wetranscripts | Entries tagged with stakes

Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/07/11/16-28-common-first-page-mistakes/

Key Points: Don't start with a character waking up. These little moments of life don't really tell us what the book is about, or even much about the character. Your opening should ground the reader and orient them. Don't start with dialogue. We don't know who the person is or where they are. Be aware, readers take your beginning literally, so avoid wild metaphors. Keep our readers going forward as fast as possible. Make your opening a trail of breadcrumbs. What kind of questions do you want the reader asking? Don't start with a fight. We don't know what the stakes are, or what's going on. We don't care about the character yet. Action is only exciting if there is real tension to it, a real threat to it.

[Season 16, Episode 28]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Common First-Page Mistakes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] Okay. This week, we are talking about some of the most common mistakes that we all see in first pages of books. So, there's a few things that are sort of talked about a lot in workshops, among agents, among a lot of the writing advisors. But we wanted to break down a little bit why these are… Why these don't work as places to start your book, even though they are sort of natural places that you think might be a good way to open. So, I think the first one is a really classic comment that you hear a lot, which is, "Don't start your story with a character waking up." We see this a lot of a character coming out of sleep, waking up in bed, and again, it's this thing of starting the story at the beginning because you think, "Oh. My character's going to have a big, exciting day. I should start where the day starts." Which is them getting out of bed, seeing themselves in the mirror, so that they can describe themselves, get a cup of coffee, drive to work. These are all natural things, because it's what we think about as a person's life. Because a lot of a person's life is these little moments. The problem is, as a reader, you don't know anything about what the story is. By the time you're done with that scene, you have no information about the book. You may know a little bit about the character. But these also aren't moments that are really defining who a character is and what they care about under pressure.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Because one of the things that you're dealing with in the morning is that you're disoriented. Right? Part of your goal in that opening is to ground your reader and to help them feel oriented. But a character's natural state… I mean, your natural state in the morning is disoriented. The things that you're thinking about are not the things that are most important to you through the day. They're just like, "Where are my pants?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's not… I mean, I'm sure that there is out there somewhere someone who will write a really compelling story about where are my pants…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But that's…

[Dan] But it's not you.

[Mary Robinette] It's not…

[Dan] I mean, I do so many chapter critiques, and I teach so many classes, I am astonished at the sheer number of people who will tell me to my face, "Yes, I know that we're not supposed to do this. But I'm doing it differently." No, you're not. Like, that's why we tell people not to do this. The odds of you, on your very first novel, being the one who cracks the code and is able to do this cliché in a brilliant and innovative way… It's just safer to stay away from these kinds of things.

[Dongwon] Of course, the problem with any kind of writing advice is there is someone out there…

[Dan] Yes.

[Dongwon] Who did do it and it's great.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Odds are, it's not you. Maybe it is. You can try. But then don't be frustrated when it doesn't work.

[Mary Robinette] So, like, for instance, there's a book that's just come out, which is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. His character literally… It starts with his character waking up in a literal white room. But he has reasons for doing that. Like, this is one of the things, it's like when you do something like that, you are buying a thing. He's buying something very specific with that. He is buying a character who has been in a medically induced coma in spaceflight. Most of the fun of the book is figuring out… Like, all of the book, really, the fun of it is him figuring out what's going on. So, he's buying a specific thing. However, I'm also pretty darned convinced that if that manuscript landed on an average agent's desk, that they would bounce off of that. You have to buy trust from the reader in some way. Starting with something that… Something like that on your first go round is just not safe. Like, Andy Weir has bought trust because he's Andy Weir. Not because of the actual writing on the page. Which is not fair, but it's true.

[Howard] The first lines, the first page of The Martian were outstanding. They grabbed me straight out of the gate. The book convinced me that I am… I am willing to pick up more Andy Weir books and read well beyond the first page before making decisions.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That is a luxury that debut authors simply don't have.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that he's using all of the other tool. He's using voice and he's created an unusual setting that the character is waking up in.

[Mary Robinette] But there are other mistakes, too. It's not just waking up. There's starting with dialogue. This is another example of a thing that I see a lot of people do. You can do it. Like, the book that I started… I mentioned last week starts with a line of dialogue. The problem with starting with a line of dialogue is that we do not hear a voice without attaching things to it in the real world. It's incredibly rare to hear a voice and have no sense of who the person is. But when you start with a line of unattributed dialogue, you have no sense of who that person is, you don't know where you are. So…

[Dongwon] The thing that I… Oh, I'm sorry.

[Mary Robinette] Go on. Oh. What I was going to say was that the reason that it works in The Last Watch and then also Ender's Game begins with just straight dialogue. No dialogue tags at all. Very, very short. But what it is telling you is that these characters are not important. The subject of the conversation is the thing that is important. In J. S. Dewes's, the subject of the conversation was the main character. In Ender's Game, the subject of the conversation was Ender. It's very, very fast and it gets you on and it launches you. What were you going to say, Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Oh, the thing that I notice most of the time is that when it does start with that line of dialogue, I immediately forget what that line was. It's almost invisible to me. Nine times out of 10, because I have… There's nothing for me to attach it to. Right? The important thing to remember is you have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours thinking about those characters, this world, your plot, all these elements. I, as reader, coming to your story for the first time, know exactly zero things about the book that you're giving me. I have nothing to attach anything to. So anything you present to me, A, I'm going to take it very literally, so be careful of wild metaphors in your first paragraph, because I will take them as real actual things that you are saying. Like, if you say this person is a duck, I'm going to think that person is a dock, even if what you meant was metaphorically, this person walks and talks like a duck. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For instance, Gregor Samsa? Not actually a cockroach.

[Dongwon] Debatable.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Dongwon] But, yeah, so starting with a line of dialogue with nothing to attach it to in terms of character or setting or story… It just vanishes. It disappears into some recess of my brain, never to be seen again. So I have to go back to that later to get context for wait, why are they talking about this? Oh, right. Somebody said something before. The last thing you ever want your reader doing on the first page is having to go back to the top again.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] You want them going forward as fast as you can make them.

[Dan] Let me give an example of this. Sometimes… So, like in the example that Mary Robinette gave last time, I think the first line of dialogue was "Spread your legs and bend over." Right? Which by itself is very eye-catching, it is very compelling, because it's shocking. That kind of gives it a pass and makes it work, because it makes it more memorable. But… So, consider one of my very favorite first lines of all time, which is Paradise by Toni Morrison. It's narration. The narrator says, "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." It's incredibly shocking. It's compelling. But because it's narration, it's easy to understand. If you take that exact same line, they shoot the white girl first, and you put it in quotation marks, what you're doing is adding a bunch of extra layers on top of it that the reader doesn't understand. We don't know who's saying it. We don't know why they're saying it. We don't know who they're saying it to or in what situation. Which means we understand it far less then if it was just the exact same words, but as narration.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great example. Speaking of first lines, let me use this to segue to our book of the week, which is something I'm going to talk about. This is a literary magazine that I think you all should pick up a copy of. This is the place that I made my first couple of sales. It is called, literally, The First-Line. thefirstline.com The premise of the magazine, it's a quarterly. They… Each issue of the magazine, every story in that issue has the exact same first-line. Because their premise is that if you hand call me Ishmael to Mark Twain, you do not get Moby Dick. You get something totally, totally different. So it's a really good example of what a first-line… Like, how important a first-line is, but also how much the rest of the story comes from the specific author. Like, the first-line is incredibly important, and also, not important at all.

[Mary Robinette] To segue us out of that, I'm going to talk about a literary horror story, which is that my second novel, Glamour in Glass, when it came out, they accidentally omitted the opening line of the novel.

[Ooo]

[Mary Robinette] So, this is a thing that we… I had done all of the things. I had gone back… I labored. I am not kidding. There is a handwritten page that is just me rewriting that first-line over and over again to get exactly all of the beats that I wanted. They left it out. For reasons, not on purpose, it was a… For reasons. We'll just leave it at that.

[Dan] Where did you bury the bodies?

[Mary Robinette] You know, we have 12 acres.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And there's a gully. So…

[Dongwon] I feel that story in my bones every time I hear it. Goof.

[Mary Robinette] But the thing is, if you don't know that first line is missing, the book actually plays just fine. It breaks me inside, because I labored over it, and also because my closing line is an intentional mirror of the opening line. But one of the things that I did as kind of part of that how do we deal with this was that I posted a thing on my website of the second line to books and asked people to guess which book this came from. People were able to guess. So the thing to understand, I think, about openings is that it is a series of breadcrumbs. The mistake that a lot of authors will make is that that first thing that they put down on the page isn't a breadcrumb leading to the next thing. There's no logical causal progression. They're just trying for I'm going to try to catch… I'm going to hook the reader with the shocking thing, and then we don't go on from there.

[Dongwon] I think that's really the argument with dialogue is it doesn't give you a base to build off of. It will connect at some point, but in the example were talking about, in terms of The Last Watch, it connects so cleanly to the next line that you do get that breadcrumb effect. The way I think about it is you have a first-line that leads to the first paragraph which leads to the first page which leads to the first scene. If you can get them past that threshold, you have them, at least for the first chunk of your book. You've got them into your book at that point. So if you think about that progression as sort of a clean step up into where you want to get to, I think that can be really helpful.

