Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/17/17-29-the-job-of-dialogue/

 

Key points: What is the job of dialogue? Conversation has no real purpose or direction. Dialogue, however, needs to move the story forward, provide information, and help with characterization. It also has authorial intent, the reason the author put it there, and character intent, why the character is saying these things. Another part is to be entertaining, funny, to reward the reader for reading. It conveys information, but we mask that to keep the reader from noticing. Beware the unmasked info dump! Evoke an emotional response. Transition. Questions and answers. Sometimes you need to cut dialogue, because it doesn't move the story forward.

 

[Season 17, Episode 29]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Episode Two of our Dialogue Masterclass, The Job of Dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And I wish I sounded as good as Maurice.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] Oh, he sounds good when he's laughing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's Howard.

 

[Dan] So, this week we're going to talk about the job of dialogue. So, Maurice, I'm just going to ask you, what is the job of dialogue?

[Maurice] So, first off, I mean, there's a difference between dialogue and conversation. Right? I think we touched on this last week with the whole idea of just recording a conversation between folks, between friends, family, whatever. When you listen to a conversation, I mean, a conversation is just this… Well, it's people who are in each other's presence, they're enjoying each other's company, hopefully, but it's going all over the place. There's no real purpose or direction to it, it's… It's a conversation. It's an exchange of ideas. Versus dialogue. Dialogue has a very specific purpose in writing and in telling a story. So the way I look at it is that whenever I'm coming to a scene and dialogue's involved, it's like, all right, I'm keeping in mind, I need to be moving the story forward, I need to be providing information, and I need to be honing in on characterization of the people who are engaged in this conversation or in the dialogue. All right. So I see those as the… Those three things, that's the actual job of dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Within that, there's… Something that I'm going to be talking about a couple of times throughout this course, which is the area of intention. The area of intention is, like, why the dialogue is, why the spoken line is happening. This goes for, like, actually verbal and unspoken dialogue. But whenever someone is talking, there's a reason they're saying the thing. Every piece of dialogue has two areas of intention. There's the authorial area of intention, the reason the author needs it to happen, and there's the character area of intention, which is why the character is saying the thing. So in this episode, what we're focusing on is the authorial area of intention, that's why is this here and what loadbearing thing is it doing for us.

[Howard] As often as not, when I'm writing a portion of the job of the dialogue is to be entertaining. It needs to be funny, it needs to be witty, it needs to be pithy. It's… It has to do more than just advance the story and inform us about who the characters are and what they want or don't want and where conflicts are and… I mean, that's a huge load. That's… That's… That's some seriously heavy lifting, but then, for my own part, I have to make sure that the reader feels rewarded for reading some of these lines of dialogue, that the banter is entertaining.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a lot of what you're doing is… Like, I joke, and it's not a joke, that everything that happens in a story is exposition because all of it is… It's conveying information and sometimes that information is about the tone, sometimes that information is about the characters, but it's all conveying information. Part of our job is to mask that and to use a bunch of different techniques so that the reader doesn't notice that. So, banter, keeping them entertained in whatever form, whether that's through tension or humor, all of that is to mask the fact that I'm giving you a piece of information that you need in order to understand what happens next.

[Maurice] So, yeah, cool. I keep remembering, because there's always this conversation like, oh, wow, in terms of providing that information, it's like… We see a lot of bad examples of that, because… All right, let me confess. First off, I'm a TV junkie.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Particularly of like police procedurals. I just love police procedurals. So, CSI is like one of my comfort watching things. Actually, I'm watching… What am I watching right now? Assignment Witness, which is basically a British version of CSI.

[Mary Robinette] Aha.

[Dan] That's cool.

[Maurice] But it's all… But you see all of the best… And by best, I mean worst examples of this providing information. Right? Because you have these scientists, and they are explaining these tests out loud. Right? But they're explaining it to their colleagues who hopefully took the same classes and understand the same things that is going on. That's a poor mask.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Maurice] Of providing information, that's a poor mask of info dumping. So I often get that question. It's like, "Oh, when is info dumping bad?" I'm like, "Well, bad isn't quite the word we're looking for." Right? Because we need the information as readers, as viewers. We need that information. It's how do you mask that because one of my favorite books is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is literally one big info dump. The whole book is just one big info dump. But we don't care, because, what Howard said, because it's entertaining. Right? So you don't really notice, oh, he's just… It's literally an encyclopedia giving us information all the time.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was just watching… We've been re-watching CBS Elementary. The Sherlock Holmes with Johnny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. There was a moment where Johnny Lee Miller asks a scientist on screen, says, "Tell Watson what you told me about DNA profiles." The old scientist says, "I would be happy to. But I think I need to ground you first in a bit of molecular cellular biology." At which point Holmes says, "Hold that thought a moment," and cuts the connection and turns to Watson and says, "He can get kind of long-winded." I love that moment because it tells us, yes, there's a whole bunch of science here, and we're going to hand wave it and just arrive at the conclusion. There's this tension release where the old guy starts talking and you think, "Oh, please, no. This is going to be boring, and I want to hear Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu talk." Then he disconnects…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And there's a moment of joy as the old guy gets cut off.

[Maurice] Great.

 

[Dan] Yeah. Those are, I think, another kind of entertaining. In addition to all of the loadbearing informational properties that dialogue has, sometimes it's funny, like Howard said. Sometimes it needs to be frightening or it needs to be triumphant or bad ass or something where we are evoking a specific emotional response. Because that's the part of the story where we want the audience to feel a certain way. We want them to be quoting a particular line because it's so good. Yeah. All of these different kinds of entertainment.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes the job is to transition us into another part of the story. So, sometimes it's like this is the line of dialogue where everything shifts. It's representing the moment when a character changes their mind. Or the moment when I need the reader to understand that this is not the story that they thought it was. Not quite a reveal, but it's a… Like, oh, no, no. Reader, just remember this looks like we're all having a good time, but you are actually in a horror story.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Which is most of [garbled]

 

[Dan] So, speaking of transitions, let's transition into our book of the week. Which, this week, Mary Robinette, is you. You were going to tell us about The Murder of Mr. Wickham.

