Recent Entries

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/01/13-26-character-relationships/

Key points: Beyond the character arc, with characters changing and developing, other characters get involved. That's where character relationships come in. Some people plan them in advance, while other people discover them in the writing. Leave yourself wiggle room, and when you find two characters that work well together, let them show you great scenes and better stories. Try the Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Mind: intelligence. Money: what is money for, and what are your goals? Morals: what's right and wrong? Manners: what's polite? Monogamy: hot, burning kisses? What is our relationship? The Marx Brothers: what's funny, and what's not! Alignment makes compatibility, differences create friction points, tension points. Another tool is position power versus personal power. How can you introduce backstory in a relationship quickly? A shared in-joke. Free indirect speech, aka internal monologue, reflecting on the relationship. Final question: the relationship after HEA! How do you write that? The classic romantic arc is a character arc, from I am dissatisfied with being alone to they hook up. After that, don't break the relationship, use an event arc, with something disrupting the status quo. External conflicts plus friction in the Kowal relationship axes equals story! Don't just strut like a hawk, scratch for your own worms.

( Putting words on the outline... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Character Relationships.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] All right. So, we know what our characters… They have a big arc, and they're changing, and they're developing. Now other people are going to start interfering with that. Helping or hindering it. We're going to talk about character relationships. This is something that I do a lot ahead of time. But I know that Dan, for instance, just kind of… Often they…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Mess each other up and you see what happens.

[Dan] Sometimes. I do a mix of both. I like to plan out in advance when I know, for example, that I'm going to have a group of friends. I want to know how they all interact with each other. But very frequently, and in fact the book that came out earlier this year, Active Memory, turned into a father-daughter book. Not because I planned it that way, but because as I was writing the other two in the series, that relationship became more and more interesting every time the father came on screen. So by midway through the third book, I'm like, "Okay, you know what?"

[Laughter]

[Dan] "We're just going to focus on this, and we're going to do it right."

[Brandon] I would say… I mean, I joke about being a heavy outliner, but this is one of the places, no matter how much you outline, you have to have wiggle room for. When your characters are quote unquote on screen together and you find that you write them with great chemistry, that they are working… When those two characters are on screen, you have a better scene than when either of them are apart, you know that something is going on there, and you need to be willing to run with that and explore it. You want to write the scenes that are best. You want the characters to give you the opportunity to write better stories.

[Mary] This is one of those things that we're always talking about, that writing is a spectrum from outlining to discovery writing. This is one of the areas that I also tend to discovery write a lot. But I also have a tool that I use when I need to… Like, when I know that I'm going to need these two characters to fight, but I don't want it to be a stupid fight. Because… Oh, I see this all the time, where the characters are fighting and I'm like, "Why are you fighting? You're fighting… There's no…" Or conversely, the characters who really do not get along at all, and then suddenly wind up in bed together. I'm like, "What? You've got nothing in common." So allow me to introduce you to something that I call the Kowal relationship axes.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] It's actually named after my mother-in-law, who used it as dating advice to my husband… Or to her son. I realized that it actually works incredibly well for describing the ways we interact with not just a romantic partner but kind of for everybody. So the idea is that there are six axes along which relationships exist. The more closely you are aligned on any one of these, the more compatible you are. The farther apart, the less compatible. It… The sliders don't have to be very far off. So those are mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers.

[Laughter]

[Mary] I will grant that my husband added the Marx Brothers after he realized… After we were married, that I had never seen…

[Laughter]

[Mary] We'll start backwards and work our way up. Marx Brothers basically represents that you have the same sense of humor.

[Brandon] Right. You laugh at the same thing.

[Mary] It's a very simple one. Monogamy is not that you're both monogamous, but that you have the same idea of what the relationship is. I mean, you've experienced the thing where someone thinks that you are BFFs, and you're like, "I kind of vaguely know you from work…" It's really super uncomfortable. So it's just you have to have… She labeled that one as hot burning kisses, which is better for the romantic stuff.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So they weren't all iterative?

[Mary] No.

[Brandon] When she… You being a writer have…

[Mary] Well, it was actually… The first four were alliterative, and then…

[Brandon] Then, hot burning kisses.

[Mary] Then hot burning kisses.

[Dan] Then hot burning kisses. Which, to be fair, can stand alone.

[Mary] It's true. So, manners mean that you have the same idea of what is polite… What is… And what is not. Morals are different from manners. Morals is your sense of what is right and wrong in the world. So you can have morals that are in close alignment and manners that are wildly off, or the other way around. I mean, that's often why you know someone on the Internet who's a terrible person on the Internet, and you meet them in real life and they're so nice. It's because your manners are really closely aligned, while your morals are wildly off. Money is that you have the same sense of what money is for, and the same goals towards money. It doesn't actually necessarily mean that you have the same amount of money, but that…

[Brandon] For swimming through in your giant money vault, obviously.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's what you do with it.

[Mary] Yes. Obviously. Mind is that you have comparable degrees of intelligence. What's interesting about this is that they really do not have to be very far off. So you can have people that are compatible. Like, the upper ends of all of these sliders in terms of their compatibility, but even just a little bit off… Those are the points where the friction is going to happen. What that does for you if you know that, if you know the places that they're a little bit farther… A little bit off, it tells you what the fight is going to be about.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] The… Why would you even say that?

[Mary] Yes.

[Howard] That surprise… We are so like each other, and yet you just… That thing.

[Dan] Yeah. The… Using those, some of them being close together can also be a good reason why the characters stick together, even though the others are far apart. I mean, the Lethal Weapon franchise is almost entirely founded on the idea that their morals are completely aligned and their manners are wildly 100% off.

[Mary] They have very similar… They're also lined up on mind and they're also… At the beginning… What's, I think is interesting is that they are in agreement on what their relationship is. Which is that we don't like each other.

[Brandon] I work alone.

[Mary] Yes. For both of them. Their understanding of what the relationship is evolves together. So those sliders move in the same…

[Howard] I have a much simpler tool that I deploy much differently, which is the two scales of power. Position power and personal power. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer has position power over the employee. But a very, very charismatic, intelligent, effusive employee has gobs of personal power, and without even trying, can undermine an employer who doesn't have any personal power. In fact, you see this a lot in workplaces, in all kinds of relationships. Where someone assumes that their personal power grants them position, or assumes that their position power grants them… For instance, friendship with everyone under them. I pay close attention to this in Schlock Mercenary, because the military organizations that make up so many… Or that encompass so many of the relationships in the books are inherently about position power, and there's a wide array of differing personal powers in there. I need to make sure… We talked about manners. Something that you would say to a fellow grunt is not something that you would say to an officer. That… That dichotomy, I have to keep track of that, because if I get it wrong, it knocks people out of the story.

[Dan] I had… I worked in an office, and was there for the moment when the guy with all the position power realized that he didn't have any personal power.

[Mary] Oh, hohoho.

[Dan] The office became unlivable. It was fascinating to watch that. That has just given me the dialogue to describe what happened.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have a book coming out!

[Mary] Yes. I have two books coming out, actually. I have a duology, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Book one is called The Calculating Stars. That's coming out this month. Actually, has just come out last week. The sequel, The Fated Sky, is coming out in August, at the end of the month. The set up for the first book is basically, it begins about two minutes before an asteroid slams into Washington, DC, in 1952, wiping out… It's actually the Chesapeake Bay, because it turns out that a water strike is way worse than a land strike. But it kicks off the space program hard and fast and internationally, with 1952 technology. So the first book is push to the moon, and second book is push to Mars. It's a woman-centered cast, because I've got a lot of… Because it's 1952, all of the women who are in Hidden Figures, all of those computers? Not only are they computers at that point, but historically speaking, a lot of them were also left over WASPs, Women Auxiliary Service Pilots from World War II. So you have a lot of people who are lighter than men, better able to handle gravitational blood pressure shifts, and who are walking computers.

[Brandon] It's out, it's awesome, I've read it, it's great. You guys should all go read it.

[Mary] So one of the exciting things for me about this book also is that I had astronauts reading it, and we are actually going to be at NASA and do a project-in-depth about The Calculating Stars, which is the first book in the series, in two weeks. Although we will have done it already… It's time travel, don't worry about it. So this gives you two weeks to read the book before we get to NASA. Go ahead. Three… Two… One… Lift off!

[Rumbling]

[laughter]

[Howard] Was I supposed to make a rocket noise?

[Mary] No.

[Howard] Oh.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] That was a terrible joke.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was waiting to see. Is she going to say lift off? Or are we not going to do that? Nope, she did it.

[Brandon] Either way, there will be massive spoilers for Mary's book in two weeks, so you should read it now.

[Brandon] Let's… Let me ask you guys another question about relationships. One of my favorite things in books and in film and whatever is when you get two characters who minutes after interacting, you can read in their interactions an extensive history that they don't have to tell you point by point by point, which is boring. Characters who just… You can read their relationship in moments. How do you write this? Any tips, any tricks?

