Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/09/19/16-38-deep-dive-into-character/

 

Key points: Character stories are driven by character's self-doubt, angst, internal conflicts. A problem with themselves. They begin with "Who am I?" and end with, "This is who I am." Often paired with an external catalyst to cause the moment of self-doubt. An exploration of self-discovery. Wanting to change, to be somebody different. Character stories do not require a deeply flawed character. Struggles with priorities, struggles with expectations. Obstacles are when each self-revelation opens up new problems with self-identity. Complications are when the self-revelation opens up different problems not related to identity. Coming-of-age stories are often character stories, trying on different identities, coupled with event stories, changes in the external status quo. In try-fail cycles in character stories, the character is either clinging to an old self-definition or trying on a new one, asking, "Is this who I am?" Many stories have an outer character frame, because it provides a satisfying emotional payoff at the end of the story. How do you avoid navel gazing? Multiple threads, stakes, or... make sure you externalize the internal changes!

 

[Season 16, Episode 38]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. Deep Dive into Character.

[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 are continuing our really wonderful M. I. C. E. Quotient class taught by Mary Robinette Kowal. Thank you so much. And thank you to C. L. and Charlotte for being here. Today we get a talk about character in nice juicy details. So, take it away.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. To recap, in the M. I. C. E. Quotient, character stories are basically stories that are driven by the characters' self-doubt. Angst. They are very much about internal conflicts. They are about a problem that the character has with themselves. They began when your character basically asks, "Who am I?" and they end when they say, "This is who I am." Most of the time, when you see a character story told in the wild, it is paired with something else, and there is a catalyst, an external catalyst, that causes that moment of self-doubt. That moment does… Can… Doesn't have to be a major driver of the story. So if your character is plagued with self-doubt because… It's like I thought that I was a charming philanthropist, and someone is like, "No, actually, I find you very much an asshole." They don't need to necessarily try to fix that person's opinion of them. But that can be the moment that causes them to have the self-doubt, and they're like, "Am I? Am I? I thought I was charming?" Then kicks off this exploration of self-discovery. It also can be something that they are trying to fix. So in a romance, that relationship that misin… That probably completely accurate impression is something that they would be trying to fix, because they wanted to have a relationship with the person. But they don't have to. So, in a classic one, it is just about the character being sad about who they are and wanting to be somebody different. I'm also going to say…

 

[Charlotte] So in my…

[Mary Robinette] Oh. Yes. Go, Charlotte.

[Charlotte] Sorry, Mary Robinette. I just completely spoke over you. But I think while it's true that an event can help kick off a character story, also, the reverse is true? So the novel that I'm currently grappling with, it's the character and their flaw who makes a mistake, and then that kicks off an event that upsets the status quo. So you can play around with which order these things happen in.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Absolutely. One of the challenges sometimes with this is that the urge when you're doing a character story is to make the character deeply flawed so that they can come to some magical realization and become a better person. The fact is you don't have to make someone deeply flawed to have a character story happen. It can be just two pieces of themselves warring about which… What they're going to prioritize. Do they prioritize work or family? This is a thing that we often have to struggle with. That is enough to be a character story.

[Dan] Yeah. A great example that came to mind is It's a Wonderful Life. Which is a character story about a really, really good person. Who, kind of his problem is he's got big ambitions and big dreams that he keeps giving up because he's too nice. He gives all his money and all his time to other people. That does eventually lead him to a suicide attempt, so there's definitely flaws at work. But in general, it's a character story about a very good person rather than about a very flawed one.

[Charlotte] I'm also thinking about the kind of character story where someone is trying really, really hard to be who they think they are supposed to be, and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with character flaws at all. That the process of their character story is to question all of these things that they are supposed to be, and discover who they actually are. So, in a way, it's actually a story about rebellion.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. Which actually leads me to talk a little bit about the obstacles versus complications in this form. So, obstacles in… When you're looking at a character story, is that each self revelation, each time they discover something new, it opens up additional problems with their self identity. So if they're like, "Well, this is who I'm supposed to be, this is how everybody sees me." When they're going through that, and then they realize, "Oh, but this doesn't actually fit me." That shows them… This one piece of how everybody sees me doesn't fit me, and if I try to shift that, it shows this problem with this other piece of me. So you can have this cascading sense of problems with self identity. But complications are when self revelation opens up a different problem that is not related specifically to their identity. So this would be things like where… That… Imposter syndrome makes them decide that they aren't going to turn in… That they aren't going to turn in the manuscript, say. And they aren't going to communicate to their editor about this. I'm not speaking to anyone in our audience at all.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's all being motivated by this sense of self, but what it kicks off is this whole cascade of event problems, where everything has to move around because the manuscript hasn't been turned in. It could eventually lead to a status quo change, where they are… They have to return the advance. To be clear, just for anyone who's afraid of this, it is totally okay to be late with your manuscript as long as you communicate clearly with your editor.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I say… And I am late with my manuscript.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] I have a question, but before we get to it, I'd love to hear about the book of the week. So, Charlotte, you're the one who has our book of the week this time.

[Charlotte] That's right. It's me on book of the week. So, my book of the week is Popisho. P. O. P. I. S. H. O. In the US, or This One Sky Day in the UK, by Leone Ross. It is full of amazing, magical characters. It's a super sensual novel. It conjures a world where magic is everywhere, food is fate, politics are broken, and love awaits. It just brims and blisters with life and love and grief and magic. The overarching, I guess, thread is character, because it's also a love story.

[Mary Robinette] I think I need to read this, a lot.

[Charlotte] You do. Everybody should read it. Popisho…

[Mary Robinette] Popisho or This One Sky Day.

[Charlotte] This one… That's it!

 

[Mary Robinette] Dan, what was your thing?

[Dan] Okay. So I am wondering about coming-of-age novels. Coming-of-age stories. Something like Little Women or Huckleberry Finn. Are those character stories?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I'm asking mostly because I can't think of where else they fit.

[Mary Robinette] They are. I mean, so, coming-of-age often is coupled with event, because they are experiencing a change in external status quo. Not always. But frequently. But really, what it is is that the character is trying on different identities, a lot of times, as part of the coming-of-age. This is something that we all go through when we are teens, and sometimes it continues on. The thing to understand about character stories is the try-fail cycles. So in try-fail cycles, your character is basically clinging to their old self-definition or they are trying on a new one. It's basically, it's this… The idea is that we… Our self-definition is super precious to us, and shifting it is terrifying. Because it completely redefines who we are. So every time you have a try-fail cycles, what your character is doing is like, "Is this who I am?" is the question that they're asking. If they're trying to break out of a role, it's like it's someone that they don't want to be. If they're trying to take on a new role, this is… They're experimenting. So, "Is this who I am?" is the question that they're asking. When they fail, the answer is no, this is not who I am. That leads them to their next level, because they have to try something else at that point. So, that's… That is basically what's going on with the try-fail cycle. In the coming-of-age stories, it's… They're… They are doing two things, frequently, when it's a kid growing up. They are trying to cling to the safe things of childhood, and they're also trying to reach to the adulthood. So frequently what you've got is they're doing both. They are trying to cling to their old self-definition and they are trying to try on the new ones at the same time.

 

[Dan] Yeah. It occurs to me as well that character might be the most common. As we talk about nesting these things, character might be that the most common outer frame. You look at something like Shawshank Redemption, which is clearly a milieu story overall, but it doesn't really end until the character Red learns to hope again. Which is how we started the movie. There's this thin shell of character development around it. There's countless examples that we don't necessarily have to go through. But whatever story you're telling, there's this character frame around it, because that's kind of that really satisfying emotional button on the end of the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, as you were saying that, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. This is… Reluctant hero is the same…" That's the… Like, "Am I a hero? No." Then you get to the end of the story. "I am a hero."

[Dan] Yeah. I mean, not to do another Morgan Freeman one, but Seven does the same thing. It is obviously an inquiry story, through and through. But it begins with Morgan Freeman saying, "This is a horrible place and my life is awful and I gotta get out of here." It ends with him saying, "You know what? I can do a lot of good if I stick around here." Again, he has learned to hope, he has grown as a person. That is the shell around the inquiry story, is this character frame.

[C.L.] That is the most optimistic reading of the ending of Seven that I have…

[Laughter]

[C.L.] Ever heard in my life.

[Dan] Well, but it's true, though, because the inquiry story ends horribly, but the story itself ends with him kind of getting a little bit of hope. Yeah, it's… You gotta really dig through some mud to find any kind of optimism there, but it's there.

 

[Charlotte] It's there. Mary Robinette, and my other people in this podcast, question. Character story. How do you get it… How do you stop it from being navel gazey? How do you make it a driver, how do you keep it going? How do you make it exciting?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, this is… That's such a good question, because frequently people are just… They think, "Oh, if my character is dealing with this internal self-doubt, it's all my character just going, 'Oh, woe is me. Woe!'"

[Charlotte] Absolutely. A lot of describing of the thoughts and the feelings and the… There's no action.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So…

[C.L.] As… It's… I was going to say, like, the thing about all of these elements so far that I'm seeing, especially with character, is that it needs some juice.

[Charlotte] Yes.

[C.L.] Like, we're doing an escape from this place because… We are answering these questions because… We are examining ourselves and changing because…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. This is, again, why you almost never see them solo, because they can be super dull. You need the juice that another thread gives you. Or the stakes, what… Why does it matter to the character. The… For me, the thing that I think about is that while you have an internal conflict, you have to externalize it to make it visible. So, again, I come out of theater, and so what you're looking… One of the things that we say is, "Acting is reacting." That the character… It's not just the character sitting there and having feelings inside themselves, it is them reacting to their environment and moving through it and taking action. But the actions that you take and the reactions that you have change from person to person. What happens in a character story is that a character is becoming a different person as they go through the story. So the actions, the externalization of that change means that they are making different concrete choices in the physical world, based on the internal changes that are happening to them. So making… Figuring out why… What are the… What does the way their mind is built, what does that do to affect the way they move through the world? Then you make… You frequently windup presenting them with increments of the same choice and that they respond to that choice in slightly different ways each time they come upon it. It doesn't mean that it has to be exactly the same beats, but it's the same kind of thematic choice. Like, do I kick the puppy this time or do I not kick the puppy?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] The question we all must ask ourselves.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I may have just revealed too much about myself there.

 

[Dan] Awesome. So what homework do we have for character?

[Mary Robinette] Shockingly, we're taking our fairytale and we are converting it straight to being just a character story. So, in our story of Goldilocks, there are four different characters and I can decide to center that story on any one of them. So if I center it on Goldilocks, Goldilocks is tired of being treated like a child. So she is going to prove that she's not a child by going out and having adventures. Then realizes the adventures are too frightening for her, and that maybe she's better off being a little girl after all. Or, it can be Mama Bear desperately wants to be a great porridge artist. But no one appreciates her porridge. Her family doesn't. She's disconsolate. Her family takes her out to try to cheer her up. She attempts to pack a picnic to fit into the mold that they want her to fit into. She's just so unhappy making sandwiches. Sandwiches are for a different kind of bear. She returns home nearly broken and discovers that someone has eaten her porridge and loved it. She has found her audience. A little blonde girl. So you can do this in any way you want. Now, obviously, there is in my very dramatic Mama Bear telling, there is an event that happens in there that's the catalyst, which is someone comes and eats her porridge. But what we're looking at there is her attempting to fit herself into the mold that people are expecting her to be in, and her sadness that she is not appreciated for who she truly is. A great porridge artist. So…

[Dan] Well, now I want to read that version of the story.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So your job is to take whatever you're working on and try to strip it down to being just character. Good luck.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/09/05/16-36-deep-dive-into-milieu/

 

Key Points: Milieu, stories driven by a sense of place. Thresholds and environments. How do you get in, and how do you get out. Heist stories. Survival stories. Often coupled with event stories, shifting the status quo. Or a character story, a personal transformation. MICE helps you decide what to focus on. It also helps you decide when the story is over. How can you tell whether it is a milieu story or just a strong setting? Look for the entrance, exit, and conflicts in the middle. If the main goal is getting out, it's probably a milieu. If your ending isn't satisfying or your middle is sagging, check for misplaced MICE threads.

 

[Season 16, Episode 36]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, coming back with another M.I.C.E. Quotient episode, Deep Dive into "Milieu".

[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 are back with the second episode of this new master class, where we are going to dig really deep into milieu. So, Mary Robinette, this is your class. Very quickly, catch us up on what we're doing today.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So we're going to look at milieu. So milieu is a fancy French word of saying place, but it just made the acronym better. So, in this episode, we're going to be looking at how stories are driven by a sense of place. Milieu stories are all about thresholds and environments. These stories, they classically start when a character crosses a threshold. That threshold represents a transitional period in the character's relationship with the location. Then, again, in a classic milieu story, we end when a character succeeds in exiting their transition and ending their journey. So what this means is that you can start something in one place, like you can start by say entering a spaceship and then exiting the spaceship and that spaceship is the milieu. Or you can start by say exiting New York City, driving across country, and then entering San Francisco. The drive across country is the milieu. So you do not have to… The threshold you cross does not have to be the same every time.

 

[C.L.] I have a quick question because when I was thinking about stories about places, just because of the way that my silly brain works, I was like, "Oh! Do you mean like heist stories?"

[Mary Robinette] Heist stories? Yes. Heist stories have a very strong milieu component. Because it is all about getting in and getting back out again. Yeah.

