Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/06/19/17-25-archetypes-ensembles-and-expectations/

 

Key points: How do you differentiate the members of your ensemble? What is the story about, and who needs to populate that world? What archetypes do you need? Archetype may not be the right word. Roles? Mix it up, make the mentor also dopey comic relief. Consider roles in the plot, along with personalities or characterization archetypes. Beware of falling into stereotypes, of making characters just like your favorites. Make sure your ensemble has to come together as a group, that they have to work at it.

 

[Season 17, Episode 25]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Archetypes, Ensembles, and Expectations.

[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.

[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] So, we... This... I've been looking forward to this one all masterclass long. Archetypes and ensembles. Really what we're talking about here is...we've talked in the past about making every member of the ensemble meaningful. Now we want to talk about why are they there? What do they do? How are they different from each other and what is each one bringing to the table? What skills or baggage or whatever do they have? So, when you're looking at this, Zoraida, when you sit down to start an ensemble story, a story that has an ensemble cast, how do you start differentiating the characters in this way?

[Zoraida] It's hard to say. I've been thinking a lot about this, but sometimes it's hard for me to identify that because I think that as I write what the story's going to be, I start with plot first sometimes, not always character. Which has changed in the last few years. I used to start with character first, and then go to plot. But again, it goes back to the question that I asked in a couple of episodes ago, which is what is the story about? So once I figure out what the story is about, I understand who needs to populate my world. Obviously, we have a leader. The leader should also have another kind of archetype, right? Like, are they important for example? Are they a mastermind? Is it the villain? Once I start identifying their archetype, that archetype for the leader, then I understand what is the actual job that needs to get done. Heists are little bit easier, because I think that in heists, you… Which is going to be my book of the week. In a heist, somebody has a very, very specific job. So what happens when you have an adventure? Right? Does somebody bring in a skill? Then, so, I think about skill sets, personalities, chaos… Right? What is the character that brings chaos and creates tension? That's kind of where I start. In chaos.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I like the way that you started by talking about sometimes you start with plot, and sometimes you start with character. Because I do think it's worth pointing out that the point at which you make the decision of this needs to be an ensemble cast might be in the beginning, it might be halfway through. You might have a big chunk of your story already in mind or outlined or whatever, and realize, "Oh, you know what? This is not going to work with a single person going through this alone. I need to add in… I need to turn this into an ensemble." Or it might be at the very beginning, you just set out like Howard did to tell a big group story solving a mystery. So that can happen at different points for everybody. Once that decision is made, Kaela, have you written ensemble stories before?

[Kaela] Yeah. Actually. When I look at it, I'm like, "Oh. Maybe I…" I never thought I was, and then I look at it, and I'm like, "Maybe I always do, actually."

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I think they all are.

[Howard] I don't do this. Wait. I do it all the time.

[Kaela] Oh, my gosh.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's kind of the unofficial subtheme of Writing Excuses is all of the instructors realizing we do things we didn't know we did. So, what about the archetypes themselves? That's in the title of our episode. What is an archetype? And how does it help us put together on ensemble?

[Kaela] They're reoccurring. Like, they're reoccurring characters or roles almost that you see a lot. Like, the mystical… Like, the hag or the… I don't know why that's the only one that comes to mind whenever someone says archetype. I'm like, "The hag!" I think because I secretly want to be the hag when I grow up.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] That's my dream.

[Howard] As life goals go, that's a good one.

[Kaela] Thank you.

 

[Howard] I think that archetype might not be the right word for us here. Because… I mean, you look at Leverage, the opening credits for Leverage. Hitter, hacker, grifter, thief, mastermind. Those get defined in a way that kind of makes them archetypes, but Carl Yung would not define hitter as an archetype. But for our purposes, it very much is. I was reading an article just last night, I think, about how many black superheroes have electrical powers. I realized… Actually, to the point that Mark Wade years ago did a comic book story that called it out. Let's see if I can find the line of dialogue. Yeah, the hero says, "Surprise. I'm a black superhero with electrical powers. I know, I know. Because there are so many of them." I bring this up because when you think of, say, Elliott in Leverage, when you think of the hitter, he's a guy who doesn't want to use guns, but he is super good at punching, and he's former special forces and whatever. Are there tropes there that make the definition of hitter predictable? Have you created the archetypal black character with lightning powers unconsciously? So, for me, anytime I'm creating a character that feels like an archetype, the first thing I look for is… The first thing I start doing is interrogating myself. Am I doing this because I've seen it somewhere before? Am I just re-creating a character from Warehouse 13 or Ocean's 11 or Fast and Furious five?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I needed things with numbers so that that rule of three worked.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or am I doing something fresh? In a recent manuscript comment, Sandra said, "Oh, I like the way the dopey character puts his foot in his mouth and keeps digging and actually successfully digs his way out the other side and everybody's like…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Good job." Because that's not what we see. What we typically see is the dumb character digs his way in deeper and then we don't on him and we move on with the conversation. So I look for opportunities to take the archetype and make it different than what I've seen before.

[Dan] Yeah. Well…

[Zoraida] Yeah. I mean I feel like… So, there's like a skill, right, that character can have. Right? This is like a part of their job. But I also think that there is like a symbol that they represent. Right? Like in Star Wars, right? [Apologies] to Yung, right, and Campbell. The dreaming farmboy. The trickster in Han Solo. The mentor in Obi-Wan, right? Like those are… Those are archetypes. They, like, represent something in the story. But I definitely agree with you, like, what if like what you think is an archetype is actually maybe a stereotype, right? How do some shows that have ensemble casts or books that have ensemble casts subvert that? So that's actually a really interesting point, yeah.

[Howard] Take the mentor… Take the idea of the mentor character and make the mentor character also be… I don't know what the archetype would be, but the dopey comic relief.

[Laughter]

[Howard] This is the dumb guy, but every so often, the dumb guy just drops wisdom that puts it together, so we're all going like, "Hey. How are you… No, that's good. I have learned it. I have now mastered the laser sword."

[Laughter]

[Dan] Okay.

[Zoraida] That's actually…

 

[Dan] I want to keep this conversation going, but I am going to stop in the middle and do a book of the week.

[What?]

[Dan] Sorry. It's gone on too long with no book. Our book of the week this week, Zoraida, you are going to tell us about Six of Crows.

[Zoraida] Okay. Let's see if I can do the book justice. Six of Crows is a book by Leigh Bardugo. It is about a group of unlikely friends. They are criminals in a fantasy world called Ketterdam. They have taken on an impossible job to break out a magical prisoner from a jail that is a literal fortress. It is one of my favorite books. It's an ensemble cast. It… To me, this book is one of Leigh Bardugo's best works overall. It is a masterclass in writing, in the way she introduces the stories and the characters, and to me it's just the perfect book. It is also one of the storylines in Shadow and Bone, the TV show currently on Netflix.

[Dan] Six of Crows is one of my very favorite fantasy books. Fantasy heist is difficult to do. But she absolutely hits it out of the park. So, Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo.

 

[Dan] So, let's get back into this archetype conversation, because I find it really interesting. One thing I wanted to point out listening to Howard talk about it is that there's two different ways to think about these archetypes. Because hacker, hitter, grifter, thief, mastermind. Those are the roles that they perform in the plot. But also, when you're dealing with an ensemble, specifically, there are archetypal personalities and roles that they can serve kind of emotionally. Characterization archetypes rather than plot archetypes. They have the very sophisticated elegant one. They have the kind of loose cannon crazy one. They have the really confident sassy one. They have the kind of quiet pragmatic one. You don't have to have the really elegant one be the grifter, like Sophie in Leverage. You could have the really elegant one be something else. That is one way to make sure that you're not falling into these stereotypes. But maybe your ensemble requires a leader who pulls everyone together and it requires kind of a really friendly person who is the glue that keeps them together and is the peacemaker that stops the fights. Maybe there's another person who's the younger one that everyone looks out for. Like there's lots of different kinds of emotional archetypes and group dynamic archetypes that are very different from the role that they serve in the plot.

[Yeah]

[Howard] The Doctor Who episode that I mentioned a month ago. Character's name is Mickey. His line describes the roles that he thinks he fits. He says, "I'm their man in Havana. I'm their tech expert. I am… Oh, my God, I'm the tin dog."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That… If you understand what man from Havana means, you can see what Mickey thinks he is and where he arrives. There are… Oh, I had another example of it, and it's gone now. So I'm going to hand it back off.

[Well, I think…]

[Howard] Kaela?

[Zoraida] Oh, go ahead, Kaela.

[Kaela] No, I was just going to say…

[Zoraida] Well, if you look at Six of Crows, there are six crows, there are six people in this heist. I think if you look at… If you break down sort of their characters, Kaz Brekker is an orphan. Like, his archetype, I think to me would be the orphan, and his job is the leader. Right?Inej, who she is… Her job is, like, a keeper of secrets, but she's also a shadow. So she like… And also the foil of Kaz Brekker. Then you have somebody like Wylan Van Eck, who is sort of a hostage, sort of a demo guy, but his archetype is the innocent. Right? So I start with… When I study this book, I feel like I'm looking at, like, okay, this is their function, and this is what they represent in a larger story. That's sort of an interesting angle to come at an ensemble cast, I think.

 

[Dan] Yeah. Definitely. Now, when… A concept that Dave Wolverton used to talk about when I was taking writing classes from him is called braided roses. The idea is that your characters all have this wonderful rose that makes them vital and important, but they also are covered with thorns. When you braid them together, they poke each other. So when you are putting together an ensemble cast, to what extent are you doing it on purpose to create conflict? Not just people who will inevitably work well together, but people who will inevitably butt heads. Because every ensemble we've talked about involves characters fighting and arguing and… They have to come together as a group, they can't just start together as a group.

[Kaela] That's one of my favorite things about ensembles. Like I mentioned earlier in an earlier episode about the sandpaper. Like, that's the thing that I'm there for. Admittedly, I've said that about like everything about ensembles. But…

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I love angling them so that they rub against each other the wrong way in a way that will ultimately make them better. Like, again, bringing up Guardians of the Galaxy again, the transition from Guardians of the Galaxy One to Guardians of the Galaxy Two is so interesting, because we get the coming together of the group, which has plenty of thorns, as you're trying to get these people together. But then you also get the way that those thorns keep moving as they grow as people, because all of them have grown by the end of the first episode. I mean, not episode, movie. In the second movie, you watch how they're still the same people, so they're still going going to going to be rubbing each other the wrong way in ways that make each other better. That's… Character growth wise, I just find that so fantastic that they end up being the river stones that end up smoothing each other out. They end up… They always…

[Howard] The moment where in Avengers: Infinity War, when they find Thor and everybody's talking about Thor and saying, "Oh, my gosh. It's like a pirate had a baby with an angel."

[Yes]

[Howard] Starlord is like, "What am I? Chopped liver here?" Well, you are getting a little soft. You're one sandwich away from another chin. The… That bit of characterization where we see that Starlord, even though he's ostensibly their leader, feels threatened any time he sees someone who's better looking than he is…

[Kaela] Or more competent. Or stronger. Or…

[Zoraida] Yeah. That's vain.

[Garbled]

[Howard] Even with just one eye.

[Zoraida] I mean, it has to go into your character work. Like making sure that there's cohesion. But cohesion doesn't always mean harmony. Right? Like, these people can work well together, but they don't all have to be friends. Or they have to work to be friends.

[Dan] Well, this doesn't mean that every character has to conflict with every other character.

[Right]

[Zoraida] Right. Howard has been very excited.

[Dan] Danny Ocean has his sidekick… I can't remember Brad Pitt's name in that series. They are inseparable. They never butt heads. They agree with each other almost all the time. Even when they disagree, they don't fight about it. That helps give a lot more texture to what's going on.

[Howard] I just remembered a… It's a piece of biology that has stuck with me forever. When you have a fertilized egg cell that then divides, those two things are genetically identical. Okay. Yet, they're going to grow into an organism that has bazillions of cells, all of which have differentiated. The genetics did not tell which cell to do what. They didn't tell a cell, "Oh, you're going to go be the nervous system." No. You know how they developed that? They fight. They argue over resources and push each other to the outside. The ones that get pushed the furthest to the outside? Hey, congratulations, you've become the largest organ in the body. You've become skin and so on and so forth. So this idea that the ensemble comes together through conflict is in biology.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's fantastic.

[Incredible. I'm made of ensembles.]

 

[Dan] All right, Kaela, you have our homework this week. What is it?

[Kaela] I do. Today, I want y'all to identify the archetypes of each character in your work in progress. Take whatever you're working on, figure out, like, what each archetype is, what role they're serving, stuff like that. But I want you to try something out. Change that archetype or give them a sub archetype to try to branch out and create rounder, unexpected characters. Like we were talking about earlier. I think one of my favorite things is when you have a… Like a role and you expect it to be a certain way. You have a stereotype in your mind or something like that, but then you combine it with this emotional archetype that's not always together. Like the cold, emotionless warrior like, let's say. But they turn out to be the maternal figure, like the mother of the group. I love that combination, because you don't always see it, but they work together. Like new ways of exploring to give your characters more humanity, I suppose. More nuance.

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

 

[Mary Robinette] The Writing Excuses 2022 cruise and workshop aboard the Liberty of the Seas is filling up fast. If you want to join us, go to writingexcusesretreat.com and register today. Looking forward to seeing you.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/06/05/17-23-are-we-stronger-together/

 

Key Points: It's a classic archetype or style of story, answering the question, are we stronger together. Start by looking at what story you are trying to tell. Not who is the story about. Be aware of the fun of character introductions, and the tendency to overdo them, leading to bloat. Don't try to answer the question are we stronger together just by splitting the ensemble and then bringing them back together, without adding something. There are other ways to answer that question, like the tin dog. Look for the desire for connection as part of the ensemble. If you break up the ensemble, pair them up in new ways. Make sure we are invested in the characters first. Think about how to bring in a new member, a new character, as part of the ensemble.

 

[Season 17, Episode 23]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Are We Stronger Together?

[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.

[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Howard] I'm pretty sure we're definitely smarter together.

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] I would agree with that.

[Dan] Definitely.

[[Zoraida] I agree with that.

[Kaela] Our powers combined...

 

[Dan] So, are we stronger together? This is kind of a classic, I guess, story archetype or style of story. Zoraida, when you put together the outline for the classes, you started this by asking the question, what is the story I'm trying to tell? Why is that the first thing we think about when we look at this concept of being stronger together?

[Zoraida] I think that… So the question is what is the story I'm trying to tell, as opposed to who is the story about. Right? So the distinction to me is the story itself is… Represents the internal life of my character. Right? So, like, my character has this rich internal life. Then everything around them is what they're reacting to. Identifying that part of the story really makes it easier for me to understand whether I have something that is an ensemble cast or whether I have a singular, let's just say, hero's journey of one person making their way around the world. So once I know, for example, my The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina is a multi-generational magical realism novel. I originally wrote the first draft with only the main character, her name is Marimar. It was only her. As I wrote the story, once I identified that this story is about the entire family and not just one person in a family, I added the different points of view. That came with revision, obviously. But first I needed to identify this story is bigger than one person. That change the entire scope of how I was telling it.

[Dan] Absolutely. Has anyone else come across the same issue before? Figuring out what story you're trying to tell?

[Kaela] Yes. So the sequel for Cece Rios and The Desert of Souls, it comes out in September, it's dual point of view versus the first one, which was just singular point of view. That's because the story I was trying to tell, I realized there was no way to have Cece and her sister in the same place at the same time without it changing the point of… A large part of the story for both of them. So I was like, "Wow, I'm going to have to add another point of view here, because it's just a bigger story." Their stories connect and what I like to think is a nice important way. But that, it was too big for a single point of view. I'm currently drafting the third book, and let me tell you, I'm also still wondering whether I need to add another point of view to that. So, the revision and writing process is filled with many questions like this.

