Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/06/17-6-hitting-reset-without-getting-hit-back/

 

Key points: How do you reset expectations, break old promises and make new ones, without breaking the trust of the audience? Deliver something different and amazing! Yes-and, keep the old promises and make new ones. No-but, break the old ones, but give them a different wonderful experience. Oh, crap. I broke it, and I don't know how to fix it. Dash through the red paint and hope no one notices. Telegraph the change as much as you can, and accept that you may lose some audience. Long-running shows often do a reset during season breaks. Give them a big moment of character change instead of the big climax they expected. And a Big Can of Worms for resetting your career... 

 

[Season 17, Episode 6]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back.

[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] We are talking about resetting expectations. We are talking about breaking promises and then making new ones without actually betraying the trust of the audience. I'm trying to think of a good example of this. It's possible that the good example may be Million-Dollar Baby…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which breaks a promise to the audience, this is a sports movie, by giving us 1/3 act that shows that it's actually a drama about euthanasia, about… It's very dramatic and it's not very sports movie. As we pointed out when we mentioned it earlier, it's got a 90% fresh rating from critics and audiences over at Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe part of this is because it's 15 years old. But it won a lot of awards and it did great grossing in theaters. It was something which broke promises that audiences felt had been made to them, and then delivered something different, but delivered it so well that the majority of the audiences put up with it, they accepted it. They loved it, they came out of the theater… I don't want to say happy, but having experienced something amazing, which is what the filmmaker set out to do. So let's talk about that. What are some examples of things where you feel like the expectations have had to be reset and they did it well?

 

[Kaela] Well, I think that, personally, for me, there are two main movies that come to mind for this. One is Kung Fu Panda Two, which is one of my favorite movies ever, and How to Train Your Dragon, for different reasons, but both of them playing with expectations. I think Kung Fu Panda Two does multiple things with your expectations. For one, it kind of gives you an origin story again, except it's deeper, it's bigger, it's… You're like, "Whoa, I didn't think I was going to get this from a Kung Fu Panda franchise."

[Laughter]

[Kaela] So I think that's the other thing is, tonally, it's a lot harder, it's a lot… It's more explorative of pain, of destruction, of trauma, of working out issues like… Heavier themes than the first one. Like, the first one had a good heart still, but the second one just really dives in there in a way that you wouldn't have expected. But at the same time, I was not like, "Why is my fun movie sad?" when I watched it. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, they do a great job of acclimatizing you." They start out fun and everything too, but they do a good job of acclimatizing you to this is going to be a bit heavier of a movie. It's still going to be an amazing adventure, but it's going to be more emotionally in-depth than the first one without losing you. I don't know anybody who was lost with Kung Fu Panda Two. I think… I know most people just sat there stunned and in awe instead. Not disappointed.

[Howard] Yeah. I was kind of slack-jawed. I was, "Wait. How did they do that?" Usually, the origin story has to come first, and the two movie is a raising of stakes and a new adventure. But you managed to raise the stakes and give me a new adventure and give me an origin story and it's… Wow. It seems to defy… It seemed to defy the number two.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Which was pretty cool. Meg?

 

[Megan] I actually have an example of something that did it badly, that raised my expectations and then turned it on its head.

[Howard] Okay.

[Megan] It's the anime Attack on Titan. Which is about humanity fighting to survive when they are constantly attacked by huge giants who are referred to as Titans. We have are very strong protagonist character who's going to get revenge on all the Titans and he's going to save the world. They kill him off, seven episodes in. I was like, "Amazing. I love this. Now his meek sidekick character is going to have to step into his shoes and become the new protagonist and…" No. Protagonist came back, magically, and with magic powers.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And is so magical now. I was like, "Man. I mean, that's cooler now, but… I wish he'd died."

[Laughter]

[You want a ghost?]

[Howard] Why couldn't you stay dead?

 

[Howard] As I categorized these in our outline, I talk about yes-and, which is a raising of expectations, making new promises while keeping old ones. I feel like yes-and is the easiest expectation reset. Because really, all you're doing is raising the bar. It's not like you've broken promises. No-but is the next one, and that's the actual reset where you had to make promises by breaking earlier ones. Yes, I know I promised you a sports movie, but I'm going to give you an amazing cinematic experience that's going to touch your soul and you wouldn't have come out to the theater to watch this anyway, but it's important and, thank you, everybody, and I'll take my Oscar now. I may be projecting a little bit. The third category is what I call oh, crap. It's the one where I felt like I most often lived in Schlock Mercenary, which is the discovery that you've broken a promise but only after it's too late to fix things. I foreshadowed something and got the technology wrong. Oh, crap. Oh, I can't actually make that work, what do I do instead? So in these three categories, what are our strategies?

[Sandra] I remember watching… Oh, it was decades ago, the making of Indiana Jones. A documentary. So it was like one hour long, the making of show. Listening to Steven Spielberg talk about how when they're writing the scripts, they would actually literally paint themselves into a corner. The opening sequence, Indiana Jones has just run from the boulder, tumbled out, and now he is standing trapped, facing a circle of spears, and there is literally no way to get out. Spielberg basically says, "Well, what you do when you've painted yourself into a corner is quickly duck and dash your way through the red paint and hope that nobody notices the footprints."

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Which is pretty much what that movie does. There may be better tools for this, but honestly, I think of like the Pirates of the Caribbean, I think it's 5, that begins with we're dragging an entire building through the middle of town using a horse-drawn cart.

[Howard] Yes.

[Sandra] It is absolutely completely and totally ridiculous, but basically what it's saying is, "This is the movie you're getting. If you're not on board, just go ahead and leave the theater now." So if you have to reset, any time you have to reset expectations, you're going to lose some audience, you're going to shed some audience who don't make the turn with you. That's just normal and expected. If you need to make the turn, make the turn anyway. Telegraph it is much as you can, so that people are ready for that moment. Okay, we all need to lean to the right. Lean to the right so we can make this turn, and… Now the wheels are back on the ground and we can keep going.

[Howard] There were a lot of turns in that scene where they were dragging the…

[Sandra] The whole building.

[Howard] The bank through the village, and, as I recall, they lost all of the money.

[Sandra] They lost the entire building.

[Howard] In the course of doing that. Yeah. Nice. Good choice of scenes. Nice metaphor. Well played. Bravo.

 

[Megan] There's something, especially in long-running television series, where, in between seasons, they will reset. So it's always sad sometimes when they come back into a season and these characters are now gone, and, oh, no, the set where they spent all their time, that's different now, they're going to spend all their time here instead. Sometimes writers rooms will literally just reset the world and which characters we have and we just never mention it.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Yeah. That becomes part of the expectation of watching a long-running show. You just kind of know that there's going to be a reset. A…

[Howard] Sorry. Let me interrupt you there. That's the experience of someone who has watched lots of long-running shows.

[Sandra] Right.

[Howard] There are plenty of people who watch a long-running show for the first time and as those things happen, they're like, "No!"

[Yeah]

[Howard] No. Because they feel like they've been betrayed.

[Sandra] An excellent reset to examine is the movie Serenity versus the TV show Firefly. Because you have this TV show that only ran for a very short time and then was canceled. Then you have this gap of time. Then they make a movie. In order to… Which is actually a jump in media. It's… A movie is a different medium than a TV show. Which meant that there are different expectations, different language you can use, and in order to make that shift, they had to do some reset. The one that I… That jarred me the most, was that by the end of the run of the show, the doctor character had kind of become reconciled with the captain character as we're a family. When they start the movie, there's a lot more friction between them and it's more like the beginning of the show than the end of the show. They had to do that reset in order to give the proper arcs to the movie, because the movie had to be able to stand alone as well. So, it jarred me, as a watcher of the show, but once I was like, "Eh," it was not so jarring that I was knocked out and walked away. I was like, "Eh, I don't like that, but… Okay. Take me along for this ride." So…

 

[Megan] As an example for the no-but resetting expectations, Avatar the Last Airbender did that to me in, like, the third season. Like, the day of black sun. Because they really built up to it. I was watching this is a kid at the time, about 13-ish. I was like, "It's finally happening." We've had seasons building up to this day, they really built up to it in those moments, too, where they're like, "We're really… This is the day we lay siege on the Fire Nation." It's the eclipse that we risked all our lives to find information about in the previous seasons. This is it. It's a two-parter, and everything, so I was like, "Oh, this is finally going down. We're going to take down the Fire Nation." And it doesn't. It does not pan out. They fail the invasion. Because they already knew and were already ready and just gone. They're shocked and terrified, and I was too. I was like, "What?" But what they did was a great job in that, because otherwise it could of felt like really deflative, where you're like, "Well, great. Okay, but what did we spend all this time for, then?" But what they give you is a bunch of other things that you really wanted and needed, like, most particularly, the Zuko storyline carries out the days of black sun two parts. Having Zuko come in and that's the moment where he decides to defect from the Fire Nation and healthy avatars make his new plan to take down his dad. Like, that ends up making the story worthwhile. So, no, I didn't get like the big climax that I was really prepared for, but I got Zuko's storyline intersecting finally and his big moment of character change.

[Howard] You can argue that we set out to defeat the Fire Nation, and we got the victory we didn't expect, which was turning Zuko.

[Megan] Yeah.

[Howard] So, you can make the argument that you actually fulfilled the promise. I think that's part of how you make no-but work is that you take the new thing that you hand them and say, "By the way, this actually fulfills all of your other expectations." Trust… I'm just going to paint it red so that it looks like what you were…

[Giggles]

[Howard] Yeah. [Garbled a neat] trick.

 

[Howard] We need to have a book of the week. Or a thing of the week. I think Meg's got it.

[Megan] I have a thing of the week that also ties up a lot of the things that we've been talking about in all of the other episodes. This is a Korean drama that I originally watched on WB's drama streaming service, which no longer exists. But you can purchase the show on DVD which I have. The show is called Circle: The Two Worlds or Circle: the Connected Worlds depending on your translation. But every episode is two completely different stories. The first half of the episode takes place in 2017, the other half takes place in the far future. The 2017 story is about these twin brothers who are going to university and there's some strange things going on and they're investigating it. It's a smaller story about brothers investigating a mystery. The future story is high sci-fi, and there's this town where you can only live if there's a chip implanted in your brain that regulates your emotions and there's no pain and no fear and there's no crime. It's about a police detective who is trying to investigate an alleged murder that's happened inside the perfect city. But the guards won't let him in. But it turns out he has a second motive to get in there. He believes there's evidence about two twin brothers who disappeared back in 2017. It's these two completely different stories, completely different genres, and you've got expectations set up for how these kinds of stories work. It's slowly about how these two storylines tie back into each other and influence each other. Circle: the Connected Worlds.

[Sounds cool]

[Howard] That sounds really cool, and I wish I had it on a streaming service right now.

[Megan] Howard, I have my DVDs here in Utah. They could end up at your house on accident or purpose at some point in time.

[Whew!]

[Howard] Well, see now you're making all of our listeners terribly, terribly jealous…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which just doesn't seem like a fair thing to do.

 

[Howard] Early on in Schlock Mercenary, I was writing… I mean, the design principles for Schlock Mercenary were I am not making fun of science fiction in my science fiction comic, the comedy will come from other things. But it was very newspaper humor, dad joke type stuff. Would have fit right in in the age of people collecting newspapers. But this was a web comic. About two years in, the Teraport wars begin, and the stories begin getting bigger. Brandon Sanderson wrote the introduction for book 2, The Teraport Wars, and said, "This is the book where Schlock Mercenary figures out what it wants to be when it grows up."

[Accurate]

[Howard] It very much… This was not a thing that I did consciously. It certainly wasn't a thing I did expertly. But it was a thing I did. I had an existing audience, an existing brand, and I decided to take them from a quick episodic fast beats sort of story to a much larger form story. I got lucky in that I guess the audience was so small to begin with that when it grew, we didn't notice that we lost anybody. But this was definitely a case of something which at the time I began creating it was one thing, and at the time I finished it was very much something else. Even though you still have this blob character and mercenaries running through the core of it.

[Sandra] You had an assist from the fact that web comics are expected to evolve. So there is a genre expectation that there will be evolution which totally assisted in the redirect, which [garbled can be…]

[Howard] Yeah. That is the… That is what we called the low expectations of audiences watching amateurs.

[There's that. Anyway…]

[Howard] Good times. Wow. Are we really already 19 minutes in? What else can we say? I had a… We just need to can of worms this part. The whole career level can of worms of how do you rebrand yourself after spending 20 years as a cartoonist. Whatever I go do next, how do I keep the promises of my old brand…

[That's]

[Howard] Or break them in such a way…

[Another can of worms]

[Howard] I don't know.

[I think we just need to…]

[Howard] That's an old can of worms.

[Garbled]

[slap a lid on that, and say, whoops, can't cover it.]

[Howard] Whoops. Sorry. That's another eight part thing.

 

[Howard] Okay. We ready for homework?

[Homework. You are giving us the homework this time.]

[Howard] Okay, I am. In the first episode, I talked about how this intensive was expectations and promises, and how I didn't call it Eight Expectations because that would have forced me to drill down and to configure the content in such a way that there were eight discrete elements covered across seven episodes plus a… It was a headache. Your homework is to fulfill the promise that I decided not to make because I would have broken it. Call this intensive, call this discussion we've had over these last eight episodes, Eight Expectations. For you, for your toolbox, write down eight different categories in which promises and expectations can be used as structural elements, as troubleshooting elements, as critical elements, as career elements. Laying over all of the other tools that you use, that we all use, when we write, when we create. So there's your homework. Write the thing that I was either not smart enough or into much of a hurry to write, the course outline for Eight Expectations. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/23/17-4-the-gun-on-the-mantel-is-actually-a-fish/

 

Key Points: Red herrings help make the inevitable surprising. Aim for inevitable first, build surprise second. Deconstruct shows and books that have deliberate twists to them. Drop fish into your foreshadowing to keep us distracted. Use the tricks of a stage magician, give us other things to watch. Make the red herring story significant, while the actual foreshadowing is just a small thing on the side. Include clues to support multiple endings. Beware the sudden change, and unintentional storytelling without knowing where you are going. Ambiguity can be useful! Use your context to highlight the wrong thing. Use the character that everyone likes to point the reader in the wrong direction. Synonyms, homonyms, and other misdirection. Make sure you deliver in an enticing, wonderful way.

 

[Season 17, Episode 4]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[pause]

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[chuckles]

 

[Howard] I was late with my line about who I am. Okay, last episode, we talked about foreshadowing. I described it as creating a thread which makes a surprise inevitable. This episode, we're talking about red herrings. This is where we create the thread which makes the inevitable surprising. As we said last week, aim for inevitable first, and then build the surprise second. Because if you fail at inevitable, you've got a deus ex machina and we're disappointed and bewildered and we feel llike we've been lied to. If you fail at surprise, we're like, "Oh, I saw that coming."