[C.L.] Yes. So I was, like, you mean like Leverage? Because they're always like just… Always the thing where they have to get into a location, succeed at the thing that they need to do in that location, and then get out again. I mean, there are other things that are going on in the story, but that's what we came for. That's what it says on the tin.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's a…

[Dan] Yeah. I…

[Mary Robinette] Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] I would suggest survival stories fit into this really well. Stuff like Die Hard and Jurassic Park. You enter a dangerous location and then you have to live through it. Then the story ends when you successfully leave.

[Charlotte] Does this mean that Annihilation has to be a milieu story, by this definition?

[Mary Robinette] That is correct.

[Charlotte] Which makes me think also about my idea that Annihilation is a kind of a nice way to satisfy the itch of the popular like science fiction kind of story structure of here is a new planet that we are going to check out. It's going to have all these great things. This is like Star Trek, the original series, was all about this. The other thing that I was thinking of just flew out of my mind. So give me a moment, I'll try to remember it.

[Mary Robinette] But these are exactly the things. One of the things that I'm going to point out is that with Leverage and Star Trek, that these are often coupled with event stories. That there is a status quo element that they are attempting to shift, in addition to navigating this place. So when you're looking at… When you're thinking about the milieu and you're thinking about these examples that we're tossing out, concentrate in your mind on the conflicts that are around the place versus the conflicts that are around the shift in status quo. One of the things that's cool with things like Leverage is that that shift in status quo is often the excuse for the milieu exploration. So when I was talking earlier about… In the first episode about a light frame or a minor thread, that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about. Whereas in Star Trek, the navigation of the space varies. A lot of times, it is that they are trying to right some terrible wrong and that's your major thread. But it varies episode by episode.

 

[Charlotte] I just remembered what I was thinking out. I was thinking of the movie Labyrinth. Because that basically… Like, it's a milieu story, because you have to… She has to get through the labyrinth to rescue her brother. But also, the labyrinth is a symbol of where she's basically going through a personal transformation. So as she goes through the labyrinth, she is discovering herself.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. That is a great example. Indeed.

[Dan] So is that… Maybe this is… I don't know. Let me start my question over. Is that something you would describe as a nested story that is a character story framing a milieu story?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] The reason that I kind of prevaricated a little when I started the question is I thought, "Well, how important really are these definitions?" Then I thought, "Well, very important, because we're doing eight episodes about them."

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, one thing that I say to people a lot of the time is you don't need to really stress about these very granular definitions of specific writing things. But this is a case where we are. So let me just ask, what do we gain by the revelation that, yes, the Labyrinth is actually a milieu nested inside of a character? What does that teach us and how does that help us when we get that specific with it?

[Mary Robinette] So, at the beginning of Labyrinth, she's faced with a couple of problems. She's trying to get the baby to sleep. She wants to spend time for herself. The thing that she winds up needing to solve is getting the baby back. Right? And getting out… Which she solves by getting out of the labyrinth. But the thing that she is not spending time on is trying to get the baby to sleep. Like, she's not spending time on trying to entertain her little brother. None of that is important. That… The M.I.C.E. Quotient helps us decide what thing we are focusing on. So that's the thing that it's doing. The… In… Trying to think of another example of a thing where it's like we could have… Oh. Here it is. Let me use Wizard of Oz again. At the beginning of Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy runs away, she ends up at Prof. Marvel's. He says to her, "You don't have to go looking any further for adventure than your own backyard." Had she taken that advice and come home, the story would have ended right there. So what the M.I.C.E. Quotient can help you do is decide not to resolve a conflict, because you need it to keep going through the entire story. Does that make sense about…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled a few sources]

 

[Dan] I think that makes a lot of sense. I would further say, and you covered this a little bit in the first episode, knowing that there is a character conflict wrapped around our milieu conflict helps you know when the story is over, as well. If Labyrinth ended when she escaped the labyrinth without having learned anything… Like C said, it's about her kind of finding herself and learning who she is. If we didn't get that resolution, and we just get the triumphant "Yay, we got out of the labyrinth," it would feel unfinished.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The example that was given to me when this was first explained to me is if you're reading a story and it begins with a mystery and there's a dead body on the floor and the detective comes and he's talking to the widow and over the course of the novel, the detective and the widow fall deeply and passionately in love and the story ends with them getting married and living happily ever after, but you never find out who did the murder… You would track the author down…

[Chuckles]

[garbled murder… We need to know…]

[Dan] Really, the detective did the murder because he wanted to meet this hot widow.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Or the hot widow did it because she was wanting to meet the detective. I mean…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] We don't know.

[Dan] We don't know.

[Charlotte] We'll never know.

[Mary Robinette] That's what it does, is it helps you identify those things that the reader is just going to be gnawing their arm off because you didn't answer the question that you raised at the beginning.

 

[Dan] All right. Well, I'm going to continue this discussion a little bit with our book of the week. Because this week, we want to talk about my middle grade trilogy, The Zero Chronicles. The reason that we wanted to pitch this one this week is because each book takes a slightly different tack on the M.I.C.E. Quotient. So the first two are very clearly milieu stories. Zero G is about being in a spaceship. Dragon Planet is about being on a planet. The story begins effectively when they are kind of thrown out of the station, the colony where they live, and they have to survive in the wilderness. The story ends when they get back to civilization and they have survived. The third one though is very different. Stargazer is more about an inquiry. There is a mystery going on, what happened to the missing spaceship, and the story ends when they solve it. So depending on the type of M.I.C.E. Quotient element that you focus on, it can be very different. But, anyway, everyone go read the Zero Chronicles by Dan Wells because they're amazing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, they are. Actually, I listen to them on Audible, as does my dad, and we both enjoy them quite a bit.

[Dan] Aw. Thank you very much.

[Mary Robinette] Neither of us are middle grade. So, there.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Fun for all ages.

 

[Mary Robinette] Charlotte, before the break, it looked like you had a thought. I just wanted to check in with you.

[Charlotte] I did have a thought. So, you've mentioned that milieu begins when a character crosses a threshold, and it ends when you and that thread, when the character succeeds in exiting their transition. But can you have a milieu thread where the character does not get out of wherever it is that they are in? Is that possible?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. It is extremely tricky to pull off in a satisfying way. So there's a famous play called No Exit with… Which is basically people in Hell, and it's an exploration of the idea that Hell is the… Is other people and there is no exit. So that is an example of just like enduring. The problem with these things… With something where the character doesn't exit is that you have to hit a point where the reader understands that this is really final and understands why they have given up trying…

[Charlotte] Otherwise…

[Mary Robinette] That's difficult to do in a… Go on.

[Charlotte] Otherwise, as a reader, they'll just be frustrated and hate the book?

[Mary Robinette] Well, it's like, "Why didn't… Why don't they keep… Why did they give up? Why don't they keep trying?"

[Charlotte] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a little frustrating.

[Charlotte] It's frustrating.

[Mary Robinette] But it… If you can deliver it as a this is a design element. But it often winds up having them feel hopeless. So that's if it is a straightahead milieu. The other piece of it is that I've seen at work successfully is when it is paired with a character story in which the character gets up to the point at which they could exit, and then they choose not to. So the point where they have the option to leave the space, it means that they have successfully navigated and they have the solution… Yes, yes, I can get out of here. But they choose not to take it because it fulfills a character choice. I have seen that work successfully in a number of cases.

[Charlotte] Okay. Great. Thank you.

 

[C.L.] I have another question really quick. I was just thinking about how place is, as we all know, extremely important to science fiction and fantasy stories. That… Like, it's kind of… Like, it's the marquee feature of a science fiction and fantasy story is that it is taking you to a place that is not like where you are. How… What are the markers that tell you whether you are writing a milieu story or whether you just have a really strong setting?

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, it is all about… There are three markers. There is where you start and stop the story. Then there's the stuff that's happening in the middle. So the question to ask is, are they trying to get out? Are they trying to… Is their goal to exit? If their goal is to exit, then it's probably a milieu story. There are, like… Being in a high school, walking into a high school, you can treat that as a milieu story. Because no one's goal is to live in a high school. No one's goal is to permanently… Like, to never graduate. So, arguably, that is a milieu. Whereas someone who enters a university and wants to get a tenure track, that is arguably an event story, because they're trying to change their status quo. Even though both of them are going to involve navigating elements of the place as a new place. Does that make sense?

[C.L.] It does. Thank you.

[Mary Robinette] I say arguably because people can argue other thing. Like, the main thing about this is it really is about helping the writer make decisions about how to focus the story. I should say, as we are going into this, that I have definitely seen examples… And we've all read them, of things that do not nest, and that's just fine. But I have found that if you… If your ending is not satisfying or if your middle is sagging, that frequently it's because you've got a thread that is misplaced. 

 

[Mary Robinette] So with that, I think we should probably do a little bit of homework.

[Dan] I agree.

[Mary Robinette] So, the homework that we're going to have for you, you're going to be doing a variation of this homework for this… For each episode. What I want you to do is I want you to pick a fairytale, something that you're fond of. The reason I want you to pick a fairytale is because they tend to be fairly simple, but also have lots of weird extraneous elements in them. I want you to tell that fairytale so that it is only a milieu story. So, for instance, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In the classic Goldilocks and the Three Bears, she goes out, she visits this house, she pokes around in the house, she breaks things, and then the bears come, and she runs away. So in a milieu story, Goldilocks would go into the meadow, then she would go into the house, she would look around the house. But she wouldn't necessarily break things, because that is a shift of the status quo. Then she would leave the house. The bears would never come home. She would never see the bears. She would just leave the house because she had finished exploring. She can break things, it's not that you're not allowed to have events happen. But they aren't the drivers. So the drivers are all about her exploring.

[Dan] It seems also like the… If you cut out all other M.I.C.E. Quotient stuff, you would not have the inquiry of whose house is this, why are there three weird things, and then answer that with the bears. So that would just be removed completely.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. Like, again using our Wizard of Oz example, if we cut Wizard of Oz down to just a milieu, Dorothy just arrives in Oz. The tornado that messes her house… That… Messes with the farm? We never see Kansas. We just see her arrive in Oz. Then we don't need to meet the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, or the Scarecrow, because they all exist to teach Dorothy something about herself. We don't need the ruby slippers, because that's the inquiry of how do I get out of here. Then when we get to the end, we just get in the balloon and go.

[Dan] So it sounds like kind of what we're asking you to do with this homework is to fundamentally break a story and make it less interesting and less effective.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. That is exactly what we're asking you to do with this. This is why I tell you that single thread stories are usually pretty dull. So, I am not recommending that you tell stories this way. But I want you to be able to identify what the elements are.

[Dan] Perfect. Great. Well, that is going to be some exciting and different homework for you. So dig into that. We will see you next week. For now, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/22/16-34-novels-are-layer-cakes/

 

Key Points: A novel is like a layer cake? Well, layers of information. Revision helps!  Also pre-work can help. Spontaneity is not creativity. Structure also helps. Make sure you are starting the story in the right place, but also make sure we have context. Use tiny flashbacks. Manipulate the POV. Use free indirect speech. Mostly, think about how you want to layer the information, what's important, what order to present it in, and how to slide it in there.

 

[Season 16, Episode 34]

 

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Novels Are Layer Cakes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dongwon] Okay. So, we're talking about novels as layer cakes. Which may initially sound a little confusing. But, this is one of the central metaphors I think about when I think about what makes a novel a novel that's distinct from a short story or a novella or a novelette. The thing about a novel is it requires more complexity, because you're sustaining a narrative over so long, there need to be so many more different aspects going. So you want layers to be present at almost every point. Especially in an opening scene. I'm not just talking about like two layers of a birthday cake. Ideally, you want like a Mille-Feuille, one of those crêpe cakes that's like layer after layer after layer…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] That gives you that kind of information density in that kind of character and world building and all those elements. We've talked about individual pieces of how to do that so far. But this is really how do you weave all of that into one coherent whole, while still maintaining the distinction of that lamination. We're turning into the great British Bake-Off here. I'm sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I've gotta tell y'a, when I think of layer cakes, I… Sandra makes cakes from time to time. You take the cake pan and you make a bunch of different layers. You saw the tops off of them to make them stack flat. Then I think of the episode of British baking show where they were trying to make dobos tortes with bazillions of little layers. I look at that and think, "No, I'm sorry. That has to be done by a machine and a computer. That is not possible for a human being to make that cake." I know there are many people who look at the way novels are constructed and to step back and see all of that layering and all of that construction and have that same reaction. "I'm sorry. That had to be done by a computer and a machine. No human being can hold all that in their head."