[Dan] Yeah, with my cyberpunk series, I had this same question pop up, and realized the story I was trying to tell was a heist. All three books in the trilogy ultimately are heist stories, because that's what got me really excited. That meant that they needed to turn into ensemble stories. Which is not necessarily what I set out to do, but heists really require that. Because you need to have all the different specialists and they each have their own thing they can do that no one else can do. Then that turned into a big team dynamic story, and then eventually, in later books, turned into a family dynamic story. Because I was… As I changed which characters I was focusing on. But because of the story I was trying to tell, that really did force me into a specific type of cast.

 

[Zoraida] I think that one of the things that I encounter a lot when I'm writing… One of my favorite things to write, and as a reader or consumer of media generally, is character introductions. I just… I die for them. I'm like, "Yes! Introduce another one. I don't care that there's 200 people in the cast already. Give me another one." Which is something I have to also control about myself, because my editor's like, "Do you need another person though?" I'm like, "But they're cool." And he's like, "Yeah, but do you need them?"

[chuckles]

[Zoraida] I think that's…

[Kaela] Well… Yeah. I mean, I feel like I've had situations where… I've had to cut entire characters out of books because I'm like, "Okay, you're dead weight. The… Another character… Two other characters are doing the exact same thing." I just want… I just thought it would be funny to have, like, a talking dog. Not really. Like, that's…

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I don't think I've ever had a talking dog in my books.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] But, for example…

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] Right? That's sort of what I was thinking, like, if you look at, again, the Fast and Furious movies, they all work stronger together. Because you can't... well, you can rob a car by yourself, but you can't rob like 17 cars by yourself.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] So it is… The question is, and that's where the dynamic comes in, can you trust everybody on your team? Right? What happens in Avengers Civil War or Captain America Civil War when all of a sudden our ensemble is broken. Right? Because two sides are… There's a line in the sand is drawn.

[Dan] Yeah. Comic books are such a great use of this particular thing. The X-Men in particular. The X-Men is absolutely a group that falls into this we are stronger together kind of archetype. Because their powers are so unique and often so strange, like Jubilee or Dazzler or some of these other strange kind of minor X-Men, you couldn't necessarily… They're not going to stop a bank robbery on their own. They're not going to stop any of the huger stories on their own, certainly. But put them all together and you have the one character who can make bright lights and the other character who can do this or other little minor thing, and together they can all do this… Overcome this big evil. But also, that starts falling into the same thing that Kaela was talking about. You go back to the 80s and 90s, Chris Claremont run of X-Men and they were introducing new characters constantly. Because it is really fun to think, "Okay, what if there was a character who had this cool power? Or was from this background?" You can really see him just kind of letting his imagination run wild and introducing more and more characters constantly, which can lead to bloat. That is what is really bogging down The Song of Ice and Fire series, because there's just more and more characters and we've got to give them all their weight and their time. It becomes a bigger and bigger house of cards with every new person that you add.

 

[Howard] A very common story structure for the ensemble, and I... we complained about it last week with one of the seasons of The Expanse and one of the seasons of Stranger Things, is that when you answer the question are we stronger together by splitting them apart…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then you bring them back together and it's wonderful for the audience because it's something we've all been waiting for. Boy, I'm here to tell you that I've seen enough of this… I've actually written enough of this, that it's not that cool all by itself. Also, there's other ways to ask that question. One of my favorite ensemble moments, the question of are we stronger together, is in an episode of Doctor Who, and I think it may have been David Tenon as the Doctor, I don't remember the name of the… Of Rose's friend, the goofy kind of dumb guy who ends up going along on some of their adventures. But at one point, he's got K-9… He's putting K-9 in the boot of a vehicle or something, and he says, "Oh, my gosh. I'm the tin dog."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He has this realization that he doesn't belong on the team.

[Oh, wow]

[Howard] He's useless. He's the tin dog. It's such a… It's a fun, soul-searching moment, and it's the sort of thing you can do without breaking the ensemble up. You just have one of the characters have this realization I'm not helping, I don't think we're actually stronger together. I think you're better off if I stand over here and keep score. That's… The point here being we want to ask that question, are we stronger together, we want to answer it with a resounding yes. We can do it in ways other than just showing and they come back together and everybody goes rar and we win.

[Right! Yeah!]

 

[Dan] I've got a question I want to ask about this exact thing, but first, let's do book of the week. Kaela, you've been telling us about Cece Rios.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] You got a new book, book 2 in that series comes out. Tell us about it.

[Kaela] That's right. So, it's a sequel to the first book, obviously. That's how series work, I guess.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I'm so excited about this one. Like I mentioned earlier, it's dual point of view. You get Cece's adventure and you get her older sister Juana's adventure. The set up is that Juana has realized that part of her heart is missing. Her heartbeat… Her heart isn't beating, part of her soul is missing, and it's stuck in Devil's Alley. In order to get it, she has to go in by herself. Cece tries to go on an adventure to go get it herself, first, but Juana goes instead in secret because she wants to fix it herself. She's tired of being saved by her little sister.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] They go on a wild adventure. She ends up teaming up, Juana ends up teaming up with Lion, diving into Devil's Alley on their own. Cece begins to uncover some secrets about dark criaturas, how they were made, and maybe even her curandera powers. Woo hoo. For anyone who's read the first one, context. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. It's going to be taking a lot of the themes of the first one and going deeper with them and giving some nice resolution for the pretty hard things that Juana went through in the first book. We get a little bit more context about what happened and how she's dealing with it. So… Oh, yeah, then of course, the big hook. We end up meeting and facing the king of Devil's Alley himself, the king of fears, El Cucuy. So… Very proud of that.

[Dan] Awesome. That is the title of the book, Cece Rios and the King of Fears. Remind us of the title of the first one, again, if people want to start at the beginning.

[Kaela] Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls.

[Dan] Desert of Souls. By Kaela Rivera. Go out and grab those now. You can get the first one, the second one is up for preorder, I hope.

[Kaela] Yes.

[Dan] But it comes out this fall. So, anyway, great.

 

[Dan] Let's get back to this question then. So, let's talk about this idea of are we stronger together, and then how season two or book 2 or whatever breaks that group apart. In something like Stranger Things, while we have complained about oh, no, but I wanted to keep my team together, I love the ensemble interaction, it was ultimately a very satisfying story the way they told that. Compare that to something like the TV show Heroes. Where season one was let's bring the team together, are we stronger together, yes, we are. In the end, the final episode, they're able to defeat the big bad guy. Then, season two, they broke them apart and told that same story of coming back together and it was not satisfying. It was frustrating. What is the difference? What makes that, that kind of severing the team, how can we tell that in a way that works versus what are the pitfalls that make that not work?

[Oh.]

[Dan] It's a hard question to just throw right in your faces, because it's not in the outline.

[Howard] In the…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In the Joss Whedon Justice League… Might have been in the Zack Snyder as well, I don't remember because that one was way long… When they introduce Flash, Bruce Wayne says, "I'm putting together a team." Flash says, "Nn, I'm in." "I haven't even told you what…" "Nn, I need friends."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Flash's desire to connect is what, for me, held that whole team together. I think our desire for connection is what draws us into an ensemble. If you break that ensemble apart, you are taking away my friends. Stop that. You're a bad person.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I think that… Like, I'm actually okay with breaking up ensembles. But…

[Gasp]

[Kaela] Like, you have…

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] Howard just decries my name for the rest of my life. But I feel like you have to do it in a way that's giving you more dimension that you wouldn't have another way. Like… Okay, once again, cartoons. Duck Tales.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] But the new version.

[Yoo hoo!]

[Kaela] The new version of duck [garbled] Ooo-hoo! So, like, towards the last season of it, there was a whole episode where everyone had to split up because there was multiple things they had to get. Right? They paired them up in some really unexpected ways. Like, they had Lena, who is one of the magic characters, who is best friends with Webby, and then they had Huey… Huey, Dewey, Louie… Yeah, Huey. I'd never seen those characters together. So I was suddenly like, "Wow, what in the world are they going to be up to?" It was fascinating the way that being with Lena ended up helping Huey through his whole… His last character arc thing that he needed to get through. I was like, "That was so unexpected and satisfying." That, like seeing… Sorry, go ahead.

 

[Zoraida] No, I was going to say, like the unexpected part. I mean, when I first watched Lord of the Rings, everybody starts off together and then they break apart into different groups. I think I'm okay with things like that. Where it's like we have now… We're delegating. Right? Everyone has different tasks. You go to Mordor. You go over here. You'll get some allies. But that has to happen after pre-establishing a big win, or why we are here together, why we are a collective. Then… Because then, when you break it apart, when somebody dies, it is that much more impactful because we have invested. As a reader and a viewer, like once I'm invested in characters, I feel like they're somebody I know. That's really the goal for me, like, creating characters like that.

[Dan] Yeah. I think, for me, what makes something like Fellowship or Duck Tales work, these places where they have broken the fellowship, they've split the ensemble, and it still works, is that they're using it as an opportunity to tell some new stories, to combine characters in a new way. Community was great at this. You very rarely got for example, a Jeff Winger and a… Now I can't remember Yvette Nicole Brown's character. They rarely had stories together. But when they did, it was fascinating because of how rare it was. It was like, "Oh, this is a side of them I have never seen before, because they bring out different qualities in each other."

[Howard] The foosball episode.

[Dan] You compare that against something like the second season of Heroes or the fourth season of Arrested Development where they weren't really doing anything new. They were… Second season of Heroes was the exact same story as the first season of Heroes. They're apart, and they're going to come together over time. So they weren't using that as an opportunity to reveal new things about the characters or to delve into new aspects of who they are as people. So it… I think that's really the separation.

[Howard] Yeah. That's… That feels like the crux of my complaint, is that if you're doing it just to answer the question are we stronger together, yes we are, look, because we came back together, everybody's happier, and our readers, our viewers, like it more. That's just formula. That's just canned green beans. But if you give us something fresh, if we're exploring new story bits, then I'm okay with it. Like with Fellowship, we still had an ensemble. We still had Legolas and Aragorn and Gimli as a small ensemble. So…

 

[Zoraida] Yeah, they're just like [bigapeas?] One thing I want to add is, like, also once you have all these great casts and ensembles established, right? And they're stronger together, what happens when you bring in a foreign entity? Right? Like, there's this episode of Friends where they are all hanging out at the apartment, and then somebody knocks on the door. They're like counting each other. They're like, "Well, we're all here. So who is at the door? Who has come to interrupt our carefully curated space base?" Right? Of course, it's Rachel's sister or somebody who like brings in chaos, and then creates tension in the group.

[Dan] Yeah. I think ultimately that's why so many people consider the ending of How I Met Your Mother to be unsatisfying is because they couldn't figure out how to solve that problem. They had built, over six or seven seasons, this really strong ensemble cast with the fundamental promise of we're going to add a new character to this eventually. They never really were able to. I thought that Cristin Milioti did a phenomenal job as the mother…

[Yes]

[Dan] When she finally appears at the end. But the writers didn't really know what to do with her, how to bring her in, how to disrupt those ensemble mechanics in a way that let her really feel like she was part of it. So they eventually, I think, kind of took the coward's way out and wrote her out and went with Anne what's her name. But…

 

[Dan] Anyway. We have let this episode run just a little long. We've got homework. Kaela, this is your homework this week.

[Kaela] Yes. Okay. So, both practically and in a way that should help your writing generally, I want you to sit down. Take out a piece of paper. And, like, an actual pen. Physically. You could also do this digitally. But, like, try it. Create a connection map for your characters. This will both help you keep track of everybody, but it will also help you understand how they interact with everybody in the group. So, make connections between like… Describe first what their relationships to each other are, like, each person. What their relationship to each other person in your ensemble is. Then, one challenge in that relationship. Then, one way they enhance each other, or have an interesting something. It might not be enhancing sometimes. You don't know. But you'll find out that way.

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to go write… With us? Register for the 2022 Writing Excuses Cruise at writingexcusesretreat.com. Hope to see you there.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/05/22/17-21-casting-your-story-with-character-voice/ 

 

Key points: How can you start making your ensemble cast members unique, interesting, distinct? Well, start with the protagonist protagonist, and how the other characters interact with them. Look at shared and individual goals or motivation. Sitcoms highlight the differences between characters. Make sure the right person has the right lines. How do you make characters distinct? A catchphrase! Physical features, way of talking, or even a distinct problem.

 

[Season 17, Episode 21]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Casting Your Story With Character Voice.

[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.

[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] Brains!

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Howard] I'm obviously the zombie.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's what's left of Howard.

 

[Dan] So, this week, we're talking about Casting Your Story With Character Voice. You've got a bit ensemble cast. How do you make every member of that ensemble unique and interesting? Zoraida, where do you start with this?

[Zoraida] I usually start... I... As I talked about in a previous episode, I start with the protagonist protagonist. Then I make sort of this spiderweb of how the other characters interact with them. I think about who they are as people, making sure that every single character wants their own thing that is separate from the protagonist protagonist. So everybody has a shared goal and individual goals. I start there. What they want usually tells me who they are as a person, what they're willing to do to get the thing that they want, and making sure that they have very distinct personalities.

[Dan] Yeah. I… Motivation is such a great place to start with this. It's something that you can see a lot in role-playing games, if you've ever played D&D or any of the other role-playing games. That's a slightly different situation, because in that case, each character is being run by a player, and that player likely thinks of themselves as the main character of the story. They have specific things that they want, specific goals that each individual is trying to achieve. They all come across then as fairly vibrant. They're not… I shouldn't say it never happens, because there's always one player whose content to just sit in the background and happy to be included. But…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah, making sure that they each have their own goal, that they are really trying to do something that is different from what everyone else is interested in. Even though they do all have that shared goal of destroying the Death Star or whatever it is they're trying to do.

[Howard] Tricks of characterization and motivation in a tabletop role-playing game is even more complicated than that. Because you have a group of five people, all of which have gotten together in order to play a game. But why? Is it because I wanted to spend time with my friends? Is it because I wanted to escape? Do I just want to smash monsters and roll dice? What do I personally want from this? I'm just here for the pizza. I'm probably the GM. I'm working way too hard for pizza, but that's the only reason I'm here.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then you layer on top of that all of the character motivations. Boy, howdy, does that get complex. It's one of the reasons why studying what is happening at a tabletop when you're participating is such a great way to begin wrapping your head around how you might make members of an ensemble distinct in your book.

[Dan] Um...

[Kaela] Yeah, and…

[Dan] Nope, go for it.

[Kaela] Okay. I was going to say, something you hit on earlier, Dan, about, like, each character kind of being their own main character. In their heads, they're their own main character. I think that's one of the things that ensembles really excel at. It's one of the things that… That's why I want to watch an ensemble, or read an ensemble, or things like that, is because each character has their own strong motivation. They have the reason that they came, whether it's pizza or it's rolling the dice or intense wish fulfillment, whatever it is that their goal is. It's like that's the thing that compels me to like the characters. When I'm writing characters like that, I think I pull from… Like the… I'm a kind of a hoarder in real life. I mean, not like concerning, I'm not going to be on a reality show for it, but…

[Zoraida] Will they find 17 cats underneath your pile of [garbled]

[Kaela] Yeah. I'm like, go look at them. I have five more, but it's not a problem. But I kind of do that with creative stuff, like I hoard things in the back of my head. I hoard stuff that I like. Where I'm like, I love the character of, like, the super cool guy who's like, "Oh, I don't have any feelings." But then you find him petting cats and cooking food for his mom. You're like, "Adorable." Things like that. You just grab… Just, like, hold all of those… Hoard all of those together. Then you start plugging them into different characters to make them distinct, like Zoraida said.

