Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship

Feb. 26th, 2020 11:14 am
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Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship
 
 
Q&A Points:
Q: What have any of you learned in the past year that has improved your craft?
A: Talk to your editor early in the process. Use an outboard brain. Do the hard thing. Take a chance, make mistakes, and do something because it might be fun. Go watch Lindsay Ellis Three Act Structure. (Maybe this one? https://youtu.be/o0QO7YuKKdI)
Q: My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?
A: Look at the problem, what is the barrier to moving the story forward? Make yourself a checklist, an inventory of things that can go wrong. Trust your instincts.
Q: As published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?
A: Committed idiot. Plan ahead, but publishing is volatile. Strategy, planning, but be ready to drop it. Be ready to jump in a different direction. Have a roadmap, and build a new one if you need to. Diversified income. Make plans for multiple scenarios, for whatever happens at cost points.
Q: How do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?
A: When you wonder if it's gone on too long.
Q: How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?
A: Learn by teaching. Externalize and explain, talk through the process.
Q: When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?
A: Identify different phases, and avoid doubling up on phases.
Q: If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?
A: Try it. See how it reads.
Q: What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?
A: The end is a frame, matching your beginning. Show who the character is now, how things have changed, and give the reader the emotional punch you've been aiming at.
Q: What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?
A: Rhythms that are linked to the character's personality, idioms, metaphors. Make the character feel specific and vivid.
Q: How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?
A: Experience and personal preference. What are you looking for in readers, how are you using them?
Q: My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?
A: Does it connect to your story? If a horse is just a horse, call it a horse.
Q: How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?
A: Agents work with people, not projects. If they believe in the person, they get lots of leeway.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Eight.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on a Ship.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Howard] I've been on this ship for several days now.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Which is a lot longer than 15 minutes. We are here at the 2019 Writing Excuses Retreat on a cruise ship in the Caribbean Sea. Actually, right now we're in the Gulf of Mexico. We have a live audience in front of us. Say hello, live audience.
[Whoo!]
[Dan] Awesome. We have asked them to ask us some questions. Our theme this whole year is the questions of the audience. We've been trying to answer them, we'll continue doing that throughout. Now, we have some live ones. So, our first question. Tell us your name and your question.
 
[Caleb] This is Caleb. I'm wondering what any of you have learned in the past year that has improved your craft?
[Mary Robinette] What any of us have learned in the past year that has improved our craft? I actually learned the value of talking to my editor really early in the process. One of the things that happened to me this year was that I had a number of events that derailed me from writing. I was working on a novel, and my usual process did not work. So… When I say editor, what I guess I mean is using an outboard brain. My usual process was not working, because I kept having life things go wrong. There were some family members at hospitals, then we were moving, and it was just a lot of things. Going to someone else and saying, "I cannot hold this story in my head. Please help me focus." was immensely valuable and actually got me back on track.
[Dongwon] That's convenient, because the lesson I learned this year was to talk to my clients early in the process.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] To make sure that everything's on track. I think one of the things that I learned that kind of lined up with that is to not be afraid to push people to do the thing that is hard. Right? In that sometimes when you're giving editorial feedback, because you're working with somebody who puts their heart and soul into a manuscript, into a book, you want to be… You want to be nice, right? You want to go easy on them in certain ways because you like this person, you work with this person. For me, one of the things I had to really learn in this past year is to get involved early and don't be afraid of saying, "Is this really the right choice? Is this the best way to get where you're going?" Sometimes, breaking it down and doing the hard work is the most important thing. Whether or not that's going to make someone upset.
[Howard] For me, it was when I joined the TypeCastRPG role-playing game and decided that, you know what, for fun, I think I'm going to try to live sketch things that happen during the game. The pressure there being I need to turn out a… What is ultimately a single panel comic strip that depends on the context of the game in a minute and a half. Then we did a live show at [FanEx] and they set up an Elmo and I… To borrow the metaphor, screwed the courage to the wall and said, "I'm going to make terrible, terrible mistakes and I'm going to do it when my arms are 10 feet long on this screen behind me…"
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "But I'm going to do it anyway because it might be fun." It unlocked a piece of my brain that allowed me to visualize more quickly and draw faster and draw things I've never drawn before.
[Dan] Fantastic. Just, really quick for me, I talked about this in one of the classes that I taught here on the retreat, the Lindsay Ellis's episode about three act structure and the way that she explained it made three act structure work for me in a way that it never has before. So everyone go watch that. It's brilliant.
 
[Dan] All right. We have another question.
[Allison] Hi. My name is Allison. My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?
[Mary Robinette] I wish I knew the answer to that one.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's a really super common problem. The way I evaluate it is whether or not… Is to interrogate the quest… The problem that I'm having. I look at the problem and I'm like, "Okay. What is the barrier between me and moving this story forward?" If it's… If I can't identify a barrier, that means that it's probably me, it is not actually the story. If it is… Sometimes it is… There is actually a problem with the story that is really difficult to diagnose. That's when handing it to someone else to look at becomes useful. But most of the time, if I ask just what is the barrier that is between me and moving forward, or the character and moving forward, that will unlock what the problem is.
[Howard] I've found that, for a lot of people, by the time you reach a point in your writing career where you're comfortable answering this question, you may have moved beyond actually writing down the equivalent of a preflight checklist. But having a preflight checklist, having a way to take inventory of the things that can be wrong… They might be diagnostic tools like pacing, three act structure, character arc, conflict, seven point whatever… The sorts of things that we talk about here on Writing Excuses all the time. When I'm writing jokes, I have this sort of checklist. I've internalized it. But what I found is that when I'm stuck, I have to take inventory. A lot of the times, it's me. I haven't had enough sleep. I haven't eaten correctly. I'm exhausted because of an emotional thing. The temperature in the room is wrong and it's making me grouchy. This character is at the wrong point in their character arc for me to write the scene that I want to write, therefore, I don't feel justified in writing it. By the time I'm able to articulate these things, the unlocking starts moving really quickly. I can see where the problems are, and where the problems aren't.
[Dongwon] I think it's probably the most frustrating advice I give, and also the most important advice that I like to give, is that you need to learn to trust your instincts. Right? But this is a case where it's very hard to tell where the line between your conscious thought and your instinct is. So, the thing I think about a lot is what Howard was just talking about is the ways in which your conscious and subconscious mind are connected to your embodiment, right? So, a lot of things that can help you are really core mental health and mindfulness techniques, right? Meditation, yoga, go for a run, go take a shower, go take a break. Find something that uses up part of your brain so that your subconscious can chew on it. Then come back to it when you're feeling calm and relaxed and centered, and try and get in touch with what is your core emotion here? What is your instinct telling you, versus what is your fear telling you? Right? If that instinct is saying, "Actually, it's a structural problem here," then focus on that, and do that hard work. On average, if you're having that question, you're probably right, that the problem is bigger than I don't feel like writing right now. On average.
[Mary Robinette] I forgot that I have an entire blog post on this that we'll put in the liner notes. Which is… For those people who never go to look at the liner notes, you can search for it. It's called Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. I talk about how to diagnose the kind of delays that you are having and the kind of… Like, if your drowsy, it's probably that your story is boring. If you are restless, it's probably that you don't actually know the next thing that's going to happen or you don't believe it actually, I think. But, anyway, Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. It includes how to diagnose it, and then a long list of tools for when it is… The problem is not with the manuscript, but external to the manuscript, to your own life. Some things to help you move forward.
 
[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Next question.
[Matt] Hello, my name is Matt Chambers. My question is as published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?
[Howard] 10 years ago…
[Dan] Now I'm just depressed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] 10 years ago, I could have told you that 10 years from now, I would definitely still be doing Schlock Mercenary. Five years ago, I could have told you when the major Schlock Mercenary mega arc was going to end. Two years ago, I could have, but wouldn't have, told you how it was going to end and what all the book plans and plot plans were around that. This year, I am re-thinking all of that, because I was probably an idiot, but I'm committed, so I'm sticking to it in a blind panic.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Committed idiot is actually a great thing to put on my business cards. Six years ago, I had the very best year of my career up to that point, and since.
[Howard] Oh, dear.
[Dan] I thought at the time that I knew I would be doing six years later, and had no idea that one of my publishers was going to dry up completely, that one of my series was going to tank abysmally. So, kind of my answer to this is that it is very smart to plan ahead, but that this industry is very volatile. A lesson I did not learn early enough is how to plan around that volatility. The good news is we're going to have one, and possibly two, episodes on this exact topic later in the year with Dongwon about how to plan out your career and how that career can change and how to reboot it when it falls apart.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I love talking to my clients about strategy. A lot of times, what most of them are planning three, four… Not even books, like 3 to 4 contracts out, right? And a contract can be 2 to 3 books. So it's what are we doing here, what's coming after that, what's coming after that? The important thing, as Dan kind of touched on, is that you have to be sort of ready to throw all of that out at the drop of a hat, right? Publishing is extremely volatile, you have no idea what's going to happen when that book hits the market. So you have to be kind of ready to jump in a different direction. Sometimes you have backup plans, and sometimes you don't. But always have something… Some roadmap of where you want to go. Then be ready to build a new one when you need to.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I… Much like everyone else, my plans change. The things that… For me, the metrics that have been working is that I have… I have kept my income stream diversified, so that's why I have three different careers running simultaneously. So that when one of them is not doing well, I can fill in the gaps with one of the others. I also think about the shape that I want my career to take. That, generally, is that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. Which means that if a really lucrative contract comes in, and I'm like, "That looks… I mean, the money looks really great, but I don't want to be pigeonholed into doing that kind of work," that's not… That is something that I can think about turning down, and that I can decide in the moment. I have a giant list of novels that I want to write. I won't get to write them all, probably. But I keep them. Then, I think, the last piece of advice that I was just given this past year… I was in an enviable position, which is that I had just won the Nebula and the Locus, and we were looking at the Hugo. I was like… People kept saying, "Well, you're going to win it." I'm like, "You can't think that. That's not healthy. Certainly not healthy for me." Then my agent, Seth Fishman, said I should think about it like applying to college. That you don't know whether or not you're going to get into college, but you make plans for both scenarios. You make plans for well, if I get into college, I'm going to need to be able to put these things into place. If I don't get into college, then these are the backup plans that I have and this is how I'm going to occupy my life. So I think that that's one of the things that is very useful, is to think about the possible cusp points in your career, and to think about positive outcomes for either cusp point. So that's… That has been very helpful for me. Fortunately, I did get into college, in this particular scenario.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it was also… Even the positive things can rock you if you are not prepared for them.
 