[Dongwon] Yeah. With… We were talking about tell don't show, we kind of touched on this a little bit, but I think this is a case where thinking about movies and TV and visual media is really useful to think about how to layer all this different kinds of information. You're absorbing worldbuilding, you're absorbing character, you're absorbing some of the thematic elements, right? If it… If a scene is lit in a menacing way, it's like, okay, we're in a thriller. If they're wearing Regency dresses, we know the time period and we know the class of the person we are looking at. If the background behind them is an office, then we know what kind of story we're in. So there's automatically many, many more layers in a single shot of film than there is in a book by… As a default. So what you need to think about is how do I start working all that other information that I would get if this were a movie into the text. You have a laser like control over the focus of the reader, so you can show us bit by bit. The downside is you have to do that deliberately. You can't just rely on us passively absorbing that information.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of this will come down to word choice, specificity, I mean, all of the different things that we've been talking about for the past several weeks. You're trying to manipulate all of those at the same time. It's what is the character noticing, what order do you feed that information to the reader, which pieces are you telling versus which pieces are you showing. Is this sentence a long sentence or a short sentence? What is my word choice here? Am I going to say, "Pulled out of a chair," or "jerked out of a chair"? Because those are two different things. This is… This is complicated. I will disagree slightly with Dongwon because this is also something that you do with short stories, and in many cases, it is more vital because you have less space. But I understand… But the layers of plot that you have to deal with in a short story are not as many as you have to deal with in a novel. This is, for me, one of the biggest differences and the thing to think about regardless in some ways if you are writing a short story or novel. That first page is framing the thing that you're getting into. In a short story, you're framing a small thing, and it's like, this is the emotional punch that you're going to get. But in a novel, you're framing something that has multiple different emotional punches that you're going to get. You're going to have multiple plot threads. How do you tell the reader, kind of, which of these is the thing that… Like, which one do you introduce as, "Here. This is the thing I'm drawing a line under. This is the story that you're going to be in on." Because you have to make that choice. Is this a coming-of-age? Yes. Is this also an epic adventure? Yes. Where do you start?

[Dongwon] Yeah. I'm going to say, actually, I'm in complete agreement with Mary Robinette. When I say that a short story has fewer layers, I purely mean in terms of character arcs and plot lines. When that information density, I don't care what you're writing, you're going to need to make sure each word, each sentence, is doing as much work as it can, while maintaining crystal clarity for the reader.

 

[Dan] Yeah. I want to emphasize the importance of revision.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] For this. Because, like Howard was talking about, if you're making a layer cake, most of the time you're making several different cakes in several different batches and then you're combining them together later on. I'm… I don't think that you have to do that with writing. I'm not going to say that you can't, because I'm sure that there are people who do. But what I do do is I will write out… The first draft is often just focused entirely on plot or on character. Then I have to go back through multiple revisions and say now I'm going to add in the other parts.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now I'm going to emphasize more of the description… Now I'm going to do another revision pass to really drill into internal monologue and emotion. It does take… You're going to have to get a lot of cake pans dirty by the end of this revision process.

[Dongwon] Your first draft is going to look more like Nailed It! than British Bake-Off, and that's okay.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Well, so… Continuing our cake metaphor. So, first of all, I do the same thing that Dan does. I do multiple passes. The second thing is, right now I am reading… And this is not our book of the week. I'm reading Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage, which is about making. In the entire time I'm reading it, I'm like, "Oh, dear Lord, this is about writing a novel… Or this is about writing." In the midst of it, he talks about making a cake, and that one of the things that, in general, you want to do while making is to set yourself up for success with your pre-work, and that chefs go in and they lay out all of… Here's the bowls that I'm going to need. Here are the ingredients that I'm going to need. They measure things. It feels like it's so much more work, but it in many ways will go faster. It can often feel like, "Oh! But my creativity!"

[Whem]

[Mary Robinette] But what we're talking about here is, with this idea of a layer cake, and especially when you're learning the tools, it's okay to learn, like, one tool at a time. When you… When we're talking about pre-work, that doesn't necessarily have to mean, oh, you're going to outline everything. Oh, you're going to do all your world building ahead of time. What we're talking about is the number of iterations it takes you to get to a product that you're happy with. So sometimes you have fewer drafts, because you've done a lot of pre-work. Sometimes you have multiple drafts, because that is the process that you particularly enjoy going through in order to get to that layer cake. You may only have one bowl in your kitchen. So you have to mix that bowl and then clean it, and then mix the next bowl and then clean it. You may have a ton of bowls, so you can lay it all out. Everybody's kitchen is different, everybody's brain is different. Every cake that you bake, every book that you write, every short story… All of these are different. But the point of it is to remember that there are layers, that there are multiple ingredients that you have to be managing.

[Howard] If there's one thing that has stuck with me after 20 years of Schlock Mercenary, from beginning to finally ending the whole thing, it's that I cannot afford to conflate spontaneity with creativity. Those are not the same thing. Spontaneity is fine, and it has its place. But creativity is never being throttled by me imposing a structure. It's being funneled, it's being channeled, it's being directed. It's… I love having a structure, and so the layering of things in a novel is incredibly helpful. The current work in progress… I had about a 4000 word scene which I couldn't make work all at once because the voice had to be consistent, but the voice is kind of tiring. It's that noir detective sort of lots of humorous metaphors, lots of weird extensions. Can't be maintained well by the reader. I realized that, "Oh, wait. This is… I wanted to use this to frame some of the other characters. What happens if I carve it into chunks?" What happens if I make separate cake pans and saw the tops off of it and then use… I call it a common tone modulation, where the theme of one scene kind of introduces the theme of the next one, even though something has changed. As I began assembling that, yeah, there's no spontaneity anymore, but the creative fire is raging, because now I can see how it needs to be built.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's pause for our book of the week. When we come back, what I'd love for us to do is… We've talked now about the importance, and I'd love for us when we come back to talk about some of the hows, of how to do that. So, Dan, I think you have the book of the week this time.

[Dan] Yes. So, our book of the week is Legend by Marie Lu. Marie Lu is an absolutely incredible science fiction writer. This book is a kind of a YA dystopia. It's about 10-ish years old from back when YA dystopias were all the rage. This one has stood the time better than most, I think. It's called Legend, like I said. I wish I had the time to read you like the entire first page. But I'm just going to read you the first two sentences.

 

My mother thinks I'm dead. Obviously, I'm not dead, but it's safer for her to think so.

 

[Wow]

[Dan] That says… Tells you so much. It is asking you compelling questions. It's introducing elements of the character. It goes on in the next paragraph, if I had time to read that, just lays out incredible detail about the world that this takes place in. There is so much density of information, while also being incredibly compelling and readable. It's a wonderful book. It's called Legend by Marie Lu.

 

[Dongwon] So, as Mary Robinette mentioned, I do want to talk about some of the mechanics, about how you make this work. I think when I'm in writing workshops the thing that I see most commonly, like the feedback I'm giving like 60 or 70% of the time is I think you're starting the story in the wrong place. This kind of goes back to what we were saying about the earlier mistakes is often… Or the common mistakes is I often see that the story's starting too early. It's starting before interesting things are happening. Now the problem is if you jump into when interesting things are happening, we don't have context. Which leads to the common mistake of the gunfight problem where then you're like, "What's going on? Why do I care about all this?" The solution, for me, is that layer cake. Right? So you can start when things are kicking off, you can start in the heart of the inciting incident, and then you manipulate the timeline. You don't have to go straight A, B, C, D. You can start at C, and then tell us about A, right? You can layer in those tiny flashbacks. They don't have to be big scenes. They can be a sentence. It's like, "Oh. Yeah. When I woke up today, I wasn't expecting this." Right? You can layer those things in to give us the context of where this character comes from, what do they care about, and then introduce stakes that may not be immediate to this scene. Like, the stakes of the scene is I need to get out of this gunfight because my sister needs to go to school today. Right? I don't know what book I've just written here…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But it's something, right?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, that sounds like Jade City, actually.

[Dongwon] Kind of. Actually. Right? Like, if the character cares about something, then suddenly I, the reader, care about this gunfight. I think when you think about how do I change the timeline, I think you can get a lot more of that density in and start layering those elements in from sentence to sentence, from clause to clause, and really get all of that information into my brain much faster than if you did it sequentially.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other piece of that when you're dealing with that kind of thing, one of your best tools for stacking that information is the manipulation of POV. So, we have talked a lot about all of the things that make… In previous episodes, about all of the things that make a point of view. If you go back to the very first episode that I appear on, which is episode… What was it?

[Howard] Three, 14.

[Mary Robinette] Three, 14. Right. Because it's pi. In which I talk about puppetry and focus and breath and internal motivation and all of those things. All of those pieces are the things that make up POV. But the other piece of POV that you have to manipulate is the showing versus telling, the describing versus demonstrating. It's basically are you… You can pull back and go a little omniscient for a moment. You can go deep in. Those moments, those choices that you make, allow you to layer information in. Within that, one of my favorite tools is free indirect speech. Where you can have the narrator basically just say something to the reader, even if it's in third person. So, this example is from Wikipedia, which actually has a great explanation of what free indirect speech is. So, quoted or direct speech would be: 

 

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And what pleasure have I found since I came into this world," he asked.

 

Whereas free indirect speech is something more like:

 

"He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found since he came into this world?

 

So, that thought just goes straight into the text. You can do so much with that to layer in information. She picked up the knife. Her grandfather had given it to her. That's just like, "Ah, I picked up the knife. Ah, my grandfather gave this to me." That slows us down. It's popping in and out. So, these are the kinds of things that you can be thinking about and manipulating when you're playing with that opening.

[Dongwon] I'm going to give another very highfalutin literary example here, but if you ever have the chance, go take a look at Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. There's a very famous scene of Clarissa walking down a street. There's like somebody's doing sky writing and she uses that to slide from POV to POV to POV in this scene as you move through the crowd. You really jump… Like, someone will make eye contact, and then suddenly you'll be in that character's head. It's a master class in how you can use POV to build out a complete scene, and the balance between telling and showing. Of telling us a piece of information about another person, dropping into their mind to see how they see the world, and then sliding back out into someone else's POV. If you want to think about how powerful shifting that perspective can be in building out a narrative, both in terms of using free indirect speech in terms of subjective experience and seeing things from different angles in that Rashomon style, even that one scene, if you don't read the whole book, I think is an enormously instructive thing to take a look at.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we are now at the point where we are at our final homework. Dongwon has this for us. But I'm actually going to tag on at the end of it with a trick. So this is going to be a tagteam homework, and he has no idea that I'm doing this. This is information that I probably should have layered in earlier.

[Dongwon] Well, I'm also calling an audible and I'm going to shift what the homework is. So we're going to see if our two plans line up right here.

[Mary Robinette] Okay, then.

[Dan] [Oooo]

[Dongwon] So, I think the thing I want you to do is actually to delete your entire first scene from your draft. I mean, save it somewhere else. Put it under a different name, don't throw out your draft. But I want you to start from word one for that first scene and rewrite it using all of the tools that we've talked about here. I want you to think about the exercises you've done up to this point rewriting that scene using all those different tools, characters' interiority, that sort of narrative description, describing the world building and setting. Then redo it and try and think about how am I go to layer all these techniques into a single whole? How do you make that cake feel more complete using these tools?

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. I am going to tag onto that, that once you've done that, but I want you to do is I want you to revise it. I want you to tighten it. The way I want you to do that is I want you to go through and highlight which things you really need the reader to know and make sure that they are in the right order. Then I'm going to see if you can fit them into a single paragraph. So what you're going to do is… This is an editing technique that I call one phrase per concept or one sentence per concept. So each concept, you're like, "Okay. They absolutely have to know that there are dragons and the dragons can talk. They absolutely have to know that this is 1950s. They absolutely have to know that I'm at a girls' boarding school." Okay, so that gives me four sentences. Then you get one more sentence for tone. Because tone is incredibly important. That is also a piece of information that the reader has. This is just an editing exercise. Then your final thing is probably going to be somewhere in between those two. But that is a way to start really, really thinking about which layer is important to you as you start your novel.

[Dongwon] I think these two homeworks dovetail beautifully. I think, by the time you're done with it, you'll have a killer first page that's going to work great for you.

[Mary Robinette] So, now you are really and truly out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/08/16-32-first-page-fundamentals-the-killing-floor-by-lee-childs/

 

Key points: A thriller introducing an iconic character. Incomplete sentences, pop, pop. Foreshadowing. A very brief cold open, and flashback. Layers of questions about what's going on and what's going to happen. Short, blunt, simple sentences, with rich visual imagery.

 

[Season 16, Episode 32]

 

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, First Page Fundamentals – THE KILLING FLOOR, by Lee Childs.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dongwon] Okay. So, this week we're doing the last of our three deep dives. We're going to do a close reading of the opening page of one of my favorite thrillers that introduces the character of Jack Reacher, who will be the protagonist of this series for however many books there are, 10, 11 books. I think he's an incredibly iconic character in the field of thrillers. Yeah, so we're going to have a quick reading of the first couple paragraphs of most of the first page here.

 

[Mary Robinette]

 

I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way from the highway to the edge of town.

 

The diner was small, but bright and clean. Brand-new, built to resemble a converted railroad car. Narrow, with a long lunch counter on one side and a kitchen bumped out back. Booths lining the opposite wall. A doorway where the center booth would be.

 

I was in a booth, at a window, reading somebody’s abandoned newspaper about the campaign for a president I didn’t vote for last time and wasn’t going to vote for this time. Outside, the rain had stopped but the glass was still pebbled with bright drops. I saw the police cruisers pull into the gravel lot. They were moving fast and crunched to a stop. Light bars flashing and popping. Red and blue light in the raindrops on my window. Doors burst open, policemen jumped out. Two from each car, weapons ready. Two revolvers, two shotguns. This was heavy stuff. One revolver and one shotgun ran to the back. One of each rushed the door.