[Which, depending on...]

[Howard] I would much rather have the reader feel like they're smarter than me than feel like they're better than me.

[Laughter. Very true. Very, very true.]

[Howard] So. Red herrings. Let's talk… Some good examples of 'em? Where have you seen them done really well?

[Fish market. [Whisper] I'm kidding.]

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mmm. So tasty.

[Kaela] You just really went for that one, Meg.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Straight in.

[I was going to give a serious answer.]

 

[Sandra] I think it's useful to look at shows or books that have a deliberate twist to them. Where… A frequently used example of this is the Sixth Sense. Where you have this twist that I can see… The kid sees dead people. Oh, our protagonist is dead is the big twist at the end, and the surprise. And yet it is the surprise that makes you want to go back and rewatch the whole movie and see how absolutely clearly inevitable it was. It was absolutely there. So much there that there are many people who saw it coming from scene one. Some people were not surprised. So you go into the movie and you deconstruct and say where… How did they mislead the majority of the audience into believing that Bruce Willis was alive and interacting with the world? They put him in scene after scene after scene where there's another human in the scene who our brains fill in the blanks, because they are sitting opposite each other in chairs. We assume that there was a part where Bruce Willis knocked on the door and came in and was welcomed and invited to sit down. We don't see any of that. So the show uses the medium and the automatic back and fill that the medium asks of the audience to get us to back and fill something that absolutely wasn't there. So the show actually is getting the audience to create their own red herrings. Which is kind of a cool and interesting thing that that particular show does. So that's one of my examples and it's fascinating to go through and figure out where was I misled.

 

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. I think that's a really good example, particularly leaning into the strengths of your medium to accomplish that. I think one for books was Harry Potter, the first one. I think that was one of the best, like, at least… I mean, admittedly, I was young when I read it, but I still think it holds up really well. The way that they make you think that Snape is the one who's trying to steal the Sorcerer's Stone. Because, by all means, it seems completely reasonable. Snape was the one that was muttering a curse when Harry's broom bucks around and he nearly falls off. Snape seems to hate Harry for absolutely no reason. So you're like, "Yup, I believe he's a bad guy." And, like… There's the cut on his leg after everybody runs through the troll in the dungeon. So we have pieces of evidence that imply that it is him. But when we find out that it's Quirrell, we also suddenly remember that Quirrell was in all of the scenes, that Snape was muttering the counter curse, Quirrell got knocked over by Hermoine's fire stuff, and that broke his concentration for the curse. That Quirrell had run through the dungeon, Snape headed him off, and, like, they were there with Fluffy. Like, they… We forgot Quirrell was there because we were wrapped up with a very good and reasonable explanation of Snape.

[Yeah. And…]

[Howard] The… Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, what you've described here is a pattern that has a tool built right into it. Which is, any time you are laying a piece of foreshadowing, grab a fish and drop a fish next to it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay? You want to have a red herring in there with your foreshadowing, so that the audience can be misled.

 

[Sandra] Right. We can also take a… Learn things from stage magicians. Where there's the patter and the hands that are waving because he is moving something from the table in front of him into his pocket. He does this big gesture with his opposite hand and tells a joke because he knows that the audience can only pay attention to a limited number of things at a time. Then there's also that video with the passing the basketballs and the gorilla that dances through the middle of it. Nobody sees the gorilla because we're so busy paying attention to the balls. You can do the same things in what you are creating. You can teach them, and teacher audience, okay, pay attention to the ball. Your job is to count how many times the ball is passed. When, truthfully, you're hiding the gorilla in plain sight. Meg?

[Megan] Yeah. So the idea is to give your red herring story significance while making the actual foreshadowing something that's just happening to the side or… Like, a small joke in the conversation, where we're talking about the big important thing. A show that I think does this very well is The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin. It has some of my favorite examples of long set up and payoffs for a joke in an episode. I'm going to tell you one that just happened now. The payoff won't be as good because I'm telling you the beginning and the ending right after.

[Howard] Go ahead.

[Megan] You need to imagine there's 40 minutes in between. But there's a news anchor, and he's complaining to his wardrobe assistant that, "Is there something wrong with the pants you give me? Because I keep trying to put them on, and both my legs end up in one side." The assistant's like, "You can't put your pants on, and you think there's something wrong with the pants?"

[Giggles]

[Megan] The A story of this episode is someone is here to do a hatchet job news article about the news agency. He used to date the main producer of the show before she dated the main character, the news anchor. So the reporter and the producer are having a huge argument. She is standing up for the news anchor. She's like, "You don't understand. He is a great man. I mean, he struggles with things, but he's a great man." As she says struggles with things, we see him hop into the scene, trying to put on his pants.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Then he falls over in the background. It's been a half hour since we mentioned the pants, but it just comes back at like the best moment. So… Check out The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin.

[Howard] Yeah. That's the… As a professional humorist, that sort of thing is something that I use a lot. Sandra mentioned stage magic. In the second edition of X-treme Dungeon Mastery, we call attention to the way in which surprise, for a magician… The deception with a magician there should never be a reveal. They have red herrings, but they are never going to tell you how they perform the trick. Whereas as storytellers, the deception needs to be gentler. It can't be, as we mentioned last week, can't be animating Hans having a loving, kind, totally genuine expression of love while the music cues and the lighting all say this is a good boy for her to be interested in, when in fact, he's just making a play for the kingdom. That's deceptive. We want our reveal, for storytellers, the big payoff is in the reveal. For audiences of magicians, the big payoff is I was deceived and I don't know how. I use the example… We illustrated the example in the book of the trick knife. If the magician says, "Aha, see, this is where I switched out the actual knife for a knife with a collapsing blade. You didn't see it, though, did you? But, yeah, the knife just has collapsing blades. Stab, stab, stab." Big deal. In the movie Knives Out, we are told that there is a knife that has a collapsing blade, and in the very last scene, someone attempts to commit a murder with it, and we find out that they've grabbed the wrong knife, and it is delightful. Because we get to see the trick knife.

[Kaela] Knives Out is a master.

[Howard] I just realized… Oh. Go ahead.

[Kaela] I say, Knives Out is a master class in red herrings and guns on the walls and like, seriously, like, pick it apart.

 

[Howard] So, very, very many. On the subject of red herrings, I have the book of the week. It is And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. I picked this one because it is arguably the place in which red herring cemented itself in the colloquial… The jargon for a distraction. The character Vera scolds everybody for being distracted, because in the verse that applies to one of the previous character's deaths, a red herring swallowed one, and then there were three. She's saying, "A red herring's swallowed one, that clearly means Armstrong was not dead. There was a distraction here." And Then There Were None is a fine book to read. It's short and it's very tightly woven.

[Megan] In my eighth grade English class, I disagreed with the ending. I remember meeting with my teacher afterwards, because she was talking about, like, it was inevitable. This is the only way it could end. I'm like, challenge accepted.

[Laughter]

[Megan] I wrote a different ending as to who the murderer was and what they were doing. I pointed out it could have happened this way. She's like, "Okay, Megan. It's not that deep. But good job."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Here's the thing. This is… I can't remember where I got this. I could be speaking out of class. But I have heard said that Agatha Christie often wrote these things three quarters of the way through without knowing who the murderer was herself, and then went back and made sure that the foreshadows in the red herrings all aligned and she had a proper ending in place. Which means if you… Depending on how much of the book you let yourself rewrite, yeah.

 

[Sandra] Yeah. Well, it's fascinating, the movie Clue, I don't know what year it was, but it's the Tim Curry movie Clue, which did an experiment that they actually filmed three different endings with three different murderers. Then they sent different endings to different theaters.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] So, theoretically, you could go see the movie in multiple different theaters and get to see the three endings. Now, in the age of streaming, they just play all three endings one after each other.

[Howard] Yeah, they've concatenated the endings and they've given the third one, they're saying, "But this is what really happened."

[Sandra] Right. But the whole thing is written so that there are clues to support every single ending. Which is valuable as a writer to deconstruct, because the vital clue for one ending is a red herring for a different ending, and so you can pull that apart.

 

[Megan] So, the writers' strike of 2002 hit a lot of shows very hard. One of the shows it hit quite hard was the procedural Bones…

[Yes]

[Megan] Which is one of my favorite shows of all time. There is a recurring murderer in the third season. Which is rare for this show. Normally, we get our guy every time they show up. But there is a recurring murderer that is a cannibalistic cultist that eats people's faces. Like the Sith, there's always a master and an apprentice. At the very end of the season, it is revealed that someone on our team is the apprentice of the murder. Even though throughout about 90% of the season, this person has been making discovery after discovery, helping us track down the murderer. So you try and rewatch that season, and there is no clear moment when this character betrays us until you can see in the writers' room that… Well, or lack of a writers' room, I'm not entirely sure how the writers' strike wrapped up the season. But…

[Chuckles]

[Megan] They had to cut the season early, and about two episodes from the end, this character starts actively working against us. But it's clear to see that that was a decision made much later on in the season, and it doesn't logically follow. So what we have earlier aren't red herring, it's just unintentional storytelling before we knew where we were going. Because you can't go back… [Garbled]

[Howard] It was the writers' phone booth, not room, because…

[Yeah]

[Howard] Phoning it in. Because… That joke would have played better if I told it sooner. What other tools do we have for creating satisfying red herrings in order to make the inevitable surprising?

 

[Kaela] I think one of the things that… You have to use this carefully, but ambiguity is a very helpful tool when depicting things. Because ambiguity is the… Or almost an objectivity. Like, this is what happened. These are the facts of what happened. But a lot of storytelling is contextualizing what has happened. So, if you can show what happened and either just leave it there as if it's not important or touch on the… Like, use your context to put only one part of it in focus, without obscuring the view of the rest of what happened, you can use that ambiguity to your advantage to get people to look at the wrong thing or to pay attention to the wrong thing. That still makes sense, but you haven't hidden anything from them. You're just leaving it ambiguous or uncommented on.

[Howard] One of the things that I try to do is take the character who is the most charismatic, the character that everybody likes the most, and have that person look at the wrong thing. The right thing is someplace else, but the person we like is looking at the wrong thing. Now, obviously, you can't do this all the time, or you're just like, "Okay. Check everything in the room that he didn't look at. That's a possible clue. That list of things will thread to the answer." But, yeah, the audience is going to follow… They're going to follow the funny, they're going to follow the cool turns of phrase, the… When I write, I try and put the funny around the wrong thing enough of the time that people mislead themselves.

[Kaela] The power of misdirection. Like you were talking about with the magician's stuff, where you're shoving the context over here. That doesn't mean that you turn out the lights on everything else and you are deceiving them, but you're like, "Hey, look at this cool thing." I love using a trusted, likable character to do that. Where you're like, "Oh, I love this character. I appreciate this character." Or even "I trust this character, they're really smart." Then, you're like, "Oh, but they didn't have all of the picture either. They didn't tell me that this thing was the answer, but I thought it was."

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] Sandra. Sorry.

[Sandra] A quick set of tools depending on what medium you're working in. If you're in a prose medium, you can use synonyms and homonyms carefully. That's a potential tool depending on what you're writing. Auditory, then you want things that sound the same but mean different things. Then visual mediums, you can do visual misdirection again. So it's all… Just another set of tools to think about. Meg?

 

[Megan] I want to kind of wrap this up by saying it's okay if the audience guesses what's coming, if you can deliver on it in a very enticing way. That's Chekhov's cauldron of hot lead is coming back. Because I had just assumed they were going to put on some red and orange lights when it's time to spill it, because we're in a small theater, we're inside. They set off fireworks inside the building.

[Gasp]

[Megan] There was just a fountain of real live sparks and fire on the stage. So I knew the scene was coming, and just didn't care. Then they delivered with an actual explosion. I was like, "Oh. I was wrong. Oh, my gosh." So, that was great. That was wonderful.

[Howard] The 1812 overture…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Done by the high school, in which the sheriff is backstage firing his shotgun into a bucket.

[Laughter. Yeah.]

 

[Howard] Sandra, I think you got this week's homework. We could keep talking and talking and talking about this. We need to get people homework.

[Sandra] Yeah. The homework is, this is a paired episode with last week's episode. So, do the reverse of last week's homework. Instead of finding a thing in the beginning and writing a scene at the end, find something that is important at the end and find a place early where you can rewrite the scene to put that on the mantle in some way. Then, maybe, take some of the tricks and tools to magician misdirect so that it's there, but it is not the focus of attention. So…

[Howard] Outstanding. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/09/17-2-it-was-a-promise-of-three-parts/

 

Key points: Sometimes the first line promises beautiful and evocative prose. Often pilots and prologues are violent or romantic, to show the range of what you can expect. Action, excitement, characters at their extreme. Try flipping to the middle! Use revisions to create consistency. Craft your promise and deliver on it. Use chapter beginnings as opportunities to write killer first lines. Watch for the dips when you're connecting the tent poles you are excited about. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 2]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It Was a Promise of Three Parts.

[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] The title of this episode comes to us paraphrasedly from the opening line of Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Which I'm going to go ahead and read in its entirety.

 

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

 

This is beautiful and evocative prose. Among the many things that this first line does, it promises us a book in which there is going to be beautiful and evocative prose. Rothfuss's writing is delicious. It is… It's delicious. That's just a great word to lead with. When we talk about first lines, first scenes, first paragraphs, first pages, first chapters. Establishing shots. Overtures for a musical. Opening splash pages in a comic. All of these things make promises to the audience about what's going to follow. We need to make sure that we make those promises consciously. So let's talk a little bit about what some of those promises are. Meg, I think you had an example from Lower Decks that you wanted to…

[Megan] As a call back, when Howard was talking about the Lower Decks pilot, I brought this up in our notes as an example to really hammer home in this episode. Often, the pilot episode of a television series needs to show the full range of what you're going to experience within the show. So this means your pilot is often the most violent or it has the most romantic content. This is one of the reasons why, also branching over to books, you'll often have a prologue that's full of action and excitement for you to meet our main character. So, the specific cold open that Howard mentioned, when we first meet Boimler and Mariner initially put a lot of viewers off the show, because Mariner was so extremely Mariner and Boimler was so extremely Boimler. But in order to introduce these two characters, we had to see them at their most extremes to get an idea of what their dynamic would be like throughout the show. The final bit is that slice into Boimler's life at the very end of the cold open with… You can see the sinews and the tendons and the little fountain of blood to show that, oh, hey, other Star Trek shows are not going to have the kind of… I'm not going to say gore, but we're going to go a little bit further visually then your use to in a Star Trek. So that minute and a half had to show the full extremes of what the comedy, action, and characters would be like through the remainder of Lower Decks.

