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Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/02/16-18-poetry-and-the-fantastic/

Key points (and angles?): If poetry breaks language into meaning, then fantasy breaks reality into truths. Take reality, and tip it on its side, so you can see the interconnective tissue. Puppetry, science fiction and fantasy, and poetry all do these. Consider the aesthetic, what things look like or what language is used, the mechanical, the structure and plot, or the personal, the idiosyncratic choices of a person, their narrative and message.

[Season 16, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetry and the Fantastic.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Amal] And we're all fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we are.

[Mary Robinette] This is the final episode in our eight part poetry master class with Amal. She's going to bring us around to a coda, I believe.

[Amal] Yes. So, throughout the series, we have talked about ways to approach poetry, to make it less scary. We talked about differences between poetry and prose. We've talked about strategies and approaches for writing poetry, appreciating poetry, structuring poetry, and some of the failure modes that can come from those things. But what I'd really like to talk to you… Talk about, rather, in this last episode is just how inseparable to me poetry and the genre in which I love writing, science fiction and fantasy, are. I want to talk about the fantastic more broadly, to incorporate multiple elements and facets of our genre. But I also just want to say that these things are not separate in my head. They are so often absolutely married to each other. I wanted to just kind of dive into the why's and wherefore's of that a little bit. So there is a quote by T. S. Eliot that I often refer to. The quote specifically is that discussing poetry, the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. So, I like to take that quote and break it, essentially. Do unto it, as T. S. Eliott says, the poet does in general. I like to say, to recall it as that poetry breaks or dislocates if necessary language into its meaning. I think about this a lot, because of the way that I was raised with poetry. I… So, my family is from Lebanon and Syria. I was born in Canada, but my parents were born in Lebanon. When… I lived in Lebanon for a little bit when I was little for two years when I was seven. That was where I first wrote poetry. I wrote my first poem at the age of seven when we were living in Beirut. When I did that, my parents were very moved and they told me that I was part of a sort of lineage of writing poetry, essentially. That my grandfather, my father's father, had been a celebrated poet and that poetry was part of my inheritance, essentially, and that they were very happy to see me writing poetry. I cannot stress enough how, like, the poem that I wrote when I was seven, was not a work of staggering genius.

[Laughter]

[Amal] But it was a poem, and it was recognizable as such. I absolutely still remember it. It was… It involved like a lot of playing with language, with unfamiliar bits of it, and it was also addressed to the moon. My grandfather's poetry was political, was revolutionary, was part of this kind of lineage of speaking truth to power and being a voice for the voiceless and stuff like that. My address to the moon was not that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But it was, nevertheless, something that showed my parents that I wanted to use language in the ways that he did as something transformative, as something that made the world different than it was otherwise.

[Howard] My father had memorized a lot of poems, and would storytell with them. One of the ones that he told a lot, because us kids ask for it a lot, was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Which I love. I love it because my dad… I can hear my dad saying it. My dad, when he read the poem, relied heavily on the rhyme and meter, he leaned way into it as he read it. My freshman year in college, one of my professors on an outing recited The Cremation of Sam McGee and was much more… Conversational is the wrong word, but more natural dialogue-y with the way things flowed. I remember the first couple of stanzas thinking, "Wait. Did he… Are those the right words? No, I've heard this enough, that those are the right words." Then, the whole rest of the poem, as I listened, I think poetry itself became unlocked for me. Because I realized, "Oh. The meter and the rhyme aren't the point. The story isn't necessarily the point." It's sort of this whole thing, and the poem has a life outside of what Robert Service gave it. The poem has a life that is experienced differently depending on the listener and depending on the person who says it out loud. Okay, this was 17-year-old, or maybe I was 18 at that time… 18-year-old Howard having what at that time passed for an epiphany.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I still love that poem, and I still like sometimes reading it and hearing the different voices in my head as I scan through it.

[Amal] Do you feel like one of them has like superseded the other in your head, or that your own reading voice has sort of introduced a different natural cadence into it?

[Howard] My voice dominates all of those at this point. Because my dad passed away when I was 20, and the reading I heard from Prof. Lyons was when I was 18. I'm now 53. So the voice that's in my head at this point is my own. But I cherish… This… I think this comes back to poetry as meme. I cherish this memetic series of events because there's a whole bunch of information compressed into that poem that Robert Service didn't put in there.

[Amal] Hah! That's absolutely true. This is the way that... I feel like a lot of us talk about novels in this way, too, that you read a different novel when you come to it at a different age, or that you might have one version of this novel in your head that gains or loses elements as you grow up, and then revisit it as a different person, essentially. To me, there's a lot of fantasy in that as well. There's a lot of… Even though this is obviously a very natural and observed progress of mortality, the idea of departure and return, moving through time in these ways, or, like the kind of time travel that feels inherent in [garbled] to something that you first experienced at a different age. All of that, to me, partakes of these relationships, of this kind of sense of the fantastic. There is this beautiful, beautiful essay by Sophia Samatar called On the 13 Words That Made Me a Writer. I like all of Samatar's work. I return to her work on a bimonthly basis, basically. I just reread her essays all the time, because I always… They always speak to me in a way that I feel like I need at a given moment. What she does in this essay is she talks about how, for her, fantasy resides in language. That when she was a child… I'll say like… So the 13 words in question are

There was a library, and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble.

These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast…

And so on. So she draws these comparisons between like… So, this was a fantasy novel. So she tried to then go and find other fantasy novels that would make her feel the way that this made her feel. It became very hit or miss. She would get that feeling from some books, but not from others. She came to realize that the thing that catalyzed this very specific feeling in her of wonder and awe and marvel was more to do with the language that was being used than the plots or characters or tropes in a given story that might market it as fantasy. So she found herself finding that experience of fantasy in books that were not marketed or labeled as such. That that spirit of wonder and stuff like that she could find in lots of different places. I feel that way about fantasy, because it brings me back to this idea about what poetry does to language. So if poetry breaks language into meaning, I feel like fantasy breaks reality into truths. That what poetry does to language, fantasy does to reality. That the experience that we get from it as writers of genre fiction in so many different ways is that we are always figuring out ways to break and hack reality into a specific experience for our readers, right? And that poetry is doing that too, but at the level of language in a way that you can foreground or background as much as you like. But I also want to say that literature has been poetry for a lot longer than it has been not poetry. That we have… The novel is actually a very recent technology in terms of literature. Poetry is ancient. Similarly, fantasy is ancient. We have had domestic realism for a lot less time than we have had fantasy and the fantastic in our literature. I want to just give people this similarity because I want people who love reading science fiction and fantasy to look at poetry as as much theirs to play with, to read, to be moved and transformed by as the stunning books that they read when they were 12.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… You've given me a thought that I want to dive into, but first, let us pause for the book of the week, which is Monster Portrait.

[Amal] Yes. So, Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar, whom I adore. It's by Sophia Samatar and her brother, Del Samatar. Del Samatar is an artist. So the book, Monster Portrait, is a very slender book of fictionalized autobiography, where Sophia Samatar is responding to these illustrations, these images that Del has made with snapshots that involve interrogations of what is a monster, like, thinking about monsters and monstrosity, and when those things are valued and when they are not valued. Thinking of those in relation to race, to borders, to belonging. It's just an absolutely luminous… I know luminous is like a massive cliché in terms of talking about [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Amal] I review books for a living, I am too keenly aware of this, but genuinely, reading this book gives me an experience of light that I just don't know how to talk about otherwise. It's deeply beautiful. I just cannot recommend it enough. If you wanted to read a book that kind of could be a bridge to you between prose and poetry, I cannot recommend this one enough for doing exactly that thing.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that sounds amazing. So, that was Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar and Del Samatar.

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing that was running through my head as you were talking. There's a thing that longtime listeners will have heard me say before that one of the things that drew me to puppetry is the same thing that drew me to SF and fantasy, which is that it takes reality and it tips it to the side, so that you can see the interconnective tissue. As you were talking, I was like, "Oh. Okay. That's what poetry does, too."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the other thing that went through my head as you were talking was about why a person picks a particular form. There's this other idea that I often talk about, usually when I'm trying to explain to people what voice means. It was in puppetry, we have these three ideas. There's the aesthetics, the mechanical, and the personal. The aesthetic is what something looks like. The mechanical is literally like what kind of puppet are you using. The personal is all of the idiosyncratic choices that you, as a person, make. The example that I use is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. But what occurred to me as you were talking is that I can take that kind of model and think of it as the kind of thing that drives you as a writer. The story you were telling with Sophia that it was the language that called to her, it's like, "Oh, that she is drawn to aesthetic." Whereas I am… There are a lot of people who are drawn to the plot, the structural mechanics of a story. Then, other people are drawn to the kind of the personal story, the personal narrative, the message, so to speak, that's within it. That kind of knowing which thing drives you as a writer also tells you where your defaults are and where your weaknesses are.

[Amal] Yes. I completely agree with that. That's so helpful.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, "Oh. That is part of why…" Like, Pat Rothfuss talks about the fact that he needs to get the next word right before he can move on. I've always been like, "What's the point of him polishing words if you're not going to use them?"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, if I'm going to [garbled delete them?] later.

[Howard] How do I know if I'm going to use them if they're not polished?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wait. Yeah. This is exactly that thing.

[Howard] That's the dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So it strikes me as a… That, for listeners who are not naturally language driven, that one of the really arguably most powerful reasons to dive into this is because it gives you a different way to approach story. It gives you a different understanding of the ways we communicate. It basically tips your entire narrative form on its side to allow you to see the interconnected tissue.

[Amal] I think that is a beautiful, beautiful way of approaching that. I completely agree. I'm reminded… Gosh, who was saying this? Mmm… I'm not going to get this right. I think that Vonda Lee at some point was talking about… Possibly had an article on Tor.com or something that was about exactly this kind of thing, about how writing outside of your comfort zone being to learn… Actually, I'm not… I could be totally wrong, that it wasn't Vonda Lee, either. But mostly what I'm remembering is an article on figuring out where your facility is so that you can figure out in reverse, essentially, where your lack of facility is so that you can work on those things. I love that thought of approaching… Like, the thing that interconnected tissue and stuff. Because I think, too, of how many fantasy novels can… Like, are maybe not thought of as ones that are poetry forward and stuff, but, to me, absolutely are, because… I'm thinking of something like Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Where, like it's written… It's not written in a way that is difficult to get into and stuff. It's very clear. But it's also very stylized. It's also very… And poetry is like a thematic plot-based concern. In the book, you need to know poetry in order to be able to read bureaucratic documents that end up on your desk as an ambassador and stuff like that. The crux of the novel, the climax of it, is the writing of a poem. Which is something that is unbelievably difficult to pull off. Like, this is where you absolutely do not want to miss the mark with a piece of rhyme that is not landing in a way that… Your whole plot depends on whether or not this is a good poem.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Amal] And she absolutely nails it. Like, I think that the phrase "I am a spear in the hands of the Sun," is like the last line of this, and on the back of that line, they build a revolution and it's this whole enormous thing… Sorry, spoilers for a book that came out two years ago.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But, hey, it's just absolutely wonderful, and poetry is part of the texture of that book. But I… Like, I don't know if Arkady would talk about herself as having written it poetically, or of [garbled]. But, nevertheless, there's this sensibility, I guess, to that style, to that aesthetic, that is truly wonderful to me.

[Mary Robinette] This has been fantastic. We are, I'm afraid, at the time which we need to wrap things up with our time with poetry. Do you…

[Howard] I would love… Dan, you remember that thing that I read from Robert Service at the very beginning to you? The…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] That feels like closure. I'm just going to go.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. I have no idea what you're talking about. So you say that thing.

[Amal] Do you want to do it after the homework or before the homework?

[Howard] Have we done the homework yet?

[Amal, Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] No. We did not do… Okay. Do the homework.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Dan] Someone was looking up a poem instead of paying attention.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So, as the… As sad as I am to leave things here, I… We have come to the homework part. Talking about novels and about prose and poetry, and to bring this all full-circle, the homework I want to leave you with is I want you to find a favorite line from a novel or a short story, one that moves you really, really deeply, one that you kind of keep in your head every now and then. I want you to take that line and use it as the epigraph for a poem. So, essentially, if you see a poem and there's like a single line in italics at the start, before the poem actually starts, that's what I mean. I want you to use that line from a novel or a short story, and I want you to write a poem following it, I want you to write a poem sparked by it. A kind of poetic tribute to whatever that line did to you.

[Howard] The reason I brought this up is that it feels like a poet's version of "you're out of excuses, now go write." It's from Robert Service.

Lone amid the café’s cheer,

Sad of heart am I to-night;

Dolefully I drink my beer,

But no single line I write.

There’s the wretched rent to pay,

Yet I glower at pen and ink:

Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,

It is later than you think!

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's lovely. Also, so painful and so true. I'm… As we send folks away, I'm going to also share my father's favorite poem by Ogden Nash. Further Reflections on Parsley.

Parsley is gharsley.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Dan, do you want to share a poem, too?

[Dan] That poem reminds me of the time that someone auditioned for our high school musical by singing Minimum-Wage by They Might Be Giants.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The only words in the song are minimum-wage. He just shouted it and left the room. It was great.

[Amal] Beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] That's the only thing you want to share before we wrap?

[Dan] Yes. I am going to share a poem with you. This is one of my all-time favorites. By Brian Turner, who was a medic in Afghanistan and wrote a lot of poetry, and then came home and he was, for a while, the poet laureate of the US. His most famous poem is called Here, Bullet.

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

[Whoof]

here is where the world ends, every time.

[Amal] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with all of that, my dear listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.17: The Time To Rhyme

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/04/25/16-17-the-time-to-rhyme/

Key Points: Rhyme can do wonders, but there are also ways to fail at it. It is often thought of as juvenile. It's also used to pretty up sentiments. One rhyme promises more rhymes. Rhyme is artifice, it calls attention to something. Pay attention to the whole sentence, not just the rhyme at the end. You can also use other tools, such as assonance and alliteration, to make the sentence flow.

[Season 16, episode 17]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Time To Rhyme.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And that rhymes with scurry.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm…

[Dan] Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] I thought about saying furry, but I didn't.

[Laughter]

[Amal] Thank you all for [garbled] being this brilliant demonstration of a rhyme's capacity to surprise, to be playful, to do all sorts of wonderful things.

[Dan] Also, in the outline, you're about to talk about rhyme as a failure mode. So…

[Amal] Yes.

[Dan] Good demonstration of that as well.

[Mary Robinette] We appreciate that, always, Howard.

[Howard] I have spent a solid 12 years here at Writing Excuses being exemplary… The exemplar of failure modes.

[Mary Robinette] This is my favorite.

[Howard] These are…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, Dan is also my favorite, and so is Amal. You're all my favorites.

[Amal] Oh. Thank you.

[Amal] So, the thing about rhyme is even though obviously everything about this thus far has been delightful…

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Rhyme is so often kind of pointed to as an example of how poetry is bad. Right? That there is something kind of embarrassing about rhyme. It gets sorted into a sort of juvenile atmosphere. We think of nursery rhymes. We think of poetry as being for children if it is rhyme forward, if there is a lot of rhyming in it. We've developed a kind of assumption of rhyme as something essentially immature. I think that is sort of born out or supported by the fact that English, the language we are speaking on this podcast, is a rhyme poor language. So what that means is that we don't have a ton of words that rhyme with each other the way that Latinate languages do, for instance, where you have whole grammatical modes that just make it so that you can have the same rhyme and a rich rhyme for that matter, like a multisyllabic rhyme happening at the end of a word. Right?

[Dan] Yeah. When I lived in Mexico and was teaching English to some people, this group of teenagers was astonished, like slack-jawed, wide-eyed, shocked that English could rhyme.

[Hah]

[Dan] It had never occurred to them that that was a possibility. Because in Spanish, the opportunities for rhyme are so much more present. Although, at the same time, I kind of want to push back a little bit on the idea that rhyme is seen as juvenile. I think that that attitude comes from an academic side. Because if you look at poetry as it exists kind of for the average American, the forward that your aunt sends to you on Facebook and that sort of thing, the average Westerner, I should say, it's replete with rhyme. Rhyme is everywhere. When the typical person sits down to write a poem, more often than not, they're going to put rhyme into it.

[Mary Robinette] But this is exactly what Amal is saying, is that because it is something that is accessible and is not used well, frequently…

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That's… That is often seen as… That it's a stage that poetry goes through and then you mature and cast off these constraints…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Then your poetry can live.

[Amal] This is basically exactly what I mean. I think that this is… So, not to contradict your point, Dan, I think that's exactly true. Rhyme tends to stand in for a broader understanding of form. So what we were talking about in the last couple of episodes about ways to structure poetry, I think that a lot of people only ever learn one way that poetry looks. That way is that it has rhyme. If you're lucky, it has a rhyme scheme or meter, which is not always part of that received idea of what a poem looks like as evidenced by numerous Hallmark cards that do not scan.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Amal] And stuff. But nevertheless have a rhyme. There's a received idea that language is elevated thereby, as well. I think those two things exist at the same time. That rhyme is something that you do with like children's verse or things that are aimed at kids. But it's also what you have in a Hallmark card when you want to kind of pretty up the sentiment of the thing that you are sending. If you rhyme it, it's a little bit more effort that has been put in there or something.

[Howard] I think one of the problems with rhyme, and a problem that simultaneously it's a strength, is that a single rhyme, whether it's an internal rhyme or end of line rhyme or something, functions, to the listener, to the reader, is a promise of more rhyming. If it's not there, then maybe you were writing prose and you had an accidental rhyme and now it feels weird. Or if it's not there in your poem, maybe the promise of the rhyme was subverted, and you had a bunch of things that almost rhymed, and you've now delivered a different sort of experience. But that thought that when a rhyme happens, it calls attention to itself, not just in a way to say, "I'm important," but in a way to say, "And you should expect me to bring all my friends to the party, too."

[Amal] Yes. That is a really, really good point. It sets up an expectation. When you… And similarly, this is to come back to the way that we were talking about repetition before as well, when you have unintentional repetition, it strikes your attention in an awkward way. You go, "Oh, wait. You just used that word." Especially if it's repetition of a particularly noticeable word. You use a word like scintilate twice in three sentences. That is maybe a mistake, and you should think about that, and maybe revise it. But with rhyme, it's a similar sort of thing. There are so many ways to fail at doing rhyme because it entails a whole nexus of variables. You are setting up an expectation for something that's quite difficult to do. Because of this, I want to kind of compare rhyme to another thing that is very difficult to do, but that we have a very heightened expectation of, which is makeup.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I want to talk about essentially rhyme is artifice, right? Rhyme does not occur supernaturally in English. So, there's a sense of the artificial whenever we deploy it. There's that sense of, like, where calling attention to something. Notice this thing. Makeup is something also artificial. It is artifice that we are using to a variety of different effects. You can use makeup unobtrusively to sort of, without calling attention to it, highlight features of your face that you want to emphasize or deemphasize others, right? So you can either use it that way or you can give yourself a bold red lip and smoky eyes, right? But if you're doing a bold red lip and smoky eyes, it's a lot easier to notice where you done it badly. Right? It's a lot more skill to deploy artifice in a way that is succeeding at the effect that it is trying to communicate. So I want to think of rhyme as a bold red lip and smoky eyes, and to think about like when you are using it in your poem, when is it going to be appropriate to be like that and when is it not. When do you want to put in that much effort, essentially, to be seen in this way, when you could put in a lot less effort to achieve the same effect, for instance? So, in order to talk about this… Well, actually, I'm going to talk about that a little bit later. Probably want to pause here for our book of the week?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I was going to let you go, because I was like, "This is really interesting and I'm taking notes." But it is, in fact, time for our book of the week. I want to talk to you about The Forever Sea, by Joshua Phillip Johnson. This is a debut novel. It's a book in which I'm going to promise you that you will get pirates and high sea adventure, except that the sea is a massive, massive prairie that you can sink into, and there is magic, there's coming-of-age, there's adventure, but it is such a beautiful evocative landscape. The author comes out of a literary tradition… I mean, he is fundamentally a science fiction and fantasy writer, but there is a poeticness… Poetic nature to the language with which he describes the prairie. It's a lovely book, and is one of those things that just paints pictures in your head that linger. And also, one of the ways in which magic is done is through song. So it's filled with verse that is not… It's not frequently a typical structure that you would recognize, but clearly structured and intentional. It's lovely, lovely. Highly recommend this book. The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson.

[Amal] I love that about… The combination of sea and prairies and song made a sort of trifecta in my head that reminded me of an Arrogant Worm song. They're a Canadian band. They have a song about being a pirate on the Saskatchewan prairies, basically. The title has not come to my mind, but it is super delightful. Anyways, I really want to read this book.

[Howard] I've just learned that Canada has prairie.

[Laughter]

[Amal] Yes. It's all in the… Similarly to the States, in the middle portion of the country, but yes.

[Mary Robinette] That is actually what Joshua was basing these prairies on, with a great prairies in the middle of the US and Canada, and the way that the settlers, when they were going across, that they would describe it is just a sea of grass.

[Amal] Yes. Yeah, I've seen that, especially referred to in like Kentucky. The bluegrasses there and stuff.

[Amal] But to come back to rhyme, then. Which... connecting to songs and stuff, which frequently feature rhyme. The… When you want to rhyme in a poem, but I want to make clear is that it's not that if you are unobtrusive or unnoticeable with the rhyme, it's better than if you are foregrounding the rhyme. Anymore than saying it is better to not have noticeable makeup versus to have very noticeable makeup. Those are both choices that you make, depending on the effect that you want to convey. I just want to name some failure modes, essentially, of using rhyme that are similar to smudging your mascara…

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Or going out of the line of your lips or something like that. So, rhyme when it's used as like the be-all, end-all of something often misses a number of cues. Usually, the way to fix any of the problems that I'm going to name is to read the thing out loud. Which is a way of solving the myriad problems. I'm sure that you've all talked about this a number of times on previous episodes. When you read something out loud, you force yourself to confront everything that you have put on the page. Not just the rhyme at the end. So, often, novices experimenting with rhyme sort of use the whole of the line preceding the rhyme as filler for the rhyme. That is a problem. Because usually what that means is that you're not sufficiently attentive to the meaning of the sentence, to the rhythm of the sentence, and to essentially how that rhyme is going to land. If you put the rhyme only in service of the rhyme scheme you are following or just as a kind of… You've written yourself into a corner where you realize the only way to rhyme with world is swirled or something like that, even though that's not what you want to say, it's usually a sign that you need to go back and try to think about what is it that you're trying to say. What effect do you want to convey, and how are you going to make the rhyme serve that effect? I want to read you a poem that is very short, that is, to me, one of the most beautiful evocative contemporary examples of a rhyming poem. Because rhyme, like anything, like makeup, has its fashions, right? Things fall in and out of fashion with writing all the time. Rhyme fell out of fashion in the 17th century, where, when Milton wrote Paradise Lost essentially and wrote a gigantic epic that was unrhymed. That was taking a certain stance in a certain taste in a certain fashion. Rhyme has, in and out of those fashions in a lot of ways since. But there is this one poem that is very explicitly foregrounding its rhymes. It is a poem where you cannot ignore the rhymes. They are absolutely there in part of it. But it's also quiet and moving and generous and beautiful. It's… You may very well have encountered it, because it often turns up on Instagram. It's called The Orange by Wendy Cope. I'm going to read it to you.

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange —

The size of it made us all laugh.

I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave —

They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do

Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.

This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.

I did all the jobs on my list

And enjoyed them and had some time over.

I love you. I’m glad I exist.

I should also say, I should maybe have said this before hand, this is a poem that I find almost impossible to read without crying at the end. So… It's… You'll notice… The things I want to draw your attention to about this is that not only is it rhyming, it has a very singsong cadence. It has ditdit ditdit ditdit duhduh ditdit ditdit ditdit duh. It just kind of lulls you into this back-and-forth rhythm that seems, by virtue of being singsongy, something a little silly, something that's a bit like a nursery rhyme. Then, in the last two lines, it just becomes the most profound expression of adulthood, of the challenges of just taking pleasure in small things and recognizing the grace of just loving someone else and loving yourself at the same time. These are things that we're no longer used to finding in rhyming poetry. We're used to finding these instead in very sharply sculpted free verse poems and stuff. Instead, here, Wendy Cope is doing this tremendous thing with a rhyming poem which I cannot stress enough is titled The Orange, which is a word you cannot rhyme in English.

[Laughter]

[Howard] One of my favorite things about this poem is that… I mean, the orange is for… The word orange is famously the word you can't rhyme in English. Wendy gets around that not by using it never as the last word… It's right there, last word in the first line… Gets around it by using a non-unrhymed symmetry. That orange it made me so happy, as ordinary things often do. Orange and ordinary do not rhyme, but they are absolutely paired together in a way that the words echo one another. Yeah, took the rule of you can't rhyme orange, and Wendy's like, "I don't need to rhyme it."

[Amal] Right. The scheme of the poem is not something like ABAB. It is ABCB.

[Mary Robinette] Not now.

[Amal] So the first and the third lines don't rhyme. So she has also very judiciously used orange as the last word of a line in a line that she doesn't need to rhyme according to the schema that she has chosen. But you're absolutely right as well that when you are using rhyme in your poem as part of your effect, you don't need to use it to the exclusion of many other ways of making a sentence flow. So, things like assonance and alliteration, which are also ways of drawing attention to elements of language, that are much more prevalent in English because we have a lot more of those. This is why something like Beowulf or old English poetry in general didn't have rhyme schemes, they had schemes of alliteration that were extremely precise. So I think within the old English, Beowulf goes, "[Wailing kin be water man, vex chis go na men]" and… Is that right? No. Sorry. That's not Beowulf, that's The Song of Deor. Anyway. Forget I said that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Nevertheless, it has a very specific alliteration scheme instead of a rhyme scheme. You could use those as well as rhyme in your work.

[Mary Robinette] Would you like a brief aside about my elementary school poetry workshop, in which I learned about alliteration and my mom had a fine moment of adulting?

[Amal] Oh, my gosh. Please, yes.

[Mary Robinette] We had to write… Artists in residence came, and we learned about all kinds of different things. Rhyme, alliteration, I think shaped poetry where you write… The poem is in the shape of whatever it is? So I did a shaped poem about my cat, which included alliteration in it. It included the line that I love to pat my pussy.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] My mom is like, "Maybe you want to take a different word here. Kitty? Kitty? It's the same number of syllables." I'm like, "No, mommy. No. It's alliteration, it has to start with the same letter. Pat my kitty does not. It has to be pat my pussy."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, in hindsight, I understand the faces that she was making in the valiant effort that she was making to not laugh.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Oh, my gosh. That's so good.

[Howard] I was worried that the shape was going to be obscene, but no. No.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] You went to a different place. Well done.

[Mary Robinette] I was in third grade.

[Laughter]

[Howard] No, I mean accidentally obscene. The prompt changed when you printed it or something. Third grade [garbled] typewriter. Handwriting.

[Mary Robinette] You're so quaint. That was pencil on lined paper.

[Laughter]

[Amal] Oh, that's so beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] Do you have anything else you want to tell us, Amal? Before we…

[Amal] Oh, my gosh. I feel like nothing could possibly top patting one's pussy.

[Laughter]

[Amal] So I think I'm just going to quickly move into homework. So…

[Mary Robinette] [inaudible]

[Amal] Yes. We have talked about limericks in previous episodes, I think. But what I want you to do for homework today is look up the limericks of Edward Lear, who was very famous for his limericks, and specifically for giving them certain features of singular persons from specific places and stuff like that. I want you to, using one of Edward Lear's limericks, I want you to use it as a model for your own limerick. I want you to just invent a limerick, paying careful attention to how the rhyme needs to match the rhythm of a limerick. So, a lot of the time, when people are taught how to write limericks, they're just given like a syllable count that you need to go from here to here, but syllables are wiggly beasts. It's not so much about the syllables as it is about the way that it sounds when you read it out loud. The meter of the way that these syllables come together. So I want you to look up a limerick, use it as a model, write a limerick, read that limerick out loud, and see if you can match the rhythm of what you're writing to the rhythm of the poem you're using as a model.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to offer people a hack for doing this. For people who are not used to dealing with meter. That one of the things you can do when you are looking at that original limerick is to put the syllables that are stressed in capitals or in bold. When you are picking a new word to go into those places, make sure that the bold and the… Or capitals match up so that your stresses are hitting the right spots. That's what I did. It took me a long time to understand what meter meant.

[Amal] That is an excellent hack, and I'm going to use it to explain this henceforth, because I'm always trying to sidestep a whole, like, lecture on meter and having to explain what an anapest is as opposed to a pest. Just… So this is much better. That is very, very helpful.

[Mary Robinette] I'm happy to help with that. With that… This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.16: Poetic Structure: Part II

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/04/18/16-16-poetic-structure-part-ii/

Chestnuts to chew on: implicit structures instead of explicit. Organizing principles, logic, instead of a schematic or blueprint. Instead of fitting your meaning into forms, let the topic suggest a form. Take a structure, embroider it, build outwards from it, elaborate on it, explode it! Instead of a single external large structure, look at microstructure, chunks of forms used on the inside. Invent a form. Transpose it!

[Season 16, Episode 16]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetic Structure: Part II.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] So, last week, in part I of this, Amal led us through talking about poems that had structures. This week, she has promised to talk to us about things that do not have a structure. Which is very exciting to me, because I see words in your outline that make me so happy, like the words short story. So, talk to me about this.

[Laughter]

[Amal] Right. So, last week, I was talking about essentially explicit structures. The structure that you have a form, it's kind of like a container, and you are pouring your poetic genius into that container and it's taking on that shape. So something that has a rhyme scheme, something that has a specific meter, or something like that. These are received structures that you are using to shape your poem. They can be very useful and they can be paradoxically very liberating, because once you have eliminated the need to kind of figure out the shape of the thing, sometimes it can be easier to just write a thing. But that said, there are tons of ways to structure poems that don't actually involve following a specific schematic for the poem. That's what I want to talk about this week. So, it's not so much that things don't have a structure as much as that the structure is implicit instead of explicit, and that the structure is more of an organizing principle, more of a logic, than it is an actual schematic or blueprint for producing a poem. The way that we talked about memes last week. So I want to talk about this a little bit the way… The thing that Mary Robinette was saying was exciting. To me, this is how I think about short stories a lot of the time. That I… If I think to myself I want to tell a story about someone who is experiencing a kind of fracturing of identity. Or something that is breaking them up inside in some way. I might want to take that theme and reflect it in the form of the story. I might want to tell the story itself in fragments. That's the kind of logic that I'm talking about here for a poem. Where, instead of fitting your meaning into a received set of forms, you instead let the thing that you want to talk about suggest a shape, suggest a form. That may or may not actually interact with the way that you're writing the poem. I don't know if you guys actually write short stories this way, though.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Is that actually familiar or is that a totally off-the-wall?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, it depends, for me, on the short story. Which is, I suspect, like, so is that the way you write poetry? That it depends on the poem? And the constraints and the mood of the moment?

[Amal] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, sometimes I'm extremely structured with my stories, and sometimes I am… Much more explorational.

[Amal] Sometimes you can take the form that one thing tends to have… I find that a lot of the time when we teach short stories, or when we teach short story structure, we end up reaching for the structure of other media. We might reach for the three act structure of a film, or at least use it to kind of bounce different structures off of and stuff like that. Similarly, like, there are a couple of poems that I want to share with people. Not by reading them out on the podcast specifically, but perhaps in show notes. There's a poem by Sofia Samatar called Girl Hours which is stunningly beautiful. I adore it completely. It's about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who I'm sure Mary Robinette knows about.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Amal] So, about the fact that girl hours was a way of talking about the length of a project, essentially, because women were computers who were crunching numbers all the time, so any kind of project that involved doing that was reckoned in girl hours. So, Samatar has written this tremendous poem about Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her life and her work. But the form that she's chosen to do that in is the form of a standard essay. So the way that an essay would have an introduction, a body, a conclusion, and notes. She has taken those elements of an essay and use them to structure this poem instead. So, but she's also turned it around. She's also made it backwards. Which… For reasons that are in the poem. It opens with notes that start in prose, saying, in the 1870s, the Harvard College Observatory began to employ young women as computers to record and analyze data. One of them, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, discovered a way to measure stellar distances using the pulsing of variable stars. Then it goes into the conclusion. And instead, the shape of it is totally transformed.

You were not the only deaf woman there.

Annie Cannon, too, was hard of hearing.

On the day of your death, she wrote: Rainy day pouring at night.

And then it just kind of goes on from there. It's this tremendous poem that I cannot enough recommend. But it takes as its structure something that is very much not a poem, and then incorporates it into the poem to reflect on many of the themes that are present in the poem.

[Howard] I had a fun experience about a week ago as of the time of this recording. Sandra and I sat down to watch a movie called Along with the Gods, which is a Korean film that sort of a fantasy afterlife epic thing. We were about 15 minutes in… It's subtitled, not dubbed. We were about 15 minutes in. I don't speak a word of Korean. We were about 15 minutes in when suddenly I realized, "Oh, wait a minute. None of the cadence of the voices tells me this. None of the subtitles tell me this. But this is about 15% comedy." Suddenly I had to rewrite in my head all of the receipts… All of my receipts for lines of dialogue and it completely changed my understanding of what was happening. So, this idea that an implicit form can change the message. The person receiving the poem has to know the form. You have to have that piece. I'm not regretting my experience at all. It was great fun. But I love the idea that form is that important, and that sometimes we rely on it without knowing it.

[Dan] So, here's what I hope is a really great example of what you're talking about. Amal, if I'm totally off base, just shut me up. But the TV show WandaVision…

[Yes!]

[Dan] Is doing this, and doing this brilliantly. Because what they are trying to tell is a story about a woman who is searching for a family, and trying to build and find a family. So they are using these received forms of sitcom structure and they're going through out… Every episode is a different kind of sitcom model from a different period of history, but they are very specifically doing detailed pastiche of family sitcoms, like Bewitched, and like The Donna Reed Show, and Dick Van Dyke, and Brady Bunch, and all these things. Because within that form, they are able to tell all of these extra facets of family life and what is perceived as normal, what we expect to have, because we've seen it on TV, and there's all these layers because of the form they're using.

[Amal] I'm literally covered in full body chills as you brought that up, that example, because it is everything that you said, and I'd argue it's even more than that, in that one of the things about WandaVision… Zero spoilers, obviously, because it's magnificent and really should be experienced in the form that it has chosen, which is the weekly episode. It is doing something extremely brilliant, which is that it's not just about a woman wanting a family, it's about a woman processing enormous grief.

[Dan] Yes.

[Amal] Within the context of the past year that we've all lived through, one of the ways that people have been managing their situation, reckoning with their grief, has been through binge watching television.

[Howard] Wait! What?

[Amal] I know…

[Mary Robinette] Shocking. So confusing.

[Amal] But this is the… For it to be about a relationship between grief and television, but also to forestall the ability to binge it. You can't binge this show, unless you wait for it to be over and then binge it. You have to actually experience it one week at a time, the way that the sitcoms that it is engaged with are doing, is a brilliant use of the form to both, like, to engage and transform the thing that it's about, and to use things like commercial breaks to explore these different elements of everything that the meat of the show is about. It is doing… That show genuinely feels like poetry to me, in the way that it has layered meaning on meaning on meaning.

[Dan] Yes.

[Amal] Within the structure it has taken for itself.