[Mary Robinette] So. The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray. This is a book that was basically written for me. It is a Jane Austen murder mystery. By that I mean Claudia Gray has taken all of the Jane Austen main characters and their love interests. They're all married now, and brought them to a single house party for reasons that makes contextual sense. Then, Mr. Wickham shows up, and someone kills the guy. It's a good murder mystery, it's a good Austen pastiche, it has a romance between two new characters that are the children of some of your beloved characters. It's so good. The reason that I brought it up particularly for this is that as a murder mystery, every line of dialogue contains a potential clue. So, the authorial area of intention there, the amount of loadbearing that the dialogue is doing, is so good. They also all sound like Austenian characters, they all sound like distinct characters. Then, kind of one of the other things that I love about it is the absence of a thing that we have not yet talked about, which is maid-and-butler dialogue, or, we haven't talked about it by name, which is basically where a maid and a butler stand around and have a conversation about things that they both know about only so that the audience will also know about this thing. So… There's none of that in this, even though there are in fact maids and butlers and they do speak. It's great. It's just a good read. I really enjoyed it a lot. So that's The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray.

[Dan] That's awesome. I remember when she told me about that book, and I said, "Please make sure you send that to Mary Robinette." She said, "I already did. Don't worry." So, that's great.

 

[Dan] So, yeah, let's talk some more about the job of dialogue. One of the things that we have referred to, but haven't really gone into in detail is how dialogue can move the story forward. We said that's not the only thing it has to do, but that is one of the things it has to do. How do we make sure that our dialogue is actually advancing the story instead of just spinning wheels?

[Maurice] Right. So, one of the things that I think about is this whole idea of like dialogue is kind of like conversation that confronts conflict. Right? So one of the things that we do as… Actually, Mary Robinette has got me thrown off, because I'm still thinking about this whole idea of areas of intent, so let me see if I can weave these two ideas together. Right? So we have this whole idea as an author each conversation has to confront conflict that's either in that scene or in the overarching narrative. Right? But then as a character, dialogue's a tool that they used to achieve their objective. Which still serves the authorial intent, but on the character level, dialogue becomes a tool which they are trying to work out what it is they're trying to seek, to complete their arc. So I've… Yeah. Sorry, Mary Robinette, you just… I'm like, "Oh, I've got all these things going on in my head." So you talk right now while I get all this stuff untangled.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. This is why I love hearing these podcasts because every time, I also have the oh, yeah. Yeah, I had this whole unpacking thing when you were talking earlier, and wrote a ton of notes. So when we're talking about moving the story forward, basically stories… We've talked about this in other episodes, that stories are a series of questions that you're answering for the reader. Some of them are things where the reader supplies their answer based on the information you've given them, and some of them are here's the next piece of information you need. So it's this causal event chain that's happening. So, one of the things that dialogue can do as part of that moving forward is that it can either give the reader a piece of information that they need or it can raise a question for the reader that creates tension that causes them to want to keep going. There's also the entertaining aspect, which is just this is funny. Which is part of like keeping them engaged as other things are happening. But if it's just funny, eventually they will opt out. Because they'll get frustrated that there's no forward momentum. So the two things that are moving the story forward are providing information or providing a question. Raising a question.

 

[Maurice] Yeah. Sorry. There is a… You just reminded me of that. So I think… There's a lot of times when I'm in the act… I'm going to call it the Howard mode, where I have my two characters and their doing this rapid banter, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. There comes a point where I realize, usually in editing, that I've just fallen in love with these characters.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] And I just wanted to hear them talk.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Maurice] So then I have to ask myself, does this dialogue scene, does this actually move the story forward or have I just fallen in love with their voices and I just want to keep that going and is it actually necessary to the story?

[Howard] That's what we call Brandon mode or Mary Robinette mode which is to I step in now and cut off Howard?

[Laughter]

[Howard] I love the idea of conversation, of dialogue being inherently funny, because the compression algorithm that we used put a conversation from real life into dialogue in a book breaks some of the rules that we implicitly understand about the way that people converse. For instance, information should not flow that quickly from a conversation. But in dialogue in a book, it can flow that quickly. That's a thing, any time you are breaking a rule, whether it's throwing a crusk… Cuss word or falling into a manhole or whatever, there's the opportunity for humor. So the very fact that we compress conversations into dialogue can be a source of humor just because of the pacing. I love that, and I exploit it a lot.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You just also reminded me of a thing that I should've mentioned when we were talking about moving the story forward with the information or the questions, is that sometimes the thing that moves the story forward is achieving a goal. When you're doing that compression that you're talking about, it's… Part of it is compressing it to the point where it is serving that need. Whichever needed is that you've pegged as this is the thing that the loadbearing thing that this piece of dialogue is doing. A conversational… Like, not just a line of dialogue, but a dialogue that is ongoing, will serve multiple functions. Each individual line may serve one or more. But it is this constant pull-through and you use whatever carrot you can pull the reader through.

[Howard] Yeah. In the novella Shafter's Shifters and the Chassis of Chance, which is probably going to hit Kindle in June or July, there's an interview scene where it could have been hugely info dumpy. One of the characters, yes, this is a Howard Taylor thing. "Tell us what happened," said Judd. "Start at the beginning." "No," said Chris. "I'll start with what's important. And then you'll tell me something important, and will keep taking turns until we run out of important things to say." Everyone in the room was like, "Oh, that seems really smart." It sets up this enter pattern of reveal after reveal after reveal. The reveals include some lies, which we find out to be lies later. But it fixed a huge pacing problem that I had in the first two drafts of the scene which is, no, I can't let this guy tell the story from the beginning. That breaks everything.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. That's something I'm struggling with in a book right now, which is all about… Or one of the main functions of the magic system is memory loss. Which meant that I had three different points in the second half of the book where a character had to reexplain everything to a character who should already have known it. It just got so boring. I had to find different ways to get around that or to have it happen offscreen or to do compressions or abridgments so that we weren't bored recapping the book 4 times.

 

[Dan] Anyway, let's end with our homework and you can probably guess what that homework is. Mary Robinette, what is it?