[Howard] Well, that first episode was, if memory serves, a splotchy Star Trek zombie comedy in which at the end of it, well, it's Star Trek, we found a medical cure and the zombies all got better.

[Uhuh]

[Howard] So…

[Ramsey met a guy, but… Giggles]

[Howard] Oh, yeah. I mean, there were a couple who were now nothing but ex-zombie excrement, but the… That slice in the opening promises us, to borrow the title from Brian McClellan's debut novel, it's a promise of blood…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And then the episode delivers that.

[Kaela] I like… For starters, you just explained to me pilots in a way that will make me kinder to pilots for the rest of my life.

[Me, too] [laughter]

[Kaela] I love it. But it brings to the fore, for me, how… Which is what we talked about last episode, genres are different, and mediums are different. Because in a book, you don't want to telegraph that much all upfront. You do need to telegraph some. You need to let people know this is what you are signing up for. However, in a book, some of this is what you can expect from this book is taken care of by the packaging of the book, the cover, the art, the back blurb, which will all talk about in a later episode in more detail. But we, as writers and creators, that first page, that first chapter, gets so much rewriting because you have to promise the right things.

 

[Megan] I had a friend once… Rachel, I'm going to say you by name…

[Laughter]

[Megan] Once, I gave her a copy of one of my favorite books. I actually think it may have been The Way of Kings. I'm like, "This is my very favorite book, and you will love it." She takes it from my hand and opens to the middle of the book and start reading. I actually yelled the word "Spoilers!"

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And I smacked it out of her hands.

[Laughter]

[Megan] She's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "What are you doing?" She says, "Well, I find the first chapter of books to be very overwrought because that's where the author spends most of their time." So she always reads a page of prose in the middle of a book, any book, to see if she likes the author's voice, and then she will start it from the beginning. Which I think is just… Makes sense…

[Wrong]

[Megan] It makes sense.

[Readers]

[Howard] No, that's fair. Because if you're reading a page from the middle of the book and… You read the opening, and you're like," Oh, wow, this looks good." Then you flip to the middle of the book. If I'd flipped to the middle of The Name of the Wind and it was suddenly super, super dry, low-end, workmen's prose… Sigh. Then the promise of the front of the book is not being kept in the middle, and I might not have read it.

[Sandra] Yeah, I know of a…

[Howard] The challenge for us… Sorry to keep going. The challenge for us is to make our first lines and are pages and paragraphs not overwrought, but wrought to the same extent as we are going to wreak… Wrought, wreak…

[I think it's wreak]

[Howard] Wring the rest of the book.

[Right]

 

[Sandra] Yeah. I once… I knew of an author who sold a three book deal after the first book was written and the other two were not, and sold it on the strength of the first two chapters, which then got completely edited out of existence.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] So, the thing that had hooked the editor, and the agent and everything, was wiped out. The whole series kind of just fell flat for everyone. Book 2 kept just like not being accepted and not being accepted and not being accepted. It was just, to me, case of that… Part of the problem was that those first chapters didn't actually match any of the other stuff. They were gorgeous and beautiful, and the rest was so much weaker in comparison. We don't want to do that either.

[Howard] Yeah. You don't try out for the long distance team by showing them how quickly you can run the 50 yard dash.

[Sandra] Right.

 

[Howard] Meg.

[Megan] In… Wait. No, I got it. Sorry. Reset. In video games, something that will happen, especially in very long story driven games, is you will start with a big action sequence, with a lot more abilities than your character will normally have later on in the game. So I'm thinking the opening of Ghost of Tsushima, the opening of the first Assassins Creed game, where you're playing a character at full strength. Then something happens that nerfs them back down to level I. It's a way to promise your audience that, "Hey, listen. Although you're going to start at a level I, can't do anything person, you will eventually work up to be this great grand thing." This is why shows like Star Wars or books like Eragon open with this big action sequence of a princess running from the villains with something very important that ends up in the hands of this farmboy. That happens in both of those. It's to promise the audience that, yeah, our protagonist is at the very beginning of their journey, but it inherently has this promise that eventually they will get to the level where they are participating in the story on this grand scale.

[Howard] I think one of the finest examples of this is the mission completion text of the first gun mission in Borderlands 2. The mission completion text is, "You just moved 5 feet and opened a locker. Later, when you're killing skyscraper-sized monsters with a gun that shoots lightning, you'll look back at this moment and be like, heh."

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's perfect. It's perfect because… Yeah, you're told what's coming.

 

[Howard] We need a book of the week. I have paged away from my outline. Who's got that?

[Kaela does]

[Kaela] That is me. Oh, uh… Wait.

[Yes. Yes, it is you.]

[Kaela] It is my book! So prepare yourself.

[I'm excited]

[Kaela] Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls is the book of the week. The reason why I suggested it for this episode is because, as I have been doing school visits and things like that, I read out like the first page and a halfish, the first page is actually half a page, anyway. So I read that out to the kids, and my favorite part is ending right after the main character, she's lost in the desert, ending right after she turns around, looks up, and she meets her first dark criatura. It is a woman who is half skeleton, traced by the moonlight, and is like known as the devourer. She's like, "Don't eat me." Is her thing, and I end right there. That's because, from the very beginning, I want people to know that even though that, yes, this is a middle grade adventure and it is… Like, we're starting out in an adventure. We're out in the desert, we're soaked in what the world is like, we have a very fearful main character because she's going to be throughout the book, and we're meeting very otherworldly, very frightening things. She is going to be in life-threatening situations very often. But also, they're cool, and the pros as well, I've found very important to bring in some of the descriptions, like the stripes of moonlight coming through her ribs, things like that. Where you know that going to be soaked into this world from the beginning. You're going to be meeting very ancient, very primordial creatures who are both dangerous but also quite unexpectedly kind as well. Because this criatura ends up taking her home. Even though she's known as the devourer.

[Cool]

[Howard] Thank you. So that's Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls. Cece is spelled c.e.c.e., for those of you who are thinking it's a carbon copy email to Rios.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] No. Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls by Kaela Rivera.

 

[Howard] Meg. You've got your hand up, and no one can see it except those of us with cameras.

[Megan] That's something, as you're creating, as you're writing, as you're drawing, whatever you're making. Check back in. What is the promise of the premise that you've set up? Are you still bringing the same level of fire and excitement to the remainder of your book as you do in that very beginning part that you've polished and framed?

[Howard] How do you avoid the problem of writing checks you can't cash in your first page? How do you avoid being so clever or so purple or so whatever that you just can't maintain it for a book?

[Sandra] Well, this is a problem we all have.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] I mean, like… It's… One of the things I think to make sure is while, yes, we do end up spending a lot of time on getting that beginning right, doing what Meg's friend did and flipping to the middle and seeing what does the middle feel like, and maybe when you see what the middle feels like, while we want to telegraph this book is going to be exciting and whatever, if your book is actually contemplative, trying to make it exciting in chapter 1 is setting a bad expectation. So if you have a contemplative, quiet book, then you do want a contemplative, quiet opening. Because lips us even though that feels like, oh, no, people won't get hooked, yes, they will. They will, because they ca… If they're a person who wants a contemplative book, and they pick up and see excitement, they're going to put the book down. So then you've suddenly created a mismatch between the reader and what you're delivering.

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. I think this is particularly achieved through revisions. Like, no matter what media you are doing, whether you're doing books, video games, whether you're making a show, you need to do revisions. It's inevitable. Because that's how you get consistency. I think consistency is absolutely key to this. Both crafting the right promise and delivering on that promise. Because, for example, both pacing and tonally wise, a previous book of mine that is not published and will need major revisions, like, the first third of the book was this very slice of life experience, and it was contemplative and soft and painful and hard and beautiful. Then, the last two thirds are this life or death video game tournament, where you're like, "Go, go, go, go!" Even though I liked both of these things, it did not mesh into the same book properly.

[Howard] You have written two very cool books.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Or at least parts of two very cool books.

[Kaela] And they're both unfinished. Yeah.

[Howard] Yep.

[Kaela] So…

 

[Howard] One of the tools that I use is treating chapter beginning as another opportunity to write a killer first-line. I'll review my first-line and I'll ask myself, okay, was it awesome because it planted a hook, was it awesome because it was pithy, was it awesome because it described something in a new way? Do I do that again, or do I do what the first-line didn't do, and do something else in order to show that this chapter still has a powerful first-line, but contains a continuation of the story in an expanding sort of way? But always treating… Always treating the page turn to a new chapter as an opportunity to overwrought again.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Yeah. One of the tools that I really find very powerful is finding the voice of your book. This is a thing that newer writers are sometimes very, very confused by, because voices this amalgamation a lot of word choice and tone shift and character voice and all of these things. But when you… Like… When you find the voice for the book as a whole, you can then go back to your beginning and make sure that the voice is matching. Again, it's flip to the middle and make your beginning promise accurately what the middle is delivering.

[Howard] Flip to the middle, but be standing more than an arm's length away from Meg…

[Yes. Laughter. Garbled.]

[Megan] Something else is when you are working on a creative… We all start with an idea. Be that one scene we love, one character we love. Something you need to watch out for is you set your tent poles of the scenes you're really excited for, and the dips come when you're like, ugh, I have to connect these, but it's so boring to get from A to B. You may either need to take out a tentpole or put something more interesting in the canvas of your connectivity.

[Howard] Yep. One of the things that I found working on the illustrations for Extreme Dungeon Mastery version 2, and I knew this going into it. I've got about a couple of hundred pictures to draw, and I knew that my style and my technique and my stamina was going to change on the way through. I was going to get better at what I was doing, and I was going to get tired of doing it. That was going to change things. One of the ways I tackled that was by drawing some of the last pictures first and revisiting some of the first pictures later, and doing a little bit of revision.

 

[Howard] We are approaching a 20 minute episode of a 15 minute podcast. So, I think it's time for homework. I've got our homework. You ready for this? Write six different first lines. For your work in progress or for a work in progress that you're imagining maybe sometime someday doing. Or maybe for six different works in progress. Six different first lines. But each of them should make a promise that you personally don't think you can keep. Now ask yourself why you don't think you can keep it, and how you would change the first-line to be something that you can do. There you go. This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you for listening to us. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/26/16-52-structure-is-a-promise/

 

Key points: A structure you pick may set expectations and make promises you didn't expect. Kishotenketsu. Police procedurals. Mysteries have clues! Three act structure, and hero's journey. Be aware of the structure you use, because audience satisfaction may depend on it. Save the Cat! M.I.C.E. Quotient. Use the structure, but paint over the color-by-numbers, too. Younger readers may need to be taught about the structure. Consider using the nesting of M.I.C.E. Quotient because it is satisfying to audiences.

 

[Transcriptionist note: Again, I may have confused the labeling. Apologies for any mistakes.]

 

[Season 16, Episode 52]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Structure is a Promise.

[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] I'm here to tell you that whatever structure you picked for the thing you're working on is making a promise that you may not know you've made. For instance, if you're using the hero's journey, you may have promised people that the nice mentor character who is helping your hero is totally going to die. If you haven't decided that they're going to die, your audience may actually be disappointed when your Gandalf or your Yoda survives all the way into Act Three. We're going to talk about how the various structures we use set expectations for audiences and make promises. Often, these are cases of audience bias where we have no control of what people are expecting when they pick up what we've made.

[Kaela] Yeah. I kind of have a fun story about this. When I was younger, I watched Spirited Away for the first time. I'd watched a few Ghibli movies, but I wasn't really much into anime. So I was really unfamiliar with non-Western story structures. So I started watching Spirited Away, and it was this delightful charming thing, but I got about a third of the way into it and I started feeling this underlying anxiety about where is this story going. I don't… Like, we just keep… Like, ah. It actually interfered with my ability to enjoy the movie at all. Because I… My story brain was expecting three act structure with peaks and climaxes and pinch points and all of these things. Instead, Spirited Away is a much more kind of kishotenketsu, which is long slow buildup, world changing event, and then resolution. Because I as an audience member had no idea that that structure even existed, it was so hard for me to engage with the story that was on the screen. Because my brain was like, "What is happening here?" That is, to me, a beautiful example of the way that the structure creates a promise, and because I, as an audience, brought an expectation with me that the story didn't deliver on. I've since watched it multiple times and I love it for exactly what it is now that I know where it's going.

[Megan] Something you find in a lot of especially Hayao Miyazaki's films is that sort of exploration of the world before we get to what you were saying, with the structure wise, because he does not start with a screenplay. Hayao Miyazaki storyboards his whole movie. I'm not going to say like free-form stream of conscious, but he'll just start with the images of a theme, and he'll build just right in a row the whole film before he turns it over to the animators.

[Kaela] Oh, that's a fascinating process.

[Megan] You can buy books of his storyboards. You can see his hand drawings of the entire film. He does it all himself. It's incredible.

[Howard] Well, sadly, we are recording this too close to Christmas for me to say that's what y'all should get me for Christmas…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And have it actually arrive. I think that the story structure underpinning a lot of Hayao Miyazaki is kishotenketsu, which is a four-part structure that we haven't talked about much in Writing Excuses. We talk a little bit about it in Xtreme Dungeon Mastery. But it wasn't until I looked at that story structure that some of the Miyazaki films actually made sense. I was like, "Oh. This is why this happens here instead of happening here." Because my expectations were wrong. But let's talk about some other structures. What are some other structures that make promises and what are those promises?

 

[Megan] I love hour-long police procedurals. Detective procedurals, murder mysteries. I like, in any language, any like country, I love watching hour-long procedurals. One of the things that that usually promises…

[Howard] By hour-long, you mean like 47 minutes?

[Megan] Yeah. 47 minutes with breaks for commercials. Because those commercials or act breaks are an important part of the structure. That cliffhanger you'll get three act breaks in, where you're like, "Oh. There's another body. What are we going to do now?" [Garbled] there. One of the frustrations I had with watching the BBC Sherlock is that show is all about, of course, what a genius Sherlock is, so it didn't drop the audience clues the way most procedurals would. Sherlock just knows the answer. Or he paid someone offscreen to do the research for him. Instead of somebody dropping a line early on about, "Oh, yeah. Diatomaceous earth. It's used for tropical fish, and is used for this, and it's used for this." And the murder tool has diatomaceous earth on it. Then somebody in Act III casually mentions, "I love my tropical fish," and if you're paying attention, you're like, "That's the murderer."

[Chuckles]

[Megan] Because I'm someone who likes to guess along with it.

[Oh, yeah.]

[Megan] So shows that break that storytelling, or telling a different kind of story, like BBC Sherlock, it's very hard to guess what happens next, because it's not relying on the structure I was expecting going in.