[Mary] An in-joke. Just one. You don't have to do a lot. But an in-joke, like if two characters are talking and one of them is like, "Oh, yeah, like the time with the pumpkin."

[Chuckles]

[Mary] You don't have to do anything more than that.

[Dan] You said you wouldn't bring that up, Mary.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Sorry.

[Brandon] They did that in the Dirk Pitt movie, and it worked really well, to kick off the fact that these two characters have been in lots of crazy hijinks together.

[Dan] A story that does this really, really well is Sneakers. Because there's that whole little group of misfits and people, and one of the great things they do is the character Mother, who is always bringing up weird conspiracy theories. The first time he does that, Sidney Poitier, who's the ex-CIA guy, he reacts before he starts the story. I mean, he starts the story, and before he has a chance to get to the weird stuff, he's already rolling his eyes. You immediately know, "Oh, they do this all the time."

[Laughter]

[Dan] They have this very specific relationship to conspiracies in government, and it tells so much in the timing of his reaction.

[Brandon] That's awesome. Yeah.

[Howard] The Rocket and Groot scene where we are introduced to them in Guardians of the Galaxy… Groot's only dialogue is "I am Groot," where Groot is drinking out of the fountain, and we establish very, very quickly that the relationship between these two is kind of father-son and kind of boss-employer and kind of brains and brawn, and yet there is something woven in there that we just don't know, but it's there.

[Mary] I think that the thing with that is not just the in-jokes, but also, tying into what Dan was talking about, that... the characters' reaction to each other. So this is a place that you can use one of the tools we talked about when we were talking about character voice, which is that indirect… That free indirect speech, where the character's internal monologue can be a little bit about their relationship. "Oh, no, no, no, not this story again."

[Brandon] You see this in relationship… Romantic relationships a lot. Someone walks on screen, in a movie or television show, and you know instantly that those two characters have a history, a relationship. Often times it's that they're extremely cold to one another, which we read as, "Oh, something happened in the past between those two." I would say, less is more, in a lot of these instances.

[Brandon] Now, different topic. I wanted to make sure we asked you, Mary. You had an entire series where two characters went through a classic romance relationship, and then multiple books afterward where many people would have just stopped the series. In most movies and things, they just stop at the point where the first book ended. You wrote wonderful, awesome books about a different kind of relationship in some ways.

[Mary] So… Why, thank you. So, anyone who's married knows that you can actually be in a committed, happy relationship… Anyone who's in a committed, happy relationship, whether or not you're… You can be in this wonderful relationship, and there's still conflict. But the conflict is external. So the way I actually structured that… Okay. It took me a while to figure out. So I tend to think about the MICE quotient a lot. What I realized was that a romantic arc is structured as a character arc. The character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and then… That is, "I am alone." Then they hook up. That what happens when you… For the most part is that when people attempt to write relationships later, what they do is they're still writing a character arc, but once you're in a relationship, that couple is now a single unit, and you have to treat them as a single unit. So when you have the "I am dissatisfied with an aspect of self," that means that it's all about an internal conflict between the couple. So what I did was I treated it like an event arc instead, where they were totally happy with each other, but any event arc is when something disrupts their status quo. So I made sure that all of the conflicts that were hitting them were external conflicts, and then used the Kowal relationship axes to talk about how that friction expressed itself between them.

[Brandon] I would say that one of the reasons I like this is, it's a pet peeve of mine… Maybe that's the wrong term… That when the two characters hook up, the story is done. Which it's totally not.

[Howard] Or we have to make them break up so we can put them back together.

[Mary] That drives me crazy.

[Brandon] It's the sort of thing that I feel like, as storytellers, sometimes we internalize this thing which is a complete lie. Sometimes the best stories, in fact often the best stories, are when the reader's personally invested in both characters and personally invested in this relationship, which only happens once they are together. It's the same sort of thing in a different way that happens with Mistborn, this trilogy. If you haven't read it, the story that I originally wanted to tell was how do you keep an empire together after you've conquered it? When you're the Rebels and you've blown up the Death Star and taken over, and none of you have any experience in leading an empire or whatever, a republic, how do you make that happen? It's gotta be way harder than blowing something up, keeping it together. That's what made me initially start working on the series. With relationships, keeping together a relationship, I wouldn't say maybe it's harder, but in some ways it is, right? Because you have to work on it every day. The initial euphoria is gone, and something deeper is growing and building, but that's way more interesting.

[Dan] There's a beautiful quote from the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, in the fourth one, where the kid just wants to go off and be a hero. One of the witches says to him, "It's easy for the chicken to strut like a hawk. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." I always think that… That is such a more interesting story to tell, is how do you actually live rather than do this one cool thing and then be done.

[Mary] I think that it's also important to note that this is… This thing you're talking about of working on a relationship is not just a romantic relationship. Like, if you've met someone at a con or just school or… And they've moved away, it's difficult. You have to work constantly to maintain that level of friendship. It doesn't just take care of itself. I think that that's one of the things that you can do when… As a conflict point, as a tension point, is not the we want to break up, but we want to hang out and there are things getting between us. That's the other secret that I used in the Glamorous Histories is that I gave them, both characters, the same basic objective in addition to the same basic relationship objective, which was they wanted to get offscreen to a fade to black scene.

[Laughter]

[Mary] All they wanted… It's like, we really want to do a fade to black scene right now, but we're being attacked by pirates.

[Brandon] I would say… You mentioned friends kind of growing apart just because you're no longer in the same social circles. If that's happening to you, start a podcast with your friends…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Then you get to see them and hang out with them.

[Brandon] We're actually out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.

[Mary] Yes. So take the elements of the Kowal relationship axes. Look at your characters. Decide where their friction points are. I want you to just pick two of them. Don't pick all of them, if you want them to be friends. Decide why they're that way. It's not enough to say they're… They have different manners. Like one of them is from the south, one is from Hawaii, which is…

[Laughter]

[Mary] [garbled] and I. But pick two, decide why, and then give them an external conflict and let the friction express itself.

[Howard] Can you rattle off the axes again?

[Mary] Yes. They are also in the liner notes. Mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, Marx Brothers.

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

Writing Excuses 13.25: Our Journey with Character

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/06/24/13-25-our-journey-with-character/

Key points: What about the journey you, as a writer, have made in writing about characters? When I started, I was very external conflict focused, with characters who got into a terrible disaster or big problem, and dug their way out. Now, I look more inward, toward character conflicts, internal conflicts, real character flaws. The characters are more nuanced. When you start out, they say, "Write what you know." But you don't know a lot, so you base your characters off friends, but they are just like you. Now, I focus on secondary characters, and how they interact with the main characters. The big change is that I'm focusing less on plot and more on exploring a really interesting person. Not creating a character who can do what I need, who can solve the problem, but just getting to know the characters. But I've fallen into a trap where my side characters are all the same! When I began, the characters were all simple melodies, melodic hooks. But as I explore variances in characters, as I add characters to the cast, I have discovered the underpinning, the mathematics of how characters and art and story interact. I've leveled up, and told the story in a new way. I have regrets, because I could have been writing symphonic scores for video games, but I love making comics.

( From here to there, and back again? )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Our Journey with Character.

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Valynne] I'm Valynne.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm… I've had such a journey. Oh, my…

[Laughter]

[Dan] I love these episodes.

[Brandon] So, this is a weird episode. I put this one in kind of last-minute into the… This… The outline. I have no idea how it's going to go. I wanted to ask the podcasters how their perspective on character has changed since they were a young writer. Since they first started writing. I'll make myself go first to give them time to talk about this, so I can kind of show you what I mean. When I first started writing books back when I was a teenager and in my young 20s, I was very… I would say external conflict focused. All of my characters… If you've read Elantris, you'll see this in Elantris in my characters. They were people who got into a really big problem and were kind of innately strong moral proactive people who had terrible, terrible disasters happen to them, and then spent the entire book digging their way out of it in some way or another. I wrote five or six books all this way. That was how I wrote characters. Particularly primary protagonists.

[Dan] Yeah. Like if you've read Elantris, that character…

[Brandon] You've read White Sand's main character as well, and you've read just a lot of my early characters. That same thing. Dan's just nodding his head.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I'm thinking…

[Brandon] I guess it's…

[Dan] I've read so many of those.