[Mary Robinette] So. Your homework is about area of intention. I want you to do two things. That's right, this is a two-part homework. One is to grab a book or a movie or whatever that you really enjoy. Or, it's okay if you do it was something that you don't enjoy, because this may break it slightly. Identify the area of intention for the lines of dialogue. So what you're doing is, you're looking at how an author has… Another author has done this. Because it's often easier to identify with someone else's work. Like, why do you think each line is there. Then, the other thing that I want you to do is I want you to go back to that transcript that Maurice had us do previously. I want you to decide an authorial area of intention for yourself. Like, if I were going to have this happen, what is my intention for this scene. I want you to cut every line of dialogue that does not serve your authorial area of intention.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/17/15-20-mental-wellness-and-writing/

 

Key Points: Mental wellness, a.k.a. self-care, not mental-health, writing with depression, and so forth. Physical and mental wellness go together. Remember it's work, no matter how much you enjoy it. When you set your own hours, you need to carve out time for other things. Set aside time for family and friends! Create, sustainable practices. How can you write with physical or mental ailments? Don't equate word count, quantity, with self worth. What is the smallest bite? Do 20 minute sprints. Crack the seal! Try different ways and accommodations to see what works for you. Listen to healthcare professionals and other people. Make yourself accountable to somebody else, and let them warn you when you are overdoing. How can you use writing as therapy? Write out your anger, then let it flutter away in the wind. When you are writing for your own mental health, you are writing so you can have written, not to be read. Outlining lets you write emotional beats that fit where you are when you are ready for them. Writing during bad times? Don't equate self-worth with word count. Sometimes you can't. Remember, writing is writing, thinking, deleting, walking, musing, and so many other things. Replenish the creative well. Try writing with pen and paper to get rid of the extra distractions. If you can't write, maybe you can plot, brainstorm, try variations on scenes.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 20.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Mental Wellness and Writing.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] We're going to talk about mental wellness and how you apply it to your writing. We have a bunch of questions from listeners about this, but let's start off… Dan, you have something you want to…

[Dan] I just wanted to make sure that our listeners know upfront that we are talking about mental wellness, which is different from mental health. This is not… We've done episodes before about writing with depression and things like that. We'll probably touch on that a little bit, but more than anything else, this is an episode about self-care. About making sure that you can handle the process of writing, or using the process of writing to help with other things.

 

[Brandon] Okay. Well, let me ask then, what do you guys do in order to take care of yourself while writing?

[Victoria] It's interesting. For me, physical wellness and mental wellness go hand in hand. So, it's hard when I'm on the road most of the year, but I always try and carve out a good 30 minutes a day for either yoga or stretching or watching a really nice television show or putting on a facemask or like taking a long shower. Doing something, it doesn't have to be fancy, but something where the onus is off of me to have measurements of productivity and success. To have something that is pass-fail, right? And you can only pass. Because I feel like so often, especially those of us for whom writing is a part or a whole career, we put so much pressure on, and you can put so much pressure on if you're carving out time to write at 11 o'clock at night or 5 AM in the morning, to just almost consider everything a metric. That just leads to a lot of self-loathing, to a lot of you're not doing enough, you're not doing what you should be doing. So I think taking a chance to reset, to put away all of the metrics, and just take time and remember to human, in addition to… So that your self-worth doesn't become directly correlated with what you're making.

[Howard] I have so very, very many thoughts on this. Let me start by saying that I love my job. It's wonderful. I really do love it. It's fun. But if it's the only thing I do all day, I feel empty. So, if you're looking at a career in writing or in drawing comics or in whatever because you think that will be fun and you think you will be able to work much, much longer hours than you could work wherever you're working now? Be advised that that may be a false paradigm. It's gonna end up as work, no matter how much you enjoy it. I got to draw a munchkin deck a couple of years ago. It wasn't accelerated, fast-tracked project, and I worked… Literally, I'm not making these numbers up. I worked from 6 AM to midnight, every day for a month, except Sundays. My sleep schedule was such that that was actually survivable. Superpower. Only actually needed five and a half hours of sleep per night. It was wonderful. At the end of that month, I learned two things. One, I can do this. Two, I need to stop.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because I was empty and I was burnt out and I knew that I had reached a physical limitation that I did not want to push up against again any time soon forever.

 

[Victoria] You also bring up a point that I want to expand upon, which is this idea of the hours. There's this idea that when you set your own hours, you can do anything. The fact of the matter is that the freedom of writing and of creative professions where you get to set your hours is also the downside, because writing is a 365 days a year process, in that you can take a physical vacation I'm sure, but turning off, unplugging, these are things which are both very difficult and you end up feeling very guilty about that time that you take. So I think that the less structure you have in this job or in this hobby or in this aspiring profession or this actual like current profession, the more important it is to find ways to carve out time in which you affect those boundaries.

[Brandon] I'm very focused on time management. I'm a very structured person. We've talked about my spreadsheets and things like that. One of the problems I had with this early in my career is I know… I got married a year after I published my first book, right? After I sold my first book. Suddenly, having a wife and family meant that I was unaccustomed to taking my attention away from the stories. Because even though I wasn't writing, they were in the back of my head. I've heard lots of rider friends have this conflict with spouses and with family, that you're always too focused… You're not there with me when you're there with me. I had to learn, for me, what worked was to pick specific times. At 5:30, I can't write. It doesn't matter if my family's home or not, I have a requirement that 5:30 to 9:30 is not work time. I've got to be doing something else. By giving myself that kind of… I turn the clock off, and even training my brain to be like, "We're not going to focus on that. We're not going to think about that. We need these four hours to refresh, we need these four hours to spend with my family, with my kids," whatever it is, that was liberating to me. To train my… It was hard at first, but it was liberating to train myself to turn it off for four hours a day.

[Victoria] It's about creating sustainability. The fact is, you can do anything, as you were saying, Howard, for a short period of time, but most people don't want to have a single project. They want to have a long-standing career, and in order to have a long-standing career, you have to find a way to create healthy, sustainable practices.