[Kaela] yeah. I would say the BBC Sherlock is not actually a procedural in any way. Which is a surprise for a Sherlock show.

[Yeah]

[Howard] But this actually kind of steps across the line from structure to genre. Because… That's okay. But police procedural is its own kind of genre that comes with an embedded structure. It's weird to me that Sherlock failed to adhere to that, because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The police procedural with the Sherlock Holmes books. We circled back around and BBC said, "Pht! We don't want to do a police procedural, we want to do Sherlock Holmes, who is also Doctor Who and Merlin."

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

 

[Howard] But that's me [garbled]. Kaela? You had something you wanted to…

[Kaela] Yeah. So I guess the three act structure's probably my bread-and-butter as a writer. Like, that's how I do… And the hero's journey. Those are like two of my favorites. I guess I like that the hero's journey is just something that you do find embedded in all mythology. Mythology is my… That's my house, man. Mythology… I love the way it speaks universally. But also, it gives you a pretty strong structure for character growth and, like, that's the number one thing for me in stories as well as… Character growth in the hero's journey is just so good. That's why I think that when I watch a show that's kind of promising a hero's journey structure and then they don't really grow, I get frustrated. I'm like, "Ah, that was kind of the whole point, is that you change, but you didn't. Now I feel a little bit cheated. Can I have my refund for this Netflix?"

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] Oh. Oh, goodness. So, book of the week. I'm going to pitch to you Eragon by Christopher Paolini. Because this is a book which unapologetically draws from the three act… Or not the three act, the hero's journey structure as deployed by Tolkien and George Lucas. To the point that a friend of mine was reading, I think, book 2 and his friend was reading book 1. His friend picked up… Looked up from his, and he says, "Hey. Have they met Yoda yet?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "What do you mean, have they met Yoda yet?" "Well, because I…" These were guys who were super familiar with the form. I'm not knocking Christopher Paolini. He was incredibly successful by delivering a hero's journey which telegraphed the fact that it was a hero's journey and made it super approachable for audiences. So. Eragon, the book.

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Howard] I've been told that the movie is not something we speak of in our house.

[Laughter. What movie?]

[Howard] Eragon, the book, by Christopher Paolini.

[To me]

 

[Howard] Let's talk about some other structures. Sandra, you had something?

[Sandra] [garbled what I was going to say] is that… Taking this back to the whole idea of what can we as writers do, it's important to be aware that the structure you pick is going to create an expectation for the story you're creating. That means that when you are pulling back and looking at the craft and looking at… You had a head full of ideas and characters and what have you, you need to pay attention to the structure, the framework that you're going to stretch your characters and stories across, because that will determine some of the satisfaction of the reader when they're done reading your story, and that kind of thing.

[Howard] Meg.

[Megan] When I was first reading the Eragon books, they actually ended up not being for me, because I loved the original Star Wars trilogy so much that I felt like the books were too close. So, there's that precarious balance of "Yeah, I wanted something like Star Wars in a fantasy world, but. Not. This. Close." I remember getting really frustrated and not finishing the series, because I'm like, "Well, I know everything that's going to happen anyways, so why should I even…" So that's something about… I'd like to segue a little bit into Save the Cat! That I deal with a lot working in the animation industry. Because you will have people that'll be like, "Okay. Make it Save the Cat, but a little different." Because now everybody knows it, and everybody reads it. I have some development friends who, when they're reading a script go… It'll actually be marked against you if you hit all the Save the Cat beats on exactly the pages that Save the Cat recommends you do it in your screenplay.

[Laughter]

[Megan] [garbled] feeling that, "Oh, this writer is just painting by numbers and they're not telling an emotional authentic story."

[Oh, that's…]

 

[Howard] When you take a structure… When you use… We've talked about this in our episodes on M.I.C.E. Quotient and hero's journey and Hollywood formula and whatever else. I've used this metaphor before. When you adhere to the formula so closely that every beat is predictable, it's like people can see the lines in the color-by-number. You just filled in the little spaces with color, you didn't actually paint over it and make your own picture. It's the difference between canned beans and fresh beans. It still beans, but if you can taste the can, something's gone wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Which is interesting. I mean… This… I think we'll get more into this talking about genre, but there are certain audience segments where… I'm sorry, but they want to taste the can. Like, they showed up for canned beans, and they want to taste the can.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] That's, again, a thing where you're paying attention to your audience, who are you speaking to, and is this an audience who really wants like to taste the can as they go through their media or are they going to be grouchy because you didn't cook fresh?

[Megan] Knowing your audience I think is definitely an important part of how you handle your structure. Like, who are you speaking to, and things like that. We'll get more into that in the next episode with the genre and media promises, too.

[Well, I mean…]

[Kaela] It can be frustrating…

[Go ahead.]

[Kaela] I was going to say, it can be frustrating as a creator when the person who's in charge of publishing your book or distributing your film project, where you're like, "No, listen. Fresh beans are so good." They're like, "Ah. But the can sell so well."

[Yes]

[Kaela] That sometimes it can be hard to break expectations and conventions and still get a large enough audience that's interested in your niche fresh organic beans.

[Chuckles]

[Then…]

[Howard] This is a case where I err on the side of understand the structure first. Know how the structure works. Apply the structure in your writing or your rewriting. Then, if your alpha readers or your beta readers say, "Your structure didn't make promises and then keep them, it telegraphed your punches and sucked all the energy out of them." Then you know that it's time to go back in and over paint the color-by-numbers so people can't see the grid. Sandra.

 

[Sandra] Another factor to consider… We have three authors here who write for young audiences. You have to remember that what is old and tired and uber familiar to an older audience is brand-new for someone who's 12. They've never encountered it before. One of the reasons that Eragon succeeded so well is because it hit a generation that hadn't grown up with Star Wars. They may or may not have been exposed to Star Wars. But, like, for example, my kids just all rejected Star Wars, which meant Eragon was amazing and fresh and they'd never encountered this before. So our oldest child latched onto Eragon as this brilliant, brilliant thing because it was the first encountering of that hero's journey and it really spoke to her. So when you are writing for younger children, sometimes you need to teach them what beans are.

[Laughter]

[garbled new product]

[Sandra] You are te… You are… As you're writing for young children, you are teaching them the story structures that they will then have in their head as expectations for the rest of their life, which is amazing and scary as a creator.

 

[Howard] One of the structures that I want to mention here is the M.I.C.E. Quotient because M.I.C.E. works so well. It's milieu, interrogation, character, and event. This structural formula in which you determine what types of sub stories are being told in your story based on these elements. One of the principles of structuring things by M.I.C.E. is that… It's the FILO principal, first in, last out. If you open with milieu, then your story ends with milieu. Milieu was first in, milieu is last out. It's this whole idea of nested parentheses. If you go milieu, idea, character, then it ends character, idea, milieu. This is something that audiences are not typically conscious of when they're consuming a story that's… Because those things are so blurry by the time you've backed all the way away from it. But if you keep that promise, if you adhere to that structure, it's inherently satisfying and it's subtle. It's something that audiences often don't know has been done to them. That's one of my favorite things. That's, for me, the difference between the fresh beans and the canned beans, is that, hey, I delivered the beans, and I delivered them fresh, and you can't tell that I used the recipe off the back of the can or whatever. The metaphor's falling apart.

[Chuckles]

[garbled second metaphors do that]

[Howard] Metaphors do that. Especially from my lips.

 

[Howard] Hey, we're 18 minutes in. Kaela, do you have homework for us?

[Kaela] I do. Get your pencils ready everybody. I'll be grading.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] No. So, your homework for today, of course, is to first you want to look up all the things that we talked about today. M.I.C.E., the three acts, Save the Cat, hero's journey, kishotenketsu, all of the good stuff. Then, I want you to take your favorite thing, like, if it's your favorite movie, your favorite novel, your favorite web comic, whatever it is. Sit down with it, have these structures out in some way. You can pick one at a time if you want, and watch it all the way through and reverse engineer what it's doing. So you can see how it is hitting or you can even identify which structure it's using or going off of, at least as a skeleton. Then, for bonus points… You want those bonus points, right? Go ahead and take your least favorite thing. I recommend it be a short thing, just so you don't have to spend too much time with it. Then look at the structure again. Reverse engineer why it's not working. You'll learn a lot by reverse engineering things. I highly recommend that process.

[Howard] Thank you, Kaela. Thank you, Megan and Sandra. We're out of time. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/12/16-50-worldbuilding-finale-making-deliberate-choices/

 

Key points: Making thoughtful, deliberate choices in worldbuilding, along with cool and fun stuff. Think about how your speculative elements reinforce plot, character, and theme. Don't just fall back on the familiar, make sure you have a good reason for including it. Pick your time and cultural analogues. Interrogate your defaults. Be aware that the defaults, the cliches, the trope elements carry a kitchen sink full of implications. Balance what you are borrowing from real world analogues with what you are building from the ground up. Make sure you keep the kernel of cool in your writing, even while you make all these deliberate choices. Look for your armored bears! 

 

[Season 16, Episode 50]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We have been talking about worldbuilding for seven weeks now. Now, here in the eighth episode, we're very excited to kind of tie this all up with what we hope is a very intelligent bow. What do we mean, Fonda, by making deliberate choices?

[Fonda] So, what I hope I've done over the course of the eight weeks that we've been talking about worldbuilding is encourage listeners to really examine why we worldbuild and how we worldbuild and how it serves the story in ways that are not just it's cool and fun to worldbuild, but are actually really thoughtful and deliberate. I have often taught writing classes, workshops, at different conventions and venues, and sometimes early career writers will submit work, and very frequently I see them fall back on worlds and speculative elements that are familiar and that are default. Because we've seen and absorbed them so much before. Like medieval European analog, or a magic school. Fantasy races like elves and orcs and so on. Those are all perfectly fine magic worlds, but what I really would like to encourage writers to do is to ask yourselves well, why am I making worldbuilding choices, and what are those speculative elements that I'm including because they really reinforce plot and character and theme? Why am I choosing something as opposed to I'm just falling back on something that I feel comfortable with or that I've seen other people use before.

[Dan] This is something that I talk about a lot, the idea that a cliché is not bad because it's familiar, it's bad because it's thoughtless. All of these elements that we see so often repeated like elves and orcs and magic schools and things like that, they're not flawed things you should never put in your story. You just need to be sure you're putting them in for the right reasons. That you have… You're not just using them because they're familiar and you don't want to think about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's that… The metric of "Write what feels good. See how it moves you." is useless because… Not completely useless. But it's a… It's very wiggly wobbly, because frequently something feels good because it's familiar. When we're talking about right reasons, it's again, that's a wiggly wobbly thing, because different stories have different reasons and different this is right. So there's not… It's not as… It's not an easy metric to go by. So what you want to make sure you're doing is that you're doing it deliberately and with intention. It's the intentionality that we've been talking about for the past several weeks.

 

[Fonda] Yeah. I especially want to encourage people to think about what time, and what cultural analogues they're choosing to use and why. I, earlier on in the master class, in the previous week, I talked about my aesthetic reasons for wanting to write the Green Bone saga in a latter half of the 20th century analog. There's also a thematic reason why I did that, because one of the big themes in that series is the tension between a very old culture and tradition with all the forces of modernity and globalization and the conflicts that are inherent there. So I chose a time period that is uncommon in epic fantasy, because it reinforced a theme that I wanted to be at the front and center of the whole trilogy. So, just think about, like, what is it that you're trying to do with that story, that you want to leave with the reader, and bring that into your worldbuilding choices.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing that we talk about a lot when were talking about a default character. We've talked about this in previous episodes, the unspoken default, and that in modern-day America at this time that we are recording, that's a 30-year-old white man. People will say, "But, why have your character be… Be… I don't know… Be a woman? Why can't you just…?" The question that I find myself asking is, like, I'll go ahead and put down whatever my defaults are. Then I'll go back and interrogate them. That also includes where I'm setting it. So why am I setting it here? What does that buy me? Because I'm going to be spending a lot to build this place, spending a lot of words. So what am I buying with that? Is there a reason that I'm doing it here? Sometimes that reason is this is a place that I'm comfortable, and I'm going to be doing something more challenging in some other part of the novel. That's not a ridiculous reason to set something someplace that you're familiar. Especially if you don't enjoy research. But it is a deliberate choice at that point. You're making it on purpose instead of just falling into it by accident.

[Howard] Now, one of the things to be aware of as well with the defaults… The defaults, the clichés, the trope-tastic elements, whatever those may be, is that… Its kitchen sink effect. They don't all fit. If you put all of the things that you love from various Western themed fantasy stories into one story, and then begin exploring the implications of any of them, actually being thoughtful about them, they will crowd some of the other ones out. They… It doesn't all work together. It's one of the reasons why highly derivative stuff feels so flat, because it feels like, "Oh, you just painted a Disney version of Tolkien as a backdrop for characters to act against. The dragons would be eating the sheep. This doesn't make sense."

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to pause us here…

[Dan] Let's pause here…

[Mary Robinette] To talk about the book of the week. Because it's actually right on point for this. It's Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. It's inspired by pre-Columbian Americas. It is, at its heart, an epic fantasy full of the kind of political machinations and prophecies that you get from other epic fantasies. But she's made deliberate choices to pull from a different mold, from a different palette than most of the epic fantasies that you read. Because of that, she's got access to all of these different areas, different intersections of politics and culture that's rich and thematicly give these additional layers that… So she's buying a lot. It's not just, "Oh, cool. This is a different setting. That's neat." Thematically, narratively, there's so much richness to this world. She's able to… She's doing one of the things that we talked about in a previous episode by having her POV characters come from very different worlds and different cultures. Some of them are outsider characters. I think, actually, all of her POV characters are outsider characters in one way or another. Your able to get this really broad, rich, just gloriously textured landscape that the characters are moving across. It's a beautiful book. It's one of the Hugo finalists this year. As we record this, it's still just a finalist. But who… It's so good I would not be at all surprised to see this one walk home with the rocketship.

[Dan] Cool. That is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.

 

[Dan] Now, Fonda, let's get back to something that you mentioned earlier. You talked about making deliberate choices about what kinds of real-world cultural analogues to… That may or may not show up in your story and in your worldbuilding. So let's talk about that a little bit. Without getting into a massive discussion of appropriation. Let's just set a baseline, do your research and be respectful. Talk about this idea of real-world cultural analogues.