[Dan] Awesome. I want to pause right now for our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about a book called Jade War, which is the sequel to Fonda Lee's… Wait. Yes. The sequel to Fonda Lee's Jade City. I just had this moment of thinking that I had them backwards. So, I blurbed the first book, and the second book is every bit as fantastic. It is the Godfather meets like a Kung Fu wire film. It's secondary world fantasy, but it feels like 1960s or 70s Earth. But there are people who can use jade and they can do magic, except they don't think of it as magic, it's just part of an… It's just completely woven into the world. It feels so real that I am surprised that it is not. The relationships are compelling. If you are someone who likes a well-written sex scene, it is not the entirety of the book, but there are a couple in there that are some of the hottest and… Like, really beautifully drawn consensual sex scenes. The consensual parts is the part that I find appealing. But the…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Just the entire thing, it's great. It's Jade War by Fonda Lee.
[Dan] Cool. Thank you very much.
 
[Dan] Now, we still have several questions to get… Left. We want to try to get to them all. We're going to let this episode run a little long. But we're going to call this the lightning round, okay? So ask your question, and then one of us will answer it instead of all four. So, go.
[Cameron] Okay. Hey, guys, my name is Cameron. I was wondering how do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?
[Dongwon] When you wonder if it's gone on too long.
[Laughter]
[Dan] [Haha!] Excellent answer. Next?
[Chuckles]
 
[Caitlin] Hi, I'm Caitlin. How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?
[Mary Robinette] I learn by teaching. When I was a pup… Getting trained in puppetry, what my instructor had me do is he would have me learn everything with my right hand, he would teach me with my right hand, then he would have me teach my left hand how to do it. What he said was any time you have to externalize and explain what you're doing, even if it's to yourself, that it causes you to hone your craft and to get rid of the parts that aren't important. I find that when I am teaching students, even if it's someone that is a peer and just saying, "Hey, this is the thing that I've learned today." Even if they don't necessarily need to know it, but I'm talking through the process, that it makes me better at my craft.
 
[Jessica] Hi, I'm Jessica. When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?
[Dan] My answer to that has always been that I will identify the different phases that each project has to go through, and then make sure that I'm not doubling them up. So I'm never writing two things at a time, but I could be writing one while revising another or outlining another or editing or proofing or whatever it is. That way, it makes it much easier for me to keep them in my brain, because they're all in different parts of my brain.
 
[Kevin] Hi. I'm Kevin. If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?
[Howard] I love the way POV use changes in our culture over time. I think that that could work. I don't know that I've seen it done, but I've thought about doing it myself. I think that 20 years from now, that could end up being the rule rather than an exception, because these sorts of things are cultural. If it's what you want to do, go for it.
[Dongwon] I just want to jump in with one little note, is the thing I run into a lot from writers and in the writing community, is people think about POV really, really rigidly. So, like, if I start in third person limited, I have to stay that way all throughout. Whereas, I think, we're seeing a lot of things that are really pushing back against that. N. K. Jemisin's Fifth Season is a really great example. Even Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside, you'll see POV jump around from first person to third person, you'll see tense shifts, things like that. So feel free to really sort of experiment with the different perspectives and the different POV's that you have. You can drop into one just for a chapter or a scene, and then they can never reappear again. So, feel free to try different things and experiment and see how it reads. I think writers and crit groups are very focused on consistent POV. I don't think readers even notice.
 
[Emma] Hi. I'm Emma. What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?
[Oooo]
[Howard] Your Patreon.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] So, what I think about when I get to the end is it is a frame. I am framing something that I set up at the beginning. At the beginning, I made promises to the reader. One of the things that I promised them is that they would feel a certain way when they get to the end. So when I look at that last paragraph, I think about it as the beginning in reverse, the inverse of that. I try to make sure that I'm showing who my character is now, where they are now, and the ways in which things have shifted. Doing that in a way that makes the reader have that emotional punch that I had been going for through the whole thing. Like, if I had been wanting them to have a sense of dread all the way through, and then the catharsis of relief, then that last thing needs to contain relief. If I want them to still feel dread, then that last thing still needs to have dread in it. So it's a… For me, it's the frame, it's the button, and that's what I look for at the end.
 
[Jess] Hi. I'm Jess. What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?
[Mary Robinette] I can take that one.
[Dan] Do it.
[Mary Robinette] So. Coming from theater and audiobook, the thing about third person and the way… Is that it is actually still very much first-person in this real simple way. The narrator is telling a story to the audience. The narrator is sometimes very closely linked to a third person character, but even so, there is a storyteller who is speaking to the audience. What you're looking for with the voice are rhythms that are linked to the character's personality. If it is a tight limited third person, you want to use everything… You want to make sure that the idioms that you're using, the metaphors that they're using, that these are all linked to how they self define themselves. All of that is going to make the character feel specific and vivid in ways that aiming for the so-called transparent prose will not.
 
[Morgan] Hi, I'm Morgan. How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?
[Howard] Sad, sorry experience.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah. I mean, that really is the answer. I know Mary Robinette and I, for example, have very different criteria as to who we count as an alpha and who we count as a beta reader. That… It all comes down to experience and personal preference, I think.
[Howard] For my own part, an alpha reader… When I've handed it to an alpha reader and gotten it back, I want to feel energized about doing the things that need to be done to fix it. I want my offer readers to energize me. My beta readers I want to be a little more critical and help me fine-tune things. But I'm fragile that way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm… Just to demonstrate that we are sometimes counter. The thing that I'm looking for in a beta… In an alpha reader is someone who is asking me the right questions to help me unpack it a little bit further so that the beta readers are getting something that is closer to the story that I'm trying to tell. The beta readers, I am using them as a general, but the alpha reader… For me, the alpha reader in this case is Alessandra Meechum [sp?], most of the time, and she is… She's what is sometimes called the ideal reader, which is that she represents the core audience that I am writing for. So when I'm writing, I am specifically writing to see whether or not I make her go, "Oh, I love this," or "I hate this so much."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That often pleases me a great deal.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] So it depends how you're using them. I'm using her to shape the story. I've spotted… Sometimes I'll spot someone in beta and go, "Oh. You also sit in that ideal reader category." There are some stories that I'm going to write at some point that she will not be the ideal reader for, and I'll switch out alphas for that story. But that's what I look for.
[Dan] It's worth pointing out that Alessandra is in the room, and beaming like the sun to be referred to as an ideal reader. So.
 
[Nick] Hello. I'm Nick. My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?
[Oooo]
[Dongwon] I would say only rename things if there's a big sort of… If it connects to the core of your story, right? If the question you're asking is about, I don't know, national identity, for example, then it can be very complicated to use an existing country or an existing sort of language structure. So… If… Unless you're asking the question of what is the meaning of horse, then I wouldn't rename it, right? But if you're trying to disrupt ideas of like what do we consider animals, what do we consider our relationship to them, what are beasts of burden, then that's a case where maybe playing with it would give you an opportunity to really do a lot more there. But, in general, if it's a horse, call it a horse.
 
[Matthew] Hello, my name is Matthew. How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?
[Dongwon] I wonder who's going to answer this one?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I don't know. Well, I'll take… No.
[Dongwon] The thing that I talk about a lot is that I work with people, not projects. Right? I sign a client, I don't sign a single book. So, the answer is if I believe in the person, then all the leeway in the world, right? That's something that we'll work together to make it right. What goes into that decision is hard to articulate in a lot of ways. But I have to be excited about this person's potential to do something really interesting… Even if they're not quite there yet. So there are clients I've worked with for years and years and years, and we haven't gotten out with anything. But we're still working together, we're still honing in on what the right project is… Or how to do X, Y, or Z. So, the answer is, it depends a lot on the person. The right circumstances, it's okay if that book isn't quite there, so long as I can see you're doing something interesting and I can see that you are someone who has all the chops, all the drive, all the ambition to get to where you need to get to.
 
[Dan] Great. So, that is all our questions that we have. I'm sure that there are many more burning in your hearts right now, but… Thank you for listening. We have a piece of homework for you. So, once again, we're throwing this to Dongwon.
[Dongwon] So, I think that the openings of novels are really, really important. It's a great opportunity to hook your reader. More than that, it's an opportunity to get someone to say, "Yes, I'm going to spend $20 or whatever it is to buy this book." So what I would like each of you to do is take the first line of your work in progress or something that you've finished and rewrite it three separate times. Make sure that when you write each one, it's not three variations on the same sentence. Try and shake those up as much as possible, right? Try a different voice. Try a different style. Try different… Even like points to start the scene and see what jumps out at you. What is the most exciting, what grabs you, what are you excited about to keep going with. I think that will tell you a lot about how your opening scenes should work so that your pulling the reader into your story as forcefully as possible.
[Dan] Perfect. Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding

