard] There's a bag of apples on the counter is pie apples.

[Mary Robinette] In the kitchen.

[Howard] I've… In the kitchen on the counter. Yeah, I've… Bag of apples in the kitchen. I put apples and the fruit basket on the counter is I found some apples that I think you will love and I have set them in this basket and I would love for you to try one because we have this thing about artisanal apples and eating them and whatever. It's the difference between the bag in the basket.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Context.

 

[Dan] Okay. Let's pause for the book of the week, which, Maurice, this is you this time.

[Maurice] Yeah. So, it's a book… It's not out yet. I believe it comes out early 2023. It's called The Lies of the Ajungo. It's by Moses Ose Utomi. So, it's a novella. I've read this novella twice already. I really love it. I'm just going to read the back cover copy for you real quick. "In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn 13 to appease the terrifying Ajungo empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be 13 in three days, but his parched mother won't last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal. She provides water for his mother, and in exchange, he'll travel out to the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus he begins his quest for salvation for his mother, his city, and himself." The great thing I love about this book is this book moves at the speed of fable. If that makes sense. Moses has a way of just weaving magic into his… All the lines in this book. So, like everything has a certain weight to it, on top of just the lush language that he uses. So I've really enjoyed this book, obviously, twice. It's just I love the magic that it just… This book is just imbued with.

[Dan] Cool. That is The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi. That'll be out next year, in 2023. So look for it then.

 

[Dan] Okay. So, let's talk some more about subtext. Howard, how are you able to put subtext into the work that you do?

[Howard] In comics, it's actually pretty easy. Because you can have a dialogue bubble whose words disagree with, at least on the surface, the facial expression, the body language, of the character. I didn't have to use words to describe how the character was standing. I can just communicate all of the body language with the dialogue, and the subtext is right there. In prose, it's something that I've had to learn, and it's something that I've actually had to back off of a little bit because I can see… When I'm writing, I can see the way people are talking, the way they're… The things their faces are doing, the things they're doing with their hands, and I have to decide which of it is important and which of it is not. Because I'm capable of describing all of it, but it really slows down a scene when I do that. So, for me, subtext is an exercise in… It's like an exercise in risk reward management. Which of these little bits of body language can I describe for the most impact, and which do I just need to let slide because there isn't enough page.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that you just said that I want to keep up to this is body language and seeing them interact. But sometimes what the subtext is is not a specific line that I just didn't say out loud. Sometimes the subtext is just a mood. That the subtext is this character is annoyed all the way through this scene. Because there's what's called direct versus indirect communication. I referred to this earlier, direct is, "Will you pass the salt?," indirect is, "Is there salt?". Even more indirect is, "Oh, this soup is a little bland." Although…

[Howard] Oh, that's direct.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, that is direct.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Actually, that's… Scratch that. Those are fighting words. Unless you're [garbled]. But thinking about, when you're crafting that subtext, thinking about your character's emotional state is also going to really express… Really help you guide how that happens.

[Maurice] Yeah. So I think…

[Dan] Uh… Oh, okay, go ahead Maurice.

 

[Maurice] One of the ways I think about subtext is, just like Mary Robinette said, it's like subtext is the emotional charge underneath what's being said. Right? A lot of times, as you're seeing the scene, the characters, they're going to betray what they're really feeling in some subtly different ways. Right? What… Again, I'm a TV junkie, but one of the shows I watch, one of the police procedural's I watch which really helped me out a lot in this was a show called… It only lasted like three seasons… Called Lie to Me. It was based on a book by Paul Ekman. I think he wrote a book called Telling Lies. But it's all about micro-expressions. Right? So, just watching how they would explain how micro-expressions work, all of a sudden I'm just like, "Oh. Hang on." So now I am getting to see just the direct correlation between what the body betrays about what a person's really feeling and now I'm able to convey that in the text. So for us as writers, it's like oh, I don't need as many dialogue tags if I'm writing their physical reaction to something. What was their physical reaction? What was their facial expression? What other kind of body language are they betraying with what's being said in the moment? So that's one of the things that helped a lot.

[Mary Robinette] So, while we're talking about this, I actually want to talk about the opposite of subtext, which is on the nose. Because one of the flaws that you'll see sometimes with early career writers or published writers to is that you'll read something and be like, "Wow, that's really on the nose dialogue." What that means is that the character is saying exactly what they're thinking in the moment without any subtext at all. It is exactly serving the plot in that moment. There's no tension, there is no… It's just statements…

[Howard] There's nothing to unpack.

[Mary Robinette] That are not… There's nothing to unpack at all. It's fine for a character to do that occasionally. But if you have a string of it, where everyone is doing that, that's where you wind up with on the nose dialogue.