[Zoraida] I spend a lot of time thinking about voice. Usually before I write, like, I'm... I want to say I'm an ideator as opposed to a procrastinator because, like, I spend…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] A lot of time doing the nonphysical part of writing and just thinking about… Just thinking, like, well, what does this character… I would they sound like? I was walking down the street, like, thinking in my characters head, like, and then just, like, laughing. But it's sort of… It makes me think of something that's not book related, which is the TV show Friends. Right? There's that story where if your friend's Stan or Stan, you know that… Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston originally auditioned for the opposite characters. So, like, Courtney Cox auditioned for Rachel, and Jennifer Aniston for Monica. Then they switched them. So I just think about how different those characters would be with the different voices, with each actress's voice. I feel like the same thing applies to your own characters. They have… Like, their singular voice makes them who they are, right? Say, on Friends, Joey doesn't share food. What are these taglines that they might have? What are this thing that only this person can say and get away with? That's a thing that really… The dynamics really come out.

 

[Dan] I think it's really interesting that we're talking so much about sitcoms as we go through these episodes. It's because these are very overtly ensemble stories. Often, one of the things that they are able to do really effectively is tell stories specifically designed to highlight the differences between the characters. Community does this all the time. Great example, they had a Christmas episode. Every member of that cast is a different religion and different background. So they all interacted with Christmas in different ways. There was a Seinfeld episode where… That's set in a movie theater… Where the four main characters were just trying to find each other. Then you got to hear them like describe each other to the ushers and things. Like, have you seen this person? They look like this. Hearing them describe what the other people look like just became really fascinating. So that kind of… This ensemble story is a really great way to tell those kinds of stories, is here is a central issue. How is each person going to bounce off of it in a different way?

[Howard] Years and years ago, we did an episode of Writing Excuses where we talked about a writing principle. I don't remember what book it's from, which is, focusing on the character who is in the most pain as a way to pick the most interesting POV. In writing Schlock Mercenary, which has a huge cast of characters, and members of that cast rotate book for book, rotate into and back out of the ensemble, I found that in the outlining, in the construction of the stories, I had to be careful that the most interesting POV, the most painful POV, wasn't someone who wasn't part of the ensemble in this book. Because if I switched away and did something really interesting with somebody who was just on the side, I was kind of throwing away a good characterization moment. Similarly, if I had a really, really good joke I wanted to tell, because it was wordsmithed well, I couldn't give it to one of the characters who didn't speak wordsmithy. I had to give it to somebody who had the vocabulary to deliver it. Often, with jokes like that, with plot moments like that, I had to bend the plot in ways to make sure that the right person was on stage in the right mood, in the right place, in the right mindset, to deliver this great line of dialogue… The lines were not actually that great.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But [garbled] to deliver this great line of dialogue, because if I deliver it with the wrong character, it knocks people out of the story. Because if done voice characterization correctly, something that… A fantastic line of dialogue that's out of character for someone will knock the reader out of the story, and that's not what you want to have happen. That's the opposite of what you want to have happen.

 

[Dan] Hey, so let's follow on this same line of thought. Howard, you are also our book of the week this week.

[Howard] I am. Right now, we are running the beta read of Shafter's Shifters and the Chassis of Chance over at the Schlock Mercenary Patreon. It is a cozy murder mystery science fiction comedy. It is… I have bent a lot of rules in order to get all of those genres in one place. What's fun about it is that it is a single person… It's a first person POV. But I had to make sure that every member of the ensemble sounded different. So the way in which this character describes what the members of the ensemble are doing had to be distinct. If you want to read it, you can join the Patreon at the five dollar level and we have been dropping a chapter a week through the month of May. The month of May will give you the whole novella. You will get this before anybody else does. Based on feedback from beta readers, I will then make it good enough to be a commercial product.

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] That sounds excellent.

[Kaela] Yes.

[Dan] I like how you just said read this thing before it's good and still made it sound really appealing…

[Laughter]

[Dan] So…

[Howard] One of…

[Dan] Well done.

[Howard] One of the things that I've learned in writing comics, in writing a web comic, I did not have the luxury of writing all the way to the end and then going back and finishing things. Every installment of Schlock Mercenary had to be publishable because it was going up on the web. The… It was… It was kind of a running gag here on Writing Excuses. You guys would talk about going back and revising something so that it works. I would quote the old Monty Python sketch and say, "Luxury!"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The… But with Shafter's Shifters, that same mode of writing… I've made four passes through the whole manuscript already. So you're not alpha reading. You'd be beta reading. I think you're going to love it.

 

[Dan] Awesome. All right. Before the book of the week, Kaela, you were about to say something.

[Kaela] Oh, yeah. I was just going to say that one of my favorite things, like what Howard was talking about, was, like, you have to change things according to who's talking. That can be from high level down to like really minute line level editing. There have been so many times where I have written down… I'm like grocery shopping or I'm waiting in the airport or whatever, and I'm like, "Ooh! Perfect line I need to use in my book. Oh, that's great." I'm currently drafting the third book in my series, so that's really top of mind right now, and I'm like, "Oh, okay." I write that down. Then, when I'm actually in the document trying to fit it in, I'm like, "Ryan would never say that. Man." Or this character would never say it like that. That's way too poetic for them. Then I have to rewrite it several times in order to get it into their voice. Or give it to another character. But I always end up changing, because I think that just speaks to how distinct character voice and how essential it is to the ensemble cast.

[Dan] Definitely. So, that's a good thing. Let's talk a little bit about this then. It's not just making your characters unique, but making them identifiable. Kaela and Howard have said that they come up with a good line of dialogue that has to be from a certain character or can't be from a different character. That comes from really strong solid characterization. How do you achieve that? How do you make your characters so distinct that dialogue can only be from that one person and wouldn't sound right with anybody else?

[Howard] That… You used two different words here. You used unique and distinct. If you have a pair of characters who are identical twins, they don't look unique. They don't pass the silhouette test when they're standing next to one another. But we still need to tell them apart. They still need to be distinct. That's why I use… That's why I try and use the word distinct. All I need is for the reader to be able to tell them apart. Some of the tools that I use are, if any of you have seen Free Guy… A catchphrase!

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled] here. I have things that only they will say, and that they can almost be expected to say in certain circumstances. So by the time you get to the end of the story, when someone says catchphrase, you know exactly who it is. I don't need a dialogue tag to prove it.

[Zoraida] Right. Right. Absolutely. I actually… I really love that, because sometimes it's frustrating reading something where you can't tell characters apart or if you look at [garbled] and it's like… It's a handsome brunette man. Right? Like, what makes this handsome brunette man unique? And distinct? The distinction is the very thing. I feel like the thing that goes into that is the personal touch. Right? If I'm… I've had, like, readers come up to me and say, like, "I recognize you because of your jean jacket with, like, XYZ buttons." Right? They've identified me because of this thing that I was wearing. Right? Like, if you look at all the Avengers, obviously they all have different uniforms. So I think that everything from [garbled] dialogue goes into that as well.

[Kaela] Yes.

[Dan] I'm… Go ahead, Kaela.

[Kaela] I was going to say, like, I love that we're using the, like, outer equivalent of, like, distinction to represent also the inner equivalent of distinction. So, I love anime, again, cartoons. One of my big beefs with anime, though, is that, like, when you create a bunch of characters who have so many cool little things that they're wearing…

[Laughter]

[Kaela] That it all becomes meaningless. I mean, like, literally, it's like everything and the kitchen sink outfit. I am like everyone has weird hair here, so it's not actually distinct anymore.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] Like, I'm watching everyone…

[Zoraida] [garbled]

[Kaela] Yeah, I'm like everyone's a UVO protagonist, no one's a UVO protagonist now. But, one of my favorite things is to, like, in the books that I write, because, again, anime. I love anime. I love to give characters a very distinct physical feature, so that the moment you see that, when you're glancing down the book, you know who's there. But, also a really distinct way of talking or a distinct problem, that whenever you see somebody is facing that, that's their inner distinction. So you're like, "Oh, if Ryan is in this scene, I know he's going to be angry most of the time." That's his thing, he's the angry one. Now, of course, that goes deeper. We'll talk more about avoiding flat characters later. But I think that adding a distinction that is recognizable… Like, when you get lost as a kid in the store, and you're looking for your mom's pink coat. Like, you don't want to have too many pink coats around, or else you have the terror of grabbing some lady's hand and looking up and it's not your mom.

[Zoraida] That happened to me once.

[Kaela] And it's a terrifying woman.

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] That happened to me once when I was a kid at the supermarket.

[Kaela] You don't want to do that to your readers, right?

[Zoraida] It was the 90s. Everyone had jean jacket skirts.

[Dan] Okay. So, last week, Howard had the very unpopular opinion. I think that it's my turn, because a really beautiful example of this comes from the Netflix Marvel shows. Particularly Iron Fist. Iron Fist was awful and everyone hated it. But…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] But you?

[Dan] Once he was part of the Defenders, you could… He worked. He was still not necessarily likable, but you put him next to Daredevil, who was grim and competent, Luke Cage, who was grim and competent, Jessica Jones, who was grim and competent, and then Iron Fist got to be this kind of arrogant hothead who was eager to jump into fights he couldn't win and things like that. He didn't work necessarily on his own, but in the ensemble, he absolutely filled a vital niche that kind of rounded out the group as a whole.

[Howard] I think one of the reasons he worked is because the other characters all got to say what all of us had been thinking during his Iron Fist season.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Especially Jessica Jones. Man, her scoring points on him was my favorite jam for a couple of episodes. It was great.

[Cathartic]

[Dan] Well, it's not just that it was fun to watch people knock him. But I don't think Defenders would have been as strong without him. Because he added some really necessary texture and distinctions.

 

[Dan] Anyway. We've let this episode go on really long. So we're going to end with homework. Howard, you have our homework.

[Howard] I do. We got a glimpse of this when we were talking about that episode of Friends in the movie theater.

[Dan] Seinfeld.

[Howard] Two-part homework. Have each of your ensemble characters describe themselves. How they see themselves. Go ahead and write a mirror scene. Because, heaven knows, you're not going to be able to put it in a book. Second, have each of your ensemble characters describe each of the others. So, that second part suddenly gets really big. Because, I mean, you know how matrices work. You've got four characters, and suddenly, you're talking about writing 16 things.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But, there's your homework. The point of this is to let you see how voice affects perception, and ultimately, audience perception of this ensemble you're going to be putting in your story.

[Dan] You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/05/08/17-19-working-in-a-collaborative-environment/

 

Key points: One part of collaboration is meetings and suggestions. One reason to collaborate is to tell stories that you just don't have the time to tell. Sometimes the other people can bring things to the story that you can't. One nice thing can be ideas and advice. Beware creative squabbling, making creative disagreements personal. To collaborate effectively, you have to let it go.

 

[Season 17, Episode 19]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Working in a Collaborative Environment.

[Brandon] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Meg] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Meg] And I'm Meg.

[Dan] We have Meg Lloyd with us today, who is one of my favorite people. Meg, tell us about yourself.

[Meg] Well, I am a storyboard artist and a screenwriter working in animation out in California. That means I'm one of the first wizards on call when it comes to making movie magic. It's usually my job to take the scripts from the writer and then turn them into the pictures, the designs, the sets, and the camera work that will be turned over to the other departments in order to make a final animated scene.

[Dan] Cool. What are some of the things you've worked on that our audience might be familiar with?

[Meg] Yeah. So, some of the stuff that I've worked on… Well, a lot of it is still a secret because since I'm at the beginning of the process, I don't get to talk about it until a couple of years after it's all done and out of the way. But some of my released work includes boarding on Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and Star Trek: Lower Decks. This week, Nickelodeon finally title dropped a show I worked on for them called Transformers: Earth Park.

 

[Dan] Whoa. Awesome. So, we are going to talk about creating in a collaborative environment. Whether that is authors collaborating with each other, like Brandon and I are doing, or you working in a whole company full of creatives who are constantly having to be creative together. How is… This is such a dumb question. But, how is that different from just making something on your own?

[Meg] Well, I get a lot of other people telling me what I did wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] Instead of being able to gauge that for myself. One of the things is where you're positioned on a creative project, because… I've directed as well as like boarded. There is a very clear chain of command. It differs from show to show on how much you're allowed to pipe up in a meeting and make suggestions. Like, I've been with some directors and some heads of story that really welcomed jokes and riffs in a meeting. But I also remember with a great fear my very first job when I raised my hand and made a suggestion, and the supervising director, and then later my director, and then one of the producers pulled me aside, one by one, and said, "You can't talk in a meeting."

[Laughter]

[Meg] I was like, "Whah?" Which is like a real shame, because I talk all the time.

[Dan] So conducive to the creative process, as well, is, like, telling people to shut up.

[Brandon] Yeah, I've… Hollywood's this weird place where it feels like everyone knows the rules but you. I've been in some of those meetings too, and I'm like, "How do you know?" And it's different in every meeting. Yeah, I don't envy you trying to navigate some of these things, because it gets really weird.

[Meg] So, animation and just moviemaking in general is one of the biggest team projects that there is. There's a reason why our credits are 10 minutes long. If you're in a short schedule hi rush production like TV, you only are going to be touching an episode for a specific amount of time, and then you have to pass it down to the next person. The only thing that stops this from being an absolutely garbled game of telephone is the people who are sort of steering this ship, which would be your director and your head of story. So, a lot of times you have to gauge the water yourself, to be like, "Okay. Can I… What can I bring of my own flair?" Or what do they need me to just get done and pass on to the next person?

 

[Dan] Let me ask Brandon, you have recently, in the last few years, started to do a lot more collaborations.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] With me, with Jancey, with others. What prompted that decision, and kind of what got you into that frame of creative mind?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, this was kind of a very specific thing, which involves the explosion of audiobooks, and several of the audiobook producers, the companies, coming to me and saying, "Hey, Brandon. We would love some exclusive content. Is there something of yours that you can provide?" Meanwhile, I had been having various stories that I wanted to write for years that I'd never been able to get to. The one I'm doing with you, the one I'm doing with Mary Robinette, these are stories that I had outlines for. I'm like, "Someday I'm going to write this story." Then, other demands just kept taking me away from them. These two things intersected, where I said, "Well, maybe if I brought on a friend, I can take one of these stories that I really think is really cool that I've wanted to tell, but I just don't have the time for because the Cosmere's dominating more and more of my attention." So, for me, collaboration was a way to tell more stories that I just don't have the time to tell.

 

[Dan] So, question for both of you then. Can you think of something that the collaborative process brought to a story that you hadn't seen there or you wouldn't have come up with on your own?

[Brandon] Well, I definitely have one, but I don't know… I'll go ahead and go first, then you can. The story I wrote with Mary Robinette, we'll just bring that up because she's one of the other cohosts. So, this is a story about a woman, who, for reasons mysterious, has murdered her husband. Right? She… A clone of her wakes up, with missing… Her whole life she remembers except the week that led to murdering her husband. The clone's like, "I would never do that. I love my husband. Why would I ever do this?" They're like, "Well, that's why we brought you. Your job is to figure out why you would do this." It's that kind of story. Never having had a husband, Mary Robinette was able to… Like, I wouldn't have been able to approach this from the same direction she could.

[Dan] She has had a husband, but you have not.

[Brandon] I have not.

[Dan] Okay.