[Brandon] How it's changed is the more I've written, I've very naturally looked inward with characters toward character conflicts, internal conflicts, character… Like, I had character flaws, but they're always something very pithy and easy to say. Like in White Sand, which is my first book and my seventh book, and now you can read the graphic novel, the character flaw was he just wasn't very good with the magic. In a world where he was supposed to… The story is about a guy, the guy who's very weak in the magic, where everyone better than him dies and he has to take over. So his flaw is I'm the weakest guy around. That's a handicap, really. There's not a strong character flaw. The further I've written, the more I've had my characters look inward. But beyond that, the more I started to deal with things like… A great example is in Elantris, I have a character who has autism, but it's very Hollywood autism. It's very Rainman. Right? You can read that, it's straight like Rainman sort of thing. In my latest books, there are three characters on the autism spectrum. People will read the books and be like, "Wait a minute. This character's autistic, aren't they?" It's come from knowing people with autism, researching, actually reading about it. Not taking the super dramatic example is the only example of how someone who has this way of thinking exists and things like this. It's me… I don't want to say trying to be more nuanced, because that gives me maybe too much credit. But it's me getting bored with doing the same thing and/or be trying to do better with… It's like when I write a character, whatever attributes that character has, the people who share that attribute in their real life are giving me trust over that character to do it right and do it justification. If I do it poorly, and kind of the big glitz Hollywood way, what happens is, we have yet another checkmark on the one out of a thousand people who are like that and the other nine hundred and ninety-nine who share a condition with this but think wildly differently or have a wildly different life experience never end up getting represented. They're like, "Oh, you know. You did what everyone did."

[Howard] You've done them a disservice.

[Brandon] You've done them a disservice. I don't want to say that, though, because that's like saying Rainman did a disservice. There are legitimately people who have that type of autism. But it's not the only way to express that in books.

[Howard] But the 10th movie that comes out depicting that condition the way Rainman did? After 10 movies, that qualifies as a disservice. Which is why I say it that way.

[Brandon] Exactly. So you see me looking inward at characters, doing character arcs differently, making internal conflict and dealing with flaws and handicaps in different ways. That's been probably my biggest journey as a writer with character.

[Valynne] I think, for me, the… I think the problem is when you're just starting out, you hear a lot, "Write what you know." The problem is you don't really know a lot, at all.

[Laughter]

[Valynne] Like, for someone like me. So I decided that I would base some of the character… Characterizations off people I knew, my friends, and discovered that when I did that… The problem is that you're friends because you have a lot in common. So you say a lot of the same phrases, and your interests are the same. That's what kind of brought you together in the first place. So I think that it's important to… For me, creating characters these days that are different, I focus a lot on the side characters, the secondary characters, and how… Based on those interactions or based on who those characters are, how they affect my main character. That has changed a lot. I mean, if you have a character who was raised by grandparents, it's going to be different than a character who is raised by a single mother, but just looking at the side characters, and seeing what they've contributed to your main character's life has helped me flesh out the characters so that they end up being a lot different from each other than they originally started.

[Dan] I… First of all, I just want to say I love how much you focus on relationships. Like, all the things you've said in all these episodes are so deeply clued into relationships and who these people are and where they come from. Which we don't often talk about as much, which is cool. Anyway, I was just thinking about that when you were talking. So, my characters... The big change that I have gone through from my own perspective is that I am focusing less and less on plot and more and more on just exploring a really interesting person. I am now less concerned about creating a character who can do what I need them to do. I no longer worry about, "Well, this is the problem that needs to be solved. Is this person going to be able to pull that off?" Sure they will. Of course, they're the hero. They can do it, eventually. What's more interesting to me is just spending time with them and getting to know them. So, on the one hand, I've got a lot of books, a lot of my YA books all have female protagonists, teen girl protagonists. Kira is very different from Marissa who is very different from Quincy, who none of you have read because her book is not published yet. On the other hand, I have fallen into a trap that I've only just noticed where the boy that hangs out with that girl, they're all the same. Marcus is basically just Bal who is basically just Ruben, who again, you've never read. So I've had to take back… Take a step back and go, "Now, wait." I've been doing really well with my main characters, and kind of letting the side characters fall away.

[Brandon] I did that too. I've… It's been fairly recent that I've noticed it, but more like in the last five or six years, that I was commonly letting side characters fall way more into tropes than the main character. I was focused so much on the main character.

[Dan] Yeah. Which I think is just a natural stage of progression, as you really start to love getting to know who this person is and just as deep as you can. You can't get to know an entire cast of characters with that level of granularity without going nuts. So you do kind of have a tendency…

[Brandon] So that's what happened to you.

[Dan] Aha ha ha. You have a tendency to kind of let it slide on those. Like, "Ah, yeah, you know the best friend boy. He can just be the best friend boy." But then my writing group on this most recent book is like, "Um. This guy does not have a very distinct personality." I realized, "Oh, yes he does, it's just this other person's personality."

[Howard] We should do our book of the week.

[Brandon] Oh, you want more time to think, do you? All right.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I… I'll be honest with you. I'm trying to find a way to articulate this so it goes quickly.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] Because it's a long story.

[Brandon] Let's do our book of the week. My Lady Jane.

[Valynne] Okay. My Lady Jane is written by Brodie Ashton, Cynthia Hand, and Jodi Meadows. One of the things that these authors do so well is humor. It's kind of a young… It's a young adult… Basic description would be a Princess Bride meets Ladyhawke. Some of you may be…

[Dan] I want to read it right now.

[Valynne] Way too young for Ladyhawke. But basically, there are three characters that this book focuses on. It's from different perspectives. It's going back to the time where Edward is the king of England, and he's dying. So he's trying to focus on finding an heir, and he's getting his cousin Jane ready to… He's arranging a marriage to secure their kingdom. There's also a horse that turns into a man. He turns into a man during the day, at dawn, and then turns into a man at night. So the three of them get drawn into this conspiracy and have to figure their way out. But the thing that I love is mostly the humor in the way that these characters interact with each other. The time period is just fun as well.

[Brandon] That sounds great. Is the soundtrack done by Alan Parsons Project or…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] In my head, all books have a soundtrack by the Alan Parsons Project.

[Brandon] Actually, I don't think Ladyhawke was technically the Alan Parsons Project, but… There is a relationship there.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Howard, you're up. Come on.

[Howard] Okay. I majored in music. Specifically, music composition. One of my feelings is that… I mean, I could write a melodic hook. [Garbled] They called me Mister Viral Melody because I could write a melodic hook very, very quickly. It was a thing that I was good at. What I was not good at was taking these things that worry a minute and a half long and turning them into a four or five minute piece that explores variations on that melody. In part, that's because of a general failing, which is that I just didn't know how to put the time in. I didn't know how to do the difficult things. I had done the easy part, and it's cool, and it sounds good, and can I be done and turn this in? By the way, I graduated with a degree in music composition, so apparently the bar is lower than it should have been.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The bar is quite a bit lower than it should have been. But when I look at my work, writing and cartooning… I look back at it. I've been doing this now for almost 18 years. I have learned to do the hard things. When I began, these characters were… They were one-hit wonders. They were simple melodies. They were melodic hooks. I have needed to draw them out for 18 years. There have been… If you know the mathematics behind how a fugue is written, you'll see that the melody for a fugue… Not every melody can be turned into a fugue. In fact, there are a lot of melodies that sound like they will make a good fugue, and then you find out halfway through that they don't. I had that happen to me several times. The point here though is that as I am exploring variances in characters, as I'm adding more characters to the cast, I'm discovering this underpinning, this mathematics of how the characters and the art and the story all interact. I don't have an actual mathematical formula for it, but… But when I close my eyes and sit in the chair with the blanket on me and the cat on the blanket, thinking about the next things that happen in the story, the pictures in my head are the same as the pictures were when I was trying to write music. I know that sounds really weird and creepy, but that's the way it works. That journey… For me, the journey has been one where periodically I will do something that I just love in cartooning and realize, "Wow. I've leveled up. I've told the story in a new way. This has been awesome." I told a story entirely from female points of view. I didn't think that was even possible. Did I do it well? I did it better than I would have three years earlier. Could I do it better now? Absolutely. But I was very pleased with it at the time. I look at that and I look back at my career as a musician and I'm disappointed. Because I was not the musician I could have been if I had woken up and paid attention to doing the hard things. So ultimately, my journey with character is this journey where I'm looking back at me as a musician and shaking my head and saying, "Dude. I know you love making comics, but you could have been writing symphonic scores for video games. If only you had gone a little deeper than these little cardboard melodies you spat out."

[Brandon] Wow.

[Dan] That story was sadder than I thought it was going to be.

[Howard] It was not going to end happy.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Honestly, if you come back…

[Dan] Come on, funnyman. You're supposed to be funny.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] If you… If any story you tell about your journey, if it does not reflect back and have some regret in it, you've lied. And I'm not gonna lie. Well, I'm gonna lie. A lot. But I'm not going to lie about that. There are regrets. We've done things wrong. We get things wrong all the time. I love that… Recently, I wrote an argument between Ellen Foxworthy and Kevyn Andreyasn in the comic. Kevyn apologizes. My email box was flooded with people who were saying, "Oh, my gosh. You need to… You need to make a poster of this apology, so that people can learn how to apologize. That's the most beautiful thing I've ever read. It's so in-character and so perfect." When I wrote it, I was crying the whole time because I had learned how to feel what that character was feeling and talk my way out of it in ways that explored all of the mistakes that he now recognized he was making. That was really difficult writing to do. It was fun getting email that says, "Hey, wow, you're awesome." But it hurts to recognize that I could not have reached that point without having made some of that character's exact mistakes and failed to appropriately apologize for them.