[Howard] I also like thinking about it in terms of the kinds of questions I want the reader to be asking themselves. Even if they're not consciously articulating those questions. And how swiftly and satisfactorily I can answer those questions. If the first line of the book is dialogue, the reader's question to my mind should be something along the lines of, "Why would someone say that?" Then I immediately am told why that is being said, and it is an answer that raises another question. "Oh, that makes perfect sense. But what's going to happen to…" And now I'm hooked. So the first line of dialogue can work that way. But, yeah, if the first line of dialogue, if the question I'm asking is "Uh. Who is talking? What's even going on?" That is way too broad a question. I want that first line to ask me a narrower question, ask the reader a narrower question, so that I can answer it specifically.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm going to talk about, just to segue us a little bit away from verbal dialogue, is also physical dialogue. Wesley Chu talks about combat as being nonverbal dialogue, that it is a conversation. So when you start with a fight scene without telling us why we are in the fight scene, it's like coming in on two people having a conversation without understanding what any of the stakes are. So another very common mistake that you will see is, again, you want to start… You want to start with the action, so you start with people having a fight. The reason that James Bond films can start with a cold open of Bond doing the things is because we know that we're in a James Bond film. Bond is already an established character.

[Howard] And the cold open is the… dun dada dun dun... dun dun dun... The music that tells us why we are here. It's…

[Mary Robinette] Yes…

[Howard] That opening romp isn't quite that cold.

[Dongwon] I think one of the challenges of starting with a fight scene… People think, "Oh, I need to start in media res, and that's going to be exciting." But we don't know the character yet, we don't care about the character yet, so if this character dies, I genuinely don't care. Or if they get shot, I'm like, "Okay. Cool. What's this book about?" Right? So, I think you need to give us something that we really care about in some way to attach to the character and really pull us into the story that way. So I think people think action is a great way to start because it's exciting, but action's only exciting if there's real tension to it, if there's real threat to it. There's no threat if there is no character that we know yet. So I think it can be a really tricky place to do it I think with all three of these examples, as we're talking about it, it's sort of become clear as we talk about it and when we get in-depth with it, is that these aren't fatal errors, but they are starting a book on hard [mode]. Right? It is possible to do these things, but you've set yourself a very high threshold that you need to clear in terms of your need to communicate to the reader knowingly… You kind of need that wink, wink, nudge, nudge, in those opening pages of I know I'm not supposed to do this, but I'm doing it anyways, and you're going to trust me, because I'm so competent at doing this thing. So it's all about building that trust in the reader in that opening scene.

[Mary Robinette]

[Dongwon] Go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, building trust is what we're going to be talking about next week. So, before we… Because I can feel myself wanting to talk about how to do that, right now. But why don't we give them homework, which is a very simple assignment this time.

[Dongwon] Your homework is make sure you haven't done these. Go back to your first page and consider where you're opening. Go back to that first scene and consider am I doing these mistakes. Maybe not necessarily one of these specific things. But think about the principles we started to talk about here in terms of making sure we have a character we can attach to. Making sure we have context, and that we're not coming into the story disoriented and confused. Really examine that first page and see am I making these mistakes. If not, then how do I make sure that we're moving forward from here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It really is my character… Have I given the audience something to orient? Have I given them a breadcrumb about what the future story is going to be like? We'll talk next week about how to build trust with your reader. But right now… You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/30/16-22-scenes-and-set-pieces/

Key Points: Scenes and set pieces? Start with setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development. Setting? Wow factor and tactical implications. Environments let players get creative. Challenge? Variety, and catering to different players. Sneak, battle, talk? Unique elements. Make your challenges hinge on character abilities, not player abilities. Adversaries. Introduce bad guys early, and make things personal. Give them distinct abilities. What's their motivation? In prose, we often challenge characters outside their area of expertise, but in games, we usually challenge players in their skill sets. Rewards, or consequences, and story development. Rewards, gear, show the reader they are making progress. Story development. Make sure characters have incentives to do the encounters, and that there are stakes. Think about how a scene pushes things forward. What are the ramification, what are the potential callbacks?

[Season 16, Episode 22]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Scenes and Set Pieces.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are talking about scenes and set pieces today. We've got a lot to cover, so were just going to jump right into it. James? Get us started.

[James] Yeah. So when I'm designing an encounter or a scene or whatever you want to call it, I like to break it up into several different categories. So I like to think about the setting, the challenge, the adversaries, the rewards, and also story development. So we're going to hit each of those in turn. I just want to start off with, so, for setting, Cass… Oh, Mary Robinette?

[Mary Robinette] I just want to say… I just want to jump in real fast and say all of the prose writers have been riding along with this because they're interested and curious about it. This episode in particular has stuff that directly applies to what you do. Because every point that we're about to hit is something that you should be thinking about in your prose scenes as well.

[Setting]

[James] Yeah. I mean, I definitely think, Cass and I both write fiction as well and I'm sure we probably bring everything we've said in this class to those as well. But, so I want to just right now with Cass, when you're designing the setting for a scene or an encounter, what do you think about?

[Cassandra] Well, there are two things, primarily. The wow factor and the tactical implications of your environment. The wow factor can be a whole bunch of things. With video games, in particular, it's all about the visuals, it is all about the audio, and it's also about cinematography. You can have the best graphics in the world, you can have the best music, but if it's a very static kind of thing, or it's just a character walking in, it's not going to work out for everyone. It's also about individual imaginative [garbled]. In prose, for example, it could be things like how things smell, how things taste, texture. But in games, it can also be about emotional beats. My favorite example of that is Persona 5. When you start the game, you are midway through a heist. There are people with shadow faces leading you on through it. You're running through it. It's great and everything, but it's not terribly impactful because it's weird. However, at the climax of the game, after you have everything explained to you, you actually revisit that first place with the exact same parameters. It's suddenly so much more powerful, because you just had 40 hours of context drilled into your head. Well, we've come to the tactical side, since most of my design goes through actual designers. I'm curious about how you develop them into the RPGs, James?

[James] Yeah. So, in a game like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or Starfinder that's all about more or less killing things and taking their stuff, or occasionally other variations on that, environments can be really important to the design of scenes, especially combats, because it allows the characters to get really creative. It allows… And it makes, frankly, things seem more interesting than just fighting skeletons in a blank room over and over again. When you add an environment, suddenly the players have a lot more things they can work with. So, for instance, you get the players coming up with all these interesting ideas where they'll go, "Okay, if I tie the badminton net to the goat, and then I scare the goat with the airhorn, then they'll run up the end." Like, players are really creative. You want to give them props to do stuff with. So that's where I feel like the environment can really be handy. Which… Oh, Dan, did you want to jump in?

[Dan] Yeah, I was just going to say that this is a lesson that I learned watching Star Wars movies, actually. Because the first time I played a tabletop wargame about spaceships, I very quickly realized that it's super boring. Because there's no terrain in space. So there isn't really an environment to interact with. It's the absolute epitome of an empty room. Then you watch the Star Wars movies and realize, "Oh, this space battle, they're running through a trench. This one, they're dodging asteroids. This one, they're flying through debris. This one, there's the big giant shield and it's all about which side of the shield are you on, and is it going to be brought down in time." There's always some kind of dynamic interactive element to make those encounters more interesting.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about the setting that I just wanted to get in here for prose writers, is that the same thing is true. Like, when you're thinking about the setting, how is your character going to use that setting? How is it going to play into the overall arc of the story?

[Challenge]

[James] That brings us right into the second one, which is talking about the type of challenge. I really like variety, like you were saying. I really want to mixup the enemy types with the types of challenges. So it just doesn't become wave after wave. Thinking about challenges that cater to the different character types and player types. Because some people are going to want to sneak, some people are going to want to battle their way through. Mary Robinette's probably going to want to make friends with them if they're giant apple trolls, like from last episode.

[Laughter]

[James] So, you want to make sure that there's sort of something for everybody. But, Cass, what do you think about?

[Cassandra] Well, the balance is definitely one of the most necessary things. But I think it's also important to focus on the elements that make your game unique. If your game is all about a character with an energy whip, create challenges that explore every possible use of that whip. Let her swing across chasms, electrocuting things, retrieving objects… I remember Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I picked up this weird Taser-like ability, and my favorite thing to do would be to knock out people and just very gently, like, fill the water full of electricity to watch them very gently buzz to death.

[Laughter]

[Cassandra] In an RPG, you should always…

[Mary Robinette] Very gentle.

[Cassandra] Be sure that your challenges hinge on character abilities and not just player abilities. The players who spent points building a detective should have an easier time solving mysteries. Even if the player playing the barbarian is naturally better at puzzles.

[James] That's so important. I feel like I've absolutely been in that game where I'm the wizard with the 18 intelligence, but I'm naturally just terrible at most puzzles compared to the people I play with. So it'll be the barbarian being like, "No, it's this and this and this."

[Chuckles]

[James] I'm like, "Dude. You shouldn't know that, and I should."

[Dan] Yeah. The first time that I wrote, it was actually an adventure for Starfinder, typically the game writing that I have done has been in much more narrative systems. Starfinder is much more of a crunchy numbers-based thing. So, the main comment that the editor sent back after I submitted the first draft was, "Dan. Players like to roll dice."

[Yeah. Laughter]

[Dan] I realized that I had not really given them any skill checks. It was all based on just kind of interaction. You can ask these questions and learn this information and then you know where to go. He's like, "No. There's like 20 skills in this game. You haven't used any of them. They put points into those skills and they like to roll dice. Give them a chance to do what they're good at."

[Cassandra] That sort of reminds me, I think, of my favorite tabletop RPG story that is in [garbled]. There was a comment going around a few years ago, of this group of Avengers trying to fight, I think, this Orc Lord. Everyone was kind of dropping over dead and it was just terrible and they were all going to lose. There was this one dude left. He was like, "Okay. What? Screw it. My character has like really high charm. I am going to try to seduce the Orc Lord." He rolled a natural 20.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] There was just this long pause. He was like, "You know what, I am going to go for it. I am going to declare my love and just stop the war." He kept rolling natural 20s. By the end of the game, his character was leading this Orc Warlord home and going like, "Mom, this is my new husband."