[Brandon] So, she was able… Like, in the mindset of a woman in her… She's in her 30s. Mary Robinette isn't, but she has been a woman in her 30s, which I never have been. As a writer, we're trained to get in the heads of people that aren't like ourselves. That's what we do. That's one of the main things. But in this specific case, I knew I couldn't write this story as well as she could, and that she would bring certain things to it that I could never approach. Lo and behold, when I read the story, I'm like, "Those are the things." I could point to them. Say, this is what Mary Robinette brought, that I didn't even know I was missing. Otherwise, I could have maybe faked it.

[Dan] Yeah. A lot of times we just don't know what we don't know.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] What's the name of that story, if people want to go look at it?

[Brandon] It's called The Original.

[Dan] The Original.

[Meg] Something that's been really hard during the pandemic is working all alone at my house with my cats who don't know the first thing about moviemaking.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] Because I usually get to do it at a studio with all of my friends who are very good at making movies and TV. So I really like working in a collaborative environment with other artists because when you just get stuck on something, it's really easy to reach over and be like, "Hey. What's wrong with this picture?" They can, like, literally tell you, "Oh, your composition's off." You need to like lower your camera, or fill it out, or all these other jargon thing that I could fire off 50 times in a row.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] It's very fun because at the storyboarding level, we're all on even footing, we're all like this portion of the team is we're [off and days?] Oh, wait. Am I allowed to sing copyrighted…

[Dan] You are totally allowed to sing copyrighted things.

[Meg] Probably not. So one of the things I value the most out of collaboration is building elements of trust with the artists that you know and admire. That it's easy to ask for advice and it doesn't feel like they're criticizing you when they give you ideas and feedback.

[Dan] Yeah. That's something that I've seen with Brandon as we worked together on Apocalypse Guard and now on Dark One. We know each other very well, we know each other's creative process very well, and we know each other's strengths very well. So it's easy for me when he says, "Hey, the ending to this absolutely doesn't work." I can think, "Yeah. You're right. It doesn't. You're better at endings than I am." That's one of the reasons why we work so well together.

[Brandon] Yeah. You shore up one another's weaknesses. Right? Like, Dan is really good at voice. The reason I went and brought him onto Apocalypse Guard, which we haven't released yet, but we're going to…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] Is the voice was broken. Dan's the best person I know when it comes to writing narrative voice for a character. So I went to Dan and said, "Dan. Help." In that specific case, because the book was broken and I'd pulled it from the publisher because I couldn't get it fixed. Now the ending of that one was also broken. So Dan fixed the voice, but Dan's like, "I don't do endings."

[Laughter]

[Dan] I mean, I do, just… Technically. But…

[Brandon] You have lots of really great endings.

[Dan] What I don't do are Brandon Sanderson endings.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Which are distinctly different in flavor. So, to make sure that works. We're actually… Now, we forgot to tell you this in our intro. We are currently at LTUE.

[Cheers]

[Dan] That was very hesitant cheering. We actually read from… An excerpt from Apocalypse Guard at this con two years ago.

[Brandon] Two years ago.

[Dan] It's still not published.

[Brandon] Still not published. This is my fault, not Dan's.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Dan kicked it back to me and said, "I fixed the voice. The ending's still broken. You need to fix that." I'm like, "I do."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But the whole point is I don't have time to work on things anymore.

[Dan] Yeah. Which makes it tricky.

[Brandon] Which makes it tricky. But we will find a time.

 

[Dan] Okay. Now, Meg, we did not prep you in any way for this, but we do want to do a thing of the week in the middle. This can be something of yours you've worked on. It doesn't have to be a book. It could be a book you've read by somebody else. It could be whatever you want to recommend for people to go out and see.

[Meg] Okay. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but I deeply enjoyed Arcane on Netflix.

[Dan] Yes.

[Meg] I mentioned before about how TV schedules are so crunched. They had five years to do their storyboards for their episodes. I only get six weeks at a time per episode. So I was both blown away by the artistry and also incredibly jealous of like the flexible creativity everyone showed. I would check out Arcane. It's an animated series inspired by the League of Legends videogame, and it's on Netflix now.

[Brandon] They cheated though. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] When you have League of Legends money, which Riot did, and they just said, "We're going to make our own show, and you're going to publish it." People are just like, "Okay. We don't have to pay any money for it. Do what you want." So they just… They spent through the roof, and just made the cool thing that they wanted to make, because they wanted to make a cool thing. It's off a budget that no one would ever pay for that.

[Meg] Yes.

[Brandon] Except for the people who are like, "We don't have to care. We have League of Legends money."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, it shows. It's… The music in that show, and just how they integrate the music original songs by big bands and thing. It's just really cool.

[Meg] [Provo loco], Imagine Dragons.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] Now, kind of germane to our discussion, usually when someone roles in with a ton of money and says I'm going to make whatever I want to make and screw you all, it often turns into a very self-indulgent kind of piece of nonsense. It didn't in this case because they were willing to listen to each other. They didn't have to listen to Netflix, but they listened to each other and said, "Okay. Let's tone down these things. Let's make sure that everything lands as perfectly as possible."

[Brandon] Yeah. That's what made it work. Right? Like, League of Legends is… Has the advantage that it's not one person rolling in with a bunch of money, thinking they know how to tell a story and then not doing it. It's a videogame company, which is another big collaborative environment where everyone knows and understands they need to collaborate, deciding to make something together and therefore being willing to collaborate to make it good.

 

[Dan] Yeah. So, Meg, let's ask then, what are some of the pitfalls of collaboration? How can it go wrong, and how can we avoid those things going wrong?

[Meg] It's very easy to disagree over creative thing. Because all creativity starts internally, and it's very hard to make it something external from yourself. I think the biggest pitfall is… I don't want to say infighting, because that sounds way more dramatic than it is. But...

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Squabbling.

[Meg] Yeah. Taking a creative disagreement and making it feel personal. Sometimes you just have to take one or two steps back from what you're making. It's almost like you have to shut the feelings… Turn down the volume on the feelings part of your brain in order to talk things through with someone. I don't think great art comes from argument. Great art can become an argument. But if you're not enjoying your collaborative process, you will forever look back on the thing you made with the same negative feelings that were stewing while you created it.

[Dan] Brandon, do you have any collaborative pitfalls?

[Brandon] I mean, that's a really…

[Dan] Juicy stories about when you and I went at each other?

[Brandon] Good one. Well, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We don't, actually.

[Brandon] [garbled] The first thing I had to do in order to collaborate effectively was I had to let go. Right? The first of these I did was The Original, which I pitched earlier. This was an interesting experience for me because I had had the story in my head for years. I had been planning to write it, I had an outline, and I just could not find the time, couldn't justify it. For whatever reason, it was never the right project to do. Then I thought of this, and then there was a moment that I'm like, "But if I do that, I don't get to write it." That actually is… It's… Painful is the wrong term, but there is something there where it's like giving the other person permission to let it be theirs, too. This is a different kind of collaboration, because I have a thing and I'm giving it to someone else. But I think this is a really important thing. If… Our mutual friend, Kevin J. Anderson, once tells the story of collaborating… I'll leave out the other collaborator. But Kevin was going to write with another author. He wrote with this author, and he came up with something really cool, and he gave it to the other author. The other author's like, "Nope." Put it aside and wrote it again from scratch. Kevin's like, "Why did you bring on a collaborator if you're just going to do this?" The other author's like, "I realized that I just can't let go. I know how this story's supposed to go in my head. You can't do it because it's not in your head. I just have to do it my way." So you have to be excited by the prospect of what the other person's going to bring, not expect the other person to do the things the way that you exactly would do them.

[Dan] Exactly. I would add to that, that clear definitions of responsibility or domain have also helped a lot. If you know that it is one person's job to do the outline, and a different person's job to do the first draft, or however it is that you divide things up… The way that Brandon and I are like, "Well, you are going to do this ending, and you're going to do this other part." Then we know that we're less likely to step on each other's toes.

 

[Meg] It's very enamoring to think of the idea of a solo, solitary creator that's an absolute genius. Everyone else around them is… If we're talking about filmmaking, that you have a director who's just head and shoulders above everyone else, and everyone on the team just bows to their will. There's no way that a single person can create every aspect of a movie themselves. Even if they have a say in everything that goes on, there's no way they can fabricate all the costumes, there's no way they can location scout all of the places. So the idea of a genius solo creator on a collaborative project is a myth. Because they're not a creator, they're a dictator.

 

[Dan] Exactly. That is a great note to end on. Meg, what homework can you give to our listeners?

[Meg] Listen, you're going to have to find a buddy.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] So, your homework is to find one of your friends and pull up an old idea that maybe you haven't been able to get off the ground, or the nugget of a new idea you're not sure which direction to take it. It's to sit down with them and talk it over. Figure out with them what the next step on your story is going to be.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/24/17-17-writing-in-the-public-domain/

 

Key Points: So, what's in the public domain that you can use? Make sure what you are using is in the original work, not created by the media. What's public domain? Anything older than 96 years. You get to use an established universe, and you can bring out lesser-known aspects and characters. Retelling is fine! Remember, writing builds on shared understanding. Twists play off audience expectations.

 

[Season 17, Episode 17]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing in the Public Domain.

[Brandon] 15 minutes long.

[Gama] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Gama] And I'm Gama.

 

[Dan] We are here at LTUE…

[Cheers]

[Dan] Very excited to be here, recording live in front of our home court science fiction fantasy conference. We have Gama Martinez with us. Gama, you've been a friend of ours forever. We're so excited to have you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

[Gama] I am a writer, obviously. A runner, a diver, I dive with sharks all the time…

[Dan] What?

[Gama] Yeah, I volunteer at the aquarium. I dive with tickling shark tanks.

[Dan] Okay. I thought you just like broke into the aquarium.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] This is the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium?

[Gama] Yeah.

[Brandon] Cool. I didn't know that that was you.

[Dan] Yeah, I didn't know… Well, we're not going to talk about the other thing. We'll just talk about sharks.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] No. You pitched this, and I think it's a fascinating idea. Because the public domain at this point does include a lot of really cool stories, fiction, characters, all of this cultural background that we might be very familiar with that is actually totally legal to just tell your own stories about. You are publishing a book about…

[Gama] It is called God of Neverland. It's set 20 years after Peter Pan, where Michael Darling asked to return to Neverland to help save Peter Pan.

[Dan] That's cool.

[Brandon] It's very cool. I have read it. I got an early copy. It is… You're even kind of… The worldbuilding's really cool. Because it's, like, Peter Pan, you find out very early in the book, is, like, this ancient God, a trickster God, that Peter Pan is just one of his incarnations.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It delves into mythology and things. It's really cool.

[Gama] So, yeah, in Celtic mythology there is a God called Maponos who is an eternal child, and is a personification of youth. So I'm like, "Oh, that's perfect."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah. I thought that connection was just awesome. It propelled me through the whole book, just that single idea, landed so well for me. The book is great, too. It's not just that idea.

[Dan] So, Peter Pan and Celtic mythology are both public domain.

[Gama] Yes.

 

[Dan] If somebody wants to write with public domain characters, such as Peter Pan, what are some considerations that they need to take?

[Gama] The big thing to be careful of is that what you are using is part of the original work, and not something created by Disney or another movie company. The third book in this series, for instance, is going to be based in Oz. But what a lot of people don't realize is that the ruby slippers were not in the original book. They were silver. They were put… They were made ruby in the movie because they were just doing color movies and red popped out more. So, I can't use ruby slippers because that's not public domain, even though the Wizard of Oz is.

[Brandon] Yeah, it's really odd was Sherlock Holmes, right? Because the estate of Sherlock Holmes has somewhat successfully proven that certain elements from Sherlock Holmes are not in the public domain, even though early stories of Sherlock Holmes are in the public domain. So, they'll like sue if the friendship between Sherlock and Watson is as it's represented later in the books instead of as it is early in the books. Which is really an interesting distinction that is a little intimidating, I think.

[Gama] Yeah.

 

[Dan] So, is there an easy way of learning this stuff, or is it just do your research?

[Gama] Anything before 96 years from now is public domain. There's some gray area between…

[Dan] Before 96 years from now?

[Gama] Well, 96 years…

[Dan] Anything older than 96 years?

[Gama] Yeah, that's exactly it.

[Dan] Okay. So, for example, what are some Peter Pan things that I'd probably assume are original, but are actually Disney creations?

[Gama] The crocodile's name is Tick-Tock.

[Dan] Okay.

[Gama] That is not in the book. The crocodile is not named in the original. Obviously, a lot of the songs.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I assume all of the song.

[Laughter]

[Dan] None of them were original in Barrie. What about, like, aspects of the lost boys? They all… Did they all dress up like squirrels and stuff in the original?

[Gama] No, they didn't. Now that you mention it, no, they didn't.

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Gama] They were just boys who had… In the book, they had fallen out of their cribs. The reason they were only boys is that girls were too smart for that.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Oh! Okay. As the father of three of each, I agree.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's absolutely correct.

 

[Brandon] This topic's going to grow increasingly relevant in the coming years. Because so far the Sonny Bono act, which extended copyright, has not been re-extended. I don't know if it's actually called the Sonny Bono act…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But that act that was… That extended copyright protections in the 90s. Everyone is expecting Disney to fight to re-extend it. So far, they haven't. They were a big motivator behind it happening in the 90s. So, for instance, Batman and Superman are going to be entering the public domain within the next 10 years or so. If this doesn't… If something doesn't happen. Right now, the people who are watching this are saying if Disney's not going to join this fight, then it's going to happen. Which means that you will be able to write Superman stories if you want. But this can only be the issues of Superman containing elements from the ones that were the first year that Superman was out, and then, the next year, the next set of issues will enter the public domain and certain other things will enter. So it's going to get real interesting about 10 years from now when there are unlicensed Batman and Superman movies that start getting released.

[Gama] Right. Originally, Superman couldn't fly.

[Brandon] Uh-huh.

[Gama] He could leap tall buildings in a single bound.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah. No, that's legit. A lot of the villains, the iconic villains, will not enter because originally Superman was not fighting Lex Luther, he was fighting generic 20's mobsters. So it's going to be a real interesting thing when that starts happening.

 

[Dan] Yeah. I can't recall the specific outlets right now. We'll try to find this for the liner notes. But there are… I have seen announcements come through almost every year of, "Hey. These are all the things that are going to enter public domain this year." 96 years ago is not very long ago in terms of our cultural history and our pop culture. I mean, was 96 years ago? 20 something… 20… Bleah, I can't do math, I'm a writer.

[Brandon] Yeah. It would be the 20s.

[Dan] 28? Yeah, the 1920s. So we're going to start getting all kinds of… Like, it's only another decade or so before we get Captain America.

 

[Brandon] Entering this year is Winnie the Pooh. A. A. Milne.

[Dan] Winnie the Pooh. Everyone get out there. Be first on the Winnie the Pooh train.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the big one. But there is an Agatha Christie novel entering the public domain. There is some Faulkner and some Hemingway entering the public domain. Not as big franchises there as perhaps Winnie the Pooh, but…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But kind of interesting to see these things now that that expansion has run its course.

[Dan] People have been waiting for William Faulkner to enter the public domain…

[Brandon] Yeah, my William Faulkner…

[Dan] With bated breath.

[Brandon] As I Lay Dying cinematic universe…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Is up and ready to go. Just various people in their caskets, monologing about their deaths.

[Dan] Okay. So you were just reading us a list you were scrolling through your phone. Where did you look that up, so our listeners can look it up?

[Brandon] I googled "entering the public domain in 2022" and took the first hit.

[Dan] Oh. Well, there you go. That's…

[Gama] So that means it's actually already in it, because all the stuff goes in when the year starts. So Winnie the Pooh is public domain now.

[Dan] Winnie the Pooh is already out. Jump on it.

[Brandon] Don't quote us on that. Go get a second source, because it was a five second Google for me.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So if you write it and then you get sued because you're a year early because this list said it will enter next year and I just didn't read that, you can't blame me.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Well, you can, but I will dispute that.