[Dan] Yeah. The… Both on the nose dialogue and subtext can be very useful tools culturally. So for… A good example of on the nose being very good, I just watched a movie from India called RRR. It's about two guys, two revolutionaries in the early 1900s in India who end up meeting each other. Then there's a song, because it's an Indian movie and they have songs. They have a whole song where the lyrics are as on the nose as it could be. These two guys just met each other, now they're best friends. Even though one of them is secretly working against the other one and doesn't realize it. Like it's… The whole plot of the movie just described to you by a guy singing a song. Culturally, that's really valuable, because I don't… I'm not a part of that culture. There are nuances to their interaction into their relationship that I would have missed without that song to say, "Hey. Gringo who's watching this, let me explain some stuff to you." At the same time, subtext can be really useful for cultural reasons as well. Some of the write-for-hire stuff that I have written… In one, for example, I wanted to make two of the characters gay and they did not let me for corporate reasons. They're like, "No. We will not allow that. We're not going to have gay characters." So I was able to make them clearly gay in subtext so that someone looking for it will be able to see it and someone who doesn't want that in their fiction doesn't have it. That kind of stuff is so useful as a way of giving your audience the kind of stuff that they need. The ability to see yourself in fiction, especially for marginalized groups, often comes through subtext because we can't say it out loud.

[Mary Robinette] Just, again, to underline what Dan is talking about, the thing is that those clues are there for someone who has the right context, and is looking for it.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] But for someone who does not live in that context, they aren't there. Also, I think that we should all acknowledge that the corporate overlords are in the wrong in that particular case.

[Dan] Absolutely. That was the subtext of my statement. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I was saying the quiet part out loud for you.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Very on the nose.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So. Let's slide into our homework. I want you to… We're going to force you to develop subtext. I want you to take a work in progress… If you want to grab that transcript that we had earlier, that's also fine. But grab a scene with dialogue where you understand what's going on in that scene. As a writing exercise, I want you to just delete every third line, regardless of who's saying it, regardless of how important it is. I just want you to delete every third line. Then go back and try to use nonverbal cues to make the dialogue still make sense.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/08/07/17-32-everything-is-about-conflict/

 

Key points: How does conflict affect dialogue? Start with an overarching conflict of your narrative. Then each scene reflects that conflict, and every dialogue needs to reflect the conflict of this scene. Sometimes it's conflicting agendas, sometimes it's a juxtaposition of two ideas. Pacing has a lot to do with it, and where you are in the story. Try-fail cycles, and the rule of three. Yes-but, no-and. What is at stake in this dialogue exchange? Deflections! 

 

[Season 17, Episode 32]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Five, Everything is About Conflict.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Everything is about conflict. 

[Mary Robinette] It is not!

[Dan] I think this... 

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yes it is. How many times do we have to go over this?

[Mary Robinette] Fine.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Maurice.

[Maurice] Yes.

[Dan] How does conflict affect the dialogue that we write?

[Maurice] So I actually had this whole idea reframed for me not too long ago because I was... This sounds... Again, with my wierd stories of my life, but... So I was on a mission trip to Romania. Like I say, I will turn anything into a writing opportunity. So I'm sitting around, I'm talking to these groups of missionaries. One of them turns to me, he's like, "So I'm the top playwright in Romania." I'm like, "Oh. Of course you are, and of course you happen to be in this circle right now." So he and I end up having this whole conversation. He's also a professor, so he was determined to like give me his entire course over a three hour breakfast. But he starts talking about the whole idea of conflict, and how everything starts with an overarching conflict of your narrative. If you understand what your overarching conflict is, then when you come to write a scene, each scene touches into that conflict. Because that conflict is played out in each scene, now he says, now I get to play with time, because it doesn't even matter what order I arrange things in, because each scene is playing out that conflict over and over again. So that's something that's kind of stuck with me moving forwards is just the whole idea of, like, okay, everything starts with identifying one of the overarching conflicts in the story, but then I start pushing that out a little bit, so when my two characters are engaged with each other, so what is the conflict in this scene? Sometimes that conflict is the whole conflicting agendas item, and then sometimes it's just a matter of like them tying into the greater theme of the book. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this really well, but that's kind of where my headspace goes to when I start talking about it all starts with conflict.

[Mary Robinette] I think, for me, it totally makes sense what you're talking about. I have lately been thinking about the idea of conflict as being… I think that when we think about conflict and use that word, we think about a fight. I really think it's about attention, and that fights are about the easiest way to explain that idea of conflict. But that overarching tension or conflict that you're talking about is often like a juxtaposition between two ideas, which a conversation between characters can expose. There's a thing that I think ties into what you're talking about that I learned from a PR firm that we used with… When I was president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association that… This was from Kevin Lampi of Kirk Lampi Worldwide. Great people. Anyway, but one of the things he did was that he had us do a crisis management exercise. We had to write down in these blocks what we thought of ourselves. What we thought of ourselves, then… This is an us and them thing. What we thought about them. What they thought about us, and what they thought about themselves. What was interesting about that was the act of trying to put yourself into someone else's mindset also started to expose where the opportunities for more disagreement were and also where the opportunities for compromise were, where the overlapping things were. Oh, look, here are the things that we actually do all have in common, the same common goals. So when you're thinking about this conflict between the characters, if you think about, okay, what does your character think about themselves and what do they think about the person that they're in the conversation with. And vice versa, like what does the other person think about themselves and how do they think about the character. A lot of times, there's just kind of natural areas for this conflict, because things are so out of alignment.