Feb. 6th, 2019 10:32 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding
 
 
Key Points: Worldbuilding using character viewpoint? How do you integrate setting into your characters?  Start with the way the character interacts with the world, both physically and emotionally. Use actions and dialogue to show us assumptions and attitudes, how things work, without lengthy info dumps. Use two or more characters with different backgrounds or opinions, different viewpoints, to give the reader information about the thing, about the characters, and about the unreliable viewpoint. One way to use viewpoint to intersect with worldbuilding is in the way characters describe other characters. The same character seen through the eyes of two different characters can be very different. Think about how the character's voice directs the narrative versus keeping the narrative safe and trustworthy. First person, the character runs everything. Third person, you need to balance. Some voice, some straight narration. To make your worldbuilding richer, think about what people swear by, who makes what jokes, and how your character interacts with the environment. A room with marble floors comes to life when heels clack across it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Five.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Viewpoint As Worldbuilding.
[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] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] One of my personal favorite topics… Perhaps even hobby horses, is to talk about how to worldbuild by using character viewpoint. I love it when books do this. In fact, it is one of the things that when I pick up a book, if the first chapter does, the first page does, I know I'm going to have a good time, at least with that character. I really like it. I want to talk about how we do it. So, how do you make setting an integrated part of your characters?
[Mary Robinette] I think a lot of it is the way the character interacts with it, not just physically, but also emotionally. That... the weight that things carry. So, using Jane Austen as an example, someone can… Like, two characters can look at each other, and that's no big deal. But when Austen handles it, she gives you that emotional weight. It's like she… And I'm thinking specifically in Persuasion, there's this scene when Capt. Wentworth pulls a small child off of Anne Elliott's back, and there's a moment where he's touching her. The emotional weight of that tells you, as a modern reader, that oh, there is no touching. This is… There is a lot going on between these two. It is… It gives you all of these layers of detail, while just being a physical interaction in the world. So that's the kind of thing that I find very interesting.
[Dan] One, very similar to that, is in Age of Innocence, when he takes her glove off. It is so steamy, and it's just a glove. But it tells you so much about the world and what it's like and the rules they have to follow.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you do that. It's actually one of the things I enjoy in the Stormlight, is the safe hand.
[Brandon] Right. Right. The safe hand came from… So, for those who aren't familiar. Society has eroticized the bare left hand of women. This has all kinds of social implications, and all kinds of… People always want to ask me, they want to say, "Why?" They often come to me, "Why, why is this?" I can answer. From, like, I… In the worldbuilding, the past, well, there were these events and these influential writings that happened, and then there was some institutionalized sexism that insp… But really, the answer is, "Why? Because that's how their culture is."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] That's how they see things. It's not why because they are like, "Well, when my great…" No. They're just like, "This is how my culture is." Then that culture becoming a big part of how people see the world is the sort of thing that I just love.
[Dan] You just look at all the different cultures on Earth today and the cultural assumptions that we carry and assume are common to the entire human race. Then you go to another country, and it's… They've never even heard of it before. You realize that we do this all the time.
 
[Howard] Last season, we had an episode on confronting the default, in which we talked about exactly that. When I wrote, I think it was Scrap Ante for Privateer Press, they wanted me to develop a character for them… Develop an existing character. They wanted me to give a POV to a character who was a mechanic… And this, they've got game fic… They've got game stuff surrounding this guy already. Who is a mechanic, and he needed to sound like a mechanic, and they wanted to talk a little bit about how these things work. Then it needed to not be boring. So I created a mystery in which someone is sabotaging a Warjack, and in as lean writing as I could, I have this mechanic digging in and finding out that somebody has swapped a part that looks like another part, and he has names for all of these, and he's rattling them off the way a mechanic would. In the course of writing this, I started lifting names and altering them a little bit from actual steam engines and diesel engines and whatever else. When I sent it into the Privateer Press guys, Doug, who's the chief worldbuilder, read it and said, "you have done something that I have been terrified to do forever." Which is explain how these things work.
[Laughter]
[Howard] They loved it. It read like a fun story, and it was all POV. It was not, "Oh, this is how the magic flows through the whatever." It's just a guy fixing a thing and looking for a problem, and then determining that somebody had sabotaged this to kill him.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Dan] So. An example from one of my books. In the Partials series, one of the things that I wanted to play with for the worldbuilding was the generational divide. People who remember life before the apocalypse and the kids who have grown up in a post-apocalyptic world. So I had the chance then to start with two or three chapters entirely from this teenage point of view, just describing a normal world. She didn't think it was scary, she wasn't constantly concerned with the things that they had lost. Then, we finally get to a meeting with adults, and they spend their whole time bemoaning how rustic everything is. Just the difference between their attitudes immediately tells you a lot about the world and the society.
 
[Brandon] Yeah. That's one of the things I like the most is when you can take two different characters and describe the same thing, the same event, or the same cultural mores, and then, with those two contrasting opinions, the reader is given a bunch of information. They are, number one, told about the thing. Right? You're getting the worldbuilding. But you're, number two, told about the characters. You're told what they find important and valuable, or what they notice. But, number three, you're also told viewpoint is untrustworthy.
[Dan] Yes.
[Brandon] Which is a really important thing with these sorts of stories.
[Dan] That can make it very difficult. If you want to do that, that's something that you might need to refine and polish quite a bit, because your readers of the first or second draft might say, "Oh, you've got an inconsistency here." No, I don't. You need to look at who is saying it, and maybe I need to finesse this a little bit so that that is more clear.
[Howard] The number of times I have taken an inconvenient fact about the Schlock Mercenary universe and backtracked it to determine who said it…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And then ascertained, "Oh. That person is actually allowed to be wrong about this." Did the narrator ever… Nope! Narrator didn't… Did a footnote ever… Nope! Oh, this is awesome.
[Laughter]
[Howard] This is awesome. I am off the hook.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have… There's a timeline problem in the Lady Astronaut universe. Because when I wrote the novelette, I was just like, "Eh, it's a one-off." I wrote it. I didn't do a lot of worldbuilding. Basically, when I got into doing the actual hard-core how long does it take to get people into space when you're kickstarting a space program… I'm like, "Oh. Elma's just wrong."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] About some of her memories. She's just conflating them.
[Dan] Just misremembering.
[Mary Robinette] Just misremembering.
[Brandon] I run into this a lot. But it is nice to establish viewpoints that are untrustworthy for this sort of reason.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a book that I'm reading right now that's doing a really interesting job of this shifting viewpoint is Semiosis by Sue Burke. It's a multigenerational novel. So you will move forward like an entire generation, and it's a colony world. So the first generation are the first people on the planet. Then the next generation are kids who've grown up there. The way they view their parents versus… The worldbuilding is fascinating, because… They're… You see how they're shifting and how the culture is shifting to adapt to the place that they're living. It's really, really interesting. It's all POV that's doing it.
[Brandon] Now, that is not our book of the week, but it would be a good book for people to read.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Brandon] Dan actually has our book of the week.
[Dan] Yeah. The book of the week actually hits this topic perfectly. It is Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Which is a YA fantasy. Big secondary world fantasy set in a world inspired by Africa. What's fascinating about it… Many things are fascinating about it. But pertinent to this discussion, there are three viewpoint characters. It's a world where magic has been stolen. No one can do it anymore. The people who used to be able to do it are an oppressed class. So one of our viewpoints is one of these kind of former mage people. Then we have a princess who has been sheltered her entire life and runs away from home. Then we have her brother who is struggling with the King's policies. So they all have completely different ideas about what the world should look like and what it does look like and how they want to change it. It's really fascinating to see the interplay of those viewpoints as you go through.
[Brandon] Excellent. That is Children of Blood and Bone. I was on a panel with her, and she was really interesting. Had some really cool things to say about magic. So I anticipate it being a great book. Emily really liked it.
[Dan] Yes. She describes the book as Black Panther but with magic.
[Brandon] She does.
 
[Brandon] Now, one of my favorite ways to use viewpoint in worldbuilding, to intersect them, is by the way the characters describe other characters.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Uhuh.
[Brandon] I first picked up on this as a young person reading The Wheel of Time, where… And I'm not going to be able to quote these exactly. I'm sorry, Wheel of Time fans, but you have one character who would describe someone and say, "Wow. They look like they spend most of their day at the forge." Then another character describes the same person and says something along the lines of "Wow. If you beat that person at cards, leave early. Because otherwise, they'll jump you in the back alley." Those two descriptions are both "This is a tough, intimidating person." But seen through the eyes of two very different characters. I love this sort of thing. Description. Now, my question for you guys is, do you ever worry about the blend of… When you're in narrative, how much you're going to let the character's voice direct the narrative and how much you're not?
[Mary Robinette] It does depend on whether… Which voice you're using. Are you using first person, or are you using tight third? Because first person, all over the place. It's no problem. But with tight third… With third person, it is a tricky line. Because what I find is that the… Unless it is very obviously voice-y, that the reader will interpret that as being safe and trustworthy. So I tend to try to be fairly honest when I'm doing narration that is less flavored than when I'm doing something that… If I'm doing free indirect speech, I try to… That's… I try to reserve the perceptions for those.
[Brandon] Yeah. I always kind of go back and forth on this, because, of course, Robert Jordan did very much a lot of tight thirds. There would be these moments where it felt like it was right in their head, and other times when the narrator was speaking. He balanced it really well. I'm always a little scared about that. Because you do want the narrator, the non-present narrative, to be trustworthy. But you want the viewpoint of the character to maybe not be.
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it's a thing that you can do… I was just reading The Killing of Kings by Howard Andrew Jones. It's not… At the time of recording, it is not yet out. But one of the things that he does is there is this character who's constantly… Male character who's constantly looking at women with a very male gaze. Like, constantly looking at boobs and ass. Just all the time. Then will say things like, "I don't understand why this woman doesn't like me."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Right. Right.
[Howard] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] "It's like she's always so cold and distant. There's always a piece of furniture between us." I'm like, "Yep. Yes, there is. Absolutely, yes, there is." But it is… It's deftly handled, because he is staying absolutely true to the character's point of view. But by giving us very obvious physicality and recognizable body language from the other character, he's telling us how this behavior is actually perceived in the world.
[Brandon] Later in the year, we're going to do an entire week on writing imperfect worlds. Or imperfect characters. With… Using topics like this, not validating but acknowledging that some people are like this. We will cover that. It's going to be in a few months, but we are going to get to that. That is one of the… That's like Using Viewpoint and Character Level 501.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Being able to pull off some of this stuff.
 
[Brandon] Before we go out, any tips for writers on making their sentences, particularly their worldbuilding sentences, do more than one thing at once?
[Howard] What do these people swear by? I love that. My favorite examples of this currently are from the various different NPCs in the ESO world, where they swear by different gods. They are consistent in the way this works. It adds a measure of depth. Because some of them will swear by those gods, and somebody who is from the same culture will never utter those words. You can now tell that those two people are actually different. That's not the sort of thing that you expect to see… Well, if you grew up with video games. It's not the sort of thing that you expect to see in a videogame. But videogame writing has progressed to the point that we are expecting that level of worldbuilding, especially in dialogue that has to be read by an actor in a way that sounds conversational and believable.
[Dan] Very similar to that, and I'm starting to notice this more as I read… In the current science fiction that I'm reading, is what our people allowed to make jokes about. Which jokes can come from which species in the space station? And things like that.
[Mary Robinette] I would say, for me, the tip that I would hand to our listeners is to make sure that your character is interacting with their environment. Which is where I started us, but I'm going to give a really concrete example. Like, I can describe a room and say, "The room had marble floors, tall vaulted ceilings, and green velvet curtains." That tells you what the room looks like. But if I say, "My character's heels clacked across the marble floor as she strode to the window. The velvet was soft against her skin as she pushed the curtains back." You know so much more about the character and the world. So you're getting both things at the same time. I think that's going to make it feel richer to the reader, as well.
 