[Dan] Yeah. The audio evidence that he has told you this is there.

 

[Dan] Gama. You're our book of the week. So, once again, tell us not only about your Peter Pan book, but where people can find it.

[Gama] God of Neverland would be in all book stores. It's being released by Harper. Like I said, it's 20 years after the original Peter Pan. The audiobook is by Simon Vance, which I am really excited about.

[Brandon] It… If you're looking for [tones], again, I read it and really liked it. It has about a mystery thriller feel to it. It's like lots of interesting sort of detective-ish things. Detective adjacent, would you say, Gama? It's not really a detective story.

[Gama] Right. Yeah.

[Brandon] But thriller-esque.

[Gama] Yeah, definitely.

[Brandon] Sort of feel. Very fast-paced, very seat of your… On the edge of your seats sort of stuff.

 

[Dan] Cool. All right. So, let me ask another question then. What is the value of… Maybe this is super obvious. What is the value of using a public domain character or setting rather than just making everything up on your own?

[Gama] You have a whole established universe to play with, and then you can find the lesser-known aspects of the story and bring those out. Unlike writing media tie-ins, you don't have to get permission for that. So, like I said, you have this really big expanded universe. There is one thing that's like in the epigraph of Peter Pan, it talks about a little old lady with a crooked nose and a house. She becomes a major character. You can expand on little-known parts of stories that everyone knows about.

[Dan] That's very cool. This would also, I assume, include retelling, right?

[Gama] Oh, absolutely.

[Dan] That you could do "This is Peter Pan, but it's cyberpunk in the future, and it's all gritty, and everyone dies."

 

[Brandon] It's interesting for you to ask this question, because narrative… When we are writing stories, we are always building on a shared understanding. Even if it's just a shared understanding of story structure and things like this. A lot of what we do as writers to make things feel fresh and original is we are in some ways twisting that structure. We are playing off of audience expectations. You can't have a twist in a book if the audience isn't expecting something else to happen. That's the definition of a twist. Because of that, anytime you have something shared in a narrative with the reader that you can expect they will understand, you can play with it. Gama does an excellent job with this in his book. It's one of the reasons we like… Like, when someone gives you a pitch, "It's this, but 20 years later and with this twist," you're building on that shared narrative. That is just really fun. That's the way that we make interesting twists and interesting takes. Like, even when I will pitch Mistborn, I'll say, "Oh, Mistborn is a cross between My Fair Lady and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the pitch I used to give when people knew Crouching Tiger a little bit better, right? Because it was new. It's a ninja story. My Fair Lady, the ninja story. That works because you know My Fair Lady. You're like, "Oh. My Fair Lady, but with magical ninjas." That is just a cool twist. It's a cool take. It lets you give these really efficient pitches.

[Dan] That's awesome. Cool. Well, Gama, we have really loved having you on the show.

[Gama] I was glad to be here.

 

[Dan] We've been so organized the last several years that we haven't had the opportunity to do what I'm about to do. Which is, with no warning whatsoever, say, "Gama, what's our homework this week?"

[Gama] Your homework is to find something entering the public domain and write a story about it.

[Dan] There we go. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, as is Winnie the Pooh. Now go write.

[Laughter]

 

Writing Excuses 17.15: Storytelling in the Footnotes

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/10/17-15-storytelling-in-the-footnotes/

 

Key points: Footnotes may just add worldbuilding and flavor to the text, or they may add twists or even a whole second story. A version of story within a story, which can talk to the reader and break the fourth wall. Be aware that some readers may not read them! Think about how you want to handle them in audiobooks. Footnotes affect pacing, too. Footnotes work best when they are a story, too. If there's a reason for the footnotes, then readers are more likely to read them.

 

[Season 17, Episode 15]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Storytelling in the Footnotes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We're talking about footnotes today. Footnotes are something that shows up in a lot of different kinds of writing, mostly academic. But there are some really wonderful examples where footnotes are themselves used to tell a story in fiction. That's what we're going to talk about today. Peng, once again, I'm going to throw this to you to kick us off. Why did you suggest this one, and what can we learn about storytelling in footnotes?

[Peng] Well, I think footnotes are a really interesting structure because they are... There's actually two structures for footnotes. One of them has to do more with giving additional worldbuilding and flavor to the text. The other one has to do more with twists. So the first way that you can use... That you can structure your story around footnotes is to use the footnotes kind of like in an academic setting, like you said, where you are adding little tidbits of extra information, whether it is something about the setting or something about the history or the characters. It can be a really neat way for you to get in worldbuilding that you just love, but it doesn't fit in the main text or maybe there'd be some readers that it might be too much for. Then, on the other hand, you can use footnotes in a way that they form a sort of frame around… Actually, I guess it would be the other way around. You can use footnotes in a way that the main body of the text becomes a frame, and the real story is actually within the footnotes. So that's where you reveal some kind of information, or, like, a contradiction or a secret. Where… So if you just read the body of the text, that's one story, and it's just the surface story, or if you read the footnotes, get this whole other layer of what the real story really is.

 

[Howard] My high bar for this is Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens where… There's an opening scene where babies are being swapped around so that we can have the antichrist be raised by American politicians. But there are three babies there. At one point in the narrative, it says, "You'd like to… We'd… You'd probably like to think that baby C is adopted out to a nice house, this surplus baby, and grows up to be a chubby child who wins prizes for tropical fish or something. Yes. That is a much nicer story than what probably happens baby C." All right. 70 or 80 pages later, we're introduced to a chubby kid who wins prizes for his popular… For his tropical fish, and there's a footnote that says, "We liked your version better."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I love it so much because they put paid on a joke in the footnote and had me spinning a story, and then they completed the story and told me that mine was better. Even though… No, I didn't actually tell that story. They did. But they convinced me that I had told it. It was… It was wonderful.

[Dan] Uh-huh. Yeah. In a lot of ways, this… Telling stories in the footnotes is a very specific version of the story within a story that we already talked about. Where the story within is… Takes place in footnotes rather than some other thing. What does the footnote specifically do to change that story within a story?

[Peng] Well, the footnote… So if you have story within a story, it's just existing within the world of the frame. But with a footnote, depending on who's the writer of the footnotes, you have an opportunity, which is really fun, I think, to talk directly to the reader and kind of break that narrative fourth wall. That can be really exciting for readers to read, and it also... It can make them feel more involved and make them more likely to investigate and keep reading your footnotes.

 

[Mary Robinette] It can function as an aside, which is the way actors would handle it on stage, where they just stepped to the side and say something directly to the audience. There is a caveat though that I have with footnotes which is that some readers don't read them.

[Peng] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So when you're structuring it, I think that you have to think about whether or not the story will survive without the footnote. In part, I think about this… Or if you want to treat them as an aside. One of the reasons that I think about this is because when I'm doing audiobook narration, and run into a story with footnotes, we have to have a long conversation about how those footnotes are handled. Some of the footnotes, some books, the footnotes provide some interesting supporting detail, but are not central. These, we often just don't record them. Some of them, we treat as an aside, where we just briefly break in and say, "Oh, and by the way. Narrator. They were not happy."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Some of them… I haven't done one of these myself, but a colleague of mine did this, they recorded all of the footnotes and put them at the end.

[Peng] Oh, no. But that's…

[Dan] That is fascinating.

[Peng] Then you wouldn't get them at the right moment, though, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah yeah.

[Peng] Because you wouldn't know where to jump in… Or could you skip forward in an audiobook and then skip back?

[Mary Robinette] I have no idea how they did that in the end, if it was… Like, if they were tagged so that you could jump back and forth. But, yeah, it is… It's a… They made them all end notes instead of footnotes.

[Dan] That's… I'm glad you brought this up, because I was going to mention the difficulty that it brings. Because with a footnote, what you're doing is very specifically playing with the physical form of the novel, in a way that doesn't necessarily work in audio. The Squirrel Girl books by Shannon Hale, I adore. I find them delightful and hilarious. They're filled with footnotes. They are mostly just an opportunity for extra jokes. But, now that I am reading one of these to my kids, I find that the footnotes… Excuse me. The footnotes, which were so delightful when I was just reading to myself, have suddenly presented me with this challenge that I have to break and I have to find some way of calling out while reading aloud, oh, and there's a footnote that says this. Given now that so many books… I mean, a traditionally published novel, more than 40% of its sales today is probably audio. So that is something to think about if you're going to play with something like this that is so intrinsic to the physical book itself. You need to think about is it worth this… Creating this problem for 40+ percent of my readers.

[Howard] Yeah. We have to… We have to address this problem pretty soon with the Xtreme Dungeon Mastery version 2 book. Because Tracy Hickman is getting ready to record the audiobook, and there are footnotes throughout. I think what I need to do is frontload the decision for Tracy and say when you come across a footnote in the text, don't read the footnote number, you just pause, take a breath, and say, "Note 7. Robert Kobayu published an essay about random numbers are much too important to be left to chance. It's a serious article, but the title is ironic." Then take another breath and go back in. Like the aside. But I don't know what Tracy is going to be comfortable with because Tracy's the one who has to do the reading.

 

[Peng] I just had this really… As we were all talking about audiobooks. What if, depending on who was the writer of the footnotes, you got a different narrator for that? Then they could break in with a really intimate kind of, like, here's my aside, here's what I have to tell you about this moment in the story, and then it goes back to the other narrator for the body of the text. I could see something like that maybe being a possible way forward.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think some people might… Like, that would be an interesting thing to try. The way you structure the narrative breath, when you're going to pause for something, is different than if you're reading straight through. So if I were told that I was going to be reading it straight through without doing the footnotes, and someone else would be doing the footnotes, I wouldn't build those pauses in.

[Peng] I see.

[Mary Robinette] Which is, also, I think, a thing to think about as you're writing them, that any time you do the footnotes, you are… It's a way of affecting pacing as well. Because your causing the reader to jump to the bottom of the page and then jump back up, find a place, and continue. So you are breaking that flow. So, making sure that you place the number that causes them to jump in a spot where you want that pause is… The number of times where I've, like, hit a footnote… Like, I've read to the bottom of the page, and then seen that there was a footnote that I missed and had to go back up and figure out where it was…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I think that those happen because the writer has put it at a spot where there was not a kind of rhythmic pause on the page.

[Peng] Yeah.

 

[Dan] Let's take a break from talking about footnotes and go into something that is completely unrelated, but wonderful and delightful.

[Giggles]

[Dan] Mary Robinette, tell us about our book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] Footnote. The reason we're doing this is because I have a new book out. So, Molly on the Moon is my first picture book. It is the story of a little girl and her family who move to the moon. She has some conflicts with her little brother. They've moved to the moon and they can only take one toy each with them. So when there is conflicts over the toy, as childhood rivalry happens, it also happens in a place with very low gravity. Interestingly, although when I said, "Let's talk about my book because it's out now," one of the decisions we had to make was about how to handle discussions about gravity. I attempted to get it into the text itself, to explain to 3 to 6-year-olds how lunar gravity works. Instead, we just did an author note at the end. Which is basically a one long giant end note. But I am certain that there are going to be parents who are reading it who are still just going to have to create a footnote. Now I'm sitting here going, "Oh, I should have put a footnote in…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "For the parents." The parents could just be like, "Oh, here's the information I need to give my child right now." Now I'm wondering if there are picture books with footnotes, that someone in comments is going to be telling us all about that and speedily typing right now.

[Dan] All about… Well. So everybody go out and buy Molly on the Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal.

[Mary Robinette] Illustrated by Diana Maya, and the illustrations are gorgeous.

[Peng] That sounds…

 

[Dan] Okay. We've talked about some of the difficulties that footnotes can present, especially with audio and with reading aloud. Let's set that aside, call that discussion for another time, and talk about all the good things that footnotes can do. Why would we want to include footnotes? What can they add?

[Howard] It was so much fun when we did the Planet Mercenary role-playing game book. The whole book is an in-world artifact, in which the printer accidentally left document comments on when exporting to print. There is a 1200 word short story about a bunch of writers in a horrible situation trying to get a book out the door. It has corporate politics and murder and kitten and all kinds of things in it. Yes, it is entirely possible that I was channeling my own experience at trying to get this book out the door when I wrote this. But it's one of my favorite things I've done. It's just a white room story told in document comments as you turn pages in the book.

[Peng] I think that might really be the key to making footnotes a structure that can work for you rather than an element of structure that readers might skip over. You risk them not really giving them the attention they deserve is when the footnotes are, like in Howard's story, they are the story. So it's not the main body of the text. That's almost the footnote, in a way. So what you're really reading for is the information that's in the footnotes or the little comment bubbles off to the side. So, I think if your story can work in that way, footnotes are definitely a benefit for you there.

[Mary Robinette] I think they can also, in addition to that, that they can also really enrich, make the world feel larger. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has wonderful copious footnotes that really expand on the sense of this being an actual magic system that is well rooted, and it gives all of this additional information that I found deeply enriching. My understanding is they totally skipped them in the audiobook. Which is a tragedy. Since, for me, much of the joy of that novel was the footnotes. The other example that I can think of in terms of giving a sense of no, no, no, but this is real, is the Jane Austen mysteries by Stephanie Baron. The frame… So, these books incorporate two things. One, they have a frame story, which is that they have found Jane Austen's missing diaries and, in the real world, her sister Cassandra excised portions of her letters and burned some of them. It turns out, when you read these mysteries, her supposed diaries, that it is because she was doing spy work for the Crown and also solving murders. The author, the actual author of the book, is pretending to be the editor of the book, and so has put in footnotes. It'll be things like, "You can see in this scene where Jane took elements of it and later incorporated it into Pride and Prejudice." You're like, "Yeah. Absolutely. I totally… Wait. No, no. That is the opposite order."

[Laughter]

[Dan] I love that conceit. I've seen it in some other stuff, though nothing comes to mind. The idea that what you're reading is actually an annotated book…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I suppose that's how Princess Bride is written.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] It's filled with annotations. I am adapting a pre-existing work, and we're all going to play along and pretend that this is not my original product, but that I am commenting on it.

[Mary Robinette] I desperately… When I read that, I desperately tried to find the original Princess Bride.

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Same. Did you mail in to get the real kissing scene?

[Mary Robinette] No. I didn't know you could do that.

[Dan] Yeah. There was a thing that's like, "We've cut out the kissing scene… Or Morgenstern cut it out, but I have written one and you can mail in to get it." I mailed in, and they're like, "Actually, because of copyright reasons, we're not allowed to give you our version of the kissing scene."

[Mary Robinette] Oh!

[Dan] Which was just a delightful real world thing. I actually… My girlfriend in the freshman year of college, we met because we had both mailed in to try to get the real kissing scene…

[Laughter. Garbled]

 

[Dan] Which is delightful. Let me ask one more question. How important is it, and I can think of examples that go in either direction, so maybe the answer is it's not. How important is it to have a reason for the footnotes? In the case where we're pretending that these are editor annotations, then clearly there is a reason for the footnotes to exist. But something like Squirrel Girl, it's… The narration is all from Doreen and the footnotes are also from Doreen, just making extra jokes. Is there some way to help… That an author can look at their work and decide which direction they want to go with their footnotes?

[Peng] I would say that the more important to the story your footnotes are, it's probably better, or more important to have a reason, so that your readers are more likely to be like, "Okay, that's a legitimate reason for having footnotes. I guess I'll read them." Because if you just have the footnotes there, you just run the risk of readers reading them or not. So if they're not integral to the story and they're just funny jokes or they add flavor, maybe you could risk not having a reason. But I think a frame, especially if your footnotes are really important to the story, that will help make them feel like they belong.