[Brandon] Every once in a while, you remind us why we have you on the podcast.

[Wheeze… Laughter]

[Howard] Thanks. Those moments fill me with regrets.

[Brandon] No, that was brilliant, Howard. That was really, really well done. I'm glad we did this episode. I'm glad I kind of gave you guys free rein.

[Brandon] Dan, you're going to give us some homework.

[Dan] Yes. We want you to do what we have just done. You can learn a lot about yourself as a writer and editor goals for the future by taking stock of where you are. So find someone, some wonderful person who is willing to listen to you, in your writing group, or a significant other, or whoever it is. Then give them your journey with character. Talk about when you first started writing, how did you do characters. How do you think you have changed since then, and where do you think you should go next?

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

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.24: What Writers Get Wrong, with Piper, Aliette, and Wesley, with Special Guest K

Writing Excuses 13.24: What Writers Get Wrong, with Piper, Aliette, and Wesley, with Special Guest Ken Liu

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/06/17/13-24-what-writers-get-wrong-with-piper-aliette-and-wesley-with-special-guest-ken-liu/

Key Points: The Asian Diaspora, or the Great Diaspora, refers to the fact that people who claim an Asian identity or Asian ethnic origins no longer live in the cultures and lands of their origins, they are spread around the globe. Pet peeves? The limited set of roles often occupied by Asian characters in popular media, especially torn between their two identities. These characters are not a symbolic background where cultures are fighting. Who should play what characters? Make a decision, and be ready for the meta-conversation that will happen around it, because you are doing it in a community. Beware of trying to have one character represent all of Asianness. To write better characters, don't think of your Asian character as having an identity that revolves around being Asian. Write characters who are individuals first, and their ethnic identity is secondary. Do talk to many people in the ethnic group you wish to use for your characters, and ask questions. Be aware that Asian is a huge umbrella. Drill down 20 steps, where are they from, what are the details of their lives that informs who they are. Do the research, get the names right.

( Go right to the source... )

[Piper] So. All right. We're wrapped up. We've gotten our tips in. We do need to apply homework.
[Ken] The homework will be easy and pleasant. If you're interested in more about Asian Diaspora issues, a lot… I cannot recommend more than to read actual books by Asian Diaspora writers. One of these, it's less well-known, is Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men. Everyone knows about The Woman Warrior because that's on college campuses all the time. China Men is one of her books that I think is the equal of The Woman Warrior, and perhaps even better in some ways. I told her that when I met her, and she smiled at me and didn't say anything. But I really think it's a beautiful book, and reading it will give you lots of insight.
[Piper] Okay. Thank you, everyone. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses.
[Chorus] Now go write.

Writing Excuses 13.23: Internal Conflicts

Writing Excuses 13.23: Internal Conflicts

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/06/10/13-23-internal-conflicts/

Key Points: Internal conflicts are problems that your character has with themselves. When your character is their own antagonist. Conflict and growth. How do you come up with them? The difference between what the character wants and what the character needs. Backstory reactions that may even surprise the character. From the MICE quotient, it begins when the character is dissatisfied with their self-identity. Consider role, relationship, status, and competence. Role, responsibilities to career. Relationships, duty to other people. Status, what does your position in the class or hierarchy demand? Competence, expectations due to abilities. Where do these come into conflict with each other? How do you shift from I'm fine through I need to learn something to I'm going to make a change without alienating the reader? Illuminating backstory! And an external catalyst that triggers an internal reaction. Changing contexts often make us look at ourselves. Be careful when using mental illness as internal conflict. Every internal conflict does not necessarily need to be fixed or overcome. Some things are part of who we are. Consider the two questions, will the character succeed in the change they are making, and will this make them happy. The answers can be positive or negative, making four combinations -- made the change and happy, made the change and unhappy, didn't make the change and happy, or didn't make the change and unhappy. When a character is the only representative of a mental illness in a story, it often feels like a moral judgment and social commentary. The social baggage or weight of understanding about some issues is frequently erroneous and not nuanced. Watch out for reinforcing social understanding that this needs to be fixed. Just because someone has depression, anxiety, BPD, ADHD, is on the spectrum… Does not mean that's all they are! Let it inform the character, not define them.

( And more details here... )

[Brandon] We are out of time. We will dig more into topics like this in coming months. For now, Mary's going to give us some homework.
[Mary] Yes. Okay. So… In the first half of this podcast, I talked about role, relationship, status, and competence. What I want you to do is sit down and figure out what each of those are for a character. What their role is, what their relationship… How… For each of these, they'll have multiple aspects. Like their relationship, you may have three or four relationships listed there. Then, figure out how their role is… Creates conflict with their relationship. How relationship creates conflict with status, and how status creates conflict within competence. Within competence, not with incompetence.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Although, maybe so, yes. And how competence creates conflicts with their role.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 13.22: Character Arcs

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/06/03/13-22-character-arcs/

Key points: A character arc is the emotional progression of a character. From MICE, a character arc starts when a character is dissatisfied with some aspect of themself, and ends when the character is satisfied. DREAM: deny, resist, explore, accept, manifest. Often, trouble with a character arc means you are trying to skip steps. Use this as a checklist for your character arcs, especially when outlining or diagnosing a problem. You can also use promises, progression, payoff: What promises am I making at the beginning of the story? What does the character lack, where do they want to go? What is the payoff at the end? What are the steps of progress to get there? And parentheses -- open, open, close, close. Downward spiral character arcs, or tragedies, may be a heroic arc inside a tragedy. There's also a style where everything the hero wanted is offered to him, but accepting it is a disaster, while refusing it also is painful. Think of the classic tragic flaw, where the person follows their motivation even as it destroys their life. Pantsers! Try using the tragic flaw, followed by a heavy series of yes-but try-fail cycles. Progress, but everything is getting worse. Watch out for a series of no-and, where no progress is made, and everything gets worse.

( Swing your partners... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Character Arcs.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Character arcs! Whew!

[Mary] Yay!

[Brandon] This is a great topic.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] What is a character arc? Were you laughing because I come up with the topics? So…

[Dan] No, we're laughing because people don't think that writers are actually like this, but we do…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Sit around and geek out over character arcs.

[Brandon] Oh, man. Character arcs are so cool.

[Dan] We totally do.

[Mary] We could do 15 different podcasts just on character arcs. A character arc, what we're talking about, is the emotional progression that a character goes through. Their journey, their learning experience, whatever you want to call it.

[Howard] We describe it as an arc because it's typically graphed the same way the narrative curve would be graphed. That's because it's a narrative.

[Mary] So I… Like I've… The character arc falls into the category of things that I have mostly understood. If we are talking about the MICE quotient, a character arc begins when a character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and it ends when they are satisfied. But I've recently learned a new tool that I am super excited about.

[Brandon] Oh, wow.

[Mary] Yes! Okay.

[Dan] Okay, I'm…

[Brandon] You're so excited about this, this is proving how geeky we are.

[Laughter]

[Mary] I know. So Elizabeth Boyle, who is a romance writer, talked about this, and she said that it was the arc… She was like, "This is the structure of a romance novel." As she was talking, I was like, "Oh, my goodness. This is the structure of every character arc in the history of ever." So what you have… It's an acronym. DREAM. So first, you have denial. The character denies that there is a problem. "There's not a problem, everything's fine." Then they resist the problem. It's like, "I see what you're talking about, but I have it under control." Then they explore it. Which, in romance terms, as well may be one date. Then they accept. "Ah. I am in love." Then there's… In romance, it's matrimony, but for everybody else, it's manifestation. Which is the action that they take after they accept that. When you start looking at other arcs, it's like everywhere.

[Brandon] It's… That sounds a lot like the pattern of grief. What do they call it, the stages of grief?

[Laughter]

[Mary] She actually got it from an anger management class.

[Brandon] Wow. Interesting.

[Mary] When she was a manager at Microsoft. She teaches this… If you can take her class, I highly recommend it.

[Dan] That's really cool.

[Mary] But it's so good. Because it's like… It's so… Once she pointed that out, and I realized, "Oh, yeah. That is, in fact, the progression that I go through pretty much any change." Climate change? That's not happening. Or… Brussels sprouts? They're terrible. Well, some people like Brussels sprouts. All right, I'll try one. This is pretty good. All right, now I'm cooking them at home.

[Brandon] I wish my children would go through that. They just live in denial stage for pretty much everything.

[Laughter]

[Mary] This is the thing that was so exciting to me, was that I realized that when I was having trouble with a character arc, that my problem was that I was trying to get them from denial to manifestation without passing through the other steps. Stepping them from denial into resistance, that you have to go through each of these changes in order to get to the next stage. You don't have to… The amount of time you spend in any of those is going to vary wildly depending on the type of story you're telling. But they… It's still a progression that happens naturally.

[Dan] Well, it's not just that you can't skip three middle ones. If you skip even one…

[Mary] Yeah.