[James] See, that's what I love about tabletop role-playing games. Because in a videogame, maybe you spend the resources to build out that possibility, even though it's a very, very faint possibility. But in a tabletop role-playing game, you can just change on the fly and go with that. I think that's really one of the things that has kept games like Dungeons & Dragons alive in the era of video games.

[Mary Robinette]. If you been listening to all of these things, the variety of challenges that your character faces in prose is as important as it is in a game. You don't want a character who's constantly just fighting things. You want a character who's having to solve the things in different ways. Often in ways that do not play to their skill sets. That's what often will make an interesting challenge in prose.

[Adversaries]

[James] Actually, that's a great segue into talking about adversaries. So, I think it's really important when you're thinking about the adversaries in your encounter, you want to introduce any big bad guys early and give players a reason to care. You want to make things personal. So, yeah, what do you folks do in terms of trying to establish a good adversary?

[Cassandra] You want to give them a few distinct abilities that strongly point towards who they are and what they are, and possibly, at least for me, have at least one encounter that completely cements their personality. I think a good example of this is Borderlands and Handsome Jack. Very early on, you meet him and you kind of get a sense of exactly who he is and why you should absolutely hate him. These things need to be done quickly. I think if you're designing a tabletop role-playing game, these parameters have to be set very clearly as well. Because players have the whole game to learn how to use a complex character effectively. A game master who is looking at your notes, he only has minutes. I'm curious about what people have done in regards to that [garbled]

[Howard] Yeah.

[Cassandra] Adversaries.

[Howard] For my own part, the word adversary is hugely informative here. If you run across something, somebody, some animal, whatever, and it just wants to kill you, that's not an adversary. That's just obstacle, it's an enemy. An adversary that I'm going to care about? Well, look, the party and I, we are trying to build a bridge across the street. But the Otter King has decided that there shall be no bridge across the stream, and he takes issue with our entire project, sabotaging us at every turn. But if we don't build the bridge, our eventual plan to unify the clans on both sides of… You see where I'm going?

[James] I romance the Otter King.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yes. Please. Romance the Otter King, because everybody loves otters. Ultimately, if… For the adversary to feel real, and for us to feel invested, they have to be working logically and passionately and investedly in something that runs counter to what we're trying to do.

[James] I just want to throw out that in my current Starfinder game, I have a player who is literally playing an otter marriage counselor. That's her whole deal. She's incredibly effective. It's… We've talked our way through half the encounters.

[Mary Robinette] So, the thing with adversaries, we been talking about and around, comes back to a thing that I bring from theater for you prose writers. What's my motivation? The Otter King? Like, sure, the Otter King wants to stop you from building the bridge, but why do they want to stop you from building the bridge? That why can make your adversary often significantly more interesting. So think about what that motivation is.

[James] One other thing I want to throw out before we go to our game of the week is that something Cass had said about keeping abilities narrow. This is especially important in tabletop role-playing games, and which I always tell people who are designing new monsters or new adversaries is that really, you're only… If you're not going to use an ability in the first couple rounds of combat, that's often all that an enemy is on stage for. So you don't want to build an enemy with a dozen different abilities if they're only ever going to use three of them. Because that just makes it harder for the game master to process quickly. So pick a couple of things and that'll both let the GM know how to run them and let the PCs know how to fight them.

[James] But, let's pause for our book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] So, book of the week, or game of the week, is Shadow Point Observatory. Which is a game for Oculus Quest 2. It's a puzzle game. But I picked it up because it's beautiful. It's about observatories, which are totally my jam. You're trying to solve this thing where this young girl has been ripped out of time. It's the character that you're going in and you're trying to figure out how to restore her to her time. But because she's been ripped out of time, every time you encounter her, each layer of the puzzle, she gets older and older. It takes decades in her… For her for you to figure this out. There's this one point… It's a spoiler, but this is also like… The kind of excruciating thing that they're doing. Because you're in this beautiful environment, and she begs you not to leave. You're like, "But I have to go, because I have to finish solving these puzzles in order to bring you back." It's so painful to walk away from her. It's just… It's really nicely done. I liked it a lot. My dad likes it too. So. Shadow Point Observatory. Highly recommended.

[Dan] Super cool. Before we move on to the next thing, I cannot get this thing out of my head that Mary Robinette said earlier, when we were talking about challenges. She said that for prose, it is often, and I would say usually, really important to challenge the character in something that is not their area of expertise. Which is the exact opposite of what we were saying about game writing. Where often you want to let people do what they are good at. I think that that's a really key thing to bring out, that in games, the players want to excel. They want to have a chance to use their powers. They want to show how awesome they are. In fiction, we often kind of… We want to let our characters demonstrate their awesomeness, but we also want to force them to be weak and to overcome those weaknesses. Which, I think, is a really interesting dichotomy.

[James] Well, it's important to remember that when you're doing a game, you're designing for a range of characters, often in a role-playing game. You don't necessarily know which one you're getting. So you want to make sure that the challenge you design is hard enough to challenge the person who specializes in that particular type of challenge, so that it's a satisfying thing, but they can succeed. But it still needs to be beatable by characters who aren't specialized in that. So you want to make sure that you are accommodating for all of the above.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even… In both cases, I think, the thing that will happen is the thing that happens in real life, which is that whatever tools you bring to the table, whether it's your characters bringing it to the table in prose or in games, they're going to solve it with the tools that they have on hand. So, just because the challenges and set up for them to be like this is the… The character who in prose who walks into the room and is like, "Oh, there's a lot of people here that I'm supposed to shoot at and I can't… I don't actually know how to use a gun. But I'm very good at sneaking." So they do this… They use the skills, even though the challenge in front of them is set up for them to fail.

[Howard] I want to do a quick call back to something Cassandra said two or three episodes ago about choices yielding consequences. The reward being consequences. I don't mind failing a challenge in a role-playing game, provided the failure isn't, "Oop. Wawawawawa. Game over. Start again." If the challenge going back to the Otter King… I failed to talk to the Otter King, now we have to fight the entire otter tribe. Well, that's a sad failure, because I don't want to fight the otters, I want to befriend the otters. If you build the challenges in such a way that the failures alter the choices we can make, then failure isn't catastrophic. I feel like in role-playing games, failure should be fun.

[James] Yeah.

[Rewards]

[Mary Robinette] I feel like that is a natural segue to talking about rewards as part of the consequences.

[James] Yeah. Absolutely. Rewards, and even putting rewards and story development together. Because in many ways, like you were just saying, there kinds of the same thing. The rewards, the consequences, and the development, all fall into the same category. So how do you all handle that?

[Cassandra] Very carefully. Because I feel like…

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] The entire feel of a player's experience can be ruined, honestly, if they end up with, let's say equipment that is meant for them in the end dungeon. Now, for some players, again, I am a power player, I am happiest when I can just bulldoze through things. It makes me laugh. But for other players, it just takes away the enjoyment, because all the challenges are gone. The environment, the varieties you build in the consequences, they no longer matter if one strike of the sword is enough to stop an adversary cold. So you do not want to end up with a character that is overpowered. Similarly, it's important to track the rewards, because an underpowered character is just going to be miserable. The grind isn't fun when you're dedicating a few hours of your life to fun.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that I think about in prose is that the rewards are part of the way of letting the reader know that you're making progress. It's not just about the gear that you pick up, but that yes, this slog is worth it. Because it's really easy in prose, we talk a lot about yes-but, no-and, and making things worse for the character, and it's really easy to forget the importance of the yes, which is the reward. Even if there is a consequence for that reward. It's still that forward momentum, that forward progress, is still important to think about.

[Howard] One of the mechanics we built into Planet Mercenary, if players embrace in character their failures, they get role-play points. You can spend the role-play points to boost die rolls, to reroll dies, to reroll dice, to… There's all kinds of uses for them we didn't put limitations per game around on how you spent these. One of the players in one of the play tests I ran, to my great joy, figured this out, so that when we got to the point where it's time to defuse the nuclear weapon, he has accrued all of his role played failures and plays this stuff and Bam! The weapon is defused. Nothing about that felt steamroll-y. Everything felt earned. Because he had done such a good job of owning all of the earlier failures.

[Dan] That's great. One thing about rewards, when we're talking about gear, I keep talking about Star Wars and I apologize for that. I don't know why that's the example that leaps to my mind. But when you're talking about giving overpowered gear to a character too early, Luke Skywalker gets his lightsaber like 20 minutes into the first movie. That's the best weapon in the game, so to speak. But what's fascinating about it is that he… The reward is not the gear. It's his own skill with it. We have to get into the middle section of the second movie before he really learns how to use it. It's not until the end of the third movie that he gets it into a full-blown lightsaber battle where he gets to show off all his skills. So sometimes rewards are… It can be really valuable to give someone the crazy equipment early on, and then just let them learn how to use it.

[Story Development]

[Cassandra] Last of all, one you really do need to consider is how story development ties in with encounters they are creating. Make sure that your characters are incentivized to actually do the encounters. Make sure there are stakes. They don't need to be big stakes, however. Assassin's Creed Valhalla had this one [cat] that you could find and [stick, take] to your boat. It was a completely separate, quiet quest. Mechanically, it did nothing. It's just a decorative item. But, good Lord, it's also a kitty that you can have on your Viking boat for the rest of the game. James, do you have anything to add on that point before we run away [garbled]?

[James] Yeah. You want to think about how does a given scene push things forward. What are the ramifications? What elements do you want to tag for future reference, so that, as we said before, you can call back to something? What can the outcomes of this scene lead to later so that when, three scenes down the road, somebody calls back to a thing you just did, you've laid the groundwork for that?

[Mary Robinette] You all had homework for us, I think?

[Cassandra] We did. We would like you to design an encounter for a game that you've enjoyed, getting all of the factors that we mentioned. Setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development.