[Howard] At the time of this recording, I'm feeling huge like despair-worthy amounts of stress, because there's a whole bunch of cartooning that needs to be done before Monday, and it's not done yet. Last night, one of the kids had a severe medical emotional stuff. I was told that I had to sit next to her on the couch and watch YouTube videos. In fact, I was told that I wasn't allowed to get up and run errands, because my part of the medical process was to be the service emotional comfort Dad or something. I look at that, and I recognize that for my own part, yeah, it was kind of a huge sacrifice to help this other human being instead of doing the thing that I wanted to do for me. But ultimately, those other human beings are more important to me than I am. If they are not happy, I really despair. Me not getting my work done? That makes me sad. But them being unhappy, that is huge. As Brandon said, being willing to carve out time, I have to do it. My schedule isn't as rigid. But when something happens, my moral compass says I will drop what I'm doing in order to be with them.

 

[Brandon] So, there's a question here about writing under the stresses of physical or mental ailments. How can you long-term do this? What measures and steps do you take?

[Victoria] Well, so I have chronic pain, but I'm going to talk less about that because I use physical activity to try and mitigate some of the effects of that. But I will talk about writing as somebody who has anxiety and depression, and are obviously hills and valleys that come with having anxiety and depression. Look, there are some times when you can't write. We'll talk at the end of this about some homework that might help with that during those times. But in the immediate, what I do is I, one, do not equate word count and worth. In the interest of that, I carve down my goals to the smallest possible metric. There are some days when that metric is can I open up the document and sit with my story and think about it for half an hour, because that is going to create… Keep the creative door propped open in my head. Because I think the more time you spend away from the project, the harder it is to come back. Some days that's can I write a couple sentences? Let's not look at this as 2000 words or a chapter. What is the smallest bite? So I am somebody who is extremely structured in my writing, but I also only write for 20 minutes at a time. I probably, even on my most productive days, write for three hours total. That's nine sprints. Really. So I don't think that it's time equals quality, but I do think that by cutting it down to 20 minutes, I can stare at a Word document for 20 minutes. I can think about a story for 20 minutes. Even on a bad day, I can spend 20 minutes not doing anything else. Neil Gaiman has a process where he says, "When I sit down to write, my two options are do nothing or write. It's simply about removing the other distractions. You can either write or do nothing. Those are your two options." For me, I want to make the smallest bite possible. Just the same way that I never sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a book." I don't even sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a chapter." I sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to spend some time in this scene, in this moment." There are some days when I make a paragraph out of that, and I'm so happy. Usually, if I can cracked the seal on the overwhelming feeling, the overwhelmedness of that day, I can get something down on paper. Getting something down, even a small quantity, is better than nothing, and will help me feel better and make things feel a little bit more manageable.

[Howard] I like the idea of cracking the seal, because it makes it sound like the doom of the world is going to spill forth…

[Victoria] It is.

[Howard] Once I've gotten it open.

 

[Brandon] Dan, I know you've had some chronic pain issues before. You had your tailbone. You were trying to record, while your tailbone was hurting. You also had carpal tunnel. How did you write during these times, with these chronic pains? What did you do?

[Dan] For me, those were chronic issues, but they were not long-term issues. They were a few months at a time. So, for me, it came down to being willing to change my routine. I am a creature of routine. I like to write in the same room every day during the same hours. So, forcing myself to say, "Well, actually, you know what, for the next year, I'm going to use a standing desk instead of a normal desk." Or "I'm going to try a different keyboard layout." I had one that was split up… I am using gestures that you can't see the thing because this is audio only. But trying to find different ways and different accommodations. But, at the core of it, it comes down to, am I willing to do this in a different way than I've ever done this before? Which is kind of how I do my whole career. That's why I jump genres. That's why I find new programs to be a part of. I'm always trying to find the new thing, because I don't know until I try if that's going to be a thing that works really well for me. Some of these accommodations that I have used in the past, like a standing desk, I keep coming back to over and over because I genuinely have come to love it.

[Howard] I'd like to go on record real quick to say there are healthcare professionals out there. Some of them may be related to you. They might be part of your circle of friends. People you can listen to who are going to tell you, "Oh, wow, that thing you're doing? Maybe don't do that." I've failed to listen in a couple of key places. I can't take much ibuprofen anymore because I took a whole bunch of it in order to be able to draw a lot, and now one or two of those will give me IBS in all the best let's not talk about this on air sorts of ways.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are things that you may be doing to push through and get it done that make you feel like a superhero that are actually not good for you. Being willing to listen to other people and step back into the mortal realm a little bit might be good.

[Dan] I recognize that not everybody is in a position to have someone else to listen to, but if you do, whether it's someone who lives in your home with you or just a friend that you can text, making yourself accountable to somebody else is a huge part of self-care. Because we can't always be the best judge of have I spent too much time on this? Am I fixating too much on this? Am I burning myself out on this? So having someone who can check in every now and then and say, "You know what, it's three in the afternoon and you haven't eaten anything today." "Okay, yes. Then I need to put this down and I need to go eat."

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Lab Girl.

[Victoria] Yeah. Lab Girl. It's interesting. It came out a couple years ago. It's by an author named Hope Jahren. J A H R E N. It is a book that is very hard for me to quantify. But it's something that I recommend to anybody who is… Once an exploration of mental wellness and mental health issues, especially, as they intersect with creativity and with writing and identity. Hope Jahren is a brilliant botanist and biologist who was sensibly is writing a memoir through an examination of her relationship with the natural world. Underneath that is an examination of her mental state as it shifts and she processes it through this motif. I found it at the time when I needed it. I think it is a beautiful book, regardless of when you find it. But I hope that it will just find some of your listeners at maybe the right time, and just make them see themselves a little bit and understand that you can find beauty and that you can have some really incredible experiences. And, that really, like, sometimes if you struggle with mental health, because that's something that I do struggle with, even though this is a self-care podcast, I think sometimes it can feel like a deteriorating condition, where you can feel like, especially if you're in one of the hills… Or one of the valleys, that you're never going to have a hill again. I think it can be really grounding, the same way that you need people in your life that can kind of call you back to yourself, it can be grounding to see yourself, especially your mental self, through other works as well. I found it just an incredibly powerful book.