[Dan] Well, the moment for me when it moved from a thing I really loved to a thing that I consider to be genius is when Wanda wants to avoid an argument, and so she rolls credits.

[Yah!]

[Dan] And Vision has to chase her into the next room. He's like, "No. This isn't over. You have to talk to me." And the way that it uses that form. Although, to go back to what Howard was saying about how you kind of have to know the form, my children completely bounced off of this show.

[Ha!]

[Dan] Because they did not grow up with the Dick Van Dyke show. So episode one meant nothing to them.

[Mary Robinette] So, harking back…

[Dan] Yeah. Go for it.

[Mary Robinette] To last episode, they were missing the meme.

[Dan] Yes. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Let's take a moment to pause for our book of the week, which is The Space Between Worlds by… Which Amal has recommended.

[Amal] Yes. So, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing her name. It's Micaiah Johnson or Micaiah Johnson. I'm not sure because I've never heard it spoken. I apologize if that is not correct. But, The Space Between Worlds is a magnificent book. Talking of pandemic stuff and our processing thereof, this was the first book that really enabled me to read again last year. I've observed that lots of people fell into different camps of either reading a lot more than they normally did or reading a lot less than they normally did to manage the situation. For me, I basically lost the ability to read for about three months. The book that snapped me out of that was The Space Between Worlds. It is about… It's high concept science-fiction. It is… The premise is that someone has figured out how to access hundreds of alternate realities, but the… In order to go to that alternate reality, in order to actually be there, you cannot have a version of yourself alive there. So people who… The people who become traversers, as they're called, the people who are actually able to do this, are people whose lives are so contingent and vulnerable and volatile that the fact that they have survived into adulthood is basically a miracle, and they can go to all of these other worlds. So the protagonist, Cara, is someone who is only alive in seven worlds out of… Eight worlds… Seven or eight worlds, I can't remember, out of like over 300. So as a consequence, she's able to go to these other worlds.

[Mary Robinette] Wow.

[Amal] It is so pacey and action-packed and also gorgeously written. Is that it basically just lit me on fire from within. It flooded me with gasoline and struck a match. It just… Suddenly, I could experience color and heat and wonder again. I just love this book so, so much. I really want everyone to read it.

[Mary Robinette] That sounds amazing. So that's The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson.

[Amal] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Ah. So good.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have a question. I hope this doesn't take us to far off course. But one of the things as you've been talking that I was thinking about is the poem that we have all just heard, which is Amanda Gorman's The Hill We Climb that she read on the inaugural… The day of the Inauguration. Like, I'm in awe of that kind of poetry, because it is not a structured poem. I… The only poetry that I have really written as an adult has generally been in service of a novel, one of which was in Valor and Vanity. Lord Byron was a character. I needed him to recite some poetry that he had written about glamour, which is clearly not a poem he has ever written. So to do that, I took one of his poems and I used that as my structural template. I understand how to do that. I understand how to interrogate the text and figure out why he was placing the linebreaks where he placed them, why he was…. I don't understand, when we're looking at this implicit form with poetry, how to articulate and go after the structural goals of the language. Like what… So when we're talking about this implicit structure, like, how do we… What are we… What am I doing?

[Laughter]

[Amal] So, like with a short story… Obviously there are lots of variables there, right? But I love what you're describing about what you did with a Byron poem. Because… So… I mean… Can I ask, how did you choose the Byron poem that you chose?

[Mary Robinette] I looked for something that was at least thematically linked to the topic and the mood that I wanted him to be going through. So that there would be… So that, I guess, that tonally it was still… It was in the right ballpark for what I was going for. I wanted to be able to kind of retain as much of the original structure as I could. But it… That was… I looked at a lot of Byron poems. But that was mostly what I was looking at, was the emotional tone.

[Amal] Right. So, similarly, I think that when you want to be writing something that is following again, like a certain organizational principle, there's going to be a certain amount of chicken and egg in terms of figuring out what poem you want to write on this theme versus what theme this structure suggests and stuff like that. There's some back-and-forth there. But in terms of like how do you do it. So, what I…

[Mary Robinette] Specifically, like with unstructured things.

[Amal] Yeah. Exactly. So, with unstructured things, a lot of things come into play. I love that you brought up Amanda Gorman's poem, because a great deal of what's going on in that poem is the room she allowed herself for its performance. If you see that poem on the page, it is experienced very, very differently than when she reads it. A big… And I don't just mean in terms of like her charisma and her ability to perform it. I mean the… There is a lot of internal rhyme in that poem. If you don't… It's internal rhyme that you won't notice on the page, because it's not structured with linebreaks where those rhymes are. They're occurring almost like commas in a sentence. Like those rhymes, there's a layering that's happening. I would also argue that, like the layering that's happening with those rhymes is not dissimilar to building a ladder on a hill that one might climb. For instance, like, there's a kind of upward motion in that poem that follows… So the form of it is sort of following the function of it.

[Mary Robinette] Got it.

[Amal] It's following the idea of it. But those are kind of day brain concerns, right? Those are kind of structural, thoughtful, logic-based elements that you're bringing to something which in its conception tends to be a bit more numinous and a bit more strange. So I want to give a different example of a form that I think is essentially exploding a certain structure in order to build itself out from it. This is possibly… Possibly the kindest, most generous poem I've yet read. I love it so much. It's by Kaitlyn Boulding, and it's called Questions to ask yourself before giving up. It's a bit too long to read on the podcast, but what I want to say about it is that it was sparked, as the biography says… It appears in GUTS magazine, and I'm sure we will link to it. But there was a certain text that began to be circulated, I think on Tumblr, that was a series of questions, a kind of self-care checklist, essentially. It goes like this Are you hydrated? If not, have a glass of water. Have you eaten in the past three hours? If not, get some food. Something with protein, not just simple carbs. Have some nuts or hummus. Have you showered in the past day? If not, take a shower right now. So, Kaitlyn Boulding encounters that article and explodes it. What I mean by that is, if you take that, just that first line, are you hydrated? If not have a glass of water. What she does is

Are you hydrated?

When did you last glut your thirst with a handful of spring?

Have you eaten anything besides emails or your fingernails in the last three hours?

Have you pulled the protein out of an oak tree or palmed an avocado pit this month?

She just takes these straightforward questions and embroiders them and builds them outwards and elaborates on them. She takes them and she… To return to a previous episode, she sings them, in a way. It feels to me very much like she's taken that checklist, which was the source of some controversy. I remember at the time, this was several years ago, but I remember this checklist kind of being denigrated by a lot of people. Not unjustly in terms of this is not how you solve depression. You cannot solve depression in this way. But in different contexts, with different degrees of distress, this may be helpful to someone, essentially. What Kaitlyn Boulding does, and in the biography, I think she says specifically that she wrote this poem for a friend going through a difficult time. That checklist becomes transformed into a gift. It's like taking yarn and knitting. It's like taking some kind of initial fiber form of something and build… Using it as material to build something else.

[Howard] Mary Robinette and I have both talked in the past about times when we just needed to fall back on craft in order to get something done. Without the assist of an external large structure, it's difficult to fall back on craft. I think part of the answer, Mary Robinette, that you may be looking for lies in the microstructure of some of these poems. The opportunity to use an internal rhyme, the opportunity to use something that sounds like two lines of a sonnet, because they have the same meter. As I listened to The Hill We Climb at the Inauguration, I kept hearing chunks of forms in the presentation. That's not to say that that's how it was composed. But I think with a lot of these formless, or absent an outlining form, poems, you will find lots of these little forms on the inside. So, as I've done with, for myself, when I'm trying to write humor, coming up with a list of tools, things that I know how to do. Oh, I know how to say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] With Wikipedia titles. I know how to do all of these things. You make a list of these tools, and you said it in front of you. Then you take your topic, and now you might have the pieces you need to fall back on craft and write a formless poem that is borrowing from a dozen different forms at once.

[Amal] Well, this is actually… You've hit on a much more succinct way, I think, of talking about, like, how do you do the poem that has a non-traditional form. It's basically that you invent a form for it. You can… I'm reminded here…Shweta Narayan, who I've mentioned before, has a stunning poem called The Bone Harp Sings Nine Moods. To write that poem, what they did was they took a fairytale which is like The Bonny Swans or The Cruel Sister, the tale type where one sister murders another because of some jerk. But, anyway, took that basic story template and took the fact that there was a harp in that story and thought what if I transported that story not from a European setting, but like transposed it into an Indian setting via the medium of Carnatic music. So what Shweta ended up doing was structuring the poem in nine sections to reflect different ragas, essentially. Like different musical modes in Carnatic music. And had each one title the section. Then, within each of those sections, has a very free verse engagement with the meat of the story of that fairytale, essentially, that they were retelling. But it's structured within this totally other context now of ragas and of the different moods that a different raga refers to. As a consequence, you've got this like multi-vocal poem that isn't in a strictly speaking recognizable form, but is very, very structured nevertheless. Very, very formed.

[Mary Robinette] This is all incredibly interesting. I've let us run long because of all of… Like, I just want you to keep unpacking things. But I know that we have homework and we have two more episodes in this topic.

[Mary Robinette] So, your homework, I think is going to give us some exercises to actually try and take some stuff out for a spin. So, will you tell us?

[Amal] Absolutely. So, today's exercise involves basically writing a poem inspired by the thing you've chosen to structure it. I want to make this easier. I'm going to use the medium of the numbered list, okay. So I want you to take a numbered list of things, and use that numbered list to write a poem inspired by the list, and also organized according to that list. If that seems complicated, let me unpack it. Consider, for instance, if you used the four cardinal directions. So you have, the form that I am giving you is, 1, North, 2, South, 3, East, 4, West. Use each one of those headings to write a piece of a poem that is going to make a whole that is in some way involved with north, south, east, and west. But once you have those four directions, you can apply them to whatever you want. Do you want to make it relevant to a map, to some geography? Do you want to make it relevant to the body? With, like, North as the head, and South as the feet? Do you want to make it be about a compass? So, having that numbered list of four things should be a springboard for you to then write a poem about something related to that list. Some other examples can include the elements, four or five, depending… According to whichever tradition you choose. The periodic table might be slightly too long for your purposes. Or the three laws of thermodynamics. Or the neighborhoods in a city. Or anything else that you make up. It just has to be a numbered list where each number is the heading to a different section.

[Mary Robinette] Ah. This is great. Thank you so much, Amal. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.15: Poetic Structure, Part 1

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/04/11/16-15-poetic-structure-part-i/

Key points: Sonnets are memes! Poetic forms are memes. Structure, rhyme scheme, meter can be tools of communication. Patterns of difference and repetition. Sonnet, villanelle, sestina, different forms suit different themes and topics. Repetition catches our attention, but it needs to point to something.

[Season 16, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetic Structure, Part 1.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And this is haiku.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Humm…] [Mary Robinette] I'm not going to pause to count to see whether or not that was actually haiku, however…

[Howard] I counted five times to make sure.

[Laughter]

[Dan] It is. Our tagline is very accidentally a perfect haiku.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's

[Amal] That's beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] That is so beautiful. And thus, poetic structure. Which Amal will speak to us as part five of our eight part series on poetry.

[Amal] Yes. So, poetic structure. So, one of the things that we've been sort of… I feel like up until this point in this series, I've been trying to talk about lots of underlying ideas about poetry, some things that are assumed, some things that are received, and stuff like that. To kind of challenge and develop our ideas of what a poem is or can be. But what I want to do in today's episode is talk about some much more recognizable poetic forms, and talk about how, even though you don't need a poem to be structured in an explicit way that has been received with like centuries of lineage and baggage behind it, in order for it to be a poem, it can be really fun to play with those forms on the same. So you absolutely do not need to write a sonnet in order to be writing a poem. You don't need to write a villanelle or a sestina or a limerick or a haiku for it to be a poem. But since we have these forms, I would love to actually talk about the forms themselves and how they can be not so much constraining as liberating sometimes. Especially when you're just starting out writing poetry. Also, to talk about a revelation that I experienced about poetic structure that I received from one of my students while trying to teach a class on structure, when I was talking about sonnets. What happened was this. I was talking about how sonnets have come through a series of transformations over time, the way that the sonnet form tends to get taught at say an undergraduate English student level is that it is 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme. But there is a distinction that happened. In the past, once upon a time, Petrarch, an Italian poet, wrote in a certain rhyme scheme because Italian is a rhyme rich language. So poets were wanting to write sonnets the way Petrarch did copied that scheme. But then Shakespeare comes along, and Shakespeare, recognizing that English is a rhyme poor language, changes the rhyme scheme of the sonnet. Instead of having a turn in the poem that happens in the middle, he has the turn come right at the end, before that last couplet. All this sort of stuff. As I was going on and saying this in class, a student, absolutely ingeniously, interjected to say, "So, you're saying a sonnet is like a meme?"

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I said, "Oh, my God. Yes."

[Chuckles]

[Amal] A sonnet is a meme. My mind exploded. I thought this. This is the most… How could I not have seen it before? A sonnet is a meme. So is almost any poem that is a received form that you interact with and engage with and transform as you move forward. Then it occurred to me that there is actually a fantastic example of this in that there is a specific poem that has been meme-ified more than perhaps any other, which is This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That was exactly what I thought you were going to refer to.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So, here you have this poem. This is the plum poem, if you're not familiar with its actual title. If you literally just Google this is just to say meme, you will get the most beautiful panoply of transformations of this… Of the plum poem.

[Mary Robinette] This is just to say, that this is a podcast that you were probably saving to listen to later.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Amal] Exactly. Exactly. So this is what I want to kind of touch on. But even though the idea of a structure in a poem, of a rhyme scheme, of a specific meter, look essentially like constraints, like things that are going to limit your creativity, they are going to hamper you in your progress towards poetic majesty, they also can be tools of communication and of ultimately freedom as you engage with and transform them and contribute to a kind of accumulation of meaning around these poems. Shakespeare 100% did this with something like my mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. Where he took this idea of a sonnet is a sincere honest love poem, and one of its defining features is that you're going to itemize a kind of shopping list of your beloved's features and kind of sing the praises of each one. He just comes out and goes, "Nah. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is more red than her lips are red." And just kind of goes down this sort of like seemingly nasty list of ways of saying, "Nah. My lover is actually not that great. She's not a goddess, she's not got all this stuff." But "And yet, I think my love more rare than any she belied with false compare." It's totally transforming the whole principle of the poem.

[Dan] Yeah. I love… I've got a 19-year-old daughter. She is constantly trying to show me, because now she's off to college, and so most of our communication is done over text, and she will send me all these things she thinks are hilarious. I say, "No, they're not. Those are not remotely funny. What's wrong with you?" What we eventually figured out is that the root of this kind of massive generational gap between what I think is funny and what she thinks is funny is…

[Mary Robinette] That you're a dad?

[Dan] She knows the memetic structure behind everything that she is trying to share with me.

[mmm]

[Dan] Right?

[Ooh]

[Dan] So it's not necessarily funny on its own, it's funny because someone is taking a known form and playing with it. I love the idea of… That your brilliant student who compared that to poetic structure is absolutely dead on. One of my favorite web comics is Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North.

[Yes!]

[Dan] That is… He actually has… What's brilliant about that one is that it's like six panels that are identical every single time. They're thousands upon thousands of comics that he has put out and they all have exactly the same visuals with different texts. One of them, in response to critiquers who were like, "How can you possibly just use the same images over time? That's so boring." He literally calls back to sonnet structure, and says, "No. The form is just the way in which you are saying something, and allows you this incredible freedom of expression, because you don't have to worry about all these other aspects of it."

[Howard] During the break between recording episodes, I posited what I now think is a possible doctoral thesis for someone who understands…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Poetry and oral tradition. That was the idea that poetry with rhyme and meter is a checksum for the oral tradition. Well, in between episodes, I was reading up on the word meme and Richard Dawkin's original interpretation of it, which is that it's a unit of information which, when exposed to humans, is easy for the humans to copy. Easy for them to replicate. So, yes, these forms with meter and rhyme, it makes it easier for us to replicate them. I love that concept, and the idea that memes at some point… Like Dan said, I have a 20-year-old and a 26-year-old and a 17-year-old, and they're regularly trying to show me things on their phones. No, I don't want to look at your phone, I just… Do you want to tell me a story? No, I want you to have the experience of this meme unfolding before you. I guess, Dan, I'm fortunate in that I have a little bit more of the context, because I regularly think they're funny.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of stories that we want people to tell us… Let's pause for the book of the week. Which is Resident Alien. That was your suggestion, Howard.

[Howard] Oh, my goodness. It's not a book, it's a television program which is airing now on scifi. It's based on a comic book, and it is about an alien who crash lands on earth and who must take the form of a human in order to fit in in order to complete his mission. The alien is played by Alan Tudyk. In the very first episode, there is a scene where Alan Tudyk is watching Law & Order and trying to replicate the dialogue. "I've gut mn mukoset."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Rewind. "I've got news for you, Cosette."

[Gasp]

[Howard] Okay. Alan Tudyk pretending to be a human being is my new favorite jam.

[Laughter]

[Howard] As of this recording, the first four episodes are out. It's funny in that the tagline that they've been using is 3 5-syllable sets. It's the doctor… Excuse me. Alien comedy doctor dramedy we all need right now. I realize that in the patterning of their marketing for it, they've created poetry. Anyway. It's beautiful. I think you'll enjoy it. Scifi.com, and it's called Resident Alien.

[Amal] That sounds so great. I extremely want to watch it.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I love Alan Tudyk so much.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.

[Amal] Alan Tudyk being sinister, in particular, is of great appeal to me.

[Amal] So, I want to pick up on the last thing you were saying about pattern, actually, and how that fits into this idea of poetic structure. So, a pattern is essentially a recognition of difference and repetition, right? And the… So often, when we use a shorthand like rhyme scheme and stuff like that, what we're talking about is a pattern of difference and repetition. And that poetic forms are an orchestration of those kinds of differences. They are formed over time, they have different origins, different contexts, that kind of give rise to them. That each one can be its own mini lecture that I don't really want to get into, because I want to talk about structure more broadly. But I do want to point out that when you look at a poetic form, I would encourage you to think about what it is suited for. The sonnet comes out of a love poetry tradition. But something like the villanelle… if you look at a villanelle, thinking of famous ones, something like Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light, by Dylan Thomas, or Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath. I think I made you up inside my head. The thing that when you look at a villanelle, the repetition… The refrain in it makes it peculiarly suited to themes of obsession, to themes of being caught up in some feeling or idea, in a way that is different from something like a sonnet, where you kind of are building towards an argument and then turn away from it. Or from a sestina, where you have this ludicrous form of like repeating six words in a different pattern every stanza in a way that ultimately feels eclectic. Or like a sort of pattering of rain or something like that. So… Yeah. Sorry.

[Mary Robinette] No. Continue your thought, and then I have a question thought.

[Amal] So, it's… All this to say that different poetic forms can be… Can come out of a process that has suited them to a particular theme or topic, and then you can get a lot of mileage out of subverting that theme or topic, the way Shakespeare does with a love sonnet to make it slightly more sarcastic or something like that.

[Mary Robinette] This is so interesting to me. So, one of the things that I talk about, and it took me a while to get to it, was the idea of repetition carrying important. So, in puppetry, people have heard me talk before about head bobbing, which is where the puppet's head just bounces up and down. The problem with that is that it carries no meaning. It's not that the puppet's head is moving, that's not the problem. It's that it's not pointing to anything. Part of this is because the way people are wired, when you're thinking about narration, that someone who is droning is hard to listen to. But repetition also catches our interest. This is, I think, related to how we are originally hardwired, which is that repetition is inherently unnatural. So when you hear something repeating outside in the wild, that's important and that's something you should pay attention to. When you're… Like in prose, when you have accidental repetition, when something… A sentence is awkward because of the accidental repetition, it's because it's pointing to the wrong thing. So, my question is, after all of that, is one of the things… Like, it sounds like what you're talking about with this, with these different forms being well suited to different things, is, to some degree, because of where that repetition happens, because of what it's pointing at. Am I getting this?

[Amal] Absolutely. Absolutely, completely. I love the example of accidental repetition or unintentional repetition that happens in prose. Because the… There's a corollary to that which I find really fascinating. Those of you who did the night brain exercise might find this interesting to muse on if you look at the results of what you did. When I see people do the night brain exercise, there are a few things that kind of come up, that recur. That in the shape that their unguarded, unselfconscious thoughts take as they're trying to write past a snag or something, one of them is a sort of chanting repetition. That, as they're trying to write something that is poetic, they'll find themselves repeating a sentence over and over again. As if the repetition itself is going to bring them into a more poetic affect. It works. It absolutely works. Because the intention is there. Off the top of my head, I think of something like TS Eliot's The Hollow Men where it ends with, "This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper." You need that repetition, that accumulation, essentially, of a kind of storm gathering.

[Mary Robinette] That's so amazing. I cannot wait for us to get to part two, where you're talking about the without constraints.

[Mary Robinette] So, do you want to slide us into homework so we can…

[Amal] Absolutely. So, your homework for today is to essentially write a poem with a form. So right either three haiku or one villanelle. You can look up the constraints of these respective forms. They are widely available online. I want you to pay attention to the demands of the form. Consider how those constraints that you're experiencing can actually inspire the theme of a poem or a certain mode of poetic expression. If these particular two forms don't speak to you, go for another one. But it has to be an established, traditional form that you are engaging with from our contemporary present moment.

[Mary Robinette] This is amazing. Thank you so much. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.14: Poetic Language

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/04/04/16-14-poetic-language/

Key Points: What do we mean by poetic language? Really beautifully prepared sushi, I slow down. Reading poetry, reading well-done purple prose, these give a similar experience. Dense, compressed, oblique. A glancing blow to reality. Sentences, or phrases, that are beautiful without context. Negative space. Word choice and sounds. Production of an effect. Think of spectra, sparse to lush, opaque to clear, simple to ornate, which can be used with any sentence or use of language.

[Season 16, Episode 14]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetic Language.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Were going to be talking about poetic language this time. Amal has… The starting question on her outline is, "What do we mean by this?" So, tell us, what do we mean by poetic language?

[Amal] I was going to throw that to you, but actually…

[Aha!]

[Amal] I'm going to start with a tiny anecdote, which is, I am… I'm always… So, I have this book that I cowrote with my dear friend, Max Gladstone. The book is called This Is How You Lose the Time War. It's a time traveling superspies write to each other letters and falling love sort of book. It's very simple, very straightforward, obviously. But the… I've often seen people react to this book by saying, "Oh, the language of it is so poetic. It's like reading poetry." I'm always really interested by the people who say that as a feature and those who say that as a bug. I wanted to kind of ask you when… Like, if you were to read something and say that, "Oh, this is such poetic language," what would you tend to mean by that?

[Howard] If you sit me in front of a really, really beautifully prepared with complementing flavors all the way through it plate of sushi, I know to slow down. If I'm at the all-you-can-eat sushi place, I'm just going to pack it in at the rate that feels comfortable for me.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] As fast as those little boats come by.

[Laughter]

[Howard] As fast as those little boats come by. There is an experience to reading a poem and it is an experience that is not at all dissimilar to reading… I'm going to say purple prose, but I don't mean purple in the bad way. To reading really beautifully crafted poetic in nature prose. The experiences similar for me and that I am slowing down and I am savoring every breath. I am reading it as if I were speaking it. Whereas if it's not poetic, I am reading it in quadrants as my brain sucks up blocks of text from the page.

[Dan] So, I love that. This idea that there's… That poetry can be… Poetic language is much more dense, that it can contain a lot of meaning compressed into a smaller area. I… But correlated with that is… I always consider poetic language to be a little more oblique. Roger Miller, who's a folksinger and a songwriter, he said that, "While… Music doesn't approach things head on, a song is a glancing blow to reality." I love that phrase. It… I'm going to tell a little story here. I'm going to take a little bit of time. Generally considered to be one of, if not the very greatest writer of haiku of all time, was a Japanese poet named Basho. He would write these incredible things in this very small, very evocative poetic form. One of the ways that haiku used to be used, and possibly still is, but… At least back in the day, when Basho was around, is it was a game. People would sit around, often in a tavern, and write haiku about a topic. This story is about one night when they said the topic was the full moon. So everybody went around in a circle and they gave their little haiku about how the full moon is very bright or whatever. Then you get to Basho. He starts by saying, "The new moon…" They're all like, "Dude! You got that wrong. We're talking about the full moon right now." He says, "Let me finish." His haiku is this.

The new moon

Two weeks I have waited.

But, ah, tonight.

That isn't directly about the full moon, but it packs so much meaning in there. It is so dense with imagery, and with this evocative emotion to it, that it is completely about the full moon anyway. I love that, and I love the way that poetic language is able to give that kind of glancing blow to reality, while still conveying this immense backlog of information and emotion.

[Amal] That is so beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] It really is, and interestingly, the exact opposite of where I would have gone.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Well, that makes it even better. Let's hear what you were going to say.

[Mary Robinette] Because… I was sitting there thinking specifically when I am reading prose, what is it that makes me go, "Oh, this language is poetic." For me, it is language that is beautiful even without context. Like the… One of the… One of my favorite very dead writers is a woman named Myrtle Reed who was writing prose in the early… Like 1907. She talks about someone who is arriving at this house, and that the… Oh, I've forgotten. Oh, there's a word that has just gone out of my brain completely. But the porch was the unhappy afterthought of an architect. It's just like that's just so lovely and evocative. But without any other context. Like, that can stand on its own, and be a lovely thing by itself. That, for me, is, I think, part of it when I think about hitting poetic language in a novel. It's that the lines contain a… I want to say grace. Beauty is not quite right, either. But there is a… They exist on their own, on their own merit. They have a shape to themselves that exists that does not need other context. Whereas… Like, when you read Where the Wild Things Are, which is wonderful, you get to that last line which is so beautiful and so evocative, "And it was still hot." It needs context in order to understand why that is a beautiful thing.

[Amal] Oh, my gosh. I love both these answers so much because they… I mean, they… I feel like they touch on the kind of spectrum that I really would like to think about in terms of poetic language. But you… So what Dan was talking about feels like… There you're describing poetry playing with negative space. Right? Like what Basho was doing there is… A bit like the way Mary Robinette talks about puppetry, and about the sort of the… I can't remember if this was you who said this or if this was… Oh, no, snuffleupagus. Martin…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Marty.

[Amal] Yes. Thank you. But you said like the poet… The poet? The poem… The puppet. Poem and puppet, basically the same.

[Mary Robinette] Same thing.

[Amal] But, yeah, the puppet is half alive, and it's given like half its life by the audience and half by the puppeteer? I feel like this, what you're describing in Basho's poem, Dan, is that the poem is half there and the rest of it is made up by the audience. So… That is so much of the way that haiku functions, that it is sort of pinging on… A little bit the way that I remember seeing an abstract painting, and the way that this painting functioned was partly by making you aware of the afterimages that it left on your eyes when you closed your eyes. I think that poetry and poetic language can absolutely do that, and play with that, that negative space. Mary Robinette, what you were describing instead is like the completeness of a line of prose… Of a line of… Just a sentence in a novel that can stand on its own and give you a complete emotional experience. Just that line, taken out of its context. I think that that is a lot of the time the way that we interact with text. That that is a line that is singing all of a sudden.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Amal] That you're giving your attention to it in a way that you would give to a performer or a performance, in a way that is different, that isn't connected to other things. So, I love these answers, because a lot of the time when someone talks about language as being poetic, they are defaulting towards an assumption that the language is inherently more difficult to understand. I am so happy to have already challenged that.

[Amal] But let's pause, I think, for our book of the week before getting into that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think actually you were going to tell us about our book of the week, Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse, which… Oh, no, Dan was going to tell us about it.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, I think many of us could rant and rave about…

[Dan] I think many of us could.

[Mary Robinette] This amazing book.

[Dan] Yeah. So, Trail of Lightning is… It's a really delightful book. It is kind of an action adventure in some ways. Modern fantasy. But what I love about it is that it continues to redefine itself. I don't consider it a spoiler to say once you get two, maybe three chapters into it, you realize it's not a modern fantasy, it's actually post-apocalyptic. It is filled with magic and gods and monsters and Native American culture and theology. The main character is like a vicious killer who is also a very sweet and kind of broken person who is trying to heal herself as she deals with these horrible monsters in the real world. Really, really love this. I listened to the audiobook and the reader is fantastic as well, which is always a plus. So, the Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Amal] I want that book to be a TV show so bad.

[Dan] Oh, it would be such a good one.

[Amal] I feel… I mean…

[Mary Robinette] Oh my goodness. Yes.

[Amal] I just feel like, hey, Supernatural is over now. So if there is a sort of urban fantasy shaped hole in your televisual lives, I think that this could absolutely fill it. It is just… It's so suited, I think, to a television treatment. Also, I haven't read the sequels yet, but I'm very [garbled eager?] to.

[Howard] In the discussion of poetic language, I… When I'm teaching humor, I like to cite Edgar Allan Poe's The Bells is an example of how you use word choice to mean things that the words themselves are not meaning. When he's talking about the silver bells, all the stars that over sprinkle, all the heavens seem to twinkle, with a crystalline delight, and he's got all these words that sound silvery. When he's talking about the golden bells, he's using words that have rounder sounds to them. When I opened this… When I said the thing about the sushi, there are two word pairs, utterly consumed and totally devoured, both of which could be applied to the plate of sushi in front of me.

[Hah.]

[Howard] Depending on the context of the rest of the story I'm trying to tell, I will choose one or the other of those because of what they sound like, because of the other words whose sounds they echo. Especially if I'm trying to tell a joke. If there is a little bit of a rhyme in there, or if there's wordplay, conflict and consumed, somewhere. Those are how I make those choices. So when we talk about poetic language, I lean into this hard when I'm writing jokes, because there are words that are technically synonyms which, once I put them in place, will mean completely different things.

[Amal] That is so, so true. I love that you bring up comedy as well, because I feel like comedy, like horror, in some ways, is defined a lot by a certain pace, right? By a certain kind of… Also by the production of an effect, essentially. When we talk about science fiction, we talk about fantasy as genres, we usually talk about them in terms of their contents, or the things that you expect to find in them. But when we talk about comedy and horror, we're talking about an effect that you're producing. You're talking about something that's going to make you laugh and something that's going to make you scared. I think that that dovetails very well with poetry, because poetry is so often oriented towards affect. Towards making you feel something first. Primarily. Whether it's telling you a narrative, whether it's… Whether it's a limerick, for that matter. Whether it's any number of different shapes and forms, the language is calculated, crafted, to produce an effect. To that end, I want to just wrap this up by saying that instead of thinking about poetic language as inherently one kind of way, whether that's dense or whether that's difficult or whether that's thick with metaphor or what have you, I'd like for you to think about it is a series of spectra essentially. That you can have with any sentence, with any use of language. A whole spectrum from sparse to lush, right? Or from opaque to clear. If you think in those terms, instead of poetic versus not poetic, you'll get a lot closer to using a kind of more granular set of tools for shaping your own writing. I want to give you an example of some very, very sparse and clear and simple language that creates a very opaque image. Or something… I mean, I can do this in prose, but with reference to… I don't know, something like Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. Right? Very simply written, small words, not ornate, not a ton of metaphor going on there. But the question of but what are they talking about, like, there's an opacity to the whole thing that is kind of at odds with the simplicity of the language. Similarly, there's a poet called H. D., who's Hilda Doolittle, but she's a kind of early 20th century poet. She has this extremely short poem called Oread. It goes

Whirl up, sea –

whirl your pointed pines,

splash your great pines

on our rocks,

hurl your green over us,

cover us with your pools of fir.

It's super short. It is six lines and in those six lines, you have several repetitions of the same word. It's very simple. But like a haiku, you kind of have to sit with it, and kind of let it resonate. Let it kind of rattle around in your brain until you go what is it even about? Those kind of bright images that happen from it. Conversely, you can have really lush, really ornate language that is actually very easy to understand. So something like Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, which is a very long poem, which is full of lists of gorgeous fruits and stuff, has a very straightforward narrative. Has a very lilting sort of nursery rhyme and rhythm.

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

"Come buy, come buy:"

It's much simpler, even though lists of plump, dew-checked peaches and things like that are going to be… You can feel your mouth full of them. But nevertheless, like, you don't really lose the thread of the story being told.

[Amal] So, based on that, I want to move to our homework for this episode. The homework is this. It is basically asking you to both distill and expand a very short and simple sentence. So, here is your sentence. "It's a dark, grey winter's day; there's a lot of snow on the ground, and a cold wind's blowing." I want you to take that sentence, and I want you to distill it. I want you to do whatever you feel is going to result in making that sentence feel like a poem. It can mean cutting out the connective tissue like the prepositions. It can mean introducing linebreaks. It can mean reorganizing the words however you want. I want you to turn this sentence into something dense and compact that feels like a very short poem. Once you've done that, I want you to then take that very short, compact poem, and I want you to elaborate on it. Expand on it outwards, while still maintaining that poetic feeling. I want you to consider how you can keep it feeling like a poem, while giving it more shape and length. You might want to refer to a night brain exercise from a previous episode in order to help you do that. But the idea is to just contract and then expand that language in a way that feels like you're playing a poetic accordion.

[Mary Robinette] This is amazing, and I immediately want to go do that.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much, Amal. So, for all of you. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.13: Day Brain vs. Night Brain

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/03/28/16-13-day-brain-vs-night-brain/

Key Points: Singing and speaking use different parts of the brain. Speech therapists sometimes teach their clients to sing through a speech impediment. The day brain is the state of consciousness we use for communication, while the night brain is the intuitive metaphorical side. In musicals, songs are moments of emotional change. Songs are a break in the layers of reality of the musical. Or consider iambic pentameter versus trochaic tetrameter. In writing, we try to get in the zone, where the words flow. How do you activate night brain? Try Amal's exercise! A little poetry in a dark space, and write, write, write.

[Season 16, Episode 13]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Day Brain vs. Night Brain.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are continuing with our third episode looking at poetry with Amal. Amal, tell us about Day Brain vs. Night Brain.

[Amal] I am so excited to do this. So, last episode, we ended… Well, the whole episode was about talking about poetry as being like singing and talking about prose as being like speaking. What I want to dig into a little bit more today is the ways in which singing and speaking are super different, and that they literally use different parts of the brain. So this is something… I am, by no means, a neuroscientist, absolutely. I am so open to being fact checked on this, but my understanding is that often speech therapists will have recourse to teaching their clients to sing through a speech impediment, that... To kind of essentially draw on this other part of the brain that is not impeded in the same way. So you can draw on this as a resource to shape or change the way that you speak.

[Howard] There are numerous accounts of stroke patients who've suffered from aphasia who can no longer speak, who can nod and shake their heads, but they can sing. By singing, they are suddenly able to unlock things, and, yes, the speech therapist can in many cases bring them back to being able to speak by having them sing everything first. It's… Brains are weird.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The fact that singing and speaking are different parts of the brains is probably learned early on and, it's hard to say, but there's no doubt about the fact that where we are culturally and physiologically today, they are different brain activities. Using both is a super powerful tool.

[Amal] I am so glad to be… I always have this moment of, like, I am using this as a metaphor, but I want to make sure that it is actually accurate.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So I don't [garbled]

[Howard] I googled it before we started.