 

[Dongwon] So, the two examples we've done so far have been very high-minded, very beautiful language, very high prose. I mean, we're talking two master stylists of the American canon here. In fact, a lot of times, when I'm on Twitter, I will see somebody start to make fun of Lee Childs' writing. They'll flag it as quote unquote bad writing. I could not disagree with them more. I think this is some of the most effective writing for the genre that we are talking about, the character that we're talking about. I think there is a rhythm and a beauty and a poetry to it all on its own. It is not trying to paint an incredibly moving, chilling Gothic picture, it is not painting the rich interiority of a depressed person, it is instead engaging with how a particular person sees the world and how that makes them good at two things, investigating and extreme violence.

[Howard] Calling back to the discussion of asking questions and then answering them. "I was arrested in Eno's diner." Well, I have a lot of questions already. "At 12 o'clock." You know, the time at which you were arrested was not one of the questions I had.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But thank you for the additional information. "I was eating eggs and drinking coffee." Okay, that's also not one of the answers I needed, but thank you for completing the picture. Then, "A late breakfast, not lunch." Oh, wait. Eggs, coffee, 12 o'clock. Maybe I should have been asking that question. But, no, again, that's not the question I had, but thank you for completing the picture. I love the way it works, because with each reveal quote unquote, we're being given information that isn't what we asked for, but which completes a picture, and the tone of it says, "Hey, that first question you had about me getting arrested? Pfft. That doesn't actually matter. We'll get to what matters later. Let me tell you about my eggs."

[Dongwon] Well, the thing that's implicit in that is his superiority as an investigator, right? It's not in the Sherlock Holmes, I'm like I'm going to prove I'm so much smarter than you. But there is an element to this, it's like, "Hey, dummy. You didn't ask important questions, which is what was happening. Why was I here?" All of those things that led up to this moment. You start to get a sense of how does Reacher's brain work. How does he see the world? How does he, like, put all of these things together? I love the inferences that they can pull from this. A thing that we will later learn about Reacher is that he is fundamentally homeless, he doesn't have a home. He's itinerant. So he doesn't have a car either. So that whole wet and tired after a long walk in the heavy rain from the highway to the edge of town… Why was he doing that? Why was he walking through the rain to get to this diner to have this late breakfast? Also, just so many bad things have happened to him already by the end of this paragraph, like, that's not a fun way to be, he's getting arrested, and yet, we don't get rage, we don't get anger, we don't get depression. We just get, "Eh. It's a Tuesday."

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that I notice about this is the way… Again, I always tend to look at punctuation, because of the audiobook narrator background. There's so many incomplete sentences in this. When he's describing things, it's these quick pops of things. Brand-new, built to resemble a converted railroad car. Like, that's not… That is… That's the entirety of it. There is no verb there. Well, built, I guess. But it's just… These incomplete sentences that just give you these pops of his notice. It's like… For me, what it mimics is kind of the way his eyes are darting around and looking at things. It's like, "I noticed this, I noticed that, I noticed this." I don't linger on anything, because I can't afford to linger on things. I have to keep moving forward.

[Dongwon] My guy doesn't have time for verbs, what are you talking about?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Who needs subjects to sentences? Objects? Forget about it.

[Mary Robinette] These are ridiculous things. Grammar? I don't have time for grammar. I'm wet and tired. I gave you a subject verb right there. I was wet and tired. What more do you want from me?

[Dan] Yeah. I…

[Howard] Had this been written by Melville or MacLaine, there would be semicolons.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right!

[Dongwon] Exactly.

[Howard] There would be a truck fun of semicolons.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] In order to capture that voice.

[Dongwon] But you said MacLaine when you meant Jackson. I think you meant Shirley MacLaine instead of Shirley Jackson.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Very different people.

[Howard] You're right. I did mean Shirley Jackson.

[Dan] I would read either a horror novel or a thriller novel written by Shirley MacLaine.

[Dongwon] Absolutely.

[Dan] That sounds wonderful. So, I find it really delightful that people kind of mock this language. In large part, because, that is, I think, fundamentally, a bit of genre bias. That this can't be good writing because it is airport bestseller thriller. But who this language reminds me most strongly of is Cormac McCarthy who is considered to be one of our best living writers. It's because this is not considered literary fiction that the exact same writing style that leaves out verbs and has short, punchy, very descriptive painterly sentences suddenly doesn't count anymore because of the genre that it's in. But if you look at this, the first sentence of that third paragraph is enormous. It is 2 to 3 times longer than any other sentence in here. That always jumps out at me. Like, why does this merit so much extra time and attention? The sentence is, "I was in a booth at a window, reading someone's abandoned newspaper about the campaign for a president I didn't vote for last time and wasn't going to vote for this time." There's so much in their. There's… It's such a… Not just long, but a complicated sentence. Which forces your brain to kind of look at that and say, "Well, why does this deserve more than the others?" Not having read the book… I'm three for three now, on not having read Dongwon's big examples. I don't know why that one gets more attention than the others. But it's…

[Dongwon] But it's…

[Dan] Go ahead.

[Dongwon] I think it's a little bit of the person slipping through the detective. Right? You just get this digression where he can't contain his irritation with the world. He can't contain the reasons why he's chosen to exit society and live this itinerant life. Right? He's an outsider, an outsider by choice, because he can't even be bothered to care about who's President, because to him, it doesn't matter and it won't matter because whoever it is, it sucks. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Well, structurally, what he's doing, like, every time he's got a longer sentence, it is actually a sentence about him. "At 12 o'clock, I was eating eggs and drinking coffee," is longer. "I was wet and tired after a long walk and heavy rains." "I was in a booth at a window, reading somebody's abandoned newspaper." It's… When we get even a hint of interiority that we linger on things. But the other thing I think is that part of the reason that he stretches that out is because the character's a little bit bored. This is… It's not en… It's not so much that we get bored, too. It's just enough for us to say, "Oh, he was there for a little while reading this. Then stuff started going down."

[Dongwon] Which he's still not interested in.

[Mary Robinette] He's still not interested. Exactly. Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] I do bef… I do need to pause us for the book of the week, and then we'll come back and talk about some more things. The book of the week this time is one that I want to talk about that Dan wrote.

[Dan] Yay.

[Mary Robinette] So, Ghost Station by Dan Wells is also a… It's a Cold War spy thriller. I listened to the audiobook, which is fantastic. It's beautifully narrated. It is not science fiction or fantasy, so those of you who know Dan that way, this is straight up historical fiction. It's right… Right like a week or so after the [inaudible]

[Howard] Berlin airlift.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's right after the Berlin wall goes up. It is twisty, it is tightly paced, you're deeply in the main character's head, who's a cryptographer. What he notices and doesn't notice is so important to the entirety of the book. This is… It's a great book. One of the things were going to be talking about when we come af… Come back from me raving about how much I love this book, and I loved it a lot, is we're going to be talking about foreshadowing. Listening to this book and listening to it twice, it is, in and of itself, a master class and how to handle foreshadowing.

[Dan] Well, thank you.

 

[Dongwon] One other thing I want to point out, which is a very small note here. But we've been talking a lot about how saying your book should be for somebody, not for everybody. But he does something that is so canny in this newspaper line where he talks about a campaign for a President that I didn't vote for last time and wasn't going to vote for this time. I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, you feel that, right? You could be left, you could be right, you could be a libertarian, you could be a communist. Anybody is going to read that line and be like, "Yeah. That President. I know which one you're talking about." They're all… Everyone has a different person in mind. It's so smart that he doesn't alienate anybody, but still talks about politics, because that's how we all feel about politics, right? So it's just this tiny little moment where sometimes withholding specificity can open the door to identification. Even though most of the time the more specific you are, the more you're going to find that connection.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The reason he can get away with it here is because he does not care about it.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So he's being nonspecific about a thing he doesn't care about.

[Dongwon] Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] But I want to talk about the foreshadowing which is that he… He opens with, "I was arrested at…" And then he… Essentially, what he does is everything that follows that is a flashback. Until the arrest happens. So he's saying, "Bear with me. Bear with me, I'm going to get to the good stuff." So that's… We can call that foreshadowing, although it's… Or we can call it a very brief cold open, and then flashback. But he also does some other interesting foreshadowing in here that I'm going to have Dongwon talk about.

[Dongwon] Yeah. So I think the other foreshadowing that's going on here is… The thing that makes all of this remarkable is his complete disinterest in his complete lack of fear about getting arrested. That tells us so much about who he is as a person. One thing is that he's white, he's a man, he has all these elements that don't make him afraid. But also, he's police. He was formerly a military police, which is a thing that will learn later. So he has a connection to these people. He's not afraid of them, he knows how they operate. Then the thing that comes immediately after where we stopped the reading is that this operation was for me. He knows they're coming for him, not the cooks, not the waitress. He's the target here because he knows he's a dangerous person, or capable of great danger. What this is all setting up is that the police are interested in him, that they're not interested in him because he committed a crime. They're interested in him for some other reason. That's adding this layer of foreshadowing, adding these layers of questions as to what is going on, what's going to happen. Now, what's going to happen is he's going to be forced into working for the police to help them find the killer, right? There's such an expectation across the structure of so many of these thrillers, but again, he's blasé about men with shotguns and handguns charging at him is indicative of both his control of the situation and that foreshadowing, that foreshadowing that he knows that he can be useful to them and that that's why they want him at the end of the day, not because he is a criminal.

[Dan] Yeah. Now, one of the kind of key principles of a character introduction is that we need to know not only who this person is but why do we like them. This extreme competence and lack of fear that you're talking about is a big part of why we start to like this guy. But I'm reading ahead a little bit, and in the next paragraph, he has this huge thing where he talks about reason after reason that he knows they're coming for him and for nobody else. So what does he do? He finishes his eggs, and then he puts a five dollar bill under his plate. Because he knows he's about to get arrested, he knows he's not going to have time to pay, but he wants to make sure that this diner doesn't get shafted out of the money he owes them. That says an incredible amount about the character.

 

[Dongwon] One last thing I want to bring up is this language isn't beautiful. It's short sentences, it's blunt sentences, it's very simple. But actually, the imagery is quite beautiful. He pauses in the middle of this scene to say, "Outside the rain had stopped, but the glass was still pebbled with bright drops." Then he like kind of jumps forward to "light bars flashing and popping, red and blue light on the raindrops on my window." He's pausing for these rich visual images. I know exactly what this diner looks like. I can see it in my mind. I can feel the vinyl of those booths. I can smell it. You know what I mean? He's so evocative with his imagery. We get caught up in the staccato pacing of it, his observations, that sort of like military mind looking for the threats and dangers. But the writer behind that is showing us a rich and textured world. So, just because you're being blunt, doesn't mean you can't have beauty in what you're doing. That you can't have aesthetics really coming forward in a powerful way. One of the things that makes this work so well for me is it's operating on like all these different layers at once. It's just firing on every cylinder, character, plot, setting, writing, all those things are really coming into play here in a way that I find incredibly exciting and absolutely makes me want to turn to the next page and find out, okay, what happens when the cops get in the door? Okay, what happens when he gets to the station? Okay, what happens at the next step of the investigation? Everything is just pulling me forward like a freight train. For me, I find it irresistible.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I would also argue, having… Since we just did the master classes with Amal about poetry, that this is actually beautiful language, and that if you took this and did a paragraph break where most of these periods are, that… And presented a chunk of this as free verse poetry to someone, that they would believe you and would talk about the capture of individual elements.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, this has a lot of that density of kind of meaning that we talked about with Amal. Sentences like here "I saw the police cruisers pull into the gravel lot." That's a visual detail, but that's also an audible detail. Because we can hear instantly what tires on gravel sounds like. We know that, and it's very familiar. There's a lot of different sensory information all packed into very small spaces.

[Howard] Yeah. I noticed, scanning back over it, that he doesn't use comparison to describe things. There are places where he uses words that might more commonly be used to describe other things. "They were moving fast and crunched to a stop," gives us a sound effect as they are stopping. But it's very straightforward description. He doesn't compare the red and blue lights on the raindrops to something else to help us see red and blue flashing through the raindrops. He just calls it like it is. It's very direct.

[Mary Robinette] That is consistent with the character.

 

[Mary Robinette] Which brings us to our homework. Dongwon, I think you have that this week.

[Dongwon] So, I think our homework is to sort of take what's been done here, and take a lesson from that. Write an introduction to your story that focuses on entirely the character's view of the world. Maybe, again, take that scene that you worked on for the past couple homeworks, and rewrite it again. Not necessarily the character reflecting on their interiority, but how does the character interact with the world? How do they see the world, both in mechanical and philosophical ways? How is what is happening in the world around them filtered through their point of view? When we say point of view, this is what we're talking about.

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/07/25/first-page-fundamentals-the-haunting-of-hill-house/

 

Key points: Voice! Sanity and dreams. The main character is the house. Two main ways to start a novel, action-driven and voice-driven. For voice-driven, the narrator ruminates on an important idea, something that gives urgency and stakes. Pay attention to punctuation, to how that emphasizes important things. Establish your authority. Tell the reader, up front, "I am going to tell you a story. Here is what the story is." Then tell them the story. Establish expectations, and subvert them. Imply menace at the corners.

 

[Season 16, Episode 30]

 

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, First Page Fundamentals: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dongwon] So, this week we're going to do a deep dive into an example here. We're talking about, again, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. So, to start, Mary Robinette, would you mind reading the first paragraph for us all, so we're all on the same page, as it were?

[Mary Robinette] The Haunting of Hill House.