[Howard] Yeah. In putting together XDM version 2, second edition, we… Most of the footnotes are just a little bit of enrichment, a little bit of humor, whatever. But some of the footnotes are really important stuff. We talk about the kishotenketsu story form, and the footnote says, "All the people working on this book are Westerners. We had to decide whether it was cultural appropriation to include kishotenketsu or cultural erasure to not talk about it. We decided to err on the side of appropriation because we feel like it's better for you to have this information. Go to the appendix where we link you to better sources." That footnote doesn't tell a joke. But that footnote is very important because it expresses something that we all felt while we were writing about that story form.

 

[Dan] Excellent. Well, we have gone over time because this has been such a fascinating topic. But, Peng, you've got the homework for us.

[Peng] I do. Your homework is to go find and read the short story Stet by Sarah Gailey which… It is available online at Fireside magazine. We'll put the URL in the show notes. So read Sarah Gailey's story Stet. Then, take a short story that you like or that you wrote yourself and try adding footnotes to it in a similar way. By which I mean try to add footnotes that either expand the story text that is being told or reveal some kind of a twist or new information or a contradiction by burying the real actual story within your footnotes.

[Mary Robinette] Footnote. Stet is a Latin word meaning let it stand used in proofreading to indicate that a previously marked change is to be ignored.

[Peng] Love it.

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/27/17-13-structuring-around-a-thing/

 

Key Points: Building your story around a map, place, date, or other thing can help your story in various ways. E.g., a map tells the reader where you are going, or a date gives you pacing. A deadly maze. This kind of structure may be especially helpful for pantsers, since it gives you a kind of automatic outline. Be aware that when each chapter is a new location, sometimes you need to flesh out the locations more to support the story. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 13]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring Around a Thing.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Today were going to talk about structuring around the thing. Whether that thing is a map or a location or an object or a whatever. Peng, I find this an absolutely fascinating idea which I can think of so many examples of, but it had never occurred to me that it was a type of structure. Talk about it a little bit. What do we mean when we say structuring around a thing?

[Peng] Yeah. So there are several different types of things that you can structure around. So, like you said, a map or a place, for example, like everyone is contained within a spaceship or a train, or you can structure around something that's got a set of rules, like a game, or some kind of a built in countdown, like a date that we're headed towards. So all of these different types of things that you can structure around will benefit your story in a different way. We can talk about the different types. But, for example, if you've got a story that you're structuring around a map, that will automatically give your readers a little bit of an idea of where you are like literally going. Versus, if you're structuring around something like a date, like a countdown to a date, that will give you kind of an automatic pacing bonus, I think, because if you know where the story is ending, then you know exactly how far you have to get there. It will just create this like natural propulsion that will pull you through towards the end.

 

[Mary Robinette] I just realized that Dan's Makeover does exactly that thing.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It is structured… Every chapter begins with a countdown to the end of the world. So, yeah, congratulations, Dan, on using a structure you didn't realize…

[Dan] A structure I didn't realize was a structure. Yeah. I did that on purpose in part because I… It helped me to keep the timeline correct when I first built the book. I wanted to make sure everybody knew when things were taking place, how long… How much time had passed between chapters, and things like that. But structuring it specifically as a countdown to the end of the world helped me set proper expectations for the book, which still surprised a lot of people, because we're accustomed to happy endings and everyone thought I was going to save the world. Nope. We've been counting down to the end of it since the very first chapter. This is how it's going to end.

[Howard] I told you what was going to happen. Why are you mad?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This does not count as a spoiler, since he tells you at the beginning of the book. End of the world comes. But there's… So there's… The calendar that the all of these… But there's a specific trope in science fiction, often in science fiction, which is sometimes called the deadly maze. Where… A really classic example of this is Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds, where they go in, and they have to get through this tower, this alien artifact. So each segment is getting deeper into the artifact. You'll see other examples of this. Planet Fall by Emma Newman also has an element of that. I think it's… Again, it's not something that I've thought about as a way to plan my structure, but it is absolutely… There, I think also there are elements of that in Piranesi which was last week's book of the week, which is a really interesting idea of using that… The physical constraints of something to also… To affect your story.

 

[Peng] Yeah. I think it's especially helpful for, if you like the term plotters versus pantsers. I would describe myself as a pantser. I think it, this kind of building your story around the thing, especially if it's location-based or time-based, can really help you figure out where you're going if you're not very good at outlining, which I'm not. So there's another really great example. It's called… I think the whole series is called The Tower of Babel it's by Josiah Bancroft. The first book is called Senlin Ascends. The main character's name is Senlin. It's about a husband and wife that go to the Tower of Babel. Which, in this book, is this kind of like giant part, almost… Like, it's huge, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of levels. Of course, they get separated at the beginning. One of the last things she says to him is, "If we get separated, meet me at the top." So he spends the whole book trying to get to the top. It's just such a great device, because you… Even though you don't know, whether you're the reader or the writer… So I was thinking about it as a writer, the whole time I was reading this book. So, even as a writer, you don't know exactly what you're going to do on every level, you know your end goal, which is to get to the top and hopefully find your wife. But you've got… It's just such a great structure, because the Tower of Babel has, I don't know, say 100 floors, and you're going to go so many floors every chapter, or so many floors every book, I think, because it's a four book series. So it's just such a… It's like an outline just gifted to you.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Yeah. The movie Diehard is structured in a similar way. Not that it is a quest to the top, but it's so easy to watch the movie and think… I've written scenes that way before, where I'm like, "Okay. They're in this building. They cannot leave it. That means they have these resources, they have is this method of moving around, they have these restrictions. How am I going to get them out of here?" For a writer, it really is, like you said, it's like having an outline just gifted to you for free in some ways. Because you get to think your way through that location in a way that is not only kind of… The restrictions make it both easier and they force you to be creative and they also make it very relatable. We've all been in a building before. We know how they work. So we can kind of, with John MacLean or with these other characters, kind of think our way through, well, what would I do? If I were stuck in a building with terrorists? I think it's no accident that after Diehard came out, the action movie genre exploded with a million Diehard clones. This is Diehard but on a bus. This is Diehard but on a cruise ship. This is Diehard but in a small town. Where they were very location based, because that makes the story a little easier to tell and also very relatable.

 

[Mary Robinette] Another really kind of fun thing to base a story around is a deck of cards. I have someone… I wish I could tell you to go read this, because… But it's not published yet. But one of my… Someone that I… Another writer that I know is working on something for each story is actually based on a tarot deck.

[Peng] Oh, cool.

[Mary Robinette] It's working through this tarot deck. Cecilia Tan has a spread… And we'll put the Storyteller's Tarot spread, where she takes a deck of tarot cards and puts down the spread which has the left-hand which is the path of change and the right hand, the way things are going. So literally uses a tarot deck to help her plot her novels. Sometimes. We'll put the link in the liner notes to her blog post about it. But it's really interesting to think about that kind of thing. The artifact as a way to find your way through something.

[Dan] Yeah.

 

[Howard] There's a feedback aspect to this that I'm super aware of because I'm usually doing the space opera version of this, which is… Each… The story is location-based and each location is a new chapter. Occasionally I'll realize we only went to this location because it was the only place where this piece could unfold. But I didn't flesh it out enough. It's not… This location doesn't feel real yet. It doesn't feel like… I, as a reader going through this would think, "Well, that was lazy. We should have just found a way to do that task at one of the other locations. Why is this chapter even here?" So when you are using structuring around the thing is a structure, you may realize that it's reflexive and you have to look back at the thing and make the thing more fleshed out in support of the story you're trying to tell.

 

[Dan] Let's pause here and do our book of the week. Peng, you're going to talk about The Flanders Panel.

[Peng] Yes. The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I think it's from 1990 or something, so it's a little bit older. But it's a perfect example of building your story around the thing. The thing in this story is a chess game. So it's about this… She's a young art historian. I think her name is Julia. She's hired restore this 15th-century painting that depicts a couple of players locked in a chess game. While she's working, she uncovers this kind of like hidden inscription under the paint, and it says, like, "Who killed the knight?" Or who killed… I think it's who killed the knight. So she realizes that… Because she starts to investigate the work more. She realizes that the chess game that's depicted in the painting isn't just a game, but it's actually a riddle, like a puzzle, that was constructed to answer that question. That somebody in this painting was murdered and the pieces, the chess game, is the answer to who did it. Then, of course, as she starts to dig, her own friends start to turn up dead one by one. Then somebody starts sending her advice for chess moves to continue the game in the painting. So she has to figure out how to win the game based on the moves that she already has before… Basically, before the killer gets to her. So in the book, every couple… It's usually like every chapter, every time Julia decides to make a move… The next move, the author has included a diagram of the chess board with the move done. So, you can follow along with the game as you read and watch how the pieces move. So it's just… It's just incredibly addictive, especially if you play chess. But even if you don't play chess, you have… We're all vaguely familiar with check, and then checkmate, and then that's how the game ends. So it's just such a great… Perez-Reverte uses the structure of this book by focusing all around this game, so you kind of know… You know where you started and then you can follow every chess move and then you know where you're going to end, because when the game is over, either she's won or not.

[Dan] That sounds so cool.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] It's a great book.

[Mary Robinette] I am very excited by this.

[Peng] It's a wonderful book.

 

[Dan] All right. Well, let's hear some other examples. What are some other books or stories you can think of that have been structured around the thing, and how has that affected the story itself?

[Mary Robinette] I'm actually going to jump in and try to do a practical example of how you might explore this idea. Because, as we've been talking, you'll note that at the beginning of this sequence, I talked about how I was struggling with The Martian Contingency. So, for us, in real time, only about three hours… Two hours have passed since I said that. But, for you, it's been several weeks. But as we've been talking, I'm like, "Ah. In The Martian Contingency, one of the things that's happening is that they are building the new base on Mars. An interesting structure that I might… That I find… That hadn't occurred to me as a way to structure it is as they build each module and it unpacks. Because what that would allow me to do, and I'm talking my way through it hopefully is a useful representative example, also because I'm excited. But what that might allow me to do is every time they get a new module built, another set of the passengers, the colonists, come down to join. So it's going to be… Wind up being this… It would wind up being… Making it a little bit more expansive each time with a larger cast of characters. It would also allow me to pace adding in the hundred people that I need to bring down to the planet, without overwhelming the readers all up at the front. So it would allow me to start with something kind of familiar. Anyway, this is very interesting. But this is the kind of noodling that you might find yourself doing as you're listening to these episodes, that if you're stuck on something you might go, "Oh, wait, wait, wait. This could let me do this thing." What were you going to… Peng?

[Peng] I was just thinking… My greatest fear would be that somebody says something brilliant during this podcast, and then I just totally tune out, because I'm like, "Oh, my book…" And then I forget to say anything else.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, it happens to me.

[Peng] I mean, it would be great. Like, I really want it to happen, but also I don't want to…

[Dan] I would so much rather have people listen to their own muse than to me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Dan] What you're describing, Mary Robinette, really sounds to me like the way that a lot of boardgame rules are structured. Where there's almost different tutorial levels. Like, here, play through this little scenario of it. Now, we're going to add in this new thing, this different deck of cards were this extra board for this thing that will make the game more complex once you've mastered these first little bits of rules and concepts. So now I'm thinking about how I could structure a book around a boardgame rule set or a tutorial for a videogame kind of thing.

[Peng] Yeah.

[Dan] Slowly increasing the complexity over time.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, that's what Jumanji is, right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Peng] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] Yeah, the first Jumanji movie, we know we are at the endgame when someone has rolled the dice and could land it right on the finish line. You know, it's right there. It's a progress bar.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] So…

[Dan] The recent Jumanji movies have done the same thing with a videogame. They establish right up front, these are the rules of the game, this is how this works, this is how your powers work, this is how many lives you have, and then uses that structure throughout once it's set the expectations to create humor, to create tension, to let us know what their end goal is. Peng, this was a really good topic.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan] I am delighted that we had a chance to talk about it.

[Peng] Well, thank you.

[Howard] I hope our audience has had half so many epiphanies…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] During the course of the episode as we've had.

 

[Dan] Howard, you have got the homework here. Tell us what we're going to do.

[Howard] I have got the homework. I'm going to open first by saying that in reading Peng's notes for this episode, I realized that my current work in progress has two things, two elements, which can function as structural cues, structural scaffolding, for the plotting. One is the chassis that an AI has just been allowed to move into, and the other is the space station, which is an agglomeration of smashed together spaceships, so the architecture is very different from module to module. I realized that both of these can function as ways for me to pace and structure the story. Your homework is to look at your work in progress and identify a thing or things, whether it's a map or a boondoggle or a MacGuffin or whatever. Thing or things that can function as a structure to help you unfold the story.

[Dan] All right. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/13/17-11-structuring-with-multiple-timelines/

 

Key points: One way to use multiple timelines is to dramatize backstory, telling it in scene rather than in an infodump. Flashbacks, in media res. You can use multiple timelines to feed the reader information, or for pacing. Do beware of killing progress with in-depth flashbacks. Sometimes you may use the past timeline to legitimize something to the reader. You can also compare and contrast the two timelines.

 

[Season 17, Episode 11]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring with Multiple Timelines.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're multiply in a hurry on several timelines.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] I'm getting carried away.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Howard.

[Dan] That was Howard, by the way.

 

[Dan] So, last week we talked about multiple POVs. Now we have multiple timelines. Which is a much more overtly structural thing, or more obviously structural. Peng, when… Where do we start here? When might it be a good idea to use multiple timelines, and how do you do it?

[Peng] Oh, I love multiple timelines. I think they might be my favorite structure technique. But, so what I think multiple timelines are great… Well, they're great for a million things, but one of the biggest benefits to using multiple timelines is if you've got a story that has… It's got, like, an old buried secrets that come to light years later type plot, and it's a really good way for you to dramatize back story in scene instead of having to just info dump it. Because if you've got this huge back story that happened decades ago, you don't really want to just throw that right there in the beginning or have a big section that's separated from the rest. You want to be able to weave it in really well. One of the ways to do that is to go back and forth between this back story and do it in scene as opposed to just having like an info dump. I think a really great example of that... Has everyone read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon?

[Dan] I have not.

[Peng] Oh, it's a gre… Well, put it on your list. It is a book about basically a little boy who when he's reeling from the loss of his mother who's just died, and his father takes him to the cemetery of lost books, I think it's called. He says… It's basically a secret bookstore and everybody who goes there gets to choose one book and you have to take care of it for the rest of your life and it's yours. So he ends up choosing a book by a mysterious author and he falls in love with it. He decides that he is going to find more of this author's work because the book is just so good. But it turns out that all other copies of every other book has been destroyed. So it's this mystery about who destroyed those books, where is the author, what happened. So as the boy goes on this investigation, rather than just having big info dumps of what he finds out at every stage of his investigation, which is what you would do if you did the whole thing in present, just one timeline, we end up every time he comes upon a new epiphany, we jump back in time and we get that epiphany as it happens in narration rather than as a something just being told back to him. It works so well, it makes the past just as compelling as the present.

 

[Howard] I wanted to take a moment to just pin some terms down. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has introduced us to the idea that timeline means multiple realities. But for the most part, what we're talking about here is a single timeline that has multiple pointers on it that we will be jumping into and visiting. Current time, flashback, in media res, that kind of thing. Now, that said, Terry Pratchett's… Oh, I forget which book it was. It was one of the Vime's books. Has a forked timeline in the climax. It happens when Vime takes his magical day planner thingy and drops it into the wrong pocket in his trousers. It's described as the trousers of time, and they're in the wrong pocket. There's this war going on that he has been trying to stop. In the timeline he's in, he's successfully putting a stop to things. His day planner is now on the other timeline and keeps beeping things about our favorite characters dying. It's a fascinating way, here in the multiple… In true multiple forked timelines, to say, "Congratulations. You chose the better one."