[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. This is been a long, but I think, really fantastic episode. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/24/15-21-writing-about-children-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

Key Points: Writing about children can be difficult, and you may stray into caricature. How do you avoid making fun of them? First, don't just transcribe what kids actually say. Try to give the sense of being children without hitting the reader over the head, especially in dialogue. Children focus on different things than adults. If you add grammatical issues, be sparing. Kids are sometimes overly precise, applying a rule everywhere. Why are you writing about a child, focus on the bits that enrich the story. Looking at the world as a child does can let you portray the fresh wonder of the world. The life experience, and stakes, are very different for children. When the protagonist is a child, or a teen, the stakes rise, and the tension, too. Consider kids as foreign visitors, trying to avoid faux pas. Teenagers are spies in adult country! Teens are not little adults, they are trying to figure out the transition from child to adult. Don't minimize their feelings. To write about kids or teens, you need to respect them. Pay attention to what is important for the story, and the relationships, how other characters react to what the children say and do.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 21.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing about Children.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guests, Shannon and Dean Hale.

[Shannon] Hello!

[Dean] Hi. I'm Dean.

[Shannon] And I'm Shannon.

[Brandon] Thanks, you guys, for coming on the podcast with us.

[Shannon] Yeah, it's great.

[Dean] Thank you.

[Brandon] You're going to tell us how to write about children.

[Shannon] Okay, let's do it.

[Dean] Awesome.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, this has been surprisingly hard when I've done it. I'm never sure if I'm going too far and it's straying into caricature. Like, I can usually tell for an adult when I've gone too far in a vernacular or a voice or things like this. When you're approaching writing about children, how do you keep away from making it… It almost seems silly to me. Does that make sense? Like, I'm making fun of them rather than actually writing like them.

[Shannon] It's actually… I've written… Where I've taken direct transcrip… Directly transcribed what my children have said, and tried to put it into a story. Our editors are always like, "That's too extreme."

[Dean] Nobody would be like that.

[Shannon] "No one talks like that. Come on!"

[Dean] What are these, monsters?

[Shannon] So you can't actually… Actually, I did write what I thought was a humorous slice of life story about our four-year-old twins. The editor legitimately thought it was a horror story.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] I was very… The notes were very confused. I was like, "Why is she saying… Why is she reacting…" Then, finally, she referred to it as a house of hell. I was like, "Oh, she thought it was a horror story. That's just our everyday."

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] But it is… You can't do exactly what kids do. Just like… But it's true with any characters. Dialogue would be really boring if we just transcribed what people actually say. So you have to get the sense that they're a child without hitting the reader over the head. Particularly in dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] What are some of the markers in dialogue that you find for believable child language? Is it a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, con…

[Shannon] You know… First of all, I would say children are very observant about things that adults don't care about. So for… Just what they talk about is going to be different. That can be so much fun. What does this kid… What are they interested in, what would they notice? So there are these non sequiturs that just kind of pop up. It's a great thing for humor. I would say also, just as with any character, if you want to have like grammatical issues for the kid, pick like one or two and stick with those. Don't hit the reader over the head with, like, weird grammar things constantly. Just have that consistency be for that character. Just like you would for an adult character who might have a certain quirk with the way they speak. You don't… You wouldn't do it every single sentence because it gets to be too much.

[Mary Robinette] When I was doing the puppet theater, we were often… I mean, the protagonist was always a child. One of the things that I found was that… Also, going into schools a lot, was that kids tended to be overly precise sometimes. That they would have learned a rule and they wouldn't actually have any nuance about how the rule was applied.

[Brandon] I've noticed this in my children. This is absolutely true for almost all kids I've met. That they… You tell them something. They want that to be the way the world works. They now understand the world. Then, when you immediately violate it, because of the wiggle room we give ourselves, they call you on it. I remember when my… He was only like three or four. We had talked about certain words that we don't say. Then we went to a Disney movie and they said like one word that was like this. Then, later on, that kid was describing the movie to my father… His grandpa… And said, "Don't go see that movie, grandpa. It is filthy."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It's like a Pixar movie, right? I'm like, "Oh. Okay. Yeah."

[Shannon] I actually wrote a chapter book that was based on our twins, and really tried to be true to what it felt like to be that age. My… I sent it to someone who didn't know it was about these twins. My response was that the character was unlikable and nobody would be interested in this child.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Your children are unlikable and no one is interested in them.

[Mary Robinette] She's also living in a hell house.

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] But it can be too much. You don't… Like, too much reality, nobody wants. So what do… Why a child? Why are you writing about a child, first of all? What are they bringing to it? So you focus on those little quirks, those little bits that can just enrich a story.

[Dean] The best part for me about writing from… As a child, because that's kind of where I go, is get into that headspace, is just looking at the world in a different way. It makes the story somehow more interesting. It's like that quote from… Was it GK Chesterton? That's about the dragon and the… I can't remember how it goes, but the idea that…

[Shannon] That… The quote you're talking about is GK Chesterton says that fantasy doesn't tell you if dragons exist. Fantasy shows you that dragons can be defeated. I think you're thinking of a different quote.

[Dean] No, I am… I'm thinking of the door one. That there's a…

[Shannon] Oh… Yes. So… Like a kid of 10…

[Dean] Go, quote.

[Shannon] Is interested in reading a story that says, "Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon." A kid of four is interested to read a story that says, "Tommy opened a door."

[Dean] It's finding…

[Shannon] Everything is still so new.

[Dean] Finding the wonder in those things that are sort of rote and old is… For… As a writer, is awesome. I mean, you can be able to kind of get that reinvigorated look at something from the other side.

[Dan] Yeah, that's what I did with Zero G, which was the middle grade that I put out. The plot is… I always pitch it as Home Alone in Space, but really, it's Die Hard in space with a 12-year-old. It's Die Hard if John McClane were super interested in how fun it was to jump around in antigravity, right? Like, that's his focus. He's always either trying to have fun or he's hiding from bad guys. Because those are the cool things that a kid is going to care about in that situation.

[Shannon] Yes.

[Brandon] So, when we were talking about this ahead of time, you mentioned the stakes are really different for children in life, which really struck me. Can you expand upon that? How are stakes different for children? How does that influence writing about them?

[Shannon] Children don't have the same… Well, life experience. But, just, they don't have as much in their toolbox. They don't understand how things work, they don't have the confidence, they don't have experience, they don't have a credit card, you know, they don't have… So when they're put in a situation, it's going to be totally different than if an adult were in it. You can get so much tension by having the protagonist be a kid. And a teen as well. Also, even if the main character isn't a child, if you insert a child into a situation, the stakes go through the roof. Immediately. Oh, we've got to save these people. Yeah, let's do that. Oh, and there's a three-year-old about to fall off the bridge. [OOOOH!] I mean, it just…

[Dean] We did that with Squirrel Girl. Like, we were like, "We need more tension here."

[Shannon] Let's add a baby.

[Dean] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dean] That's exactly what we did.

[Shannon] She's not just saving the day, she's saving a specific baby. Suddenly, it's like, "Yes, we need to do this immediately." I was… We were just watching Adventures in Babysitting last night with our kids. I was trying to explain to them, because I'm a nerdy writer mom that's explaining story to my children in the middle of a movie…

[Dean] Mom, we're watching.

[Shannon] I know. But, I'm like, "Do you understand why…"

[Dean] Pause.

[Shannon] If this was about adults, it wouldn't matter, because…

[Dean] Can we watch it now, Mom?

[Shannon] They've got a credit card, they can just get a new tire. But, added to the fact that all these things are happening, is the fact that they can't let their parents know. They can't make the most logical easiest way… Choice to get out of this situation because they can't let their parents know. An adult wouldn't have that same situation. So, the stakes are higher, the tension's higher, and then [you opt] for fun.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry, it just occurred to me… One of the things that I often say, like, when I'm talking about kids is that… What you said, that they just lack experience. But I think of them as foreign visitors. Like, when you come… When you go to a foreign country, what you want is someone to explain what the rules are so that you don't make any social faux pas. So, like, when I go into… When we would go into schools doing school visits with the puppets, the mob mentality was the thing you kind of had to fight. Because they would… Like, if one kid did it, everyone would assume that that was the thing you should do. But it occurs to me that teenagers are actually like spies who have come into adult country and don't want anyone to know…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That they're from the outside or child land. So they're desperately trying to not get caught is still being children.

[Shannon] Yes. Oh, teens are… I love writing about teens. I think a mistake a lot of writers make is they don't want… First of all, they don't want to be annoying. They don't want their character to be annoying. So they just make them into adults. They say they're 16, but they really just behave like adults. They're missing so much great story matter there. What matters to a teenager? What are they going through in their lives? But in addition to the science fiction adventure or whatever you're writing, you've also got that element of this is a person trying to figure out… Navigate that transition from child to adult. That's really interesting.

[Dean] I think one of the things that we do as adults, or at least that I do, is tend to believe or to minimize the feelings of the kids, or minimize the experience.

[Right]

[Dean] To believe here they are going through this thing that… [Adolescence?] Oh, that's ridiculous. How is that difficult? But if I go into writing it that way, it rings weird. But the kids are feeling with the same intensity or more than we would if we were put in… If we were plucked out of our familiar environment and put into an environment where we don't know what the rules are.

[Mary Robinette] It's stressful.

[Shannon] That's a good point, that you have to absolute… When you're writing about kids or teens, you absolutely have to respect children and teenagers. You can't…

[Dean] It can be hard.

[Shannon] It will come off as false if you go in thinking and judging them and being like annoyed with them and wanting to just make them older. Come in respecting their point of view or it will be false.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dean, you're going to tell us about The Princess In Black.