[Amal] So, this is the thing. I mean, like any… Like any muscle… Sometimes where I feel more comfortable using this metaphor is that if you have one muscle that is weak because another one is overworked, then using… Rehabilitating them will often mean bringing them into some kind of balance or line. So I want to draw on this difference, to think about poetry and prose, and how we can not only learn to write poetry, and draw on those parts of the brain that maybe we don't draw on as much in order to essentially sing on the page. But also to use it as a metaphor for this concept that comes from [Cecilia Ryan?] who i have mentioned before, who first, so far as I am aware, coined these terms of day brain and night brain, where day brain is your attitude, your state of consciousness that is about communication, denotation, connotation, and all that sort of stuff. Your night brain is instead the brain that you use for vocation, invocation, for the more ambiguous, the more intuitive, the more unselfconscious, essentially. The part of your brain that you metaphorically sing with essentially. I want to kind of like really get into this. I want to think about, again, drawing on the singing/speaking difference, I want to kind of draw your attention to when do we tend to encounter sort of singing as a weird disruption, and stuff. So I'm thinking here of things like musicals, where… Where does the… Where do the songs tend to come in? Right? They tend to come in at moments of great emotional transformation or distress. Like, the music… The song is a break in a layer of reality, essentially. And is like an opening in something to allow something else to emerge. I think too of the difference between, to draw on Shakespeare again, the ways in which characters speak in iambic pentameter in a play and the regular… Iambic pentameter being ta-duh, ta-duh, ta-duh, ta-duh, ta-duh… Which is a kind of tends to get called the most spoken sort of cadence, the one that most mimics our regular speech, versus when someone like the witches in Macbeth come on stage. Instead, they speak in trochaic tetrameter. So instead of something like, "Shall I compare the to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate," you get something like, "Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble." That's different, right? Like, that weirdness, that is a cadence that gets associated with ballads and with songs, instead of with speech. It's also associated with the supernatural, with the unnatural, with the frightening and the different. So, without the negative connotations of that, I want to kind of map out day brain and night brain. I want to ask all of you, basically, do you ever feel when you are writing your novels and your short stories or your comics, do you ever feel like you are slipping from one state of mind to another? That you feel like sometimes you are writing from a very kind of day brain-y perspective versus sometimes you slip into this weird other world that is more night brain-y?

[Dan] Yeah. For me… I don't know if this is exactly the same mechanism that you're talking about, but I suspect that it is. A lot of my writing, and one of the reasons that I try to block out long chunks of time rather than writing in small pieces, is because I feel like my writing process is trying to force my way through, out of this very structured, knowing what I'm going to say before I write down kind of brain, versus just what we like to call getting in the zone. I'm there, I'm in the zone, and the words are just flowing. I suspect that that is more of a night brain situation, where the words are just coming out kind of almost independently of my conscious thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is more literal than you actually mean it to be, but I have fallen asleep while writing, and continued to write.

[Amal] What? Wow!

[Mary Robinette] It's interesting…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Reading what I've written the next day, because it is… It's never very long. It's a couple of sentences. This… We won't go into why this happens. It involves… Well, no, we are going into why. It involves staying up too late. If I said I often write with my eyes closed so that I can see a scene in my head and not be distracted by what's going on around me. Occasionally, when I am really fatigued, it happens two or three times maybe over the course of my life, my hands keep going. In the same way that you can drive someplace and not notice… Not remember any of the drive.

[Amal] Right.

[Mary Robinette] It's very interesting when that happens, because there is this… The sentences still contain like subject object verb, they're grammatically correct, and also completely free associative. Like, one of them, I was talking about revolution, and the scene was supposed to be about some one turning around.

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary Robinette] But the entire thing pivoted off the other meaning of that word.

[Amal] Oh, wow.

[Mary Robinette] And went into this thing about a revolution and my nephew's involvement in the revolution. I'm like, "There is no nephew in this story. There is no revolution in this story." Someone was literally just turning around. It's… For me, the thing that is interesting about that is the… With what you're talking about with the day brain/night brain, is that it's about, for me, the times when I find the other places that languages can go. The unexpected places, and the unexpected associations. That these are the times that I feel like I am activating my night brain as opposed to my day brain, which is very "These are the facts."

[Amal] Yesss.

[Howard] A thing that has stuck with me ever since I learned it is that trochaic tetrameter… Is that the name that…? That is the meter of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song.

[Amal] Oh, that's awesome.

[Howard] No, it gets better. XKCD number 1412 is a Wikipedia article titles with the right syllable stress pattern to be sung to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song. If you need to break your head out of the word loop it is stuck in, start singing golden mantled howler monkeys, Greater Cleveland film commission, hairy flower chaffer beetle. Okay? It's a whole list of these. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

[Dan] There's…

[Howard] And it's…

[Dan] I just gotta say, there's a twitter account that all it posts is this.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] Yes. I follow it. It blows my mind periodically. The worst thing… It's not worst, it's actually wonderful. But as you said, each one of those terms what was coming to mind was not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the opening to Alexander Hamilton. Like… What was the howler monkeys one? [Melodic] Golden mantled howler monkey. [/Melodic] It's like… It actually doesn't match on as well, but it is the go to stress pattern in my brain still, years later.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, speaking of go to stress patterns, this is where we should break for the book of the week.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Make that segue happen somehow. The book is The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. I wanted to recommend this one this week, because… So, the book is really beautiful in a lot of different ways. One thing is that she is doing… She has these very, very different voices happening from different characters, different POV's. The other thing is it's set on a planet that is tidally locked. So there is a dayside and there is a nightside. All of humanity who is living on this planet lives in the twilight area. The daylight does not change over the course of the day. The daylight changes depending on where in town you are. So your relationship with the sun and with the night in this world as this totally different feeling. Day brain versus night brain, again, like those mean completely different things. I love that, because of how much exploration she is doing about the way our environment shapes our connotations and contexts. It's a wonderful book. It's a coming-of-age story. There's revolution… There is a revolution in this one.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Highly recommended. It got all kinds of critical acclaim. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders.

[Amal] That is so wonderful. I cannot help now but imagine a planet as a giant brain…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Amal] A right hemisphere and a left hemisphere and all of the in between this that that entails and stuff.

[Amal] but, yeah. So this is actually I think a great segue for talking about… So you've talked about these different ways in which you experience like flow states or being in the zone and stuff like that. I want to basically shape that into a question, which is, how do we activate night brains? Is there a way to do that, and to do that specifically either to write poetry if that something that's intimidating or to overcome snags in prose. My experience of this… I developed this particular exercise that I want to take us to partly because I was stuck writing a short story. I had just… I was really snagged on an issue of character motivation or of plot development essentially. Did not have Dan's intensive courses to refer to, on the subjects of character arcs and things, at the time. So I found myself in order to overcome this snag and what was really a structural problem by leaning into the prose line instead and trying to just let the language of the story that I was writing carry me over the hump that I was experiencing. By doing that, I felt like what tipped me over into being able to solve the other problems was by just languishing essentially in the language, in the prose. I felt that that was kind of tipping away from the anxieties and concerns of a day brain oriented sense of how am I going to solve this problem with a night brain oriented sense of what if this sentence felt like pearls slipping off a string? What if this sentence felt in these ways? What if I just let myself flow out of this and just let it carry me into the next thing that's going to happen and then I'll solve it later? I feel like that's something that could potentially be useful to anyone who's writing anything, essentially.

[Amal] Towards that end, I want to bring us to the homework of this episode. Which is a night brain activation exercise. What I want you to do is to either, if you are currently in a project, currently in the middle of some writing project, I want you to find a piece of prose in there that is giving you trouble. Maybe it's actually the spot that you are at right now in your work in progress. I want you to take the last sentence that you have on the page and isolate it. Put it on a different page and just have like a blank screen following that one sentence. Then I want you to put yourself in a dark place. I want you to like dim the lights. I want you to close the blinds. I want you to try and put yourself in a space where you are as unaware of your surroundings as is possible for you to be. Then I want you to listen to a recording of a poem. I will provide one shortly. Then I want you to, in response to that poem, write automatically, unselfconsciously, for five minutes. I want you to think about it like singing onto the page. I wanted to just let whatever that last sentence that you had there was, let it just lead you into some other world of language in response to this thing that I'm going to read you. So what I'm going to read you now is a poem called Moon Fishing by Lisel Mueller.

When the moon was full they came to the water.

some with pitchforks, some with rakes,

some with sieves and ladles,

and one with a silver cup.

And they fished til a traveler passed them and said,

"Fools,

to catch the moon you must let your women

spread their hair on the water --

even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing

net of shimmering threads,

gasp and flop till its silver scales

lie black and still at your feet."

And they fished with the hair of their women

till a traveler passed them and said,

"Fools,

do you think the moon is caught lightly,

with glitter and silk threads?

You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks

with those dark animals;

what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?"

And they fished with their tight, hot hearts

till a traveler passed them and said,

"Fools,

what good is the moon to a heartless man?

Put back your hearts and get on your knees

and drink as you never have,

until your throats are coated with silver

and your voices ring like bells."

And they fished with their lips and tongues

until the water was gone

and the moon had slipped away

in the soft, bottomless mud.

[copied from http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/lisel_mueller/poems/15573]

[Pause]

[Amal] Now write.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.12: Singing Versus Speaking

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/03/21/16-12-singing-versus-speaking/

Key points: What do we take for granted about talking? Clarity, we speak to each other to communicate. We mix information and persuasion. But singing is different! It may initially be uncomfortable, but it can also be enchanting. Singing changes the relationship from equal sharing to an audience. Singing can be intimate and vulnerable. Consider what space poetry allows the reader to inhabit. Rhyme, and singing, demand your attention. Let your words stand up straight, and demand a certain kind of attention.

[Season 16, Episode 12]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Singing Versus Speaking.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about singing versus speaking, which Amal set up for us at the end of the last episode. This is part two of eight parts, talking about poetry. So, Amal, you teased us about telling us what you mean by singing versus speaking, so please do.

[Amal] Yes. So, I was thinking that the… Ultimately, for me, the differences between poetry and prose, which are many, can be kind of condensed into this one statement, that poetry is more like singing and prose is more like speaking. But I want to dig into what I mean by that a little bit. So, I want to… In the same way that last episode I was like, "Well, what exactly is prose?" in order to talk about what is poetry, I want to kind of point out what we take for granted when people are talking to each other. Our speech, when we speak to each other, has certain baked-in conventions, and defaults, that you can be vaguely assured of. They will differ from place to place, from city to city, from country to country, and so on, but there are still some basic assumptions about communication in the way that we use our voices to speak to each other. So, those assumptions tend to be that there will be clarity. We speak to each other to communicate things, to… Mary Robinette was saying last time that in public speaking, you can have two broad tracks of information and persuasion. These things are often mixing up in… When we talk to each other in general. We talk to share information, and we talk to, perhaps, argue with people, and convince them of our point of view. {Melodic] But what happens when someone starts to sing to you? When you expect them to speak to you? Things get kind of weird. This is really weird, isn't it? Now I'm singing on this podcast, where you don't expect someone to sing. [/Melodic] and that's super weird. That, to me, is what happens to people when they encounter poetry in a place where they don't expect to.

[Howard] You keep using the word weird, when you meant to say lovely.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] That is very kind. That is actually not irrelevant to the thing I want to say about this, which is that that thing which can be alienating and offputting and uncomfortable can also potentially be enchanting. That's how I would like people to come to think about poetry, as something that inherently at first makes you feel all sorts of different things that are not usually the realm of speech. Where you don't expect usually to be profoundly alienated by someone… I don't know… Asking you for directions. One can be, absolutely. But usually, there is, like, an understanding that, "Oh, yeah, you go that way, you do this thing," and you just talk. But singing has a very strange place in the way that we use our voices. When someone starts to sing and you don't expect them to, there is this sudden transformation of the relationship between you and the person hearing you sing. You have turned someone into your audience in a way that you don't actually, when you are sharing the experience of just communicating. There is something extremely intimate and vulnerable about singing. Intimate, specifically, because the person singing is making themselves vulnerable. There is this wonderful aspect of a comic called The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, which is about… Essentially, every 90 years, gods become embodied in a set of like 12 teenagers, and for two years, they get to be God's, but then they have to die. They have set this in a kind of pop music scenario. So, you get to have two years of powerful and enormous fame and stuff. But these gods are… They have all this power, but they're also enormously vulnerable when they sing. That the only time you can essentially kill a God is when they are singing. I think about that all the time when I think about poetry and what is involved in writing poetry and in sharing poetry, and also, conversely, in reading poetry. There is this vulnerability and intimacy that comes into it. I'm really indebted to this insight to my agent, DongWon Song, who absolutely hates it when people sing around him. Like, he gets very, very uncomfortable. He gets just like…

[Mixed voices, transcript may not be completely accurate]

[Mary Robinette] I am not absolutely going to troll him...

[Howard] [garbled] information.

[Mary Robinette] The next time I see him.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's…

[Dan] DongWon is so mad at you for letting the three of us know that.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] No. I will… I respect people's hangups. I will not… Hah.

[Howard] You're a better person than I am.

[Chuckles. Back to normal one person speaking.]

[Amal] But this is the thing. I was really interested in this, because I don't feel that way. I really love it when people start to sing around me. I feel like it fills me with wonder and joy. But I wanted to kind of dig into why this was. I realized it was this feeling of… The kind of feeling that you get from like cringe comedy or something, where someone has made themselves too vulnerable, too naked, and you did not want to see that.

[Howard] For my own part, I remember, as a kid, reading the Lord of the Rings and other epic fantasies which had poetry in the pros. I remember, at the time, thinking, "Oh, why is this here? I hate this. This is…" As I grew older, I realized, "Oh. That's because I've been speed-reading since I was 10 years old, and poetry forces me to stop and slow down and pay attention to every word, and that's not why I picked up this book."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Recognizing that about myself allows me now to look at poetry and say, "Okay. The poet has expectations from my participation in this, and I need to acknowledge upfront how that makes me feel before I reflect anything back." Because I do want to be a good person. If you break into song around me, I don't want to slap you and ask you if you got stung by a bee.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But I think that's a really, really good and interesting point, Howard. I want us to come back to that after we pause for the book of the week. Which is… Dan, you were going to tell us about Stargazer?

[Dan] That is correct. This is my newest book, came out about a month ago. It is called Stargazer. It is the third book in my Zero G series of Audible originals. So it is middle grade hard science fiction about a boy and his family that go and start a new colony on an alien planet. It's done with full cast and music and sound effects and is just wonderful to listen to. The book's about four or five hours long in total. This one, the third one, is my very favorite of the series. It's a little more complex, it's a little more intricate. I'm really happy with it. I want you all to go listen to it.

[Mary Robinette] As just a side note, my dad and I both have really enjoyed the first two in the series. Dan told me that the Stargazer came out two days ago as we're recording this, and I'm like, I have to go downstairs and tell my dad right now.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yay. The great thing about this one is that if you are an Audible member, you can listen to it for free. It's kind of the Netflix model, you don't have to buy it, you just can listen to it. So, there you go.

[Mary Robinette] So, that again, is Stargazer by this guy named Dan Wells, and I realize that you have never heard our last names.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But that is, in fact, Dan's last name.

[Dan] That is me.

[Mary Robinette] So, this idea that Amal brought up and Howard expanded on of that relationship made me realize something that I have not actually realized about poetry before. Tell me if I'm off-base here. When you're talking about vulnerability with poetry, it's less, I think, about why it's uncomfortable for a reader. It's less about the fact that the poet is being vulnerable and more about the fact that you're asking for vulnerability from the reader. There's an idea in puppetry and in writing, too, that you want to create space for the reader to be, and that this is one of the reasons that you'll sometimes do a fairly simplified form, because you, the viewer, then puts expression on the form of the puppet figure as it moves through space, and the more specific and detailed you are in that sculpture, the less space there is for the reader… The viewer to bring themselves.

[Huh]

[Mary] So, with poetry, too, I feel like that's one of the reasons that I often have heard that advice to slow down, but I haven't actually understood that part of what it is, what I'm doing, is looking for the places that I inhabit in that. To use a completely different metaphor, that I've used elsewhere, that if you think of a form, a literature… Literary form as a clear glass pitcher, you can put anything into the pitcher you want. But every reader is going to bring their own vessel to drink from.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] You don't know the shape of that vessel. So, poetry is providing more space for that reader experience. Is that?

[Amal] I love that metaphor. It's reminding me actually of the way that Scott McCloud talks about the cartoon, or the icon, essentially. Where he puts forward the idea that a smiley face or… He doesn't use the term emoji in understanding comics, but something like a smiley face, by virtue of having so few features, literally just two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth, allows you to project yourself into that image a lot more easily than if you had a very photorealistic, highly detailed representation of a human body. So it becomes very interesting in terms of allowing people of lots of different backgrounds and ethnicities and ages and genders to identify with what's on the page. What's interesting to me, though, is that I think potentially the difficulty with poetry might be the opposite of what you were describing, even though it's exactly the right dynamic. I think that poetry can be in demanding the shift in the audience attention, and that in changing the relationship between you and your audience, it can be crowding out the reader by virtue of transforming that relationship into a different set of conventions that are not as legible to the reader as well. So, and… But I think that… I think it is absolutely the same dynamic. The idea that some poems are asking the reader to inhabit them or to take up space in them differently in a way that the reader was not prepared for, didn't want to, or that the reader is being asked to back off more than they were expected to be, that they wanted to be immersed and instead are being thrown out.

[Howard] It's kind of the difference between I want to tell you a story and I want you to have an experience.

[Amal] Yes.

[Dan] One of the very first things that you said, Amal, was when you started singing to us, that suddenly instead of a conversation, we had become an audience. The act of singing had put a kind of barrier between us. Nobody wanted to interrupt you. Nobody wanted… It suddenly wasn't as much of a back-and-forth, because it had taken on the form of a performance. So that is another way in which I think that poetry can change that relationship so much. One of the things that this is most calling to mind to me is the concept of found poetry or accidental poetry. This idea that when you're having an ord… When you're not expecting to find poetry and then you do. That does seem strange and sometimes wondrous and sometimes annoying. Because depending on how you react to it. My favorite bit of found poetry is from a physics textbook.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Old enough that it is not one that I studied from. But that I encountered in an English class. It's relatively famous. It says, "And thus no force, however great, can pull a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight." That is not something that the physicist wrote as a poem on purpose, but it is a shockingly brilliant couplet.

[Howard] Oh, it's a poem.

[Amal] I love it so much.

[Dan] Part of what's going on there is, yes, it's a mnemonic, and that makes it easier to remember, but also, because it is suddenly and unexpectedly poetry, you do have to slow down in order to parse every word. That's why I can still remember this flawlessly, 25 years later. Because that relationship… I don't remember anything else about that particular chapter of poetry that I was reading. But this one just grabbed me. Which is one of the powers that poetry and poetic language has.

[Amal] Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. I love that so much. I really want to commit that to memory.

[Laughter]

[Amal] It occurs to me that there are… This is another thing about singing versus speaking, is that when the… I mean, I think what we've been talking about is partly like the leaning more towards the alienation aspect or the vulnerability than the enchantment. But the word enchantment literally, like, the Latin root for it means to be inside a song, essentially. That you are inhabiting this different space. I think that that… There's a kind of leaping out that poetry does, in that kind of stepping forward to perform that if it has succeeded in demanding your attention… It's like what you're describing, Dan. You remember it for a lot longer. The reason that rhyme is a mnemonic is because it's so artificial. It's so unusual that it will jump out. The reason that Shakespeare's scenes tend to end on a rhyming couplet is to signal, "Here is an ending. Here is a transition to something else." Singing, by virtue of being so different from the speech that we use to communicate is more memorable, will stay in the mind. This is why we get songs stuck in our heads and stuff, in part. So I want to just leave you with this thought, that singing is to poetry as speaking is to prose, and that… Or, sorry. Don't laugh. One of those. Singing is like poetry, and speaking is like prose. If you can think of poetry as something that is within your power to do purely by virtue of letting your words stand up a little straighter and draw themselves to their full height. Let your words demand a certain kind of attention. Then you start writing poetry. I think that that is a place to start from to think about where are you demanding attention for your words and how.

[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. Do you want to give us some homework to kind of drive that home?

[Amal] I. I do want to give you homework. So, what I want you to do is, I want you to take a passage of prose, ideally from your own work, especially if you think that it isn't quite working for some reason. Like, a passage that has felt clumsy to you or that isn't quite doing the work that you wanted to do. I want you to take it, and doing whatever you need to to make this feasible for yourself, I want you to try and sing that passage. I want you to just imbue that passage with a melody. I want you to feel the difference in your own body as you are trying to sing that versus trying to speak that. When you do that, I want you to pay attention to what happens to you. Do you start to feel self-conscious in some places and not in others? Do you notice things about the passage itself that you don't usually? Then, I want you to, once you have thought about that, I want you to try and rewrite the passage as a song. As if it were song lyrics. Then, try to sing it again. Then, once you've done that, try to translate it back into prose.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.11: What is Poetry?

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/03/14/16-11-what-is-poetry/

Key Points: What is poetry? Start by considering the question, what is prose? An established meter with a rhyme scheme lies in the land of poetry. Prose tends to be linear. It tends to group thoughts by paragraph. There is usually a specific point that you are driving towards. Usually you are trying to convey an argument, and you need to make sure the stakes are clear. Usually it is either informative or persuasive. In fiction, the service of the narrative comes before the service of the form. Poetry? Rhyme and meter, linebreaks, metaphor... These are also features of prose! Poetry and prose use all the same tools. The difference between poetry and prose is the difference between singing and speaking. Come back next week to find out more.

[Season 16, Episode 11]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. What is Poetry?

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And I wanna know the answer too.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] For the next eight episodes, we are going to be digging into this question, what is poetry? Amal is going to be guiding us through a master class. I am extremely excited about this, because as I was telling Amal before we started, I have written exactly 2 poems as an adult that have not been in service to a novel. One of them was at a puppetry workshop, and the other was on the back of a placemat. So, Amal, what is poetry?

[Amal] What an excellent question. So, rather than answer the question, which would be way too straightforward and obvious…

[Laughter]

[Amal] I'm going to reply with a question, which is one that we tend not to ask ever at all, but is really crucial, I think, to answering what is poetry. That question is, what is prose, bo? What actually is prose? The reason I want to ask it this way is because it has been my experience that whenever I mention poetry to classrooms full of students who want to learn to write, who are interested in creative writing, who are interested in writing novels and short stories and screenplays and what have you, that there is this kind of instinctive bristling at the idea of poetry. That it can be frightening, that it can be alienating and offputting. I always find myself wondering why that is. I've come to realize that there is some inherent assumption that poetry is the opposite of prose, that prose is everything that you are not good at, somehow. Like your learning to write prose and poetry is like this weird other country where up is down and blue is purple and it's just hard and weird and makes you feel bad. I really want to challenge that, and kind of dig into that a little bit. So I want to start by asking all of you if you will assist me in this, what, to you, is a defining feature of poetry that makes it different from prose?

[Dan] Oh, this feels like a trap.

[Yeah, laughter]

[Howard] The challenge for me is that I've been putting things in buckets my whole life, and there are so many things that are going to fit into both buckets. But I will say that when there is an established meter with a rhyme scheme, then I know I'm in the land of poetry.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Howard] But my neighbors in the land of poetry don't necessarily have rhymes and established meters.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's… So, I'm sitting here thinking, okay, what? Prose. All right. How do I… Like, when I look at something, I'm like, well, this is prose. I think one part of it is thoughts… It tends to be fairly linear. Not always, but it tends to be fairly linear. It tends to group thoughts by paragraph. It's structure is paragraph and scene when you're talking about fiction, and when you're talking about nonfiction, again, is paragraph. That there tends to be a sort of specific point that you are driving towards that you don't want to leave the pieces out, so that people aren't lost. When I'm thinking about it, like, in terms of… And it is thinking about it as an opposite of poetry. You're right, wow, that is such a trap. But I am… That it is… Yeah, I think the linearity… Linearality of it… So that's a word now.

[Laughter]

[Amal] It sounds like you're also talking about argument, maybe. That in nonfiction, for instance, that you are trying to convey an argument and that you need to make sure that the stakes of that argument are clear and stuff like that. Does that make sense?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like, there's… With public speaking or essays, there's generally two forms. There's informative or persuasive. You're either trying to inform people or you're trying to persuade them. Then in fiction, you are… There is a narrative. It's not that poetry can't have a narrative, but that prose is… The service of the narrative comes before the consideration of form.

[Amal] Um. Okay.

[Dan] Well, that leads into what I was going to say, is that for me, and I was going to start by saying that poetry is where form matters as much as content does. As I've been listening to you talk and trying to second-guess what I think you're going to say, I suspect what's actually going on is that prose is a form that has just become so common. It has a lot of the features that Mary Robinette just talked about, and poetry is where we have culturally grouped every other form, whether that is rhyme or specific meter or leaving certain words or concepts out and turning it into more of a readerly thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Oh, and then there's free verse. Like, as we're talking about it, the thing that I keep thinking about is John Scalzi's Satan Diary. He wrote it as free verse poetry, and then pulled out all of the linebreaks, and grouped it into paragraphs.

[Amal] So, this is wonderful to me. [Garbled I'm so…] In many respects. So, because obviously you are all accomplished writing professional and not first-year university students and stuff, you are doing the thing, which is that you are kind of as soon as you put forward an example, you are scrutinizing that example and going, "Wait. There are so many exceptions to this thing." This is where I want to take what you've said and kind of put it in conversation with some of the things my students tend to call out, which is they'll say, "Okay. So, definitely rhyme and meter for sure. Hallmarks of poetry." They'll say, "Linebreaks for sure. Hallmarks of poetry." If something is hugging the left side and margin, then it's definitely a poem. Though sometimes actually say things that are much more easily, I think, interrogated then some of the things you brought up. They'll say like, "Well, metaphor is a feature of poetry. Figurative language." They'll also sometimes talk about something that is really distilled, something that is really compact, where the language is full of images and stuff like that. So it's… I always end up writing all of these on a board and then saying, "These are really great. Fantastic. However, have you considered that with the exception of rhyme, all of them are also features of prose?" So if you want to talk about linebreaks in prose, we have paragraph breaks, and what happens… Why do we break a paragraph where we do has a lot of different answers, but all of them come down to the question of intention. That you intend to convey something to the reader with where you break a paragraph. What happens when you break a scene, for that matter? You are eliding quite a lot of linear information when you break a scene in order to transport someone immediately somewhere else. Right? You… Or something like a famous phrase, like, is this Raymond Chandler, I always forget to look this up? "He had a gun. I took it from him." Is an amazing ellipsis, right? Like, there is so much condensation happening in that which people would unquestionably call prose, because it's occurring within a novel. But what I want to point out is that poetry is using all of these tools that prose also has. They're not actually opposites. When you're talking about narrative, there are absolutely narrative poems. When you have something like Alfred Noyes The Highwayman, where the purpose of that poem is the story of the poem, and everything else about the poem is in service of that story. Is in service of, like, "The Highwayman came riding, riding, the Highwayman came riding. Under the moon…" I can't remember the exact lines, but it's just… There's all of this… All of the rest of the poem's elements are in service of that story. Likewise, tons of poetry doesn't rhyme, so you can't use it as a defining characteristic necessarily. Mary Robinette, do you want to chime in?

[Mary Robinette] No, I was just letting you know that I was going to need to pause for the book of the week in a moment, when you're done with your thought.

[Amal] Oh!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But do you want to finish your thought?

[Amal] Yes. So, all of these tools, essentially, are shared by poetry and by prose. So what I want to kind of drive towards… This is not to say that poetry and prose are the same. They are not. They are very different. But they're also not opposites. They are, I'm going to get kind of technical here, but just to say, they're related modes with different emphases. We can talk a little bit about how these emphases differ after the book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] What a wonderful segue. So we are pausing for our book of the week… And… That is… A Map to the Sun, which you were going to tell us about, Amal.

[Amal] Yes. I wanted this to be the first book to recommend in specifically talking about poetry, because the last two pages of this stunningly beautiful original graphic novel by Sloane Leong made me feel the way only poetry has made me feel up until this point. It's a stunningly beautiful book about the friendships between girls on a girls basketball team, essentially in high school, and it's about the difficulties in these girls' lives, about the ways in which they relate to each other. The core of it is specifically that one girl… Sorry, two of the girls had found a really intense friendship two years earlier, and then one of them left and broke all contact off for two years, and then returned and tried to just have the same relationship again. So it's a book about the intricacies of friendship and the difficulties of it. It's deeply, deeply beautiful. When I got to the end of this book, which is full of color, there's an incredible treatment of color all throughout, the last two pages felt like a dawn breaking in my mind. Like, it was the most intensely beautiful experience of just being overwhelmed by feeling and tears and loveliness. But I'm still puzzling over how the book did this to me. Which is the feeling I get from poetry. So I wanted to [say that].

[Mary Robinette] That's wonderful. So that's A Map to the Sun by Sloane Leong.

[Howard] Before we jump into this further exploration of how poetry and prose share tools, I want to weigh in with a fun metaphor. If you've ever watched someone, a comic book artist, illustrate with just a brush and ink, and watching the way they create a picture really just using two colors and a brush and and ink, that's a skill set that I wish I had that I don't. There's also a video on… Well, it's going to be on YouTube, and I don't know where exactly, of a guy painting gold trim on a table. Freehand with a brush. Loaded with the gold trim paint that he's using. Okay? [Inaudible I think that's the confidence…" The confidence of line is absolutely amazing. To me, this is the same difference as the difference between poetry and prose. Both skills or both domains require mastery of this tool. But the one guy is framing a table in a way to create… To allow the table to then frame other things. The other guy is creating a page as part of a sequential story. So in the realm of illustration, I think we have plenty of examples of the same sort of dichotomy. I'm drawing a picture. I am illustrating a repeating pattern of Celtic knots with things going on in the knots that change as they go.

[Amal] I love that metaphor so much, and I want to build on it a little bit. I remember [Chuck Orion] who I'm going to mention a couple of times throughout this master class because they are a deeply brilliant poet and thinker and fiction writer and also artist, which they learned... when they were in art school, they were learning... looking at like art in the west. There is a kind of event horizon that happens where it seems like, "And then they learned how to draw." Where suddenly...

[Laughter]

[Amal] [inaudible] like photorealist things. So the main thing there, if I'm recalling this correctly, is perspective. It's like perspective as a kind of technology begins to emerge. The funny thing is though in… A thing that often happens is that there is this assumption that perspective is always going to be used the same way. So in art classes that focus on the art of Western Europe, you might not understand that in the farther east that you have that same knowledge of perspective simply because the same kind of art is not emerging there. So what [Teresa] was telling me was that if you look at certain parts of the Taj Mahal, there's this weird thing that happens where you look up and there's writing on a column, and no matter where you are in reference to the column, the writing looks the same size. Because they have used the same knowledge of perspective to create a totally different effect. Instead of trying to create a kind of realist reproduction of the world around you, they have bent and twisted the world around you into this one thing so that no matter where you are distance wise, you are still able to read the thing. I am being a little bit vague in my description of it, because I'm trying to remember a conversation from a while ago. But it's that same tool, used to super different purposes. I feel that way about poetry. That where prose is often trying to represent and denotate and communicate with a certain kind of clarity and convention and understanding, poetry is often transforming, shifting, weirding the thing. I want to kind of bring this to one succinct statement about, for me, but the difference is between poetry and prose, is the difference ultimately between singing and speaking. And that… We'll get into that more next episode. Which is a tool in and of itself, they’re doing so in wildly different ways that provoke wildly different effects. But we'll get into that more next episode.

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. Thank you so much, Amal.

[Amal] So, in the meantime, I want to leave you with some homework. The homework is very simple. It is that I want you to subscribe to a poem-a-day service. There are a whole bunch of them. We’re going to link a couple in the show notes. But I just want you to subscribe to something that is going to put a little bit more poetry in your life, one poem, one day at a time. Just so that it’s not as alien and different and weird and frightening as it might have been otherwise. As you get these poems landing in your inbox, I want you to read them. I want... They’re always going to be pretty short, and I just want you to pay attention to your reaction to them. You’re probably not going to understand a bunch of them, some of them are going to be frustrating and opaque, but some of them are also going to be really remarkable. You might find yourself enjoying elements of them. I just want you to pay attention to your reactions. Note where are you enjoying things, where are you not enjoying things. See if over the course of a week, you notice some patterns emerging, and start to figure something out about your own tastes in poetry.

[Mary Robinette] For those people who are exploring poetry for the first time, I’m going to offer a piece of advice that Amal gave me years ago when I was trying to learn more about puppetry. Puppetry! Poetry. Same thing. Which is to take your time when you read these poems, and that you may need to read it more than once, because if you’re used to reading prose, you’re used to skimming. A poem is not a thing to be skimmed. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go read some poetry.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.10: Paying It Forward, with Kevin J. Anderson

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/03/07/16-10-paying-it-forward-with-kevin-j-anderson/

Key Points: Paying it forward... helping one another out, sharing information, share what you have learned. One-on-one mentoring, and fostering a community. Forming friendships within structures. Find your tribe! One of the pitfalls of mentoring is that the rules change every week. Pay attention to the people around you. Treat them as peers.

[Season 16, Episode 10]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Paying It Forward, with Kevin J. Anderson.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are joined today by our special guest, Kevin J. Anderson.

[Kevin] And I'm Kevin.

[Giggles]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, Kevin.

[Amal] Hello, Kevin.

[Mary Robinette] So, Kevin has published more than 165 books, 50 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He's written novels in Star Wars, X-Files… You may know him from Dune. Then, his original work, like the Saga of Seven Sons series, the Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, and then he, like, edits anthologies, he has a publishing house called Wordfire. Generally speaking, he is very involved in the industry and has done a lot of mentoring as well. So we thought we'd bring him in today to talk with us about the idea of paying it forward.

[Mary Robinette] So, Kevin, do you want to describe what paying it forward means?

[Kevin] Well, I kind of want to come up with what right at this moment, as we're recording this, if not for the pandemic, I would be in my last day wrapping up our 12th Superstars writing seminar.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Kevin] Which would have like 370 [garbled] on it, and we've done it for 12 years. It was founded with me and my wife, Rebecca Moesta, with Brandon Sanderson, Eric Flint, and David Farland. We got together because we were talking with one another about business stuff and then intellectual property and copyrights and contracts. We realize that nobody taught us this stuff. We had to learn it, and we had to make mistakes and screw things up, and then we would rapidly go, "Dave, don't do this," or "Brandon, watch out for this." We realize that there needed to be some more stuff in the industry where we would help one another out, that we would go to our colleagues and our fellow writers and just kind of share information. That was what started our first Superstars. So we held it in Pasadena, then we moved to Las Vegas, and then Salt Lake City, and then we've been in Colorado Springs ever since. But we just felt like we wanted to like share what we learned. This would have been our 12th year.

[Mary Robinette] So, Kevin…

[Kevin] Go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] I was just… You said… Talking about sharing what you know and sharing the info. Can you talk about, like, why you felt like that was important?