[Fonda] Yeah. One of the choices that I want all writers to consider is how much, when you're creating your world, how much are you importing from the real world versus building from the ground up? Maybe I can illustrate this best with the example of this term Asian fantasy. So my books, the Green Bone saga often get described as Asian fantasy. Which is a term that I can understand the usefulness of this term from a marketing perspective, but I am not fond of it. Because it is used as an umbrella term to encompass a lot of things that are potentially very different, completely different types of stories. As an example, let me contrast a few books. There's a new novel, She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. It is a story set in ancient China, and it is based on a real historical figure, the founder of the Ming Dynasty. It obviously changes some things about our real history by re-imaging the identity of this very real person. So that is borrowing a lot from our real world, and then telling a story within it. Then you have The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K. S. Villoso which is set in a secondary world that is very reminiscent of the Philippines. K is from the Philippines and the story is a secondary world that is like if the Philippines had not been colonized. So you have very strong cultural cues, including what the characters eat, the way they dress, that say that this is inspired by the Philippines. On the other hand, you have my series, the Green Bone saga, which is in a secondary world that is not based on any one specific Asian nation, because I wanted the story to be in a place where there was this magic element, and it was this isolated culture that was on an island. So the fact that there is magic Jade would have influenced their entire development. It could not simply be Japan or Taiwan with the serial numbers rubbed off. Like, it had to be its own thing. So that influenced my worldbuilding choices, and I made really deliberate decisions when I was writing the story not to use words that tied it to specific places. I never use adobo or sushi or dim sum. Like, I never use words that would make you think that this is based on a specific place. So that's an example of three books that fall, from a marketing standpoint, under the same term, but have made very different worldbuilding choices in service of different narratives.

[Dan] And are going to appeal to very different audiences.

[Howard] When I think of worldbuilding, I'm often… And the clichés, I often force myself to question the boundary states that I've created around given terms, like… The example I'll use here, what does it mean when a place is crowded? My house has, I think, 2500 square feet, and there's five people living in it. There are people who would say that that's crowded. But I spent some time reading up on and looking at pictures of Kowleen free city, which was in the… In this area between two political entities. It was essentially 60,000 people or 40,000 people living in a space the size of a… The footprint of a football stadium. That… Was crowded. It was literally one of the most crowded places on earth. I looked at that and realized, okay, the boundaries that I've got in my mind for crowded are light years away from that, whatever that is. I perform these interrogations anytime I'm creating something to make sure that I haven't used the word like crowded to mean something that it doesn't really mean.

 

[Dan] Now, as we talk about making these deliberate choices, whether they are for narrative or aesthetic or thematic reasons, we don't want to lose the idea that your worldbuilding should still be cool. That there should still be awesome stuff that makes us want to love that book or wish we could live there. So, how can we do that? Fonda, give us some homework along these lines.

[Fonda] Yeah. I… To your point, I want to kind of bring the whole master class back around to, like, why do worldbuilding? We've talked this entire time around how it should support your narrative, your plot, your characters. It all should work together seamlessly and be this perfectly balanced three-legged stool. But I want to come back to the fact that many of us worldbuild because it's really fun. When you are a novelist, and you're going to devote years to a project, and spend so much time in this world, you need… There needs to be something about it that is so compelling to you that you'd rather spend time in this fictional world in front of your computer than out in the real one. So I often ask writing students, "What are your armored bears?" I'm… I point them to Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series. Right? That is a series that has really meaty themes. I mean, it is interrogating organized religion and oppression and some pretty meaty stuff. But what do we… What is on the cover of the book? What is on the movie poster? It's the armored bear. Because armored bears are just really freaking cool.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So that is my cool theory of literature, that you've got all this awesome worldbuilding that ideally just support your narrative and does so much heavy lifting and is meaty and rich and nuanced and full of texture. But there has to be that kernel of cool that just draws your reader in, draws you in, and keeps you there.

 

[Fonda] So, my homework for the week, and to close out this master class, is I want you to consider for your own work, what is your armored bear? What element of the story your writing right now makes you most excited to worldbuild and why?

[Dan] Sounds good. We would… At least I would love to hear what some of you come up with. This is a really great way to end this. So, thank you, Fonda, so much. This has been an absolutely wonderful master class. I've learned a lot. I hope the listeners have as well. So, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/28/16-48-believable-worlds-part-2-creating-texture/

 

Key points: Similarity, specificity, and selective depth help you create texture in your world. Help give the sense that your world is lived in, that the characters are interacting with it. Let them move through their world in their daily lives, just like you do. Put conversations in different places. Along with the purpose of your scenes, consider the activity, what the characters are doing in that scene. Don't just think about big things, think about what people do in their daily lives. Give your characters strong opinions. Remember that a little goes a long way.

 

[Season 16, Episode 48]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] All right. So we are still talking about believable worlds. Last week was the illusion of real, and this week we're going to talk about creating texture. What is texture in a story in worldbuilding?

[Fonda] Well, this really is a continuation of what we talked about last week, because a lot of the things that we mentioned, similarity, specificity, selective depth, help you create texture in the world. When I say texture, I mean the sense that your world is lived in. That is not just sort of a stage backdrop to your characters, but that your characters are interacting with that world. One of the ways that I try to make this happen in my stories is to have the characters move through their world in their daily lives, the way we move through ours. School, religion, shopping, daily transactions that you make, transportation, getting from one place to another. If you can do this while also advancing the plot, you will do a lot of worldbuilding in the background in a way that feels very organic. So if you have characters who need to have important meetings and they need to meet with other characters to exchange information, or to have confrontations and to have different things going on from a plot level, one of the best ways to world build is just to have those conversations happen out in the world in different places. So don't have them all happening in the headquarters or in whatever, in their home. Like, have them get out there. I have a scene in which… It's a very tense situation, and it's this confrontation with the two characters, but it happens in a temple. So you get to see the temple and get a sense of what religion is like in this world and the fact that one character bows in the temple but the other does not also tells you something about the characters. I also have a scene where two characters meet at a sporting event. So, those are… That's a way to have the world move by almost like you would in film. Where of… In film, things are happening and there's so much of the world building that is in the background with the costumes and the sets and all that, and you're not paying attention to it, but you're absorbing it. You can do the same thing as a prose writer.

[Howard] Yeah. A couple of examples that leap to mind. The used universe of the first Star Wars film in 1977 which so influenced the genre. This was the idea that things get dirty. Even spaceships got dirty. They were used, and they had dents and scuffs and scrapes and whatever else. When Ridley Scott produced Aliens, he called that look Trucking in Space. It was very informative to us, and it let us feel like we were living there. Contrast that with when Lucas shot the prequels, so many of the sets were designed it just as green screen that a great many of the scenes were a pair of characters carrying on a conversation while walking down a hallway in which they interact with nothing. Even though they then built lavish whatever's around them, it felt stale. So, for us as authors, having people conversing in a temple, having people at a sporting event, where the conversation, the scene requires interaction with what is around them, that's crucial.

[Mary Robinette] There is actually an industry shorthand called touch the puppets.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which sounds different. But it is exactly this. That when you have three-dimensional figures that the actors, the human actors, can interact with the puppet actors, and it feels very real. Whereas when you have CG characters, there's often no interaction. So it feels like they're existing in two different worlds. One of the things that I do when I'm plotting is that I will write down purpose of scene, which is my narrative intention for the scene, but then I'll write down activity. The activity is the thing that the characters are doing in that scene, which often has nothing to do with the purpose of the scene. So if they are plotting… It's like we're going to plot this heist. They're doing it over… While cooking a spaghetti dinner. The thing that does for me is it makes the world richer, but it also allows me to introduce micro tensions, because that's… There can be things that are going wrong in the scene, like the water starts to boil over. Which can mask the fact that they're just exchanging information in prepping for something. But it also, again, has that texture of making the world feel more real, because small things go wrong in day-to-day life. Like, in one of the episodes that we recorded previously, we had to start over because outside the booth, my cat had knocked over the cat feeder and had, like, jumped in it. If we had left that, this would have felt so very real.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We removed our vital worldbuilding details. This is one of the benefits that novels have over a lot of other mediums, in that you're essentially unconstrained by budget or time. If you're making a movie or a TV show, then, yeah, you probably only have a handful of scenic locations that you can use in your story. If you are writing a novel, you can have as many as you want. You can have that meeting take place at a temple or a sporting event, because you don't have to pay extra to get a whole sports arena into your book. You just put it in there.

[Howard] I remember my first iPhone. It was expensive, and at one point I cracked the screen and could not just run out and replace it. See item 1. It was expensive. For a while, finger swiping across the screen, there was a texture as I ran my finger across the crack. It was the texture of regret for having dropped it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It was the texture of need for not having enough money. I felt it every time I use the phone. Okay? That was a little tiny rib feeling under one finger. Those kinds of details will give you way more insight into your characters than you just got into me.

 

[Dan] All right. So, our book of the week this week is one that does this so, so well. Releasing this week into the world, we're so excited, Fonda, tell us about your book.

[Fonda] I guess I should mention that I have a book coming out this week.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So, I am finishing off the Green Bone saga with Jade Legacy, which is the third and final book. It is coming out November 30th in the U. S., December 2nd in the U. K. and internationally. It is… I've described the green bone Green Bone saga as an epic urban fantasy Asian inspired gangster family saga. That's probably as succinct as I've ever been in describing it. But it is about… It takes place in a modern era Metropolis, and one in which there is a resource, magic Jade, which endows certain people with very cool abilities. It is the story of two clans in conflict. I'm just super excited to bring the story to a close. It has been a long journey and I'm glad I got to come on here and talk to you guys about it.

[Dan] Well, thank you very much. The Green Bone saga is one of my very favorite fantasy series ever. So excited for Jade Legacy to come out. So, the first one is called Jade City, the second Jade War, and then this new one, Jade Legacy. So if you're unfamiliar with it, start at the beginning.

[Mary Robinette] They are so good. They are so, so good.

[Dan] If you like… If you have been waiting so eagerly, like the rest of us… Mary Robinette, you're a cover quote on it, aren't you?

[Mary Robinette] I am. I say that it's like your favorite wire work film crossed with The Godfather. It's just… But it's so good. Such, just beautiful intimate portraits of people. I just love it a lot. Also magic.

[Dan] Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee. Go buy it right now.

 

[Dan] Anyway, back into our world building and creating texture. What are some of the elements that are often overlooked when we are trying to create texture in a world?

[Fonda] So there are… There's many that people don't automatically think of, because they think worldbuilding, and they think lineage of Kings and government and geography and so on. But things that are very much a part of our own world, like pop culture and entertainment. What are people doing for fun? Fashion trends. Schooling or education. Fitness. Sports. We mentioned food earlier in this master class. Religious life. Daily commerce. These are all… Just sort of think about how you go through your day and the ways you interact with the world. Are you doing that in your fantasy world?

[Dan] Yeah. The… So I play a lot of role-playing games, and one of my favorites is Warhammer Fantasy, which is set in kind of a low magic, fake magic Europe. That world always feels much more real and grounded to me than most of the D&D settings, even though I love them as well. I was trying to figure out why. What about that feels more real? It's this concept of texture. The idea that any given Warhammer Fantasy supplement in describing the world is also going to have a sidebar that tells you about the specific names of all the pub games that they play in the taverns, or they won't just be food, they'll have names for this type of meat pie or something like that, to just add extra specificity, like we talked about last week. But then also kind of give those context, so it's not just we're in a pub, but we're in a pub playing this game of dice which is called this because of this, and the last guy who played it lost in his name is still carved into the table and things like that.

[Mary Robinette] The other… With those things, the pub food, games, all of that, give your characters strong opinions about something. Like that's… And maybe give them a foil who has a counter opinion. Again, it can give you micro tension within a scene, but it can make things feel more real if it's like he hears the sound of the arcade game and it haunts him because he broke up with his teenage girlfriend and lost the top score and has never been able to reclaim it. I don't know. I'm making things up wildly.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But… Because I was…

[Dan] It's a good writing prompt.

[Howard] The smell…

[Mary Robinette] That's where I was going.

[Howard] The smell of a dresser drawer, that at one point had mothballs in it, but hasn't for probably decades, is the smell that will always bring me back to me being 12 years old and visiting my grandmother's house for the first time. That's… But most people will smell that and think, "Oh, how do you… You haven't gotten the mothball smell out of that drawer, have you?" That's not the reaction I have.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm sorry… I'm… Weirdly, I'm going to wind up quoting Hemingway, which I did not expect to do in this episode.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But this goes back to something that Fonda was talking about much earlier about similarities, that you can look for similarities in these specific details. Everyone has heard the write what you know Hemingway quote. I'm going to take a moment to read the… Like, the length… The actual quote. Because it actually gets to what we're talking about here. So… It's not what most people think it is. "You see, I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of actual life across. Not to just depict life or criticize it, but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe in it. Write about what you know, and write truly, and tell them all where they can place it. Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study about. Whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about." So you know what it is to really like the taste of something. You can give that sensation to your character with a thing that is specific to that world. You can have someone in that world… Or a type of music that you know intimately what it is like to love as a fan. You can attach that to a new type of music that you have made up for this world. That's going to make it feel specific and real and textural and grounded.

[Fonda] Yeah. I definitely think that that phrase write what you know gets misunderstood a lot, and that really, what you're talking about, Mary Robinette, is writing what you know on a deeper level, on an emotional experiential level. Taking that and applying it to new contexts in your fictional world. One thing I want to say to all the readers here is a little goes a long way. Like, we may be giving you the impression that you have to just now all of a sudden just over describe everything and fill it with nuance and context. But that's not necessarily true. You want to pick your places. Show those moments, those glimpses that imply that the whole world has that same texture. I use the example of, like, the Hollywood back lot tour. Where I went to Hollywood studios… Or Universal Studios, and you take the little tram, and the streets on this back lot look so real. Like, down to the bubblegum that's stuck on the railing or the chipped paint on the windowsill. It's entirely convincing. Then you turn the corner, and, like, it's just held up by like boards. There's no building behind it. It's just the front. But what you do show has texture and feels very real and lived in. The reader or the audience fills in all the rest for you.

 

[Dan] Awesome. All right. So, what is our homework for this week?

[Fonda] I would like readers… Listeners to go and take a character that they have in the project that they're working on and free write your character with a day off. Have them just spend it doing what they would do on a day off. Where do they go, what do they see, how do they get around? What interactions do they have? After this exercise, see if you can't find a few cool details that you learned in the process of this free writing that you can use in the background of your main story.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/14/16-46-world-and-plot-the-only-constant-is-change/

 

Key Points: To make your world feel real, make sure it incorporates change! A past, a present, and a future, with the events of your story and the historical context interacting. Plot is about constant change, and you need to think about how that intersects the changes in the world. At whatever scale suits your story. Pay attention to why a status quo exists, and what is holding back change. People don't all react the same way to changes. What can you use to give your story a sense of time? Break it into chunks. Use labels for times and events instead of dates. Idioms! Pay attention to diaspora, the movement of people and the interaction of cultures.