[Brandon] So, that is Lab Girl?

[Victoria] Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren.

 

[Brandon] So, as we move into the last few minutes of this podcast, there's a question here about tips for writing as therapy. Including, how to draw on personal grievances in a tasteful way, and help you make both more powerful writing and work through, perhaps, some issues. Anyone done this? What are your thoughts on this?

[Howard] Let me begin by saying that there are… If you are furious, if there is rage, and you just want to get it out of your system and put it on the page, write it using a tool where it does not immediately go online.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Write it in a way where it is disconnected from the Internet. Maybe write it and print it and then delete the file. Because we say things when we are in these frames of mind that are valuable for us to have said. But their value decreases dramatically as they get read by other people. I can't remember what the story was that I was listening to… I think it actually might have been Amal El-Mohtar when she was doing her oracle of buses thing, and somebody was saying, "How do I make this one emotion I'm having go away?" She said, "You write down the full description of this emotion, and then put it on a piece of paper and then tear up the paper and let it flutter away into the wind," or something. It was a beautiful thing that she said, and I haven't done it justice. But there's this idea that when we are writing, we are writing so that we can be read. When you are writing for your own mental health, you're writing so that you can have written. Those are two different things.

[Victoria] I definitely use writing as a form of catharsis. I've done it since the very beginning, since far before I was published. It felt like… A lot of circuitous thinking, a lot of spiral thinking, and it can feel very tangled up in my mind, and I feel like focusing on a story and putting things into word can be a way for me to make straight lines out of a lot of the clutter in my head, to kind of channel my energy. But I also… I write as catharsis for very specific emotional beats. One of the reasons that I outline my stories so rigidly before I write them is so that I can write them out of order. So that I can pick the scenes perhaps that have emotional beats that I want to write that day. Some days you wake up and you want to write a murder. Some days you wake up and you want to write a love scene. Some days you wake up and you want to write… Or you're prepared to write some of those really difficult emotional scenes. Those very difficult emotional scenes, you're probably not prepared to write every day. So then rather than sit around and wait for the day that I'm ready to write the next scene, I basically have it prepped and have it blocked out in my story and then set it aside until I have a moment or a day in my life where I feel either very stable and thus ready to explore this darkness or feel very unstable and very ready to explore this darkness. But I definitely earmark different emotional beats that I know I can't write every day. I wait for something to happen or for some state to come along for me to be ready to do those moments justice.

[Brandon] Dan was smiling over there when you said…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Some days you don't want to write a murder…

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Brandon] Or whatever it was.

[Victoria] Some days you do want to write a murder.

[Dan] I don't know what that's like, to wake up and not want to write a murder.

[Victoria] I know.

 

[Brandon] Last question here. How do you manage to keep writing during bad times in your life?

[Victoria] You try. I mean, I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier about you don't equate self-worth with word count. I mean, like, you try. You try when it helps you. You understand that if for some reason you can't, or if the world just feels too big, it's okay to go into a creative fallow period. I've said online many times that writing is writing, but so is thinking. So is deleting. So is walking, and musing, and doing lots of things. So is reading. So is consuming. There are times when you just… You're not ready to put work out of yourself onto paper, but that's a really great time to take work in. That's a really good time to find shows or comics or movies or books and try and replenish that creative well for when you are feeling ready.

[Howard] I need to tear the question into a couple of different elements here. Bad times. That is such an enormous bucket. How do you keep writing during bad times? It is entirely possible that the very best thing for you during a particular bad time is to not write, is to not think about writing, and to do something completely different, and I can't answer how to categorize that. I just gotta come out and say that time might exist. Then there are bad times. I remember at one point my daughter talking about how she had a whole lot of trials and everything was really hard. What she was describing was I'm a teenager. I'm here to tell you that, yes, that is terrible and it is really hard. But when you are a teenager and you are experiencing that, many of the adults are looking at you and saying, "Oh, sweetie. I do not want to tell you about my 30s."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I do not want to tell you this. Because the lessons you are going to learn right now are going to allow you to function when you're in your 30s. It is possible that the bad times you are having are things that… The lesson that you learn from them is, oh, I need to change my schedule. I need to change my diet. I need to get some exercise. I need to do something in order to mitigate the bad time and carve out time to write. I don't know… To the person that is asking the question, I don't know what kind of a bad time you're having.

[Victoria] That's true.

[Howard] So I don't have the answer.

[Victoria] I also just want to say, last note, because I think this is getting into a question that we don't get to answer, really, is that often times we become very distractible especially in these days. Like, your computer is a great tool of distraction. Sometimes it can also feel like a very precious thing. You look at a Word document or a blank screen and it feels very official, because everything that you write becomes a typed thing. When I am feeling… Like, specifically susceptible to these moments, I switch to pen and paper. I scribble along the top of the page so it's already not blank anymore. I might just doodle or do something. I find that it helps me turn off some of those extra voices, some of those extra distractions. It's not to say that what I put down on paper will be great. Often times I don't use it. But it's a great thinking tool to re-open that door. Or maybe I'm not in a good enough place to write, but maybe I can plot. Maybe I can brainstorm. Maybe I can play a choose-your-own-adventure with those scenes, where I'm how can I make this scene worse or stronger?

[Howard] I would love to have a three hour session with me and Victoria and Dan and Brandon and half a dozen other people where we just talk about unlocking.

[Victoria] Yes.

[Howard] Because all of our strategies are going to be different, so my suggestion… I did unlocking session at WXR on the cruise ship. It was one of the most beautiful discussions we've had because we were able to look at this question and talk about our respective bad times and come up with strategies. It may be, listener, that the answer for you is to talk about it with someone.

 

[Brandon] All right. Victoria, you have some homework.