[Kevin] Well, when… Every year when I do this, it feels like the greatest thing ever. Even though it really takes a lot of time. As you said in the introduction, I've got a lot of books I'm doing. I've got a lot of comics. I'm working in film and TV and all kinds of stuff. I got back to thinking about all the people who mentored me, when I was starting out. There were some big-name people who, for some reason or other, kind of took me aside and steered me in the right direction. Terry Brooks was a huge help to me. Dean Koontz was an enormous help to me. Harlan Ellison was a big mentor. I remember one time, after spending hours talking with Dean Koontz and him giving me advice, I wrote him a letter afterwards to thank him. I said, "I don't understand why you spent so much time paying it forward in helping me. Why me in particular?" He said, "Oh, I help a lot of people, Kevin, but you're just one of the only ones who ever listens."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fun fact. On the third Superstars event, when you came to Salt Lake City, Brandon and Dan and I all came up… Mary Robinette was there. That was when we pulled Mary Robinette aside and said, "Hey. We are really, really Y-chromosome poisoned, and maybe… You're awesome. That one episode you did with us in Season three, the puppeteer episode." At that point, was still the most talked about episode we'd done, and we were like two seasons past it. So we extended the invitation to Mary Robinette to join us. So, Superstars, bringing people together, directly impacted what we became in the years that followed.

[Mary Robinette] Well, this is an interesting point, that one of the things that you do with Superstars is that you're not just doing individual one-on-one mentoring, that you are fostering a community. So I think that there's a couple of different ways that we can think about the idea of paying it forward. There's the one-on-one, the individual mentorship thing, and then there's also the community building aspect. I think that we've all been involved in that in one way or another. Amal, you've done some community building as well, but I'd love it if you'd share with us some of your perspectives on that.

[Amal] Yeah. Absolutely. One thing I was thinking about as you were talking to them, was just how much when I… So, I teach creative writing now in a university as well as having taught at other very community forward institutions like Clarion West or like Viable Paradise and stuff. But the first thing that came to mind as you were talking was having started a magazine called Goblin Fruit when… Many years ago now. But I started it with a close friend, partly because we had been reading poetry magazines and thinking we can probably do this thing too, and make a space for a different kind of poetry that we wanted to see flourish alongside what we were reading. But we had no idea about how to go about it. We would read them, but we didn't know how to actually make one. Mike Allen, who was behind Mythic Delirium at the time, and who has since changed Mythic Delirium from a magazine into a small press publisher and so on, was enormously generous with his time and with his… Just kind of sharing perspectives on how to run this. Terri Wendling was enormously helpful… Someone who, like, we had been so admiring of for all sorts of reasons, and she was… Like, people who basically we had no sense of as peers, but rather of people to whom we looked up and stuff, being generous with their time absolutely enabled us to do this. Once we launched, we in this case being Jessica Page Wick, Oliver Hunter, and myself. Once we launched Goblin Fruit, this community built up around Goblin Fruit, but then managed to, within a few years, had other people decide they wanted to start their own poetry magazines, like R. B. Lemberg and Shweta Narayan started Stone Telling that had a totally different perspective. Or, well, related, but different perspective on what kind of poetry they wanted to create. Once those structures were built, they… It's the whole thing about build it and they will come, right? So people started pinging off of each other, sparking off of each other, forming friendships within these structures of poetry magazines and reading each other's work, and going on to collaborate in other ways as a consequence. So there's just this feeling that once you love something and you want to share it with people, that that simple act kind of kick starts a whole beautiful chain reaction of people talking to each other and sharing with each other. That just continues to blow my mind. It's the thing, when I talk to my students now, I say that the one thing that you can't really be given in a class… Sorry. There's a lot of stuff that you can be taught in a classroom that you can just kind of figure out on your own, but one of the things that is just difficult to find on your own is a cohort, or is a sense of community. So, like, actually taking part in building those structures seems like just so crucial to have in these conversations.

[Kevin] At Superstars, we call it the tribe. It's like a tribe mentality that we all sort of get together. We very much feel that the rising tide lifts all boats, and that if we all sort of help each other, especially now, with indie publishing and bookselling and publishing taking so many different turns, that you can't just go buy a book that says how to do it. That everything changes weekly. One of the other kind of big important ways that I'm working on paying it forward is I'm running this whole Masters degree program at Western Colorado University on getting an MA in publishing. They hired me a couple of years ago just to take this thing from scratch and create it. They gave me no curriculum. I just had to make up what I thought people needed to know in traditional publishing and in indie publishing. Look, my publishing house has released 300 books with 100 authors. In the traditional publishing, I've published 140 some traditional books of my own. So I kind of have the experience. Of course, I couldn't be hired until I went back to college and got my own MFA because that's a qualification to teach. But I did that, because I thought it was important to do this right. I wanted to have the students learn, like, practical stuff and do hands-on things so that they could actually do it when they had a Masters degree, rather than just esoteric things. So I developed the program where these… We teach lectures on traditional publishing and copyrighted bookselling and printing and distribution and cover design and all that stuff, but what they actually do, hands-on, is we get funding from Draft2Digital to have a professional anthology that they edit. So they spend… They create it, they send out their solicitation. This year, the students got 535 slush pile submissions that they had to go through. At the beginning, it was kind of funny, because they were all dedicated, they wanted to do the right thing to these authors, they wanted to read every single submission straight through…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's noble.

[Kevin] I told them at the very beginning, I said, "No, that's not going to happen." No, they were determined. After like a month, they started… In fact, within six days, one of my students wrote back and said, "You weren't kidding. These are terrible. Most of these are terrible."

[Mary Robinette] Still noble.

[Kevin] So, they went through them and it really got to the point where, toward the end, when they had 100 stories piled up to read, they go through the first paragraph or so, and they'd go, "Nah, this isn't going to make it." They learned, as writers, what they're up against…

[Laughter]

[Kevin] In the slush pile. Even if you just do a polite cover letter, you're up in the top 10%. Even if you do… Like, a thing without typos on the first page, you're in the top 10%. So they… This was their job for their masters degree. They read the slush pile. They had a budget. They had a specific you-can-only-spend-this-much money, you can only buy this many words. Then they had to argue over the… Do we have too many funny stories or too many intense stories?

[Chuckles]

[Kevin] Do we have all male writers, or do we… All this stuff that they had to work on. They really got to the point of, like, pragmatic stuff, of we don't just get to accept everything we like. You had to really fight over things. Then, after that, they had to write the rejection letters, and they had to write the contracts, and they had to go through the copyediting with their assigned authors. They designed the cover. They go through… They lay out the book, they release the book, they publish it. So when they graduate, that's sort of their… It's a one year program. So, at the end of their year, this book comes out with their names on the title page as the editorial board. We… Our first one, called Monsters, Movies, and Mayhem, got a boxed, starred review in Publishers Weekly, and they're all thrilled about that. So it's… So I'm really happy to be… See, it's my cohort of students. I'm in my second one now. They have real, practical stuff they're doing.

[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. I think that's a great segue for us to talk about our book of the week. So, the book of the week is, of course, something that our esteemed guest would like to tell us about. So, I'm sorry to make you keep talking, Kevin…

[Laughter]

[Kevin] Well, that's usually not that hard.

[Laughter]

[Kevin] Because when I write… I write the 700 page books, so it's obvious I'm not a man of few words.

[Mary Robinette] That's okay, we're used to Brandon. These are… 700 pages is short.

[Kevin] Well, my… I call my fantasy book, this big doorstop thing, I call it one half of a Brandon Sanderson unit.

[Laughter]

[Kevin] So it's not quite that, but it is… I've got this huge epic fantasy trilogy. The first one was called Spine of the Dragon, and the second one called Vengewar, which just came out. They're from Tor, they're in hardcover. I have already delivered the third and final book in the trilogy. So for those of you listeners who don't want to start anything because you don't know if the author's going to let you down, well, I've already turned it in. It's already done. All three books are there, so you can go pick… It's sort of… Two continents at war and dozens of different main characters and dragons and monsters and sword writing in romance and religion and philosophy and a little bit of humor here and there. So… Your typical book.

[Dan] The thing I love about Kevin is that every time I talk to him, he has a brand-new trilogy I didn't even know about.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Like, you are shockingly prolific.

[Kevin] Yes. Well, Mary Robinette was saying, "Is this bio still up-to-date?" It was like three weeks old. I went, "Well, it's actually not, but I can't spend all my time updating."

[Laughter]

[Dan] All right. So, that's Vengewar, right? Is the newest one?

[Kevin] I'd like people to read Vengewar, so Vengewar together, it's two continents clashing over stuff.

[Mary Robinette] Sounds great.

[Kevin] I also want to throw in that on my website, wordfire.com, I have a whole section on the publishing MA. So if you want to see some links, a little more background on that, that… And a picture of me with my beard, which I don't have the full beard anymore, but since this is audio, you can't tell that.

[Mary Robinette] It's a very luscious full, full beard. I mean, it's almost Gandalfian right now. That's exactly what I'm seeing in this thing.

[Dan] Gone full [inaudible]

[Kevin] You're looking at Howard.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, right. It's so easy to confuse the two of you.

[Dan] Easy to confuse bald guys.

[Mary Robinette] Something that I wanted to draw attention to for our listeners that everyone has talked about in, is that there has been a mentor that has helped. Then, rather than attempting to thank the mentor through some concrete action, we pay it forward by then turning into mentors ourself. Which is the… I think at the heart of what it means to pay it forward. And very much part of the science fiction and fantasy community in particular. So, one of the things that we've been talking about is ways in which we've been helped. But if we want to turn around and help other people, I mean, not everyone can go and start a writing seminar. But there are small ways that we can help. So, what are some of the ways in which we can begin to serve as mentors, and what are some of the kind of pitfalls to mentoring, the things you have to sort of watch out for?

[Kevin] Well, one of the pitfalls to mentoring, especially when I'm talking about publishing and how to get an agent and how to break into the publishing world is the rules change every other week. So my experience when I broke in is just not relevant to anybody. So when I tell them how I got my agent, well, that's interesting, but it doesn't help them very much. So that's one of the pitfalls. But mentoring is one thing, but being a tribe is kind of another thing. I think you should help one another. It's great if you can have Terri Brooks explain to you how to deal with crowds and a book signing line, but I think more… It's your own cohort. Find writers who are at your level of writing and then you help each other out. If things like… Like, last week, as we're recording this, last week would have been LTUE. We… I mean, we would all go there. I'd see most of you there, and would help all these other writers, and they would help each other as well. If you hear about something new that changed on Kindle Unlimited, then share it with other people, because there is no… I mean, you can't just get the newspaper that tells you everything that changed in publishing this week. We listen to Writing Excuses. We listen to various podcasts just to keep up.

[Dan] That's one thing that we noticed very quickly with the Writing Excuses Retreat. We kind of went into this thinking that the instruction that we would provide to the students would be the most valuable part, and realized almost immediately that, no, it was the relationships they formed with each other and the networking that students were able to do. In the six years we've been doing it, our conference has spawned so many writing groups and so many different support groups. Even at least two marriages that I know of, but that's beside the point.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, yes. Finding ways to support each other at your own level of skill and your own level of professionalization is still super valuable.

[Mary Robinette] Amal, you…

[Howard] A simple example that I like to share. About five years ago, I was at Gen Con Indi, visiting with my friend, Lar deSouza, who is a cartoonist of… He is an amazing cartoonist.

[Amal] He's so great.

[Howard] I was talking to him and I said, "Yeah I… How do you do it, Lar? My hand hurts all the time." He handed me a pen and said, "Draw." So I drew, and then he said, "Okay, stop. You're gripping too hard and you're pushing too hard." I said, "Yeah. I know that. I don't know how to stop." Then he handed me a brushpen that I'd never seen before and said, "Take this. Just take it. It will reward what you're doing, you'll figure it out." I said, "I tried brushpens. I can't do them. I've never made them work." He said, "You're ready for them now. Just go. It'll make this work."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's the cartoonist's version of wax on, wax off?

[Howard] It was the cartoonist's version of wax on, wax off. No lie, that five minute discussion saved my hands, took my art to a new level, and it happened because Lar, in the role of mentor, didn't expect anything from me, but he knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew exactly how to watch what I was doing and say, "Oh, this is the problem. You're trying to make these kinds of lines with this kind of a pen and you're working too hard at it and the fix is this and you know everything you need to know to make this work. Now go." When I mentor others, I look for those moments. I look for the times where I can see, "Oh. Oh, you're doing that thing that used to leave bruises on my fingertips," or, "You're doing that thing that made me forget names of characters," or whatever. So I offer those little things. It's not a permanent mentoring relationship, it's let me give you the peace of help that you need to let you take yourself to the next level.

[Amal] So, this is super interesting to me. I feel like that we've been circling around something that I'd like to highlight a bit from what you've all been saying, because thinking of what Mary Robinette's question was, about, like, potential pitfalls of men touring, I feel like you've all talked about actually addressing the thing without necessarily naming the pitfall, which is that it is very easy to kind of calcify in an idea of oneself as a mentor, and to think that your experience is going to be a definitive one in some way. So, like the fact that, Kevin, that you just recognize right off the bat that like, no, actually, things are constantly in flux, is to me something that is crucial. Recognizing that things change as… And one of the things that changes is your degree of authority, your expertise. That that's always kind of in relationship to a landscape that's shifting around us. I just… I love that recognition, and also the fact that a mentor relationship doesn't need to be permanent, it can be permeable instead. But I mean, it seems to me, Howard, that, like, Lar is as much a peer as he is a mentor in so many ways. There are plenty of things that you could probably share at those crucial moments and stuff. That makes your relationship a more lateral one, rather than a hierarchical one. That also, like, I love this idea of trying to think of paying things forward as not like a top-down relationship, although often we are forced into those positions. There's another metaphor that I've heard people use, which is sending the elevator back down. Where, basically, like if you have managed in your career to ascend to a certain height, then you send the elevator back down in order to try and lift somebody else and stuff. That still kind of assumes a very vertical structure of people rising through something. But when we talk about community and we talk about cohorts and relationships and stuff, it is a lot more horizontal, it is a lot more lateral. So, yeah.

[Dan] Thank you for bringing that up, Amal, because that's really great. I wanted to talk about that, too, that, for example, Kevin and I. I met Kevin 12 years ago when my first book had just come out, I Am Not A Serial Killer. I was at the BEA in Manhattan, and we were at a signing. So I sat down for my little scheduled signing, and realized that my Tor publicist was sitting behind me, and that I was sharing a table with Kevin. I thought this is amazing. I'm going to impress their socks right off. I was just on point and I was trying to be as personable as possible and as professional as possible, just to impress them and try to build some networking that way. What I realized very quickly is that, first of all, I didn't need to try quite as hard. Second of all, what Kevin was doing was just already paying attention. He was on the lookout for rising talent, and immediately was treating me as an equal, rather than as a student or as an underling or anything like that. That is what I have tried to do is these two things. Number one, pay attention to the people around me. And then two, treat them as peers. I have had a lot of authors that I work with tell me that I am one of their favorite teachers to work with because I treat them like A rather than like a student or a minion or something like that. Having that equal relationship and recognizing that we are all together, we are all on the same level, has… It's not only helped me professionally, but I've gotten so many more friends that way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I completely agree. That's something we say at the Writing Excuses retreats all the time, that we are all peers, we're just at different points on the career path. That's something also that I think for people who are wanting to ask for help but are afraid to, to remember that people who are farther along the career path are actually helped by the questions, because it helps us to keep from calcifying, by having things pop up, it's like, oh, yeah, I haven't thought about things from that angle, or, I guess things have changed. The landscape has changed, or let me articulate what it is that I do, which then helps me do it better. Or sometimes just someone helped me, let me help you. So there's a lot of different reasons and ways that this pay it forward can help both individuals and the community at large.

[Mary Robinette] Now we have some homework, which, I think is Howard.

[Howard] Absolutely. This is one of my favorite exercises. It's a life hack, as much as anything else. Sit down and make a list of the people who have influenced you personally, who have personally interacted with you in ways that maybe it was full-on mentoring, maybe it was a kind word that pulled you out of a professional bind at some point, maybe it was someone who, like me and Lar deSouza, gave you that piece of critical information that let you take it to the next level. Make a list of the people who've been influential, and write yourself a little note about what they did. Then, stage three, write them a note. Maybe you're going to email them, maybe snail mail it, maybe it's a direct message via Twitter. But find a way to say thank you. Most times, as Kevin has pointed out, when we mentor, we're not doing it because we expect to be thanked or credited in any way. But I gotta tell you, we love hearing from people we've helped.

[Mary Robinette] Just as a note. When Howard says write to someone, he's not asking you to write to us.

[Howard] No. Nonononono. Not us. Unless… In fact, explicitly leave me off the list, so I don't have to feel bad about making you write a letter to me. Find the people who have helped you and thank them.

[Kevin] Howard, thank you for all that you've done for me.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Kevin, for everything that you've done for us, too. And all of you. And thank you listeners. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go thank someone.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.9: Crossing The Revenue Streams

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/28/16-9-crossing-the-revenue-streams/

Key Points: Successful artists have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets, earning money from many different revenue streams. First. look at other ways to write fiction besides just selling your stories. E.g., sometimes a publisher will pitch a series to you. Look for ways to avoid the pigeonhole, get new audiences, and work with new publishers. Watch for anthologies, and write to a theme! Tie-in fiction can help. Gaming companies need fiction, too. Balance new skills and audience versus money, money, money. Try to learn something, to grow your audience or as a writer, when you take on new projects. Second, consider ways to make money from writing you have already done. T-shirts, coins, merchandise. In-universe artifacts. How much work do you have to do to make money off it, and how much profit is there in it? Consider Kickstarter. Keep looking for other opportunities.

[16, 9]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Crossing Revenue Streams.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're going to need more than one stream.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] So, one of the things that I think is common to every successful artist that I know of is that they have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets. They are earning money from a lot of different revenue streams. So we want to talk about that is the final class in Brandon's intensive course on career planning and business information. So, Brandon, take it away. What do people need to know about multiple revenue streams? Why is this an important part of an author's career?

[Brandon] So, you need to find a way to make money off of your writing. This is the… This is what you're going to have to do. This is what… If you want to go pro. You don't… You don't have to, but, if you're looking at this as a business, one of the things you should be looking at is, how can I make money at this? The obvious answer is sell a book. However, for at least most authors I know, once you sell a book, you want to go full-time, you probably should go full-time to make a living at your writing, but you probably can't earn enough off of that book to go full-time yet. Indeed, even if you're a newer aspiring writer who's selling short stories and things like that, or maybe you're… Maybe you're a longtime writer who selling short stories. You are going to need to find a way to make a living or at least you're going to want to find a way to make more money off of your stories. So, this is ways to make money with your writing that aren't necessarily the obvious ways of you write your book, you sell your book, you get money for it. We're going to talk about all sorts of other types of revenue streams you can have as a writer to keep yourself going during those maybe lean years.

[Dan] So, I told the story to Howard last week, but when I went years ago to my 20th high school reunion, they did the little games, like who has the most kids and who's done this and who traveled the farthest and all that kind of thing that you do at a reunion. The question who has held the most jobs since graduating high school, most people were on like four or five. Except for me, the professional author, and my friend who became a professional filmmaker. We both tied with 14. That's not even counting all the freelance work that I do. So artists really need to hustle to pay all those bills.

[Brandon] Yup. So one of the first things we want to talk about here is other ways to be writing stories that aren't maybe necessarily the write a book or you write a story, whatever you want to write, and sell it. There are job opportunities that are still writing fiction in the area you want to be in that you can get. I wanted to have Dan talk to us about it, because Dan had the experience of a series that was pitched by a publisher to him, right?

[Dan] Yeah. This is actually… Not a lot of people know this, but that's where Partials came from. The publisher came to me, two editors, Jordan Brown and [Ruta Remus] at HarperCollins. They had an idea for a really great kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia YA series, and were looking for an author who fitted. So they actually brought that idea to me. It was not something I had considered doing, because at the time, everything I had written was horror, but number one, I really welcomed the opportunity to jump into something very, very different as a way of making sure I didn't pigeonhole myself as the serial killer guy. For a number of reasons. That's not the identity I was looking for. But number two, this was a chance for me to build inroads to a brand-new audience I had not yet been reaching, to a brand-new publisher that I had never worked before, to do just a lot of new frontiers. I really saw it at the time as a brand-new revenue stream. Then, when that whole YA career kind of crumbled in let's say 2014, that's the same… I used that same strategy again, let's find a brand-new audience and build a brand-new revenue stream, which is how I got into middle grade.

[Brandon] This happens a lot with anthologies, also. People will ask you if you want to be a part of an anthology or it'll go around in the community that an anthology is being made on this topic and they're accepting proposals or submissions. Once you become part of the community, you can get… Watch some of these forums or these newsletters or these things like that. This comes into the networking that we talked about in a previous week. But anthologies can be a good way to make money off of your writing other than just I'm writing a story and submitting it, you can write to a theme.

[Dan] Yeah. Tie-in fiction has also been really helpful for me. My only Hugo nomination for prose… For a pros category has come from tie-in fiction. Now, this can be hard. I've got a friend who rights Star Trek novels, and I was kind of grilling him for how can I get into this, because I'm a huge Star Trek geek. He basically said you have to wait for one of the rest of us to die.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So these established properties can be hard to break into. But what I have done is I've made some pretty good contacts with gaming companies. I've written for Privateer Press, I've written for several others. The one that I've just finished is a Kickstarter for a board game called Cult of the Deep. They came to me and they said, "Hey, we're coming out with this thing. It's horror. We want to have some fiction built so that we can use it as part of the Kickstarter. Will you write it for us?" So always being open for and looking for these opportunities to write other stuff has been super helpful to me.

[Erin] I think that...

[Dan] Go ahead.

[Erin] I think that's something… It's really interesting, because it's a trade-off. So I do a lot of freelance writing work, some game stuff, I've done some writing for, like, Paizo, and I write for Zombies, Run!, the running app. So, things here and there. But what's… The balance is figuring out what is adding to your skill as a writer or expanding your audience, and what is just like I like money, money is fun.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, whenever actually a project comes to me, I play Say No to This from Hamilton, and I… A picture of my freelance client is like the woman saying, "I should say no, but I will always say yes." But I've actually had to say no to projects, because they are far enough off from what I'm doing that I'm like, "I'm not going to learn anything, I'm not going to grow either my audience or as a writer," which, I think either one of those are a good reason to do extra stuff in addition to the money.

[Brandon] so, the second big thing I wanted to cover is ways to make money off of writing you've already done that isn't necessarily writing prose. The reason I want to talk about this is because Howard is a genius at this. He has had to make his whole career off of monetizing something that people aren't paying for. Howard, what can you tell us about how to monetize things that are free, or get extra money out of something that you're charging a little bit for?

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm… Okay, I'm laughing because, on the one hand, yes, the comic is available for free and we have all kinds… I say the comic. Schlock Mercenary, available to be read by you, fair reader, at no charge at schlockmercenary.com. Yes, it's free, and we sell T-shirts and coins and whatever else, but most of the merchandise that… The most profitable merchandise we sell is book collections of the comic. So a lot of what I'm doing is getting enough people hooked on the book that they want to own it in print. But there are things that the comic created, there are things that it built, that lent themselves really well to being an independent revenue stream. So that even if you didn't want a print collection of the comic strip, maybe you wanted this other thing.

[Dan] Awesome. So, can you tell us about our book of the week, which happens, very cleverly, to tie right into this?

[Howard] Why, yes I can. We created The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, which is a sort of coffee-table book of very, very bad advice. Malevolent canon. It's often referred to in-universe. I've been making fun of the Stephen Covey, the seven habits thing. Then, years and years and years ago, Stephen Covey started going after anybody who was saying the seven habits of anything. Basically saying, cease-and-desist, don't do that anymore. We went ahead and did a retcon in Schlock Mercenary and started referring to them as maxims, and there aren't seven of them, there are 70 of them. Then I realized, you know, I might be able to make stuff out of this. So we made some twelve-month calendars. Well, print calendars aren't as big a thing as they were 15 years ago. So, about five years ago, we released the Seventy Maxims book, which we created as an in-universe artifact in Schlock Mercenary, and we did it as part of the Schlock Mercenary role-playing game called Planet Mercenary, which is itself a whole nother thing that is not the comic. The Planet Mercenary role-playing game paid the bills all by itself for like two and a half years. That is the best thing we've ever made. I mean, except for the comic. Which makes this topical.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The fun thing about the Planet Mercenary book is that my whole approach to it from the word go was, boy, it sure would be nice if I could make money off of my world book notes that I have to refer to all the time. I still refer to the Planet Mercenary PDF all the time. But, the book of the week, The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. It is a lovely little coffee-table book that's great for starting conversations about things you should never ever do, please.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now, one of the things that I love about this book, and specifically about the plan that caused its creation, is I've always compared your maxims to Star Trek's Rules of Acquisition for the Ferengi. You made a decision that they did not make, and maybe this ties back to our art versus business discussion. You were able, because you eventually ended that list and codified everything in it, you were able to publish it. Star Trek has never done that. They're missing out on a big chunk of change. They could have, at the height of DS 9, sold copies of the Rules of Acquisition, hand over fist. They decided not to, presumably because they liked the flexibility of not having codified the entire list. But these are the kind of decisions that, as creators, we need to make. Do I want to leave this open? Could I turn this into something that I can sell? It's a really smart tactic.

[Howard] Let me look at… Let me talk about Paramount's decision, there. Back in 2006, Robert Khoo, who was the business guy for Penny Arcade comics. He's the reason there's a Penny Arcade Expo. Robert Khoo said, "No single source should ever be more than 60% of the revenue that you take in." Now, he was talking to an audience of self-employed, self-publishing web cartoonists. He was talking about things like Google ads and books in print and T-shirts and whatever else. But the advice really stuck to me, stuck with me, and it was super salient three, four years ago, when Google ads cut me off, and I realized, "Oh, no. That's a big chunk of my revenue." That's… Well, it's about 10 or 15% of my overall revenue. That did not end my life. Because we had multiple revenue streams. So the operating principle here is don't have anything that you're just super dependent on. With Paramount, making a book of the Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, would have meant devoting a writer to the process of compiling that and making it special and wonderful. Ultimately, it never would have generated more than chump change, if you will, compared to the business that they were in, which is making a TV show. So they made a business decision to leave… I mean, what would have been for me, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to leave that on the table. But hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's… That gets like four episodes shot.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] It's not very significant. So the decision about revenue streams hinges, for me, heavily in part on how much work do I need to do in order to make money off of this, and how much profit is there in the thing that I'm making. I love books, because they don't cost a lot to make, if I don't factor all of the time involved in writing them, but we can sell them… The profit margin is large on the physical merchandise. But for a print-on-demand T-shirt, the margin is very small. If my limited market of people is all busy buying print-on-demand T-shirts, I'm actually not making as much money as I would be if I could convince them all to buy copies of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.

[Brandon] One of the things…

[Dan] [inaudible… Should all…]

[Brandon] That's interesting here to talk about is this idea that there are, once you are lucky enough to be getting fans and keeping them, there are people among them who want to give you more money then… They want to support your work. I remember when this first began with me. I actually got an email from someone who said, "Hey, can I just send you a bunch of money? I happen to just be very well-off and I want to just send you a tip." I'm like, "Really? You just are offering to send me money?" People like to support artists. So, having some of these extra products that you can sell is a good way to go. It does require time. Dan was the first writer I knew personally who made T-shirts. I know that T-shirts are… T-shirts are one of the harder things to do because you have to carry them in multiple sizes and they are just a… There's a saturated market of cool nerd T-shirts out there. So making a dent and being… Selling those is hard. But they are a nice… Like, one thing that we need that Paramount… Paramount needs it on a different scale. We need multiple revenue streams, in that if something collapses, we aren't destroyed by. When Borders went out of business, this was a big deal. Right? It's possible that other sources like that will just banish. So, even if T-shirts are a small amount of your business, knowing that you have that extra revenue stream can be very comforting. About three years ago, maybe, Howard came to me and I was talking about the leatherbounds that we do. The leatherbounds are one of the things I wanted to bring up here. I am in a privileged position in that I have a big enough audience to support a luxury product like this. I was talking about it, and Howard said, "Brandon, you need to do a Kickstarter on these." I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Oh, Kickstarter has a lot more tools you can use. You can generate a lot more interest by offering rewards to people. Trust me, do a Kickstarter." I had never done one before. I went to my team and said, "Howard says we should do a Kickstarter, and Howard is the smartest person I know about this sort of stuff. So let's do a Kickstarter." Last summer we made almost $8 million on a Kickstarter.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And…

[Howard] I got a free book.

[Brandon] And Howard got a free book. This… It was true. It was bigger than the money we made… The peace of mind knowing that we could now self-publishing any of my books if the publishing industry went belly up or something happened at Tor. That piece of mind is enormous, knowing that I have another way to reach my fans. Now, granted, it's through someone else's platform. That is scary. The fact that if Kickstarter went away, I can't sell them on my website as effectively as I can through Kickstarter. But it gives me someone other than Amazon, because the rest of my life is controlled by Amazon. 80% of my books are sold through this one store that if Jeff Bezos decides he doesn't like me and says, "Pull Brandon's books," then my career collapses. Well, not anymore, because I have learned how to sell my books through Kickstarter if I need to because of Howard.

[Dan] Fantastic. Good job, Howard. Yeah. So, this has been a really good discussion. I hope that what our audience takes away from this more than anything else is that you need to be looking for these other opportunities. Regardless of what those might be, and regardless of how big they are. I could never in my wildest dreams make $8 million self-publishing something the way Brandon does, but I do have lots of other work that I do, and lots of other little streams of revenue. So, even the little stuff helps and is valuable. You need to look for opportunities to do that. So, thank you very much for listening to this episode.

[Dan] Let's have our final piece of homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. I want you to look at… Identify the places where you are getting money. They may be checks from a publisher, they may be checks from Amazon, they might be… I don't know where you are getting money from. But identify each of those as a revenue stream. Then identify… Write it down… What is the activity that you are performing that is generating that revenue. If it's ad revenue on your website, then the activity is not necessarily writing, it's publishing things to the web. So, establish a framework for where the money is currently coming from. Now, start looking at the ideas, the concepts, the conceits, the whatever that are in your work that could be turned into other things that might make you money. Maybe it's a T-shirt, maybe it's a commemorative Christmas ornament. Maybe it's a… Maybe it's a flag that goes on the back of a pickup truck. I don't know. But make a list of the possible places that the ideas, the concepts, the conceits in your work could be turned into other merchandise.

[Dan] Fantastic. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.8: Smart Promotion

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/21/16-8-smart-promotion/

Key Points: Promotion has revolutions, so focus your effort on writing your next thing. Make sure you have a solid website with a newsletter that you control. Pay attention to the way readers are finding out about books, not just where writers congregate. Don't forget that word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful promotional tools. Then, start looking at social media. Pick the places where people are talking about your books, and that you find easy to use. You want to be part of the discussion. Pick the areas where you can write good content.

[Season 16, Episode 8]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Smart Promotion.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are talking about smart promotion, how to promote yourself smartly.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, it's… This is something that I am terrible at, so I am genuinely excited to hear what Brandon has to say, because it's very easy to waste a lot of time and energy on promoting yourself in ways that have no return on your investment. So, what can you tell us, Brandon, about how to do this right?

[Brandon] Well, number one, write your next thing. This has been the only constant throughout my entire career, because promotion has had a huge, multiple huge revolutions during the time that I've been a writer. I started trying to break in in the late 90s and even mid-90s, when email was not a thing you could assume people had. Right? I ended up breaking in in 2005, before Audible and e-books on Amazon were a thing. I had broken… I broke in before Twitter existed. Right? I broke in when MySpace was a thing. I have watched social media revolutions happen over and over, but the only big constant is you should be focused mostly on writing your next thing. We're going to talk about promotion, we're going to talk about all the different ways you can promote. The thing about it is, these ways have consistently stopped working for… They'll work for some authors, and not for others. They will work for a time, and then stop working entirely. The entire game changes so frequently that if you're not consistently working on the next thing, you're going to be in trouble because that's the only standby thing you can know will be useful.

[Dan] I can give a great example of this. Back when I was doing Partials, so we're talking nine or 10 years ago, book blogs were all the rage. They were huge. I did a blog tour on a bunch of different book blogs, and it launched Partials through the stratosphere. It was fantastic. Three years later, when I launched my next YA science fiction series, book blogs were gone. They… I mean, they're still around, but they're not effective anymore. They're not a useful form of author promotion. So, we had to completely restructure all of our promotion for that series.

[Brandon] Yeah, when I broke in, I remember going to San Diego and driving to every bookstore and delivering… Hand delivering a copy of my paperback. I would walk into the store and say, "Who is your science fiction reader? Can I give them a free book?" I would say, "Hey, if you'll read this, I'll give you this free book. Here's a short pitch on it." I was able to go to 24 bookstores in San Diego. When I last was there, and look to see which bookstores I could go to, there were four that carried my books. So, things have changed dramatically. Now, that's partially because San Diego was saturated with Borders. Places where Barnes & Noble had a stronger foothold have still… More of those metropolitan areas didn't lose as many stores. But even still, the physical book market… My most recent book, Rhythm of War, which came out in November 2020, it was over 50% audiobook in its first week. The fact that… And even now, it's evened out at about 40% audio and around… The rest is split, hardcover and e-book. This is a really different world. If I'm going to say right now, the big revolution happening right now that's happened the last couple of years is book marketing has become pay to play. That's been the trend over the last few years. Unfortunately, all the major social media sites, now, if you want to get eyeballs on your posts, you need to pay for them. Indeed, the big, big change was Amazon deciding to charge authors a lot of money to promote books on different pages. If you are now… If you are an indie author, the biggest change that probably happened in the last few years is, once uupon a time, you could put books up on Amazon… There was a wild west period in 2010, even lasting into the mid-2000 teens, where if you were writing really fast and putting out good books and beating the traditional publishers to the market, you were able to sell huge numbers of books. To sell those books now on Amazon, you need to pay six figures income. I had two indie authors in my writing course at BYU last year, and both of them were spending 5 to 6 figures on marketing their indie books to make back about that much money. Which means that Amazon used to pay you a 70% royalty. They still do, but actually they're charging you half of that back in advertising money, and Amazon is no longer paying more money to indie authors than traditional publishing pays to traditional authors. That's gone now. That's a really big change in the way that marketing happens on the… In the modern era.

[Howard] One of the things that I… A soapbox I've been on for 15 years now, that I'm happy to still have as a functioning soapbox, is the idea that your brand, your identity online, needs to have a home that you own. Your domain name, your server, your blog posts or photos or comics or whatever, and you don't let go of that. Everything else you do, whether it's Twitter or Instagram or whatever else, all of those things are under someone else's control and they can cut you off in an instant just by going out of business, and a lot of them will. So this…

[Brandon] Now this is… This was point number two on my list, Howard. Of things to say.

[Howard] Oh, okay.

[Brandon] We didn't… I didn't even share this, but you nailed it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Number two. Once you're writing your new book, number two is to make sure to have a solid website with a newsletter sign-up that you are keeping up-to-date. People don't go to individual websites as much as they used to. Your individual website is not going to get the hits that your social media does, but it can't be taken away from you. It actually can't. Remember, when we talked about how publishers are not your friends. I've had multiple friends that when they launch a big new series, their publisher comes in and says, "We're going to build a really cool new website for this series." They said, "Great." They're like, "We're going to spend like money on this," and it's been great, except the publisher owns that website. That website is in all of the books. It is branding the series and not the author. My recommendation to you is to say to them, "No, thanks. My website should be the main Brandon website. You should not be building one on Scholastic.com for me that you are sending people to. We're not going to publish in the books that website that you want to put up." Put your foot down, because that's going to brand the series and not you, and it's going to take the power away from you in one of the few areas you can maintain it in your publicity career.