[Dan] Maurice, I really loved what you said earlier about how, to a certain extent, every conversation in a book is about the overarching conflict. Whether that is overt or indirect. It's important to point out that pacing has a lot to do with this. Because really, your… If you're going to be poking at this central conflict over the course of an entire book, you don't want to resolve it too early. You want to make sure that there is an arc and a flow to it. There are elements that maybe shouldn't even be discussed early, and certainly not resolved. Maybe those early conversations are a chance to establish that conflict, to avoid it, to come to false conclusions or false compromises. Make sure that you know what the pacing of your overall story is going to be like, because that can help guide these kind of sub conversations that address it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I think that…

[Howard] I am really fond… Oh, sorry.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, no, you go, Howard.

[Howard] I am really fond of the Monty Python argument sketch. Where… It actually gets cited as, in scholarly dissertations, as examples of what arguments are not and examples of how to write dialogue poorly. The… We'll post a link to it in the liner notes, but… "Ah, is this the right room for an argument?" "I told you once." "No you haven't." "Yes I have." "When?" "Just now." "No you didn't." "Yes I did." "You didn't." "I did." "You didn't." "I'm telling you I did." "Oh, I'm sorry, just one moment. Is this the five-minute argument or the full half-hour?" "Oh, just the five-minute." "Ah, thank you." "Anyway, I did." It is brilliant. I mean, it's a sendup of customer service, customer complaint culture among other things. But the way in which you unpack this, one character's motivation is to make sure that we never resolve the conflict. They're always… The argument has to continue. So he resorts to just straight up contradiction and ad hominem and… The other person is looking for, I suppose, a satisfactory experience after having spent a pound on five minutes of argument. I don't know what they're looking for. It's kind of absurd. But it's enormously entertaining to watch. And… I'm done.

 

[Dan] Awesome. Let's do our book of the week right now. Which is actually a thing of the week because it is a TV show. I want to tell you all to go and watch Strange New Worlds. This is the new Star Trek series with Pike and Number One and Spock and Uhura and all of these people. It is kind of sort of a prequel to the original series, but fundamentally, and the reason that I am recommending it to you, is it understands what Star Trek is better than any other series in the last 20 years. I am a hard-core Star Trek fan. I watch all of the shows. There's five right now and some of them are not good and I still watch them. Strange New Worlds is exquisite. It is wonderful. The way that they are able to do characterization in incredibly small amounts of time. Just a quick camera pan around the bridge and you already know who these people are and how they interact with each other. They've done a wonderful job with who these people are, making it feel like Star Trek, and then, also, in many cases, some really fascinating conversations and dialogue to the point of our episode. But, really, my agenda is that I just want you to go watch Star Trek. So, Strange New Worlds is wonderful. Go watch it.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, my agenda…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Is also to help you understand how to use this conflict. I said earlier that this is about try-fail cycles. So when Dan was talking about pacing… If you understand how to use a try-fail cycle that occurs in another part of storytelling, then you understand how to use a try-fail cycle in dialogue. In brief, if you're listening to this in and of itself, Western readers are used to the rule of three, that things happen in sets of three. Third times a charm, three times are funny, what have you. So if you do something that breaks that rule, if somebody gets an answer in a two count or they get it in a five count, it's going to affect their idea of how difficult something was. So when you're thinking about this conversation and thinking about where you are in the course of the overall story, that conversation is part of a try-fail cycle of trying to achieve a thing. So you can decide, okay, I'm going to… In this thing, my authorial area of intention is that we advance this much and my character's area of intention is this thing. So I'm going to… And I want it to feel easy. So I'm going to get the answer really fast. Or I want it to feel hard, so I'm going to draw this out, and at the end of it, in the try-fail cycle, if you've heard me talk about it in previous episodes, the idea of yes-but, no-and. Do they get the answer? Yes, but they've caused a bigger argument. Or, no, and it has exposed a greater crack in the relationship. So you can use those tools, the same tools that we've talked about for other things, you can use those and how you structure the dialogue and the conflict inherent in that dialogue.

 

[Maurice] Yeah. I think one of the things to keep in mind, so as this dialogue scene's playing out and is touching on this overarching conflict and everything, one of the things to think about is what is at stake in this dialogue exchange?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Maurice] I mean, that's the big thing, right? This ties back into what Mary Robinette just said as well as what Dan talked about in terms of pacing, is… Because sometimes, what's at stake is the reveal that propels, that opens up the door for the next phase of the story. Right? So, keep it in mind, what's at stake in this scene? That also charges the moment, also. If the reader understands there's something big at stake, then that moment, this conversation's charged with an extra energy.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That can also be like why a character doesn't want to have a conversation, and the conflict is just about trying to get them to have it. Because of the thing that's at stake… Because they're aware of how vulnerable that conversation is going to make them. They'll do anything in their power… Like, if you ask someone who is depressed and has not yet admitted it if they're depressed, they're going to tell you no. They're not… It's like… They may immediately say, "No. Do you want some tea?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Immediately deflect and move away. So…

[Maurice] Sorry, I'm going to… Sorry, I'm just going to laugh every time you say, "Do you want some tea?" Because that's literally what my mother does all the time.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] If something gets too heated. She'll do it as a way to introduce herself to a group of people she doesn't know, because she leads with hospitality, or, if a moment gets too emotionally charged, it's like, "Would you like some tea?" as her way of backing out of the conversation.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yes. That's a really great characterization thing that you can do is figure out how does your character deflect when they get uncomfortable. Do they crack a joke? Do they offer tea? Do they just gets silent? I know someone, and this is an understanding that we have between us, that sometimes their emotions become too much for them to process, and the easiest thing for them when that happens is to just walk out of the room. Because we have had that conversation, they can, with me, just walk out of the room and I'm like, "Okay. We'll pick that up later after they've had time to process their emotions." But they can't do that with other people, so they have to use different deflection mechanisms. So it… There's so many yummy things that you can do…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] To introduce conflict.