[Brandon] Awesome. Howard, you've got some homework for us.
[Howard] I do. This is the from-within, from-without episode, the Buck Rogers, Wilma Deering, the Twoflower, Rincewind. Take a character who is alien to the culture or the setting that you are writing within. But obviously has a reason to be there. Describe things from their point of view. Now describe those same things from the point of view of a native. Somebody who's grown up there, who's been there, who is familiar with it.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.47: Q&A on Fixing Characters

Nov. 28th, 2018 10:31 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.47: Q&A on Fixing Characters
 
 
Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you approach changing/refining character voices when you realize that two are too similar?
A: Redefine in your head who they are. Give them a different background and personality. Do you need the extra character? If not, combine them. Try a vocabulary fix.
Q: How can you tell if a character is the problem? How do you go about defining this?
A: Watch for the reactions in writing group. Is writing them keeping you engaged, or are they boring? Try looking at them from somebody else's viewpoint. An honest critique partner.
Q: How do you maintain interest in a character who is largely inactive?
A: A reluctant hero, or a protagonist who has not yet protagged, may mean it's time to focus on somebody else, or that the story hasn't started yet. What is the character excited or interested in? Protagging is good, but fascinations can also work.
Q: How do you write interesting bad guys when your POV characters are just the good guys? 
A: Why are the people around you interesting? Use second-hand sources, clues, and the POV characters thinking or talking about it.
Q: How do you give a powerful character meaningful challenges and relatability?
A: Identify things they are not good at, and put the challenges there. A really big bad guy. Delve into their emotional side, what they care about.
Q: How can I make alien characters charming and mysterious?
A: Listen to the podcast on writing alien characters.  [Season 13, Episode 44]
Q: How can I make a normal everyday person an interesting character without giving them some sort of Mary Sue trait? I.e., child of prophecy or magically superior?
A: Consider what you find interesting in the normal people around you. Listen to people -- the knowledge, background, even the way they talk. Passions and interests are strengths.
Q: How do I give my characters interests that mesh with the plot after writing half a draft and realizing they have no interests?
A: Use a spreadsheet. What are the plot points, and the interests or abilities that you need? Now add the characters, and see who needs what. 
Q: Who is Cheeto McFlair, and why are they writing on our spreadsheet?
 
[Mary] Season 13, Episode 47.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on Fixing Characters.
[Valynne] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Valynne] I'm Valynne.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Broken.
[Brandon] Well, hopefully we can fix you, Howard.
 
[Brandon] Jonathan asks, "How do you approach changing/refining character voices when you realize that two are too similar?"
[Dan] Oh, man. Okay. So I did this. I talked earlier in the year about how all of my boy best friend characters tended to be very similar. So the most recent one, since it's not out yet, I have the chance to go through and fix it. Really had to kind of fundamentally redefine in my head who he was. He couldn't just be the snarky guy who cracks the jokes I would make if I were in the scene. He had to have something else. So, I made sure that I gave him a very different background and a very different personality than the other character, and his language started coming out differently.
[Valynne] One of the things that I've done is when I have two characters in the same book who are sounding very similar, I've just had to decide, "Do I really need this extra character?" A lot of times, I can just combine them into one. So I kill them off.
[Howard] It's a good thing that that doesn't happen in real life.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Howard, you sound just like Dan. Die now.
[Dan] We don't need both of you!
[Laughter]
[Howard] My solution for this is often a vocabulary fix, where I'll pick words that are unique to each side. One character is willing to use metaphors in their speech, and the other won't use metaphors, they'll use something else. That often is enough to differentiate it.
 
[Brandon] All right. Darcy Cole, longtime friend of the podcast…
[Dan] Friend of ours in real life.
[Brandon] And friend in real life, asks us, "How can you tell if a character is the problem? How do you go about defining this?" I've had a moment to look at this, so I'll start us off. You guys can think about it. I've had a couple of times where the character was the problem. It took a little while to notice it. What would happen is in writing group, people were not wanting to get back to that character when their scene came up. This happens in all stories where you've got a large cast and you're switching between them. Sometimes people are going to be like, "I'm not excited to get back to this character." But what was happening with this one was habitually, people were like, "Oh, that one was a downer, too." Like it wasn't just like they were sad to get back to it. They were not excited when they were done with it, and they were happy to get off of it and back to other characters. Usually…
[Howard] Reading these chapters is like homework.
[Brandon] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was running into that. So that was one way I identified, "Okay. This character's a problem."
[Howard] If writing them isn't keeping you engaged, there's probably a problem. If it's boring, if it's…
[Dan] I find… I rarely write things from multiple viewpoints, but when I do, it's very easy in those cases to pop out, "Oh, this character doesn't work," when they're in somebody else's viewpoint. Because suddenly they become very boring. I realize that I haven't built enough of a personality for them. So when I'm seeing them from the outside, they're incredibly flat.
[Brandon] Sometimes it's just helpful to have someone like Dan read your book who will tell you…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Because he told me before, "This character's boring." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, they are."
[Valynne] I think a lot of times I just have to have a beta reader or someone point it out to me. Because I'm too close to the project and can't see what's not working. So get an honest critique partner.
[Dan] Don't be afraid of honest critique, because you're going to get those critiques inevitably. In Partials, I got a character… The character Marcus. He… Everyone hated him. That's the kind of thing that a good writing group could have caught. Our writing group didn't. So then all the reviews and all the feedback from readers is, "Hey, this is great, but this guy's awful."
 
[Brandon] How do you maintain interest in a character who is largely inactive? For example, being afraid to leave the house. It's a classic first act problem, right? That sometimes you have a character who's reacting to stimulus instead of being the proactive one themselves. How do you solve this in your stories? Valynne, we've all talked about this thing a lot. Have you ever run into this, where you wanted to start a character who was reactive and then had to deal with making the story interesting? If you've never done it, it's okay.
[Valynne] I don't know if I have. I'm trying to think of… There's a movie that I'm thinking of that deals with… It's Ryan Reynolds, and he's inside a box, like the whole movie.
[Transcriptionist's note: the movie is Buried]
[Brandon] Okay. [Garbled] thing.
[Valynne] Or Sandra Bullock in the spaceship, like the whole time, and it's like only her. That's kind of what we're talking about, right? Just, you have someone who…
[Howard] Well, I think in this case, what they may be talking about is the reluctant hero. A protagonist who is… Who has not yet protagged. Often, for me, if I'm in a situation like that, it's because it's time for the story to focus on somebody else, where something is happening, or the story hasn't started yet. This person hasn't been moved out of their comfort zone yet. In late, out early. I can come in later.
[Dan] Well, all of these examples that Valynne is pointing out are people who are confined to one location but still very interesting. That's because… Your reluctant hero doesn't want to go on this journey yet, presumably, that's because they've got something else there really interested in doing. So as long as they are excited about something or interested in something or doing something, even if it's not the plot of your book, it still makes the characters seem active, even if they're not doing anything.
[Brandon] We are interested in lots of different things. Conflict… Protagging, as we say… Proactiveness is one of them. But we're also interested in people's fascination. Someone being really interested in something alone can be sometimes enough. But the example was a character that didn't leave the house. That's a conflict. That's a really interesting conflict. How do they work around not leaving the house? You've got a story there, right away.
[Valynne] I think you end up just going deep into that character's head and understanding the thought processes behind, "What if I left?" If… I think there are a lot of things that go on in the head of someone who doesn't feel like he or she can leave the house. So you're going… You have to really analyze those thoughts carefully.
 
[Brandon] So, also longtime listener, Cheeto McFlair…
[Dan] Good friend, Cheeto McFlair.
[Brandon] Yes. As… There's a lot of Cheeto McFlair in all of us. How do you write interesting bad guys when your POV characters are just the good guys? [Pause] Oh, Cheeto stumped you.
[Dan] I'm trying to think. Because I do this in all the John Cleaver books. We never get a viewpoint from any of the bad guys. But we do see a lot of them.
[Howard] This is… That's just the story of life. You are the POV character in your story. Are there people who are not you who are interesting? Why are they interesting? What did you observe about them that was interesting?
[Valynne] I don't think you write them any differently for the most part. I mean, you still give them strengths and flaws and…
[Dan] It can be hard, though, and I see where the question is coming from, to… How can you get into the head of someone that you're not actually writing them from their point of view? I've run into this problem in some of my books. I really want to explore, for example, this person who is… It's a chase book, and we're trying to chase this person down. Why are they running? I can't say that without getting into their head, and so I had to find other ways of making them interesting and of revealing their story. Sometimes the way to do that is through research, through… Let your characters learn what they can from second-hand sources and let them extemporize on it, talk to each other. Well, maybe it's because of this, or maybe it's because of this. Which increases the mystery while answering questions at the same time.
[Brandon] I had this problem in the Steelheart books. The first one, in particular. Because it's a first-person narrative from a guy's viewpoint, and… If you haven't read the books, he basi… His father's killed by evil Superman, basically. Evil… The Emperor of Chicago, and he… His life's goal is to take this guy down. So I had to have this Emperor of Chicago who was a very powerful individual that my main character could never really interact with, because if he did, he'd be squished. So my response to this, in building the outline, I knew this, and I needed to… Like, I had broadcasts from Steelheart, the Emperor of Chicago… The kind of 1984 style, you have to watch this broadcast, sort of thing, so I could show him. I showed the effects of his rule. Had people talking about him. I built him with some immediate conflict. Not inside of him. But to the reader. Like, when I present him in the opening scene, he's presented as a savior figure, floating down from the ceiling. Then he goes ballistic and it's bad. That kind of self-contradiction of I'm expecting Superman and I got this instead allowed me to make him very memorable in the reader's mind. At least that's my hope. Thank you for the question, Cheeto.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead to our book of the week. Which is actually a TV show Howard's been watching.
[Howard] Not a book at all. Myths and Monsters, which is narrated by Nicholas Day. As of January of 2018, it's available on Netflix. The first episode is a wonderful pop-culture overview on the Campbellian monomyth. The whole series is about mythology… The heroes, the monsters, the settings of legend, and what are the historical and cultural underpinnings of those. Why are so many of them similar? Where are the standouts? It's quite fascinating. One of the things that I love about it is that where no direct footages available, say of Triston and Isolde in real life, they will often use penciled illustrations with halftone shading that are really striking. Really pretty illustrations in the show. Very interesting, and I'm four episodes in and have loved it.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Howard] Myths and Monsters, narrated by Nicholas Day.
 