 

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

 

[Dongwon] This really is one of my all-time favorite openings of a novel in the English language. I think it does so many things right. This is, first off, a great example of how you use voice to establish what your book is. One thing that we, I think, don't really talk about enough when it comes to voice is the musicality, poetry of what she has done here. There's such an elegant rhythm to it that Mary Robinette brought out so wonderfully there that it flows in this way that you get into this sort of… Lulled into this particular state of mind by, and you have this dreamlike quality, which, again, is reflected by this idea that larks and katydids also dream. Right? That, in tension with this idea of conditions of absolute reality, and then connecting that again to sanity. Right? So all of these elements are immediately put on the page of… We're in this sort of hypnagogic dreamlike state. We're dealing with concepts of mental illness and madness. Then we are introduced to the main character of the book. That main character is the house itself.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find particularly compelling about this example is… There are kind of two sort of ways of starting a novel. There's one that is sort of action-driven, which is what we usually focus on. Then there are voice-driven ones. Which are this thing where you take an idea and the narrator ruminates on it. It's something that is important. So there's something within this first paragraph that is also giving you a sense of the urgency, the thing that is important, the thing that is at stake here. That there is this house that so sense… The door is sensibly shut, that it's upright and it's holding darkness within. It's giving you a sense of "Oh, there's something terrible that is coming." But it never names what that terrible is. It's just making you this promise through what is important to the character, and the character is the house.

[Dongwon] It's such a quiet way to start. I mean, it's such a description of just a house and then some stuff about dreams and sanity, right? But really, fundamentally, the core of this paragraph is describing the fact that it's a well-built, well put together house. That is what it is. It's stood for a long time. It's probably going to keep standing for more. But then you end on that final turn, which is such like a delightful moment for me, which is, "Whatever walked there, walked alone." It's just this way of slipping the knife in right at the end of all of that lovely description, all of that sort of smooth beautiful rhythmic description. That the menace that's been building over the course of this paragraph sort of culminates in this moment of… There's going to be that moment of surprise, there's going to be that dark twist to this book. Again, that reflects the structure of the book, that reflects what Shirley Jackson is doing over the course of this story, of giving the characters, of giving them this experience, and writing in this very elevated way. But still, it's going to have that bite. There's still going to be that moment when the character twists and something is not right. Yup?

[Mary Robinette] I want to… Since we are doing a deep dive on this. I actually want you, the listener to go to the Writing Excuses webpage and look at the first paragraph which we will have in the liner notes. The reason I want you to look at it is I want you to look at how she has structured this. So, as a narrator, one of the things that I look at is punctuation. She is placing those commas, those periods, the semicolon… She's placing those very deliberately to provoke causes. Those pauses draw a line underneath things that are important. So where are the pauses that occur in this? Under conditions of absolute reality. We have a semi-colon. The larks and katydids are supposed by some to dream. There's this thing that's like some people think this, some people don't, you're going to have to make your own decision, is what she's doing right there. Hill House, not sane. Again, she sets that apart with those commas. We get to holding darkness within. That semi-colon again to just kind of punctuate that. Then, to really draw a line under the… What the thrust of this entire thing is, it's the very last clause of that opening thing, of that opening paragraph. Walked alone. With a comma, and then the period, and then the paragraph break. You step back slightly before that. And whatever walked there. That's also set apart and she's drawing attention to it very consciously, I suspect, with the way she's imagining the rhythmic quality of this language. So when we're talking about voice, this is one of the things that you can be doing. I'm not saying your writing must have a bajillion commas and semicolons. What I'm saying is use them consciously. Don't think about them so much grammatically. The grammar exists to describe and codify the ways that we naturally group language. What you're thinking about is where am I grouping my thoughts. What is important, what is the thing that I want to set apart so the reader can see it, and what are the things that I want to draw a line under?

 

[Howard] The very first line re-contextualizes what we are being told several times as it unfolds. Most people don't read this slowly. But. No. Live organism. Okay. No live organism. What am I being told? No live organism can continue. That's pretty bleak. For long. Okay, that's less bleak. To exist. Sanely. The word sanely has suddenly re-contextualized everything else. It's not existential, it's sanity. Under conditions of absolute reality. As the little things reveal, that sentence drives me screaming into the Gothic horror of the haunting of Hill House. I… To be honest, I have not read the full book. Exploring this first line convinces me that I might not like that ride.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But the poetry with which that very first line is constructed is absolutely beautiful. That's the sort of promise that I like to be made, I like to be the recipient of, early in the book.

 

[Dan] I am really loving the… Just the little clause, not sane. I mean, it's… The w… So much of this is beautiful. But that one in particular. Not only the suggestion that a house can have or not have sanity, which is fascinating by itself, and which does set up, like Dongwon said, the idea that the house is the character. But, compared to that first sentence, and I, like Howard, have never actually read this so I'm coming in cold and I would love to know if I'm wrong about this. But he's basically saying that in order to have sanity, you have to escape reality sometimes. The fact that the house is not sane implies then that maybe it does exist under conditions of absolute reality. That what we're about to see is not a dream, it's actually real things that are happening. Which takes away some of our safety net and makes this not only kind of unexpected, but also more dangerous.

[Dongwon] [garbled] with that not sane… Every time I hit that line, like, the whole theater audience in my head leaps to its feet and starts cheering…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Like, every time I hit that moment, I'm just like… This is not sane. How did you do this? How do you make me feel this unsettled by that tiny appositive? That tiny, comma-framed phrase there? But. Anyway.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's give the reader or listener a moment of feeling slightly safer. We'll talk about the book of the week.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We'll take you away from Hill House just for a moment and talk about our book of the week. Which is prep for next week. That's Moby Dick. You're going to tell us a little bit about that, right, Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, we're going to talk about the opening page of Moby Dick. Probably one of the most famous lines, opening sentences, in English literature. But when I mention Moby Dick by Herman Melville, I can sort of in my brain hear a large percentage of the audience groaning at the idea that they have to read this ponderous weighty novel. I felt that way for a long time, until I read it sort of in my mid to late 20s. I finally sat down and I was like, "Fine. I'm going to read this thing. Everyone talks about it." I was completely surprised by the book that I actually found. That wasn't this dry tome. It's funny and it's deeply strange. There's like whole chapters that are just talking about whale biology and then long descriptions of like what whaling actually is. It's dark. I cannot overstate how strange of a book this is. It doesn't feel like anything else I've ever read. It's so… It's such an interesting examination of the human experience, of what it is to be in the world and figure out how to survive within it under these conditions. I love this book. It's not going to be for everybody, but I promise it's not the book that your English class taught you that it was going to be.

[Mary Robinette] So, ah…

[Howard] The book that my English class taught me was a… Like, 50 page Cliff's Notes of Moby Dick.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That does not do that book justice.

[Dongwon] It absolutely does not.

[Dan] You're not supposed to admit that out loud.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, that is Moby Dick by Herman Melville. So go ahead and read that for next week.

 

[Mary Robinette] Meanwhile, we are going to continue talking about The Haunting of Hill House. Because there are other things that it is setting up in here besides just "Oh, this is really, really good juicy voice-y thing."

[Dongwon] The thing I want to draw everyone's attention to is… The punctuation is masterful. I mean, I think we focused on that for a long time for a good reason, but the effect of that on the reader, I think, is establishing an iron grip over your brain in this moment. She establishes an enormous amount of authority, of I am telling the story to you, and I am going to tell it my way. It's going to be distinct and unusual. But also, she just establishes this complete authority. That's one of the things you need to do to the reader in your opening page is tell them, "I am a good writer. You want to spend time here, because I'm good at this." Right? I think she does that in this way by manipulating the rhythm, by manipulating the punctuation, by doing unexpected and sort of things that you're quote unquote not supposed to do. She breaks some rules, but she does it in a way that's very masterful. So, I think, one of the lessons you can take here is to aim for this kind of authority. Which isn't necessarily meaning like you can break the rules in the same way that she does. But find a way to be as compelling and convincing of your mastery of language in your mastery of scene and setting and all those things as she does here.

[Dan] It strikes me, Dongwon, and tell me if I'm wrong about the book as a whole, but this opening paragraph is using a lot of the same tools and playing with a lot of the same toys as Lovecraft. That first sentence in particular is incredibly Lovecraftian, but in a much more sophisticated way than he ever was. Just the way that it is kind of combining these concepts of supernatural and science, directly. Phrases like no live organism and absolute reality. Then, at the same time, this is about a house that's not sane and katydids that dream. It's a really sophisticated combination of those very specific tools that Lovecraft used to establish the tone and the atmosphere.

[Dongwon] I think there's some… Yeah, I think there's a similar preoccupation with sort of this concept of insanity and the very specific way that… We don't really talk about it this way anymore for probably very good reasons. But she also has flipped it on its head in so many ways because instead of viewing the cosmic horror that breaks your brain, the thing that breaks your brain is absolute reality. It's having to be present with no ability to dream, no ability to escape sort of modernity in all of its like groundedness, and the concreteness of this house. So I kind of love the way that she has inverted that in this way and how the language just pushes you immediately into that space, and, I think, is in conversation with it, but I think in a way that says, "Lovecraft, you wish you could do this." Right?

[Dan] Yeah, exactly.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Dongwon] You wish you could dream the… To reach this level. So, yeah.

 

[Howard] I'm reading and rereading… I printed it out so I can have it in front of me as we're having this discussion. I realized that the thing that is not stated explicitly per se, but which is inextricably related to us, is that Hill House is a living organism.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, wow. That's a promise that I bet gets fulfilled later in the book.

[Mary Robinette] So, this thing that you just noted. This is a thing that I adore when an author does, when they demonstrate through all of the contextual clues that something is alive. She is not being coy about the fact that Hill House is a living organism. She spending a great deal of time letting us know that it's a living organism. In someone else's hands, that discovery would come later. That would be the I don't want them to know this thing. The big reveal is going to be the house is alive and the whole thing is from the house's point of view. That's not what she… She's right up front. This is a living organism. It is not sane. You're going to spend the next however many pages inhabiting that. Literally and metaphorically. This is… We've talked about getting the reader to trust you at the beginning. These are all things that she is doing with very deliberate choices. She's not being coy about the central thing. The interesting geewhiz factor. Which is that the house is alive.

[Dan] Yeah. And…

[Mary Robinette] You can absolutely do that. There are plenty of examples of being coy with the central… Sixth Sense. But how interesting it is when you go in, and it causes all of the stakes to shift, and become so much more immediate because you have that connection with the character.

[Dongwon] To me, it's always such a plus when a writer can start and tell you, "Here's what the story is," and then proceed to take you to the story. But when they've told you up front, "Here's what's going to happen," I just love that because it's setting expectations and then fulfilling them. As a reader, for me, one of the most satisfying things is being told, "I'm going to tell you a good story. Here's what the story is." Then they tell me the story. I'm like, "Yup. That was great. Thank you for that. Let's do it again sometime."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because the other thing that happens when they do this is this is what the story is. And it's not going to go down the way you think it is.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, she is telling us that right off the bat. She's establishing expectations, but also she is subverting them. Imagine any haunted house. It is going to be dark and creaky and full of… There will be weird breezes coming through because the walls don't meet. No. This house, the walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm. Doors were sensibly shut. This is not the kind of haunted house we are accustomed to. That by itself makes it more menacing. In the same way as like the introduction to Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs. He is clean, he's well shaven, he's not the creepy monster we thought. Neither is this house. Yet, there is still some menace to it. The fact that the doors have been shut is sensible. Which is just implying this menace at the corners of the story in a house that looks completely harmless.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we are going to give you some homework. I'm actually going to give you two pieces of homework. Or three. One is Moby Dick. The other is there's an adjacent story that I want you to read. It's called Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell. It's nominated for the Nebula. I think it's nominated for all of the awards this year. It's fantastic. It's basically what happens if you go to an open house at a place like Hill House. It's fantastic. Then, the last piece of homework that I have is your actual home, is that I want you to write an introduction to your book that is a voice-driven opening. So, this is going to be something that is… You're just doing description. There's no action. There's no dialogue. It's not about a person doing a thing. It's about a thing that matters deeply to the fundamental core of the story, and that you're just going to take some time and describe it. Inhabit that. Think about tone and setting and stakes and bring us all of those things that you would normally bring us through action through your descriptive text.

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 16, Episode 28]

 

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But that's…

[Dan] But it's not you.

[Mary Robinette] It's not…

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

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

[Dan] Yes.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

[Dongwon] Debatable.

[Chuckles, laughter]

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

[Dan] Yeah.

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

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

 

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

 

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

[Ooo]

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

[Dan] Where did you bury the bodies?

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes…

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

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

[Mary Robinette]

[Dongwon] Go ahead.

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

 

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/27/16-26-working-with-teams/

 

Key Points: Game writing tends to be more collaborative. A good team player unlocks the best in everyone. Recognize that you are all on a project together. You are not working in a silo, so acknowledge and do what the group decides. Learn to compromise. Empower those around you. When you correct people, step on their toes, but don't scuff their shoes. Honor other people's skill sets, give them freedom to inspire you. Praise coworkers, be fans of their work and ideas. Steer with praise, aka positive reinforcement. The game industry is not a zero-sum game, where praise for a coworker detracts from you. You can advance in the company and still be friendly and team-oriented. Sometimes you have to push. Be careful not to overinvest yourself emotionally in promotions or projects. Keep or make your own creative outlets. Don't do other people's jobs. Avoid head canon. If it's just in your head, it doesn't exist. Write it down, get it accepted by the team, and then use it.