[Howard] One of my favorite comedic moments, and I've seen it done several different ways, it's its own trope, is the nakedly undisguised deflection. Conversation gets uncomfortable and somebody says, "Oo. Sorry, I just realized I need to be somewhere besides this room." Then they leave.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] There's any number of ways that can be established, but the deflection that is obvious is… One of the reasons it's funny is because we see ourselves in it. We see ourselves deflecting and not wanting to be discovered in our deflection.

[Dan] Well, I… Deflections themselves are valuable because a lot of authors don't even realize they can do it. Right? You've put these two people in a conversation. Clearly, they have to keep talking until something is resolved. No they don't. The form kind of tricks us into thinking that there will be a satisfactory conclusion to this, that the questions will get answered. No. People don't always do that. So giving yourself the freedom… I hereby give you permission to have your characters refuse to discuss the things you want them to discuss. To try to deflect, to try to change the subject, to try to distract. Which I see in so many works by new writers and aspiring writers is they just didn't realize they could do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Again, if you think of it as conflict, if you think of it as physical conflict, of course when you're sparring, you're going to block. Of course you're going to dodge. So letting your characters do that as well, they don't have to hit every time. They can make other choices.

[Howard] I'm sorry, I just realized that there's someplace I need to be besides this boxing ring.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] Okay. So here's your homework for today. I want you to write… This is a pure writing prompt writing exercise that we're doing. Write a conversation between two characters, one who wants to commit a crime and one who does not. They are in conflict over that issue. One of them has done this before, the other one has not. The twist is halfway through this conversation, I want their opinions to change. Whoever was advocating for the crime is now advocating against it and vice versa. Give us that conflict, show how it changes. That is your homework for today. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/24/17-30-know-your-characters/

 

Key points: How do you know your characters? Exterior, physical characteristics, versus interior, how do they think or feel, what internal forces guide them. Dialogue is an outward expression of attitudes and thoughts. Watch for the collision between character and authorial intent. What questions do you ask your characters to help you separate their speaking? Quirks, speech patterns, ways of seeing the world. Background and attitude or emotional state. Be aware of the context that you need to provide to make prose dialogue clear.

 

[Season 17, Episode 30]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Two, Know Your Characters.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're dumb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

[Dan] Okay, this is about knowing your characters, not your tagline.

[Maurice] Correct.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] And you are both busy and in a hurry, so let's get right into this. We want to talk about knowing your characters. If you want to write good dialogue, you gotta know who's speaking. So, how do we get to know our characters, Maurice?

[Maurice] Well, I tend to think of it in terms of sort of mining out the exterior versus mining out their interior. So, it's like when I think of exterior, I think of like physical things about them, in terms of like their age, or… Let's see. Oh, yeah. Just age and physical characteristics, things like that. The [garbled]… And, in fact, like nationality, origins, culture, those I consider sort of external elements to the character. As opposed to their interiority, which is how do they think, how do they feel, what are their philosophies, what are the internal forces that guide them. I'm fascinated with this whole idea of what Howard talked about earlier about the DTR. [Define The Relationship, Episode 28] So I was hoping he'd jump right in right about now.

[Howard] Well, let me say this. If you were going to define… If you were going to try to write dialogue that sounds like Howard, a couple of the character attributes that I consciously try to apply to myself are I am more inclined to make fun of myself than to make fun of other people and I never make fun of other people unless I know them and know that they can tell that I am joking. So if you were to write Howard dialogue where Howard says something really mean-spirited to someone he just met, that would sound out of character. So that's the sort of thing… It doesn't matter that I'm 54 years old or way 230 pounds and I'm happy with weighing… None of that matters with the dialogue. What matters is how am I going to speak to other people in a way that sounds true to who I am.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing in the Regency which longtime listeners will have heard me say before that manners are an outward expression of your opinion of others. One of the things about dialogue is that it is an outward expression. So when you are having two characters speaking to each other, when your character is speaking, what they are revealing is their own attitudes and thoughts. It's not just… It's a way of exposing how they are perceiving those around them. Not just by what they're saying but by the way they are saying it.

[Pause]

[Mary Robinette] And I've stopped the conversation completely. Perfect.