[Dean] The Princess In Black is a phenomenal…

[Shannon] Phenomenal.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Yes, it's a… Let me see if I think of another word that you can say. No, it… What's the type of book that we are calling it? It's like transitional chapter book about a g… Princess Magnolia who is a princess and loves being a princess and walks around in pretty dresses. But when the monster alarm rings, she becomes the princess in black, and puts on a black costume and goes out and fights evil. As a superhero would. There are many books in the series, some of them…

[Shannon] There are seven so far. Yes.

[Dean] Oh, and if… Wait…

[Shannon] [Gorgeously?] illustrated by LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] How close are we to Easter? We're past Easter. Because I was going to recommend, there's a hungry bunny horde book if you're celebrating Lagomorph Liberation or some other kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Day.

[Shannon] [A bunny horde book] belongs in every Easter basket.

[Dean] That's true. That's true. So, The Princess In Black by Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by…

[Shannon and Dean] LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] Something…

[Brandon] We love these books in our household. My sons just went straight through the whole series eagerly, so… They're fantastic.

[Shannon] Yay. Thank you.

[Dean] More coming.

[Dan] I purposely did not tell my children that I was hanging out with you guys today because they would have just blown a gasket. So.

[Shannon] I have to tell a quick story. One time I… My son borrowed a bunch of books from a friend. Several of them were Sanderson books. We were going out to dinner with the Sanderson's, so I brought my son's friend's books with us and he signed them to this guy. When I returned them, I was like, "Hey, just FYI, I saw Brandon Sanderson, so we just had him sign your books to you." He said, "Hold on a second." He ran upstairs, he ran back down, with all seven Harry Potter books and said, "Would you like to borrow these?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'll sign them.

[Shannon] That's not going to happen. But only because… Also, talking about Princess in Black in terms of writing about children, these kinds of books… There's lots of different ways to write about children. In some of them, we like get inside a kid's head and show the world how they're seeing it. In other ones, like Princess in Black, it's purely wish fulfillment fun. There are no adults in this world. So we're not showing children by comparison to what they're not. We are just having kids in adventures. So the way they talk and the way they experience things is a very different style than in some of our other books.

[Brandon] I want to circle back to this what you said before about respecting children as you're writing about them. Because I find this is a hard line to walk sometimes, because some of the things my children do, as we've talked about, you just can't put on the page. Like my children, I think all children, are basically sociopaths for a large part of their…

[Narcissistic sociopaths. Yup.]

[Brandon] Getting that across, getting across… Like, I love my 10-year-old. He's awesome. But he will not accept that the world is not the way he wants it to be. If we say, "You have to do this." He says, "No." We say, "But if you don't, your teacher said this." "No, she didn't."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? I'm like, "No, we have a piece of paper here." He's like, "She didn't say that. It doesn't say that." He won't accept it, it's right there. Like, evidence means nothing to my 10-year-old, right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because he says it's not. So, how do you do things like this in a story about children, but also respect them and not act like they're… There's this fine line between talking down or treating down and also presenting how they are. That line can be really tough for me sometimes.

[Shannon] Yeah. It is a really fine line. Honestly, if we really wrote children exactly as they are in movies and books, nobody would like those characters at all.

[Dean] They just really aren't likable.

[Shannon] But we love them in real life.

[Dean] Yes.

[Shannon] But you just can't show that.

[Dean] [garbled… The paranoids aren't there… The paranoia…]

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] It's insane. So you have to show the bits… We're always asking ourselves, what's most important for this story? So, what matters about this story? Then characters in service of this story. Also, I mean, I think the… I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times. The heart, the foundation of every single story, no matter the genre, is relationships.

[Dean] Relationships. Oh, yeah.

[Shannon] Relationships between characters is all that matters, ultimately. Everything else is set dressing. So how the other characters react to the children is equally important to what the children say and do.

[Brandon] That's a really good point, thinking about it. Like, that's another dynamic that changes your perspective. Asking what the stakes are, asking what are the relationships, how does the child view the relationships with those around them? Which is going to be very different, but still very intense and important than the way I view the relationships.

[Dan] Well, those relationships… I love what you said about that being the most important thing. To talk about my own middle grade series again, the second one, Dragon Planet, I had this fantastic plot built, of how he was going to go out and explore this brand-new planet and there were dragons on it and all this stuff. I'm like, "This is still so boring."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "Why is this Dragon book so boring?" Then just added in the little character arc was that the little boy is trying to get his dad to think of him as a scientist. All of a sudden, all of the stakes were there because that relationship was in place.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I think of examples of stories where… That do not have relationships. But all of the ones that I get really excited about, like, the ones that I read for… Certainly, I think if you have characters on the page, that if they are not having relationships, there is a problem.

[Shannon] I mean any relationship, not just romantic, but any kind of connection…

[Mary Robinette] No no.

[Shannon] Between other characters.

[Mary Robinette] I just… There's… This is a total digression, but there's a story that I love that has no characters on the page at all. So…

[Brandon] Once in a while.

[Mary Robinette] Once in a while. Once in a while, you can do it.

[Shannon] Any rule can be broken.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the honoring of the children is that… What I've found is that when I try to remember like specific incidents from my own childhood, rather than looking at the outside of the children… From an outside observer point of view, that it is often a lot easier for me to have them move through the world in a way that makes emotional sense.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There was something that someone said when they were… It was at an assembly. Like an art exhibit opening, and someone had brought their infant, and the infant cried. You could hear a couple people in the audience make a dismissive sound. But the speaker said, "I am so glad that you brought your child, because we've all been that child. We have all cried." It was just like, "Yes, yes. We have all cried." It's a good reminder that everyone can enjoy art.

[Shannon] Some of us have been the mom who desperately needs to get out of the house. But I can't leave without the baby.

[Brandon] Didn't you take the twins on tour with you?

[Shannon] I took my kids everywhere. Yeah. The twins, specifically, came when we shot the movie Austenland in England. So they were there for seven weeks with me.

[Brandon] On set?

[Shannon] Well, you know.

[Dean] When they let you on the set.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] All right. We're out of time on this episode. It's been awesome. Shannon, you're going to give us some homework.

[Shannon] Yes. So we talked about how the stakes change when you've got a young protagonist. So find a storybook or a movie that is about adults, and conceive of it as instead to be about a teenager or a child. Just write a paragraph about how that plot would change. What would… How would the heart of the story change if everything that happened in the book still happens, but it happens with and to a child?

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/29/15-13-using-elections-in-stories/

Key Points: Don't make the outcome of the election the climax of the story! Election day is anti-climactic, just waiting for the votes to roll in. Do use elections as a background that affects your characters' lives. Do use the fun, quirky people in the campaign. The candidate, with or without spouse, is arrogant and emotionally fragile. The campaign manager is counselor, manager, has plenty of experience, and is willing to put some spin on it. They also have a deputy. Next is the communications director, a people person who interacts with the press and social media. They have to balance responses and how does this make the candidate look, will it persuade people to vote for the candidate. Again, they may have a deputy to help. The finance director tells the candidate who to call and how to ask them for money. They're accountants who know how to schmooze. Finally, the field director knows the statistics and how to manage volunteers. Volunteers have time but no money, and go out to knock on doors, call phones, or whatever you do for this selection. Donors have money but no time. Volunteers and donors can be kooky and eclectic and strange. Know what the stakes of the election are for your characters, on a personal and societal level. Think about how elections are run, across history and across geography. Think about what your characters have to do to schmooze, and what are the consequences of schmoozing and the election.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 13.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Using Elections in Stories.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We have special guest Daniel Friend. Thank you for coming on.

[Daniel] Thank you for having me.

[Brandon] You have been running or part of some political campaigns…

[Daniel] That's right. So the reason I want to talk about elections in stories is because I've been involved in a lot of them. Normally, I'm a science fiction and fantasy editor, and I don't see nearly enough elections in stories considering how often and how important they are to our own lives. So, in 2012, I actually worked in the Utah County elections office during the Presidential campaign between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. In 2017, I was the communications director for a US congressional campaign in Utah. In 2018, I ran for the Utah House of Representatives as a candidate. Lost, but that's okay.

[Dan] Well, then you have nothing important to say.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] We'll see.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] This year, I am reprising the communications director role for a third-party US congressional campaign. So I've been around elections a lot, and they're a very strange little world that not enough people know about. There's some really cool things that we can do in stories with them.

[Brandon] All right. Well. Take us on that trip. You pitched this episode to us. It sounds really interesting. You actually have an outline. You're way more prepared than…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We have ever been.

[Brandon] Yes. So let's go through it.

[Dan] Well. Mahtab.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Mahtab.

[Dan] We've got to give her props.

[Mary Robinette] Fair.

[Daniel] Well, I'm glad I can be second in something. Besides just a vote.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled... reminder]

[Daniel] So, the first thing… I want to start out with how not to use elections in stories. Because there's a really big pitfall in thinking that the outcome of the election is the climax of my story. That's the most important thing that's going to happen. But, don't do that.

[Brandon] Why not?

[Daniel] Because elections are inherently anti-climactic. It's a very strange thing. Because if you're working in an election, you're going out every day and you are meeting strangers and you're working so hard. You're putting your heart and soul into this thing that is really important to you. At least presumably. Then, at the end of the day, all that work you did boils down to hundreds or thousands of other people making a decision about you. So when election day comes, that's actually the most laid-back yet high strung day of an entire campaign.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Daniel] Because there is nothing left for you to do. You're sitting there, biting your nails about what's going to happen, and you are completely powerless. Now, you don't want to have a character be inactive as your protagonist. On election day, despite all the activity that they've done up to that point, they're just really sitting around, watching TV, waiting for those results to come in. So, make sure that there is something going on in your climax other than just what's the results of the vote.