 

[Season 16, Episode 46]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Fonda, the only constant is change. That's a phrase that we hear a lot. What do you mean by that? How does that relate to worldbuilding?

[Fonda] So, often times, we come across fantasy worlds that feel unchanging. We're out of time. I think we see this especially in portal realm fantasy, fairy tales, fables, stories that have that once upon a time feel to them. We know that in our world things are always changing. Our society is constantly evolving, technology is changing, social norms are changing. Even though I think there's absolutely a place for those sort of timeless ancient unchanging fairytale fable type fantasy worlds, personally I aim to create worlds that feel as real as possible. Part of that is making the world feel like it has a past, a present, and a future. And that the story that we're experiencing exists in a historical context, and the events of the story are also impacting what will be the status quo after you close the book on the final page. The fact that in our world the only constant is change intersects with the plot, because plot is also about constant change. Right? Each scene, each chapter, is a change that is driving that story forward. Because if you finish a chapter and you're in the same place that you were at the beginning of the chapter, that chapter is not necessary. So when you have change in the world intersecting with change in the plot, you're able to heighten and reinforce both.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to make sure to point out that this applies to a story of any scope. We're not suggesting that even the lighthearted romantic comedy that you're writing has to fundamentally alter the entire world. That's not what this says. The world of your story might be much smaller than the entire planet. But that it still needs to have that sense of past, present, and future.

[Fonda] Yeah, definitely. I mean, you don't necessarily have to be working on the scale of global change, it could be very small change, and world being the scope of what your characters immediate circumstances are. It could be change in a small town. Change in a high school. Change within this family. You have plot intersecting with world and that the changing world could be complicating the plot. For example, you have a romantic story, you have two protagonists, but some element of the world changing the industry in this town, causing one of the protagonists to have to move or a war pulling one of these protagonists away. I mean, all those potential changes in the external environment could complicate your plot. You could also have the events of the plot acting upon the world. So there is a give-and-take between plot and world.

[Howard] I like to think of change from the other side of the coin. Which is, why would things stay the same? Why does a status quo exist? There are status quo's that exist literally because we don't know any better. Because the technology hasn't been developed. In the 19th century, status quo for traveling around town was being a pedestrian or riding an animal or riding something that was being pulled by an animal… I mean, there was railroad obviously, but that was for longer trips. All the way up to the point that there were electric scooters and that there were people you could hire to take you to an airport to get on a plane. That degree of change was huge and a lot of it was driven by us learning things and things… Learning to do new things. But there's also status quo that is artificial. Where there is some sort of force keeping things from changing. Whether it's an economic force, someone has something to lose if we change things in the following way, or something, some structure has been built that prevents us from making the changes we want to make. Then there's status quo changes that are natural or huge, nature-sized, like… Was the story… Series of stories, Hellconia Winter, Spring, Summer… I can't remember the name of the author. Where you've got a planet that orbits twin suns, and it orbits on the outside… Complicated orbits. They have, like, a 1500 year year with hugely long seasons. So there would be these seasonal changes where suddenly the snow begins melting and it stays melted and what the heck is going on. So there are things that might change as a result of nature actually changing around you.

[Mary Robinette] The other piece of this is that people are going to have uneven reactions to that change. Depending on where they are in culture and society. So some people will embrace the change, some people will actively fight against it. You're going to have both of those things happening simultaneously, which is part of what makes something feel vivid and alive is that not everyone is having this even reaction. When you've got an event, whether that's the invention of a new technology or an invasion or just even class change, the events affect culture and culture affects events. Like, one of the kind of on a very granular level, when you're looking at rules, rules in a school or laws in a society, those rules… Or the ones that your own family sets… Those rules, the things that get delineated are always set in response to something. You don't have to create a rule about something if you don't… Aren't either afraid that someone is going to do it or if someone hasn't already done it, and often, it's, like, why would any sensible person… There's a… Why do we have a rule about the number of questions that is appropriate to ask a guest? Not saying that we have someone in my family is perhaps a little too curious, but…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] These are the kinds of things that can exist and can make that sense of history. Because people will… You can always have someone who remembers before the rule. Like, I remember flying bef… When you could go and meet someone at the air… At the airplane door. At the gate. That's… That is outside of memory for many of my peers, just because of where I was born. Or when I was born.

[Dan] There's a park just about a block away from my house that has a big sign posted that says, "No fireworks, nudity, or horseback riding."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I would love to know what event prompted the creation of that sign.

 

[Dan] But, let's pause here. Let's get our book of the week from Fonda.

[Fonda] So, the book of the week is Black Water Sister by Zen Cho. I wanted to highlight this because it is a great example of a story in which the fantasy elements interact with a changing society. So it is set in modern-day Malaysia, and there are ghosts and deities, but they are interacting with greedy land developers who are potentially going to be destroying a temple. The way that Zen Cho makes those elements interact is both very… It's very on point and it's also very witty and hilarious, and I really think it's a good example of what we are talking about. Because often times there are… We talked about choosing where you want to build the world in order to reinforce your themes, and Zen certainly does that because there is this sense that the fantasy world, the fantasy elements, are not unchanging. They are being affected by the real world, and things like… Like land development.

 

[Fonda] One of the reasons why I set the Green Bone saga in an analogy of late 20th century was because there were so many forces of modernization and globalization that were going on at that time. Some of them continuing to this day, but especially post-World War II and the economic boom of the Asian nations, and intersected really nicely with one of the things that I wanted to bring to the forefront in that story, which is that there is this magic element, and for a very long time it has been the birthright of the people who live in this place and control that resource. But there's no way that that would be immune to technology and to economics. Someone would find a way to, and they do, a foreign power finds a way to develop a drug so that what was once exclusive to these people is no longer exclusive. That intersects with the plot, and that's why these clans start having conflicts in going to war. So, let's talk a little bit about ways that you can make your fictional world, your invented world, feel like it has a sense of time.

[Dan] Yeah. So, I've… An example I'm going to throw out is my own book, Extreme Makeover. Which is set in our world, but is specifically about how that world is slowly degraded and destroyed by a new technology. It's a hand lotion that overwrites DNA. I realized quickly early on that while I was telling a kind of an apocalyptic story about the end of the world, that would necessitate massive societal changes over time. So the… My solution was to split the book into four distinct parts, each of them presenting the world in a different way. There aren't necessarily huge time jumps between each part. But it… Categorizing it that way gave me a chance to kind of make more obvious this is our world today. This is the part of the world where this new technology has been invented and people are focusing on that. Then, as that gets worse and worse, and as the world changes, these little breaks and it make it kind of easy for me to convey those changes over time.

[Mary Robinette] One of the tricks that I use sometimes when I'm trying to create the sense of change is to make sure that my cast of characters are not all the same age for the reasons that I've already talked about. But the other thing that I found very, very useful is the way we identify time, with the exception of 2020…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Is rarely by the year. It's usually something like before the war or after… Mid-panini, I've heard people talking about. But we come up with a catchy label for it. The something something dynasty. One of the things that you can do to create this sense that your world is very thought through is to just have people refer to something in the past with a label instead of an actual date. Because it also implies that… I've used this example before, that I had the battle of the seven red armies. Like, I have literally no idea what this battle is. I just needed to reference something that happened in the past, like a far distant event. That makes it sound like, oh, yeah, there was this whole big cultural war that went down. I don't know. I don't know what that is.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But it makes my world sound richer. It's the shorthand…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] [of cheats?]

[Fonda] That can apply to not just things that happened in the past, but the sort of echo of the historical origins for names and customs and behaviors. So, like, for example, there's… In my story, there's these people who are known as lantern men, and they're sort of patrons of this clan. But the reason why they're called that has a historical origin that dates to wartime. So having a… Having little idioms that people say to each other. I have placed interludes in my book that are structurally a way to create a sense of history. They're these brief looks back into myth or history. But then I bring them into the main narrative by having them tie into sayings or legends or TV shows and comic books or pop-culture that the current day characters are experiencing. So there's clearly a link between what came before and how that has, like, filtered into current day culture and behavior.

[Dan] We're getting… We're running out of time, but one aspect of this that's in your notes, I want to make sure that we talk about, is diaspora. Which we talked about a little bit during lunch. But I feel like the Green Bone saga is very good at conveying the concept of diaspora, and the way that different cultures migrate and kind of interface with an interface into other cultures. So can you talk a little bit about that?

[Fonda] Yeah. I mean, that was an element that I very much wanted to capture in my books, because I rarely see it depicted in fantasy novels. There's always races, different fantasy races, but they don't always take into account that people move. I mean, our whole world history is so based on the migration of people. There's a lot of cross-cultural pollination and cultures mix and they change and diaspora cultures are different from the culture that those people came from. That is an element of change and time and history that was very important to me when I was writing those books. I wanted to make it really obvious when you're reading them that these people who might be ethnically the same but have migrated to different places, now feel very distinct. Yet they have also some commonalities, and they've… So that was a tricky balance to strike.

[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite real-world details for this is the food in Peru. Peru is South American, it is very deeply steeped in the indigenous cultures, and then the Spanish who arrived. But also, they have had Chinese influence in their culture for hundreds of years, to the point that the traditional like grandma's house Sunday dinner is a stirfry in a wok.

[Fonda] Yes.

[Dan] Which changes… We don't tend to think about that being in a South American country, but this concept of the way the cultures have pollinated each other is present.

[Fonda] Yeah. In the before times… Dan, you're making me hungry, because I visited Peru, and the food there was one of the highlights.

[Dan] Oh, for sure.

[Fonda] But they have this fried rice dish which is called chaufa. I learned that it's called chaufa because the Chinese immigrants who moved to Peru and started these restaurants, the Chinese word, and I'm going to butcher it because I don't speak Mandarin fluently is chaofan, come eat. So when they would say choafan, like, that got transmuted into chaufa, which is this fried rice dish. [Garbled] That's just like a little, very cool worldbuilding detail that if you can find ways to create little moments like that in your story are just going to make your world feel so much richer and more real.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to actually recommend that people who want to dive deeper into food, because we could talk about it for hours, go back and check out episode 14:30, Eating Your Way To Better Worldbuilding. Which digs really deep into this. Including a fascinating detail, which is that often a side effect of a diaspora is that the food of the people who have emigrated to someplace else will freeze at a particular… At a cultural moment. The moment that they left their home country. Whereas the home country will continue to carry on and the food will continue to change. Which I found fascinating and totally relevant to this conversation.

[Dan] Yes, very much.

[Mary Robinette] But you can go listen to the full episode.

 

[Dan] Awesome. This has been a great episode. Fonda, take us out with some homework.

[Fonda] So, the homework this week is for you to take a timeless story. So pick a fairytale or a fable and reimagine it happening during a period of change in that society. So my example would be, let's say, Sleeping Beauty falls under the curse and she wakes up 100 years later. But that kingdom has been through a socialist revolution. Now the Royals are in exile. How can you imagine a timeless story being very different as a result of the world changing?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to tag onto that really fast, and then will let everyone go. Beauty and the Beast, the Disney film, if you look at the fashions in it, takes place about 10 years before the French Revolution.

[Dan] Yeah. Sorry, Belle. Anyway, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/31/16-44-world-and-character-part-1-all-your-characters-are-biased/

 

Key Points: You only need to create the world your characters live in. Point of view is the great determiner of worldbuilding. Focus on what the character cares about. You may do it in layers, working out plot specific ones ahead of time, but decorative ones when a scene needs them.

 

[Season 16, Episode 44]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] I am… This is quite a bold statement in our title. All your characters are biased. Fonda, what do you mean by that?

[Fonda] Well, often times, writers have to do… When they're doing worldbuilding, they get asked the question, "How do you do it all, like, how do you create a whole 'nother world?" That just seems like such an overwhelming, daunting, gargantuan task. My answer to that question is it is less daunting than you think. Because you don't actually need to create the entire world. You only need to create the world that your characters live in. Because none of us have a complete view of the world. We all live in our different worlds, and those worlds are determined by everything from our family background, our class, race, gender, culture, occupation, our position in our family, all these different factors create the world that we live in. Someone else may be inhabiting a world that is entirely foreign to us. So I like to think of the world and your character's view of the world like the analogy of the blind men and the elephant. Probably everyone has heard of this analogy, but if you have not, it's the idea that there's blind men feeling an elephant, and the one who standing near the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a tree," and someone else near the… No, the person standing near the leg thinks the elephant is like a tree. The person holding the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a snake." Everyone has a different mental image of what the elephant is because they are only experiencing their section of the elephant. This applies to characters in a world as well. That is why point of view is truly the great determiner of worldbuilding. You first need to understand who your character is and what their place in the world is and what the story is around them. That determines your worldbuilding needs.

[Howard] I just realized that I want to retell that story from the point of view of the elephant who has now decided human beings are all ignorant.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And they grope me all the time.

[Howard] And stop touching me!

[Dan] I think this is a really fascinating way to look at worldbuilding. Honestly, one of the things that I really love about the Green Bone saga as a great example of worldbuilding is the way that you were able to show the different cultures. There are the people who live in Jade City, and then there are the other people, the Kekonese who live in Espenia who are the same but also fundamentally different at the same time, because they see the world in different ways. Knowing then that point of view is, as you said, the great determiner of worldbuilding, how do you bring that across in your writing?

[Fonda] Yeah. So, a good example of this is actually my debut novel, Zero Boxer. So it takes place in the future in which the inner solar system has been colonized. There is a political conflict that is occurring between Earth and Mars. There are issues involving genetic engineering and whether or not that should be legal or illegal. But that doesn't actually matter all that much to the protagonist, because he is an athlete, and he's competing in the sport of zero gravity prize fighting. So the world, for him, revolves around athletic competition. So as a worldbuilding, as a world builder, what I needed to focus on were all the details of his life as an athlete. That included things like his supplement routine, his exercise routine, is training, all the, like, details of how those fights happen in zero gravity. All the stuff involving like Earth and Mars and like the tech in the future and how spaceships work, like we didn't need to know how the drive of the spaceship worked. Because that is not something that he cared about, he just needed to get from one competition to the next. So, of course, he gets on a spaceship and he moves through time, but for him, what was most important to the story were those details of his day-to-day life. So a lot of the other stuff is kind of just sort of hinted at, or implied in the background. It is… Still feels like it supports and it exists, but I didn't need to go deep into all that stuff. Where I needed to go deep was in the areas the character cared about. One of the benefits… That was a single point of view story, but one of the benefits of having a multi point of view story, which I had in the Green Bone saga, was each of the different characters then has their own priorities and their own experiences and circumstances, so you get a more fully fleshed out and developed world because you are seeing characters who have different views of it. It's like putting all those blind men who are touching the elephant into a room and they're all drawing out their own little section and slowly the whole elephant comes into view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The way I think of this is about the decisions that I'm making about the things that my character interacts with. Which are the things that you're talking about. The supplement routine… In Green Bone saga, we learn a lot when we go to the school. We learn a lot more things because we're in the POV of someone who inhabits that… That's a good way… Like, when you're trying to figure out, "Well, what do I have to do when I'm trying to…" How do I… When you're facing decision paralysis. It's like, "What is your character going to interact with?" So when I'm doing my worldbuilding, I'll do like… You've heard me talk about doing this in layers. Well, I'll think about the sort of broad layers that my… That I know that my character is going to interact with. But a lot of the specific details, like the supplement routine, I don't think about that until I get to… I mean, I don't have a character with a supplement routine, but were I writing it, I would not work that supplement routine out until I hit a scene where I was like, "Oh, my character absolutely is going to have supplements here and I need to know what they are." But otherwise, I don't sit down and work it out. I tend to think of it as sort of there are… The ones that I need to work out ahead of time are the plot specific ones, the ones that are going to shape the way the plot works. Then there are other ones that are kind of what I think of as the decorative ones that are the ones that affect the way maybe my character interacts with the plot. But doesn't necessarily shift the course of the plot.