[Dan] Stepping directly from denial to exploration. I hate Brussels sprouts, but I'm going to try one. Why? You need that resistance step in the middle.

[Brandon] That is a really good way of putting this.

[Howard] It's helpful to realize that… This happens to me all the time. You explain this technique and I think, "What? How have I been able to successfully create character arc without knowing this technique?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because I observe myself, I take inventory regularly. I observe other people. When I write, I'm just kind of naturally, intuitively doing this. You, fair listener, are very likely doing the same thing if you're writing character arcs. But now that you know how to spell DREAM… ea… Now that you know how to spell DREAM, you have a tool that will let you run a checklist on your arc, so that you know you're doing it right.

[Brandon] I've said this before on the podcast, but a lot of these tools that we come up with, these are not things I actively use while writing. I use them actively when outlining. Or when I'm diagnosing a problem…

[Mary] Yup.

[Brandon] And I say, "Something isn't working here." The more of these tools I pick up, the better I get at diagnosing these problems. Because every book goes haywire in some way. In the past, I've always used kind of the thing we've talked about a lot on Writing Excuses, promises, progression, payoff. Right? With me, I ask myself, "What are the promises that I'm making with this character at the beginning of this story? What are they lacking in their life? Where do they want to go? Or where do I want them to go? What is the payoff at the end that I have to earn through steps of progress for that payoff to really feel exciting and wonderful?" We referenced Star Wars a few weeks back. The idea of Luke standing and looking at the… Into the sky and you know he wants to get off this backwater world and do something cool, and your payoff is when he saves the entire galaxy. The progress are those steps in between where you see that he's earning that payoff.

[Howard] It's also useful to… The concept of parentheses. The parentheticals. You begin with a character who is unhappy, who desires a thing, and who is in trouble. As you close parentheses, they're resolving the trouble, they are… They have the thing they want or they have the thing they need, and they're still unhappy. Or they're happy. You put that parenthesis there and it completes the arc. I love the fact that you can think about it in terms of parentheses, but they don't need to be opposites. You can have unhappiness at both ends, and still have a very, very satisfying arc. Especially if it's one for a side character or for a character who you are planning on pulling forward into another volume.

[Mary] That was one of the things that was exciting… That positive or negative state about the DREAM thing, is that like you can get a character all the way up to the point of manifestation, and the way they manifest… Look, I accept that I have fallen in love with this person, and I am going to do nothing about it. That's like… Or I am going to send them away, or I'm going… It's… They can… That's what a tragedy looks like when the character's manifestation is in the negative state.

[Brandon] Right. Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Howard, you've got a book for us this week.

[Howard] Yup. Another nonfiction book that I really enjoyed. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies. It's by Cesar Hidalgo. One of my favorite… I actually had to look it up on Wikipedia. One of my favorite bits in the book was his description of how the physical… The theories that describe the physical process of entropy… The formula, the actual formula was mirrored in information theory, and the people working on these two theories didn't know about it. The parallels… Once you look at the two parallels, you realize, "Oh. These are necessarily parallel because of an accident. These are parallel because energy is information." It's super cool, mind blowing, good fun.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] Why Information Grows, by Cesar Hidalgo.

[Brandon] So, Mary, you were mentioning kind of tragedies.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Brandon] Let's talk about downward spiral character arcs. Where a character is, for lack of a better phrase, falling to the dark side, or…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Descending into madness, or being overwhelmed by depression, or whatever it is where the character is going to be at a worse state at the end of the story than they were at the beginning of the story. How do you write these? Why would you write these? What's going on there?

[Dan] I actually consider that I write a lot of tragedies. I think most of the Cleaver books are tragedies in some sense. They're not actually spiraling out of control so much as getting to that endpoint and choosing not to take the thing you want. Because you realize it's bad for you, or you realize that something else is better, or whatever it is.

[Brandon] So would you say you go through denial, I'm not a serial killer, resist, explore, accept, but then stop at manifest? Or…

[Dan] Well. So, since we're looking at John Cleaver. There's kind of this umbrella thing that his life is terrible. Right? He is not happy, he doesn't know how to interact with people, he doesn't know how to connect with people. But, with the exception of one of the books, none of the stories are really about him learning how to connect with people. They're about him solving some other problem. So his thing, he denies in the first book, I am not going to kill anything, because I know that that's wrong. I follow these rules. Then he basically over the course of the book is forced into a position where killing is the only moral choice, because it will save other people.

[Howard] And he's so good at it.

[Dan] And he becomes very good at it, and it's this great thing, but he gets to the end and he realizes this didn't make me a better person. This saves some people, but it kind of ruined my life. So my life sucks as much or more as it used to. So you kind of get a nice heroic arc folded up inside of a tragedy at the same time.

[Howard] There's also a style of… One of the many formulas for writing three act narrative curve type stuff where there is a point at which our protagonist/hero/main character… Everything that they have wanted for the first three quarters of this story is now presented to them. If they take it, it's a disaster. If they refuse it, we get the dark night of the soul, and they go on and progress to something else. A downward character arc is often when we think we are having one of these kinds of stories, and then they take that thing at the turning point of Act III, and we get a different dark night of the soul. Often, those are horror stories. I can't think of any good examples offhand, but it's chilling when you see it happen.

[Brandon] Well, this is what Lucas wanted to do with the prequels. You can argue how effect… But he… This was the goal of those, was to show the dissent of a heroic character into… [Inaudible]

[Dan] Now, that thing, that act of taking the thing that you shouldn't take. What that often comes down to is the thing we all learned about in high school called the tragic flaw. This person, either they are too prideful, or they are too greedy, or they are too selfish, or they love the wrong person too much. They are going to follow that motivation as far as they can, even though it burns their life down around them.

[Mary] One of the tools that you… For those of you who are pantsers rather than plotters… This works for plotters, too, but for those of you who are pantsers who are sitting around going, "I don't want to come up with each of these DREAM steps." Or… So you figure out what that tragic flaw is. Then, when you're following it, as you're stepping through, if you use something that we've talked about on previous podcasts, which is the idea of yes-but, no-and. If you do a lot of yes-but, your character achieves their goal, but it makes things worse. This is a downward spiral because everything that they tried to do that should work, makes things worse. That's what… A lot of times I will see people do, is that they will do a ton of no-and… No-and means that the character did not succeed and things get worse. While you should absolutely have some of those in there, if the novel or short story is nothing but no-and, it's going to make it feel like there is no forward progression. Whereas if you have a lot of yes-but, it's just continuous failure when they should be having success. Which is one of the things that will make people unhappy.

[Dan] That's one of the ways that Extreme Makeover is structured, is with a constant stream of yes-but. Which shows this thing I shouldn't be doing is working. I'm getting rich. I'm getting famous. I'm getting all these things that… Even though I know that my methods are wrong. So it's just kind of building on top, until you know that it can't sustain itself.

[Howard] You look at that with the first Captain America movie. There is yes-but for about the first third of the movie. Then it's just yes. Everything he is doing is making things better. He hasn't beaten the bad guy yet, but he's always moving closer to the objective. That film often comes under fire for that exact problem. The big thing that the character wanted… Well, he got all that in the first third of the film.

[Brandon] Great first half of the movie and kind of boring second half of movie.

[Brandon] We'll go ahead and stop here. I'm giving you guys some homework. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot when designing this particular podcast and things was the idea of sideways character arcs. This is like when the character isn't necessarily learning something new, they are just becoming something different. Not necessarily better. It's an arc, where obviously the arc where you learn to be a more generous person is a positive character arc. Or the arc where you end up murdering Jedi children is a downward character arc. What about that sideways arc? That sideways arc where you're just becoming someone new, and it's not necessarily better or worse. See if you can come up with one of those and apply this DREAM aspect to it. Those steps for DREAM are denial, resist, explore, accept, manifest. Right? See if you can apply that to a sideways character arc. I don't even know if this works. I want you guys to try it out and tell us about it, if it does. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 13.21: Q&A on Character Depth and Motivation

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/27/13-21-qa-on-character-depth-and-motivation/

Q&A summary

Q: How do you write a deep and compelling character that you personally dislike and still treat them fairly as an author?

A: Look at the character and think, "I hate this person. But somebody likes them."

Q: What do you think is the best, most useful way to discuss character's underlying motivations without overtly talking about them in narrative?

A: How do they react to things. Careful and subtle seeding of motivations and backstory into quirks and interactions. Look around you, and ask "What motivations underpin their actions and talk?"

Q: How well should characters understand their own motivations?

A: Be realistic. Most people don't understand all the reasons behind everything they do. Who is the character, and what motivations? Some things we ask, "Why do I do this?" but others, we don't.

Q: How do we make a nonviolent main character or characters interesting?

A: Is interesting only violent action? Conflict is interesting. Review the elemental genres, many are not violent, but they still have conflict and interest. Look at the people around you that you find interesting.

Q: Can there be too much depth to a character?

A: Depends on their role in the story.