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] This… Another really good example of this is the one that I used as a book of the week a couple weeks ago. The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina. What the book's plot is kind of sort of about is the inheritance that this grandmother leaves to her family includes a debt to some kind of very mysterious, very dangerous person. If we had gotten everything in chronological order, the life of the grandmother growing up and then all of the family trying to deal with it after the fact, we would already know everything about that mysterious person and the danger that he represents before the family comes into play and struggles against it. So, by jumping back and forth between these two periods of history, we get to discover with the family all of the things that are happening at the same time that we get to see them happening to the grandmother in the past. So having the chapters alternate back and forth is this really smart structural choice that doesn't give away the ending before it matters.

[Mary Robinette] So, you just said that we get to see it happening at the same time that we're seeing something else happen. I just want to remind readers that even when we're talking about a nonlinear storytelling, like multiple timelines, that your reader is still experiencing things in a linear fashion. So as you're thinking about this, recognize that one of the tools that you're manipulating is when you are feeding them information. You're also using it to control pacing, as well as… So it's not just about now we get this thing, now we get that. It's also a way of controlling a lot of different pieces. So when you're… I'm going to flag a danger with multiple timelines. Which is, sometimes flashbacks can stop progress in a story while you sit down and explore something deeply. So when you're thinking about this, remember that you also want to make sure that whatever timeline that we're jumping into carries tension, that it's still serving as a good interesting story in and of itself, not just a way to try to mask an info dump.

[Howard] My rule of thumb on this is that if there's going to be a flashback, the flashback should be an answer to a question that just landed on the reader, rather than an opportunity to ask a new question or don't new information so that the story can move forward. I've found that… Yeah, the flashbacks that I hate, the flashbacks where I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to go get a sandwich," if I'm watching on TV, are the flashbacks where it has arrived and I didn't want it because it's not answering a question I had.

 

[Dan] All right. We are going to pause here for the book of the week. We've got a really awesome one this week because it is Peng's book. Peng, tell us about The Cartographers.

[Peng] Yay. The Cartographers is my second novel. It is a story about mapmaking and family secrets. It follows Nell Young, who's a young woman whose greatest passion is the art of cartography. She's been… She's spent her whole life trying to live up to her father who's the legendary cartographer, Dr. Daniel Young. But they haven't spoken for seven years since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her professional reputation over… It was during an argument over an old cheap gas station highway map. When the book kicks off, her father is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library with that very same seemingly worthless map hidden away in his desk. So, of course, Nell can't resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map holds, like, this incredible deadly mystery. So she sets out to uncover both what the map and her late father have been hiding for decades. It is a… It's coming out right about now. It comes out on March 15. I'm really excited for everybody to read it.

[Dan] Well, awesome. That sounds great. So that is The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. So go look that up. Go buy it. Do your thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Okay. Let's get back to our…

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to say, Peng is a heck of a writer, so you are in for a real treat with this.

[Peng] Well, thank you.

[Dan] Absolutely.

 

[Dan] So. What are some other… We talked about using multiple timelines to provide information. What are some other good uses of multiple timelines in a story? When might you want to do this?

[Howard] I think one of the most fascinating and easy to consume examples is the movie Julie & Julia, which follows Julia Child, the beginning of her career in the 1950s, and a woman named Julie Powell who created a blog in which she was going to try and cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook. This story bounces back and forth between the 1950s and the early 2000s. Directed by Nora Efrain. It was actually Nora Efrain's last movie. She wrote it, she directed it. It's a beautiful way to tell two different stories, each of which if you're familiar with Freitag's triangle or the narrative curve, each of those stories has its own narrative curve to it, and by jumping back and forth between the two of them, we increase the tension, we increase emotional investment, we reach our climaxes at the same… At about the same time. It's a delightful film. Also, just talking about it has made me hungry.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] Another really good example is Vicious by V. E. Schwab. Each scene begins with something like 10 years before, five minutes before, three days before. It's… They're absolutely… There's no linearity to when those hop in. But it does this thing of enriching the world and deepening the character motivations. It is a structure that makes me deeply jealous.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because I'm like… I don't have any understanding of how you write something like this. One of the things that I think that she does, which gets to Howard's earlier point about making sure that you're answering a question that was just dropped, is that she doesn't always do that. But she has built trust with the reader so that you understand that if we are doing this jump, that there is a reason for it, and you'll understand it later. But she has built trust by setting… By, at the beginning, that that's the way it's going to work.

 

[Peng] I think another really good way that multiple timelines can be used is this same sort of, along these same lines as answering a question. If you've got a story in which you have something that you need to sell to the reader that's a little bit difficult to believe were you think you're going to have trouble getting them to buy, whether it's like a worldbuilding aspect or it's a plot point or something about a character, if you put that into the past timeline, just by putting it there, the existence of that history or of that previous mention is kind of automatically legitimizing. So, it sort of works the same way as if you've got a legend in the story. The more times you mention a legend or the more times you mention something about magic, the more it just starts to feel real and believable, just through the repetition. So a lot of times, multiple timelines will have that same effect, where if something… If you tell the reader that something has happened in the past, it just automatically makes it more believable. It's a really easy way to sell something to readers that you need them to buy for the present narrative.

[Dan] It's so weird that… The way that works. Because you're absolutely right. Everything in a fantasy book, for example, is just stuff we made up. Right? But it's… The idea that this has happened before… If I tell you it happens now or if I tell you it happened 10 years ago, either way I just made it up. But that 10 years ago thing does really kind of hack the reader's brain into saying, "Oh. This is very unbelievable, but if it happened 10 years ago, it must be true."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Then that helps us kind of suspend our disbelief of it a little better by setting an artificial precedent. It's so weird that that works, but it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Extending that trick, if you say, "Oh, this exact same thing happened 100 years ago." Yeah, wow, that's kind of cool. But if you say, "This exact same thing happened 122 years ago, only it was in the summer instead of the winter." Holy crap. I am so onboard.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Wow. Because now… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, Wheel of Time…

[Dan] There's a specificity to it.

[Mary Robinette] Wheel of Time is based on…

 

[Dan] There's one more example I want to mention really quickly, just because. It's the movie Frequency which is about a father who is a firefighter and dies in a fire and his son who grows up to become a cop. The story is told with watching them both when their about the same age in life, scenes inter-cutting back and forth, but what's different is that through a weird quirk of science fiction, they actually can talk to each other and the two timelines interact with each other over the radio. It's a really interesting take on this narrative premise.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. While we're doing examples, there are two that I want to just throw in there because they are structurally so different and interesting. One is Firebird by Susanna Kearsley. It is both multiple timeline and multiple POV in that she has a character who's in I think the 1500s and one who is in the early 2000s. Those characters never interact. Their stories are connected only by one artifact that they both possess. It's this… It's just… It's a beautiful meditation on time and place. But what she does by going between those two timelines is that the contrast between them also makes you appreciate the commonalities, the things that don't change over time. She's a… It's beautiful, beautiful writing. The other one which is completely different structurally is a picture book called When I Wake Up by Seth Fishman. It's a kid wakes up in the morning and says, "Today I could…" And the story splits into four distinct timelines, each color code… Each are happening simultaneously on the page and color-coded. So I could go to the park. I could make breakfast for my parents. I could… It's this beautiful thing of like this is how my day… It's basically sliding doors for a kid in four timelines with colors. It's really lovely. But, it is, again, it's… What I like about each of them even though they use different versions of the multiple timeline is that they are exploring the texture of contrasts.

 

[Dan] That's awesome. All right, Howard, bring it home. What's our homework?

[Howard] Okay. Your current work in progress. Look at adding a second timeline, time stream to it. A couple of ways you can do this. Take a character whose back story perhaps you haven't told yet. Write a fun back story for them and find a way to weave that into the existing story bouncing through multiple timelines. Alternatively, you might take your current work in progress and the ideas you have for your second book and see if the first book story could be told as a flashback in the course of the second story. But, dig in and try to do this. I don't want to make it easy. Drill into it and break some things and when they are broken, step back and say, "Howard, you're a jerk. You did this to me." And we will all have had fun.

[Dan] That sounds great. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/27/17-9-lets-talk-about-structure/

 

Key points: Beyond Freitag's Triangle, Save the Cat, Truby's 22 steps, and other overarching story frameworks, what are the specific techniques that fit into these narrative shapes? What is the writer's version of copying the masters? Sometimes you have a story, character, setting first, and then try to find a structure to fit. Other times, you have a structure or element of structure, and need to develop the other parts. Think about what is the important aspect of the story, and how can the structure enhance that. Look at what you are trying to do, and think about what structure can help bring that out.

 

[Season 17, Episode 9]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, our structured deep dive class, Episode One, Let's Talk About Structure.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We have a brand-new class starting, eight episodes, we're going to talk about structure. You've heard us talk about structure a lot, so we wanted to bring in Peng Shepherd to get her take on all of this incredible stuff. Peng, tell us about yourself.

[Peng] Well, first of all, thanks for having me. My name is Peng. I am a speculative fiction writer and the author of The Book of M, which came out in 2018, and The Cartographers, which is coming out in March.

[Dan] Well, excellent. Thank you very much. Now, we are starting today to talk about structure. This is your class and your outline. Where do you want to start in this structural discussion?

[Peng] Well, I think we should just talk about… We should just talk about structure in a kind of general way just to open this deep dive series. I also just want to say how important it is, I think. So what I really want to do with this series is go beyond the Freitag's Triangle, Save the Cat, Truby's 22 steps, these really big overarching story frameworks and look at structure much more closely as really specific techniques that can fit into these really big general narrative shapes that often get talked about. Because I think that structure at this level of detail gets overlooked a lot. We spend a lot of time as writers talking about plot and character and world building, but we don't often give structure the same level of attention. It's just something that sort of happens naturally to a lot of our stories. But I'd like to talk about ways that we can be a lot more intentional with structure as we write.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I was excited about when we were talking to you and bringing you in for this was exactly that, we tend to go back to the same things. So, two things that I wanted to say. One is that I asked Peng to come because I've been working with her for the past couple of years doing programming for the Nebula conference. When I was president, she was in charge of that with Erin Roberts and [K. M. Szpara]. So, it's really nice to have someone with this kind of breadth of knowledge of the industry. The other thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is one of the reasons I was so excited about this topic, is the idea of structure in general. When we're talking about things like Freitag's triangles, Save the Cat, all of that, what we're really talking about is something in art that we call copying the masters, where you take an existing structure like what you used to do as an artist and sometimes still do is that you would take a painting and you would make an exact copy of that painting as a way to learn the techniques. Another related thing that you would do… Can do is you would take a painting and draw circles around the major elements. Then remove the original painting and put your own elements into the structures, into those circles, to kind of copy their compositional structure. I think that a lot of times what happens to us as writers is that we are constantly copying someone else's structure as a kind of reflex. It's like, "Oh. I've found Save the Cat." That works. It works every time. Except that it… The problem with that is that it gives you… The problem is something that can give you repeatable results is that you are always going to be repeating the same kind of story. So what I'm excited about with this is that we're going to be talking about a lot of different structures, which is going to really broaden the kind of story that you're going to be able to tell.

[Dan] Yeah. I… On my other podcasts that I do called Intentionally Blank, we did an episode about Encanto, the movie, which follows… Which ignores a lot of what we think of as kind of structural norms, because it is based on Latin American magic realism. Which does not follow a lot of the structures that we think of. It's been fascinating to have that conversation with a lot of people in the audience who, some people thought, "Oh, this didn't work. The ending didn't land. It's because they were expecting one thing and got another. Other people in the audience were very thrilled by seeing something that was so new and different that they hadn't seen before. A lot of that just comes from using different structural techniques. There is not one way. I do think, and I'm guilty of this myself, we often teach that the existing structure that we use is there because that's just how brains work. It isn't really. It's a cultural artifact. There are lots of different ways of doing it.

[Howard] Yeah. We talked about this at great length in the setting expectations class we did at the beginning of this year, end of last year. We talked about how when people recognize the beginning of a structure in a work that they're consuming, whether it's a movie or a book or whatever, you've set their expectations for that structure unfolding per formula through the rest of the work. If you're not seeing that structure, they will often be disappointed. It's which is what some people who saw Encanto experienced. That doesn't mean that it's wrong. It means that we haven't yet educated the audience to set expectations for a structure they've never seen before.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. A lot of structures exist for reasons that aren't… That are just kind of encoded. Like, the three act structure that we are all very familiar with, one of the things about that is when you listen to… When you really unpack what's happening with the three act structure, it's like, well, there's a beginning, and then there's a middle, and then there's an end. That's not actually all that useful when you really dig into it.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm wondering if we should actually pause for a book of the week, since I think we are about at the middle right now.

[Dan] Yeah. I think that's a good idea.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of structure.

[Dan] Let me take that one. I've got our book of the week this week, which is actually another magic realism novel called The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina by Zoraida Cordova. She's been on the show before, and she's a really wonderful author. This is the story of a magical family with Ecuadorian roots, but living in a place called Four Rivers in Oregon. The grandmother, the matriarch of the family, calls everyone together right at the beginning of the book to tell them that she is dying and they need to come and collect their inheritance. This being a magic realism novel, the inheritance is not money, it's several other things both good and bad that spin out over the course of the novel. It's told in multiple timelines, we get the modern stuff interspersed with the life of the grandmother as she grows up. The woman, Orquidea. It's a really wonderful book. I'm absolutely loving it and I recommend it very highly. It does have a very unique structure. It's not following a lot of the rules that we expect. It's very surprising and delightful to not see so many things coming. So, anyway, great book, check it out.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm particularly interested in this whole topic, and I'm about to ask Peng a question. Because I am in the process right now of working on the outline for the Martian Contingency, which is book 4 in the Lady Astronaut series. The structure which I used for Relentless Moon was the seven act structure that… Seven point plot structure that Dan teaches. It will profoundly not work for what I want to do with the Martian Contingency. I've been like trying all of these different structural ideas to try to figure out exactly what the framework is that I'm hanging the thing I want to talk about, the thing I want to explore in the story. So, Peng, what are some… When we're thinking about structure, what are some of the implications that are there for us when we start looking at how to pick one of these, a different structure than maybe one that we're used to working with?

[Peng] Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think there's two ways to come at it. Because there are some writers who probably come up with a story or a character first, and then you have to figure out what kind of structure to use, which is what it sounds like is happening for you. The story and the characters are already really, really set. Then, on the other side, you could come up with… Or just have a structure or an element of structure that you really want your work to center around, but you don't have anything else yet. It's sort of like you come up with the character first or the premise first or the setting first? So, I think… I don't know which is harder. They're both hard. If you come up with the structure first or you come up with the characters first. But I think that if you've got the seed of a story, you've got the seed of the character, and you're trying to figure out what type of structure would be best for that, you first have to ask yourself, what is the most important aspect of your story that you're trying to explore? Is it the character or the relationships between characters, for example? Because then you might want to consider structures that focus on that, like multiple timelines or multiple perspectives. Or is the thing that you're trying to emphasize most the world or your world building or the setting? In which case, you might want to focus on a structure that is built around… And we're going to talk about all these in depth in future episodes. But you can focus on a story that's built around a specific thing in your world, or stories that have footnotes. Or, if the thing that you want to focus on the most is maybe like a twist, if your whole story is built around a twist, there are different structures that lend themselves really well to that kind of reveal, more than others.