[Victoria] I do have a homework. I like this homework because it involves getting a piece of paper and some colored pencils. I feel like that just…

[Oooo]

[Victoria] it taps back into like that elementary school or that young, like, joy of, like, creating something. I want you to create a lifestyle tracker. This is a very simple grid where you essentially make like an x-axis and a y-axis and down one side you put different things. I want you to put at least three things which are craft oriented, reading, writing, planning or plotting. I want you to put three things which have nothing to do with your chosen craft. Is it eating healthy, is it taking a half an hour walk, is it stretching, is it self-care? Then, across the top, I want you to put the dates. You can start with a track that just goes for 30 days. I tend to get overwhelmed by that, so I do a 10 day tracker. The point of this tracker is I want you to track each of these things every single day and color in the squares if you do them. The reason is because when you get overwhelmed, it can be very easy to lose track of time. If you struggle with anxiety and depression, a day becomes a week becomes a month. Suddenly you haven't written in a month, and you don't understand why. I am very good about that thing of if I start something at the beginning of a month, and then I mess up on the third day of the month, I'm like, "Oh, well, try again next month." The goal with the lifestyle tracker is the most that you can lose is a single day. Every single day a fresh start. I find that even if you get to 4 PM and you think this day is lost, again, you're not losing a week. You're not losing a month, you're not losing a year. You've lost a few hours. Go and nail something else on the lifestyle list, if you feel like I can't make today, I bet you can do 30 minutes of self-care. I bet you can take a bath or put on a facemask or like, do something nice for yourself. Then color in that square and see every single day as a fresh start.

[Brandon] Awesome. So this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go take care of yourself.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/09/15-06-prose-and-cons-with-patrick-rothfuss/

 

Key points: Delicious, tasty writing with flavorful words? Good word do! How do you write beautiful prose? Go over it again and again, tweak and tweak and tweak, like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. Watch for repetitions and ambiguities. Beware lazy writing. Focus on the sound of language. Listen to good word doers. Read good word do! Read your own work before writing more. How do you add density to your sentences without going purple? Don't add things to it, take out the unnecessary parts. Trim, and trim, and trim again. Ask yourself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be, and what order of information is most effective in getting there? Words go through the brain, but sounds can strike you in the heart. Lyricism can put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Six.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

 

[Dan] We have Patrick Rothfuss with us again. We're going to talk about prose. This is specifically about writing itself. Word for word, how do you make your prose delicious? How do you make your writing as wonderful as it can be?

[Howard] Tasty, tasty sentences with flavorful words and syllables and… And…

[Mary Robinette] Things.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You know, it's a lot easier to do when I write it.

[Pat] We all good word do. We make you do word good too.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now I'm super excited to have Pat on for this episode. This is… You have such a reputation for fantastic word-for-word writing in your work.

[Pat] Do I actually?

[Mary Robinette] Yes, you do.

[Pat] Really?

[Dan] You absolutely do. That's always…

[Mary Robinette] You didn't know that?

[Pat] I mean, I know I work on it, but… Usually, that's not what people s… I mean, it's rarely what people say when they come up to me.

[Mary Robinette] Huh. That's what people talk about all the… I'm…

[Howard] It's what we say behind your back.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah.

 

[Dan] But I know that people do ask you how do you get… How do you write beautiful prose? What do you say when people ask you that?

[Pat] What I said just today was, "Boy, I don't know how I would teach that." Because it comes very intuitively to me. So for it to get better and better, I just sort of go over it again and again. Each time, I tweak and I tweak and I tweak. It's like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. It gets smoother and smoother and smoother until it's done. But that's not advice that can be followed.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I have found, because it's… I come at it from theater, and similarly, I run into this issue when people ask me about dialogue.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, how do you do dialogue, which is… Dialogue is one of those places where the words are… Like, the words… You're telling a story, so the words are always important, but dialogue specifically, because it's often carrying even more, you have to be very concise with it. But similarly, it came super easy to me. It took me forever to figure out how to teach it. I wound up having to reverse engineer what I do as a narrator. Because my job as a narrator is to take the words that are on the page and make them into sounds. Writing developed to convey the spoken language. Right? So what I'm looking for with that, what it taught me, are the things that sound good, the things that play smoothly, the… It's a lot about repetitions. What I find is that if you use repetition with intention, it will draw attention to something and it will point it at the thing you want people to look at. But when you don't use it with intention, when it's an accidental repetition, the repetition is always going to catch the reader's attention, and it will drag them in the wrong direction. That's the thing where you… It's not quite having a piece of déjà vu with the thing, but it'll pop you out of the story just a little bit. Sometimes that repetition is a word, and those are easy to spot. Sometimes it's a collection of sounds. Sometimes it's a concept. But often that's the thing that I'm looking for. Making sure that those repetitions are where I want them to be. One of the other things that I look for our ambiguities. Words or phrases or concepts that could go either way and aren't doing so on purpose. Like, one of the examples that I use sometimes when I'm talking to people about it is this thing… There's a compilation video of… In movies, people saying, "You just don't get it, do you?"

[Pat] [snort] Oh, that.

[Mary Robinette] I know. There's a compilation video of person after person after person in completely different films saying, "You just don't get it, do you?" That's lazy writing. It's ambiguous, because what don't you get? Why don't you get it? But then you look at Blade Runner and Rutger Hauer's famous speech, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe." That is "You just don't get it, do you?" But it's getting… It's making it specific, it's removing the ambiguity, and the repetitions there are all very deliberate. This beautiful rhythmic flow.

 

[Pat] That's really interesting, because you're coming at this from a conceptual… As soon this topic got brought up, I immediately thought of the sound of language. Because I focus that way a lot. But what you're talking about is something that I also do. I love the term lazy writing. That's something that I find increasingly galling as I watch more TV. I actually hear it reflected in my son's speech, now that he gets to watch more TV, is he is emulating the lazy writing that he has heard.

[Dan] That is depressing.

[Pat] Oh, it's super depressing, which is one of the reasons I've tried to keep him away from bad media, is it homogenizes his beautifully original speech. That's what it does to everyone. So, I first off say, if you want to do good word do, then listen to good word doers. Like, absorb it in a meaningful way that like it sticks to you. Sometimes, that's just like… For me, I read Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Like… Or I read Shakespeare. Like, ooh, some Shakespeare. The problem is, I am so sticky, I'm such a mimic, that if I read a Shakespeare play, I will have to fight to not write and speak in iambic pentameter. Especially if I get a couple of drinks in me.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So good word do sticks to you.