Q: How do you balance this [depth and roundedness] and what is your preference? To pick a few attributes and go deep, or to try to touch on a little bit about everything in a character's life?

A: You have so many words to drill into the character. How do you want to spend them? Probably part depth, and part spread. Remember the difference between revealing and exploring an aspect of character. How important is this to the story?

Q: How can you make a character's motivations seem not shallow, when most motivations are shallow?

A: Simple is not necessarily shallow. Also, people often don't understand their core motivations, the underpinnings behind what seemed to be shallow motivations. Take something shallow, and explore or reveal just a little bit of the deeper underpinnings.

Q: Do you guys have certain questions about characters you have to answer for yourself before you can start writing about that character?

A: No. Later, when I am stuck, when I need to figure out how the characters could have gotten to this point, then I figure things out and write a dossier. When I am writing a character, I worry about voice, what do they say, how do they say it, which suggests backstory to fill in later.

Q: Is it possible to have a story without a villain? Is the world ready for that?

A: Yes. Man versus nature. You need conflict for a compelling story, but conflict does not have to be created by a villain.

Q: How do you know if a character voice works, and how do you make it work? How much effort do you put into differentiating character voices? Do you have a different vocabulary sheet for different people?

A: Yes, I have different vocabulary for different characters. For example, awesome, excellent, outstanding. Syllables and pop culture references. Age influences voice. You don't want a 50-year-old using teenage lingo.

( Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no... )

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 21.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on Character Depth and Motivation.

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Valynne] I'm Valynne.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And you have questions for us. Starting with Eliza. She says, "How do you write a deep and compelling character that you personally dislike and still treat them fairly as an author?" Now, we covered unlikable characters, but I think this is an interesting take on it. How do you treat someone fairly when you, as a writer, don't like them?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… This has gotten easier as I've gotten older, because there are so very, very many people I've met that I don't like…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Who I need to associate with professionally anyway, and who I have grown to realize that other people like.

[Dan] My ears are burning.

[Howard] Those other people have valid sorts of opinions. That kind of… I know this sounds a little high-minded, but when you adopt that attitude, you look at a character and you think, "Oh, wow. I hate this person. Well, certainly somebody likes them." Then it gets easier.

[Brandon] All right. We'll move on. What do you think is the best, most useful way to discuss character's underlying motivations without overtly talking about them in narrative? This is from Michael.

[Valynne] I think a lot of times that can come from the way they react to different things. Their reactions tell you quite a bit about who they are.

[Dan] Absolutely. One of the books that I wrote last year had a character who… And I talked about this in a previous episode. She's not a nice person. There… I gave her one specific quirk, that any time she felt like she needed to expose herself, to make herself vulnerable in some way, there was always a very specific reason that she chose not to do that. Eventually, that turns out to be fully tied into her motivations, and something that happened to her in the past. But just carefully and subtly seeding that into the way she interacts with everybody else.

[Howard] The… There's a psychological description here where one person says, "I'm thirsty," and the other person says, "All right. We'll get something to drink on the way home." Contextually, the person has said, "I'm thirsty," as they are driving past a root beer float store.

[That happens.]

[Howard] Their actual motivation is I want to go get a root beer float. But they didn't say that overtly. We do this all the time. There's a thing that you want, and you will say anything that aims at it, but isn't it. Obviously, this can be done in ways that past aggressive and gross and angry and whatever. But we also do it unconsciously all the time. So look at your life, look at the lives of the people around you, look at the way people talk, and ask yourself, "What are the motivations that they have that are underpinning the things that they are doing?" That will help you write these things.

[Brandon] Liz asks, "How well should characters understand their own motivations?"

[Valynne] I think you need to be realistic. Because I think there are very few people who are so self-aware that they understand the reasons behind everything they do. I think as the author, it's okay to know, but I just think it's really unrealistic to portray someone as knowing everything.

[Dan] I think that depends on who the character is, and which specific motivations. One thing that I am always very clear with in my own head about myself is I know why I do the jobs that I do. I know what is driving me to do that. Because I'm very aware of, if that stops being worth it, I'm going to stop doing this thing right now. But there are other things I do in my life that, yeah, I probably… I've never had that… Maybe never had cause or never had the self-actualization to sit down and say, "Now, why do I do this thing?" So different motivations manifest in different ways for different people.

[Brandon] All right. Katie asks, "How do we make a nonviolent main character or characters interesting?"

[Dan] It's impossible. Violence is the only interesting thing.

[Valynne] That's what I was going to say.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Valynne] Howard?

[Howard] Well…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Technically… Technically, poison isn't violent.

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Brandon] All right.

[Dan] That's okay. Two people…

[Howard] Those were a series of…

[Brandon] You could pass if you want.

[Howard] Well, no, it's… When you say, "How do you make a nonviolent main character interesting?" You are defining interesting as violent action. Okay? If that is your definition of interesting, well, that's a high bar to clear. What is interesting besides violent action is… Have you watched… Beautiful Minds? The exploration of game math in their, the mathematics? I found that incredibly interesting, and there was no violence at all.

[Brandon] I think this is a question, Katie, go back and look where we've talked about conflict. Conflict is interesting. But go listen to the entire season where we talk about the elemental genres, because a lot of those are not violence oriented, and we talk about how to create conflict and interesting stories around those.

[Valynne] Well, I would also add that if you look at the people that surround you and you find interesting, I'm going to go out on a ledge and say, I bet most of them are not violent, or you probably wouldn't be friends with them. So maybe look at the people around you and just what you find interesting about them.

[Brandon] Kate asks, "Can there be too much depth to a character?"

[Dan] Depending on their role in the story, probably. This can be a case where we… The question we get all the time is what do I do with my side characters are more interesting than the main ones? Maybe you've just made them too interesting and need to dial that back.

[Howard] Can there be too many adverbs in a book? Can there be too many… Yeah, that's really subjective. If the story works, and the character is super incredibly deep, that's awesome. If it doesn't work, then… Nope.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Shawn has an interesting question kind of along these lines. I'm going to rephrase it a little bit. He's implying, and it's a good kind of implication, that depth and roundness can sometimes be in tension to one another. That if you go deep into one attribute of a character, you can actually make them less round by focusing too much on one attribute about them. He asks, "How do you balance this and what is your preference? To pick a few attributes and go deep, or to try to touch on a little bit about everything in a character's life?"

[Howard] My form and analysis teacher in… When I was studying music, said, "You've got the budget to drill 1000 feet worth of holes. Do we want to drill one 1000 foot hole, two 500 foot holes, or a thousand one foot holes in this piece of music? As we study, or in music in general?" What we came up with was, well, we need to drill at least one 500 foot hole and probably a couple of hundred foot holes. What's the budget for now 10 foot holes and 1 foot holes, because we want to look at a bunch of other things? If you look at it in those terms, how many words do you have? You have a thousand words worth of drilling into this character. 500 of them on depth, and the other 500 spread across other things.

[Dan] I think it's important to remember that there is a difference between revealing an aspect of character and exploring an aspect of character. You can pointed out without having to spend a lot of time on it.

[Valynne] I also think it depends on how important that is to the story. Because if it is something that is very important to the story, then you can make… I think you can make it work.

[Brandon] All right. Let's do our book of the week. Pitch Dark.

[Valynne] Okay. So Pitch Dark is a sci-fi book written by Courtney Alameda. She… It's released in February. It's basically kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark in space. With like combination of aliens and Raiders of the Lost…

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] So how could you not like something like that?

[Dan] I want to read that one too.

[Valynne] Right, of course. So it's set in the future. One of the things that I really like about this is that they're searching for things among deadly aliens who kill, and so they're… It's part terrifying, part just wondering what would happen in the future if our future was something similar to this. The thing that I think that Courtney does really well is reflecting different cultures, and just providing insights to how that then makes people think differently, how it makes them… Why they do certain actions, how it defines who they are. I think that she is just a pro at doing something like that. There are two protagonists. There's the male and female. So it kind of goes back and forth between the two perspectives. But they are two people who did not plan on working together, and end up needing to work together in order to battle the aliens.

[Howard] We've had Courtney on the podcast once? Twice? At least once. I've been on panels with her before. She's a lot of fun.

[Valynne] She is.

[Brandon] All right. Back to the questions. I'm going to tell Sheldon your question about untrustworthy narrators, we're going to hit that later in the season, so we will get you a podcast on that. Tiffany asks, "How can you make a character's motivations seem not shallow, when most motivations are shallow?"

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Unpack that one, guys.

[Laughter]

[Dan] We're learning so much about the people asking us questions. Learning so much about our fans. I don't know. I think that there are a lot of motivations that are very shallow. I don't know if I'd say most in the entire world, but…

[Brandon] It depends on your definition of shallow.

[Dan] It depends on your definition… And your definition of motivation.

[Brandon] Like loving your family is simple, but not shallow. I would say. Right? Like there's a difference between that… If you're saying shallow like the love of money is a shallow thing, perhaps that's your definition of shallow, and there is a lot of motivation that centers around that.