[Brandon] All right. So we get this question a lot. Both in the last Q&A, and we did this one. I'm just going to pitch it at you guys. If you think we've just covered this, we can move on. But the question is how do you give a powerful character meaningful challenges and relatability? This kind of comes into the iconic character thing sometimes, but I think they're talking about someone like Superman. How do you do this? We get this question a lot.
[Howard] Fundamentally, you identify the things that they are not good at, and you put the challenges there.
[Dan] Which works most of the time, but I do think there is something to be said for watching them use their… The things that they're really good at. We like that wish fulfillment of watching Superman just punch something so hard it compresses into diamond or whatever. So sometimes you just… You do just need a really big bad guy.
[Valynne] I think you need to delve into the emotional side of the character as well. What do they care about? Focus on what they care about.
 
[Brandon] All right. Victoria, you asked, "How can I make alien characters charming and mysterious?" We did an entire podcast on writing alien characters. So hopefully, you've listened to that by now.
 
[Brandon] I'm going to go to Andrew's question here. "How can I make a normal everyday person an interesting character without giving them some sort of Mary Sue trait? I.e., child of prophecy or magically superior?"
[Howard] I feel very bad that you perhaps don't know any normal people who you find interesting.
[Brandon] See, I understand what you're saying. But I want to be in defense of Andrew here. Sometimes it's very hard to do in writing, right? What are your strategies for doing this?
[Howard] I have spent a long time listening to people. When I was doing my drawing at the comic book shop, I would often ask people, "What do you do? Tell me about it. Describe your job." I always learned… Learning that the smell of pineapple and the smell of cheddar cheese are differentiated by like one chemical from a guy who was studying food science. People know things that I don't. I love learning that. If you recognize that, and begin exploring those aspects of the people on your page, they will become interesting.
[Dan] That applies not just to the knowledge that they have and the background they come from, but also just the ways that they talk. One of my favorite scenes that I wrote in John Cleaver six is he kind of goes on a date at one point, and he's in a taco shop with five other guys, people his age. They're just kind of local kids, about 19 years old, talking. They're all very different, and some of them are obnoxious, and some of them are based on people that I know, and some of them are based on conversations I've had. That kind of stuff is great. Just getting into the gritty details of why does she talk very differently from her? I love that kind of stuff.
[Howard] Now, if we come back to the question and rephrase it, how do you instill a sense of wonder when the character is a normal character without giving them something wondrous? That becomes truly challenging. I… Sense of wonder's tricky.
[Brandon] Well, your books do not have any superpowers or anything. How do you… Do you differentiate your characters? I wouldn't even say that they all were necessarily skilled in anything specific. At least not in a kind of traditional this one has this ability. Like, it was just about a bunch of kids, and they were all really interesting. How did you do that?
[Valynne] I think that you just have to highlight what things characters are passionate about. It's a combination of passion and interest and… Those naturally become strengths for someone. If it's a passion, or interest, you have a lot of knowledge about that area, and not everything is going to be interesting to everyone. But you just have to figure out what you need for your story, and how those characters can contribute based on their knowledge and passions and hobbies. I think that that's the best way to… In most ways, that is sort of their superstrength is what they love.
 
[Brandon] So, last question comes from Sarah. She says, "I am writing a story. How do I give my characters interests that mesh with the plot after writing half a draft and realizing they have no interests?" So she wants our help fixing her story.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Presumably without throwing away that half a draft.
[Howard] Begin with a spreadsheet. I'm serious. Make notes along one column that are here are the plot points, and here are the interests, abilities, whatever's that would be helpful in making that plot point. Then have your characters be aligned in a different way, and determine who lines up where and what needs to be given to. Then things will start to emerge organically. I start with a spreadsheet, not because I'm going to fix things with a spreadsheet, but because a spreadsheet's going to show me the shape of the problem. Then I can stand back and look at it and say, "Oh. The whole is all right here in Act Two, and it all comes down to three things. I've got three characters, and this is probably a pretty easy fix."
 
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to give you guys a writing prompt. It's actually a very simple one. Cheeto McFlair. Who is Cheeto McFlair in your mind, and why are they writing on our spreadsheet? We actually know who this person is.
[Laughter]
[Dan] We're not just making fun of a random person.
[Brandon] We're not just making fun of a random person. But I want you to make up who they are. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.32: How to Handle Weighty Topics

Aug. 16th, 2018 02:00 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.32: How to Handle Weighty Topics
 
 
Key Points: How do you decide to tackle characters who are suffering from difficult things like racism, sexism, or people who are different from yourself in your fiction in an appropriate way? Start with who you are, your worldview, your writer voice, and be authentic. How do you handle it carefully? Start with "everyone knows what it's like to bite into a piece of fruit," and remember that we have more in common than not. Start with the things you have in common, don't make your character just differences and marginalization. Start with empathy, and let the character teach you something. Be careful when writing about something you do not have a personal connection to, to avoid damage. Will getting it wrong damage people? Am I reiterating something learned from the media that already reinforces issues that the community has to deal with on a daily basis? Watch for the pressure points, where people are already bruised. See the other as people. Readers are not a monolith. Where do you draw the line between what is my story to write versus my need to write the other? Think about why you feel that you have to write this, what do you think you are doing with it? Remember that your life experience may be the exotic thing to your reader. Representing diversity does not always mean pain, marginalization, and trauma. Sometimes people just want characters who look like them and talk like them to have adventures and be the protagonist, going on the kinds of adventures and interesting things that we love in science fiction and fantasy.
 
Expand( A bite of fruit, waiting for a bus, and more... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How to Handle Weighty Topics.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] [pause] Oh. And we're not that smart.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] Don't mind me. Don't mind me.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm laughing. I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
[Brandon] We are going to talk about dealing with very weighty topics.
[Amal] We are off to a great start.
[Brandon] We got off to a fantastic start.
[Mary] This is called nervous laughter. That's what this is.
[Brandon] So I wanted to make sure we did a podcast about this this year when we're talking about character because it's going to come up in your writing, and you're going to think about it, and we want to deal with, on the podcast, how and if you should and these sorts of things, tackle characters who are suffering from difficult things like racism or sexism or people who are very different from yourself suffering from prejudice or whatnot or even just kind of approaching someone very, very different from yourself in your fiction and doing it in an appropriate way. I wanted to actually pitch this at Maurice, first, because I know you've done weighty topics a lot in your stories. How do you make the decision to do this, and how do you approach it?
[Maurice] Well, part of it is just a function of who I am. Honestly, I mean, it's part of my worldview, it's part of what I consider my writer voice, so it's a matter of… I don't know, when I sit down to write something, it's like what am I feeling at the time? Where is my heart space? Where is my head space at? Then I just sort of dive in from there, because that's obviously what I'm thinking about, it's obviously on my heart, and that's the space I try to write from. That, I think, is what plays out as authentic to people when they read it. Well, there are two examples I have that's actually not for my writing, that are two stories I read earlier this year that just stuck with me. One is up on tor.com. It's by Kai Ashante Wilson. It's called The Lamentation of Their Women. It is a powerful, absolutely raw story. It tackles racism, being marginalized, and police brutality. All in one novelette. It is kind of a tour de force of rage in a lot of ways. But it is one of those things where it's like we're now past writing, we're actually… You can actually like see Kai's heart at this point. I mean, it's just all over the page. The second story is by Chesya Burke, and it's called Say, She Toy. It's a story that's up on Apex Magazine. It's about a robot that's black. Basically, it's an advanced black sex doll and the abuse that's heaped upon this sex doll by its users. It's just this… Almost like this monologue of this is what I am experiencing. Is this all to my existence? That sort of thing. It's just… It's a heavy story. Like I said, it's tackled so brilliantly and Chesya has such a deft hand with this sort of writing. It's like… We are… From the opening on… I can't even tell you the opening line. It's… You will know when you encounter this story, from the very first line of this story, and it hits you right in the face, and it grabs you right there. This is what we're talking about. You're going to go with me for this ride.
 