[Dan] Yeah. Once the publisher decides that it's no longer going to support that website, then all of those people who are being driven there from the books, they're finding nothing. You have no control over it, you can't use it for updates, you can't cross promote other books. It's… Now better than just saying don't do this is providing an alternative. Suggesting how about we take some of that same marketing money and we do this with it. But, Erin, I cut you off. What were you going to say?

[Erin] I was going to make a horrible analogy and say that it's sort of like when your work… Like, anybody worked and, like, they gave you a Blackberry, like, a work Blackberry, and they're like, "Just do everything on this. Cancel your personal cell phone plan." Fast forward like five years later, you're quitting that job, and you're like, "Oh, wait. My entire life is on something that I didn't actually have control of, even though it was in my house and I felt like I did. I didn't." One other thing though that Brandon said reminded me the idea of having not as many people going to your website and more people going to social media is that I think there's also a difference between what writers do and what readers do. It's always important to remember that you are both a writer and a reader. So, where are you, as a reader, finding out about the books, the stories, the things that you're consuming? A lot of times, I love Twitter, and, like, I love talking to people on Twitter about my work, but I find more writers congregate on Twitter and talk amongst each other about the field, whereas when people are looking for a book recommendation, they may be more likely to find that through some other source. So I think it's important to think about, like, what are you doing, and would you find out about your own book in the way that you're promoting it. If the answer is no, then you should probably change that up a little bit.

[Howard] A fun example from… And I have… We have three of the key participants here. Typecast RPG, which Dan launched, two years ago now? Two and a half years ago?

[Dan] Yeah. Something like that.

[Howard] It's a live streaming of role-playing games. Dan's the GM, I'm one of the players, Erin's one of the players. For a year and 1/2, we were trying to do Twitter marketing, Instagram marketing, whatever. We talked a little bit about setting up a Discord channel for us. The response was always, "Why would we do Discord?" Then, we're recording this in December of 2020, literally three weeks ago, I sat up and realized at the end of an episode, we end these episodes and our audiences having this fun interaction in the chat room in Twitch. Then we stop, and they all have to go home. They can't keep talking. If we set up a Discord channel and link them to it, suddenly our fans, our viewers can keep having their conversations, and by having those conversations, and I've said this explicitly to them so it's okay, by having these conversations, some of them may become evangelists for our show, talking about it in other places and doing our marketing for us. I feel like an idiot for not making this connection 18 months ago. I guess the lesson there is we all get to feel like an idiot for not having made the right decision sooner. But that decision is always going to be one that you have to look at. The landscape is going to be changing, and you're going to discover that something that you previously said, "Why would I even use that?" is actually the thing that you should absolutely be using right now.

[Dan] You can go right now and join our Discord if you want to be part of our Typecast community. I'm sure will put the notes in the liner notes.

[Dan] We need to do a book of the week and this week it is coming from Brandon.

[Brandon] So, one of the fun things about being a published novelist of some renown is that you get offered a lot of books before they come out. We looked at the schedule for this year and work sure that I was going to be on an episode, because were frontloading my episodes, when this book comes out, so I'm sorry, I'm promoting it to you several months early. But, the book of the week is Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. Andy Weir, you may know, is the author of The Martian which is a fantastic book and movie. Project Hail Mary is his new book coming out in May. I loved this book. Just absolutely. 100% loved it. I like it more than The Martian, which is a great book. This is more of a me book. It's got a little bit more of a far future feel to it, even though it's kind of happening now. The science and technology is more science fiction-y. It's… There's just something, just pleasantly fun about this book and the problem-solving, and I can't even tell you really what the book is about without giving you huge spoilers. But it is written… There is a non-linear fashion to it, where you're getting flashbacks to find out character… It's what we call a white room book. Character wakes up without any memories in a white room, and he has no idea how he got there, what's going on, and what his situation is. He slowly pieces together his past and his history as he is trying to keep himself from dying and to solve a big problem. It is delightful, and I recommend it to anyone. One of the things I love about Andy Weir is he is kind of bringing hard science fiction to the masses. I count myself in that. I bounce off a lot of hard science fiction and I force myself to read it because I know it's good for me, and there are some really interesting hard science fiction books. Andy Weir's, I never feel like I'm forcing myself to read. I'm having a wonderful pleasant time. So, Project Hail Mary.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Brandon] Also is a really good pun, because the character's name is Grace. Hail Mary and Grace play into what's going on in an interesting way that is never mentioned in the book, and is just a delightful pun.

[Erin] You know…

[Dan] Well, awesome. Sounds good.

[Erin] Listening to that, I have to say, reminds me that word-of-mouth and people telling you to read something is one of the, like, most powerful promotional tools out there.

[Brandon] It really is.

[Erin] It's so important and something that I think about in terms of marketing just generally, is, "Is your book, is your work, in… Like, on the lips of the people who are talking about the works you love and that you want to be in conversations with?" If you're like, "I am also writing hard science fiction for the masses,"… I'm not, but let's say I was. Like, I also want people to say, like, "Oh, if you like that Andy… If that's what you like about Andy Weir, you'll also love Erin's next novel." So, really figuring out what are those people doing who you want to be, like, your book and your work to be mentioned alongside. How are they promoting themselves? Who are they getting in front of? What can you do that similar? Is a good way to try to like get that word-of-mouth that is so powerful.

[Brandon] That's actually a brilliant thing to bring up that I didn't even have in my list of notes here, Erin, because I have several friends whose careers him were made by the fact that a series got really big, that they had a book similar to, at the same time. Kind of just been bought or just on submission. That they were able to then get on those bookstore talkers, where they're like, "If you like this, here are books like it," and get that halo effect, and it made their careers. You could say that I… My career was made kind of by that. By picking up the Wheel of Time in a similar way and things like that. But I do want to get to the third point on my list of things. Number one is write your next thing. Number two is make sure you have a solid website with a newsletter. We didn't talk enough about the newsletter, we've talked about them before. Newsletters are one of the most valuable resources you can have, because those are people who opt in and who want to get an email from you telling them when a new thing is out. You will have, generally, a smaller number of people on your newsletter then you will have following you in various social media settings. But the buy-in, you don't have to… Like, on Facebook, you make have 100,000 followers, but when you post on Facebook, you don't promote it, 15 of them will see it. I'm exaggerating, but you know what I mean.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your newsletter often will have a 30 to 40% response rate, is very common. They're annoying to set up, you have to get something like MailChimp, it takes a little bit of upfront set up an understanding, but it is absolutely worth your time to have a newsletter, and to be writing one at least every year, or I try to do them quarterly.

[Dan] Well, I wanted to just jump in quick and say, per our earlier discussion, newsletters have been one of the longest lasting promotional outlets. They have outlived five or six generations of other promotional systems, and they're still effective.

[Brandon] Yep. You can't… They can't be taken away from you. Again, you control that newsletter and you can send it to people. Now, there are ways to do this right so that you're not ending up in spam folders, and there is the fact that people generally get a lot of newsletters because unscrupulous sites sign you up for their newsletter knowing that it is one of the best marketing tools. I would recommend that you be upfront with your newsletter and not have one of those big pop-ups and not just automatically sign people up. Treat your fans with respect. These are the people who are going to be spreading the word-of-mouth. Give them a good return on their newsletter. Generally, a good tip is to put some exclusive stuff in the newsletter, like exclusive fiction, previews of things, or, oftentimes a newsletter promotion is very handy, and things like that. But point number three is, after you've done those things, then you can start to look at social media platforms. Understand that social media, we're still in the wild west in social media. It's less than 20 years that social media has been a force. Early in social media, new platforms would rise and fall every couple of years. That's stopped happening, and big platforms have started to get a foothold, but what we found is that people tend to calcify on their given platform, and, like, you'll find Facebook and Twitter having this problem, they don't pick up new people very often. The people who were active on them stay active, but they don't pick up the new people. The new people go to a new generation of platform and are there. So you can drive yourself mad trying to be on all the platforms and reach all the people. I would recommend doing what Erin has said. Find out where the discussions about your books are happening, or find out the social media platforms that are most easy for you to use, that you will be consistent on. Because being consistent is more important than being in the place that is the most popular. If you're in the place that's most popular, but you are bad on that platform, it's not going to do you as much good as having a nice Twitter timeline where you are consistently updating and are writing interesting things.

[Howard] One of the most powerful things about social media, and, again, Erin mentioned this with regard to word-of-mouth, is the idea that other people are talking about your work. I've had people say, "Howard Tayler is writing the finest hard science fiction in the market today." That is not something I would ever dream of saying about myself. People are not going to believe it if I said about myself. But if someone else says it, I can retweet it and say, "Thank you. You are very kind." Now I have accomplished some promotion and expressed an opinion or amplified an opinion about my work that I could not have done myself. The social aspect of it is key. I can't just shout my brand into a void, I have to participate in a discussion.

[Brandon] Yeah. Knowing what your social media is trying to do is another thing to think about. During the years when blogs were a big deal, becoming a platform writer was a thing you could do. John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow both kind of broke out as platform writers, where they were having a big platform where they were writing really interesting things and people work coming to them for the other things that they were writing. Also, they started writing books and selling to that audience. Harder to do now than it used to be. You can still do it. But that's very different from, for instance, my social media presence. Because I have the luxury of having a large audience already. My social media platform does not have to draw new readers. My social media platforms are there for existing readers to get information that they want. That's a very different type of social media platform. Like, my Twitter is very different from Howard's. If you want to read a Twitter that you're just going to have fun with, go to Howard's Twitter. Right? If you want to know specifically about what Brandon is doing, that's the reason to go to my Twitter. I'm not going to entertain you on my Twitter. I don't have to. But I will probably entertain you on Reddit, where I'm posting still mostly about my books, but in much more expensive ways and doing updates and things like that, because I'm on Reddit and I'm just there as part of that community. It was very easy for me to do updates on Reddit that are interesting and engaging for me to write an interesting to the people who are going there. So I have made a focus in the areas where I am most likely to write good content.

[Dan] Now, that kind of leads into… I know that we still wanted to talk about targeting your audience, but I'm afraid at this point we have to can-of-worms that for a future episode, because it sounds like effective promotion is something we could talk about forever. So we promise we will come back to this at some point in the future.

[Dan] But this episode is wildly over time, and we need to cut it off now, with a little bit of homework from Brandon.

[Brandon] So, this can actually tie into that targeting your audience thing. Which is, I would recommend you take the authors that you read and go see what their social media presences look like. Because you can learn a lot by looking at what different people are doing and seeing what you think is effective. Take that author and kind of… You're going to have to kind of lump them in groups based on their sales and their awareness of them in the market, and see what kind of responses they're getting on various social media platforms. Use this to kind of start building an idea for yourself how you would want to approach this. These are things you can start while you're not published yet. You can spend too much time on them, so don't do that. But be watching what people are doing and be thinking about this.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.7: To Series, or Not to Series

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/14/16-7-to-series-or-not-to-series/

Key Points: One-offs, when an editor rejects book one, you can send them a different one. But a series can become a blitz. Make your choice deliberately. In short fiction, you may want to put the stories about a world in different publications to get a larger audience interested. You may also want to think about themed collections instead of eclectic collections. Reflections from Schlock Mercenary: Point 2, don't assume people are going to read the whole series, write each book as if it will be their entry point. And make sure there is an ending you can live with. Think about whether you want to be a series person, or a one-off person. You might use the model where there is a common universe, with different stories and some continuing characters. When you are considering a series, trilogy, or whatever, think about what else you want to do with that universe or world, and whether or not that means you need to keep the status quo or not. Consider artistic versus business decisions.

[Season 16, Episode 7]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, To Series, or Not to Series.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm 20 books into a series I'm done with.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Yay, Howard.

[Dan] [garbled] Howard. Thank you for flexing on us.

[Dan] We're going to talk about series. This is part of the ongoing business class that Brandon is running. So, we're talking about the business side of series. Brandon, what are those business considerations when you're thinking about whether something should be a standalone or a series?

[Brandon] So, there's a lot that plays into this. It is one of the early decisions are going to have to make, particularly if you're a novelist, but even in short fiction. Because… Let me share a story. I might have shared it before on the podcast. But when I was breaking in, one of the things that I learned early on, or I thought I learned, was that I shouldn't ever write a second book in a series. This is because I was submitting books, traditional publishing back in the day, and if an editor rejected the first book of a series, I couldn't very well send them the second book of the series. But I could send them a new book from a different series. What I was looking for and starting to get were these kind of nice rejections, where they're like, "You know, this isn't for me, but I kind of like some things about it. What else do you have?" I could send that person book 1 of something else. So I got very good at writing a different book with every… A different series with every book I was writing. Well, in the meantime, Naomi Novik was writing the Temeraire novels. We were breaking in right around the same time. She wrote four… Three or four books in this series unpublished and put all her eggs in this basket. The advice you should write something new with every book would have been bad advice for her because when she sold that book and the editor said, "What else do you have?" She was able to say, "Actually, I've got two more done and an outline for several more." That actually made the publisher go all in on Naomi's books. I remember the publishing blitz that they did when they released her books. It was amazing. I'd never seen anything like it before for a new author. Three books came out, one a month, in three different months. Everyone was like, "What? A new author? One book a month? This is insane." It was presaging what became one of the best ways to break in during the Indy era, which is to save up a few books and then blitz. So that your releasing very quickly, so that people can suddenly been. Naomi Novik went from nobody to one of the biggest established names in fantasy in the process of three months, because publishers just went all in on those books. So it isn't as easy a choice or a decision as I had assumed it was. There was a branching path here. The more I've published in the more I become part of the business, the more I realize that there are lots of different decisions you can make here, none of which are bad, but I do think you should be thinking about and maybe making deliberately.

[Dan] I… If I remember correctly, Naomi crushed you in the Campbell award the first year, right?

[Brandon] Yeah. Absolutely crushed me.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And deservedly so, right? Like, there was no… I would not have voted for me with her, because her books were great and there were three, and you knew she was going to be a major force in the industry. Who knew about me with my one wacky little book?

[Dan] Yeah. So, I love this question. One of the things that Erin brought up as we were preparing for this episode is that she thought at first maybe she wouldn't have much to contribute, and then she thought, well, actually I do have several stories that maybe could turn into series. Erin, what are the questions you ask yourself as you are looking at your own work and trying to decide should I continue this or try to turn it into a series?

[Erin] I think that, to be honest, it's not a completely business first decision in my case. A lot of it is about exploring the worlds that I'm really passionate about, and, because I tend toward short fiction, just as a natural tendency, there's not… There's only so much you can encompass. So you come up with all this world, and then, you're like, here is one moment in the world. Maybe I should have another moment? And a third moment! Where I do think about things, and this is more on the business side, is, okay, now I have a second thing. Do I go back to the person who published the first story in that world? Do I want to try to get a new audience interested in this world by putting it somewhere else? To try to bring in new people who might then go back and find my first thing? Unlike with novels, where you're probably going to find it at the bookstore no matter who is publishing it, stories depend a lot on who the publisher is. So one of the cool things in the short fiction world is you can try to plan out a little bit and say, like, "Okay. This particular version of this story has a more science fiction-y angle, so maybe that's a Clarkesworld. This one maybe is more of an F&SF." And get more people interested in the work that you're writing, which, part of a series is really trying to capture people's attention for the long-term.

[Brandon] I would think, though I could be wrong here, that a consideration here is also the inevitable collection that you're going to put together. Because if you have books on a… Or stories on a theme, a collection is going to work, I've found, somewhat better if you can release a themed collection rather than just a… This goes into branding. Your name should be the brand that's going to sell this collection, but I've released one collection of short fiction. It was all fantasy stories set in the same universe. Because of that, it did better than expected. Because the fans of that culture… I call it the Cosmere, that universe, were able to pick up an entire book knowing what was in there and it wasn't going to be just completely eclectic. However, there are times when I have bought a book, wanting it to be eclectic, because I want to have a different experience with every story. In that case, I go look for one that is just collections of an author's stories through a time., Knowing I'm going to get something with a lot of just diversity in story type. So I do think that this is a business consideration. It doesn't have to be the driving force behind what you write, but it certainly behind the scenes as you build your collection of stories, deciding how you're going to market them.

[Howard] I'm… Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] I'm going to pause for the book of the week is what I'm going to do. Then I'm going to let Howard say the brilliant thing he was about to say. So, my very favorite book series, I have talked about this multiple times on the podcast before, is The Saxon Chronicles from Bernard Cornwell. I'm delighted to report that a few months ago, the 13th and final book in that series has come out. This is a series of historical fiction that charts kind of the creation of England as a united kingdom that covers the entire island, and how King Alfred the Great and his children and grandchildren kind of formed all the disparate little kingdoms into one single nation. It's wonderful. Bernard Cornwell is a fantastic storyteller and a great writer. This has been years coming. So it was just an absolute pleasure for me to have this final book to cap off my very favorite series. So if you never read it before, the very first one in the series is called The Last Kingdom. It's got a BBC series as well. But the one that just came out, the final book, is called The Warlord.

[Dan] Now, Howard, what were you going to tell us?

[Howard] Oh, I feel really bad because Dan said, "And then we'll go to the smart thing Howard was going to say."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The thing Howard was going to say is I could spend an entire 45 minute Writing Excuses super episode talking about the decision process for how to create each new book of Schlock Mercenary. I'm going to try and distill that into a couple of key points. Point number one, the first book is terrible. The art is bad, it's full of dad jokes, and I had no idea how my intrinsic biases were negatively affecting the stories that I was trying to tell. I had no clue. So fairly… I say, fairly early on… About a decade ago, I stopped telling people, "Oh, you should start at the beginning." I said, "You know what, go ahead and start at book 3." The decision… That decision meant that every time I wrote a book, I checked all of my assumptions, if you will, at the door, and asked myself, "Who are the characters that I'm going to be using in this book? How can I introduce them anew to the reader, assuming that this becomes the book that a reader picks up first?" Because I will never make a living at this if everybody has to buy my first book before they get to number 13. The third piece, the third decision piece, was the realization that the larger this series gets, the less people want… The less willing people are to commit to consume it. Because it's huge. It's 20 years of daily, every day daily comic installments. It's ginormous. Yes, it's 20 years of my life, and so it's allowed to be big. But that's a lot to ask anybody to bite off. So, we decided about five years ago it had to come to the end, and whatever end that was, it needed to be an ending where whatever I do next, even if it's in the same universe, whatever I do next needs to be something that people can pick up with zero knowledge of the existing Schlock Mercenary universe. As I said, I could talk for hours about the individual decision points. But those three pieces, the first book was not fantastic, each book needed to be its own starting point, and it has to end satisfactorily and completely without destroying the universe because I still want to write Schlock Mercenary things, I just don't need you to know what Schlock Mercenary is before you pick them up.

[Erin] I would say, this is a little bit of a side note from that brilliance, but thinking back to what Brandon was saying about sort of short fiction and collections, eclectic collections versus sort of getting everything in one world, I think that's true of novels as well. I think, getting back to what we were talking about in our last episode about branding, I think you can also kind of brand yourself as like a series person, like, when you sit down to read so-and-so, like, you're going to get a lot, you're going to get like a 20 year, you're going to get a deep dive. Or, there are other authors who are like, "Everything I do is a one-off." Every time you're going to get the same style but a completely different type of world and a completely different type of narrative experience. I think that's something to think about, what you want for yourself for your career, do you want to be a series person, a one-off person, as opposed to kind of just letting it happen.

[Brandon] I think that this… This can… They both have advantages and disadvantages. One of the biggest boosts to my career is the fact that I set all of my fantasy novels in the same universe. This was during a time where that was not necessarily… I mean, people have done this all through the history of storytelling. But it was not a selling point, for the most part, through most people's careers. King… Steven King did it and different authors have done it. I happened to be doing this the same time that the MCU launched. Right? My first book came out in 2005, the MCU launched in 2007, I believe it was, and suddenly, the MCU was getting big, when I had basically the same sort of model in my epic fantasy, where I had a bunch of different stories that were all connected with some continuing characters moving between planets and worlds. What this did is it gave me the same sort of boost that the MCU got where the series that may be a little lesser-known or people are a little less likely to try out or things like that got the boost of everyone knowing, "Oh, but it's connected to the whole thing. If I like this other thing, some of the things I love are going to be in this lesser-known story." What it does is it really makes it a lot easier for me to launch a new book series by saying, "This is a Cosmere." It's going to focus on this and it's tied into this whole big thing that I'm doing. The core fan base starts… I've got like three levels of branding. There's branding on the series, there's branding on the name, and there's the branding on half of my work is this larger universe. It's been an enormous help in marketing.

[Dan] I want to take a slightly different direction for our final few words here. One of the choices that I make, one of the things I look at when I'm deciding if something needs to be a series or not, is deciding what else I'm going to do with that universe, with that world, and if that means I need to keep its status quo. What I mean by that is, for example, Mistborn is a great example of this. The story you were telling with that trilogy is the story of changing the world irrevocably. More so than a lot of dystopias. Dystopia does this, but Mistborn in particular. What that means is after you finished that trilogy, if you had wanted to… Well, and you did, want to continue dealing with that world, you couldn't use those same characters and you couldn't use that same kind of style and world and culture that you had established and the people fell in love with. You found other ways to do that with the follow-up series. But, for example, with the role-playing game tie-in, with the board game tie-in, those necessarily are not continuations of the story, they are kind of infixes to the story you already told.

[Brandon] So this is a good… We haven't talked a lot in this series about when you make artistic decisions versus business decisions. I've often said, Erin said in a previous episode something like this, that I think while you're writing the stories, artistic concerns should be primary. We're not talking about those in this series, but it should be in the back of your brain that it's all right to make bad business decisions for artistic reasons. Because we are storytellers who want to tell a specific story. When I came in with the pitch for the original Mistborn series which ended with an irrevocable change to the status quo, the publisher told me this was a bad idea and recommended I not do it. I did it anyway. They thought this was a terrible idea. This was Tom Doherty, this wasn't my editor. This is the head of the company, who said, "This is probably disastrous for your career. You should not do this. Because if this series takes off, you are limited to three books. You're going to have to completely rebrand the series for the next books in the series, and they are just not going to sell as well. They never do." I made artistic decisions that I wanted to do this. Then I leaned into them business-wise. I said, "One of the selling points of the Mistborn trilogy is that it is a complete trilogy, that you know you have an ending." I think artwork is stronger when there's an ending to it. I then tried to do the best with the business that I could, and I think it has certain advantages by having different eras of the series. But I made that as an artistic choice, not a business choice. Then I made the business adapt to it, rather than the other way around.

[Dan] That's, I think, a very smart way of handling that. Lots of different series… You look at my own, the Partials series, that is about the end of a status quo. Where is the Mirador series, I could write Mirador novels for the rest of time, because the status quo never changes. Extreme Makeover, which I think is my best book, will never have a sequel, because…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I made that choice early on that that's how the world is going to end.

[Dan] Anyway. We have come to the end of our episode. We have a bit of homework that were going to get from Howard.

[Howard] Right. This is leaning a little into the art side of it. Hopefully, you, fair listener, have a favorite series. Something that you've read or watched or otherwise consumed that you are familiar with. Here is your homework. For each installment of that series, whether it's a book or an episode of TV or a movie, write down what questions were asked and what questions were answered. Do this so that over the course of the whole series you can see the question-and-answer dialogue that takes place between the creator and the consumer. You're doing this so that when you have to ask yourself, "Oh, no, am I holding back too many of my best ideas for later in the series?" you have an answer. Because some of those question-and-answer moments in the series that you love, some of those may be your favorite things and they didn't show up until six books in. So, there's your homework. Question-and-answer, documented over the course of a series that you love.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.6: Building Your Brand

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/07/16-6-building-your-brand/

Key points: Branding for your audience, staking a claim in the writing industry. What do you do really well that makes you stand out? How can you avoid being locked into a series? Make the fans follow your writing, not the series. What makes your writing unique? See what people are responding to. Your brand isn't necessarily the whole soul of your writing. The articulation of your brand isn't necessarily the message you want the fans to internalize. Take the highlights of your work, and turn them into pitches. Expand your brand into different genres.

[Season 16, Episode 6]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Building Your Brand.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. We are back here in our intensive course on publishing business, and we're going to talk about branding and what kinds of things we need to think about. What do we mean by that, Brandon?

[Brandon] So, this is something that I have come to realize I think about a lot more than most of my writing friends. Which is, when I was breaking into the business, and even still, a major idea in my head was how to brand myself to my audience. How to stake a claim on a part of the writing industry or part of the continuing dialogue or great discussion that is the publishing… A genre. Right? I very deliberately wrote a bunch of books and decided what it was that I did really well that made me stand out. I made that a major feature of my career. What this allowed me to do… My goal from the get go, I looked at the careers of a bunch of different authors and I identified some that… Whose career path I didn't want to follow because they would often talk about being locked into a series, a certain series, and being only… People only wanting to read that one series from them. Then there are other authors, Neil Gaiman is a great example of this, that whatever that author wrote, the fan base went and read. I realized Neil Gaiman had done a really good job of branding Neil Gaiman as a writer, rather than branding Sandman or branding any other thing, it was whatever Neil writes, people are going to go read. Nora, N. K. Jemisin, has done a really good job of this recently in saying this is what she writes and the feel of her writing and whatever she puts out, we're going to go read. Because we are into her writing, rather than branding to a series. Whereas some places that this happens the other way, a lot of YA writers I noticed accidentally fall into the series becoming the brand. So it becomes very hard, for instance, for Suzanne Collins to get another series or get people interested in something else. I have some other YA friends whose names I'm not going to mention because I don't know if they want me talking about this with them, but have released other books, not in a series that they are well-known for, and they just vanish. Even though these authors can demand huge advances and lots of attention when they write in their series, anything else they try just fails. I think this is partially a branding failure rather than their other books not being good, because I've read some of these other books, and indeed, they're very good.

[Dan] Yeah. I suspect that some of that, with YA specifically, is just the nature of the YA audience that has a very specific kind of blockbuster mentality that we don't see often in others. But this branding issue is definitely there. I've done this myself. The first year that I was on twitter, my twitter handle was John Cleaver. It was Howard, I think, that finally convinced me to change that out and become Dan Wells instead and really work about building my own brand as me. It's especially… I feel kind of especially stupid for doing that, because in terms of my actual books, I did make a strong effort to make sure that my second book series was as wildly different from my first as possible. So even if you're thinking about this in some areas, it's still an easy mistake to make in others.

[Brandon] Indeed. One of the things that really helped me in this was deciding what made my writing unique. Another… Pointing back to N. K. Jemisin, this is something very easy to see in others. Sometimes it's hard to see in yourself. What does Nora write? Nora writes stories that are in the traditional fantasy tradition but that are using modern literary techniques borrowing from literary fiction. Kind of making a blend where you have the characterization and pacing of traditional genre fiction and the literary styling of literary fiction, and kind of marrying these two together. Each book or series she writes finds a different way to marry a different type of literary flourish with a different type of science fiction or fantasy. The series that won all the awards was, hey, she's going to do a really cool magic system and marry it to somehow second person voice, right? Which is just like so literary, and it worked. For me, my branding, the thing that I did, is I said, "I'm going to be the magic system guy." I was writing a new world with every book I was writing during my early years. I really fell in love with writing these kind of rule-based magic systems, kind of sometimes called hard fantasy. I don't know if that term actually really works. But the idea is that you're going to get a really interesting take on magic that's very rule-based in every book of mine you pick up. I was able to pick that because I had written a bunch of books and known whatever I end up writing, this is something that I just naturally put into every book that I try.

[Erin] I would say, if you don't know that about yourself, you might be like, "I don't know, I'm just trying to write the things. What is my brand?" As you start getting work out there, either publicly or even with your own critique groups, is to look at what people are responding to. Sometimes you can learn your brand by having sort of other people put a mirror up to you. I, for example, I write a lot of racy dark work. I don't know that I would describe myself that way naturally, but when people over and over again are like, "Oh, no. Erin, I'm so excited about your next racy, dark thing," I'm like, "Oh. Maybe that's…"

[Chuckles]

[Erin] "A thing that I can cut out for myself." If you're all saying this and it's not in opposition to what I write, why not embrace it? I would also say some parts of your brand, you can't control. As a black writer, there are going to be certain maybe assumptions or things that people might put on you based on who you are that affects the way they see your writing. So not everything that someone sees in you, you have to necessarily claim as your brand. But it's good to know how people see you and decide what of that you want to maybe lean into and what of that you want to push back against.

[Brandon] That's really smart. One of the things that I want to mention that that kind of jogged in my brain, Erin, is this idea that the brand doesn't have to represent the whole soul of your writing. Honestly, like when I branded myself as the magic system guy, I made some deliberate choices on that. But in reality, behind the scenes, I'm like, "I really don't want to be the magic system guy. I want to be the really great characters guy." Right? That's what I think every writer wants. I want to be known for writing great stories. I don't want to be known for this little niche. But the way that marketing works, the way that writing works, the way that the minds of fans work is they kind of notice things that make you stand out. Hopefully, we're all doing great characters. So the fact that you do great characters who… Like, one of the things that's really great about Mary Robinette's writing is she has mature relationships between adults who legitimately love each other. That's not going to be in every book she writes. But it's a hallmark of her career. She's like, "I'm going to show how relationships can actually function." Because a lot of writers write dysfunctional relationships, because that's a source of conflict. Where she has actively said, "You know what, good relationships are also a source of conflict. I'm going to deal with these things." It's a hallmark of her writing. Doesn't mean that great characters aren't, but that's something that stands out. So the thing that stands out about you doesn't necessarily always have to be the thing that you're thinking of as the soul of your writing.

[Howard] There's a marketing 101 concept here that I've talked about before, but I think I need to reiterate. That's the idea that the articulation of your brand… I'm the magic system guy… The articulation of your brand is not the message that you actually want to be received at the subconscious level by the market. The subconscious level that you as a writer who wants to make money want to deliver to the market is, and I'll use my own name because of course I'll use my own name, "Oh, Howard Tayler. That's the guy who I buy all of his books." Okay? That's the message. Now, I can't come out and say, "I'm Howard Tayler. I'm the guy you want to buy all your books from." Now, part of my articulated brand is humor, and self-deprecatory humor. So I can actually get away with saying that thing and people will laugh. But that's not the same as the message being internalized. So what you need to do when you are building your brand is understand that at one level there are the things that you are articulating about yourself. I write jokes, I write humor that's in dialogue rather than situational comedy type things. Science fiction. I'm kind to people online. I try not to be a jerk. These sorts of things that I articulate about myself are things that get distilled down to the reader, and as they absorbed them, some of those readers will be like, "Oh, my gosh, it's a Howard Tayler thing. I just want that because I love his stuff." Others will be, "Oh. It's all silly. I don't love it. I'm not buying his stuff." The value there is that… And again, this is marketing 101 stuff… You really don't want your brand being in the wrong place. I don't want people who hate funny books to pick up my stuff and then be mad. Because now someone has a super negative association with me, which is that I wish I hadn't spent money on Howard's book.

[Dan] We, much later than usual, are going to stop for a book of the week.

[Howard] Sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's okay. I'm actually throwing this back to you, Howard. Because you have our book this week.

[Howard] I do. I do. The book is called Blowout by Rachel Maddow. You're probably familiar with Rachel Maddow's brand as a commentator on MSNBC. Blowout is a nonfiction exploration of the petroleum industry written by Rachel Maddow, and she narrates it. I loved the book. I mean, as a… At a high level, the meta of we have a commentator who is doing a book and this is an extension of the brand, that's all well and good. Understanding the way the petroleum industry influenced current events, influenced historical events, is not something that I had in my head until I read that book. It was fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. The audiobook is narrated by Rachel Maddow, which, she's easy to listen to and that's part of her brand.

[Dan] Okay. So that is Blowout by Rachel Maddow.

[Dan] Now, we don't have much time left, but I do want to ask a question. I love the way this discussion has been going, I love what Erin said about having other people help you find your own kind of brand identity. One thing that was pointed out to me several years ago that I had never intentionally done and had not seen on my own is that all of my main characters in all of my books across the six or seven different genres that I write, the one thing they all have in common is that they are all obsessed with an expert in some very specific niche of knowledge. I had not done that on purpose, but it's absolutely true. Even in my historical fiction that came out earlier last year. So, what I have not yet figured out is how I can take that piece of knowledge and turn it into a useful marketing message like Howard was just saying. So, Brandon, what advice can you give us of how to turn your brand into a marketable thing?

[Brandon] So, one of the things to do is watch… Erin mentioned this… What are people saying about your work. What are they saying as the highlights of your work? You, as a writer, are going to have to come up with pitches to sell your work. When you are sitting on a panel, when you are even just writing a blog post, you're going to have to give a three sentence pitch on each new thing you do. One of the ways that you can start making this a brand for you is incorporating these things into your pitches. So that your fans know how to talk about your books. If you were provided these pitches, then they will kind of start picking up on them. It's kind of this feedback, back and forth.

[Erin] I would say panels… The mention of panels made me think that if you are somebody who goes to… Who's able to go to conventions, they're a great way to… If you're able to speak on panels, number one, see where people place you is a good way… Sometimes it's random, but if you're on like 10 panels in a row about like unreliable narrators, maybe that's a thing that people associate with you. Two, you can try to ask for panels or on a panel, like, talk about the things that are within your brand or that mesh up with your brand.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's also a great way to kind of try out some ways of talking about it. Because most people are just going to absorbed the panel and go about their merry way. So you can kind of hone your messaging a little bit while trying to convey information about writing as a whole.

[Brandon] You can also kind of expand your brand. If you want to put something like I am the magic system guy, right? Well, magic system guy really focuses on fantasy. I wanted to write science fiction, and even I wanted to write some detective stuff. I thought a lot about how do I expand this to match what I'm doing in these other genres. So I actually have a couple of brandings. One is the Cosmere. I have an interconnected universe. So when I started doing my science fiction, I'm like I'm going to be doing a little bit of that. But there's also this idea that more than magic system, it's like these rule-based speculative elements that I was able to apply to my detective fiction. Because it's a… There's a magic system, even though there's no magic in the world. The way that the person approaches solving crimes is very like one of my fantasy novels, even though there's no actual magic involved. So being able to expand that brand and know how you can talk about these things in different genres is also really handy. Mary Robinette's another good example of this. Instead of branding as historical fantasy, she's now branding as I take some sort of cool historical item and then I change one thing. She's doing like a larger alternate history sort of thing rather than just doing fantasy. Now she's got science fiction in that and things like that. So you can still have… You can expand these things and make them umbrellas and cover a lot of things. Dan, you're… You talk about you've got specialists in your stories. Well, I mean, specialists, a lot of different types of genres use specialists. If you could find a way to say, "I do deep dives into topics…" Michael Crichton made his whole career about a team of scientists get together and have a problem. That works in a medical thriller as well as a science fiction as well as… He did the great train robbery, which is a heist, all with a team of specialists get into shenanigans.

[Dan] That is a very good point. Lots of good things to think about here. We encourage you all to work on this.

[Dan] We're going to give you some homework to help you work on this for yourself. Brandon?