 

[Season 16, Episode 26]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Working with Teams.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pause]

[Howard] Oh, I'm sorry. Was that my job?

[Giggles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] There is no I in mistakes.

[Laughter]

[James] Yeah. And Howard is funnier.

[Howard] Oh, wait. There is an I in mistakes.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] So, this is… We're going to wrap this up today, our wonderful intensive course we have had about game writing, by talking about working with teams. Writing can often feel like a very solitary thing if you're in standard kind of novel short story. But other industries are much more collaborative. Game writing is one of those. So, tell us, what do we need to know about how to work well in a team?

[James] Yeah. So, in my experience, how good you are at working in teams is even more important than how good you are at actual game design. Because a good team player will unlock the best from everyone around them, while a bunch of cantankerous geniuses, which describes a lot of the game industry, will frequently crash and burn when they don't need to. So I wanted to just talk with everybody about how you work well in a team. Cass, what do you have for working well in a game team?

[Cassandra] I think the most important thing is recognizing that you are all on a project together. Whatever you do, you're contributing to the main body of this animal. You're not working in a silo, it's easy to think that, especially as a creative. But ultimately anything you do connects with every single other department. So you should absolutely show off your ideas. But at the end of the day, you need to acknowledge and you also need to do what your group decides, at least within reason. Because there's always the risk of people who are a little bit more controversial trying for things that are not quite so nice. So it is a little bit of a balance. But being able to understand that you are part of a group is valuable.

[James] Yeah. Something I always used to tell my team members is you never get to a point where you get to stop compromising. As a new writer, you want to show off your ideas, like you said, but in the end, you need to sort of salute and do what the group or your boss decides. But the flipside of that is that, as I learned as a creative director on Starfinder, being a good creative director means flexing that muscle and that authority as little as possible. You want to empower those below you, technically, in the hierarchy. The thing to remember there is that if your default is yes, then when you do have to say no or why don't we go this other direction, then you will have built up the good will that hopefully people will really listen to that and take it to heart, rather than just automatically butting heads.

[Howard] I was a terrible team player when I worked in the software industry. I was just not good at it. I got put in charge of $100 million product line. That's not a great environment in which to learn good practices, because there's already so much at stake. One of my bosses pulled me aside and said, "Look. When you correct people, yeah, it's because they're wrong. Go ahead and step on their toes. But don't scuff their shoes." The point being it is possible to issue corrections, it is possible to tell people, "No, that's not fitting the course we're going." It is possible to do that and let people retain personal self-worth, retain pride, retain whatever. You don't need to smack talk people in order to make your point. I don't want to suggest that that's the level to which I was a terrible manager of other people. But that's the advice I got, and it has stuck with me.

 

[James] So, one of the things I think about a lot with this regard are art orders. When you're ordering art for a game, you want to give other people room to be creative. Something an art director I worked with told me once was, "After two sentences, the artist stops reading." That can feel like a smack in the face as a writer, where you're like, "But I have 10 pages of description about this character." But the thing to remember is that you want to honor other people's skill sets. A visual artist is likely going to be way better at coming up with cool creative compositions than you are as a writer, because, like, that's what they do. So giving people just enough information… So a good art order is something like, "This is a black woman wearing practical knight armor, with a phoenix on the shield." You don't need to say which hand she's raising her sword with, you don't need to say everything about what type of armor she's wearing, unless it's really key to the project. The more freedom you can give that artist, the better the end product is going to be. You're giving them a chance to inspire you and make it a conversation, rather than just a top-down, "I am telling you what to do and you are doing it."

[Howard] Yeah. This is a combat alchemist who needs quick access to lots of different chemicals. The artist is going to go crazy designing shoulder things for test tubes and whatever. Let them do that, rather than you trying to describe all of those things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I always found that I got much better results when I talked about the mood of the character and the intention. Cass?

[Cassandra] I think our own skill sets is important in regards to other disciplines as well. It's not just the relationship between an artist and a writer. Working in video games, you have the opportunity to collaborate with level editors and level designers. It's easy to go, "No, you just put the nice things down. I will tell you how the story goes." But if you're willing to make space for them, you eventually will recognize, I know, because they're the ones who put things down, they know exactly the structure and how people might approach it and also have little tools and little tricks that might not necessarily be things you think about that can enhance whatever story you're trying to tell in the videogame.

[James] Yeah, absolutely. It's not just people from other departments, it's people in your own department. Every writer is coming with different skills to the project. So recognize when somebody's got a good idea. Support that idea. Praise your coworkers. Be fans of your coworkers. The most fun jobs are the ones where I'm on a team and everyone there is a total bad ass. I'm just happy to be there.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the tricks that I will use as a manager sometimes is steering with praise. That I praise the things that I want them to do more of, and I don't necessarily have to tell them, "That other thing, I don't want you to do that." People notice. It's like, "Oh, they really like it when I do X." They'll start to deliver… They will self guide, self-correct over to that direction.

[Dan] Yeah. This is a principle that I learned early in a child-rearing class, when my first kid was born. They talked about the difference between positive and negative reinforcement. Both of them work, but one of them works so much better and makes everyone so much happier.

[Howard] There is a point is a team member… If I'm on Mary Robinette's team and she's telling me all of these things that she likes and there's this thing that I enjoy doing that she hasn't praised… At some point, I should ask Mary Robinette, "Hey, this one thing I'm doing, you haven't said much about it. Can you please tell me how you feel about it?" Then we get to have that discussion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… At the same time, like… Getting mad at someone because they… Because you… They keep doing a thing that you haven't told them not to do. Like, you should do clear communication, but it shouldn't be… It doesn't need to be retributive to say, "Don't do that thing." You know, like, "You stupid wankedoda!" It's like… "This is… This piece of it is not in line with the overall aesthetic that we're working for. Can you… But these pieces that you do. I love that. I love this, I love that."

[Cassandra] This is something I heard very recently from a friend who works with animal. Clicker training works with humans, and it works surprisingly well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's depressing, but true.

[Dan] Oh, that's wonderful.

 

[Dan] All right. We're going to take a little pause here for our game of the week, which is me again. This is one of my absolute favorite new role-playing games. It's not new, it's a couple of years old, but I discovered it very recently. It's called Heart, The City Beneath. It is by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor. It's kind of a dungeon crawl game. It's very free-form and it's very narrative. But the thing that I love about it, and the reason that we're doing it on this episode, is the experience system of how your characters grow over time is based on something called beats. Every character class and every character kind of calling has a bunch of like two or three lists of what they call beats that are things like "Take a certain amount of damage" or "Betray someone you love" or like all of these story elements. Then every session, each player looks at their list of beats and says, "Well, I need to pick three of these." You pick them and you tell the game master. Then that becomes this very collaborative way of you as the player have control over what you want to do and how you want to steer your character. The game master knows exactly what gets you excited and how to build the story in order to enable those beats. It becomes this wonderful collaborative session. It's one of my favorite game mechanics I've ever seen. So, Heart, The City Beneath.

 

[James] So, jumping back into working with teams and working in the industry, I want to throw out… We were saying be a fan to your coworkers, praise good work, honor other people's skill sets. I think sometimes people misunderstand and the think that there's… That the game industry is a zero-sum game, and that if they praise what their coworkers are doing, then they'll be less likely to succeed, or, on the flipside, they feel like, "Oh, well, I can't self advocate, because if I do, my coworkers won't like me." I think that, like, that is absolutely a thing that people run into, that especially runs into issues of privilege as well. But I do believe that you can absolutely climb the ladder and self advocate, while still doing your best to be responsible and friendly and team oriented. If you do good work and you're pleasant to work with, hopefully, if you have a good team, people will be happy to see you rise. But I guess another thing I'll tag onto that, is, I at the same time, advancing in a company, in my experience, you… Sometimes it's about just being there a long time and doing good work, but sometimes you really have to push, because there's often not a lot of structure in game companies that are smaller. People just sort of put things together, so they don't necessarily have a plan for after X years, you become senior designer or whatever. So you need to show the company what you can do for them. I feel like every promotion that I got as I went to… Senior editor, executive editor, creative director, all those things. It was always about me going to my bosses and saying, "Hey. You've got a problem. I can solve it if you empower me. If you give me this team, I will give you this game that you want." I think that can be hard, because it's not about what you deserve, it's not about necessarily who does the best work or who's been there the longest. There's not a clear path like that. It's really about what you can convince your employers to give you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think along those lines, one of the things that I want to remind people who are… Women, people who are from marginalized communities, is that women especially, we are socialized to not push. It's not universal, but as a general rule, we are socialized to let other people have the space. So it's important to understand that when you go in and say, "Hey, I can do this thing," or "Give me the opportunity" or "Here is an idea that I'd like to present," that you're not… That that's normal, that's what people are supposed to do. So you're allowed to take up space in a room.

 

[Cassandra] I think it's important when talking about teams and talking about promotions, to not overinvest emotionally. Which I know sounds a bit self-contradictory, compared to the other points. But it's just… If a promotion is not there for you at that moment, it does not mean you're a terrible person or you're not deserving of it were that people are keeping it from you, although the latter is sometimes. It just means it's not the right time. That's fine. Similarly with projects, if you have ideas, things that are precious to you, and you run into say, a creative director, who goes, "I like that idea, but it doesn't work for this project," you should be able to let it go. Working in teams does mean you have to be able to stand your ground, but also not overinvest and become caught up in the minutia.

[Howard] I've got a couple of friends who are very interested in building things that are much larger than themselves, much larger than what one person can build. Neither of them have worked as part of a team with a large organization to build something. In both cases, they're looking at things like Kickstarter or [garbled going dark?] and going out and finding other self-starters, whatever. The piece of advice they don't want to hear from me, but which I keep repeating, is "Until you've worked with a team to build something, nobody with money is going to trust you to spend money to build a team to build something." You have to learn this first. It can be a small thing. It can be… Go volunteer for Habitats for Humanity and build a barn over the weekend with a group of people. That will teach you some of the skills you need.

[Mary Robinette] If anyone would like to volunteer for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, I'd be happy to set you up as project lead on something.

[James] I also want to just throw out, tagging in on that, don't overinvest emotionally, I've seen a lot of friends get really hurt because they poured all of their creative energy into the job or they gave a company the ideas that they'd cherished since childhood. Their one big setting, they sell to a company. Then they can't… A, they can't do anything with it outside of that company, which can be really hard, and Be backspace, like, they've got other people who want to mess with their thing because it's their job to mess with that thing and try and make it the best it can be. So, one of the things that I have found really kept me sane in the 13 years that I was working at Paizo as part of the teams on Starfinder and Pathfinder was to have a creative outlet outside of work that could be just mine. Or at least different. So I'd pour all my creativity at work into those settings, but then I would go home and I would work on a novel or I would play with the band or do something that allowed me to get that same creative release without having to always be compromising with the same people, because it can really chew through friendships if you're trying to get along with your coworkers and they keep touching your things.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… One of the best pieces of advice that I got… A lot of my experience came from starting off in theater. One of the best pieces of advice that I got was about boundaries and not doing other people's jobs. There's two reasons for that. One is that if it's a job that someone else is already doing, you're going to annoy them that you're doing it, that you're trying to micromanage or change directions, and they have to reset it. But the other piece of it, and this one is really hard, is that if you do someone else's job, it will eventually become in your job. So I was in a show and one of my cast members didn't preset a prop. So I preset it for them. I saw it and I moved it into place. The show had already started. So when they came offstage, the prop was there. I'm an intern at this point, but being treated as if I'm a full cast member. It happens again another day, and I do it. The third day, one of the other cast members says, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "Well, he forgot to preset this." He's like, "If you keep doing that, it's going to become your job to preset that. You need to let him fail on this." The hardest thing I've ever done was to leave that prop in the wrong place. Even though I knew exactly where it was supposed to go. Like, I didn't just leave it there. I said to him, "Hey, you've been forgetting to preset this." He's like, "Okay, okay." He didn't preset it again. Even after having been reminded. He came off… Tearing offstage. Prop wasn't there. He had to go running around to find it. He never forgot to preset it again, and it didn't become my job.

[James] I'd like to throw out one more rule that I have for myself, which is no head canon. What I mean by that is when I'm working on a game or something, until it's written down and has been published or at least accepted by the team, it does not exist. Because it's really easy to fall into the trap of you've decided a thing in your head, but you have not communicated it to your team or the audience. So then later on, somebody else on your team comes along and introduces something that conflicts with it. You get mad because it conflicts with what you've already decided, but you haven't communicated that desire. So I think it's really important to… I always say, when I leave the office, like, I turn off that part of my brain, and I don't invest extra time in it, both for my own mental health, but also because I don't want plan a bunch of stuff that I don't actually get to implement because it's just going to lead to version control problems down the road.

[Dan] Awesome. This has been a really great discussion. I think that we could talk for a long time about it, but we do need to end.

 

[Dan] So, Cass, give us our homework for today.

[Cassandra] Your final homework is spend some time brainstorming a game idea with a friend. Try to draw out and explore their best ideas. Encourage them to make changes to your homework, and make sure you're both contributing equally. This is a chance for you to try out working in a team.