[Brandon] So, let me kind of expand on that and ask the why. This is for any of you. Or the how, I mean. What are these authors doing that is making these stories work? You say deft, words like that, and handled so carefully. What are they doing? What can our listeners learn from them?
[Amal] So what you were describing, Maurice, seems to be like… These are two instances of people… I mean, so Kai and Chesya are both black and they're writing about experiences that are… Like the black people experience. But I think that when it comes to writing people who are different from you, I always, always think of something that Nalo Hopkinson said on a panel at ReaderCon a few years ago, which was that, "Yeah, people are different from each other, but most everyone knows what it's like to bite into a piece of fruit." From that example, and from that… She goes on to say, "Most people, we have more in common than we have not in common." If you try to ground… At this point, I'm just extrapolating. I'm no longer paraphrasing what Nalo said. But if you are approaching writing a character who is different from you by focusing exclusively on the differences, it's just going to happen let that character is not going to be fully rounded. That character is only going to be whatever marginalization you've given them. As opposed to if you try to ground your character in the things that you have in common, in the things that you can imagine, in the fact that, yeah, you both know how to bite into a piece of fruit, you both know what it's like to have to wait for the bus, you both know what it's like… All sorts of different things, and to maybe try to whenever you're building a character and trying to get out their experiences, build out from the things that you feel you have in common. Then, from that point, think about how the differences inform those same experiences. I mean, if you're at a bus stop and you're white, you're probably going to have a different experience than if you're at a bus stop and you're black and something… Some inciting incident based on race takes place all of a sudden, right? But you're still… You can still know what it's like to be tired and annoyed and frustrated and aggressed and all sorts of things like that. So it's… I mean, writing is so entirely about empathy. I think that when you're talking, Maurice, about the writing from your heart space, as well as your head space, and things like that, it sounds to me like what you're saying is, you're also writing from a place of empathy, you're writing from a place of… I almost want to say love, honestly. Like, write from a place of love for these things that are different. If you approach writing a different character from a place of humility, as well, a recognition that… That you don't know everything, and that you almost want a character to teach you something. This maybe sounds too facile and didactic, but that when you're approaching a character with a background that differs from yours, approach that difference with humility and care as opposed to as a science project. I mean, sure, some people approach their science projects with humility and care, but… Look at my humanities background here.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] But just to have that care is so important, I think.
[Mary] One of the things that I'll see people going wrong, and I say this as someone who has done this in my earlier writing, and I'm sure it's something I will do again unwittingly, where there's a topic that is current or something that I'm thinking about, but not necessarily I have a personal connection to, so I will want to write something that comments upon that. But it's impossible for me to talk about it with the same… With any degree of nuance, because I haven't experienced it. That's not to say that, oh my goodness, you must experience everything. Because Lord knows, I've never experienced spaceflight, either. But… But when you're dealing with a really weighty topic, one of the things that is going to happen is you will be expressing your opinion about it. If you're not in the group that you are expressing opinion about, the chances of that opinion being damaging increases disproportionately. So when I am looking at something, about whether or not I should tackle something, the thing that I look at is not whether I'm going to get something wrong, but is whether or not getting it wrong will damage people. Like, getting something wrong about spaceflight, that's not actually probably going to damage anyone. Getting something wrong about someone else's lived experience, the chances of damage increase disproportionately, especially if it is a piece… If the wrongness that I am delivering is something that I have inherited from media that I have consumed that is already reinforcing issues that that community has to deal with on a daily basis.
[Amal] I completely agree. I think that maybe one way of thinking about that problem is that maybe when you're approaching a new character, a character with a different background, be aware of the fact that you're not writing in a vacuum. That as much as you feel like you're alone with the page and with this character, part of the reason I think we called them weighty topics is because there is a disproportionate amount of pressure in the world surrounding these things. Like, I'm literally imagining the world as a body with pressure points, and the pressure points are these weighty topics. So if you touch very lightly even on one of those pressure points, the pain or the shock of it is going to be, as you say, disproportionate. Whereas on places where that pressure isn't, it isn't already there... I often talk about it as sometimes friends want me to see a movie that is popular, and I see the trailer and I'm like, "No, I'm good. I don't want to see that movie." They're like, "But why? It's so great." I say, "Well, it… I'm pretty sure that it's going to punch me where I'm already bruised." It's like that thing that there are a lot of people who walk around carrying a lot of bruises, and that even a light touch on a place where you're bruised is going to really, really hurt. You want to try and recognize that.
 
[Brandon] So, this sounds to me a little bit… I think somebody could listen to this and say, "So you're saying just don't do it?"
[Amal] Noooo!
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So, what's the difference between what you're saying and just don't do it?
[Amal] The flipside of this is… I'm going to recommend this really, really amazing article by Kamila Shamsie called The Storytellers of Empire. In it, she is doing a whole bunch of things. It's a brilliant, brilliant essay. She starts out by talking about how… Her background is Pakistani, but she writes novels by like one image coming to her mind and she really… Like, the image kind of guides her into the book she's going to write. The image that kind of burned itself onto her brain was about Hiroshima and how when the bomb went off, patterns from people's kimonos were burned onto their skin. She suddenly got this really vivid image of someone with a kind of kimono pattern on their back and stuff. She wanted to write from that. So she dove into teaching herself about the history and the culture and everything, but in the rest of this article, what she points out is that for North America, for the West if you will, she has this amazing line that says, "Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won't." It's so, so striking. Like, it seems like she's actually saying the flipside, she's saying, "well, yeah, why aren't you writing people who are different from you?" Whenever I see another horrible hot take on the idea of cultural appropriation, people are often saying things like, "Oh, cultural appropriation doesn't exist because everyone is always appropriating, and also, we should try to understand each other." Those are two different topics as well. What I want to say here is, yes, do the thing. But ask yourself a lot of questions, and recognize that the thing is hard. Recognize that there are pressure points, and that sometimes you are going to do damage, but that you should try to decrease that pressure. If there is pressure all over the world, then ask yourself how can you siphon some of that off? Because I do think, we all have a responsibility to be as empathic as possible with each other. So, not trying is not ever going to solve that problem, it's just going to reduce the space in which you can operate. When instead, we want to try and expand that.
[Maurice] so, I actually felt like reading… Like, when I was writing Buffalo Soldier. That was my novella from Tor… tor.com. I was really nervous, because like the last half of the novel takes place in Native American territory. So I have Native American characters, I have reimagined Native American culture, the technology, their cityscapes, everything. It's a complete reimagining. I was nervous. Because I did not want to get this wrong. In fact, actually, it kept me… Actually, that nervousness actually attributes a writer's block in me, so I actually set the project down for I think like three months, because I was ahead… I was already picturing the social media backlash on me. So that alone kept me from writing. I was like, "Oh, man." But then I had to like trust myself as a writer. Like, I'm doing the job of a writer, I'm being empathic and I'm doing my research and I'm being careful in what I'm doing. Then, I'm going to turn it over to a beta reader who's Native American and go, "All right, if I got that wrong, let me know where and why and how." Because my job is… I don't want to add to that hurt. I want to… Well, I want to set the story here. So that's what I ended up doing. I have a friend whose Lakotan. She agreed to read it for me and she gave it her blessing. Actually, she really liked what I did in terms of dialogue and the reimagining, because she was just like, "You see us as people." That's all I wanted. I was like, "I wanted to… That's what I… That was my end goal." I wanted to see them as people.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for a book of the week. That's actually one of your books, Maurice? Tell us about The Voices of Martyrs.
[Maurice] So, The Voices of Martyrs is my short story collection. In a lot of ways, it mirrors my career. So there are stories set in the past, stories set in the present, stories set in the future. Basically, it is… It's almost like a collection of weighty stories. But part of it is… I realized, you know what, as part of my writing process, I realized I am a black nerdy male. Unless I'm going to write all of my stories about being a black nerdy male, I'm going to have to write the other. But I even appro… Because of my background, coming from being born in London, my mother being Jamaican, and raised in a predominantly white culture in a lot of ways, I treat everything as me writing the other, even if it's writing about other black people. That's how I approach all of these stories. So even the stories set in the past. Like, the first story opens up in ancient Africa. But then we moved to stories of someone being in a slave ship, or on a plantation, or in the 20s, going through a boxer battling… Basically battling his own demons at this point. Then moving into stories of the present, with urban fantasy stories. But then ending with Afro future tales. So basically, I'm going from dealing with these sort of issues of culture identity and just hard history to a time of hope. Not… The past is there. The past is what it is. The present is where I am. Now, I get to dream about the future. That's the way I approach all of that.
[Brandon] Awesome.
 
[Mary] So, one of the things that I was thinking about before we took the break, when you were talking about doing the history and getting beta readers, is… And I've talked about it on the podcast before, that I had a novel that I chose to pull because I, at the very end, I had a beta reader who had a very negative reaction to it. But you actually have read this book. One of the things that I remember when I was making the decision was… And coming back to you and saying I'm getting this reaction was that you said that you felt like you had done me a disservice because you hadn't flagged things. So I think one of the things that I want readers to be… Or listeners to be aware of is that even when you try to do all of these things, you may still have a project that is fundamentally flawed.
[Maurice] That is a fear. So one of my mottos has always been, you know what, I will learn my lessons, and then fail better the next time. Because when I think about doing you a disservice, I was like, you know what, there was stuff that I flagged and stuff that I didn't flag. I was like, "Ooo, I wonder…" It kind of goes like, "Is it my place to flag certain things?" That was actually what… It became a wrestling exercise on my end of things, too. Which is like I'm having different reactions. But I'm going to have certain reactions as a black male versus if you have passed a reader through a black female, for example. I'm going to have a certain set of biases, and there are certain things I'm not going to see, for example.
[Mary] Even within that, like I… One of… Because I had about 20 beta readers on that, and tried to get people that I didn't know, to eliminate that… The sympathy aspect of it. One of them, when I went back and said I just wanted to let you know that I pulled the book because damage, she was upset because the book spoke to parts of her life. But her life experience was very different from the life experience of some of the other people who had read it. That's one of the things… Recognizing that your readers are not a… Your readers are not a monolith anymore than characters are. Which is why I've begun using the metric of what is the damage. That's… That is… It's a tricky, tricky thing. Like, there's… I don't think that there is actually an amount of research that you can do to make a book that will be flawless and harm no one.
[Amal] This is a thing, too. It's so difficult to control for what will harm or what will help people. I think about this a lot. Because partly, because I'm a critic as well. So, a lot of the time, the way that I have seen discussions in publishing shift as to whether or not a book should be published, a lot of the time, I look at that and go, "But surely there is a… There is room here, or there is a role, for discourse to play?" For people to actually have a public conversation about the elements of a book that are harmful or helpful in how. I… But… So my instinct is, I would rather, in the abstract, see books published and talk about them than not. At the same time though, to make a hypocrite of myself, I have read books or started to read books that were so terrible… Like so hateful in what they were portraying or so damaging in what they were portraying that if I could make a recommendation... like it's not just a matter of panning it. Like there was one time that I read something that was early enough in its production that I made the publisher aware that this is like horrifically racist and maybe you weren't aware of that, but I would like to make you aware. They actually did the work of consulting other people on that and deciding, "No, you know what, it is actually really, really awful, and we'll just pull it."
[Maurice] I…
[Mary] I had that happen as well with a book that I blurbed. The author was like, "Oh. Ha. You're right." I actually didn't blurb it, but they asked me to blurb it. I was like, "I can't, because of these things." The author… They actually told the author… They didn't tell the author who, but the author went back and corrected things. Sorry, you were going to say something?
 