[Brandon] Yeah. So your homework is to do something Erin was talking about, actually, is to go to your friends. You may not have readers yet, you may be newer, you may not have readers you don't know, but you hopefully have a writing group or you have alpha readers and beta readers. You have been sharing your work with them. Have them make a list. Impose upon them, hopefully it's not too much of an imposition, but say, "What are…" Ask them to write down the things that stand out for you as a writer in their mind. Do this with a couple of people. Because it's so hard to see in yourself. See what different connections and themes are showing up time and time again in those lists that your friends are making.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.5: Pros and Contracts

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/31/16-5-pros-and-contracts/

Key Points: What's in a contract? And what do publishers try to slip in that shouldn't be there? First, for novels, contracts in the US are usually for life of copyright. Short fiction is first printing. Around the world, audiobooks, it may be a certain amount of time, with renewals. Do look for the reversion clause, too! Try to raise the threshold of sales. It should not include perpetual irrevocable rights. Second, watch for ancillary rights. Exactly what rights is the publisher buying. In the US, for books, North American English rights, and maybe North American Spanish rights. If they are strong in the UK, you may want to sell world English rights. Be prepared for the publisher to want audio rights, too. You should try to keep translation rights, film rights, and stage rights. Shared worlds are different. Tie-ins and work for hire are also different. If you want a lawyer to look at the contract, make sure it is someone who is familiar with literary entertainment contracts. Finally, expect to have a right of first refusal clause, but avoid noncompete clauses. Make the right of first refusal as narrow as possible. Also, avoid signing away your series rights. Do try to include a clause making the contract binding on successors, assigns, and heirs. Try to strike any noncompete clauses, or at least get a narrow definition of what a competing work is.

[Season 16, Episode 5]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Pros and Contracts.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] We are going to be talking today about contracts. This will be the deepest dive we can do in the next 15 to 18 minutes about what does a publishing contract actually look like, what does it involve, and what do you need to look out for.

[Brandon] Yeah. A lot of these things are just… It's interesting because on one hand, publishing contracts are fairly standard. Right? There's a standardization and there's certain things that are in them. Our industry has been around longer than any of the other major entertainment industries. Because of that, the contracts kind of have been around a lot longer and they've been refined. But at the same time, things consistently get… Publishers try to slip things in consistently that they should not be putting into those contracts. Beyond that, there is some legalese to how a contract looks like that when I got my first one, I was glad that I had an agent to go through and explain it all to me. So I thought we would take a week, an episode, and just talk about what some of these things are and what they look like and hopefully make them less intimidating to writers as they are hopefully getting given some of these contracts. So let's go ahead and start with the things that are generally in a publishing contract. This is one thing I would say that… The first thing is, in America, unfortunately, contracts are usually for life of copyright for novel contracts with big publishers. I don't know how it works in short fiction. Mary Robinette, is this common? Is it going to be life of copyright also? Like, I would assume it has to be so they can keep the magazine in print forever.

[Mary Robinette] Well, so the interesting… One of the interesting things is that they'll get the right for the first printing, but then it's usually specified very clearly in the contract that they get to print it in that one magazine and that is the only place that they get to use it. If they want to do an anthology, they have to come back to you.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which allows you to sell reprints. You do not get to sell reprints with novels.

[Brandon] You don't. This is… This was… This was something that was fine in previous eras because novels went out of print when it became too expensive to warehouse copies and sell a few enough copies. So if your sales declined, you got the book back. You could then sell it again and hopefully get a relaunch of things like that. Modern contracts, because of the way epublishing works, a lot of books just never go out of print by those old things. So it is a big kind of source of contention with a lot of the indy published people that they don't like the idea that it's life of copyright. I think that's a valid argument to be making, but it is standard in the industry. It's not standard in, for instance, the UK. All of my contracts around the world get renewed very commonly as they run out after a certain amount of time. This happens in Germany. We just renewed with one of the publishers there. It happens often in audiobooks. My audiobook in America just came up and we had a chance to renew the contract or not. So the only really big place that I have life of copyright is the main place in the main contracts that I do which is with New York. But that is not a thing that you see and should raise red flags in that you're getting taken advantage of or rather we're all getting taken advantage of and perhaps as authors we should try stamping this out, but it is a common thing in contracts to see.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] The next thing that's going to be in there is it's going to…

[Mary Robinette] Can I…

[Brandon] Go ahead, Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, just life of copyright. One thing that I wanted to mention with that is that there is something called a reversion clause. A reversion clause is that if your publisher doesn't meet certain conditions, the threshold of sales, payments… There's a number of different things, that the rights will revert back to you. It's very important to make sure that your contract has a reversion clause so that there is a mechanism by which you can reclaim those rights.

[Brandon] As I said before, this is harder to have happen than it used to be. Maybe what you should be doing is raising those thresholds of sales that they need to meet. Some of my early contracts, which are still in force, right? Because I signed them before the e-book revolution happened, but they knew enough to get e-books in there. So they are for e-books. Say we have to sell, like, 50 copies or something like that. Which is just… They can put it on sale on Amazon for $0.99, and even if you're not a big author, they can sell that threshold. The old thresholds no longer are really… They really don't work anymore. But a lot of the contracts still have the old thresholds. So watching what your reversion language is and trying to get better reversion language is well worth your time. I got books back from Scholastic after… We weren't pleased with how they were doing there. But unfortunately, because of this language, there was no chance they would ever revert. Because my name is big enough that sales would trickle in, and they would get those 50 or 100 copies per pay period. So I had to write a big fat check to just buy them back, to get them back. Which is something you can also do.

[Dan] Yeah. That's what I had to do with audio rights for Active Memory, the third book in my cyberpunk series. Harper had the audio rights, but chose not to bring the third one to audio. So I eventually, after several years of arguing with them, just bought the rights back. I haven't had a chance to do anything with them yet. But I did not have a good reversion clause and they were able to sit on them for several years doing nothing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. In short fiction, you're going to be looking… The… Some of the language that you're looking for is making sure that it doesn't ask for perpetual irrevocable rights. Because if… And we've seen this happen before, unfortunately, in short fiction… If the market does something and you no longer want to be associated with that market, you may want to be able to pull your story from it. So you want to make sure that your contract has a good way to get out.

[Erin] Yeah. Or if the market goes on hiatus… Sometimes the market goes on hiatus and doesn't seem to ever be coming out, it's good to have something in your back pocket. I think one of the things to be aware of with short fiction is that it can feel… Like, you've already written the story, and the contract usually comes to you after. They're like, "We are going to take your story. Here is the contract." So it can feel like it's a done deal. Like there's no way anything could go wrong. But there's always a chance. Murphy's Law. So it's always good to have a plan and a contract that maybe you don't end up needing, but you still have it if you do.

[Brandon] So, another one of these things that you really want to pay attention to is what we call ancillary rights. It's sometimes listed in different ways in contracts, but you can find it by… Them… The contracts should limit what rights the publisher is purchasing. Meaning, for most cases for book contracts, you should be selling in America, North American English rights and maybe North American Spanish rights, are the extent and the full extent of what you should be selling, with the asterisks of some UK publishers that have US arms have a strong UK publishing arm, and in some cases, you may want to sell them your world English rights. That's like, for instance, Orbit in the US, it's very hard to not sell them world English, because they're a UK company that has started up a US arm in the last 15 years. They are acquiring for both of those. The other big one that has the asterisk on it is audiobook rights. Audio rights are worth big money now. They didn't used to be. When I broke into the business, audio rights, you would sell several dozen copies to libraries. Now, as I spoke about, my audio rights are almost 50% of my business. So publishers have certain mandates of, now that audio has become such a big deal, to not buy things without audio rights. You're going to have a fight if you want to keep your audio rights. It still can be done, but it's getting harder and harder and harder. But they should not be taking our translation rights, any film rights, or any stage rights. They will…

[Dan] There are some outlets right now, like, I know SerialBox insists on film rights as part of their thing.

[Brandon] Oh, really. Oh, well, they're doing…

[Dan] Yeah, I just learned that a couple of days ago, actually. I was very surprised.

[Mary Robinette] They are…

[Brandon] Aren't they doing [garbled] story things, though, on SerialBox a lot?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's a shared world. So their model is much… Their contract model is somewhat different than standard. It is also, because it is a shared world, there are things where you are unlikely to be able to sell those rights on your own anyway because you're a chapter in a novel.

[Brandon] Yes. Shared rights are a different thing and tie-in things and things like that. Like, when I sign a contract for the Wheel of Time, I was not looking at most of these things that we're talking about right now, because that was work for hire. That's it. That's a completely different ballgame. But your publisher, if you sell traditionally, is going to try, in my experience, to keep the film rights. All this means to them is… The film rights for authors generally, in my experience, cell because somebody in Hollywood reads a book, decides it's hot, and offers to buy it. I have very rarely been able to go to Hollywood in pitch something and sell it. You can. It does happen. But most of the time, they are coming to you. So if your publisher keeps the film rights, all it is is free money for them. Because the film rights will be 50-50 split between you and the publisher. The publisher… The personal come to you and say, "Hey, we want to option this." You'll be like, "Oh, the publisher has the film rights." They will go to the publisher and give them the same deal they were going to offer you and the publisher will send you half the money. You should not sell anything that gives these rights to the publisher on an author created property. It's gotta be one of your first lines you don't cross is that and translation rights.

[Dan] It used to be very common in YA, for some of the big publishers, such as HarperCollins, to retain film rights and then market them aggressively. Aprilynne Pike, for example, when Wings came out, she had sold film rights to Disney before the book even came out because Harper was doing such a great job of marketing those. I don't think that they still do that. I don't know exactly how that has changed over the last eight years.

[Brandon] I will say that Joshua sold film rights on Alcatraz before the book came out and I got all the money and Scholastic didn't get any. So if you have a good agent, that's also… That also can happen. Often times, an author will have… Their agent will have a relationship with an agent in Hollywood. Hollywood's a completely different world. But a lot of times, you can have an agent in Hollywood who is as aggressively marketing things as the publisher. But I will take that as say… As a sign that rule number one is whatever Brandon or anybody tells you is going to have exceptions. It's only going to be the experience of that one author. In my experience, none of my publishers have done a good job of ever doing anything with any of their film rights that they've had from other authors I've known at those publishers.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you mentioned that I just want to jump in on, because you said Hollywood is completely different. It is important to understand that each area has their own terms of art. So when you are looking for someone to represent you, you want to make sure that you've got someone… Like, these… If you take a publishing contract and you show it to a contract lawyer in any other field, they will look at it like you are high and why would you sign this thing?

[Brandon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] But these are terms of art that are understood within the industry, and if you… And would be handled appropriately if anything came to litigation. So you want to make sure that you are dealing with an entertainment lawyer if you are having a lawyer look over your things. Your agent should be familiar with these things and not worried. You should be fine. But if you are a belt and suspenders person who wants to have a lawyer look over it, make sure that they're an entertainment lawyer. Specifically, make sure that there someone who knows how to handle literature, because that is different from film.

[Dan] Awesome. Let's pause now for our book of the week, which, Mary Robinette, you are going to tell us about Middlegame.

[Mary Robinette] Middlegame by Seanan McGuire is this wicked twisty tale. I want to tell you so little about it, and also want you to read it, so we can shout at each other about it. I didn't know what the conceit was when I went in, and when I figured it out, it was so cool. So it's… It is again, it is about family, it is about magic, alchemy is real, and it's really, really good and will keep you guessing. I blew a deadline finishing this book.

[Dan] Fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Middlegame by Seanan McGuire.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

[Dan] All right. I wanted to ask Brandon when you were talking about ancillary rights, are you inclu… Is this a good time to talk about international rights, or is that…

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Coming up?

[Brandon] Nope. That's part of this discussion. So, for those who don't know, we have talked about it on the podcast before. The way that translation rights work for books… I'm not sure so much on short stories, but for books is you will sell the rights separately in each country and usually your agent will have a relationship with agents around the world. A sign that an agent is a good agent is that they will have these established relationships with other agencies in the local languages and those agencies will take all the books that the US agent acquires, and then try to sell them locally to their markets. This is really a great, an important source of income, for a lot of newer novelists who've just broken in. I know that I lived on some of these foreign rights sales back when I couldn't make a living just off of my US sales. I know Dan had a similar experience, that this can be the difference between going full time and not going full-time, is making some of this money. A lot of the agencies consider it a mark of pride that they're able to do this and to sell rights around the world for their authors. It doesn't happen for everyone. One of the things you have to understand is if it's not happening for you, there are some times where certain genres just do not sell as well internationally as other genres do. This is very common, for instance, in humor. Humor is so focused… It's so much harder to sell a humor piece in another language, because a lot of the humor just doesn't work. Local countries have their own sense… Styles of humor. But it is something you should try… You should retain in your contracts, regardless. Because you might as well have the shot at it of selling internationally.

[Dan, Erin] Yeah, and…

[Dan] Go ahead, please.

[Erin] I was going to say in short fiction, I think one of the big differences in short fiction and novels is that unless you have an agent anyway, because you write novels in addition, in short fiction, like, you're a one-person shop. You're your own agent, publish… You're dealing with… You're reading your own contracts and they're a lot shorter and easier to look at, although it is a good way to learn some of these terms of art because you have to look at everything yourself. But I will say that I've had short stories published in three or four languages, and actually what happens is, as long as you retain the right to do it, usually in short fiction, people will come to you and say, like, "I like your story," and, like, "I'm Italian and I want to translate it into Italian and give you a little bit of money." I'm like, "Yeah. Why not?" So long as you have the rights, then, you can say yes. So it's just something to check off and make sure that your… I think there's one or two magazines that do hold other language rights, but most will allow you to work directly with somebody in another country or translate into another language.

[Mary Robinette] You can actually pitch your stories… Submit your stories to foreign-language markets, which is a good way to start to build an audience. There's a couple of different databases out there of markets, foreign-language markets. One of the interesting things… Hello, colonialism… Is that when stories are going out of the US into another market, they will take responsibility for translating it. When stories are coming from another country into the US, the author usually has to translate it. There's a couple of different markets in the US that do translate. That is starting to shift. But for a very long time, we were really export only.

[Dan] I just wanted to say that, for me, because a ton… I would say a majority of my business is non-English, mostly Germany, and Latin America, but several others as well. Sometimes that does translate into significant money. I lived on Germany, and in fact in Germany, for several years. Latin America, on the other hand, while my books are huge there, I don't get a lot of money from there. But I still get… This goes back to what Mary Robinette talks about with shininess. The opportunity to travel to Peru or to Argentina or to Budapest or to any of these countries where my books are big but there's not a lot of money is still worth it to me. Because that is a cherished experience and I've got good friends and that shininess really comes into play there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I just got the Japanese translations of The Calculating Stars. It's in two volumes. Their tiny and adorable and I love them so much…

[Brandon] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] And can't read them at all.

[Brandon] Japanese books are the best. The translations. They're so good. And here's just a little tidbit. Science fiction sells better in Japan than fantasy. So keep an eye on your selling to Japan if you have a science fiction book. Science fiction by foreigners sells better than fantasy by foreigners, let me state it that way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] There is one other major topic I want to get to. We're going to kind of skip over royalties and advances. These are talked about quite a bit more. It's easier to find things about them. And indeed, there are some standardization's there. My royalties on my books change very little between my first published books and my later published books, because of some of these standardizations and things like that. However, one area I really want to cover is right of first refusal and noncompetition clauses. A few years back, all the major publishers started inserting really egregious noncompetition clauses into their contracts. I remember SFWA raising a big storm about it before I got one. I'm like, "Hey, this is what they were talking about." This is something that, as I talked to my agent, he said, "They try to do this periodically. A new boilerplate is made by the publisher that is what they're going to give to everybody. Then everybody throws a fit about it and gets the noncompetition clauses pulled out of them. Then they wait a few years, and they try it again." What they're trying to do here is to make it harder for an author to walk away from a publisher once that author has gotten very popular, and that author has been able to demand better terms by playing the field then they would be when they're a new author just writing their first books. So, they try very hard… This happens in our local market here in Utah, there are some regional presses that have had… In the past, have had very egregious noncompetition clauses because they're really worried about this. This is where the the thing we talk about, where the publisher is not your friend, comes into play. They will try to keep ahold of you and they will tell you… The publisher will tell you, "We're family. We want to be in the business together. That's why we're putting these sorts of things in there." When it's just going to limit your options later on. So you want to watch. It is all right to have a right of first refusal clause. It's very common. But you want it to be as narrow as possible. They will start with a "We have right of first refusal on your next work, whatever it is." You may be an academic writer who also publishes. That right of first refusal technically means that your fiction publisher gets to see your next dissertation piece on something. You should limit that right of first refusal on, if you can get it down to, the next book in the series you're writing. That is the ideal place for it to be for you as an author. Often, you can only get it down to your next work in the same media, meaning your next book for adults or your next epic fantasy book or something like that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think mine is something like… With… One of the things that I remember with The Glamorous Histories was that it was the next work of adult historical fantasy. So I could do other fantasy, not historical. To someone else, I mean.

[Brandon] That's an example of a really good clause. That's an agent who got a good clause put in there. To explain right of first refusal, this means that you have to show the book to your current publisher first, and basically, they get the first crack at making an offer and things like that. It doesn't mean you eventually have to take that offer. You can then go play the field and take it to other publishers and things like that. I'm not sure how the litigation plays out. I've been told sometimes that if you take a really bad deal from another publisher and your publisher has offered a much better deal, that could get you into a tricky legal situation. That's a question for an agent, not for me. But the reason right of first refusal is all right in this case is because if something is doing really poorly at your publisher, then you still have that option to go somewhere else with the rest of the series. The ones you really want to watch out for are clauses that let the publisher own the series rights. You should never sign this unless it's a work for hire or a series pitched by the publisher. Because then you could have a big falling out, walk away, and they own your characters. You'd say, "Wow. No. That clause would never be in a contract." I've seen that clause in multiple contracts.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Brandon] Sent to authors. Never to me. But I have seen that clause before.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Can I say one other clause that I want to encourage people to make sure is in their contract? It's something that shouldn't need to be in there. That's a clause that says that the contract signing is binding on the successors, assigns, and heirs, or at least successors and assigns. What this means is that if a giant publishing house gobbles up another publishing house, that all of the terms of your contract are still binding on the new publishing house. That they don't get to mess around, they still have to owe you all of the things that you were originally owed. They're still obligated to pay you.

[Brandon] [garbled] something related to a current thing in the news right now, regarding contracts [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] As we're recording this, we're in the middle of something called Disney must pay. We're talking to Disney about Alan Dean Foster. But it's not just Disney. There's… We're seeing this kind of thing happen in comics and a lot and other places. So, in US copyright law, unless there is something in the deal memo between the two companies that by each other, or one of them buys the other, that says, "Company A, you're still responsible for all of the obligations. We are in fact just buying the rights, but you're going to take care of all the obligations." Unless that language is in there, the way copyright law in the US is understood is that if you take on a contract, you also take on all of the obligations for that. That said, it is… What lawyers do is they take words and they make them mean the opposite of what they look like they mean. So having the successors and assigns in there is really a belt and suspenders kind of thing, but it makes it unequivocal. The other thing that it does is that it protects your heirs as well. So that when you pass, it makes it very clear that these rights go to your heirs. That's… Rather than leaving your book in limbo.

[Brandon] The last little topic on this is the noncompete causes. Mary Robinette, have you seen these during your tenure at SFWA pop up and things, where… These are language where the publisher will say, "The author won't write a competing work for another publisher while this contract is still in force." Things like that.

[Mary Robinette] We do see that. Like, I've seen them attempt to do that in my own contracts. The… Again, the way it's… The way we suggest approaching it is… First of all, get it struck, but if you can't, at least get it defined narrowly about what a competing work looks like.

[Brandon] Yeah. They showed up in my contracts and we did get it struck. But only after… It was like the fourth round of complaining about it that they took it out. These sorts of things… Noncompete is all very vague. As I understand it, like, there's lots of… [Garbled] there's a lot of baggage to noncompete in various legal terms and things. I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. But I would say be very careful about these clauses if that makes sense.

[Dan] Yeah. I have been burned by a noncompete in the past where I had to give up like none agreed upon YA contract because I learned that one of my other YA contracts included a noncompete, and I had to walk away from a deal, which was really painful. One thing, as you're thinking about this, and you're thinking, "Well, if the publisher is really just trying to earn my loyalty and keep me in house," just tell yourself, they're asking you to accept these contractual obligations to not work with another publisher. They would absolutely refuse any contractual obligation that prevented them from working with a different author. So if it doesn't go both ways, it's not really fair. Anyway, we need to wrap up. So, this has been really valuable, though, and I'm glad that we gave it the time that it needs, because aspiring authors need to know this stuff. Especially if it's the first contract you've ever seen.

[Dan] So, anyway, let's get some homework from Brandon.

[Brandon] Right. I'm going to let Mary Robinette jump in, too, because SFWA has a model contract that you can look through. Kind of familiarize yourself with some of these terms, and also to see what a good contract should look like. So, your homework is going to go to find these. Now, Mary Robinette, you said that there are… We know that there is a pretty new one focusing on model magazine contracts. We'll have that in the liner notes. Some of their novel ones are a little older, isn't that correct?

[Mary Robinette] That's right. The… You can find the archived samples on the SFWA site, which are from 1989 and include things about microfiche and whether or not you need to print out your manuscript. They are extremely old model contracts and are interesting as historical curiosities. The magazine contract is up-to-date. But more specifically, SFWA also has a contracts committee which looks at contracts and evaluates them for good practices. So if you are a SFWA member, that's something that you can absolutely take advantage of. The other thing… I'm going to plug my own Patreon. I got permission to step through one of my contracts, all the way through, clause by clause, for my Patreon supporters. That is recorded up there. I can't share it with the general Internet, but I did get permission to do it for my Patreon supporters. So if you want to see a contract and have someone walk you all the way through a 38 page novel contract, I have one that I can walk you through. Or that I did walk you through.

[Dan] Great. That is a really cool resource. I need to support you on Patreon, it sounds like.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Anyway. This has been Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] There's a certain amount of me going, "I don't know what that clause is."

[Laughter]

[Dan] You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.4: Networking

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/24/16-4-networking/

Key Points: Networking isn't just getting to know editors, agents, and publishers. It's also how you relate to the greater community, and how we all build that community. Volunteering lets you see how it works, and lets you shape things, too. Conferences, writing groups, anthologies. Remembering names! Don't just try to imitate other people, think about how you normally relate to people, and then expand on that. To meet an author, start with common ground, small talk, and pay attention to what is interesting about them. Don't just chase famous authors, watch for peers, too. Editors and agents? Remember, the work comes first. Be aware of the demands on their time. Pay attention to them as people. Let them pitch to you! What are they working on, what are they doing that is exciting to them? Be ready to talk business if they ask. Practice your pitch, your elevator talk. Make genuine friends, don't just follow your task lists. If you aren't comfortable, walk away.

[Season 16, Episode 4]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Networking.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're part of a five person network.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are going to talk about networking today. We are delighted to have both Erin and Mary Robinette with us, instead of switching back and forth like they have been throughout this course. Networking is a really valuable part of any business, and certainly also of our business. Brandon, this was… This is your class. This was your suggestion. What do you think we need to know about networking?

[Brandon] Well, I thought I was good at this until I met Mary Robinette.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Right? Like, for me, networking was getting to know the editors and keeping my little black book of editors and agents and publishers. Then I met Mary Robinette, who introduced me to the idea of networking with the greater community and building the community. I knew I wanted to have an episode on this in the Master Class, even though I don't consider myself an expert in this particular area.

[Mary Robinette] That's very flattering, Brandon. I think one of the…

[Brandon] Mary Robinette, you know everyone.

[Mary Robinette] Here, I'll put in a plug for being on the board of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. But in all seriousness, volunteering is one of the best ways to network within a community. It allows you to see how things are working. But it also allows you to shape… And this is not just the random plug that it seems to be. One of the things that you will hear across organizations is that when you want to get involved with something, one of the best things you can do is to volunteer. It's because of what I just said about the… Seeing how things… How the sausage is made, but also getting to shape the sausage. This metaphor is going downhill very fast.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Delicious shaped sausage. One of the things, because we also… I mean, one of the reasons that our podcast is what it is, is because of networking. We all met each other… I've known Brandon forever, but the rest of us met each other through various professional outlets and conferences and book tours and things that we started doing together.

[Brandon] How did we meet, though, Dan? We were both volunteering.

[Dan] We were both volunteering on a science fiction magazine. That's true. It was a student run magazine, so I guess it wasn't professional, but even so, we met through the industry. Then, because this podcast became what it became, we started doing our own writing conference, the Writing Excuses Retreat, that happens every year. Erin is the person that we have asked to kind of lead that, because we met her when she was a scholarship recipient at that conference. She's incredible, and impressed our socks right off.

[Mary Robinette] I met her…

[Dan] Now she's kind of running the show for us in a lot of ways. And, to bring this back around, the most valuable thing that our students get out of the conference that we run is not us, it's the opportunity to network with each other. We have seen so many writing groups form, we've seen anthologies come together, we've seen people get married because they met on our retreat. There's a lot of really great networking opportunities at every level of this industry.

[Howard] The value of networking is something that we could all anecdotally establish and reestablish and reestablish. I don't think it's in question. For me, the hardest part with networking is… Was, I'm better at it now. I had a terrible problem remembering names, and I've been to three or four GenCon Indy events where I was sitting next to Tracy Hickman, so there were bazillions of people at the booth. I kept introducing myself to people who I'd met last year. I realized every time I was doing that… One, every time you do that, oh, I should already have remembered your name and I've forgotten it and I feel bad, I'm actually micro-aggressioning all over them by having dropped them into this index space in my brain that says well, clearly, you weren't worth remembering. I hated that about myself. So I started trying to find ways to make my brain work differently. The tool that I picked was back in the before times when I went to restaurants all the time, looking at my server's name tag and using their name and conversation and just teaching myself new name, new face, might never see them again, but the name is important. I got a lot better at it.

[Mary Robinette] I dealt with the same problem from a totally different way, which is that I just removed the pieces of casual small talk from my conversation that would betray whether or not I remembered someone.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I no longer ever say, "So nice to meet you." I say, "It was good talking to you." The reason is because I, at this point, meet so many people, and have learned that my brain just… Like, I have made efforts. But I don't hold them… And I'm starting to learn that I have a little bit of face blindness. Not terrible, but enough that I will see someone that I have spent… Like, had dinner with. I met my assistant three times before I remembered her. Not as my assistant, I want to be clear.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But… One of those included a multi-hour dinner. So… It's… I find that the way my brain works, it's so contextual that I have better success at modifying my language than at modifying my brain. Erin, what are the tricks that you use? For networking and moving around in these social spaces?

[Erin] Well, the first thing I'd say is that what I love about both of the examples that you all just gave is that they're all about knowing yourself. I think that one of the biggest pitfalls of networking can be the assumption that there's like a way that you have to do it. You see other people networking in a certain way and think, "Well, I need to replicate that. This person's shaking everyone's hands in the place. I'm going to do that." Instead of thinking, like, how do you relate to people normally when you're not trying to do anything, when you're not trying to get anywhere careerwise, just in your life. And then figuring out how can you slightly expand that. So, like, how can you work on that in a bigger space? So I am a slightly extroverted person, which in the writing world makes me an extremely extroverted person.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I… And I love karaoke, so I will go to karaoke bars and talk to random people. So I know about myself that I'm okay with just going up to a stranger and making conversation and am pretty nonthreatening. So, because I'm a small person in my face somehow says I won't murder you, I'm able to go up to people and kind of just strike up conversations at a bar or at a reading, in a way that others may not be able to.

[Mary Robinette] And then later murder them.

[Erin] Mary Robinette…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Well, now it's going to be harder.

[Dan] Thriller warning.

[Laughter]

[The murder…]

[Howard] Later step in the business relationship.

[Mary Robinette] Murder them with song. Murder them with song. That's what I meant.

[Dan] I have personally been murdered by Erin's singing at least twice.

[Mary Robinette] But murdered in a good way.

[Dan] A very good way.

[Dan] I want to pause here for our book of the week. Mary Robinette, you have that. It is The City We Became.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, I do. Yes, I do have that book. So, The City We Became is N. K. Jemison's latest, as we record this. I went in not knowing what to expect. It is a love letter to New York and all of the boroughs. It is a coming-of-age story about a city. Also, intrigue and… Just, it's social commentary and action and magic and it's so good. Very much its own book. But it's also… One of the things that I love about it, and one of the reasons I suggested it for this, is that it is very much about building your community and found family.

[Dan] Wonderful. That is The City We Became, by N. K. Jemison.

[Dan] So, as we continue our discussion of networking, one thing that I know our listeners want to know is how to do it. How do they approach authors? How do they approach agents? How do they approach editors? Let's start with authors. Somebody wants to meet an author. How do they do that?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I always suggest is a lesson that I learned from my mom. Which is that when you go up to someone, her philosophy… She was an arts administrator. Her philosophy is that the other person is always more interesting than you are, and that when you begin a conversation, you shouldn't begin it with business. That you should begin it with some common ground, some small talk. Small talk exists to basically say, "Hello. I am not a threat." So, what I do when I'm approaching someone or when someone is approaching me, the thing that I try to do is find that common ground. So it's things like, "Oh, the elevators are running really slow." Or, "Man, how's the…" I will actually now, especially when we are all in Zoom land, say, "How is the weather where you are?" We have a conversation about weather. But it gives us this moment when we are people and we are not doing business. If I know anything about the author, or if I hear anything in their conversation that I am also interested in, I try to steer the conversation in that direction. Because saying the other person is more interesting than you are does not mean that you have to fawn over them. What it means is that you live in your own head. You experience it all the time. Anything that's coming from them is new and interesting. You can… Like, if I know someone has an interest in cars, I don't have an interest in cars, but we do have a 1952 MG-TD that I have a great deal of fondness for. So I steer the conversation towards classic cars. Then we have some common ground. Then, afterwards, I become the one person that they didn't talk about the publishing business with, and I stick out in their brain more.

[Dan] Brandon, what are your thoughts on this?

[Brandon] I just wanted to throw in the reminder that getting to know authors does not… The best thing that I did, early in my career, was identifying people that were writing great books who weren't published that I could make a bond with and that could be my… Ended up being, like, my friends for life in the business. I'm kind of talking about Dan. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But people like Dan, where both of us were in the same state in our lives. But Dan was writing these really great stories, and I knew Dan was somebody I wanted to know because I thought he made my writing better. Knowing people like that in your… Like, it doesn't necessarily… Networking with other authors doesn't have to mean going and approaching famous authors. It can mean knowing people from your community so you have a group to grow with as you all kind of start to learn these things together.

[Erin] Yeah. I'd say it's important to put as much time into like networking and building community even more with your peers as your heroes. Because ultimately your peers are going to grow with you in the field, but also, because in a group, there's… You don't want to be known as the person who's like looking for, like, oh, who can I network with that's going to like move me up in the world. You want to feel like you're genuinely interested in other people. A lot of… I'll say, I didn't set out this way, but I've gotten a lot of opportunities in my own career from friends and peers who I just met because I wanted to meet them and they were interesting and I liked what I knew they had written. But then, later on, as careers start to develop, you never know when somebody might be able to, like, throw something your way that they're not able to do, for example. So I think it's really important to, like, just care about the people around you and not get too much in your head because you're in a professional writing space and forget who you are as a person, which is a cool person who, theoretically, knows how to relate to at least some other people in the world.

[Dan] Yeah. That's my kind of primary source of author networking right now is throwing people jobs. If somebody comes to me about a freelance thing, I need someone to write this RPG adventure or whatever it is, and it's not a job I can take on, I will always try to suggest three or four other people instead. So instead of just saying no, I do this, I'll say, "Please go look at these people. They do excellent work and you may not have heard of them." That has been really valuable as a way of kind of spreading that love and building relationships both with the authors I'm recommending and with the publishers that are talking to me.

[Dan] Now, what about with editors? This is something that is maybe a little more immediately valuable to an aspiring author. How do you build networks, how do you get to meet editors and agents? Let's throw them both in there.

[Mary Robinette] So, ultimately, I'm just going to remind people that in terms of selling a book, it still comes down to the work.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] So, what you're looking for with these conversations with agents and editors is a better understanding of the field. It's not… You're not going to make a sale because of your relationship with an agent or editor. It might help a little bit. It might cause them to do a more sympathetic read, but the work itself has to be there. But when you're talking to an agent or editor, there's something that I call the hierarchy of time, which is the idea that how many people want a piece of you affects how valuable your time is. It has nothing to do with your actual merit as a human being. It has nothing to do with any of that. It's not that some people are worth more than others. It's just… The hierarchy of time is someone who's… As Brandon was talking about earlier in a previous episode, knowing how much your time is worth. Some of that is how many people are trying to take that. So editors and agents have a lot more people wanting pieces of their time than an early career writer. So they stand higher in the hierarchy of time for that reason only. So when you are talking to them, I think it is helpful to remember that. So that when you are having a conversation, that you are contributing to their enjoyment. And I don't mean sucking up, it's just that… Because everyone is trying to get a piece of them, it is useful if you can share… You can be amusing. I don't mean like, "Hello. Here is the joke that I have prepared to tell this editor." But actually paying attention to them as a person and as a conversation.

[Brandon] One of the things that Dan and I found is that if you're doing this at a convention, which is where we normally did it, actually going to that editor's panels and going in afterward and approaching, at appropriate places like at parties or things, those editors to ask them about the panel, things that they said. That was really handy, because, number one, it gave us more information. This is what we were looking for. These are the experts in the field. Number two, it was a conversation starter about something we knew they want to talk about, and it is a way into a conversation. The other big one was always we wanted to know what books the editor was working on and why they were excited by them. Because this, number one, gives us information again about the field, but it also is something that every editor I've met wants to talk about because it's exciting for them. Because they love these books. Because they want to sell these books. You're actually letting them pitch to you in that case, which is helpful for them because maybe they'll get a sale off of it. But it's also helpful for you because you probably should go by those books to find out what the editors in the field are really excited by right now.

[Dan] Definitely.

[Erin] I think it can be very inspirational. There's nothing… I love hearing editors talk about the books that they're working on and how much they love them. At a time… If you're like in the slog of writing and it's like oh, it will never end, seeing what the part of the process that you can get to and thinking, "There's so much excitement. Editors want to be publishing great work." is a great way to, like, for me at least, give me a little boost and get me back in front of the computer or the page.

[Mary Robinette] One thing that I also want to say in terms of agents and editors is, while you should go in and plan to treat them like a person, and they are your peer, they're not a target… Is the thing we say on the Writing Excuses cruise all the time. At the same time, be ready to talk business if they ask. So have practiced your sales pitch, your elevator pitch. Know what you are actually writing. Do that homework so that when it comes up, you can talk about it without going, "Well. I mean. It's kind of a… Fantasy…"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] She's saying that because she's heard me pitch books before.

[Mary Robinette] I have. Hey, I'm really loving Ghost Station, by the way, which is not a fantasy.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

[Mary Robinette] Hey, look at me networking. So, that's the kind of thing that you can do, is just be prepared. What's Ghost Station about?

[Dan] Ghost Station is a Cold War spy novel about cryptographers who are on… In West Berlin about two months after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. So, that's what it's about.

[Mary Robinette] Good job.

[Dan] Thank you.

[Howard] Ghost Station is a cold start to a good pitch that… Okay, I'm on my game.

[Dan] That was awesome.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you for demonstrating, Dan, why it's important to practice your elevator pitch so that when they ask, "So, what are you working on?" which will inevitably be a topic of conversation, that you can actually answer it smoothly.

[Dan] In my defense, if you ask me what I'm working on, I've got a much better answer. I haven't had to pitch Ghost Station to anyone in a year or more. But, yes. These are all good things to remember. Howard, you've got something? Looks like you want to say?