[Laughter]

 

[Maurice] I was just thinking… I'm processing all that. So it's one of those things where it's like all right, so. I'm trying… Start off with the Howard thing, because I'm like, "What would it be like to write Maurice as a character?" So that's been like a weird mental exercise, because it's like, all right. So I am black. Spoilers for anyone who didn't know that, by the way. So that is going to affect how I operate in certain contexts. It shouldn't, but it does in a lot of ways. Because I'm going to… I mean, even right now, there's a light version of that going on right now, even though I'm friends with all of you. I'm also in podcast performance mode, as opposed to oh, I'm hanging out with my boys mode. Right? So there's that aspect, which is feeding into how I'm coming across in terms of what I'm saying. But then there's the internal stuff that's going on too, the stuff that informs me in terms of what are my aspirations, what are my insecurities. That's going to weigh in how I frame certain things, in how I want to come across versus how I do come across. Right? So that's that balance of the interior and exterior that I was talking about.

 

[Howard] There's the collision between that information and what Mary Robinette has described as authorial intent. In the Shafter's Shifters cozy mysteries I'm writing, I have five mean characters. It's an ensemble. Often, all five of them are in the room with someone else. I have to remember that authorial intent, I want to move the story forward here, intersects the fact that each one of these characters may have a question that… There's information that they need or there's an objective that they're after, and they will interrupt. They will participate in the conversation, they will turn it from a dialogue into a trialogue or a quadalogue or whatever. I'm breaking the word dialogue, I'm sorry. I shouldn't do that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But it gets very confusing because when you have that many voices, if they're not distinct, you have to start using dialogue tags. Now the page gets cluttered. Now it starts to slow down. And now I flip back to authorial intent and ask myself, "Do I get to override what I know those characters want in order to make this scene function the way I want it to function?" It's challenging.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Maurice] So I think… Oh, go ahead, Mary.

[Mary Robinette] No, no, no, you go ahead.

[Maurice] Well, so one of the things I… So along those lines then, so I think there's one part where we're figuring out… Each individual character, what they want, in terms of what they want to accomplish in the story, what they're trying to figure out, that sort of thing. But there's also that… That kind… You have to sort of like figure out what is their relationship to each other character, also. It's almost like a separate column. 

[Meow]

[Maurice] Right?

[Mary Robinette] There's a kitty.

[Maurice] There is one. She can always sense when I'm on a podcast.

[Meow]

[Mary Robinette] It's purrfect. So, this is another great example of dialogue, and how when you're trying to get to know a character, sometimes having them interrupted by something unexpected is a way to expose stuff about a character. Dialogue is rarely totally linear. So sometimes having something happen like a random cat walking through, having a waiter interrupt a conversation, can help shift the conversation. It can also help you understand more about that character. The… Going back to something that…

[Howard] Maurice?

[Beep… Beep… Beep]

[Mary Robinette] So, for instance, Maurice, when confronted by a cat, reaches down and pets the cat. Howard, when confronted with a beeping alarm, has walked away from his microphone and into another room. Both of these things expose different things not only about the interruption, but about the way the character reacts to that. So…

[Dan] Now I am going to interrupt all of you.

[Mary Robinette] Fine. Fine. I mean… Oh, of course, Dan. Please do what you must.

 

[Dan] Maurice, what's our book of the week?

[Maurice] Our book of the week is… What is it? Oh, shoot. The Ballad of…uhm... Let me think. I'm sorry.

[Dan] The Ballad of Perilous Graves.

[Maurice] Thank you. This cat is all over the place right now.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] It's by Alex Jennings, and I just started this book, but I'm falling in love with this book. It's New Orleans, it's music, it's magic. Alex really put his foot in it. Which… Oh, yeah, which is a good thing. Trust me on that. But it's just… You have this world of magic that's going on and… Uh. I'm sorry, this cat is killing me right now. But I've just started this book. I'm falling in love with what Alex has done in terms of creating the magic and tying it in with music in this world.

[Howard] That's The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings.

[Maurice] Yes.

[Dan] Fantastic.

[Howard] And what's the name of the cat?

[Maurice] Ferb.

[Mary Robinette] Ferb. Oh, that's great.

[Maurice] As in Phineas and Ferb.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Yes. At some point during this, we will be visited by Elsie as well.

 

[Mary Robinette] So I want to tie us back into some concrete tools based on something that Maurice talked about in the first episode, which is thinking about questions to ask about your character. I talked about the interiority of the character, the… What the… Their manner exposing what they think about other people. But the way they express themselves is not just that attitude. It is also about their culture, their nationality, their class, their age, what their home language is… Language or languages. So if you think about these things when you are sitting down to approach that dialogue… Patrick Stewart is going to say things in a very, very different way than Woody Harrelson. Well, did I just get the actor's name right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, good. Good job, me.

[Dan] You did, assuming you were talking about Woody Harrelson.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, I was.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] But they have enormously different approaches to the way they would say something. Dan, one of the things that I love about the way you handle dialogue and characterization in the John Cleaver books is with Marcy and the way we can tell who is kind of present at any given moment. Do you want to talk about some of the tools you use for doing that?