[Howard] Well, let's… When you say most people's motivations are shallow, fundamentally, most people don't understand their core motivations. I'm hungry is… Well, my core motivation is I need food. Well, the truth of the matter may be I'm sad. I want comfort food. Okay? The underpinning there is a bad thing has happened, and I suffer from clinical depression, and I just ate, and I'm feeling guilty about being hungry, but I'm convincing myself that I am hungry, and all anybody else gets from me is I'm hungry. I am completely unaware of all of that. All I know is I'm hungry. So when you say people's motivations are shallow, yeah, that was totally shallow. Because I can't see the deep bits.

[Valynne] I agree. I think a lot of… For me, when I think of shallow, I think of the motivations may be behind the way people look, wanting to be thinner, or wanting to be more beautiful. That may seem shallow. What we value may be material. But, like you said, Howard, going behind the motivations of why do we value that. For example, if I am insecure about the way I look, which is about every girl I've ever known at any stage, why? What are the things that have been said to us? What are the things that are part of society or the culture or the media that have aided in that feeling of feeling insecure? So, I think that shallow is… It really does depend on the motivations behind it.

[Howard] So when it comes back to our writing, how do you give deep motivation when motivations are shallow? You do exactly the thing that we're describing. You take something fairly shallow, and then you explore for just a moment a deeper underpinning, and let the reader see, "Oh, there's something more here." Then you can move on and the reader will understand that it's deeper than just I'm hungry or I want new lipstick.

[Brandon] Do you know, we will do a podcast on character bias and our own biases as writers later on, so look forward to that. A lot of questions about what we call so-called dossiers. Meaning the questions you ask yourself about a character before you start writing. We covered this a little bit in an earlier podcast, but let me just make it explicit. Do you guys have certain questions about characters you have to answer for yourself before you can start writing about that character?

[Dan] No, I don't.

[Valynne] I don't either.

[Brandon] I do not either.

[Valynne] I just go. Then later…

[Dan] What it… Go ahead.

[Valynne] Later, when I am trying to figure out why this character is important, that's… When I'm kind of getting stuck, that's when I take the time to figure things out. Because I don't want to…

[Howard] I've reached the point with a couple of characters where I realized, "Oh. You guys both fought in the same war and you fought on different sides." I now need to build a dossier that explores where you were and when you were, because your reactions to each other in the story thus far suggests that you've never met. Okay? How can I canonically build this so that it works? That's the point at which I end up writing a dossier.

[Dan] When I am writing a character, I am much more concerned with voice. How are they going to sound? What kinds of things are they going to say, and how are they going to say it? That will suggest to me backstory that I can fill in later.

[Brandon] All right. Stephanie asks, "Is it possible to have a story without a villain? Is the world ready for that?"

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] Yes?

[Howard] Yup.

[Dan] Examples exist.

[Brandon] Can you find some? Examples?

[Dan] Well, I mean, the classic example that breaks like every rule is There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury, right?

[Brandon] It doesn't have characters.

[Dan] There's no characters at all, and so it's easy to point out. I would say that…

[Howard] Any man versus nature story qualifies, because nature isn't a villain. Nature doesn't care.

[Dan] Uh-huh. So we need to survive this earthquake tornado title wave whatever that kind of thing can happen. I don't think, and I'm sure someone will come up with a counterexample. I don't think it's possible to tell a compelling story without a conflict in it. But that conflict does not have to be created by a villain.

[Brandon] We're getting a lot of questions about story arcs and character arcs which we will cover in the next few months. We're also getting a lot of questions about character voice, which we've done a few podcast on, but not with this team. So I'm going to end by pitching you a couple of these. Eric asks, "How do you know if a character voice works, and how do you make it work?" Amanda asks, "How much effort do you put into differentiating character voices? Do you have a different vocabulary sheet for different people?"

[Howard] Let's answer the second question with yes.

[Brandon] Okay. You do have a…

[Howard] There are words that I know that some of my characters will not say, and words that I know that they will always say. The example that I usually bring up is awesome, excellent, outstanding. I have characters who will always say outstanding in response. I have characters who would never say that, and who would instead say awesome. It has more to do with kind of their military bearing. There's a whole list of those things that I keep track of.

[Dan] I don't get that granular with my dialogue, with the vocabulary that they use, but I do think about syllables. Like how big of a word is it? I will control which characters can use pop culture references and which don't.

[Valynne] I think that when you're considering age, a lot of that will make a difference in terms of voice, because you don't want a 50-year-old using teenage lingo, if you're wanting the 50-year-old to sound cool.

[Dan] Unless you're writing a story like 40 years in the future.

[Howard] I turned 50 in February.

[Valynne] So stop using the cool lingo, Howard.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because that's been such a problem for me.

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to end us with a writing prompt. During this session of the podcast, Howard has drawn something. What did you call it, Howard?

[Howard] Okay. On the way over here, some syllables just marched around in my head, and I ended up with the idea. Tyrannopotumus Rex.

[Laughter]

[Howard] So I didn't bring a sketchbook with me. I asked Emily for a paper and pen. She handed me one and I scribbled a Tyrannopotumus Rex.

[Brandon] He says scribbled. It's gorgeous.

[Dan] It was great, because he literally showed up at the house, sat down and said, "I need a pen and paper." And just had to get this out of his head.

[Brandon] I've done that with stories before, so… It's… It was fascinating to watch. He's been doodle… Noodling on it during the whole thing. I guess he's been doodling on it too. We're going to put a picture up for you. In the liner notes. Your job is to write a story about this. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.20: Fear and Writing, with Emma Newman

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/20/13-20-fear-and-writing-with-emma-newman/

Key points: BIC (butt in chair) is not that easy! Between the desire to write and the ability to begin writing, we need to unpack the reasons why we procrastinate, and look at ways to handle them. Specifically, what are the fears that keep us from writing. Sometimes you may also find depression or other blocks, and need different tools for those. Watch out for unprocessed wounds from one's past, the fear of failure, and the fear of success. Be aware of what's happening. Try using one fear to combat another, e.g. fear of regret overcoming fear of success. Give yourself permission to be selfish, to carve out time for your work. Negotiate with your fears, trick them. Think about the advice you would give a friend who was suffering from your fears. Promise your inner toddler a reward when you finish!

( What else could go wrong? )

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Fear and Writing, with Emma Newman.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're terrified.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Aliette] I'm Aliette.

[Howard] [squeak]

[laughter]

[Dan] With us, we have our special guest, who's terrifying Howard so much, Emma Newman. Emma, I'm excited that you're here. Tell us about yourself.

[Emma] Hello. I'm an author, an audiobook narrator, and a podcaster. And also a role player.

[Dan] Well, awesome.

[Mary] Yay!

[Dan] Okay…

[Emma] I think I paid for the latter one, though.

[Dan] We… Dear audience, who is not actually here with us while recording. We are currently on the Writing Excuses retreat. Let's get some love from the audience here.

[Whoo! Applause!]

[Dan] Okay. One of the things that we have heard nonstop… This is the last day of our weeklong thing. Emma's was the very first class at the retreat, and people have not stopped raving about it. So we want to talk about fear and writing. What do we want to talk about here?

[Emma] Well, the whole reason I created the talk that I did at the beginning of the week was just sheer rage at all of the people who I saw tweeting or blogging who were professional authors who were saying, "Well, all you need to do to be a professional author is to just sit down and write. Like, butt in chair, darling." I would just get so furious because it's not that easy for everybody. I don't actually believe it is easy for anyone, and that's just a very glib thing for them to say, to kind of emphasize the fact that there is an element of self-discipline. I understand that, but I feel that it kind of shut a lot of things out of the dialogue that we need to have about what nee… What work you need to do between the desire to write and the ability to actually begin writing. So the talk kind of unpacked all of the reasons why we procrastinate, and then what we can do when we've identified those underlying reasons, on a practical level and an emotional level, to enable us to be able to write as much as we want to.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Mary] I was really glad to hear you give that talk. I think that you were absolutely right to have it at the beginning of the week. One of the things that I want to highlight for you listeners is one of the things that can happen to you when you start to unpack the reasons that you are not writing is that you can discover that there's some other stuff going on. I went on this journey myself, and I've alluded to it on the podcast, that I for years was like, "Oh, I'm… I'm a procrastinator, and sometimes I get burnt out, or I'm in a funk." Then realized, after hearing other people talk about it, that actually what I was dealing with was depression, and that I needed different tools to deal with that, because it was getting in the way of me writing. The analogy that I often use is that it's much like having dysentery. That you're afraid to leave the house. It makes everything a mess. You're miserable. And no one wants to talk about it.

[Howard] And you're going to lose the game of Oregon Trail.

[Laughter]

[Mary] And you're going to lose the game of Oregon Trail. So that's one of the reasons that I was so excited to have you on, is because people talking about the various aspects of fear and depression is what got me to go to the doctor, at the age of 45. So hopefully, listeners, this… Don't be… Hopefully this will help you, and don't be surprised if you're listening to this and thinking, "Oh, no, this doesn't concern me." And then suddenly go, "Oh. Oh, this is me."