[Howard] I may be coming at this from an established position of luxury or whatever, but I find that networking as a I am networking is really arduous. I'm an introvert, I'm not an extrovert. I like having genuine friends. I find that the most… I make friends by meeting interesting people and talking to them and listening to them and I love that. I have… Lately, anyway, I have zero task lists in my brain. No must meet the following people, they must be able to do the following things. None of that is present. I just… I like having friends and being genuine and meeting people. I think it was about 15 years ago, I was at Comic Con and got to meet Steve Jackson for the first time. It actually would have been more than 15 years. 17 years ago. He was a fan of my work. Suddenly we had conversations that had nothing to do with what we were doing. Then, at one point he talked about online sales, and I realized, "You know what? I was talking to Scott McCloud the other day, who is a web cartoonist and who… Understanding comics," and I said, "Steve, Scott McCloud is the expert, and I think he's right here at this convention. Let's go find him." So I got to introduce Steve Jackson to Scott McCloud. What did I get out of that? Well, my friend Richard took a picture. It made it look like I was in the middle of a brilliant discussion between these two luminaries in their own fields. But, ultimately, what I got out of it was this is a fun conversation. Steve talked to Scott talked to Steve, and I was kind of in the middle of it. They're just… They're good people and I like them. If I ever need, really need to meet an editor, what will probably happen is I'll talk to Erin, Mary Robinette, and say, "Geez, I've got this thing, and I don't even know what to do with it. Maybe it needs an editor." One of my friends might say, "Oh. There right here at this event." And walk me over and introduced me, because we're friends. It's nothing… It's not transactional at all.

[Dan] That is…

[Mary Robinette] All of that is…

[Dan] One of the things I love about the publishing industry is that for the most part, it is a friendly industry full of people who want to help each other. Having worked with Hollywood, I could tell you how rare it is to be in a friendly industry full of people who want to help each other.

[Mary Robinette] I actually want to say that that is something that is very true of science fiction and fantasy, and some of the other genres. There are genres that that is not true. So just take that under advisement a little bit. Erin, did you want to chime in on that?

[Erin] Yes. Just one other thing to take under advisement, not to put a bad negative spin on anything, but also remember that, like, networking is great, but you are important and your own safety and comfort is important. When you get into things where there's hierarchies of time and power, sometimes people… If something is making you uncomfortable, if you don't feel good about a conversation you're having, you can walk away. It will not kill your career. It won't do anything. The most important thing is for you to be okay with what you're doing and the people that you're around.

[Dan] Yes. That's a wonderful note to end on. Thank you very much for that.

[Dan] Mary Robinette, you have homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So the homework that I have is that I want you to think of… Think of and do five things. I want you to think of five things that you can do to help someone without getting credit. It doesn't have to be completely anonymous. But I'm talking about doing things like quietly signal boosting something, a donation, fulfilling a wish, beta reading for someone. You get thanked for beta reading, but you don't get like big public credit for it. So things that you can do to help other people. Because the biggest thing with networking is the old aphorism, a rising tide raises all ships. So how can you help that tide rise?

[Dan] Fantastic. Thank you very much for that. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.03: Publishing Pitfalls

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/17/16-3-publishing-pitfalls/

Key Points: There are people out there who see aspiring writers as someone to make money off of! $50 reading fees? Remember, money flows toward the author. Beware of people who see you as a mark. Talk to other writers. Check Writer Beware and similar sites. Pay attention to the groups you join, you may not fit there. You may need multiple groups for different reasons. Accountabilibuddies! In indie publishing, you need to make business decisions. Think of yourself as two different people, a writer self and a business self, and make sure you are using the right one for the situation.

[Season 16, Episode 3]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Publishing Pitfalls.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Welcome back to the third episode of our intensive course on the insider business of publishing. We're very excited to have with us Erin Roberts on the show. Erin, can you very quickly remind our listeners who you are?

[Erin] Sure. I am a short fiction writer primarily. Early in my career, so excited to share that part of the publishing world. I've had stories published in Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and a few other places here and there.

[Dan] Fantastic. Well, we're excited to have you on the show.

[Dan] We're going to talk about publishing pitfalls this time. Things that inexperienced and sometimes even experienced authors fall into, mistakes that we make. Brandon, what are some of the things you need to warn us about?

[Brandon] Well, the big overarching theme for this episode is going to be to teach you to realize and recognize the fact that a lot of people out there see you as someone to make money off of as an aspiring writer. Or as a new professional. I point to an example of this in my career. Before I knew what I was doing, and I thought the way to get an agent was just to buy a book of agents and start submitting to all of them, I submitted to an agent who wrote back… Or, no, I didn't… Yeah, I just went to the website and they said, "Send your book along with $50 to our agency and we will consider you." I just lost 50 bucks. Right? They had a reading fee, and I'm sure they made a nice bunch of money off of being in whatever list that I had read on agents who took science fiction and fantasy books. They cashed my check, and I only got taken for 50 bucks. It's not a big deal to get taken for 50 bucks. But I'll tell you, when I was later on at a convention and someone said, "Watch out, there's a lot of agents out there who will put on their thing send us 50 bucks and we'll consider your book, and they're making their money off of people sending them 50 bucks rather than actually selling books," I felt like a total loser. Because I'd just been taken in, hook, line, and sinker by these people.

[Dan] Yeah. Now, there are, and I'm sure that we'll get into this a little bit in the show, there are certainly people that are not out to get you. There are absolutely legitimate writing conferences and editors for hire and things like that who are doing valuable work for the money that they get from you.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] We're talking more about the hucksters, who, like you said, they make all their money on jilting you out of yours.

[Brandon] Yeah. The phrase that was commonly used when I was breaking in was money flows toward the author, and that any time you are writing a check to someone, you need to stop, consider, and decide if this is someone you should be sending money to. Normally, early in my career, people would say, "just never, never write a check to anyone." That's not the case anymore, because as indie publishing has become a much more legitimate way to make a career as a writer, there are lots of good places that you should be spending your money if you are an indie author. Indeed, there are a lot of good conferences and conventions that you have to pay to get in. That's not a bad expense. So this episode is to talk to you about the mistakes that new authors often make specifically relating to shortcuts that you are offered towards publishing that often can just either waste your time or your money. The first one I want to talk about is people who see you as a mark. Now, this doesn't actually have to always be someone who has your worst interests at heart. It can also be someone who just doesn't know what they're doing, right? Looking at the agency I submitted to, years later, I went back and looked at them. They were out of business. I don't think this was someone who was there to look at authors as marks. I think this was someone who thought I'd be a pretty good agent. I spent years as, say, a real estate agent. I know how to interact with people. I know how I… I sell houses, I should be able to sell books to publishers. But how do I make any money? Well, I probably should charge these authors a little bit upfront because we're in this together. So I need to know if they're serious or not. So that's probably how they came about having is like that. But the problem there was not that I necessarily was taken in by a con artist, I was taken in by an agent who had no idea what they were doing, and, indeed, could not further my career at all.

[Howard] You know how you tell if an author is serious about something? If they hand you a book. If they've written a whole manuscript, this is someone who's serious about something. A real agent knows that.

[Brandon] The easiest way… I mean, agents are one of the easiest ones to determine if they're legit or not. Because if they're a legit agent, you should be able to go to the bookstore and find new books represented by that agent. Authors who are represented by that agent, who include new authors that the agent is actively discovering. Not just the states that the agent is representing. If you can't find… If that agent hasn't released in the last five years, if they don't have new authors that are releasing books with the publishers you want to publish with, then that's just not an agent to send to.

[Dan] Now, Erin, you have published in some pretty high profile short fiction markets which is the kind of thing that typically makes someone a mark or predatory agents or publishers. Have you experienced any of this? People coming after you because you're kind of starting your career?

[Erin] I have had some people reach out to me because, as you should do, like, I have a writer website with how to contact me because legit people will also contact you. So, things come in, and some of them are, "Oh, this is actually a really great opportunity," and other ones where it's like, "Oh, I did a little research and no one seems to have heard of you. You're an agent, like you said, that doesn't seem to have any clients or any clients who have published books." So a lot of it is doing research. I also say one thing I really like about the short fiction world is that there's a really great community there. Talking to other writers is a great way to know, like, if you're dealing with something that is legit. Not everyone knows everything, but a lot of times asking people, "Have you heard of this agent? Have you heard of this editor? Do you know any experiences with this person?" can be a way to try to weed out folks who maybe don't have your best interests at heart.

[Brandon] When I was a newer writer, one of the places, and I would assume it's still there but I can't say… I haven't been there in years, was Predators and Editors, the forum, where there was generally a thread about every small press, every legit press, and a lot of threads about non-legitimate presses and agents on those forums. I went there a lot during the early part of my career because I had no idea who was legit and who wasn't.

[Dan] Awesome. I just looked them up, it looks like Predators and Editors is kind of in transition right now.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] But there are other sites like Writer Beware that are still doing very similar work. So there are places to do this research.

[Dan] Let's pause for our book of the week, which is actually not a book. It is a channel that Brandon loves and wants to tell us about.

[Brandon] Yeah. This isn't maybe the best topic to slot this in, but I wanted to give a shout out to a YouTube channel called Noah Cadwell-Gervais. Noah Cadwell-Gervais, he does long form essays about videogames. Really long form. The sort of stuff that is terrible click bait, that YouTube does not optimize for. He'll have a four hour YouTube video that he'll do on some in-depth look at a series. He recently did The Last of Us where… The thing about Noah is, he's just an excellent writer. I listen… Every episode when I listen to, I write down multiple phrases that he said that I think, "Man, I would love to have come up with that." He talked about writing in a recent episode where he said, "Writing is about editing, and it's super hard to walk into a room with your two favorite paragraphs and a bullet for one of them, knowing you're only going to walk out with one of those paragraphs."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I'm like, "Man, that is a metaphor." That is just a brilliant way to use words. He's really good at it. He writes these all out ahead of time, and then reads them and puts over footages, and even if you're not interested in the games themselves, he has a really interesting take on video games. So I wanted to give him a shout out. I think that his channel is doing fine, it has more subscribers by a little bit than mine does, but he certainly isn't as watched as he deserves. So give it a look. It's really fun to watch people writing in other mediums and in kind of new media ways. I learn a lot from the way he crafts his prose for his video essays.

[Howard] You know, if you walked into a room with two paragraphs and you've only got one bullet, you're not editing hard enough.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One bullet and a machete. So that the paragraph that survives is a lot smaller when it comes out.

[Dan] Now, one thing that we were talking about in preparation for this episode is the idea that there are many different kinds of writers that are looking for different things. Part of the pitfall can be misidentifying which group you're in, or really just kind of accidentally stumbling into a group rather than choosing that deliberately.

[Brandon] Yeah. When I was early in my career, a lot of people recommended several local writing groups that I go and try out, because I was looking at writing groups and things. I found that each writing group had its own kind of theme, and some were not necessarily themed the way that I wanted to do things. Like, I was very gung ho about writing novels and publishing in the novel field very soon. I was looking for a writing group of people who would read a lot and who were also very aggressive about their publishing careers. I found a lot of well-established groups that were support groups for friends, for people who were not necessarily as aggressive about publishing as I was. I found I was a really bad fit for those groups. I've heard of other people getting in some of these groups and kind of adopting the mindset of the group, which can be a bad thing for helping you achieve your goals as a writer.

[Erin] I would say that it's… A lot of it, you can have a lot of also different groups that you belong to that feed different parts of your writer's soul. Like, we contain multitudes. So, as long as you know what that is doing for you. So, like, I have a group of friends that is more of like a just how are we getting through the day, like, have we made it through 2020, type of like let's just all commiserate group. But I don't use that group as a way to push me forwards. That's more of a group that's a way to make me feel comforted and that I do the work. Then I have groups that are more about critique, group accountabilibuddies where I'm riding with someone and it's about getting the time into do the writing. As long as I know what each of those is, it completely works.

[Howard] Accountabilibuddy.

[Erin] Yes.

[Howard] Accountabilibuddy. I'm going to say that word a couple of times, and then maybe write it down in the liner notes. Accountabilibuddy.

[Erin] Everyone should have at least one in my opinion. But, yeah, as long as you know what the people are and you're not going to one group for something that they're not going to provide for you, I think it can work. But the problem is when you think one group maybe is going to do all things for you. Or you don't recognize that they're not in the same place as you are.

[Dan] Yeah. I… This isn't just about groups, either. This is how I divide up a lot of my alpha and beta readers when I send out a book. Because I need to be able to send it to someone who's going to give me a meaningful, useful critique, but I also need to be able to send my books to someone who is going to tell me that it's awesome and make me feel good about myself, even when it's terrible. One of the groups, we've kind of hinted at this, I want to be a little more explicit. There are absolutely writing groups out there that are not really treating writing as a professional career or as a professional outlet, it's more of a supportive community. I would wager that a big chunk of you wonderful listeners fall into that category. So I want to be clear that we're not trying to bag on that. If you are writing in a way that gives you joy, then you are doing it correctly. If your goal is to make money, then that's a different goal than just having some fun Friday nights with your writer buddy. So that's why it's so important to know which group you're in.

[Brandon] Yeah. Writing groups are this kind of their own special pitfall in that you can find one that matches your career goals, but the type of feedback you're getting is detrimental to your writing style and to your writing psychology. So, we have several other episodes on that. But just be aware, it's okay for a writing group to be a good writing group, but a bad fit for you.

[Dan] Now, that said, I bet a lot of our listeners maybe didn't realize that they were in the wrong group until we said it just now. So take this opportunity to take stock of yourself. Maybe one of the reasons that your aspiring career dreams are stalling is because you've slotted yourself into the wrong kind of community. Howard?

[Howard] Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about the publishing pitfall for indie publishers. I say the publishing pitfall. There are a million of them. Because when you are an independent publisher, when you are indie publishing, you have become the publisher, and Amazon, for instance, really is the distributor. As the publisher, you are now being asked to make partnership decisions for who am I going to hire to copyedit my book. Who am I going to hire to do cover art for my book? Who am I going to work with to help me build a promotional campaign around my book? This is a fantastically fraught space, especially if you have never in the course of your career doing other things, never had the opportunity to, for instance, administer a job interview or say no to someone who wants money. These are life skills that if you haven't developed yet, indie publishing is a space where even if people aren't looking towards you as a mark, you are a mark. You are going to hemorrhage money and time until you figure out how to make the decisions correctly. When Sandra and I decided to do, and this was a decade or more ago, the Schlock Mercenary iPhone app for reading the comics via iPhone, we put together a very simple application which was, "Hey, if you'd like to build an iPhone app, show us an app that you've done and come to us with a business plan for how you'd make money with this app." We had dozens of people show us apps that they'd made, some of which were pretty shiny. Only one person came to us with a business plan. That was Gary Henson. We don't have an iPhone app anymore because reasons. But Gary is now running the Schlock Mercenary web service. Because I set up a threshold where I knew I'd only be doing business with somebody who understood that this was a business.

[Erin] Yeah. To that point, I think a piece of advice that I've always loved is the idea that you've got your writer writer self and your business of writing self, and to really think of those as sort of two different people inhabiting your body, and that sometimes you need to turn things over to the businessperson and sometimes you need to be focusing on the writer person. In the short fiction world, a lot of times that'll be like, "You can write as many lovely stories as you want," but your businessperson's going to have to be the one being like, "When do I need to submit them, and to whom? And, like, in what order?" I think that continues in indie publishing, your businessperson is a huge part of what you're doing.

[Dan] Absolutely. I wish we could talk about this all day, but we do need to be done. Brandon, you've got some homework for us?

[Brandon] Yeah. So. One of the best websites that was really helpful to me when I was breaking in, and it's still being maintained and supported by SFWA is Writer Beware. If there's a single best resource to watch, it is probably them. They explain a lot of these pitfalls in much more depth than we can cover. Particularly, indie publishing as it was becoming a thing, it was really hard, and still is kind of difficult, to determine who is a legit editor, freelance editor you should pay, and who is someone who is out there to try to feed you into this vanity press loop, where you pay for editing, they send you to a publisher, a publisher recommends another editor, who then you pay for editing. The publisher gets a kickback, and then you… You could end up in this loop forever, spending tons of money. Vanity publishing, which is different from indie publishing. Learning the difference will help you, if you go to Writer Beware. So our homework is spend some time familiarizing yourself with Writer Beware and other resources like it on the Internet that will help you see who is trying to take advantage of you and who is a legitimate editor that you may want to hire.

[Dan] Fantastic. Well. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.02: Publishers Are Not Your Friends

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/10/16-02-publishers-are-not-your-friends/

Key Points: Publishers, the companies, are not your friends, even if editors and individuals may be your friends. The businesses have different incentives, which may not match your incentives as an author. Example: the corporation will try to take worldwide rights in all languages, but they probably won't exploit them well. Another example, when you want to change series or genres, the corporation wants to keep you in that well-worn slot, but you may want to change. Also, be aware that your agent and you may have different incentives. Remember, you are the person who cares about your career, so take care of it. Your relationship with the publisher and the agent is a business relationship.

[Season 16, Episode 2]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Publishers Are Not Your Friends.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.

[Dan] We are back for another episode of Brandon's intensive course on career planning and kind of the inside of publishing. This time we want to talk about publishers. Now, Brandon, you named this episode Publishers Are Not Your Friends.

[Brandon] Yep.

[Dan] That's not what I want to hear.

[Brandon] Well, yeah. It's not what I wanted to hear, either. Actually, I got told this by my agent early in my career. Working on, I think, my first contract. I'm like, "But, no. I want to have a really good relationship with my publisher." The thing is, when I say publishers in this, I'm not usually meaning the individual, the publisher, I am meaning the company, the publisher. My editor is, indeed, my friend. Right? Indeed, many people at the publisher are my friends. But the corporation that is publishing you, traditionally published, is not your friend. This can be expanded to, unfortunately, Amazon is not your friend. Indeed, to an extent, your agent is an individual might be your friend, but your agency might not always be your friend. What do I mean by this? I mean that everyone is, when you're looking at yourselves as businesspeople, everyone has different incentives working on books. Your incentives as an author do not always align with your publisher or your agent. Almost always, it's going to align with your agent's incentives. But there are a lot of times where the publisher's incentives and yours are very different. I've got a bunch of examples of this. We'll go through them. But the idea is that I want you to start thinking about this. Because the publisher as a corporation will pretend to be your friend. Indeed, you will have good relationships hopefully with the people at the corporation. But they will make the corporate decisions rather than the friend decisions when money is on the line.

[Howard] Several years ago, my friend, Dave Brady, wrote a piece on loyalty to a corporation and the madness that it is. I want to read a little bit of this text from my friend Dave because it's so amazing. "A corporation is not a living creature. It has no soul, it has no heart, it has no feelings. It can neither experience towards you nor enjoy from you even the concept of loyalty. It's a legal fiction and it exists for one purpose, to make profit. If you assist in this goal, your ongoing association with the organization is facilitated. If you distract from it, will be cut. Family is where they have to take you in, no matter what you've done. A corporation is the exact opposite of that."

[Brandon] Exactly. Again, none of us want to hear this. I didn't want to hear this. In fact, it took me years to understand what my agent was saying. I'm hoping that with some of my examples here, you will be able to understand. Like, let me talk about one of them that happened in my career. So, when you sell the rights to your book to a publisher, there are lots of different rights that you can sell. You can sell… What is normally sold to a US publisher is US or North American English rights. They will want to take worldwide rights in all languages. They will not be able to exploit those very well. But they'll want to take them. Well, why do they want them? Well, think about it this way. If they take all of those rights from you, and they make an extra $2000, then, they have come out ahead in that contract. Those rights are only worth maybe $2000 to them. To you, those rights may be worth $50,000. The corporation is not going to look and say, "Wow. If we let him have these, it's $50,000 to him. If we keep them, is $2000 to us and $2000 to him." They're not going to think that way. They're going to think, "$2000 of profit is $2000 of profit. We should not let go of these." But to you, those mean a ton. How did this work in my career? Tor fought to try to get world English rights out of me. They let go of all the other English rights… Or all the other language rights very easily, but they wanted to sell my books to their imprint in the UK, which was going to give them a couple thousand dollars for them. My world English rights, which is usually considered the UK, Ireland, Australia, and other places they export, like India. That was worth, when we finally sold it, somewhere around $50,000 on that same book. Tor would have been perfectly happy taking that $2000 and never launching me in these other countries. And really kind of ruining my career worldwide. They would have done that in a heartbeat. We took it to a publisher in the area who had unaligned incentive with me, that wanted to sell me really big in these countries. Tor would not have lost any sleep or even shed a tear if they had made an extra couple thousand dollars off of me by ruining my career worldwide.

[Dan] Let me give an alternative perspective on this. Because, first of all, that's absolutely true. I make a vast majority of my money outside of the US. So I am all aboard for international rights. On the other hand, some of my early deals with HarperCollins, they wanted to maintain international rights and we didn't let them. We kept them because I wanted to be able to sell to Germany and South America, which are my big markets. The result is that me as a person, my contract to them was actually worth less, because I was only making them money through one channel, instead of through multiple channels. We were able to work around that, and Partials was still a very big success. But it's definitely something to think about. I had to find other ways to make myself more valuable to the publisher.

[Brandon] Yeah. Part of this equation for us, and this goes back to last week, learning your business, was understanding that Tor had a poor business in the UK, and indeed, would not have been able to do for me, in the UK and world English markets, as well as going to a local publisher. It was worth such a small amount of money to them that we didn't think it would really add anything. But it is a consideration. There are times when you want to give up some or all of these rights for one reason or another.

[Mary Robinette] Just to add on to that. The… When I had the Glamorous History series, Tor also held the English language rights. They never sold the rights to Of Noble Family in the UK, which is book 5. There's a reason, in the UK, you can only get books one through four, book five wasn't sold. That is the one that took the longest to earn out. Because we only had one stream for that, which was the US.

[Dan] Yeah. Now, I want to pause here for our book of the week, which is actually a little bit about my story with HarperCollins. On my second series with them, the Mirador series, which is my cyberpunk YA, that series didn't fit well with them. In hindsight, it was not a good fit. My age… My publisher, my editor, I should say, my editor loved it. He was 100% behind the book. But, as Brandon was saying earlier, the publisher at large was not. We kind of had to convince them to take a risk on it. What that meant is that they didn't really understand the book, they didn't really understand how to sell it. So the series, every book in that series sold worse than the last one. By the time we got to the third book, they essentially just opened their window and threw a bunch of copies out and hoped people caught them. It got zero marketing, zero publishing. That one is called Active Memory. It's the best book in the trilogy, and I would love for you to all go read it. Because it's great. Even though the publisher did not know what to do with it, and therefore didn't support it.

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, another place that this happens is when you are trying to change up your career. Starting a new series. Starting a new genre. Another thought experiment you can have, and of course, this… There are lots of different things that play into each of my examples here that could change around the numbers for you. But let's imagine that you are pretty good at writing fantasy novels. You make, say, $50,000 at fantasy with each of your new fantasy novels. But you, as a writer…

[Mary Robinette] I would love to imagine that.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But you as a writer love the idea of writing different thing, because your artistic pursuits take you different directions. Indeed, let's say you could write science fiction books, and they make $40,000. Which to you is a good trade-off, because it lets you do something else. It lets you avoid burnout. It lets you just explore new areas and potentially get new fans and things like this. Publisher's not going to want you to do that. They would rather have you not be writing that $40,000 book, in fact, they would rather you just not release it. Because they would rather slot into that slot a science fiction writer earns 50,000 a year, rather than have you do $50,000 with a fantasy and the other side… And then your science fiction next year do $40,000. They would just rather have two $50,000 books and have you not publish a book that year. Now that obviously is a very different alignment in interests. I've known lots of writers who are like, "You know, I want to try a fantasy now." Publishers are like, "Oh, that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea for this reason and this reason and this reason. You shouldn't do this." Well, a big part of this is that, but even if they were making the same money, it is very… Much easier for a publisher to brand an author as "This is our fantasy person." The marketing people want to know this is our person who writes this style of book. They want to be able to have the sales force go into the bookstores and say, "You buy this sort of book from this author." That's just way easier for them, and it's actually way… They have strong incentives to have that kind of list. They don't want to have this person who does all these eclectic things that they have to explain to people. Where that may be where you want to take your career.

[Howard] I wanted to point out that in this situation, in this circumstance, it's really difficult for the individual author to wrap their head around the full list of things that the publisher is looking at when they're making those kinds of decisions. But the agent you may have partnered with may have a really good grasp of that. This is one of those cases where having a friend was also a business, who is an agent, can really help you deal with the publisher. Because you can talk to your agent and you can say, "Look. I want to write science fiction. That's what's going to keep me happy. What do you and I need to do, writer and agent, what do you and I need to do in order to find a way to make money with publishers for that?" The discussion after that point is going to take all kinds of shapes depending on you're publishing with.

[Mary Robinette] To that point, harkening back to the first thing in this, when we were talking about thinking of yourself as a business as well, be careful about branding yourself by whatever it is that the publisher initially slots you into. So, I was initially slotted into historical fantasy. Right now, I am writing science fiction, historical science fiction. But whatever. But the point is, I am doing much better… My sales numbers are much, much better with the science fiction. If I had branded myself solely as a historical fantasy author, if I had done that with my twitter handle, my website name, and all of those things, that would have locked me into something that did not represent everything that I could do. George RR Martin, his first books were about vampires on steamships. Like, you don't want to lock yourself into whatever that first book is, because something else may happen. The publisher, if they are paying attention to your numbers, which is what happened… The reason we moved over to Science Fiction was because they noticed… With me, they noticed that I kept winning awards with science fiction short stories. I was not winning awards with fantasy short stories. So, they're like, "Why don't you try a science fiction novel?"

[Brandon] It is much easier, and we'll have a whole episode on branding later on, but it is much easier for the publisher to brand you as a series. This is really common in YA. They lips us it's easier for their sales force to sell a series than an author. It's easier for the publisher to be like, "We have this series." You want to brand your name. They're going to want to brand the series. This is just very… Historically, what I've seen in almost every instance. The other thing I want to mention before we leave, even though I know were running a little low on time, is, there are a couple of places where you and your agent will have different incentives. Not nearly as many, but I do want to bring them up. It's happened in two cases, most often I've seen in the industry. One is that, particularly early in your career, a small amount of money to you might be life changing. Right? You may be able to pay your rent with an extra $500 from your book getting sold into a foreign market that does not pay a whole lot of money. Your agent will make 75 bucks off of that $500 sale. Their incentive, if you look at an hour to earnings ratio for them, it might take them three or four hours of work to get that sale to happen in that small country. They may look at it and be like, "This just isn't worth the money. I'm not going to spend the time there." Where that $500 coming to you could mean the difference between making rent and being able to be full-time and not. So you need to be in charge of your career and saying to the agent, "I really want you to go and spend this time." They... A good agent will recognize that selling you worldwide is going to help build the brand of the author in ways that are beyond that extra 500 bucks. But I've known a lot of agents who just don't do the extra work to sell those small markets.

[Howard] I was almost published by Steve Jackson games. The publisher is not your friend. Steve Jackson is my friend. The original contract that came out, I looked at it and realized if you're planning on selling a couple of thousand books and paying me 5%, I will run out of money before these hit print. Steve came to me, my friend Steve, not the publishing company friend, my friend Steve said, "The only way for you to eat is for you to self publish." Then he put me in touch with his spouse Monica who walked me through building self-publishing. Monica has since passed away and I love her and can point at that friend is one of a handful of people… A handful of people who made my career possible. But that handful of people does not include a company. It was somebody who was acting against the interests of their company in order to help me. I was very fortunate.

[Brandon] Yeah. Kind of pulling us to a close here. We'll talk about this later. But we'll keep coming back to this concept. Just get it in your head. You are the person who needs to care about your career the most. You are the person who needs to watch out for yourself and make sure you're not being taken advantage of. You can't expect an agent and a publisher to do this for you. Maybe at times they will. Maybe at times they'll help you out. But at the end of the day, you have to understand, you have business relationships with people in addition or alongside your friendships.

[Dan] Awesome. Now we do have one closing bit of homework, which is also from Brandon.

[Brandon] Yes. So, one thing that was related to this is that Dan and I when we were breaking in, one of the things we found very useful to do, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I want to give you the homework for it. Which is, make a little black book, so to speak, of publishers. This is write down all the publishers in traditional publishing who are releasing new books by new authors consistently into the bookstores where you shop and you can find them there. Write those names down, write those publisher names down, and start watching for the books that they release and the editors who work there. So that you start having a grasp on the industry and who are the players that are in the industry. Read all of the acknowledgments pages for those books. Find the names of the agents. Start actually treating yourself like a businessperson who is looking how to network and how to understand your business.

[Dan] Fantastic. So. Thank you for listening to Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/03/16-01-your-career-is-your-business/

Key Points: Look at becoming a writer as a business. You are starting and running a small business. You have to manage your business, the publisher and the agent will not do it for you. They are partners, they will help, but it is your business. What do you want, what do you imagine it becoming? Think about a creative mission statement. Make sure your career is deliberate, not accidental. Ask yourself questions. How are you going to handle health insurance? How will you balance your time between writing and promotion? How are you going to handle email? You might silo the non-writing things into one day a week, or chunks of time spread through the week. How are you going to handle taxes? Hire an accountant or DIY? Think about placing a dollar amount on an hour of writing time, and use that to decide whether to pay someone else to do it or do it yourself. Try balancing money, audience, and shininess. Money, how much does it pay or cost. Audience, how many people will you connect with. Shiny, how much do you want to do it. Think of your writing as a career, a business, and make deliberate, informed choices.

[Season 16, Episode 1]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Your Career is Your Business.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] As you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary…

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] Robinette.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] We're all fine. I'm Mary Robinette, we've done this a lot.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] This, as you can tell, is the very first episode of 2021. We are excited to be here. We've got a cool thing that were going to do for the entire year, is, we have split this year into a series of what we are calling Master Classes, or intensive courses is maybe a better way of thinking about this. So each of us has come up with a topic and we'll spend eight or nine episodes diving really deep, kind of teaching the rest of the group about that specific topic. So we are going to start with this really cool kind of inside look at the publishing world class that Brandon has put together. Brandon, do you want to tell us a little bit about your course in general?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, the idea is to have a course that starts training writers to look at becoming a writer as a business. This is something that took me by surprise when I started into this. I was not aware that writing is a small business. I didn't know I was starting a business. In fact, I didn't incorporate for several years. That's very common. But not knowing that led me to make a large number of mistakes before I'd got my feet underneath me. Even still, I'm making some of these mistakes. But I thought, you know what, one of the things that I really wish I'd known when I began was that I was starting a small business. I wanted to give some tips to writers starting on this journey or who are in the middle of it who just may not have given enough thought to this aspect of it. We all want to be artists, that's why we become writers. This whole thing isn't to dissuade you from your artistic intents. But it is to start you this class and this mindset that just isn't often shared in writing courses. Because we all want to be artists, and sometimes it feels like talking about the business side of things is crass, and we don't want to monetize our artistic intentions, but when you start on this path, you are starting a business.

[Howard] Speaking briefly as the parent of four hungry adult children, who still don't all have their own jobs, I very much want to monetize every last little bit of my everything that I do.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Crass or not crass, I want to eat.

[Dan] Yeah. So, I am very fortunate in that one of my best friends got published about a year and 1/2 before I did. So when I did get my contract, Brandon, the very first thing he said to me was, "You need to think about this. Think of yourself as a small business owner," and gave me some really great advice. So what are some of the bits of advice you want to give us, Brandon, about starting to think of ourselves as business owners?

[Brandon] Right. Well, the first idea is just this mindset change. Which was the biggest hurdle I think I had to overcome. That's why I named this first episode Your Career Is Your Business. A lot of writers, myself included, when we begin, we have in our head that once we get published, the publisher and the agent are going to be in charge of the business. We're going to have people managing all of the business side. We will be able to spend our days in artistic pursuits. This just isn't true. An agent is not a business manager. An agent will certainly help. An agent is, if you're going traditionally published, an agent is the number one resource you will have for these sorts of things. So certainly it's nice to have them. But it's your business that you're starting. It's not their business. They have a lot of different clients they'll be working for. You're going to be expected to care about your career.

[Howard] One of the things that I like to… I developed this mindset when I was in the corporate world. My career in the corporate space really was defined by the people I was working with, but my career as a person who makes things, a person who imagines things, a person who wants to be paid to operate the oven that bakes the cookies that only come out of my brain, that is not a career path that can be managed by somebody else. That is a career path that has to be managed by me. So a literary agent is a business partner. A publisher is a business partner. I already had, when I started doing comics, I already had a big framework in my head for what business partnerships look like and what they don't look like. So that gave me a quick leg up, and it made a lot of things easier early on. But Brandon, you're absolutely right about this mindset. You have to start from that point, believing that what you are doing is your business and, it is, to layer the meaning, a little bit, it's your business, it's not anybody else's business. They're going to try and get all up in your business from time to time, but it's really all about… It's all about what you want and what you imagine it becoming.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm really glad Howard mentioned what you want, which I'm sure Brandon is going to get into. But I come into this from theater, and being a freelancer for my entire adult life. So, for me, the small business was transforming the small business that I already had. Which was puppeteer, audiobook narrator, and then writer. One of the things that I find helpful when thinking about this small business is to actually have a mission statement. You can think of it as your creative mission statement. But it's going to change over the course of your career. So, initially the mission statement that I had was fairly simple. It was to be able to turn down the gigs I didn't want to do. I've gotten to the point in my career now only gigs I've got are the gigs that I want to do. So now I have to figure out actually what kind of work do I want to be doing and who do I want to be and be presenting myself as. Because I have to start figuring out how to turn down the gigs I do want to do in order to focus on really refining who I am, and this thing that Brandon is talking about and Howard about monetizing. Because it's not… It's not always a straightforward path.

[Dan] Let's pause really quick. Do our book of the week. Which is coming to us this week from Howard.

[Howard] Well, I wish I could take more credit for this one. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I read it years and years and many years ago, and absolutely loved it. It has one of my very favorite uses of footnotes. It's widely regarded now as a classic space in which it sits, and recently was made into a TV miniseries available on Amazon Prime. I have really enjoyed and benefited personally from comparing the two. I'll circle back around to that later at homework time.

[Dan] Awesome. So that is Good Omens from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

[Dan] Now, I loved what Mary Robinette said about mission statement, which ties into what I've heard Brandon talk about a lot in the past, is making sure that your career is deliberate rather than accidental. Brandon, what do you have to tell us about that, and how to do it?