[Dan] Oh, boy. First of all, thank you. Yeah, so I assume you're referring most specifically to books four and five?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] In which Brooke is essentially possessed not by an actual spirit or person, but by a vast backlog of memories that have been downloaded and different ones will take over her personality at different times. I gave her, first of all, a set number of people who would be in charge. Typically we will get Brooke, we will get Nobody who is a demon, we will get… I can't remember the name, but there was a medieval woman who appears a few times, and then eventually Marcy shows up. So, knowing first of all, knowing your characters, knowing who the main personalities were going to be, me to give them specific quirks. Different speech patterns. We have the two modern girls, Brooke and Marcy, who I had already written several books about and I knew them well and they were very different people. Then we had the medieval one, who of course spoke in a different way. She had a child, she had very different life experiences than the others, that allowed her to speak in… Use different words, notice different things about the world, ask questions about the world because she came from a different time, things like that. Then, of course, the demon, Nobody, who is again someone that I had known fairly well. She is very acerbic, very biting, very aggressive, but also incredibly and deeply broken, and kind of flawed as a person. She hates yourself, and that's kind of the root of the whole problem that drives the book for about… Or drives the whole series for about three books in a row. So making sure that they all had these very distinctly different ways of viewing the world meant that as soon as one of them popped up, they had a different relationship with John, so that they would refer to him by different names or they would use different tags, different vocabulary, when they were talking to him, when they were talking about him. They would ask different kinds of questions. That made it relatively easy, after the giant amount of work that you've put in.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then it's relatively easy to use those tools once you've built them and put them on the wall. To say, "Oh, well, this is clearly Marcy who's talking right now."

 

[Mary Robinette] So, just to recap, what we're talking about there is knowing the background of your character and also generally speaking their attitude or I guess emotional state at any given moment.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Which is why when I'm building characters, I'm always trying to focus in on… Well, not always, but there's like a series of questions I tend ask each of my characters. Like, what is your dream, what's a traumatic experience, what is… What's your greatest fear. These sort of questions. So I can just get a feel for who they are. Then, in essence, writing dialogue boils down to knowing your characters so well that you can drop them into any situation and you're just going to know how they're going to respond. You know how they're going to speak in that given situation.

[Dan] Yeah. I have found lately, and there's actually… We could talk about this for an hour, so I will give you the truncated version. Most of what I have written over the past several years, and everything that I have published over the last several years, has been audio drama scripts rather than prose novels. That has caused me to think about dialogue differently. Not that I have learned new things that are… That make my novels different or better. In fact, it often is more difficult. When you're writing an audio drama, there are no dialogue tags. You are relying on different voice actors to convey the idea that this is a different person. So there's no tags, there's no narrative… No editorializing, he said, suspiciously. Things like that. Some of the little tricks that we use when we're writing prose I absolutely can't do when I'm writing scripts. So, being forced to strip the dialogue down, removing all context from it, removing all commentary from it, so it is just words and voices and nothing else actually made it hard to come back to novels because I'd forgotten how to do some of that stuff. But also really forced me to get into their heads and make sure that when you heard somebody speak, it was different words. I had to find other identifiers aside from dialogue tags and adverbs and so on and so on.

[Mary Robinette] This is a really great thing to underline here. Prose dialogue and scripted dialogue, anything with an actor, are not the same thing. It's two different toolsets. It's not just that you can't use the things in prose to go into scripts, it's that when you are writing for an actor, they're going to do some of the lifting for you. You can give them a line that is… Would be ambiguous on the page and trust that they will have done their character homework and come to it and give it a spin. Like, you can just say, "What?" And they can find five different ways to say it, one of which is going to be completely appropriate for the character. But if you just put the word what on the page, there's so much ambiguity there that it's not… It's the kind of thing that you maybe due deeper into a novel when the reader is doing that lifting for you. But it's not something that you can get away with in a short story or the beginning of a book where the reader doesn't yet know that character. So learning… I've seen a number of things that I've gotten from an early career writer where it's clear that they have learned their dialogue from watching media. Because of all of the ambiguity that's inherent in it. Because it doesn't… Because it's dialogue that would work great for an actor because you left space for the actor to do their job, but it doesn't work on the page. Because there's no one there to provide that context for you.

 

[Dan] With that, we're going to go into our homework. Our homework is me today. This is something that I have talked about before, but it is something that I still do all the time. When you're trying to figure out who a character is, write a monologue. Pick one of the characters that you're working on in a work in progress or something like that, and write something. I have done job interviews, I have done just straight let me tell you who I am. Let that character talk for a page or two and just tell you about themselves. This doesn't have to be part of the story. It can just be the character speaking, breaking the fourth wall, telling you what kind of character they are. Whatever it is, write a monologue in which a character talks about themselves. Let that kind of… Use that to discover the character and get to know them better. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/10/17-28-keys-to-writing-dialog/

 

Key Points: Listen to how people speak. Learn to evoke that in writing. And make every character's voice distinct. Err and uh and the F-bomb. Cursing with a slingshot or a crew-served weapon? Culture, nationality, age, class, education, community, all define the character in a specific way. Pacing and attitude. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 28] 

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialog Masterclass, Episode One, Keys to Writing Dialog.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are very excited to have with us for this brand-new class Maurice Broaddus. You've recorded with us in the past. You were one of our instructors on our retreat. We are so happy to have you back. Maurice, tell our listeners about yourself.

[Maurice] Well, A, glad to be back. I like to say I have three jobs. I am the resident Afrofuturist at a community organization called the Khewprw Institute. I'm a science fiction and fantasy author. I have… Man, I have two books that just came out this year. Then I'm also a middle school teacher. So, keeping it busy.