[Dan] In a lot of ways, I feel like what we're saying is similar to the episode we did last year with Amal about poetic forms. That there's lots of different forms of poetry, whether it's a Shakespearean sonnet or a sestina or something like that, and the form you choose will help guide the poem itself and the impact that it has on the reader. We often think that there's only one structure and we have to use it. That's not the case. There's lots of different ones. Like Peng was just saying, the one you choose can help draw out elements of your world building or your characters or the twist you want to focus on or things like that. They can change the pacing and the tension. I think that's a really great point to make.

[Howard] One of the things that I… And I do it instinctively at first, and then I fall back on craft when I realize I'm doing it. If I've come up with a fascinating setting or a fascinating… A location or a thing or a technology or a plot twist or a character, I will begin structuring the story I want to tell around how our understanding of that thing unfolds. If it's a character who's undergoing transformation, then… Are there beats in that transformation? Well, those beats become structural landmarks around which the story paces itself. Are we exploring a location? Well, the geography becomes kind of a map to the structure. Once I realize that I've started doing that in my head, I take a couple of steps way back and say, "All right. Does this map onto an existing structure that I know how to use? Does this map onto seven points? Does this map onto kishotenketsu? Does this map onto… What does this map onto and how can I use it?" Usually I don't catch myself soon enough, so there's lots of slop.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… I was actually just thinking about kishotenketsu, which is the first time that I really… When we… I had talked about, oh, there are other things, like the rule of three is very Western, but other places it's the rule of five, the rule of nine. But until we did the episode with Dong Won Song, where we looked… Did a deep dive into Parasite, the film, and they were talking about kishotenketsu, I hadn't really thought about what… How that worked and why that film was so satisfying. So in that structure, you have… It's a four act structure. You have interaction, ki, development, sho, twist, ten, and conclusion, tetsu. It's… It is… It's really satisfying, and one that I'm… It's the one that I've been thinking about, contemplating, for Martian Contingency. But it is this thing where there are so many options out there that it's just exciting to be talking about this.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, I… Before we end, I want to point out that this doesn't have to be a massive sweeping thing. It could be something much simpler than we're making it sound. For example, Avatar The Last Airbender, the cartoon. It is split into three seasons, each of which follows one of the major nations that's involved. We get Water, and then Earth, and then Fire in season three. That, like Howard was saying, that's just the geography of the world and the world building influencing how the story is told. So, just thinking in those terms, you can come up with, well, why did they use three seasons? How did that fit their story? Well, it allowed them to explore each of the three extant nations. The Air doesn't get one because it doesn't exist anymore. So that's… At some level, that's what we're saying. Look at what you're trying to do and see what structure is going to help bring that out.

 

[Dan] Anyway, we've gone slightly over time. So let's throw this to Peng. What is our homework for this week?

[Peng] Your homework for this week is to pick a favorite book with an interesting or unusual structure and see if you can identify how the author's chosen structure enhances some aspect of the story, whether it's the tension or the plot or character development.

[Dan] That's wonderful. Thank you very much. We will be back next week with more talk and some specifics about structure. Between now and then, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/13/17-7-dissecting-influence/

 

Key points: Dissecting influence, aka learning from the things that inspire you. Find what you love, then take it apart and figure out how it works. What do you need to do to practice that? Look for commonalities, themes that call to you. Approach your self corrections with a generous heart. Pull feelings from your inspirations, and feed them into your work. Trust your voice. To avoid being too strongly influenced, go adjacent. Remember, no one can do me like me. Do your research ahead of time, and let it settle.

 

[Season 17, Episode 7]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Dissecting Influence.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart. 

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] This episode was pitched to us by one of our guest hosts, Megan Lloyd. Megan, take it away. What are we talking about?

[Megan] Today, we are talking about dissecting influence, which is, how do you learn from the things that inspire you. You've seen the masters of their craft create masterpieces. You want to make one of your own. What are some tips and tricks to studying how other people do the thing?

[Howard] Part of the problem is that I don't get to see them make the thing. I get to see the thing.

[Laughter. This is true.]

[Howard] It's… I mentioned this in the expectations intensive. I talk about the Dirk Gently TV show. I don't know what that writers' room looked like. I don't know what the outline looked like. But it has… It is incredibly influential to me, because of the way all of the things connect. I want to be able to build that. But I don't get to watch it being built. So how do I learn? Tell me, Meg, how do I learn from it?

[Megan] So, you've got to take the thing and you literally have to dissect it, cut it open and take all the little pieces out and you have to break it down into little bits and find out, okay, why do I like this is much as I do. While you can't see them make the thing, you may have to reverse engineer it a bit yourself. Because, I believe how they would make it and how you would make it would be very different, but you're coming to the same purpose. So, I come at this, I'm both a writer and an artist, working in the animation industry, so a lot of the references, a lot of the work that I like to look at is other visual art. So I look at something and be like, "What do I love about this? Do I love the thin line art, or do I love how they depicted the light?" A lot of what I do is, in my sketchbooks, I also write out lists of things I like and what do I need to do to practice doing this thing.

[Sandra] One thing that's coming to mind for me… Back when I was coming back into being a creative person, after a very fallow period, I kind of stopped writing when my kids were little for about nine or 10 years because I was fullbore mothering instead of being a writer. As I was coming back to creativity, I discovered a hunger for visual inspiration. Which was exactly when Pinterest launched. So I was doing Pinterest boards. They've reconfigured now, and Pinterest no longer works for me in the same way. But I was just collecting images. I was just listing… I like this, I like this, I like this. The fascinating thing about having it collected all into one space is that then I could suddenly see patterns. I could see that so many of the images I liked had an implied journey in them. A boat about to launch, a path through a wood. I realized, oh, wow, here I am trying to launch a creative career and I'm being drawn to images with an implied journey. You could pull the same thing with… If you take a look and say, "Well, I love this show, and I love the show, and I love this show. What do these shows have in common?" One of the things that I discovered I really love is a sense of comradery and found family. So you can discover what are the themes that call to you. Then, once you know what… That helps you begin to decipher why do I like this thing, what is it that draws me. Then, how can I then make sure I pull those themes into my own work.

[Megan] Yeah, I think that's a… Aggregation of themes is really helpful. I know that I definitely use that as my compass when I'm looking like… About when I want to make stuff is like first gut instinct, oh, my gosh, I love this, it resonates with me. How does it work? Sometimes, I think that like being outside of the writers' room and things like that can be a benefit in that way. Because if you're with the person, sometimes… There is a certain level where you need someone, like a mentor, or you need mentor text or things like that. But there's a point where it's not helpful, because you just do what they say without knowing why, without knowing how it connects. You're just following instructions. Versus, like opening the guts of something and, like, rummaging inside. I mean, like, "Ahah. I see. This connects to this, which makes this happen." Like, with characterization, looking at… Or with worldbuilding, like Avatar The Last Airbender, I will always bring it up, because I love it. One of my favorite things is Katara bloodbending. That was such a genius extension of how the world works, and it resonated with me so powerfully because it did the thing that I love. I dissected it, and was like, "What is it that… Why do I love Katara bloodbending so much?" I realized because it was going a step deeper, answering questions they hadn't answered before about how waterbending works. Like, yeah, there's water in blood. We've seen Katara bend her own sweat before. We've seen her bend the water out of a cloud. Like, how does that apply? It's not that we didn't talk about it before. Like, the medium was hiding it or anything. It's that we hadn't gone into it. We had… No one had asked that question before in the world at that point. I… That's why I learned like going deeper with your magic system can be very satisfying. Especially to people who have been following something and become fans of it. Whether… They started to ask themselves questions like that. It's like addressing what people might want to write fan fiction about. You're like, "Yeah. That exists. Right? Aren't you excited?" You're like, "Oh, my goodness, I am."

[Sandra] I can't remember, is Toph's metal bending before the bloodbending or after? Because it's like, one, they fold into. It's like, again, both going deeper. Well, if Toph can metal bend, then Katara can bloodbend. So you've set things up.

[Megan] It's before, because that's Toph's… That's the culmination of her storyline in the Earth book. Because Got, water, earth, and fire. Then Katara learns from a displaced water tribe woman in the Fire Nation.

[Yup. Yeah.]

[Sandra] But again, it's going deeper both times. I love it.

 

[Howard] The salient point here is not that worldbuilding by extrapolation, extension, logical conclusion is how you should world build. The salient point here is that is a thing that you loved about Avatar, so now that you know you love it, you can pick that influence apart and you can see how you want to apply that principle into your own work.

[Kaela] Yes. It's, in fact, something that inspired that principle, being able to go deeper like that, that I pulled out of Avatar the Last Airbender or something, that I'm using in the sequels to Cece Rios and The Desert of Souls.

[Howard] Cool.

[Kaela] So… Great application.

 

[Megan] To jump ahead into how do you implement this in your own work with the same level of love and interest that you take something that you love that inspires you and being able to break it down. What do I like about it? What do I not care for? Being able to approach your own work from a… I don't want to say scholarly or clinical, because honestly, we love what we do, but being able to search your own work for places it could improve without knocking yourself down as you do it. So instead of critiquing your own work, but just trying to go through and like plus and improve your own work. So always approach your self corrections with a generous heart.

[Sandra] I love… I think it's very, very easy, because the world teaches us that we should be humble and we should not toot our own horn or whatever. It's very easy to approach your own work, and, like, apologize for it is you're talking about it. I instead love it when I see creators who are just like super excited. Fanfic writers tend to be really, really good about this, because there really, really super excited about this cool thing, and they just let themselves be excited. So… When you… If you can carry that from your inspiration you're talking about. You're inspired by this thing because it excites you or it makes you cry or whatever, and if you let yourself have those same emotions about your own work, that's a beautiful way of carrying the influences and expressing them again.

[Megan] One of the reasons why I like to use the simile of dissection and study is the goal is not to plagiarize someone. The goal is not to trace someone's art to learn how to draw, or retype someone's book to learn how to write. But it's to find the familial similarities between what you love and what you do, and try to put the creative juice in your brain to think up new ways to implement your own skills.

[Sandra] Yeah. It's like you said, reverse engineering to figure out the principles that they use that you can then use. Like, if you know… It's… So you figure out the rules on a very personal level of how and why something works so that you can then use it to your advantage.

 

[Howard] I think, coming back to the worldbuilding example, I think that's why this is so important, because we talked about extrapolation in worldbuilding on Writing Excuses before. Okay? That is a principle that you can lift out of Writing Excuses and probably any number of books on writing and worldbuilding and whatever else. But if you dissect the things that have influenced you and you find that as a thing you love, now that's a principle you own. Not just something somebody has written down for you.

 

[Howard] Let's have a thing of the week. What's our thing of the week?

[Megan] I'm suggesting the thing of the week this week, which is one of my favorite things. It is the YouTube account called Sakuga which will be in the liner notes, but I'll spell it out here. Hobbes Sakuga. This YouTube channel is a collection of the very best cuts of hand-drawn animation compiled into category specific videos. So, like, 20 minutes of just special effects hand-drawn animation or sword fighting animation or dramatic character acting. Usually, when I'm stuck on a specific thing, I'll just sit and watch, well, how did 20 other of the world's greatest masters accomplish it. It gets me… Gets the brain moving and the juices flowing, and it helps me when I go back to my own drawing board.

 

[Sandra] This is a thing that comes very, very naturally to like dancers or musicians, the idea that you just need to go through the motions over and over until you create a muscle memory. You can do the same thing as a writer or artist too. Because you have to draw things over and over. But, writers, you can also create that in your own head. So if you need to write a love scene, maybe go watch some love scenes to get your head into that space. Pull that feeling from your inspiration, so that you can then feed it into your own work. That sometimes creates an anxiety, the influence, like, oh, no, I'm copying. But that's where you trust your own voice, because every dancer can tell you that even though you're practicing over and over and over the steps the choreographer gave you, each performance becomes different. Becomes your own as you do the dance.

[Megan] Well, it's like the difference between strawberries and jam, right? Like, yeah, you're watching strawberries, but you can turn it into jam. You turn it into something else by boiling over it, by stewing over it, by making it into something new. Now, it still tastes like strawberries… It's still romance.

[Yup]

[Megan] But it has turned into something new, because it's… You have delivered it in a new way. You've done it thoughtfully by having boiled on it and stewed on it. Strange metaphor, but it was the first one I thought of.

[It's okay. Chuckles.]

[Howard] Now I want strawberry jam.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] How do we deal with anxiety of influence in light of this? Because I know there have been times when I was worried… I would not watch something because I would worry… I worried that it would influence me and I'd find something in it that I liked and that thing would just flat out end up in my own work. How do we avoid that?

[Sandra] For me, go adjacent. If you are writing an action scene and you're worried that if you watch kung fu movies, you will port it directly across, is there some other way that action is expressed where you can get into an action headspace without being so directly… My example is not working.

[Howard] Let me state the problem differently. I didn't watch Firefly on TV because I felt like it was too much like what I was already doing. Therefore, I just wasn't allowed to watch it. It would influence me. Same with Cowboy Bebop. People kept telling me, "Oh, you should watch this. I know you'd love it because Schlock Mercenary is so cool." I'm like, "I don't want to love it. It will undo me, influence me. Go away, stop telling me about cool stuff that is similar to what I'm doing." So the question is how do I avoid that? How do I get to have Firefly and Cowboy Bebop in my life?

[Megan] So, I have a little mantra that I tell myself. It's, "No one can do me like me." Where even though there may be similar elements, when you see the work as a whole with the different theming, the different staging, like Sandra says going adjacent, that… We write for a world that loves what we write. I'm sorry, that wasn't phrased very well, but… We are writing in our genres for genre savvy people. So, I think people may say, "Oh. Another story about an orphaned wizard named Harry? I'm not even going to pick up the Dresden Files. I know this story." You can share elements with different things. But it's the whole of it that makes it your work.

[Sandra] Well, also, if you're writing, for example, space opera, and the only other… You only consume one other space opera, the risk of you porting visibly from one thing to another… But if you have filled your head with 10 or 20 or 30 space operas and then let them all settled before you sit to write, they turn into a stew…

[Garbled jam]

[Sandra] The likelihood that you will steal specific bits becomes less. Because, Howard, your head was full of space opera already. It's just you didn't want to refresh specifically… I don't know. I don't think you're necessarily wrong for deciding to avoid those things at that time.

[Howard] I was a much happier person with Firefly when it got canceled before I'd even started it.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] But, I mean, listen to your instincts. Because if your instinct says that's not the thing for me to be watching right now, maybe it isn't.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Kaela] I would say that I am not careful about that at all. I'm not careful about any of those things at all. Mostly because I love doing my own riff on things like purposefully. But I will say when I was younger and when I was starting out, I avoided it more because I knew I was more impressionable because I didn't have a strong sense of my own voice or how I wanted to do a thing. So, then, I would just… I would make sure I wasn't writing something at the same time as reading something like it or watching something like it. I still read and watch all of those things, but I'd make sure it wasn't at the same time. Because I was very impressionable.

[Megan] Oh, yeah. That's something I want to piggyback off of is when I'm doing a specific project, I'll do all of my research ahead of time. So I'll read two or three similar books before I write one of my novels or I watch a few similar movies before I start boarding a specific scene. But once I do my initial research, unless I'm completely up against a wall and I don't know what else to do, I'll eat jam on toast instead of going to pick more strawberries from that point on out.

[Howard] Now I want toast too!

[Laughter]

[garbled words]

[Howard] Oh, no.

[Megan] But it's the best metaphor.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] Working quite well. Hey, it's… We're 18 and a half minutes in here. Is it time for homework, Meg?

[Megan] It's time for homework. I bet if you been listening to our episode, you might have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to ask you to do. For homework this week, take a slice of something that inspires you. Books, movies, art. Break down a list of the specific elements you find appealing.

[Howard] A slice of something, and of course it's toast.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or thick with jam. Thank you everybody. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.