[Laughter]

[Pat] Sometimes, yes. So, like, that is a trick that I would recommend, is, like, if you read enough of something, it kind of gets in you.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the way I wrote The Glamorous Histories is that I would read a chapter of Jane Austen, and then I would write a chapter.

[Pat] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Because that… Because I was using it as a conscious upload of her language.

 

[Pat] Actually, that's a trick that I use in my own stuff if I've been away a while, or even just to maintain consistency, is I read the previous chapter before I start writing or drafting a new chapter.

[Mary Robinette] You do that, don't you, Dan?

[Dan] Yes. I will always start each day's work by reading what I wrote yesterday to kind of get myself up to speed before I step out of the moving car, so I can…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] By the time you get to the end, I'm usually already tweaking and fiddling, so I'm already writing by the time I hit the end.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Pat] Then I've got momentum.

[Dan] That also makes the first draft a little cleaner, because it's kind of been cleaned up as you go.

[Pat] Exactly. And the tone is easier to match, because you've kind of… Or at least I tend to have my head in it.

 

[Dan] I would like to pause here if we can for our thing of the week. It is not a book this time. It is a podcast. What are you going to recommend for us?

[Pat] I would really love to recommend to you the One-Shot Podcast Network. Now, it's a group of podcasts, and they all deal with gaming in some way. But what I have really come to love over the last year is listening to a lot of comedians and actors and game players get together. Effectively, what they're doing is collaborative improvisational storytelling. They have an ongoing series called Campaign. There was 100 episodes of like a Star Trek theme podcast. The current one that they're doing, where I think they're about 30 episodes in, is unoriginal world called Sky Jacks that is inspired by the Decemberists' music. Oh, it's so good, guys, it's so good. But also, the One-Shop Podcast Network itself, they do a bunch of one-shot games. Like, I came in and I played a game called Kids on Bikes.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's…

[Dan] That's a good game.

[Pat] Oh, it's amazing. It's based off like the 80s, like ET and Goonies and The System. James D'Amato runs it, and he runs a lot of these games. You can go in and see like what they're doing. This year is especially interesting, because they… James has decided to feature only games designed by not-white dudes. He is an amazing guy, an incredible storyteller. I've learned a lot about gaming and narrative just by listening to the podcast.

[Dan] Cool. That is called One-Shot?

[Pat] The One-Shot Podcast Network. Which contains many shows, including Neo-Scum, One-Shot, Campaign, and some others that I'm embarrassed that I can't remember off the top of my head.

[Dan] Awesome. So go listen to that. We will link to it in the liner notes as well.

 

[Dan] Now, I've got a great listener question that I'm going to throw out, and then immediately provide my own answer for.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because I've got a really good answer to this one. Someone asks, "How do you add density to your sentences without going purple?" Purple prose is something that we want to avoid that… If you've ever read an AP English essay, you've se… They're just trying to cram so much brilliance into their… My solution to this is actually you add density to something not by adding things to it, but by taking out the unnecessary things. Think of this as you are cooking your writing on low heat so that it reduces down, and what you're left with has just as much flavor as possible. Earlier, Pat was telling a story about how he revises by trimming something and then leaving it and coming back and then trimming it down until… What was it you said, that one day you'll be left with just 12 words that are so intense they can kill a person.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] What I loved about that story is that that's exactly what the poet, Ezra Pound, did. He had an experience where he was… He went into the Metro in Paris, and, just for whatever reason, had this profound experience looking at faces in there. He wrote this giant thing, it was this multipage essay, trying to re-create that emotion that he had. He was like, "No, this is too much." He kept cutting it down. He ended up with a poem called Faces in the Metro, which I'm going to tell you right now.

 

"The apparition of these faces in a crowd,

Petals on a wet, black bough."

 

[Pat] I remember that. [You said that before]

[Dan] Cutting out the extraneous stuff until he's left with just this one powerful emotion adds so much density to it because you don't have any filler.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that… I have a similar kind of a relationship with Ray Bradbury's writing. Because it's… What I love are his short stories, and the way he plays with language. There's a piece that I use when I'm teaching narration, which was again one of those things where I'm like, "I know this works. Why does this work?" So I'm just going to read a little bit to you. This is from The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.

 

"William Acton rose to his feet. The clock on the mantel ticked midnight. He looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with the same ten whorled fingers."

 

It's like… It's just… It's so beautiful. But the thing about it, and we'll put this in the liner notes so you can look at it, there's… That repetition that I'm talking about. He uses "He looked at his fingers, he looked at the large room around him, and he looked at the man lying on the floor." It's like this is a normal thing, this is a normal thing, this is not a normal thing. One of the things that he's doing there, when you look at it, is he's adding modifiers, but he's adding modifiers just to the things he wants you to pay attention to. The… First, it's "he looks at his fingers," and he doesn't give you any modifiers, he doesn't give you any modifiers to feet, to the mantel, none of that. "He looked at his fingers, then he looked at the large room." Gives you a little bit more emphasis. "Then he looked at the man lying on the floor." Like, lying on the floor, it's not purple prose. It's just… Just adding that little bit and it's making it more specific and it's pointing you at it, just by lingering on it. Then he comes back to the fingers again. Because those actually… It's like these… This, I… These are the things that did that. Everything in that sentence, about stroking the typewriter keys and the ham… It's all about these were normal, and I've done this other thing with them. I think it's just beautiful, but it is… It's that layering and that deliberate choice about what things am I going to emphasize. It's not about let me add more adjectives, but it's about pointing.

[Pat] It's also… Bradbury is so good about this. He's extraordinarily lean.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Pat] It's just so clean. Robert Bly once said, he's an American poet, he was on stage, I saw a recording of it, and he said, "I think a person could be an amazing poet, even if they…" He goes, "You don't need more words. You don't need fancy words." He goes, "If you knew 25 words perfectly, you could be a poet." That was really interesting to me. It's the sort of… In some ways, this is kind of a wankery statement. But, I think, he's pointing towards a truth. That is, like, you don't need to get fancy. Now, I think there's a space for fancy. Sometimes a perfect word is perfect. But a lot of times, the perfect word is the less perfect word that everyone knows.