[Brandon] Right. I didn't really grasp this until you said it. But now I can totally see that the last day is the most boring day, with a really nice exciting moment at the end of it.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm trying to think.

[Daniel] Or a soul crushing disappointment [garbled]

[Dan] I'm trying to think of stories about elections. I remember there was a movie with Chris Rock and Bernie Mack years and years ago. They got to that point where there is nothing left to do, and they showed that moment where he was sitting around bored. He's like, "You know what, I'm going to go drive people to work." So he got a bus and he went… They had him doing something during that period.

[Daniel] Another example is I just finished watching the season of Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope runs for city council. Now, that isn't exactly a great example because they treated it like a U.S. Senate campaign.

[Choked chuckles]

[Daniel] There was way too much money going on in that race for a small town city council. But…

[Brandon] That's the joke, right?

[Daniel] That is the joke.

[Howard] It's Parks and Rec.

[Daniel] So do use it for… As a good example of what people do to each other in campaigns. Don't think that a city council race looks anything like it. That's U.S. Senate and above.

[Mary Robinette] You're making me think about Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly, which is all about this political campaign that is going on in the background. It is… None of the characters are directly involved in the campaign, but their lives are being influenced by everything that's going on around them. It's… You're right, it's fantastic in that way.

[Daniel] That's an excellent way to use elections in a story, is to have this thing that is really going to affect your characters' lives happening in the background, and to what extent do they pay attention to it, to what extent do they understand that this is actually going to matter to them? Do they get involved or not? So, to use elections as a vehicle for telling interesting stories, doing it within an election campaign is actually a great idea, because there are so many fun, quirky people in a campaign. Everybody in a campaign is automatically a little bit weird. Because they are willing to take a job that's going to last for a few months, and it does pay decently for those few months, but then after that, you're out of work, and you either have to move to another place to get a new job, or you have to do a completely different kind of job, which is what I'm lucky enough to be able to do. They're really just a little bit kooky because they're not just getting involved like, "Oh, I'm going to donate." "Oh, I'm going to have a yard sale." They're actually putting their 40 hours a week or more into this. So I want to just run down the cast of characters within an election campaign and tell you a little bit about why they are going to be fun. So, the most obvious person is, of course, the candidate, the person who is running for office. Whether or not they have a spouse is also going to be a big deal, because candidates' spouses make a huge influence. But the candidate is going to be arrogant. Arrogant enough to think that they can win. And yet also emotionally fragile. Candidates are always needing reassurance from somebody that they're doing okay, that they can actually win, that this is worth all of the time and effort they are putting into it, because everyone is so invested.

[Howard] It sounds like writers.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was going to say, the TV show Veep, in the season where she was running for President, they did that beautifully. That combination of just absolute bullheaded arrogance and complete fragility. So that's a good example to look up.

[Daniel] Yes, it is. Now, the person who is most often going to be helping the candidate feel better about these things is the campaign manager. Besides being the psychological counselor for the candidate, their main job is to manage. Now, campaign managers tend to have lots of experience under their belts. They tend to not really… Like, they want to make sure that they're supporting someone that they like, but, there also very willing to spin things, to color the truth a little bit. That's part of the job. So, campaign managers tend to be interesting that way. Under… They also usually have a deputy to help them when they're not around. The next job is the communications director, which is what I know the most about because I did it. Communication directors are usually a people person, because they have to interact with the press. They have to figure out social media. Beyond them, you have the finance director.

[Brandon] Wait, wait wait wait. What makes communication directors weird?

[Dan] Yeah, you skipped over that.

[Daniel] Oh, now I have to tell you something weird about me. Communication directors are the people who have to think about how we are going to persuade people to vote for you. What's the message? So they kind of have to get into other people's heads. They like this. They think of it as really, really fun when somebody drops something, like some insult on Twitter, and they get to respond to it and really burn the other guy. Yet, they've also got to balance this with how is it going to make my candidate look. They're always the ones who want to get the zinger, the "Oh, yeah, gotcha!" But they've also got to be really careful. How well your communication director balances those things or how well they don't, makes a really interesting character. Now, when I tell you these things that the person should be good at, a really interesting thing to do in a story is make them not so good at one of these things. Now, in the real world, your deputy should cover for you. I'm not the best at social media. My deputies do that really well. But what if in your story, they don't have that deputy for whatever reason, and they have to fail really hard at something that's really important.

[Howard] It's interesting to note that when you describe the communications director… I mean, I have years of corporate experience as a marketing guy. I realized, oh, that is squarely in the middle of the marketing wheelhouse. Squarely in the middle. All of the skill set of marketing, whether or not you think marketing is evil, that is where it fits. It's just that the product you are marketing, the message that you are marketing, is… It's this weird sort of flexible undulating brand that is a person whose brand will necessarily change during the course of the campaign.

[Daniel] Yes. That is all very true. Just to give you a real life example in me, I was told the other day that I'm really good at writing fundraising emails. Which is something I have never aspired to be.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just making a note of that for my own [garbled]

[laughter]

[Brandon] Let's pause here for book of the week, then we'll come back to the rest of the roles. So. Our book of the week, you were going to pitch at us…

[Daniel] So, every year, there is the Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium in Provo, Utah, that is a wonderful conference. I'm sure it has been talked about multiple times. Now, last year, they started having a benefit anthology that keeps prices low for students going to this. I'm in that first benefit anthology. My story is called Launch, and the benefit anthology is called Trace the Stars. So, it's available on Amazon. All of the stories in there are fantastic, I've read every one. The reason I want to bring this up is because the next benefit anthology is already opening up their call for submissions. The topic is A Parliament of Wizards. If you don't think elections go into that, well, I'll just tell you, I'm going to write something for it. We'll see if it gets in.

[Brandon] Now, this is for charity, right. So there's no payment for the stories once they been picked up.

[Daniel] That's correct. It is a benefit anthology to benefit students who are attending this writing symposium.

[Brandon] Excellent. All right, let's get back to our roles.

[Daniel] All right. The next one is the finance director. This is the person who sits next to the candidate while the candidate is calling up people like Brandon and saying, "Brandon, can you give me $2700, please?" The finance director is the person saying, "This is how you ask. This is what you need to do." The thing is, they're usually only paid on commission. So their job is to bring in money so that they can actually get paid.

[Brandon] Wow. So they're getting paid on commission to raise money for the political campaign. So a percentage of what you're giving is going…

[Daniel] To the finance director.

[Brandon] Interesting.

[Daniel] For their services and figuring out who to call, figuring out how to ask them for money. Because if I just walk up to Brandon and say, "Hey, please write me a check." I'm probably not going to get anywhere. The financial director is the person who goes, "I know that Brandon has enough money to give you a max donation, and this is the best way to ask him for it." Whereas they'll say, "Daniel doesn't have enough money to give you a max donation. You probably want to get him to volunteer for you instead." So the financial director is a very strange numbers punching kind of person. They have to have a weird mix of an accountant and someone who can really schmooze people.

[Dan] Well, someone who can read people, it sounds like.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that's common in all fundraising. Most fundraising, except at some nonprofits… But most fundraising, you do get a commission for the amount of money…

[Brandon] I had no idea.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. My mom was a fundraiser for years. She is where I learned all of my schmoozing from.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is this constant interplay of a political and financial conversation that you're having.

[Dan] When I was raising funds to put together a scholarship locally… I built an endowment at one of the local universities. We would 100%, every person that we targeted, we research them and we figured out what's the best way to approach this person specifically.

[Brandon] What did you determine about me?

[Dan] We said, "Hey. Brandon."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "I've known you forever. Give me some money." It worked.

[Daniel] Sometimes that works. Finally, the last person in charge is the field director. This guy has to be really good with numbers, because he's looking at statistics. This is the guy who actually figures out how many voters do we need to win this election? Where do they live? How do we contact them? Then he leads a team of volunteers to go out and knock on doors, call phones, do whatever you need to do. Go on the Galactic Inter-Webz and give them a holo-projection, whatever it is that works in your election. That person's got to have both the numbers aspect and a managing aspect. Those don't always come in the same package. Finally, you'll have volunteers who are always kooky and eclectic and have more time than they have money.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] You also have donors, who are exactly the same as volunteers, except that they have more money than they have time. So you can make them just as strange as you want them to be, and it will not be different than real life.

[Howard] That feels so incredibly safe right now…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I have insufficient quantities of both money and time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We're almost out of time on this episode. Is there a last point that you want to hit?

[Daniel] Yes. Just really quick. Make sure you understand what the stakes of the election results are for your characters, both on a personal level, because either they'll lose and nothing will change, or they win and everything in their life changes, and also on the societal level. What are the impacts to the society, based on who wins this election? Also, make sure that you take some time to look at not just how American elections are run, but also how elections across history and across geography have been run. You've got parliamentary elections where it's based on what party gets a percentage of the vote. That's how the seats are allocated. You have ranked choice voting, like you have in the Hugo awards, which we've all done. You also have very small electoral colleges, like in the Holy Roman Empire, where seven princes would choose the next Emperor. Each of those elections plays out differently. If you only have to schmooze seven people, that's a very different election than if you're trying to schmooze a Galactic community of several billion. So, know what your race is, if it's local, if it's provincial, if it's national, if it's Galactic or what have you. Then follow the consequences of that.

[Brandon] All right. What's our homework?

[Daniel] So, your homework is to go out and volunteer for a political campaign that you support. It doesn't matter if it's local or national or what have you. Then go out and do whatever they have you do, whether it's knocking on doors or calling phones or whatever. Then, when you get home, start writing down what you did. When your imagination takes off in a different direction, start writing that story.

[Brandon] So, this was a really awesome episode. I learned a ton. I can imagine that there might be people out there who are writing books about elections who might need a really good editor, and you freelance.