[Dan] Cool. That sounds like a fun thing. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/13/16-24-worldbuilding-for-games/

 

Key points: Your number one goal is to inspire curiosity, to create a place that people want to come back to, to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. You're giving them a springboard to tell their own stories. Use the power of allusion, drop interesting details in without fully explaining them. Ask more questions than you answer. Think about adventure hooks, details or questions that people can use to tell their own stories. Work on narrative resonance, build motifs and themes into every component of the game. Ask questions, drop in allusions, adventure hooks, and random details. Then explain and expand later, justifying and exploring those details. Fill the well, then grab one of those old ideas and queue it up. Start by inverting things or pairing things that do not go together, then follow the logical causal chains. Why, how, and with what effect. Focus on the worldbuilding that your players will interact with. Watch out for your personal biases and norms. Make sure all kinds of people can say, "They're like me."

 

[Season 16, Episode 24]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Worldbuilding for Games.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are so excited to be talking about worldbuilding. This is something that we all do in our normal kind of fiction novel short story writing. But how is it different for games? Cass? What do we need to know?

[Cassandra] It's actually very similar, I think, in that your number one goal with worldbuilding and games, like in novels and prose, is to inspire curiosity. You want to create a place that people want to keep coming back to. Not necessarily to stay, because some of these places can be absolutely terrible. But to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. I think this is especially true for tabletop role-playing games, isn't it, James?

[James] Yeah. Because in tabletop, you're often giving people the tools to tell stories, rather than telling them the stories. So the setting that you give them in something like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or whatever is really a springboard for people to tell their own stories. One of the things I love, as a writer for games like that, is I'll have somebody come up to me at a convention and be like, "Oh, that lost city you wrote about. We've been playing a game there for a year. Let me tell you all about it." They'll get to the end of their story, and I'm thinking, "I wrote two sentences about that city."

[Laughter]

[James] They put all that detail in, it was them imagining it, and they think I'm a genius because they created all this stuff. So you're really getting the audience to do your work for you. Which is why one of my favorite things when doing game design is what I think of as the power of allusion with an a. Where I will, just like drop interesting sounding details in there and not fully explain them. Let them, let the audience sort of wonder about it or decide for themselves what that could be. That's fodder for them to tell their own stories. The same way as in like a videogame maybe you show some cool art off the edge of the map in the background.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is actually very similar to the way puppetry works. Hey, we've gotten six episodes in without me bringing up puppetry until now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But what you want to do is you want to create certain specific aspects of the character and then trust that the audience is going to fill in the rest. Like, we've all seen Miss Piggy bat her eyes at Kermit the frog, and she does not have working eyelashes. You, the viewer, puts that into your head… In… You build that mechanic from the world.

[Cassandra] Fantastic.

[Howard] The humor classes that I teach, I use a theater principle called noises off. Which is that the pie fight you imagine is way more interesting than the pie fight I can draw. James, what you said here about allusion, dropping a reference for something and getting you, the player, you the reader, to imagine whatever that was, whatever it is, that's incredibly useful because I didn't have to draw it. I didn't have to build it. You did all the heavy lifting.

[Cassandra] I think that one really good example of that, if you want something to research, is the Bloodborne game from FromSoftware. One of the things that I remember most distinctly about it was there was this whole journey to a boss. You're kind of going up this completely red river, there are just mountains of corpses everywhere, there's no explanation, there's no one giving you exposition. At one point, you see a gate. This guy, who has been completely skinned, he's just red muscle and tissue, he's holding onto the bars of that gate and just very gently banging his head against the door. Again, there's no explanation and it never comes up again in the rest of the game. But I remember just standing there, like, "Oh, my God. What happened here?" My brain just went wild on that.

[Dan] I love that. I do want to give the counterpoint that as absolutely correct is all of this is, sometimes you do need to provide a lot of those details and fill in a lot of that allusion, which is kind of the big main job of worldbuilding.

[James] But, actually, I would… We're going to turn this into a debate show.

[Chuckles]

[James] I think that that's true, but you always need to ask more questions than you answer. You always want to make sure that if you give somebody the answer to a big mystery, you better make sure that you asked another one. Because the answers are rarely as satisfying as the questions, in terms of keeping somebody up at night thinking about stuff. Especially in tabletop. Which is why, when I'm writing for a tabletop book, I'm always thinking about adventure hooks. I'm trying to think, every paragraph, I want to be putting in a detail or a question that could lead a game master to go, "Oh. I can write a campaign about that." I'm trying to give people tools that they can use to tell their own stories. So, if you give somebody an inn, you can have whatever details you want, but make sure that there's something there they can work with. Because that's what they're paying you for. So even if all you need for your story is an ordinary basic tavern, make the tavern keeper have a criminal past so that at a moment, she's worried her old colleagues could find her and kick in the door. That's dropping something in that the game master doesn't have to use, but they could use to start a game.

[Dan] Yeah. Absolutely, and I'm… I didn't mean to imply that we shouldn't be doing that. Phrasing it the way you did, ask more questions than you answer, I think, is a really good way to put it. But, as a game master, when I come to a supplement, if it's putting all the work on me, well, then, I didn't need to buy that supplement, because I'm the one doing all the work anyway.

[James] Right.

[Dan] So, I really like it when a game offers me enough tools to work with, rather than being so free-form that there's nothing there.

 

[Cassandra] I think that's one thing that is possibly, like, definitely necessary on the topic of worldbuilding. You can go as light as you want, you can be detailed, depending on the property, but narrative resonance, I feel, is vital. You should build your motifs and your themes into everything you do, including the mechanics themselves, like, every component of the game should carry its weight, doing double duty where possible. I think the Persona series is a really good example of that. They have something called the Social Links mechanics, which makes use of the tarot arcana and builds on the idea that each of the cards has different meanings. Each of these cards are associated with an NPC. You can be friends or romance or whatever. They're fascinating, because mechanically, the Social Links are just a way of leveling up the personas that you get in the game. Even if you're not necessarily into the idea of doing the side quests, you're going to move towards them. Because you want to discover more, because you want to interrogate your understanding. There is this one character that I think of that is a really good example of this. Kanji Tatsumi in the Persona 4 game. His arcana is the Emperor. He begins as this really stereotypically rude, thuggish guy who yells at everything, who is very contrary. But he's also hiding the fact that he's an absolute sweetheart on the inside, and he is trying to compensate for the knowledge that he isn't a typical guy's guy by over exaggerating those traits. His journey becomes confronting his fears. That kind of ties to the Emperor, that sense of patriarchy and control. What happens when you have too much of it holding onto you? Even though vaguely wandering through this game, you know it's related to terror. You know it's related to the Emperor. So you sort of know what you should be doing. That is because of narrative resonance.

 

[James] We should pause there for the game of the week, which is Dan with the Dune RPG.

[Dan] Yeah. Dune is my favorite book of all time. It just got a brand-new RPG. By the time this heirs, it will be just a month old, maybe. It's from Modiphius, it uses their 2D20 system, which is the same basic game system that we use on Typecast for Star Trek: Horizon. But what they've done here that ties into the world building is Dune is a… Has a really wide range of power sets. You've got very weak, physically weak, characters set up against characters with incredible magic powers versus characters who have incredible technology, who can see the future and do all these things. How could you possibly balance all of that worldbuilding together so the game is still fun? What they've done is a really brilliant mechanic where your motivations and your drives as a person directly affect how good you are at doing something. So it's less about the powers that you have and more about why you're doing the things that you're doing. It's a really clever twist on the system and they do a really good job with it. So, the Dune RPG from Modiphius.

 

[James] All right. So with all these things we've been talking about, with dropping… Asking questions, dropping in allusions, and adventure hooks and stuff. This is something that gives game masters something to build on. But it also gives you job security. If you can get the audience excited about something, then you can come back later and continue to write more about it. This explanation and expansion way of working, forcing myself to justify and explore the random details that I dropped before, is something that I really enjoy. A lot of my best work has come out of… I drop a couple of lines… Early on in my career, I wrote about a city called Kaer Maga, and just like through in a line about, like, "Oh, yeah, and it's full of worm folk and bloat majors and sweet talkers who sew their own lips shut so that… Because they're not worthy of speaking the name of God." Like, I just sort of dropped these details in, and a bunch of fans went, "Wait! Whoa! What? Like, I want to know more about that." That led to setting books and adventures and novels. That's really my favorite way to work, is to just kind of throw out random ideas and test the waters. But I want to know, how do you all come up with interesting setting ideas? Setting details, specifically.

[Howard] At this point, I stopped coming up with them. I have… The well is too deep. I just reach in and grab something that I thought of 15 years ago and queue it up. I don't have time for new ideas. I'm going to die before 90% of these hit the page. Wasting time thinking of new ones is awful.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that helpful piece of advice…

[Explosive laughter]

[James] Kill Howard and take his ideas.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Some of the things that I'll do is inverting things or pairing things that are unexpected. So a lot of times this'll be… Like, I'll take a single starting point… Like milliner assassins was something that we used in an earlier season. I'm like, "These two words do not go together." Then chasing the logical causal chains out from that point. So I think about like, why do we have milliner assassins? How? So, for me, it's why, how, and with what effect, and chasing these in the logical. The how is kind of how it exists in that moment, and the with what effect are the effects to the future and kind of to the sides. So that's one of the ways that I will come up with interesting worldbuilding details. A lot of times, I mean, it really is that I will just fart words onto a page and be like, "Well, that looks interesting," and then carry on.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[James] I love that.

[Howard] I love the causal chain idea. For Planet Mercenary, one of the worlds has too many metals in it, and I conjured up genetically engineered pigs whose metabolisms push the metals out of the meat so they're actually safe to make bacon from. When we came up with an adventure in which someone is stealing the pigs, my daughter asked me, "Where do they push the metal?" I said, "Well, probably all the way out to the edges of their skin." She said, "So they glitter?" I realized, "Oh, my gosh. Not only do they glitter, they shed glitter." If you've stolen the pigs, you are now trying to steal animals that shed glitter everywhere.

[Laughter]

[Why would you steal that?]

[Howard] It is now a game mechanic, and it grows out of the idea of causality. You had a cool idea. Make that idea causal for something interesting.

[Cassandra] I feel like causality is definitely a very good way of developing worlds. All of this sounds very much like how I do it. I tend to start with the idea of a primary food source in a world, and build from there. Like, why is it this way, is it a migratory let's say protein? If so, do people… Are people largely nomadic? Do people settle down? What kind of world would have flying pigs wandering around? What kind of cities would come through? What kind of economies? How do you build a luxury item of it? What would pair with bacon on an alien landscape? Then I start building the flora and fauna and cultures just around that single idea to begin with. I also really like food. I don't know if that's obvious.

[Laughter]

[James] I also love approaching things from that evolutionary standpoint, of always asking yourself why things are the way they are. Also, what are the evolutionary pressures, and where are they pushing things? I think it's important when you're doing all of this stuff, like, it can be very big picture. But focus on the worldbuilding your players will actually interact with. Also, it's okay to do it patchwork. It's actually, in some ways, better. You don't have to just sit down and write the whole setting in a day. If you try to, you're probably going to end up spreading your ideas a little too thin. So by zooming in and saying, well, I'm going to develop the city today, then, next week, I'm going to develop this nation over here that's different, you'll have a different flavor just because you're different from day to day. You've taken in different stuff.

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say the same thing about focusing on the worldbuilding aspects that players will interact with. I had to recently, for a science-fiction RPG that I was writing a scenario for, they really, for some reason, wanted it to have a diner. It's kind of a noir style adventure, and there like, "Well, we need to meet the cop in a diner." So, if I was going to put a diner into this science-fiction world, I wanted to make sure that it had an appropriate science-fictional sense of wonder to it, despite just being a diner. This particular world had brain… Everyone has a computer in their brain, and you can download memories. So I thought, well, obviously what that means then is the chef can make absolutely anything. Because he's going to just be able to download your grandma's recipe and then reproduce it for you because he can do the memories that way. Which then spun out, well, he needs access to an incredible amount of ingredients if he can make anything that a customer asks for. That started creating all these things. Then we had to think, well, how are the players going to interact with this? Not just they can get their favorite food, but are they going to be able to mess with the little drones that can deliver these ingredients? Are they going to be able to request specific different things? Keeping the players at the forefront of the worldbuilding changed how that whole scene played out.

[Cassandra] I think we're slowly running… Well, we're very quickly running out of time.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] One thing I want to throw in there is when we're building worlds, it's important, I think, to consider our own personal biases. A very large budget game that I will not name because I do not want its fans to go after me is absolutely brilliant it is a wonderful thing. Great quests. It's also been rightly lambasted for only having white people, an entirely white cast. The developers pushed back, going, like, "Well, this is our country. The ethnic majority is X." Everyone else is like, "No. Historically speaking, this is not true." I understand everyone's arguments here, weirdly enough. If you do not think about things, you just expect your norm to be other people's norm, that can be incredibly alienating. So, when you're worldbuilding, think about your own privileges and biases, and how it will interact with your players' needs.

[Mary Robinette] This is true for prose as well. You've heard us talk about this.

[Howard] I've shared this before on Writing Excuses. My son, adult son, he's autistic. We were watching Elementary and Sherlock is interacting with an autistic woman. My son, who rarely is interested in what I'm watching, stood behind the couch and watched that and said, "They're both like me." I almost wept. Because that is the only time I've heard him say that. Everything that we build… Everything that we build can easily be built to have room for people to have that experience. Where they can look at a character, an NPC, or whatever, and say, "They're like me."

[James] I don't think were going to get a more powerful point to go out on. So we should probably wrap it there.