 

[Dan] Let's pause here for our book of the week. Which is, actually, you, Mary Robinette. You were going to tell us about Craft in the Real World.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses is a craft book. Normally we're giving you fiction to read, but I actually think that every writer should read this book. It's looking at the biases that we bring to fiction based on the ways that we… The fiction that we have read and the societies that we move through. You think, "Really? Biases? Do we have them?" One of the examples that he gives in this book is how we've all been taught not to… When we do dialogue tags, to do like said or asked, and not to do things like inquired or queried. He says the problem is if someone grows up in another culture and they are taught to write… That queried is the invisible one. So they are always like, "my character queried, queried my character." If they come to a writing workshop in a culture that is an ask culture, and they write queried, everybody in that workshop is going to be like, "Why do you keep using this word? Go with the invisible word." One of the things he talks about is how ESL writers will often read something like written by a native English speaker and be like, "Why do they keep reusing the same word? Why do they keep reusing said? Don't they know any other words?" It's about the inherent worldview that they're approaching their writing with. So this is, I think, a great book to read in general, and specifically a good book to read when you're thinking about the biases that your character is carrying, because a lot of those biases are biases that they're inheriting from you as the writer.

[Dan] That's awesome. So that is Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses.

 

[Dan] A lot of what we've been talking about reminds me of a funny thing that a creative writing professor showed us one time where someone had taken a story set in the modern day, but written in the style of Isaac Asimov. Where he is explaining the technology behind everything that he encounters…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Including wooden doors and door knobs…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And automobiles and all of this stuff. Which, in a science fiction book, we kind of accept as well, yes, you need to explain to us how this door opened by itself, but putting it into the real world really gave it that context of, "Well, duh, we don't need to know this. Why does this character feel it important to tell us about how a car turns on when you turn the key?" That's a lot of what you're talking about here, where the point of view that we're getting the world through is going to change what details about the world we get. I find that a really valuable perspective.

[Fonda] Yeah. I think that if you think about the genre of dystopian fiction, dystopia is a point of view. So if you rewrote the Hunger Games from the point of view of a middle class to upper class person living in the capitol, it would be a completely different story. I mean, they would be, "Who are these district 12 rebels? Insurgents, insurrectionists, who are here to destroy society?" So if you take that perspective of, like, everyone is living in their own world and there are people in our world who are living in very dystopian situations, every… If you decide you're going to tell a story about a… let's say a fictional city that you have made up. Is that story being told from the point of view of someone who has power and is privileged or somebody who is living in the sewer system? Those lead you to completely different stories. Neither one is correct. There's no right or wrong in terms of which perspective that you decide to write about. But that choice is going to fundamentally drive your world building needs. There is a minor character in the Green Bone saga who's the most hated character in that trilogy. But he plays a really valuable role from the perspective of the narrative because he is outside of the system that all the other main characters inhabit. Now, 90% of the time, you are spending time with the characters in this one family that they are very entrenched in their world and their culture. There is this one minor character who is not. Every time you step out into his point of view, you get a very different view of the world.

[Dan] Is that Bero?

[Fonda] It is.

[Dan] I actually love that character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I do too.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] This is, I think, a super important thing to bring up. Because I worry that some of our listeners are hearing us talk about this perspective driven world building, and finding it limiting. Really, this is an opportunity for you to expand your world in whatever direction you need it to go. One of the problems world builders have, we call this world building disease, where fantasy writers and science fiction writers, we just craft this enormous gargantuan world, and most of it, we don't actually need to put into the book. This is how you can put some of that into the book. If there's a part of your world building you find especially compelling or interesting, but your main plot doesn't necessarily focus on it, you can add in a side character who does or a subplot of some kind that will interact with it. That is how you can get that cool thing you're excited about into the book.

[Mary Robinette] Or you can write a short story that is set in the same world if you don't want to have story bloat.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled]

 

[Howard] One of the things that I fall back on all the time is the unreliable narrator. This is not the unreliable narrator of literary fiction where do I believe what this person is… No. This is the person who just says something in order to fill us in about some world details and I, the author, do not know whether they are right or wrong. I only know that they think they're right, and I might be wrong when I first wrote that dialogue for them. I'll find out later. This principle, the unreliable narrator, the… Oh, I forget his name, he was the story bible guy for Elder Scrolls Online from 2014 through I think almost 2020. He looked at the old Elder Scrolls games and was like, "Oh, no. Your stories are so inconsistent. You contradict your… Well, I have a solution. The solution is nobody says anything about the world except through the eyes of a character who might be wrong, might be right. Tada! Everything has now resolved itself. How old is the city? Eh, the city's about 500 years old. No, the city is 750 years old. No, the city is 2000 years old. It's built on another city that was built on another city that was… They're all right or they're all wrong." It doesn't matter, and it makes the world building so much easier when I let go of that and just allow myself to make mistakes, but my characters take the blame.

 

[Dan] Well, that is going to lead us right into our homework. Fonda, what homework do we have today?

[Fonda] I would like your listeners to take a favorite story of yours and reimagine it from a different point of view. Take a side character, a non-POV character, and imagine how your world building needs would be different if it was told from someone else's point of view. So, as an example, let's say you wanted to tell the story of Harry Potter from the point of view of the Minister of Magic. So what different world building needs would you need, would you have as a result of that story being told from a completely different perspective?

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/17/16-42-m-i-c-e-quotient-after-the-fact/

 

Key Points: In editing, how can you use the M.I.C.E. Quotient to diagnose and solve problems? Identify weak points and story bloat. If the ending is flopping. look at the questions you set up and the kinds of conflicts in the middle, and see if the ending matches. What conflicts dominate the middle? Are they trying to escape? It's a milieu. Are they answering questions? It's an inquiry. Is the bulk of the middle spent being unhappy with themselves? You've got a character thread. Are they trying to change or restore the status quo? It's an event story. Then look at the kinds of barriers that the character is encountering. Are things preventing them from leaving? Are things blocking their attempts to answer questions? Are they just getting more and more unhappy? Are things just going wrong? Then decide whether to pull the thread out or strengthen it. You can also use these questions to shape your outline. You can use the M.I.C.E. Quotient elements to look at the overall structure, and on a scene-by-scene basis.

 

[Season 16, Episode 42]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, After the Fact.

[C.L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

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

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[C.L.] I'm C.L.

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

 

[Dan] We're going to now take everything we've learned over the last seven weeks, and we're going to use it as a diagnostic tool. When we get to the editing phase, how can the M.I.C.E. Quotient help us to solve problems in our work?

[Mary Robinette] So, way back in the dawn of this particular series, I talked about how to use it if you were a pantser. That you could use it to make choices about which direction that you were going. As a diagnostic tool, it's very useful in identifying weak points and story bloat. So the reason that I wanted to break it apart into individual pieces when we first started is to help you understand what each piece does structurally. It's a super unnatural way to tell stories, and it's not something that you would normally do. But, it's, as Dan pointed out earlier, it does make stories… It takes good stories and it breaks them and makes them worse when you strip them down to being a single thread story. But it does tell you what each piece does. So, if the ending of your story feels like it's flopping, what you can do is look at the questions that you set up and the kinds of conflicts that dominate the middle, and then see if that ending matches. Then what you get to do is to decide which of those things you like best. One of the things that you may have heard me talk about in previous episodes is that I used to have stories that had a great beginning and a great middle and a great ending to three completely different stories that happened to have the same set of characters. What was happening was that I would begin a story that was a character story, and the conflicts that my characters struggled with in the middle were all in a milieu, and then when I'd get to the event, to the end, and I'd solve an event that I'd never really set up, and my character was still in the milieu, and their character issues were still unresolved. It was just not satisfying. So what was happening to me when I started figuring this out is that I would just back into stories and I would be like, "Well, this story's good. I don't know what I did." The M.I.C.E. Quotient allows me to flag things and address them in a somewhat more systematic way. So, how do you identify these questions? When you're looking at the story, look at the conflicts that dominate the middle. Are they trying to escape someplace or navigate? If they're trying to escape someplace, you've got a milieu. Is the bulk of their energy being spent on answering questions? That's a very strong inquiry. Do they have a big chunk of the middle where they are unhappy with themselves? You've got a strong character thread going on there. Then, are they trying to change the status quo? Change the sense of normal? Then there's an event that's happening. So that means that you know the kinds of barriers that you need to keep throwing out them. You can check to see if those are the kinds of barriers that are happening to your character. Are things preventing them from leaving? Are things blocking their attempts to answer questions? Do they just keep getting unhappier? Are more things just going wrong? If you take a look at those, and you're like, "Oh, actually, yeah. Yeah. They're supposed to be answering questions right now, but instead, all they're doing is thinking about what a terrible, terrible person they are, and I don't actually set that up, and I don't pay it off." So, at that point, your choice is you can either pull that thread out and remove the thing where they angst about their sadness, or you can strengthen it by adding stuff at the beginning and the end. The choice comes down to your personal taste and the purely mechanical question of length. If you've got the space and you like it, strengthen it. If you don't have the space, or you don't like it, cut it. So simple when I describe it that way.

 

[Dan] So, I have a really good example of this from my own work. One of my early novels is called The Hollow City, which is about a man with schizophrenia. I… In the first draft of that, I had a chapter in which he was trapped in a room, he'd been locked in, and his medication is wearing off and he was starting to have delusions and hallucinations and this sense of, "Oh, no, I'm going crazy." It didn't work. It didn't work in the least tiny bit. In hindsight, it is easy to see that I had started a milieu story, him locked in a room, and he needs to survive and escape. But every obstacle I had thrown at him and every solution that he was coming up with were all character-based, because I was trying to focus on the room and on his kind of conquering his mind at the same time. It just wasn't working. I'm not saying that that kind of thing couldn't work, but I certainly was doing it all wrong. So, looking at it in these terms helped me to figure out, "Oh, that's why this doesn't work. That's why this is a problem." I was able to fix it.

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something that I cut out of The Relentless Moon. In one of the chapters… This is… I don't count this as a spoiler. Things go wrong in space. Surprise. But in one of the chapters, as a consequence, I had someone get a concussion. The person who got the concussion wasn't one of the main characters, it was someone who was on a ship that they were on. The problem that I had was that this was now a new event thread that was not related to my other event threads. It was a disruption of the status quo, and it was one that I was not planning on tying up or resolving in any way. But people were going to want it resolved, because I had injured a character, and my characters cared about the person. But it wasn't part of the big events that I was trying to solve. It was a different kind of event. It was pulling focus away from the main events which were things going wrong because a saboteur was doing them. So I pulled it completely out of the novel all together. It was, again, that thing of looking at it and going, "Okay. What is the answer that I'm going to be giving to this? Does that answer fit with the ending that I'm heading for? Do the conflicts that people have to go through to resolve this fit with the other kinds of conflicts?" Because to help the person with the concussion, that meant… It was all of the solutions that were around that were lots of time in hospital rooms. Those were not things that I was interested in doing.

[C.L.] I think the biggest thing that I had to do, and to learn, in writing novels was… In Witchmark, everything was too easy. When Miles decided that he needed to know something or do something or talk to someone or anything, it would be like, "Okay. So you do that." I wasn't coming up with problems. What I was basically doing was I didn't have a character, I had a mail carrier. He would go to a place and somebody would hand him information. Then he would go to a different place and somebody would hand him more information. That was the only thing that was happening.

[Chuckles]

 

[Charlotte] I mean, I know that this episode is titled After the Fact, and we're using it… Or we're talking about how you can use it as a diagnostic tool when you're editing, so that evidently is presuming that you have a body of work. I don't have a middle for my novel right now, and I certainly don't have an end. So I'm wondering whether I can use these kinds of questions at the start of my… Starting to plan my novel to help me not have weak points and to help me not have story bloat at all.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You can absolutely… Say the… If you're an outliner, you can absolutely use it as a way of thinking about the shape of the story in outline form.

[Charlotte] Yeah. That's [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] So you get your outline and you look at it and you're like, "Oh. There is not enough of X." Or, one of the things that I have done is I have color-coded things based on which M.I.C.E. element is kind of the major driver of any given moment, and looked at it and realized that it's very heavily weighted towards one in the beginning, and then another one comes to dominate. That will happen sometimes naturally, but frequently, when you've got something that's out of balance, it is because of something like that. It's because your focus as the writer shifted during the course of writing it. What I also will find when I'm doing outlining is that my understanding of the story is different when I get to the end then it was it… At the beginning. But I don't necessarily go back and clean that up to make it fit the ending unless I do several passes through that outline. Even then…

[Okay]

[Mary Robinette] When I get into the story, I'm still doing revisions based on new understanding, but trying to keep things in those… Within whatever I decided are the major drivers, trying to keep my focus in those areas, helps.

 

[Dan] Let's pause for a moment for our book of the week really quick. We're going to do something a little different this time around. Our wonderful audio guy who records all this stuff for us is Marshall. Yay, Marshall.

[Mary Robinette] Yay, Marshall.

[Dan] He has a fantastic podcast that he does with some other writers. He's going to tell us about it.