[Daniel] Yes, I do.

[Brandon] How could they get ahold of you?

[Daniel] You can email me at dcfeditor@gmail.com. Daniel Craig Friend initials editor at gmail.

[Brandon] Awesome. Well, you guys, get out there and knock on some doors. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/06/16/14-24-political-intrigue/

Key points: Political intrigue? The fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust. Shifting the dynamics or balance of power. Am I looking for the answer (aka mystery) or am I trying to find out why this is happening (aka thriller)? A heist of information! Why are people doing things, what are their motivations? Who has informational advantage? Beware of boredom! Give us a reason to care, make sure we understand the stakes. Scheming leads to actions, and actions lead to complications and ramifications. There must be change, not just scheming. Build rooting interest and sympathy for a character before you dive into political string pulling. The machinations of your villain should be smart, not just insanely convoluted. Secrets and informational advantage are the keys to political intrigue.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 24.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Political Intrigue.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] Or are you? [Dum, duh, dummmm!]

[Margaret] Last I checked. I hope so.

[Brandon] Let's talk about political intrigue. So, can we define this? What do we mean by this? I'll give you a little starter, primer. When I was pitching books, back when I had no idea how to pitch books, right?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I was just wondering around the World Fantasy convention, trying to pitch my book to anybody who was standing by looking bored.

[This potted plant…]

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I pitched to somebody, I think it was an editor at Delray or something. I pitched my book as a political book about such and such. They listened and like, "Oh. You mean political intrigue. Not political book. Make sure you add that word intrigue on when you do this pitch in the future…"

[Howard] To somebody else. To somebody who is not me.

[Laughter]

[Margaret] But solid advice for a free sound rejection.

[Brandon] Yeah. I always thought, oh, I was presenting… Because what I really did mean was a political intrigue book. I was not writing a book about politics, it was about the fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think… I mean, the word intrigue, it is intriguing, it is engaging, the curiosity of it, the quest for answers. I sometimes joke that… And it's not really a joke… That the third book in the Glamorous Histories, Without a Summer, is a political intrigue disguised as a Regency romance. It is all about the way things are shaped in court, and although my characters wind up being somewhat peripheral to it, it is all about shifting those dynamics.

[Brandon] I can…

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that in Season 11, when we talked about the Elemental Genres, we drew a distinction between mystery and thriller. Re-listening to those episodes as we talk about political intrigue might be useful, because in some cases, the mystery is I want to answer the question. In thrillers, often it's I already kind of know what the answer to the question is, but I don't know why this is happening. There's looking for the answer, and then there's looking for a way out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I sometimes think about political intrigues as a heist of information.

[Brandon] Yeah. I think that that's a…

[Howard] Info heist.

[Brandon] That's a great way to put it. When I'm looking at this, it's often you don't know other people's motivations. The main character is trying to figure out where does this person lie, where do their allegiances lie? What are their actual goals? And these sorts of things. As I was thinking about political intrigue, I realized a lot of what I write is political intrigue. Because, if you want to have fast-paced intense fantasy, one way is people always fighting, but that kind of gets boring to me very quickly. So the next step for that is trying to figure out people's motivations, and the plots they're pulling, and things like that.

[Mary Robinette] It is ultimately about trying… There is a character who's trying to shift a balance of power.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That is a key element to a political intrigue, is that shift of power.

[Margaret] I think… Because sometimes the political intrigue can definitely be the informational heist of trying to obtain information. But that doesn't mean that necessarily it's a quest for something, like that is a part of the guise of I am trying to accomplish my goal of X, and it is made difficult by the fact of the shifting sands that are all around me.

[Howard] It's worth looking at a couple of terms here. The term political. It's easy to get bogged down in current politics, or current events. Really, what's meant here is balances of power. Who has power over who else? How are these powers related? How is this power expressed? This group has power because they control the military. This group has power because they control the making of laws. Understanding that when you're thinking of the word political is critically important. As is just politics at like the university level or the family level. On the intrigue side of things, the term that I fall back on is informational advantage. Which is something that comes up all the time in sociology. The idea that one group has informational advantages over somebody else, and that gives them power that cannot be disrupted until, coming back to Mary's heist of information, until the information has flowed the other way and the advantage doesn't exist anymore.

[Margaret] What you were saying reminded me of the idea that power can take many different forms. One of the classes that I teach fairly frequently is one in adaptation. Where we ask students to take a piece of literature in the public domain and change it somehow. I had one student, he was adapting Macbeth. But he adapt… He set it in a junior high school classroom.

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] So you had all of the political machinations of Macbeth, but it was all revolving around, it's not the crown of Scotland, it's who's got social and political capital inside this group of tween's. So it doesn't necessarily have to deal with kings or presidents or government, if you're talking about political intrigue.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I mean, the number of times that a Shakespearean political intrigue story has been re-done as a teen high school drama… I think you would be shocked to see how many times they've done that and how well it translates.

[Margaret] Or as a motorcycle gang.

[Yeah. Yeah.]

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that… That's important about this is that when we're talking about this shift of power and capital, we're not talking about the shift of physical power. Which is why Avengers: Civil War is not a political intrigue at all. Even though it is very much about a shift of power.

[Brandon] Right. Whereas…

[Mary Robinette] Winter Soldier kind of is, though.

[Brandon] Winter Soldier kind of is. Yes. Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So my question to you is, and this is coming from the professor mind where… I get a lot of students who obviously are trying to do this, and it is b o r i n g…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So boring. How do you keep this from being boring, and highlight what makes it interesting?

[Mary Robinette] The same way you do it with everything. Stakes. And giving us a reason to care. What happens if the character fails to accomplish this thing? Why do we care that they're going after this information? If we don't care, we're not… It doesn't matter how compelling you make breaking into some place, it doesn't matter, any of that, if we don't care. That means telling us about their motivations, that means telling us about the physical visceral sensations that they have when they're trying to hack into a database, or use their mystical powers, whatever it is. If we aren't getting those things, it doesn't matter what set piece you've got, it's going to be dull.

[Margaret] To me, it's that machinations have to result in actions, and actions have to result in complications and ramifications. Things that change… The shifting status quo has to actually be shifting. You don't want a bunch of people sitting around scheming, but nobody ever actually does anything.

[Brandon] I think that's part of the problem my students run into. I think part of the other problem is that they assume just like action, that political intrigue is naturally interesting. So you get these chapters where they forget they need to establish rooting interest and sympathy for a character, and then just immediately dump the political situation on us. They start, this is a young prince at court, and here's the politics of what this person's behind the throne and all that. You're like, I don't care yet. So since I don't care yet, I don't want to know who's trying to secretly pull the strings. I want to see this character and see the impact on their immediate life, and make sure that I'm interested, and then start layering this on.

[Howard] If I need to know who is motivated to kill the CEO, then it's useful for me to know a little bit about the lines of succession to being the CEO or what happens if there is no CEO. But relaying that information to me organically through the story versus narrating to me the constitution of the corporation of the book that you are writing…

[Mary Robinette] I'm getting bored…

[Howard] Are two completely different things.

[Mary Robinette] Just listening to you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yes…

[Margaret] I think there's an assumption sometimes that in order to understand or be interested in a chess game, you have to see the entire board.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Margaret] In terms… For chess, yes, that is literally true. But for metaphorical chess, often you want to, as you say, reveal things more organically. Stick to your point of view and let this get discovered…

[Howard] Position the camera right over the bishop's shoulder at what the bishop is aiming at diagonally, and suddenly we're invested in the direction that the bishop can go.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm going to make the argument that you have to see the entire board to play chess. You don't have to see it to watch chess.

[Margaret] Oooo!

[Brandon] Well, I also would make the point that playing chess when somebody else can see the entire board but you can't is part of what a lot of political intrigue stories are about.

[Mary Robinette] That's true.

[Margaret] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Right. Somebody is moving all these pieces, but you can only move this little one.

[Margaret] Well, how long of a driver in Game of Thrones is it that… The Starks arrive in King's Landing and all of this stuff is going on, and it's Ned blundering around in the dark trying to figure out what's actually happening.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. I'm going to pitch at you The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki. This is a fantastic book. I love this book. You probably don't need me to tell you that. I mean, it was a finalist for the Locus Award and various other major awards. It is a really cool political intrigue story that starts in the political intrigue of a secondary fantastical world based on Indian history and mythologies, where the main character is part of a harem. She's grown up in the harem. She's the daughter of the king. We start to inch into political intrigue, until it turns about-face and turns into political intrigue in the world of Faerie from Indian mythology. That happens very naturally, but also very surprisingly in a very cool way very early in the story. From then on, you're like, "Oh. She was having to play 2D chess where she didn't know all the pieces, and now she's playing 7D chess and she doesn't even know what kinds of creatures are playing on the playing field with her." It is written beautifully. The language is beautiful. The intrigue is interesting. The mythology is fascinating. It is just a really well done book. So that is The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki.

[Brandon] So let me bring it back to you guys. One of the questions that I have is when you're doing political intrigue, and when you're reading it, often times you will eventually find out the machinations of the villain, who was behind the scenes, and it is the most convoluted…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] They were… Their method of winning this chess game was to have like 17 different things that don't mean anything, and at the end, they're like, "Ha Ha! I've won this." It just… It really bothers me when the brilliant machinations come to fruition and they're kind of dumb.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of problems with that, where you're like, "There are really a lot easier ways to accomplish that. Why didn't you…"

[Howard] One of my favorite lines… It's from one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan books is, from somebody who's doing this political chicanery, and she says, "I don't plan a path to victory. I plan so that all paths lead to victory."

[Mary Robinette] Interesting.