[Maurice] Oh, yeah. I was wondering like, what you were saying, Amal, where do you draw that line between what is my story to write versus my need to write the other?
[Amal] I guess that's a really good question that gets to the core of it. Most… I mean… Here's the thing, too, I think we're covering a lot of ground and sometimes I'm wondering if our listeners, some of these things will sound so contradictory, but the reason they'll sound contradictory is because this is really complicated territory, and there are so many different situations and so many different scenarios, and sometimes something is an exception, sometimes it's a rule. Like, for me, personally, I can think of a lot of different controversies that happened around whether or not a book should be published, especially in the last few years. I've had different opinions on every one of them, given the context around them. Maybe not every one of them, but certainly on several of them, given the circumstances surrounding them. A lot of that will hinge on that question of why did you feel like you had to write this? What did you think you were doing with this? A lot of the time, when I see these things done… I'm going to pick an example which… I'm going to just name it, because I really, really hated this book. Which did get published, and it got published to great acclaim, which made me feel a lot less bad about how vocally I hate this book. It's called Your Face in Mine by Jess Row. I mean, here I am, giving it publicity. It's just… It's basically… It's a book that is tackling a premise which is… Feels weighty, feels like, okay, this is a complicated issue and will engage a lot of intense feelings and it's because it's got this core of racial reassignment surgery, basically. That you can just… You can change your race with surgery. It's a very, very near future thing. But what pissed me off about it was that it was entirely… Entirely about a white middle-class man's kind of complicated feelings of guilt about race and stuff. This was just a device… Just a device that wanted to demonstrate ultimately how much res… But there's literally… There was a bibliography at the back demonstrating how much research this man had done on all of these things. But reading it, I just kept wanting to throw up. I just kept wanting to be like… I… This is… You've done so much work to so little purpose. Or to such a… Just a terrible purpose, a purpose that uses trans discourse to terrible ends, to ends of basically equating trans peoples' difficulties and the things that they live with with something that is speculative and… Anyways, I'm sorry, I'm going to get on my… I should get off this soapbox. But the point is that all of this work was done, and I kept going, "But why did you do that? Why did you feel this burning need to write this book about… Like… Ultimately, to kind of exonerate your white guilt?" It just made me so angry when I read it that I resent it.
[Mary] There was something that I was talking with Mary Anne Mohanraj who was one of our guest hosts last year, and she said, "You know, Mary, I never see you write Southern characters." It suddenly made me go, "Huh! You're..." I mean, I do, sometimes. But I think that there is a thing that we do what we tend to assume that… That we… We always talk about how you will assume that your own life experience is normal. But I think that there's a thing that white writers are particularly prone to which is that they will want to write the other because it is exotic, and that they will forget that to other people, their own experience is the exotic thing. So I actually think between that and something that Desiree Burch said on the podcast a couple of years ago, I actually feel like a lot of the things that people could do is simply be more specific about writing their own specific experience and writing about the topics that affect them specifically instead of wanting to go and play with someone else's life because it is set dressing that seems new and exciting to them.
[Amal] That's a really good point. I think, to come back to the question that Brandon was asking before about this sounds like you should just not do it, I found myself going, what is to stop you from writing a character that's just in your books? Like, totally determined by your plot, your setting, and so on, but make them a different ethnicity or make them a different gender or make them… This is, I guess, you could call it the aliens version of doing… All right, so you've written a character as a dude, and now you just make that dude a woman. There's criticism about this, about that kind of approach, but I think that one of the reasons that people react so strongly to the absence of diversity in books is that a lot of the time, people just want to see not their pain or their marginalization represented, but people who look like them and talk like them and experience the world like them getting to have adventures or getting to be the protagonist of a novel that isn't about pain or getting… Because there's a sort of ancillary thing to all of this, which is that one of the unfortunate results of these conversations when people don't… Are too afraid to do the work of representing whoever is other to them, it falls on those people, those who are of underrepresented ethnicities, backgrounds, and groups, and so on, to only be able to tell the story of their pain, and to only… Like it's to have their pain be the only currency they have in the marketplace of ideas. That really disturbs me. I could go on and on about. I won't. But it just… That's something that I would like to see lifted as a burden as well, to just be able to have characters of all different backgrounds going on the kinds of adventures and interesting things that we love in science fiction and fantasy.
[Mary] You don't have to equate representation with…
[Amal] Trauma.
[Mary] Trauma.
 
[Brandon] All right. We could go on forever. This has been a 30 minute podcast already.
[Whoops]
[Mary] Sorry, guys.
 
[Brandon] Amal, will you give us some homework?
[Amal] Yes. So this is… Basically, this is a little tricky. It's maybe more of a sort of shift in perspective than it is about generating something new. Basically, if you've ever… This is more of a revision exercise. If you take something that you've written where you represented someone from a group that you are not part of, and write a scene in which a person of that group is reading the thing that you wrote. This kind of forces you to imagine the fact that someone of that background will probably encounter your work, and see where that takes you.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.10: Developing Your Own, Personal Style

Mar. 7th, 2017 02:58 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.10: Developing Your Own, Personal Style

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/03/05/12-10-developing-your-own-personal-style/

Key Points: Voice or style comes in three flavors: mechanical, aesthetic, and personal. We need to learn to trust our personal style. But don't worry about it? You probably won't know you have it, even if everyone else can see it. When you try to mimic someone else's style, you mostly mimic aesthetic voice. Personal voice is in part word choice, but beyond that, what you choose to talk about and how you talk about it. Even a transparent or translucent prose style can be a personal style! Overriding copyeditors may be part of your personal style. But beware of overrunning character styles with your personal style.
Expand( Haircuts, some makeup... )

[Brandon] Dan, you have our homework this week.
[Dan] Yes. So, one of the ways that you can start to identify what your own voice is, is to take something written by somebody else, and… Ideally, this would be something you don't like. So a book that you didn't really enjoy or whatever. Because you want to fix it. It feels wrong to you, it feels awkward. I want you to take that, and then rewrite it, and rewrite it in a way, going back to what Mary was saying earlier, where the main character is you, or someone very like you. Someone from your background. To make sure that it is really your voice coming through, in the narration or the dialogue or however you want to do it. Then, once you've done that rewrite, you'll have a chance to see, "Oh, that obviously came from me, because it wasn't in the original."

[Mary] So, hey. I just wanted to add one thing that we skimmed past in this episode. We mentioned the #ownvoices movement and we didn't actually explain what that was. The #ownvoices movement is a movement that was begun with a hashtag started by Corinne Duyvis... Duyvis, excuse me. The idea was that people who have a lived life experience… That if you're looking for a book about a disabled person, that you should buy a book that's written by a disabled person. If you're looking for a book about an African-American person, you should buy a book written by an African-American person. And that sometimes people can get displaced because it's very easy to just buy a book by an author that you're familiar with. So the idea was that you get a more authentic experience if you are reading a book that is written by someone in their own voice. I felt like I did want to just explain where that movement came from, and you should actually read some more about it. Just searching on the hashtag #ownvoices will give you a lot of information. Just wanted to share that with you.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 12.9: Q&A on Viewpoint

Mar. 1st, 2017 10:24 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.9: Q&A on Viewpoint

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/26/12-9-qa-on-viewpoint/

Q&A Summary:
Q: Third person omniscient is generally the norm in most fantasy/sci-fi. Do you have any ideas, tips, tricks to make this voice more interesting or unusual?
A: Give the narrator a personality, characterization.
Q: How can you make [third person] limited more interesting?
A: Make the character sing. It's not the viewpoint, it's the character.
Q: It usually takes me a few drafts/revisions to really nail down a character's voice. Is this normal for most writers? Any tips on how to discover it in other ways?
A: If it's working for you, don't break it! Try writing a quick scene that is pivotal and important to your character. Sample scenes, monologues, conversation, job interviews. Don't be afraid to throwaway writing. Let the character talk so you can figure out who they are.
Q: What is the most effective way to portray an unreliable third limited viewpoint in which the reader can still know what is actually happening?
A: Why do you have an unreliable narrator? To fool the audience? Dramatic irony, where we know something the character does not? Establish that this is the character's personality, they think one thing, even though something else is really happening.
Q: How does one thoroughly immerse themselves in a setting/person? I know it's very subjective, but what are the most effective methods you have found in feeling, for example, when a pregnant woman, a pious man, or a lost child might feel? It's so far eludes me.
A: Meditation, guided imagery. Primary sources! Find forums where people are sharing trials and experiences, and get the things people gripe about right. Method acting for writers – feel it yourself, then write.
Q: How do you choose between first and third person? What's your process? When you're preparing a story, how do you make that final decision?
A: Is the story about plot or character? If it's about character, do it first person. Check your genre – adult romance usually is third, YA first person. How can you best express the characters? Try a writing sample, a quick scene or paragraph, to see which works best.
Q: How do you pick the right character for a viewpoint in a scene? How do you choose whose eyes you're going to see through?
A: Who is in the most pain? Who's most interesting? Who has the highest stakes, the most emotional response? Who's going to be doing the most, whose protagging the most? What do you like to write?
Q: I'm writing my first novel. How do I choose to do first person, third person, it's overwhelming. I could do omniscient, I could do non-omniscient, how do I make this decision?
A: Which POV makes the words flow for you? First novel, just write it. Spot check along the way, "Is this still working for me?" If so, keep going. If not, try a test scene in another perspective and see if that works better. What do you want to accomplish? Grand in scope, lots of different characters, third might work better. But first and foremost, finish the book.
Q: I have a problem with transitioning between voices. A.k.a. How do you know when to cut, how do you smoothly transition from one viewpoint character to another, how do you do a chapter break, do you sometimes not do a chapter break, how do you decide this?
A: End on a phrase that resonates with the reader, that's impactful, and makes them want to keep reading. Look at the first line of the next scene, make sure the reader knows whose head they're in as quickly as possible. Beware the garden path sentence, where the reader doesn't know whose head they are in until they turn the corner. End on a zinger, something awesome to say goodbye to that character for a while. Answer a question, raise a new question, resolve a package. Give emotional closure.
Q: My characters start to sound less distinct the further in my story I get. How do you keep this from happening?
A: Give each character a high concept that's evolving out of the consequences of previous acts, along with a dialogue tic that's a result of the consequences. Check prepositional phrases and three syllable words to see if your characters are all using the same ones. Visual and verbal tics work because they remind you, the writer, who the character is. Remember the character's passion.