[Howard] My approach to this is… The Bradbury piece. What is the reader to be left with? Well, the reader is supposed to be left with the horror of having committed a murder and staring down at one's own hands and realizing that you are the murder weapon. Or at least that's what I got out of it. Other readers may get other things, but that's what I got. You can get that, sort of, by telling the reader exactly what they are supposed to feel. "He stared down at his hands, and was horrified that these were now murder weapons." Okay? That is really, really lean. But I've been very literal and told you exactly what to feel. Purple prose is when you have words in there that are not working towards giving us that emotion. They are working towards demonstrating to us that you…

[Dan] Own a thesaurus.

[Howard] Have memorized the thesaurus.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] So, a great many times, I will sit back and look at a paragraph and ask myself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be? How do I get there? How do I get there fastest? Well, I get there fastest by being very literal, and that's actually not the most effective. How do I get there in an order in which it's the most effective? What are the pieces of information that I want to give? That's where I think the Bradbury piece becomes a tutorial.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Where we're looking at… We're identifying the murder weapons, but not yet. We're just looking at them. Then we're describing that there has been a murder. Then we are con… We are recontextualizing the hands. By describing it in that way, it suddenly sounds very non-poetic and very mechanical and very soup can. But when you sit down to do this, when you sit down with this recipe if you will. I'm headed for this emotion, and these are the beats I want to hit, that's the point at which, at least for me, I can no longer teach it, I can no longer describe it, because I have to have done it 200 times in order to have any sense of how this is going to work.

[Pat] It's a muscle memory thing, and I think… For some people, it's easier, for some people, it's harder. The same with plot and character and dialogue. I always come back to sound, as… Because, like, I love the plain… Rather, the simplicity of the concepts that Bradbury's talking about there are great. Because, like, who knows ham? Everybody knows ham. I can… It's good. Like, this isn't fancy, it's not elaborate. These are simple, solid, real things. He could get florid, he could get fancy, but… Honestly, I see that in a lot of like first-time books. Where they're describing the breakfast somebody sits down to. But authors like Bradbury, it's almost like everything he puts on the page is an icon with roots down to the heart of the world. Like, there's just nobody like Bradbury. Nobody did what he does, or does what he did. But, like Robert Frost, not to bring up another white guy, but Frost, like… Seuss doesn't get credit for his mastery of language. Because what most people know about Seuss is his kind of thumpy, heavy-handed, singsong-y kids' books. Which, by the way, are extremely hard to pull off, and you could not do it even though you feel like you could. But he wrote a book called The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough. Which, it's hard to understand how brilliant that title is, until you look at it in print, because all the words look the same, and they're all pronounced differently. Dude was like deep in the paint in his understanding of how words do. But, like, same thing with Frost. Frost wrote consistent beautiful iambic language and you would never know. He would do it in dialogue. Some of his longer unknown… Like, never cited, never read poems are pages and pages long of people having a conversation. You don't realize your reading iambic anything. It's because it's perfectly natural and perfectly flawless. Which means he sweat blood into it. I think Frost also wrote

 

"The old dog barks backwards without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup."

 

It's amazing because what he's doing is playing with metrical feet. "The old dog barks backwards" is a series of words that you must say in stochee, in single metrical feet, because of just how… You can't make those flip trippingly off your tongue. Then, I think, the second line are all dactyls. They go dada dah, dada dah. One two three, one two three. "And I can remember when he was a pup." They're frolicking. They sound like a ferret running. It's things like that that I think of, and that I have a particular fondness for, because the words always have to go through the brain, but sounds will start… Will strike you straight in the heart. I get… I can get… If I can get past your brain to your heart, then I've won as a writer. It's like way easier to short cut around the brain because our brains are really messy and complicated.

[Mary Robinette] And often not very bright.

[Pat] Right! So, like, poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who would write things so beautiful that I could not understand them. Like

 

"I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." [The Windhover https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover]

 

You're like, "What are you even doing? What are you talking…" That is beautiful. I don't know what you just said.

[Laughter]

[Pat] See, that's… I don't know if that's purple? It's close to purple, but, like, if you can figure out how he did that and do a piece of it… You get 15% of that in your prose, and you can have a lyricism that will put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.

 

[Dan] This is… Has been a wonderful discussion. I'm glad we ended on poetry, because that is our homework for you, is just to go out and read poetry. We've been reciting some of our favorites. We will put some of our recommendations in the liner notes, but go out and fi… Not just one poem, but multiples by several different people, and people of different backgrounds. Just read a lot of poetry, and see what they're doing, and how you can put that kind of fluidity and grace…

[Howard] Read it until your mouth starts trying to poet…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Actually, no, one of the things I'm going to suggest is that if you are having difficulty getting poetry, because it is a different language, it's a different form, if you've been reading prose your entire life and you're trying poetry. One of the things to try with it is to try to read it out loud as part of your homework assignment. Also, to listen to people. So I'm going to add a… We're going to put some poems in the liner notes that we have mentioned or that we're fond of. I'm going to give you one to start with. That is Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool.

[Pat] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] It's so good.

[Pat] Read her off the page, but then… I'm sorry, go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Because there is audio of her reading it. So, read it on the page, and then you can find the audio to listen to it. Then, also, if you're still like this is difficult for me, there is a video by Manual Cinema which is, strangely, is a public company that I am very fond of.

[Dan] Imagine.

[Mary Robinette] But they were commissioned by the Poetry Foundation to create a poem… A visual poem to go with and support the recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading We Real Cool. It's a great way to kind of get a sense of oh, this is what it can do, if it is new to you as a form.

[Pat] I heard her do it live.

[Mary Robinette] [gasp] I'm a little bit jealous of you.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm a lot jealous of you.

[Dan] All right. So, go read some poetry. Read it to yourself, read it out loud. Just kind of see what you can do with it. That's your homework. You are out of excuses, now go write.