 

[James] Your homework for this week is to take a story or a game that you've written and drop in several casual allusions to names that you've just made up. So, places, people, objects. Don't try to figure out what they are. Just make the names as cool sounding as you can. So you throw in soultrees, and the Babbling Throne, Kobishar the Unmoored. Just write those in there. Then come back a week later and write a page of background on each of those names to sort of justify what it is and explain why it makes sense.

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 16, Episode 22]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Scenes and Set Pieces.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

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

 

[Setting]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Challenge]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

[Cassandra] In an RPG, you should always…

[Mary Robinette] Very gentle.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Yeah. Laughter]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

 

[Adversaries]

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

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

[Howard] Yeah.

[Cassandra] Adversaries.

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

[James] I romance the Otter King.

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

[James] Yeah.

 

[Rewards]

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

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

[Cassandra] Very carefully. Because I feel like…

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

 

[Story Development]

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/16/16-20-branching-narratives/

 

Key Points: Branching is what separates role-playing games from traditional stories, by letting players make choices. Like choose-your-own-adventure games. It's easy to let possibilities multiply out of control, so you need to plan the endings and the pruning. Make sure you know the intersections or checkpoints that keep the story on track. Let the players make meaningful choices. Tie the big beats (story, character, or whatever) to the checkpoints where the paths converge. If you put something important on one path, make sure other paths have something of equal value. How do you make branches fun? One trick is branches within branches. Another is responses by NPCs that help make them persons, not just information sources. Use conditionals and callbacks to show that choices make a difference, that they have consequences and ramifications. Avoid hat economies, choices need to matter. The best reward is consequences. Leave room for the players to make interpretations. Objectives or item collection can give an illusion of control, an apparent freedom of choice, while still pointing the players in the direction you want the story to go. Consider using access as a consequence to help control the direction of the narrative.

 

[Season 16, Episode 20]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Branching Narratives.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I want to go left.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] So, we're talking about branching narratives this week, which is a big part of the player choice we were talking about last time. Cass, where do we start with branching narratives?

[Cassandra] Branching narratives is, I think, over the years something I've learned to see as both almost a poem and a puzzle. It needs to be this elegant, very spare thing, but there's just so much thought that goes into it. It is really what differentiates a role-playing game from a traditional story, because branching allows the players to step into the narrative and make their own choices. Kind of like those old classic choose-your-own-adventure games. But every time you give a player a choice, you're kind of splitting off into two different realities. On paper, this doesn't sound too bad. Life is an infinite split of possibilities, after all, but if you're writing a game, you will not have a life if you follow that momentum. So every turn and every binary decision, these can quickly multiply out of control. As such, you need to have certain things figured out. Such as the ending where you plan to have people go, any early failures, and you need to kind of prune it, to make sure it fits the kind of format that feels both dynamic and elegant, and is still leading a player towards the information you need them to go. But if you do too much of it, players will notice that they're being… Well, you're leading them along. Sorry. James?

[James] No, like, I'm with you. I think, like what you said about pruning branches, you always need to be bending those branches back toward the main story you want to tell. You want to have things divide, but you want to think of it like links in a chain potentially. Where characters make a choice, and their paths diverge, and you can totally see the hand gestures I'm making, because podcasts are a very visual medium…

[Chuckles]

[James] But you diverge and then you bend those choices so they come back towards an intersection that I think of as like checkpoints that let you keep the story on track. So, for instance, if you give the players the choice of talking to the witch or talking to the Dragon, they can head off in those different directions, but you know, as the writer, that whatever they do in those two interactions, they're still going to get request to go find Bigfoot. So then both of those paths will converge again on Bigfoot's lair. So now, suddenly, you've branched apart, people got to make a meaningful choice, but now they're back headed towards the direction you want to tell.

[Howard] Yeah. For my own part, it's been helpful… I love the term pruning that you used, Cass, because there are… At times, you have to prune and remove possible choices, just in order to keep yourself sane. Other times, what you are pruning is choices that are no longer available because of a choice that the player has made. Then there's the decision, like with Bigfoot's cave, this is the thing I'm not going to prune no matter what gets cut or chosen elsewhere, this piece of the tree remains because I need it. Often it's helpful when outlining these things to make decisions ahead of time as to which pieces you just can't prune and which pieces you will be removing, you'll be swapping out, or, if they decided to kill off an NPC versus talking to them, you have the option to file the serial numbers off of that NPC and have them show up elsewhere, so the dialogue you've written, the clothing you've designed, whatever, those assets can be reused.

 

[Dan] One thing that I want to throw out really quick as a resource, if… It was very hard for me initially to get my head around how to write a branching narrative like this, and specifically how to outline one. Until I realized that there are several websites that have mapped the full flowchart of all of the original choose-your-own-adventure books. You can Google those…

[What!]

[Dan] And they're these beautiful little just kind of line drawing look like a subway map kind of things. They really help you to wrap your head around this idea of how the story can branch apart and then checkpoint back together. It kind of helps visualize it in a way that helped me a lot.

[Cassandra] I did not know that existed.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just like the effort it was taking me to not Google that right now is…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I want you to appreciate that I am not going down that branching narrative path.

[Howard] Well, I did Google it because I'm going to be told to include it in the liner notes.

 

[James] Well, I think one trick that's important to remember for that is to, in the story you're telling, tie the big story beats or big character beats or whatever that you want to make sure are in there, you want to tie those to your checkpoints. So you want to make sure that if there's a crucial piece of character development, it doesn't happen on just one branch, because you want to make sure that… To tell a successful story, if you know you have to hit certain key plot points, you have to make sure that they're at those points where all the paths sort of re-converge or else you need to do it separately in each of the paths. But doing it multiple times is expensive.

[Cassandra] I would also say that if you're insistent on let's say not sharing a narrative beat or like something important to the story at a certain checkpoint and, like, you want to keep it exclusive for one node, the other node should have information of equal value and consequence. Players don't necessarily mind it if they miss something if they get something else in return.

[James] Yeah.

 

[Dan] Okay. Let's pause here for our game of the week, which I believe is coming from Howard today.

[Howard] It is. Several years ago, I decided that I wanted to create a Schlock Mercenary role-playing game. It's something that I'd been asked about for a decade and a half until that point. So I sat down with Alan Bahr and we created the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. We looked at the possibilities of licensing a game engine from someone else or homebrewing our own. Ended up going with homebrewing. Because one of the things that I wanted to be able to do is create game mechanics that gave characters… Gave characters? That gave players the tools they needed to tell a story in the spirit of the Schlock Mercenary comic space opera. I wanted it to be funny. So we created the Mayhem deck and a whole bunch of fun materials so that… Our goal was I want you to be able, with your friends, to play a Schlock Mercenary game and have it feel like I'm there telling jokes with you. That was a pretty high bar to clear. I feel like we cleared it. Of course, I'm the authoritative source here.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Alan recently with… He went on to form Gallant Knight games and has done lots of role-playing game design since, has released the Tiny Planet Mercenary rules set which uses many of the same tools that we created, but is in the… It's a much smaller format. So there's Planet Mercenary and Tiny Planet Mercenary which are both tabletop role-playing games in the Schlock Mercenary setting.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it pronounced [squeaky voice] tiny planet mercenary?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Now it is. I think Alan might request that soundbite from us.

[Laughter]

 

[James] All right. Thanks, Howard. So, I want to know, Cass, how do you make these narrative chains fun? How do you make them fun and interesting?

[Cassandra] Oh, there are a lot of different techniques. You… Once you know the scope of what you're working with and how much you can play around with those dimensions, there are a bunch of weird little tricks. The simplest one being having branches within branches. When you're talking to the witch, who will eventually lead you on towards Bigfoot, there could be a whole subsection where you kind of coax her into discussing who she is, why is she there, and that can be a whole thing. Or… This is something that shows up in one of the games that I wrote that unfortunately fell through because AAA is full of games that die without anyone ever knowing its name.

[Laughter]

[Cassondra] I had a character there with prosthetic limbs, and there was always this option where you could ask him, "Hey, why do you have a prosthetic limb?" And he would give you progressively sillier and sillier answers constantly. I think for about 50 or 60 loops. Finally, as you get to the end of it, he just goes, "Really, this is none of your business, snoop," and just shuts off that entire dialogue chain, stopping you from repeating that whole thing again. Little tricks like that show up very often in video games to really build up a sense of this is a real person versus just an NPC that is regurgitating information for its use. Has anyone else seen like interesting things in branching narrative design?

 

[Mary Robinette] I have, but I actually wanted to pause to ask a question that I should have asked last episode. You used the phrase AAA games and I realized I have no… I can extrapolate what that means, but I don't actually know.

[Cassandra] Oh, basically games by companies like Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Bioware, things that tend to involve 100, 200, 300, or, in Ubisoft case, several thousand people in its production. So, usually, really, really high budgets, of a number that absolutely terrifies the crap out of me.

[Mary Robinette] Great. So it's a metaphor that is related to baseball, not to automobile repair?

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] Yes?

[Or batteries]

[Dan] AAA games are the ones that can help you get your car off the highway.

[Howard] All games are physics simulations.

 

[James] So, having never worked on a AAA game, I want to throw out something that you can do that is cheap, and it doesn't require a team of a thousand people, which is conditionals and callbacks can be a really great way to make things feel significant. What I mean by that is when the players make a choice, just putting some sort of little tag or reminder in their so that later on in the game, something can be different depending on their choice. So if you insult the witch and the first scene, when you took that branch, just having something towards the end of the game where you run into the witch again and she goes… She clearly dislikes you because she remembers that you said that thing. That can be one line of dialogue, but it suddenly makes the player feel like, "Oh, this is a real world with real consequences. Because a choice I made a long time ago is continuing to have ramifications." It wasn't superexpensive. It didn't lead to a whole new branch. It was just one thing that was tweaked. Similarly, if somebody picks up a different item or gains a different ability or even just has like a shifted NPC attitude, anything you can do that calls back to a decision a player made earlier feels like a reward, even if they didn't get anything. Because you're reminding them, like, "Hey, we're paying attention to what you're doing. Your choices matter."

[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that you see a lot in big MMORPG titles is what my friend Bob calls a hat economy. Which is, you can spend money to get hats, to get costumes, to get outfits, to get whatever. These have no bearing on the story. They're just this is how I want my character to look, and I have spent the money, so now I have a new costume. When you present a choice to a character, what they get needs to be more than just a hat. It can't just be, oh, I beat the game wearing red clothing. Oh, I beat the game wearing blue clothing. The choice has to matter.

[Cassandra] The best reward is always consequences. I am curious if anyone else has tips and tricks and things they've learned from writing branching narratives?

[Mary Robinette] When I was working on… I did the dialogue for Hidden Path, and it was a game called Brass Tactics which is in VR. The thing for me that was interesting about it, because it was really the first time that I had attempted to do this, was that I needed to be able to really create space for the player in that they could interpret one of the lines of dialogue that the NPC was delivering to them, that they could interpret it in multiple different ways depending on their own emotional state in that moment. Trying to figure out how to sculpt things that felt like they were… That inherently belonged to the character who was speaking them, knowing that an actor was going to imbue them with meaning, but also then leaving enough space. So, like, sometimes it would be something as simple as, "Oh, is that the choice you're making?" That leaves room for the character… For the listener, for the player, to think, "Wait. Does that mean that I should make this choice? Or are they trying to fake me out?" It's… That's all about what the player is bringing to it. But whereas saying, "I wouldn't make that choice if I were you," that is not leaving space for the character… For the player to bring their own interpretation to it.

[James] Yeah. Going back to something that Dan had said in the previous episode about incentivizing players to sort of go the directions you want them to go. I think it's important, you can use things like objectives or item collection or other requirements to kind of maintain control of the story while still allowing an apparent freedom of choice, that illusion of control. What I mean by that is, like, let's say you got players that need to steal the crown jewels from a castle vault. You want to make sure, like, you detailed the whole castle. That's the game. You want to make sure that people hit all those areas and don't just bypass it. So you could force them to go linearly, where you say, "Okay. Well, they'll go in through the tower window, the fight their way all the way down through the castle to the vault, and that way they'll hit everything along the way." But that's a very linear, railroad-y sort of approach. A thing you could do instead is give them multiple options for how they break into the castle. Maybe they sneak in through the moat, maybe they sneak in through the gate, maybe they go in through the tower. But either way, if they somehow managed to get to the vault without going through all the castle stages, then when they get there, they discover, oh, you still need to get the key which is up in the Queen's chamber. So they're going to have to hit all those same encounters you designed, just from the other direction as they go back up to the top. So you still sort of force them to go through all the things that… The challenges that you designed, but you've done it in a way that made them feel like it was their choice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was thinking, as you were talking, that access as a consequence is a way of controlling the direction of the narrative. Shadow Point Observatory, which I'll talk about later, is one of those where your reward for figuring something out is access to the next layer of the puzzle. It also feels like… They also managed to tie consequences to feeling, like, oh, no, I'm not going to get there. But you can… But there's multiple paths to get to that access point.

 

[Dan] This has been a really wonderful discussion, but I'm going to cut it off here. Thank you so much. We have some homework now. I believe it is Cass.

[Cassandra] Yes. I would like everyone to write their choose-your-own-adventure story. You can use any of the multitude of pre-tools that are available on the Internet right now, including Twine, [Inkle?], and probably a whole number of things that I don't know about, because there are a lot of indy engines out there. Just check out the websites and see what it's like to make your own story.

[Dan] Great. That sounds good. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.