 

[Dan] Man. No kidding. That is a lot of stuff. Well, we're going to talk about one of those books that just came out earlier this year later on as our book of the week. But for right now, let's jump into this class. The next eight episodes we're going to have Maurice teaching us about dialog. So this is where we're starting. Maurice, where do we start?

[Maurice] So, it's one of those things. So, dialog comes easily to some people. It's like a chore for other people. I definitely fell into the chore category when I was first starting out. So I was kind of thinking of like different ways that I could use to just improve my dialog writing. So for me it came down to like three different things. Like, pay attention to how people speak. Then when I'm writing, only evoke how people really speak. Then, after that, it's like how do I concentrate on making each character's voice distinct. So those are the ways I tend to come at dialog.

[Dan] That is really fascinating to me. What do you mean… What's the difference there between paying attention to how people speak, then only evoking how they speak?

[Maurice] Okay. So one of the most helpful exercises I've ever done, so pay attention, this may be homework for you all later on.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Is I was assigned… This was back in college, and I was assigned, hey, record a family dinner. So it was… Yeah, exactly. So I was in college and it was the assignment was record a family dinner and then transcribe it. Just to see what happens. So my family dinner… This like… This was… I was much younger person at the time, so I was still living at home. But it was me, my sister, my brother, my mother, my father. My mother's from Jamaica. My dad is from here in the States. I was born in London. There's a nine year age difference between me and my sister. So I'd never really thought about it before, but when I recorded that family conversation, and, believe me, people forget about the microphone five minutes in, because my mom went from trying to be all proper, blah blah blah, to "all right, so why are you guys throwing food at the dinner table?" That sort of thing. But it was really interesting to just sit there and then analyze that conversation, because all of a sudden, you can dissect people… Well, no, that sounded awful. But you get a feeling, for instance, oh, with my parents, there's different kinds of slang that's being used. Generationally, between my dad and then my sister. There's different word jargon that gets used because my mom is a nurse and I was in college. So there's… And I was a scientist at the time. So, now there's different sorts of jargon that's being used. Then who is driving the conversation? Because people interrupt, and different people drive the conversation. So it was just a fascinating exercise just to see the dynamics of just conversation. But that's different from evoking… Because I have another friend whose name's Gerald. He's a mechanic. Me and Gerald, we go back decades. We're in the same gaming group. But Gerald can't describe the weather without using the F-bomb. I mean, there is no sentence he can't work that into. I love how he speaks, though, because he's one of the cleverest people I know. But I love his use of language. But I can't use the way he actually speaks as dialog because that is a lot. So now it's like how do I evoke how Gerald speaks versus transcribing how Gerald speaks. Does that make sense?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That absolutely does.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because one of the things also is that when you are having a conversation with someone in real life so much of it is also happening with nonverbal and with tone. And also there's all of the places where you're like, "Um. Err..." And the sentences are incomplete sentences. We can string it together when we're listening to the conversation in person because we're used to editing that out and adding in all of the nuances that are coming from things other than words. But when you put that stuff down on the page, people just sound incoherent. So you want to get that sense of… As you say, the evoking, the sense of the rhythm and background from the uh, err, uh.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I tried that once in a scene in a book. It was… I can't remember which, it was one of the John Cleaver books where I had just done jury duty.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my.

[Dan] One of the lawyers that was in the case, he said "Uh" between almost every word. It was crazy and all of the jurors were talking about it and how funny it was. So, later, I decided to try to put this into a book. It was the most miserable experience trying to read it. It was as accurate a reproduction of human dialog as I could produce, and it was abysmal to try to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, to be fair, when you put that much uh into uh your uh dialog, it's abysmal to listen to.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's why we're all talking about it.

[Howard] That's why it caught your attention.

[Mary Robinette] But you can evoke that by having the uh appear at significantly less frequently in dialog, and that will give the reader the sense. Like I will have occasionally my characters repeat a word. In… In the way that we do. Like that one was deliberate, but it is a thing that we do. So I'll occasionally have them do that to give a sense of someone who's like reaching for a word, trying to figure out what they're saying next. But I would never do it to the degree that I do it naturally in real life.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Maurice] The same thing with profanity. Because it's… Admittedly, I've been known to use the occasional curse word.

[Mary Robinette] What! You're kidding.

[Maurice] I know. Just in case any of my middle school students are listening to this. It's been known to happen. But in the case of like my friend Gerald, it's just like… Hey, one or two sprinkled in the in the course of a passage is one thing. One or two sprinkled in every clause…

[Giggles]

[Maurice] Is another.

[Dan] An entirely different experience.

[Mary Robinette] So it sounds like he's using the F-bomb as a uh.

[Maurice] Right. Well, as a uh, and a noun and a verb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled adjective]

[Howard] Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, exclamation, introjection.

[Mary Robinette] Very flexible word.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It is quite a flexible word.

[Howard] Quite the word. It's funny because I think of Maurice cursing… I think… I often think of curse words as weaponized language because sometimes that's what they're there for, they're there to sting somebody. When I curse, it's like a kid with a slingshot. I'm imagining Maurice cursing with that basso profundo…

[Laughter]

[Howard] That amazing baritone and that's a crew served weapon.