Expand( Wow, back and forth... )

[Brandon] I'm going to call it here. We have so many questions. I'm sorry we didn't get to them all. But, Piper has some homework for us.
[Piper] Oh, I do. My brain just died. I'm so sorry. So, my homework for you is to take dialogue, not narrative, dialogue, and take the characters who were involved in the dialogue… Probably works better with two or three, just a limited number of people in the dialogue, and swap them. So character A might say one thing, character B might say another. Now swap them, and how would character B say that first line, and how would character A respond?
[Brandon] Excellent. I really like that writing exercise. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 12.7: Description Through the Third Person Lens

Feb. 15th, 2017 11:14 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.7: Description Through the Third Person Lens

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/12/12-7-description-through-the-third-person-lens/

Key Points: Learn to let the character's voice, thoughts, and feelings come through when describing, especially in third person. Combine characterization and description! Get specific with what the character notices and does. Pay attention to what they notice, and what they miss. Describe the small things, let the reader imagine the large things. Focus indicates thought -- what the character sees, what they hear. Exercise: try and include every sense in a scene. But don't spend too long! And beware going overboard on all the senses all the time -- no one licks a vase. Add your infodumps in third person to emotion, action, dialogue -- dribble them across a scene. Pick out the important information and avoid the irrelevant infodump. Losing viewpoint? Check the emotional investment in the scene. Make sure you have the right scene. What happens when the main character knows something, but doesn't let the reader know? Frustration! Use focus, something else compelling to keep the main character going, and sometimes, it's just background for the character, no matter how surprising it is for the reader. Or... give the reader the information! Often knowing the secret makes the action more compelling. Or make that other plan a contingency. Think surprising, yet inevitable.

Expand( The third person thinker? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. Mary Anne, you were going to give us some homework?
[Mary Anne] Well, I was just going to say that I love Ursula Le Guin's book, Steering the Craft. It's a very short little how-to-write book. She's got like three chapters with exercises on various variations of third person that I find really helpful. I still… I assign it every semester and I do them again with my students every semester. I get something out of it every time.
[Brandon] Well, excellent. That is your homework. Go read some Ursula Le Guin. You will always find it time well spent, I have found. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 12.2: How to Nail Character Voice in First Person

Jan. 11th, 2017 02:00 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.2: How to Nail Character Voice in First Person

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/01/08/12-2-how-to-nail-character-voice-in-first-person/

Key points: A memorable first person voice? Sentence structure, rhythm and accent. Accent is word choices and phrasing, not just dialect. Use first person to showcase characters with an interesting voice, but third person is easier. Use a text-to-speech program to read your writing out loud! Snarky is easy, but show us the thought process, what's behind the face the character shows everyone. What's their attitude, their too factor? First person is good for wordplay. Think about the categories of words your character might use. Be aware that no one is snarky in their own thinking, or has an accent in their own voice.

Expand( I said,  )

[Brandon] I'm going to have to cut it here. It's a great discussion. But we do have some homework that Mary is going to give to us.
[Mary] Right. So, here's your homework. What I want you to do is I want you to write, about a page, maybe two, first person and you've got a character who is trying to accomplish something. If you don't have anything in your head, then I'm going to say that you have a baker, and the baker is attempting to deliver some bagels. Then, I want you to write it again, but this time, your main character is not a baker, and I want you to have them go through the same task. The goal of this is to see how the character's attitude and the way their lens affects the world, affects how they relay the story of this bagel delivery, or whatever it is that you want to do.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 7.18: Discovering Your Voice

May. 1st, 2012 03:20 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.18: Discovering Your Voice

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/04/29/writing-excuses-7-18-discovering-your-voice/

Key Points: Be authentic. Don't try to impress other people. Don't overwork it. Voice develops naturally. Give yourself the freedom to write what you want. Learn the techniques and get out of the way to let the art happen. Look for the cookie that can only be baked in your brain. Nurture your voice -- find what you love, and go with it. The narrative voice of a book or series isn't the author's voice.
Expand( Diction, Pronunciation, and other vocal tricks? )
[Brandon] Why don't we make that our writing prompt? I want you guys to try that. Find a writing buddy and swap stories halfway through. James, I want to give you a special thank you for being on the podcast and for sharing so many stories with us. We're going to have to end right now, but this has been Writing Excuses. Thank you guys so much. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Applause!]
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Writing Excuses 7.14: Writing Excuses

Apr. 3rd, 2012 01:57 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.14: Writing Excuses

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/04/01/writing-excuses-7-14-writing-excuses/

Good Reasons Not to be Writing: Writing is Hard! Relax first. You're not as good as Tolkien, and he spent 20 years worldbuilding. Don't forget cat vacuuming! Clean your keyboard. If you start, be willing to throw it away after writing a page of crap, and write it again. Many times. Give yourself a reward for rewriting that page! Consider taking a Walden Pond break. Or hide everything you write in a drawer (aka The Emily Dickinson Ploy). Set up a pulley and bucket! Or try the George RR Martin approach to fame, don't give the fans what they want, postpone! The thesaurus, notecards, and cats can help you explore the many arrangements of your first page. Try to catch sydlexia. Grow a beard! Research valid character voice by listening to all the audible.com samples of books read by famous actors. Don't forget to organize the results. Then choose which actors should play the characters in the book you aren't writing. Keep in touch with pop culture -- watch plenty of TV, keep up with the memes, definitely track YouTube. Consider hosting YouTube parties! Write your own rejection letters, give your internal editor some exercise. Collect Magic cards and other rewards to motivate yourself. Sort your books (and cards) by color. Invent some new letters, or a whole new alphabet. Try writing in second person omnipotent. Practice bomb threats.
Expand( Apropos April Fools... )
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. We've given you lots of excuses. You have no excuse to not write, now. I think.
[Mary] If not, come back to us and we can give you some more.
[Brandon] Thanks for listening.
[Howard] Please don't make a bomb.
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Writing Excuses 5.3: First-Person Viewpoint

Feb. 27th, 2011 04:00 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.3: First-Person Viewpoint

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/09/19/writing-excuses-5-3-first-person-viewpoint/

Key points: first-person let's you really get into the character's head. With first-person, the reader doesn't know how reliable they are. First person is very immediate. Beware of dropping out of that immediacy, especially to describe appearances or other things that the character would not stop to think about. Think about how the character would tell the story. Be careful of getting so wrapped up in the voice that you lose the story.
Expand( Out of the character's head? )
[Bree] Your character has a secret. We don't know what it is, but how would they get around hinting at that secret without giving it away?
[Brandon] All right. That's your story prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 32: First Paragraphs

Feb. 27th, 2011 03:50 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 32: First Paragraphs

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/08/15/writing-excuses-4-32-first-paragraphs/

Key Points: conflict and tension are good. Be careful of personification. Voice is OK, but get to scene and setting soon. Action! Sensory experience! Clarity. Put backstory in dialogue, action, and setting. Make sure we know who the viewpoint character is soon.
Expand( actual 1st paragraphs... )
[Brandon] We're going to go ahead and end with a writing prompt, which is what Dan said. You're writing in a journal, and you haven't written it in 10 years. Then you say, "Oh, man, OK. What happened? Earth got invaded. Well, let's start from there." Do this story, but do it silly. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. OK, and we're out.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Applause]
[Howard] Don't stop recording, there's applause.
[Brandon] Louder, louder.
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 31: Line Editing Dialogue

Feb. 27th, 2011 03:48 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 31: Line Editing Dialogue

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/08/08/writing-excuses-4-31-line-editing-dialog/

Key Points: Look at various ways to rewrite, and consider which works best for your purposes. Dialogue is an imitation of speech that feels realistic, not a transcript. Consider the voice of the character. Watch out for said-bookisms, adverbs (aka Tom Swifties), and "seem to"s. Make sure snappy retorts snap.
Expand( Lots and lots of line editing... )
[Brandon] All right. Writing prompt this week was given to us by Producer Jordo who really, really, really wants you to write some stories called, "The Importance of Being Earnest Goes to Jail." Or, no, "Earnest goes to Camp?"
[Dan] Or to jail. I'm sure you could take any Earnest movie and mash it up with Oscar Wilde and come up with an abomination that we would all love to hear.
[Brandon] We want a mashup of an earnest movie with Oscar Wilde. So there's your writing prompt. You might have an excuse this time to not write.
[Howard] You've got a couple of good excuses, but please write anyway. Because you're writers. Right?
[Brandon, Dan] Right.
[Brandon] Bye-bye.
[Howard] That was awful.
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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 16: The Anti-Mary Sue Episode

Feb. 17th, 2011 02:05 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 16: The Anti-Mary Sue Episode

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/09/13/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-16-the-anti-mary-sue-episode/

Key points: Mary Sue means wish fulfillment. To write different voices, steep yourself in that voice and culture. Keep someone in mind when you write a character, a dominant impression. Get inside your character's head. Fix it in revision. Find someone fascinating and write about them, to avoid always telling your story.
Expand( the voices in your head... )
[Jordo] Writing prompt?
[Brandon] Producer Jordo says I have to do a writing prompt, so I'm going to make John Brown do it.
[John] Okay. Here's your writing prompt. Go out and do some research. Find a fascinating character that is nothing like you. Go pick some topic that you don't know about. Then write a story.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses Episode 35: Voice, Tone, and Style

Feb. 2nd, 2011 02:27 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Episode 35: Voice, Tone, and Style

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/10/06/writing-excuses-episode-35-voice-tone-and-style/

Key points: how do you write so that it is distinctive to you? This is NOT something that a starting writer should worry about too much -- they need to focus on characters, plot, and setting. One stylistic thing for starting writers is to pay attention to using said and asked instead of said-bookisms. Another point (lost in the transcription) was to watch for overuse of very, adjectives, and favorite words. And the main suggestion for developing a style - practice, practice, practice. Find what you're good at and emphasize that, avoid what you're not good at.
Expand( hiding details to save friend's pages )
[Brandon] Writing prompt: take a scene -- just a quick scene -- then write it as Dan would write it, then write it as Brandon would write it, and then write it as Howard would write it.
[Dan] should we give them a scene? Maybe the "Luke, I'm your father" scene from Star Wars?
[Howard] no, make it the romantic confession scene from Star Wars Episode Two
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Writing Excuses Episode 33: Side Characters

Feb. 2nd, 2011 02:22 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Episode 33: Side Characters

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/09/22/writing-excuses-episode-33-side-characters/

Key points: Give your side characters their own voice, sensible motivation, and unique aspects. Give them a good motivation and make them the center of their own story. If they are too interesting, promote them to a main character or cut them out.
Expand( The Meatloaf )
Writing Prompt [confusion over how to take a side character without having written a main character results in Brandon suggesting]:
  • Brandon: take a side character from the future, bring them back into the past, and write a story about them.
Howard: thank you, and goodnight kids.
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