[Brandon] So, there are all kinds of questions I feel like you should be asking yourself during your unpublished years and during your early parts of your career that you have answers to for when the need arises. For instance, a good one if you live in the US, unfortunately, is going to be how are you going to approach health insurance? This is a big question that you need to think about. I never thought about it a single time in the early part of my career. You would think that that would have come up, but it wasn't until I was married and publishing my first books and realizing, wait a minute. In America, for some stupid reason, health insurance is attached to your job. I'm just not going to have that. How do I get that? Talk to other people, who are self-employed, and figure out how you're going to approach this. Other questions are how are you going to balance your time as an author? How much time are you going to spend on doing the actual writing, how much time are you going to spend on promotion? We'll talk about promotion in a later week in this master class, but right now, the question is when are you going to put these things in? When are you going to do email? I wasn't expecting how much more email would come in…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And how much of it would involve publishers' panic… Panicking about little things. I had to set aside specific times. What I've done in my life right now is I have taken all of the things that are not writing, and I've tried to silo them into one day a week. Thursdays. This is when I'm going to do all of these things, the longer emails. The short emails that can get a quick answer, I'll do at the beginning of my workday. But if there's something that is going to take a long, in-depth thing, I'll say, "Hey, I'm going to respond to you on Thursday." If there's an interview that I need to do for promotion, I always schedule them on Thursdays. If there are company meetings, I put them on Thursdays. This allows me to take off my writer hat for a day and approach being a business person for a day. With me, this helps keep me from being frustrated. If I have good siloing of these sorts of things, I'll stop being resentful of the time that I have to spend not writing.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to chime in here, because I'd heard Brandon talk about this before, so I also tried siloing my non-writing things to one day a week. It turns out that doesn't work for me, because my brain is wired differently. That wound up causing me to have more fatigue. But I did have to block out time. So I have blocked out specific chunks of time, but spread them through the week. This… I just want to point out that, much like when we talk about writing, there's no one process that will work for you, but the principle behind the process, which is to be deliberate about it and make space for it, is going to be consistent. You just have to figure out which form it takes for you.

[Dan] I'm going to give a third perspective on this for the very, very early career writers. This is one of the very first bits of advice I got from Brandon when I got my very first publishing contract. I said, "This is happening. It's real. What do I do next?" He said, "What you do now is you sit down and you write as much as you possibly can, because this is the last time you'll have all of that free time to write." That did help me a lot. I was able to finish, I think, a full book and a half of new stuff before all of the revisions and the emails and the editing process in the proofing and all of that business side crashed down on me. So, just for the very early aspiring writer, that is, I think, a fantastic piece of advice.

[Brandon] I do have more time to right now than I did when I was working a job while trying to write. But, one of the most shocking things to me was that by going full-time, I didn't gain nearly as much free time as I thought I would. Because all of these other things crept in. Doing my own taxes. My first few years… I was used to doing my own taxes. Indeed, again, in the US, we have to do our own taxes, for some stupid reason. So… But then publishing made it infinitely more complicated. Because suddenly I was getting a 1099 instead of a W-2. Suddenly, I had sales overseas. Understanding that you're either going to have to hire an accountant or you're going to have to learn how to input sales from other countries and money coming in from other countries and all of this stuff with 1099s instead of W-2s. That's a huge time sink once a year for US writers that I had just not even understood was going to come along and steal a week of my time.

[Dan] We've got an episode coming up about networking, but this tax idea, the finances of being a writer, is a really good reason to rely on other people. My agent, before she became an acquiring agent on her own, worked as a tax person for an agency house. So she was able to help me a lot, which was fantastic. Brandon and I and several other local writers all use the same accountant because the accounting process for professional writers is very different from a lot of other careers. So, using these networking opportunities to find out hey, how do you handle this, is a good way to help you figure it out.

[Brandon] One other thing that I would recommend that you think about… This doesn't work for all writers. In fact, this is one of these things I've noticed that can be debilitating for some writers. But it is something that I do that is very handy for me, is, I find out what the dollar amount of an hour of my writing time is worth. Now, you can't be writing 16 hours a day. But, once you become self-employed, as Howard so elegantly put it in an early episode, you… It's great being self-employed, you get to work half days and you decide which 12 hours it is.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Meaning, there is a danger here in that you can work all the time that you want which would lead to burnout. So be careful about that. But I keep a dollar amount assigned to an hour of actual writing time to me. Then, that dollar amount of an hour of writing time allows me to understand what things I can pay for to gain an hour of writing time. If doing my taxes is going to cost me three hours of writing time, and indeed, I will make more money writing that I would hiring someone to do that, it just gives me an opportunity cost method of determining what I should hire out and what I should do myself.

[Howard] When we started putting Schlock Mercenary books into print, we quickly realized that between cover work and bonus story and whatever else, it took a block of time to put a book out, and putting a book out generated several tens of thousands of dollars of money all at once. I could look at that and say, "Well, I have books that are not yet in print, because I've got this archive online." Going to Comic Con saws three weeks out of my life. There's the week of prep, there's the week at the event, and there's a week of recovery. It's miserably stressful. I did the math and realized that unless I was bringing home $15,000 from Comic Con, it didn't even begin to be worthwhile. We looked at it and said, "Well, gosh, instead of doing Comic Con, if I really want to sell T-shirts, I can just spend that week making a T-shirt and selling it and make more money." Now, we've never done that because I don't love making T-shirts. But that was what I had to balance it against. Without knowing how much your time is worth, without establishing a benchmark over time, you will make lots and lots of very, very bad decisions about your time and not realize what you're doing until you wake up one morning and realize that you're stressed and broke and hating the things that you're doing.

[Dan] This kind of deliberate financial thought is how I knew when it was time for me to hire an assistant. Because I hit the point where I realized, oh, giving me an assistant will allow me to write one extra book per year, which will more than pay for the assistant. So that made it a very easy choice to make. We need to wrap up soon, but I know Mary Robinette has something else she wants to say.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Which is, when you're super early career, the idea of assigning a specific number value to your writing work, especially when you haven't actually sold anything yet, that's difficult. So let me give you another metric which you've probably heard me talk about when I've talked about how to decide where to send a story to. A short story. Which is that you're balancing three thing. Money, audience, and shininess. So money is literally how much is this going to pay me. Or, how much is this going to cost me. Audience is how many people will this connect me to. Then, shiny is just like how much do you want to do it. So, like, going to NASA, it cost money, does not actually connect me to audience, but it's so shiny. So that's a choice that I make. I also know that it's something that I can use, and then will, later, down the line, have the potential to bring me audience and money. But depending on where you are in your career, you're going to value those differently. Like, when you are very, very early career, you may say, "Hey, it's totally worth it for me to go to a convention, because it is… Spending that money will allow me to connect with my peers, and audience, and that networking, the audience layer of it, is totally worth it, and the shininess aspect of it is totally worth it." So it's going to be this constant balancing act, and it will again shift over the course of your career.

[Dan] Exactly. Ultimately, this idea of thinking of it as a career, as a business, and making all of these choices deliberate and informed is what's really going to help. So, thank you everybody. This is a wonderful start to our new year.

[Dan] We have homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. In 2003, at Comic Con, my friend Jim met Neil Gaiman, and Neil introduced himself, saying, "Hi, my name is Neil. I write comics." Okay. That's a fun story. Neil Gaiman rights way more than just comics. He wrote the adaptation that took Good Omens from being a wonderful novel to being a really amazing television series. You don't know, or maybe you do, the path that your career is going to take the number of different things you might write. I posit that it will be extremely valuable to you to take something like Good Omens, your book of the week, and the TV show. Consume them both and make notes. What kinds of writing decisions were made between the two that you would have made differently? What kind of writing decisions were made that just blow your mind? The adaptation between mediums may, at some future point, be something that you get to do. As an added bonus, I think this homework will be fun for you.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/27/15-52-economy-of-phrase-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: Be brief. Expanded version: Let the art or other medium do the heavy lifting. Treat each sentence as its own dialogue bubble.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 52.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 or so minutes long, give or take.

[Dan] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.

[Pat] And we are…

[Laughter]

[Pat] Not that smart.

[Howard] I'm no longer allowed to write the titles for episodes.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Pat] And I'm Pat in a small box.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] All right.

[Laughter]

[Howard] We recorded… I'm just going to give you the back story on this episode. We recorded Pros and Cons with Pat, and at the end of the episode, he turned to me and said, "I really wanted to talk to you about writing comics and fitting all of those ideas into tiny panels." As we discussed this, we realized that that level of compression of information is something that all of us have done. Mary Robinette, you've done it writing a children's book.

[Mary Robinette] Picture book, radio, and also flash fiction.

[Howard] Flash fiction. Dan…

[Dan] I've written three audiobooks at this point, intended as audio dramas.

[Howard] Yup. And Patrick, you wrote… It's one of the… What was it, Rick and Morty?

[Pat] Yeah. The Rick and Morty D&D crossover comic, which was an interesting exercise in editorial control for me. Two IP's that I did not control, but also writing… Only getting 21… 20 pages. 20 pages and only so many words in a box. I'm also doing a comic, another comic with Nate Taylor. So, like, how… Brevity is the soul of wit and that is not necessarily my jam.

[Howard] My very first convention panel was called Crispy Crunchy Writing, and we were asked to introduce ourselves. I was last in line. One of the guys on the panel was Jerry Pournelle. We got… They introduced themselves and I said, "My name's Howard Tayler and I'm on this panel because I write comics, and I have to fit all the words in little bubbles." Jerry pounded on the table and said, "Son, you're the only one here who's qualified to speak. I get paid by the word."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which is one of the best moments of my life. But in looking at what I have to do in order to… In order to fit everything into dialogue bubbles. We've had discussions about revision, we've had discussions about editing. There are two key pieces for me that I want to lead with and get your ideas on. The first is that when I'm writing for comics, I am allowing the art, I am allowing the sequential illustrations to do a whole bunch of the heavy lifting. Whether it's facial expression on a character that's going to convey emotion or background that's going to tell me whether or not the room's on fire. That's the first piece. The second piece is arguably the harder part, which is the pith, which is the compression. For my own part, I've found that some of my most interesting experiences have come when I was writing for a different artist, and I would write some descriptions and the panels came back and I realized that 75% of the dialogue that I'd delivered was already now being told in the story. So I pulled all of those words out and put in new dialogue and had way more story to work with. It's a fascinating experience. With Rick and Morty…

[Pat] Rick and Morty was interesting. I should say, while I have… I was forced to like deal with short dialogue, short spaces… Jim Zub, who helped me script, we were a writing team there. He, in a couple of different interviews, you can find them online, has gotten very salty. Because Jim has written a bunch of stuff. He's an absolute consummate professional, gets the job done. I am Patrick Rothfuss. Who has kind of never done a comic before in a professional way. But… And he tells the story, like, he's written for The Avengers. At one point, he said that he had… He goes, "I write for this little comic called The Avengers. One of the issues, I had to write off 24 different characters in 20 pages. Because it's a 20 page comic. Comics are 20 pages." He goes, "And then I worked on this comic with Patrick Rothfuss, and…"

[Laughter]

[Pat] He goes, "I had to argue… I begged them for another page, so I had 21 pages to write off these 24." He goes, "Rothfuss turns in his third script, and here we are with 25 pages. Approved by the editors."

[Laughter]

[Pat] So, I didn't necessarily have the knee on my neck that would have taught me as much as it could have. But also, I really am thankful for the editor, because one of the things you learn with the compression is that sometimes to tell the story you want to tell… I'm curious about your experience here, because again, with this sequential medium, you can't just add another panel. That's like one of the first lessons I learned working with Nate Taylor, because we did a comic together years ago for the Numenera game, to introduce the character and the world. And he says, "Okay. Here's the thing. We're going to do a script, and then I'm going to do some blue lines, and I'm going to lay things out. I'm going to do some panels. You're going to approve those. Then we're done, because you can't just stick something in. You can't just add another panel." I'm like, "Oh, no, I get it. I get it.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Then the realization sinks in. A bit of fun back story. Jim Zub and I are good friends. When Zub said, "So I'm working on Rick and Morty and D&D with Patrick Rothfuss," I may have snerked so hard I hurt myself.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because this conflict that you have described is one that I saw coming a mile away, because Jim… I studied Jim's scripts to try and find out how to write for other artists. Jim's got a Patreon where you can look at the scripts that he does. It's a brilliant resource. I struggle all the time with being too wordy. What I've found is that sometimes… We talk about killing our darlings. I will turn a phrase… I just had to do this today. I will turn a phrase and love it and think it is key to the story. Then I take a step back and realize that I need that panel for a reaction shot.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I need that panel for a character to say nothing, but to react to someone else's dialogue. Which means that line's got to go. Because I can't make the book longer. I've got a hard page count. So I have to remove something. The boneyard is full of that kind of thing. I'm interested to know how these sorts of things play out in children's books.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's very similar for me. That… One of the things that you're looking at which is where the page turn is…

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Because you want them to… You want to make a promise so that they want to turn that page. You want to make sure that that hits in the right spot. So then when you're trying to get in more information, and like I have written a science fiction… A hard science-fiction children's book, which is set on the moon, which means that I have to explain lunar gravity two small children while still moving a plot forward, and I have a specific page number. I still need to make all of the things hit the right point. So it was very much about trying to compress and having things do double duty in making sure that anything I put on the page was an ambiguous, so that I didn't have to have a second phrase to explain it. Making sure that those pieces of language were really, really clear.

[Dan] Yeah. That was the same thing I was going to say. My audio dramas that I wrote were hard science-fiction middle grade.

[Mary Robinette] I love them, by the way.

[Dan] Thank you very much. The second one comes out… Will actually have already been out by the time this airs. But having to explain how zero gravity and microgravity works in a fast-paced children's story means that it does have to do double duty like you're talking about. You can't just sit there and explain cryogenics or zero gravity or the Kuiper belt or any other thing. So my solution was, well, this is going to be fun. If I'm explaining zero gravity while my main character is screwing around with it and doing some mean thing to his brothers, then I… Then it's still exciting, while also explaining what I need. So that making sure that it's always doing extra multiple things is something we’re all supposed to be doing anyway…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] But I feel like I learned that lesson even harder when I had to reduce everything down.

[Howard] I want to take a quick break for a book of the week which is not a book of the week. I want to break for it before we moved too far away from his name. JimZub.com, he's written… He's got some tutorials on the sidebar of his website. Comic writing number one, brainstorming to, pacing, page planning, scripting dialogue, action, and analysis. It's seven parts. We'll link to it in the liner notes. These are little older, but I would encourage you to go out and read this. Yes, it sounds a little bit like homework, but there are going to be pages from his comics in there, so it's also fun to read. I can't emphasize strongly enough the importance of reading the things that the experts decide to write about this subject. I still learn from Jim when we talk about these things. So that's JimZub.com, sidebar on comic writing.

[Pat] Can I also just throw out, since we have talked about comics, reading… And I wouldn't be surprised if you guys have already recommended over the years, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Now, I imagine people who work in comics could have different feelings about it. I read it before I really read comics, and it changed the way that I thought about a lot of elements of storytelling. Just pacing and like where action happens. It was an absolute narrative game changer for me in sort of developing my writing philosophy.

[Howard] Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. That is also an excellent book of the week. We'll link to that, too.

[Mary Robinette] One thing that I want to flag that is allowing for this compression with words when we're looking at comic books or audio is that there is another medium that is carrying part of the story. Whether that is the voice of the actor or the visuals on the page. That's part of what you're looking for when you're trying to trim is everything where that other medium is carrying the story. This is a thing that you see a lot in puppet theater where the characters will… In an early draft, people will feel the urge to have the characters… You'll have the character say something and then you get it up on its feet on the stage and the puppets are moving and you're like, "The characters don't need to say that, they're expressing it with their body," and so you cut the line. Because that physicality does the job more for you. So, what I find when I'm working in one of these other mediums is that it forces me to really consider what pieces are important. Then, when I return to prose, with straight prose, where I'm just dealing with words on the page, a lot of that economy of language comes back with me and allows me… I know, this is a very long-winded description, but it allows me to be more focused in what I'm doing, because I've learned to be unambiguous, because I've learned which pieces you actually have to have.

[Howard] It's difficult perhaps to understand the importance of audio as an additional medium without an example. My favorite is, "I can't believe you did that. I can't believe YOU did that. I can't believe you did THAT." Those are three completely different sentences. All exactly the same length.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] All exactly the same length. That's the kind of thing… Now, when you're writing for comics, when you're writing for prose, often you will have to put text emphasis in, in order to ensure that those things are there.

[Pat] What you mentioned there, I realize, now, actually this is true of some of the script notes I've been giving for the Kingkiller TV show, which, when this airs, will probably be dead. But a lot of times, I'm like, "Hey. This isn't really perfectly clear, or this or this." They would say, "You know, we're going to worry about that after we have an actor."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] Because… Which again is such an alien concept to me. I've gotten to thinking about picture books. Because like, I'm going to show a picture, and there will be a picture and text. Then it's like comics is sequential art, depending on how you want to argue that, but like a series of picture and text. Then they're like, "Well, no. The actor will sell this."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] "You don't need to explain the emotional beats. You will see the actor's face. You will…" I'm like, "Oh, gah." It's so hard for me to trust, but also, it's really hard for me to give up control.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That is one of the things that I love about writing for an actor. Like, I wrote for Defense Grid 2…

[Pat] Yeah!

[Mary Robinette] And also for Brass Tactics. What I had to do was… Because it's a game, I had to create a spreadsheet of lines of dialogue that could be delivered by the AI at a point, theoretically, in a way that follows narratively. But I had to write lines that actually did have some ambiguity to them, but that gave… That the actor could make… Give a consistency to. One of the things that, the first time I worked with them, they wanted me to make the lines in my mind a little more purple. We had this conversation about trust the actor. When they get into the booth, when the actors get in there, the lines play. Because I've given them space. I've given them space to bring this character in.

[Dan] Yeah. I remember talking to a videogame writer at Gen Con. She was telling me that she had to write a bunch of different dialogue options that had specifically different emotions. Here's the happy response, the angry response, and all of those. She realized that she could cover all five of them with just the word hey.

[Mary Robinette] Yup.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And just have them delivered differently. She convinced them to pay her separately for all five instances of the word hey. Because the actor was going to sell them.

[Pat] That's great.

[Mary Robinette] I have done the same thing.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Not with hey, but with what?

[Dan] Oh, yeah. That's another good one.

[Pat] When I wrote for the Numenera game, similarly, like, you only have… You have a very small box. Numenera was amazing, in my opinion, because they were doing a return to this older style of game where you had legitimate narrative options which could impact your relationships in the game. Like the old Planescape. This was sort of the spiritual successor to Planescape. For some of the old Fallout games, or the more character driven RPG's as they use to exist. Before graphics sort of ate up all the… Read up all the air in the room. It was like… They honestly went crazy. You could have nine different dialogue options to choose from, and go in any direction. They really leaned into it. But thinking of that sort of economy, where you want it to be clear to the player, like, the person actively engaging in the narrative… There it was, without an actor. But you're still on the screen.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Pat] And you're sort of… You are the character. You're the character that's speaking. In this theory… How to do that in 12 words. 12 words is a lot if you're going to do five different dialogue… It's like you've overfilled the box, you've got to have a little scrollbar, that's not elegant. So, yeah, it's… This is a remarkably transferable and universally useful skill.

[Howard] One of my least favorite forms within comics is the fact that the fontography for comics is sans serif, all caps. There's a huge amount of information that is lost when you're text is like that. I've found that the tools… And I'm saying this for people who specifically want to write comics. The tools that I use to work around this, first and foremost, you know the whole hit the spacebar twice for the period. Instead of hitting the spacebar twice after the period, hit the return key a few times and treat each sentence as its own dialogue bubble. Because the period can get lost and you will find yourself reading a wall of all-caps comic text, and you haven't read it correctly. If you lose the reader in that way, you've got a problem. The second is use bold and italics. These things, they have to be there…

[Pat] I hate the use of bold in comics. I'm sorry. I hate…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I mean, it's… This would be fine if it was William Shatner reading this in my head all the time. But it's a convention in comics that started like way back… Like, these days… I really want to hear how you feel. But I feel like we have the narrative technology these days… Not even like to script, like, we are better storytellers now. We… And like Zub really leaned into it, and, honestly, the editors wanted it. There like, "You're doing a comic." So he would always bold these words, and I would kind of… In my editorial pass, I would go through and unbold as many as I thought I could get away with.

[Howard] That's not going to stick.

[Pat] I got away with a few. But, like, if it's a well written sentence, you don't need nearly as much of that. Do you? I mean…

[Howard] That's… That is one of the tools that I use. If I find, wow, I've got to bold half a dozen words in here in order to get the emphasis in the right place, it's time to rewrite the sentence. It's time to rewrite the sentence.

[Howard] We are out of time. So ironic that we could…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Talk about economy of phrase being the concentrated… I'm not going to do that again.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That we could talk about economy of phrase and just keep going and going and going. Homework. Take a scene that you've written of prose. Remove all of the blocking. Just space out the dialogue. Draw stick figures and smiley faces, and attempt to convey with a different medium all of the things that you were conveying with those other words.

[Pat] That's a great one.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Pat] That's really great.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write. But short.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/20/15-51-feedback-when-to-listen-and-when-to-ignore-with-special-guest-mahtab-narsimhan/

Key Points: Prescriptive advice, suggestions about how to do it, are going to come your way. But when do you look for it? Until you show me you can articulate your reactions in a way I understand, I may not accept your advice on how to rewrite a scene. Tell me how you feel, then tell me how to rewrite the scene. Arrange your readers by the type of advice you want. Subject matter experts, sensitivity readers, tell me what's wrong and how to fix it. Most readers, just tell me your reaction. Editors, suggest how to fix a problem. When you get feedback, you decide whether to accept it or not. Follow your vision. How do you find people you trust to tell you what to do? Professionals. Agent, editor, writing group. Organizations can help, but you have to pick and choose. Audition, or vetting, process. Start with media you both consume, and see what they think of that. Reactions, fresh perspectives, the feedback echo chamber... stay true to your vision. You know how to fix your story better than anybody else. But be open to brilliant ideas from someone.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 51.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with Mahtab Narsimhan.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Mahtab] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon. Which I keep telling you and I'd like you to take that feedback.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, we talk all the time about how to give feedback, how to construct a good writing group, how to train your alpha and beta readers, and one of the points we hit on a lot is that what you're looking for in that feedback stage is reactions rather than specific prescriptive advice. But, as one of our listeners pointed out in an email, asking this question, "Prescriptive advice is incredibly valuable and we all do it and we all get it." So, we're clearly not saying ignore every suggestion that comes to you. What we need to talk about now, then, is how do you decide which pieces of advice you're going to listen to and which ones you're going to discard. When should you actively seek out that kind of specifically prescriptive feedback? So, first ideas, like, when do you seek it out? At what point do you say, "Hey, I need you to answer this question for me?"

[Howard] Approaching it from a different angle, until I have gotten reader reactions from someone and they been able to articulate their reaction to me in a way that I understand, I'm not going to accept feedback from them. If someone hasn't yet told me that this scene made them feel a certain way, I'm not ready to accept their feedback on how to rewrite the scene. I want to know that you can tell me how you feel before you tell me how to rewrite the scene so that you feel what you're supposed to.

[Brandon] Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. Although one thing I do is I kind of arrange my readers by what type of advice I want them to give me. For example, when I use a subject matter expert… I recently wrote a story about someone who's paraplegic. I went and I hired several people to read this story. To them, I said… They were paraplegic and I said, "I want you to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it, specifically, how this differs from your life experience in the life experience that you know other disabled people have. I want you to tell me." For other readers, though, I say I just want to know your reaction. I want to know if my characters are working and my story's working. The way you help me with that is by telling me your just feedback emotionally. I'm looking for different things from different people. From my editor, I want them to tell me what they suggest I do to fix a problem when they've noticed it, because I might not take that, but there's a much better chance that I will take it when it comes from an editor who really knows what they're doing.

[Dan] Let me follow up on that subject matter expert thing. When you've got feedback from them, how much of that feedback was just kind of the mechanics of daily life of a para… Someone who is paraplegic and how much of that was the story or the characterization are broken, and here's how you can fix those? Because that seems like it kind of straddles that line between subject matter and storytelling.

[Brandon] It was actually weighted toward the latter. I would have thought it would be weighted toward the former. But those things are very easy to fix. When someone says, "I usually keep a pole next to me so I reach things and pull them across the desk to me," that's like, "Oh, that's really handy. I will do that. That's an easy fix." But when they say something along the lines of… A piece of feedback I got on this piece which was really helpful was all of them noticed… They say, "We work in a community. We talk to other people." A lot of people write… When they write a story like I had done, they talk about this person in isolation, which is not how we do it. It makes it seem like this person is the only person who is paraplegic in the whole world. That's very common. I hadn't realized that's what you do, but of course, you're part of a community. I'm part of a community of writers. I'm part of a community of people who share a faith with me. I'm part of a community of people who are parenting. We look for people who have a shared life experience so we can help each other. This is something that I had done flat-out wrong that required a really big revisitation of how I was viewing the character and the story because it was just… It was flat-out wrong. That sort of thing was a harder revision, but it was also more surprising to me, and it's the sort of thing that needed a subject matter expert to explain to me.

[Mahtab] Okay. I would call those instead sensitivity readers. I mean, that's what happens when you're writing a piece, middle grade YA fiction, and your writing someone with whom you don't share the identity or a marginalized status or what have you. I mean, you just… You do not have a similar background. That's when you get someone who we call like a sensitivity reader, who's going to look at your story and tell you, "Okay. This is what it is," or "This is what you need to think about as you write." You said, Brandon, they're not in isolation, but sometimes when we're writing from an outsider's perspective, we almost make that kind of an issue story or the issue with that character is their disability or whatever. Sometimes having someone with that background read it often gives you a whole different perspective because they do not see it as an issue, because they're part of a community where this is not the center stage. You can get other feedback from it, but just coming back to your point, Dan, as to when do you seek feedback. When I've taken a story to a certain level and I do no more with it, is when I would actually send it out to my critique group. One of the good things is I have a group that has different strengths. Someone is really good with the big picture perspective. So they would like really look at the forest. There are some who actually look at the trees, and they go down to the bush level, and they will absolutely look at the pacing and the plot and the characterization. So that's when you take the feedback from these people which is… Each one gives you a different idea or a different facet of what your story is. Then once it comes back to you, I think the onus is on you, and it goes with your gut feel of should I accept this feedback or shouldn't I. If it does not fit with your vision, no matter who's given it to me, I would probably not follow it.

[Dan] Okay. I want to pause now for the book of the week, which we get from Howard.

[Howard] Yes. It's not really related to the topic, but I really, really enjoyed Dan Rather's book What Unites Us. Dan Rather has been a fixture in American and, let's be honest, world news broadcasts for… I want to say 50 years, at least 40 years. His experiences… It's kind of a retrospective of the way he sees the American nation and the people who are in it. I really loved it. I needed it when I listened to it. I don't know if you do, but the audiobook was quite good, and that was the way I experienced it. So I can't speak to reading the words on the paper with my own eyeballs and brain.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's for other people to discover. But the book is called What Unites Us by Dan Rather.

[Dan] Thank you.

[Dan] Now, the common thread between all of your comments in the first half of the episode were heavily kind of focused around this idea that you have curated your groups of people that you get feedback from and that you… When you look for specific feedback, you are trying to get it from specific people and for specific reasons. So let's talk just really quick about that. How do you find these people that you trust… Not talking about specifically subject matter experts or sensitivity readers, but just, in general, how do you find those people and how do you decide, yes, I trust what this person is going to tell me to do?

[Brandon] Well, with beta readers in particular, them, it doesn't matter, right? Because I'm not asking them to tell me what to do. So, people who tell me what to do, that I let… That I'm looking for, are professionals. Right? Which is a different sort of thing. I find my beta readers, generally, they are people who have been long-term friends, people who are active in fandom, or people that other beta readers have recommended. We do that a lot. We try to add a few new people every book that I do and not have everyone do every book, right? So we shake it up. It's just a process of watching who makes astute comments on forum posts about the books, who are active on our Facebook posts, those are the people I look for. But for alpha readers, they're giving me direct, fix this, I'm generally only looking at like my agent, my editor, or my writing group for that.

[Mahtab] I think, for me, I join a lot of organizations, and again, we've got forums, so you can connect with people on the forums and say, "Okay, I'm looking for… I'm looking for a critique partner," and everyone kind of just exchanges emails and then goes for it. In case… That's how I started with, but then, over the years, I kind of got closer to a group of people because they write similar stuff that I do, and I like their work and they like my work. So we kind of broke off and formed our own groups. But if you're looking at the children's section, SCBWI, CANSCAIP, these are the… I guess for the US, it's SCBWI, you join those groups, there are areas where you can exchange information and find critique partners. I would say, start out with maybe a chapter or two, see what the feedback is like, see if they're on the same wavelength as you are, before you go deeper down the rabbit hole, and then become good critique partners, because sometimes… What if you're not at a similar level or if the level of feedback that you're getting is not what you're looking for? Then that relationship or that critique is not really helping you. So you also have to pick and choose. Don't just say yes to anyone who says they're going to give you feedback.

[Dan] That kind of audition process, so to speak, I think is really important. Because, we've talked before about how to find fellow writers and form your little groups and things, but going through that kind of vetting process, of saying, "Okay. You know what, I really like your feedback," or "You're giving me feedback that I don't think is valuable," that's a big step. It can be difficult to say, "You know what, this relationship isn't working. I think we should break up."

[Howard] There is… To my mind, there is an easier and much lower pressure way to get to that point. That is to socialize… And I guess Zoom may be the way that we're doing this for the foreseeable future… Socialize with people right and who consume media that you consume, and talk about the things that you're consuming. If Dan and I both sit down and talk about The Mandalorian, and I say, "Oh, my gosh, it's my favorite Star Wars ever, because it's like a cowboy movie Star Wars," and I don't know what Dan's going to say about it. But if Dan's feedback about Mandalorian makes me feel like the two of us watched a completely different show, he's out of my group.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because… Not because he's wrong, but because connecting might be so very, very difficult. Initially, for seeking feedback, I want to get feedback from people whose critiques I'm able to understand. We both watched a movie and we both agreed, "Wow. The protagonist fails to protag for the entire first act, and by the time the second showed up, we were… We didn't like him anymore," and we both get that. Oh, yes, this is someone I… Because when they critique my work, I'll be like, "Oh. Oh, yes. You're right." And when you prescribe something to me, I'm more likely to get it. Now that, that initially is going to create kind of a bubble, and you want to branch out from that. But start friendly first, I think.

[Mahtab] Yes.

[Dan] Yeah. It is a very tricky line to walk, because you don't want to get into that feedback echo chamber. I always really value opinions that are different from my own. Because that, I think, is going to help me look for new solutions and new answers. But on the other hand, someone who is constantly suggesting ideas that don't fit with my style at all, that's not going to be valuable to me. So, it all comes back to this idea of just very carefully deciding who you're going to talk to. Well, I guess, who you're going to get that prescriptive feedback from. The person whose ideas are super different from mine, yes, give me all your reactions. Please. But when it comes to how am I actually going to change this, that's when I do tend rely on people who have similar sensibilities to mine.

[Brandon] Or, I would add, the further someone gets in the professional field of writing and storytelling, the more it seems they are able to help a story become a better version of itself, rather than trying to push it one direction or another. That's not to say that all agents and editors are perfect at this, or even all writing group members, but I've noticed that people who write a lot… For instance, Dan tends to be better at looking at one of my books and saying, "Here's what I think you're trying to do. Here's how to make it better." Where there are other people who are longtime writing group members of mine who like my books, who often give good feedback. But if you give them a book that's outside their normal reading comfort level, they'll give bad feedback on it. Where I've never gotten bad feedback from Dan, because as an industry professional, he reads a lot of things and even things he doesn't like, he can say, "Here's how I think you can make a better version of this thing that I don't necessarily like." Which is a really great skill for a storyteller to learn, I think. But it is not something you can expect from your average even writing group member, I think.

[Dan] I want to print up business cards that say, "Dan Wells. I will help you make a better version of a thing that you're doing that I don't like, even though you're doing a thing that I don't like."

[Mahtab] Where do I sign up?

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] But just very quickly to say something about what you said, Dan, was sometimes you can get that same feedback from the same group that you're with. So getting a totally fresh perspective, even if it does not gel with your own thinking, I think is very valuable. But at the end of the day, you have to decide am I taking it or leaving it, and that decision rests entirely with you. So you just stay true to your vision. No matter who gives you feedback.

[Dan] Yeah, well and…

[Howard] One of… Sorry. One of the things that Brandon said, the ability to say… As a critiquer, the ability to say, for instance, it feels like in this scene you are presenting me with a red herring and you want me to feel doubt about this and you want me to become convinced of this. If that's the case, you need to punch this bit up more and punch that bit down a little bit in order to adjust the balance. But if this isn't meant for a red herring, whatever, then ignore everything that I said. I will give feedback like that to Bob all the time, because I don't know where Bob's book is going. But I will tell him this is my response and this is where I think maybe your levels need to be set. Bob will smile and nod, and I have no idea if he's going to take my advice or not. But he knows what to do with it.

[Dan] So, as a final word, I suppose more than anything else, I just want to give you as a writer permission to get prescriptive feedback, to take suggestions from other people. Don't feel like we have told you you're not allowed to. I do believe that at the end of the day, you know how to fix your story better than anybody else. But that doesn't mean that someone is not going to come along with a brilliant idea that will solve your problems for you. That does happen, and absolutely be open to those experiences.

[Dan] So, let's end with some homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. Bear with me.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You're going to want to do this with a friend. Okay? Step one. Each of you prepare a quick written critique of a movie. Maybe one… I mean, they can be different movies, but something that you've watched and has problems that you're willing to critique. Now. Share your critiques with each other, swap them. Now you take the critique that your friend gave of this movie… Oh, and when you wrote the critiques, you anonymized it, you didn't say like character name, you just say like protagonist or antagonist. Anyway. So you get this feedback from this movie. Now. File as many of the serial numbers off as you can. Set it down next to your manuscript and treat this bit of random, utterly random, feedback as if it was aimed at your manuscript. Why are you doing this? So that you can see what absolute nonsense looks like with regard to your manuscript AND so that you can have the broken watch is right twice a day experience of "Oh, my gosh. That thing that you said about the phantom menace applies to my book."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, no. It may seem really weird, but by doing this, what you're going to do is refine your filters for the sort of feedback you receive and it's going to knock you out of the box and maybe make some of your writing better.

[Dan] I really like this homework. I think it is a cool idea to teach you how to sort through the value of a bunch of feedback. So, cool. Anyway, that's our show for today. Thank you so much for listening. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

May 2026

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Page Summary

mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.17: The Time To Rhyme
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.16: Poetic Structure: Part II
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.15: Poetic Structure, Part 1
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.14: Poetic Language
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.13: Day Brain vs. Night Brain
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.12: Singing Versus Speaking
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.11: What is Poetry?
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.10: Paying It Forward, with Kevin J. Anderson
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.9: Crossing The Revenue Streams
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.8: Smart Promotion
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.7: To Series, or Not to Series
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.6: Building Your Brand
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.5: Pros and Contracts
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.4: Networking
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.03: Publishing Pitfalls
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.02: Publishers Are Not Your Friends
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts i
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Nar

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

Writing Excuses 16.17: The Time To Rhyme

Writing Excuses 16.16: Poetic Structure: Part II

Writing Excuses 16.15: Poetic Structure, Part 1

Writing Excuses 16.14: Poetic Language

Writing Excuses 16.13: Day Brain vs. Night Brain

Writing Excuses 16.12: Singing Versus Speaking

Writing Excuses 16.11: What is Poetry?

Writing Excuses 16.10: Paying It Forward, with Kevin J. Anderson

Writing Excuses 16.9: Crossing The Revenue Streams

Writing Excuses 16.8: Smart Promotion

Writing Excuses 16.7: To Series, or Not to Series

Writing Excuses 16.6: Building Your Brand

Writing Excuses 16.5: Pros and Contracts

Writing Excuses 16.4: Networking

Writing Excuses 16.03: Publishing Pitfalls

Writing Excuses 16.02: Publishers Are Not Your Friends

Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business

Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts i

Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Nar

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