[Howard] As you unravel what this character is doing, you see, yes, it was convoluted, but it was convoluted because depending on the things other people do, you put me on a different path that leads to me winning. That's super interesting. But when it's super convoluted because all of these things need to work exactly right for me to cross the finish line, suspension of disbelief fails.

[Margaret] I will say for… I was going to comment, on the flipside, so I don't know if you want to duck in first?

[Howard] Go.

[Margaret] The first television show I ever worked on was called The Middleman, and the catchphrase of all of the villains on that show was, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity." The plan was never simple. Ever. I believe if we had had Season Two, it would have become, "My plan is sheer elegance in its draconian complexity."

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] You can use that to great comic effect. Phineas and Ferb does this really well. Dr. Doofenschmirtz has a very simple problem with a very simple solution, which he decides to solve in arcane ways that don't work.

[Howard] It's Pinky and the Brain.

[Margaret] Exactly.

[Howard] The Brain… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So a lot of times these plots are in fact a Rube Goldberg machine. The way I handle it is that I actually plot my villain like a hero story, so that they pick the simplest solution possible. All of the plot complications are them compensating for things going wrong.

[Howard] Well, when we come back to the idea of intrigue, and the term informational advantage, the complexities for political intrigue plots are often I have a very straightforward path and it remains straightforward if I have kept secrets from the following people. If I have informational advantage at all of these stages, then I will win. Now, once you as a writer have plotted that out, you switch sides to your heroes, and you now have a big list of obstacles that they need to clear in order to succeed, and they don't even know what the obstacles are.

[Mary Robinette] I think, again, highlighting the fact that secrets are really important in political intrigue.

[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Margaret] Yes. The homework this week is to take a classic fairytale, something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, whatever floats your particular boat. Take that story. Now assume the story we know is only a cover. What was actually going on? Incorporate as many details from the original story as you would like. If baby bear had the smallest serving of porridge, why wasn't it the coldest? Why did they leave their breakfast on the table when they went out walking, anyway? Come up with the undercurrents that explains what we see on the surface.

[Howard] Goldilocks and Three Russian Bears.

[Margaret] Da.

[Brandon] This is my favorite one we've come up with, so I'm really looking forward to what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.41: Raising the Stakes

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/10/08/12-41-raising-the-stakes/

Key Points: Raising the stakes over the long haul? How do you keep it interesting? Lots of smaller plots, smaller scenes that raise the stakes in different ways. Subplots! Make the failure worse, and worse. Mounting consequences! Put yourself into it. Find the personal issues for the character. More specific, and more personal. Use try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, and build new problems out of old solutions. Rest points can accent the pedal-to-the-metal moments, if they are real. Build a stairway, always up and progressing, but there are plateaus as well as risers. The question raised at the beginning must matter, it must be gripping, then the stakes will carry you. Don't raise the stakes too fast and too high! Save your great finish for the end, don't give it away too early. Also, delayed consequences, or solutions that postpone the problem without solving it may work for you.
( Raise the stakes? Bet on it! )

[Brandon] This has been a great discussion. I'm going to have to call it here. But I do have some homework for you guys. I want you to try a few of the things that we've talked about in this episode. Specifically, raising the stakes, number one, by making… Try taking a side character from a story you're working on, and raise the stakes for what's going on for them. I want you to try by making it more personal first, but I'm not going to let you use the crutch that a lot of us use, that they have lost someone in their past or that it's personal because this is the person that killed their mentor or something like that. It can't be related to the loss of a loved one.
[Mary] No fridging!
[Brandon] Yes. Just make that one not on the table, and just see what you can do with that then. And then make it more specific. Try to make it a little less epic, but more specific to the person. Try that. Try that instead. See if this raises the stakes for you in interesting ways for your story. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.24: Stakes!

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/06/12/11-24-stakes/

Key Points: Raise the stakes does not mean make it more world shattering. What are stakes? Things that keep your characters from walking away from conflicts. What keeps people fighting when they have conflicting goals? What is important enough to keep them in the game? Often, the difference between a hero and a villian is the magnitude and type of stakes they are fighting over. To raise the stakes, don't add more villians or explosions, make it more personal for the main character. The destruction of the galaxy? Who cares? Saving the life of a friend? We're with y'a! Make it personal, and make the audience care. Get into the character's head and show us why it matters, what motivates them. Be aware, we can empathize with a villian, or with thieves in a heist. Consider likability, competency, and proactivity! Build engagement with character sliders. Don't forget selflessness and sacrifice as ways to build empathy. The Cornwell trick? Establish two sets of stakes, put them in conflict, and let the main character sacrifice personal gain for greater good. Revenge stories and other selfish tales often use the B plot to get readers engaged. Or proactivity, especially with something that just won't quit getting in the way.

( Rare? Medium well? No, no, stake him... )

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and do a writing prompt. Mary, you have a writing prompt for us.
[Mary] Yeah. So I've been doing this thing where I write a story in 15 minutes for charity. I start it based on three things. An object, a character, and a genre. So. Listener. Look to your left. That is your object.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] Look at the bookshelf. The first book you see, that is your genre. And your character is your best friend. Now write a story for 15 minutes.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: flinching

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Writing Excuses 11.23: The Element of Mystery

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/06/05/11-23-the-element-of-mystery/

Key Points: A mystery is a puzzle, and we read them for the thrill of solving a puzzle. Mysteries often start when the main character has a question, usually "Why is this dead body here?" Whodunit is one of the common forms of mystery, but there are others. Why are our robots acting screwy? Write a mystery because you are going to need that element in nearly everything you write! Puzzles and clues, oh my! Who did it? Where do the clues lead us? The body at the start creates an immediate question and stakes! Also, especially in the bookstore genre, a body is expected. For a murder to be compelling, there must be something at stake in solving it. Not necessarily a personal stake by the main character -- consider Sherlock Holmes and other PIs! Planning a mystery? Start with a question that has multiple answers, for uncertainty. The mystery plot is built on fascinating clues, revealed one step at a time. Plus a healthy dose of red herrings. Dan starts with the solution, then lists clues, and works backwards. Learn ways to plant clues, such as in the middle of a list, with a bit of character misdirection, or as part of something else.

( In the library, with a lead pipe... )

[Brandon] All right. I have to call the discussion here, although it's going very well. We will talk more about mystery in a couple of weeks. But for now, Howard has some homework for us.
[Howard] I do. For you seat-of-the-pantser's, this may be very difficult. For you outliners, this may be equally difficult. I want you to create a crime. Start with… Not in real life, please.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Just stay at the keyboard. Create a crime scene. Create a crime that… Where you know who's done it, you know what's been done. Start leaving the clues, and work your way backwards through the criminal's path, through the victim's path, whatever, and lay clues. Then start removing the clues that people wouldn't notice, so that you are building… You're essentially building the framework for a mystery which you could then later wrap prose around.
[Brandon] Right. So outline backwards.
[Howard] Outline it backwards.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: frivolous

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Writing Excuses 11.10: Idea, As Genre, with Nancy Fulda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/03/06/11-10-idea-as-genre-with-nancy-fulda/

Key Points: The elemental genre idea story. Not MICE idea. Idea, question, what if? Fascination is the key emotion driving the idea story. What is this, what is happening? Mental exploration, ramifications, consequences, and poking. The reader needs to be fascinated, although the character may not be. Outside of SF/F, often close to mystery, drama, thriller. E.g., mystery looks at why did this happen and who did it, while the idea story looks at the ramifications of it. Beware of falling into world builder's disease -- put in character responses, and give the reader cues to understand and feel, not just details. Think about what could go wrong, who reacts to it, who gains or loses. Show how the idea changes familiar activities. Didactic stories and agendas often use idea stories. But the idea story really comes alive at the intersection with a strong character. Make sure that someone has a personal stake and consequences in the idea. For a story, start with an idea, then add in character, plot, setting, conflict.
( Brainstorms and other fallout... )
[Brandon] I like how this discussion's been going. I don't know if we've drilled yet into enough practical advice on how to write these. Fortunately, we're going to come back to this topic in a couple of weeks. So wait for it then, and we'll try to drill into the hows and whys you use this. Until then, we have some homework for you. Dan is going to give us our homework.
[Dan] All right. What we want you to do now is to go out and find a cool idea. Find a science blog or find a cool new piece of technology somewhere in the world or a great idea for a magic system you have floating around in your head. Find an idea, and then brainstorm 20 stories you could tell about it. Conflicts that could arise, using that idea as the core.
[Brandon] All right. Nancy, thank you so much for joining us.
[Nancy] Any time.
[Howard] Can you come back in two weeks?
[Nancy] Absolutely.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: sleepy

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 23: How to Write without Twists

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-23-how-to-write-without-twists/

Key points: Simple surprises and obstacles are not plot twists. Watching engaging characters overcome real problems is satisfying. Watching characters make progress is satisfying. Stories without twists often have strong setups with very clear conflicts and high stakes. Even stories with major plot twists often have straight-forward subplots.
( The Peppermint Twist? )
[Brandon] Let's do a writing prompt before this spirals completely into insanity.
[Jordo] Is it going to be Jane Austen and Diehard?
[Brandon] No.
[Dan] No?
[Howard] It can't be Pride and Prejudice and zombies, either, because that's been done.
[Dan] It's going to be Sense and Sensibility and terrorists.
[Brandon] You have lots of excuses why you are not going to write, but we're going to pretend you don't. Thanks for listening. This has been Writing Excuses.

Current Mood: breezy

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with stakes

Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes

Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories

Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue

Writing Excuses 12.41: Raising the Stakes

Writing Excuses 11.24: Stakes!

Writing Excuses 11.23: The Element of Mystery

Writing Excuses 11.10: Idea, As Genre, with Nancy Fulda

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 23: How to Write without Twists

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