[Marshall] Yeah. Thanks for letting me on here, guys. Our podcast is called Just Keep Writing. The tagline is "a podcast for writers by writers to keep you writing." You might notice that some of the names are familiar if you've gone on the Writing Excuses retreats and that kind of thing. I do the podcast with Nick Bright, Wil Ralston, and Brent Lambert. We're kind of a community focused podcast that we discuss craft, our own writing processes, and our journeys. So, for example, lately we've been doing a lot of talking about editing, speaking of editing, with Brent, who's a professional editor. He works for Fiyah magazine as well. We've been talking about his recent work and editing process. We've done author interviews. Mary Robinette and Dan have both been on. Piper J. Lake as well. Brent and I do a kind of a spinoff called Just Keep Writing While Black, where we interview black debut emerging authors. So, we've been having a lot of fun. So, definitely check us out. We're wherever you find podcasts. Justkeepwriting.org. We also have a Discord channel which is… We do collaborations, write-ins, feedback, and that kind of stuff too, and we're on social media. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. So, check us out. Thanks, guys.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks, Marshall. It is a very good podcast.

[Garbled to you]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The podcast is one of the reasons that we realized that when we needed an engineer, that we should ask Marshall. We have been very happy that he has been joining us for these.

 

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So let's continue talking about how to kind of use this as a diagnostic tool. You can use it to look at the overall structure, but you can also use it on a scene-by-scene basis. So when we were talking earlier, in one of the early episodes, we talked about how you could have a M.I.C.E. element that existed only in one spot in the story. So, if you've got a scene that isn't working well and you're trying to figure out why, look to see what in that scene is… Which M.I.C.E. element is kind of your dominant driver in that scene. You're asking the same set of questions. As an example, which I have given before in a previous episode, when I was working on Glamour in Glass, I think… Yes! Forgetting my own books. I had a problem, I had a plot problem, because there was a thing that hadn't been invented yet, but I had hinged everything on. I had to fix it. I had to pull that thing out and I had to fix it. I was struggling trying to figure out what to replace it with. Then I stepped back, and I was like, "Okay. In essence, this scene is a milieu scene. They have to get in, rescue someone, and then get back out." So if I know that it's a milieu scene, that means that all of my conflicts and also all of my solutions are coming from the milieu as the primary driver. That allowed me to plot my way through this scene and to fix the scene. So if your character is struggling with themselves and you're having problems moving them forward, remembering that is an internal conflict, it is a conflict that happens with themselves, that means that your conflicts, but also your solutions can come from inside the character. Or you can braid something and move it through to shift the focus. If you're at a thing where you don't want to solve it, and you want to push it someplace else, you can ramp up the tension by having that other thread come through. So, looking at it afterwards when you're trying to figure out what is wrong, using the M.I.C.E. Quotient after the fact to go, "Okay. This is what's gone wrong with it and here are some possible solutions." It just gives you another set of tools. Right. So, thank you for joining us on the exciting master class about the M.I.C.E. Quotient and our deep dive. I hope these tools are useful.

 

[Mary Robinette] Your homework assignment is to apply them not to the fairytale that I've been having you work with, but something that is a current work in progress. I want you to look at something that you've been struggling with. Look at it, see if you can identify the M.I.C.E. Quotient elements, and if that gives you a new set of tools to understand what is going wrong with that and how to fix it. Then fix it. It's a very simple exercise this time. Thank you so much for…

[Dan] All you have to do is…

[Mary Robinette] Fix it.

[Dan] Fix your thing.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's it. If they're trapped someplace, figure out how they get out.

[Dan] The end.

[Mary Robinette] If they're not happy with themselves, figure out what can make them happy. If you have imposter syndrome…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The best way to fix that is to be out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/03/16-40-nesting-threads-in-the-m-i-c-e-quotient/

 

Key points: Nesting threads, or first in, last out. Symmetry! When you close a thread, there is a tension drop. You need two or more threads to give most stories an interesting dynamic. You don't have to use them all, and pay attention to how much weight you give each one. Pairing M.I.C.E. thread types can work well. Be careful about braiding too many, though.

 

[Season 16, Episode 40]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, talking about the M.I.C.E. Quotient, Nesting Threads.

[C.L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

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

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[C.L.] I'm C. L.

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette, with Elsie, who is purring very loudly.

[Dan] Hello, Elsie.

 

[Dan] I am very excited for this episode. We have been circling the concept of nesting threads for five episodes now. Here we are in episode six. We get to dig into it in detail. So, what do we need to know that we haven't already talked about with nesting threads?

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, nesting threads is basically first in, last out. It works because of the length of time that we have to invest emotional energy into a problem. So, there's a couple of things to know about the way people are wired. I am going to say that this is specifically Western storytelling style. There's many different traditions, but the way we are trained is that when a quest… When we ask a question, we want an answer to it. Right? We also want symmetry. Humans tend… And babies tend to respond really well to symmetry. We like recognizing patterns. So it is helpful to have this kind of mirroring thing happen in your story, by having, like, if you begin milieu and then you open an inquiry, to close the inquiry and then you close the milieu. People recognize patterns. The other piece, and this is the more important piece, I think, is the amount of emotional energy that you've invested into something. So going back to my idea of elastics, the longer you stretch an elastic, the more tension it's going to be on it. So if you got something that you start to stretch on page 1 and you don't release it until page 597 if you're Brandon, then that's going to have… There's going to be a lot of tension remaining on that. Whereas if you have another thread that you start on page 100, you have 100 fewer pages to spread that over the span. So knowing that, what happens is if you release the tension on the one… That longest thread before… So, let's say my longest one is milieu, and I release that before I release the one on inquiry, what happens is that there's a tension drop. So when I get my… When I get that other answer, I haven't had as much time to invest in it. Thinking about Wizard of Oz, which you have all watched now, hopefully, when you get to the end, we close things out in sequence. That Dorothy exits Oz… She gets the answer, ruby slippers will carry you home, she exits Oz, she gets back to Kansas, everything is fine, she didn't have to live in a… Kansas farms are all yay and happy. If you remember in the witch's castle when Dorothy is looking at the hourglass, and we see Aunt Em sitting on the porch… Or looking around frantically going, "Dorothy? Dorothy?" That exists to remind you that the status quo is still disrupted. If instead in that hourglass what we see is Aunt Em sitting on the porch, everything about the farm has been restored, status quo is reestablished, that closes that event thread early. So when Dorothy gets out of Oz and goes back to Kansas, it's no big deal. You get a dramatic tension drop because the status quo… We already know that the status quo is restored. There's no… There's no doubt about that in the reader's mind. So that's why nesting threads are very… And thinking about this first in, last out concept is very useful for maintaining that tension through the story. I'm talking about the frame of the story, not the stuff that's happening in the middle.

[Dan] Yeah. Let me use another example. I'm going to talk about my book, Ghost Station, again. So it begins with this… It's about spies in Berlin in 1961. It begins with the message that comes in from a double agent that is gibberish nonsense. So the main thrust of the novel is figuring out what is actually going on. Why was this message weird? What does that mean? Etc. Then it hits a point where the main character and another one he's working with cross over the wall into East Berlin. Then it becomes a milieu section, inside of the larger inquiry section. They are trying to survive in East Berlin and then escape back out again. While inside… Big spoilers for this book… The person that he is working with attacks him. It has this event of, "Oh, no. The person I thought I could trust, I no longer can trust." There's this event that takes place inside of there. Then we tie them off in reverse order. He learns that, "Oh, yes, that person actually I can trust. There were very good reasons for that attack." Then he escapes out of East Berlin. Then he solves the overall problem of what's going on and what this message means. Using what you were just saying, Mary Robinette, if we had resolved those in reverse order. If he had, for example, solved the entire problem of the message and gotten that taken care of while he was still in East Berlin, then it would feel very unsatisfying. Like, well, yes, you've solved this problem, you dope, but now you're stuck on the wrong side. It would be this kind of dragged out ending of, well, the real story is over but he's still in a pickle and he's gotta get himself home and we have a few more obnoxious chapters of that. I had not thought of it in those terms, until you described it that way. But that makes perfect sense as to why you need to close the brackets in the same order you opened them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We've… You've all seen films or things where you're like, "Ah, it's over. No, no, still going." Usually that's because they're closing things out in the wrong order.

[Dan] Yeah. That is really interesting.

 

[C.L.] I was just going to say that there is something that I have been trying very hard to hold back while you've been going through the previous episodes. It's this. I'm thinking maybe that calling a particular story simply a milieu story or an inquiry story, etc., can't really accurately describe a story because you do need a second ingredient to give the story kind of like… An interesting dynamic?

[Mary Robinette] So, yes, C. It is exactly that. That you have all of these things going on all the time. With like my book, Ghost Talkers, which is coincidentally our book of the week, that has multiple things going on in it. It is an inquiry story. It's a murder mystery, whodunit. But it's also an event story. Because it's a wartime novel. There's constant status quo disruptions. And it is a character story, because the character is learning to… Learning things about themselves and how they move through the world. But it's primarily event inquiry. Those are the major drivers. This helps me… The M.I.C.E. Quotient helps me understand what things, what elements to bring into that story and which ones to focus on. It helps me understand how to end it in a way that was going to be satisfying. While, at the same time, trying to do things that were fulfilling these promises, but hopefully in unexpected ways.

 

[Mary Robinette] But, Ghost Talkers, for people… Since it is book of the week. It is probably actually my favorite of my novels, and it is the one that the fewest people have read.

[Dan] It is actually my favorite of your novels.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. It…

[C.L.] I love Ghost Talkers.

[Mary Robinette] I went on book tour… My book tour started on election day in 2016, and weirdly… Weirdly!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] There was just not a lot of interest in books at that point. I don't know what was going on them. But it is a World War I spy novel in which mediums work as advertised. The soldiers are trained, conditioned, that when they die, they have to report in as ghosts. So you have the Spirit Corp. Then things go wrong. Someone gets killed, and they aren't supposed to. Not that anyone is necessarily supposed to get killed, but… You know what I mean. But it kicks off this murder mystery. Then it's a look for who the betrayal… The person who… That's the spy and the saboteur is. So World War I spy novel with ghosts is basically it. Ghost Talkers. 

 

[Mary Robinette] But when you listen to it or read it, one of the things that I think you'll notice is that I could have weighted it differently. Because all of those elements are there, and I could have made different choices about where I was putting the emphasis in the story. That would have shifted dramatically the direction of the story and the way the ending plays out.

[Charlotte] That's great. I mean, what I'm hearing is that you can have as many M.I.C.E. threads as you want, and actually maybe it's a good idea to have more than one for a little bit of spice, a little bit of texture as C was talking about. I remember, when I was plotting my novel, I was like I'm going to… It starts with character, then it leads into event, and then it goes into milieu, and then it goes into inquiry. I remember talking it through with you, Mary Robinette, and you were like, "You don't have to have them all." I was like, "Oh. I don't?" So maybe it's a question of how many and also what weight you put on each quotient?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes, exactly. It's… It is how heavily you weight them. Because you can… Like, all of these things will exist in the story. It's just how much of them are you letting drive? That's… That is the thing that is tricky to figure out. So what I have found when you're doing this is that one of the things that works well is to pair disparate M.I.C.E. thread types. So one of the things that will happen, particularly in multiple POV books, you've got one major plot and then the other one feels extraneous. You're annoyed every time you have to switch over to the B plot. What I find is that frequently when that is happening, it is because they are the same M.I.C.E. thread. So that they are… Or the same M.I.C.E. type. That they are, say, both events. But one of the events is lower stakes than the other. So it is difficult to care as much. So it always feels like a tension drop. Whereas, if you have one event and one character one, they can intersect each other in different ways. But the other thing that they can do is that they can have comparable stake levels. So that when you move from one to the other, you don't have that same tension drop.

 

[Dan] Would you also suggest or recommend that when you are nesting them, not so much multiple POV's, but nested inside of each other, that they be different types of elements as well? If you've got a milieu inside of a different milieu, it can start to feel repetitive. We have to escape from this place, and now we have to escape from this other place, with no variation in tone.

[Mary Robinette] So, the… Yes and no. Mostly what happens when you do that is that it just reads as an extension of the original problem. So in Star Wars, the rescuing the princess, they have to get in, they have to get the princess, they have to get back out. While they're in there, Storm Troopers… Surprise! So they have to escape by jumping into a garbage… A chute. Does that work? Yes, it does. But it is a garbage chute. So now they have another milieu within the larger milieu that they have to escape. So that… That's just a long series of obstacles… Consequences, obstacles, that's just an extension of that original one.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So that's… Actually, blowing up the Death Star itself is, we have to get in, drop this package off… Which is this bomb, and then get back out without being killed. I mean, it's still, that's… It's… There's just a lot of milieu driving that. But that is not, I would say, the major driver. What are you thinking, C?

[C.L.] I was just thinking about like the idea of having like the two milieu stories in one. Because I was thinking about like the Lord of the Rings where it's like basically they're going on a journey to reverse heist a ring into a volcano. But, like, the first part of the story is about them leaving Hobbiton. It's just like the segments of, like, we're in a place, we're going to leave a place. We're traveling across a place in order to get to a place. I think it works. Generally. What I was thinking about was you want the variety of story type things going on in order to have some variety, but at the same time, I always try to think of my different plot threads as they have to be braidable. Like, they have to… Like, if I have an inquiry thread and I have a character thread, then each one has to affect the other one.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[C.L.] So it's just like two strands twisted together, like a rope. But if I add a third one, then it has to… Then things get a little bit more complicated, because each one has to affect the other two. Then, if you add a fourth one…

[Chuckles]

[C.L.] Like, lots of people know how to do three strand braids, but not a lot of people know how to do four strand braids.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Exactly. That's a great analogy. We're going to be talking about that when we get to the next one, which is the middles and conflicts. We're going to be talking about how to braid the stuff in the middle. The nesting stuff is mostly like where do you start the thing and where do you end it. But, yeah, you're exactly right, the more you layer in there, the harder it is to juggle all of those things.

 

[Mary Robinette] So. This brings us to our homework. Take your fairytale. What I want you to do is I want you to look at two M.I.C.E. threads. You're going to… Now you get to do it with two of them. Okay? So maybe you decide that you're going to do character and event, or you might decide that you're going to do milieu and inquiry, or milieu and character. Whatever. So I want you to figure that out and nest it neatly, so that you begin with character, then… So, Goldilocks is tired of being treated like a child, then she enters the Bears' house, does some investigating, and decides that actually maybe she should go home, so she goes home and then she's like, "I am actually happy being a child and my home is much nicer than the place I explored." So we have this very nice little nested thing. So you're going to do a two strand thing like that. Then the thing that I want you to do is I want you to take those tags and I want you to invert them. So, in mine, Goldilocks would enter the Bears' house, and while she's in the Bears' house, she would make a discovery about herself because of her exploration that would then cause her to go home. As opposed to the other way around. So, your job is to do a two strand version of whatever your fairytale is. Then, after you've written that out… You don't have to write the entire story, you can just bullet point it. Flip that, flip the tags, and do it the other way. See what that does to where the conflicts land and how the beginning and end feel.

[Dan] And you are out of excuses. Now go write.