[Maurice] Right. Right. It'll stop a conversation.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of stopping a conversation…

[Dan] Speaking of stopping conversation…

[Maurice] Both of you. You're all in there on that one. All right, go.

 

[Dan] Let me stop this one and let's do our book of the week, which this week is your's, Maurice. Sweep of Stars. Tell us about that.

[Maurice] So, Sweep of Stars is book one in my Astra Black trilogy. It's my first foray into the space opera. It's about this intergalactic pan-African led community known as Muungano, and just their explorations in the universe. So we have Muungano proper that they're navigating, some of the internal political issues. We have a starship powered by jazz music exploring the universe. We have an elite military unit who is exploring on the other side of a wormhole. Then how all of these things are interconnected.

[Dan] Sounds fantastic. That is Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus available right now. Go and buy it with your hard-earned money and read it and love it.

 

[Dan] Now let me get back to one of the other things you said at the beginning. One of these key tricks or tools that you use you said is making sure that the different people have different types of dialog, that they sound different from each other.

[Maurice] Right.

[Dan] Which is, I find, also a tool that I use in something that I think is very important. To make sure that everyone sounds like a different person. How do you do that? What are some of the tools that you use to accomplish that?

[Maurice] So, this is where diagramming out that conversation was really helpful for me. Because I'm keying in on what makes each of us… Which sounds weird, but each of my family members as characters, what makes us work. Right? So my mother is from Jamaica and her patois increases or decreases… Decreases when she's in a casual setting, but increases when she's either excited or angry or surrounded by other relatives. Then all of a sudden, the patois thickens. But, also, the other quirk about her dialog is she can't cuss right. So she… Despite being here many decades, she can never get cussing right. Which is hysterical. Because then we try to provoke her to cuss at us, and just watch her butcher cussing. But, so, you have those things. Already we have culture, we have nationality, we have… Culture, nationality, and age all factoring in to help define her as a character.

[Mary Robinette] And class.

[Maurice] And class. Exactly. And class. Then… So you just apply those same things to each of the characters. How are they working in terms of their cultural origin, their level of education, their vocation, their age, their use of slang, all these different things, and the community they hang around with. Because people tend to conform to the community they're in in a lot of cases. Then when you take them out of that community… So, sometimes they sound like that community and then sometimes when you pull them out, oh, now, how do they sound? So it's all those little things which all boils down to defining those characters in a very specific way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'll talk about this more when we get… There's a point when we get to talking about the nuances of this, which… Like, just to add on to what Maurice is saying, I just want to hit very quickly that one of the things that he's talking about when he's talking about culture and nationality and class and age and all of that, all of that goes into making up what we think of as accent. It's very easy to think of accent is just this single flat thing that has to do with how you pronounce words. That's the least important part of accent. There's also the other thing… Two major things that affect the voice of the character are the pacing or rhythm of the character and also the attitude. So, like, you can have two Southerners from the same place, one of whom speaks very, very slowly, and one speaks with a clipped, rapid pace. Even though their accents are the same. Just because of their differences in personalities.

 

[Howard] One of the things that I've… I come back to this a lot when I'm looking at dialog. Back in the long, long ago times when I was dating, there was this terminology… There was this term for the conversation you have with your potential significant other, this person you've been dating. The term was DTR. It meant define the relationship. It's this conversation where the two of you are sitting down and talking about us. A DTR can run for hours. But in, for instance, a romance novel, you get a page and a half. How do you compress the enormous emotional romantic angry whatever explorations of a DTR in a page and a half? The answer is, well, you have to listen to a lot of dialog, you have to read a lot of dialog, and you have to learn a lot of shortcuts. You have to identify what the key moments are and you have to be willing to compress. It's kind of a lossy compression algorithm. But you gotta compress it.

 

[Dan] I find myself suddenly very curious as to what different patterns of speech you would find if somebody did that analysis Maurice is talking about with one of our episodes. That would be fun.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Although, again, that would also be interesting just because this is not a standard conversation. We are performing. We are teaching. There's the way we speak now is gonna be different than the way we would speak in a non-podcast scenario. But that is…

[Mary Robinette] Forsooth, what are you saying? Verily.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] This is going to be our homework. Maurice, you want to send them home with some homework this week?

[Maurice] Yeah. So… I love the idea of people just taking some time and just recording a conversation… With everybody's permission, let's get that out… Make sure everybody's aware that there's a recording in progress. But, yeah, record a conversation, you and your friends, you and your family, whatever. 15 minutes of conversation. Then go through and either transcribe it or just listen to it with the ear of, ooh, how did we sound as characters? How would this work as a dialog exchange?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to ask people to actually transcribe it, because I am going to ask you to use that transcription later in this series for a piece of homework assignment. For those of you for whom transcription is difficult, for… There's a software out there called Descript which will transcribe things for you. But if you are able to transcribe it yourself, I encourage you to do that, because it causes you to pay attention to the way the dialog happens in different ways.

[Dan] Sounds great. So there's your homework and there's a little sneak preview of what will be happening later on in this series. Join us next week, we're going to talk more and more and dig into some nitty-gritty details on dialogue. So. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.