[Emma] One of the things that I wanted to achieve with the talk was opening a dialogue about mental illness as well. I suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, so I was kind of speaking from experience with writing despite pretty much constant anxiety. And to continue the metaphor, to extend the metaphor with dysentery, there is also the fear that it will happen again.

[Mary] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Emma] And that, at least, if you have a really terrible stomach bug, there's always the worry that it'll happen again at the worst time. It is exactly the same with mental illness. When you're feeling better again, and if you can feel yourself returning to that state that where you were incapacitated the first time, one of the things that is oddly reassuring about going through a cyclic journey with your own mental illness is that when it happens again and again, you can say, "Actually, I did recover the last time, and this too shall pass." But the first time that that happens, you don't have that experience or that kind of knowledge. So there's the fear of being afraid, as well, that has to be unpacked in all of this process. That's important as well.

[Mary] I think that one of the things that you listeners should pay attention to is that a lot of the coping tools that we're going to be talking about, and a lot of this is something that you will have experienced or have already experienced… We label it as imposter syndrome. But it is completely… That imposter syndrome is basically anxiety about writing and depression about your skill level as a writer, all in a really ugly little bundle.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] Life is a terrible user interface.

[Aliette] I mean… Sorry.

[Dan] Nope. Please.

[Aliette] Part of what strikes me about that some of the corners of Twitter that you mentioned was always like people are mentioning like there's this narrative that you can conquer your fears and that you can… Like, this is like a battle, you're at war with like your fears, your depression, and then there's this kind of definite victory. I'm like, "This isn't how this works." Like, you're afraid, and you still write. This is how this works. Like, it's… Well, you know, you mentioned about cycles, it's like… It's always there lurking, somewhere. Then you have to… Either it's like very strong or very weak, but then you have to find tools to deal with that.

[Emma] Yes. Because it isn't a linear progression, and there are so many narratives that [garbled]

[Aliette] It's not a videogame.

[Emma] Exactly. It's not a videogame. There are so many narratives where you encounter that monster and then you can go and find the thing that will enable you to go in destroy the monster and then everyone lives happily ever after. But it's like doing that over and over and over and over and over again. Until you die.

[Laughter]

[Emma] I'm really sorry about that.

[Mary] Of dysentery.

[Aliette] Really like Oregon Trail.

[Dan] Fantastic. I have some very specific questions I want to ask, but this is a great time to break first for book of the week.

[Emma] Everyone's looking at me. So, the book of the week, that I feel slightly embarrassed about suggesting because it's my own, is After Atlas. That is a sci-fi crime. It's set 80 years in the future. It follows a detective, Carlos Moreno, who has been assigned to investigate the murder of a cult leader. The reason he's been assigned is because he escaped that cult when he was a child, but also because he isn't an average detective. He's an indentured slave to a corporation. So as he unravels the mystery behind the death of the cult leader, he is also processing a lot of issues.

[Mary] It is a fantastic book. I recently got a… Got my hands on a copy of it and basically was like, "Oh, great. Emma's got a new book. I'm just going to read the first chapter… I have to pee now because I've been sitting in this chair for days."

[Laughter]

[Mary] It's really good. Highly recommended. I also have to say that you do not have to have read the previous book, I think, to read this one. You can step into it cold. There's obviously some nuance that you get from having read the previous one, but absolutely… It stands on its own. It's fantastic.

[Emma] Thank you.

[Dan] Awesome. So it's After Atlas by Emma Newman. What was the first book called?

[Emma] The first book is Planetfall.

[Dan] Planetfall.

[Emma] So they're both set in the same universe, but they are genuinely standalone.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you very much.

[Dan] All right. So I would love you to tell us some of these specific things, like you did in the talk. What are the reasons that we don't write?

[Emma] So, what I think of when I talk about the fear that underpins procrastination is that procrastination is kind of symptomatic of something that lies beneath. So it can take all sorts of forms, but it's the roots that are important. I see that there are kind of three primary roots, and then lots of little sub-ones. But the three primary ones are unprocessed wounds from one's past, the fear of failure, and the fear of success. Perfectionism is kind of like clinging onto the coattails of all of these. But those are the main kind of roots where it all comes from. If you start to kind of unpack all of those, then you can increase your own conscious awareness of what is actually happening, what is causing the procrastination behavior. Then I have kind of practical tools for, like once you figured out some of it, or even before you figured it out consciously, things you can actively due to be able to work despite the fear.

[Howard] One of the most difficult ones for folks often to wrap their head around is the fear of success. It's related to the paralysis of choice that happens when you're at a buffet and everything is delicious, but you do just have to pick one. If you succeed, suddenly you will have to make a decision about whether to pursue this as a career or perhaps whether to quit the day job. It opens a door and… You know, our caveman ancestors, when they opened the door and stepped outside… Well, there wasn't a door, but when they stepped outside…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The first thing they had to do was make sure they weren't going to get eaten by something new. Success is scary. It's like… It opens a whole new world of things to be afraid of.

[Emma] It does. For me, the fear of success is very much having to leave the house.

[Laughter]

[Emma] I hate leaving the house. I'm on a cruise ship, I'm on a stage in front of people, so there's a bit of me now that is absolutely furious that I have done things that have brought me into this situation.

[Laughter]

[Emma] Even though I welcome this and I love it and I'm very happy to be here. I've had a fabulous week. It's that kind of weird, they live against each other and rub against each other, that you are actively working to invite these things in, that you also maybe don't want. This is not my natural state. My natural state is to be alone at home, writing, when no one can see me. I hate being seen. So that is where the fear of success plays out worse for me.

[Dan] Awesome. So you said you had some specific tools? What is one, for example, with fear of success, that you could give our listeners, of how to deal with that?

[Emma] So, for me, I think about whether I would be able to live with myself if I allowed the fear to win and didn't achieve the goals that I have. So it's kind of the well, you could… You can stay at home. Thank you, fear, for wanting to keep me safe and being at home. But am I genuinely going to be happy in that state? Or in my going to be there on my deathbed regretting everything? So I kind of use one kind of fear and repurpose it, and fire it at the other fear. So the fear of living with regret often outweighs the fear of having to go and do all of this. I also remind myself that a lot of things that I actively fear are all totally manufactured by my awful brain. So I actively remind myself intellectually that this is not real. It's like somebody said to me this week, "Oh, it's like Labyrinth, when she turns and says you have no power over me." That there is an element of that process going on. It's really hard, and sometimes I will be really grumpy with my husband for days because I have to leave the house at the end of the week and go and be in front of people. Then I go, "Oh. It's because I have to leave the house and go be in front of people…"

[Chuckles]

[Emma] "I'm really sorry."

[Dan] That is brilliant, using fears against each other. They deserve it.

[Howard] If you have one problem, you need to find a solution. If you have two problems, make them fight.

[Emma?] Yep. [Garbled] it's like [tried and tested for grabbing roles?] Well, not on me…

[Dan] All right. I want to try this, and maybe this'll be a disaster, but… Aliette, why don't you give us some of the reasons that you find to not write? And we'll see what Emma can do to help.

[Aliette] There's always something that needs to be done in the house, oddly enough. The lawn needs to be done, and I should prepare the meals for the kids, and then maybe I will sit down at my computer and I will like go… Maybe I can go on to Twitter because I need a break now…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Ah, Twitter.

[Emma] It always… It never ceases to amaze me how pressing those domestic chores become at the moment you're about to start writing.

[Laughter]

[Emma] I can ignore a pile of laundry for days, until the moment comes when I really have to sit down and finish that thing. I think there is also a dialogue we have to have with ourselves about giving ourselves permission to be selfish, and to not give all of our time to the domestic sphere and to our families and to all of the other people in our lives. To say, "No, it is okay to carve out this time, and to have this time just for my work." Yeah, mostly I'm driven to domestic chores when I am actively trying to run away from writing. It's not so much being driven towards them. It's actively sprinting away from the looming word count need behind me. But again, in those situations, I always say become aware of it. If you stop yourself… If you're in the middle of washing up and saying, "Well, why am I doing this at this time, when it is the designated time I was going to write?" Becoming aware that you're actually being a victim of the fear, and then saying, "No. I would actually like to negotiate now." And saying, "Okay. I am afraid of this. Is this something I genuinely need to be afraid of?" Can you negotiate with it? Sometimes, can you trick yourself? Because sometimes, I find myself being terrified that the next book I'm going to write is going to be a terrible failure. So I trick myself into saying, "Well, no, I'm not actually writing my next book. I'm just messing about with the first scene. That is not what I have to worry about." You kind of trick yourself. Trick your own fears.

[Mary] Sometimes… I have two tricks that I use when I am sitting down to write and then suddenly find myself in the kitchen doing the dishes. Which happens a lot. One of them is a phrase that my therapist gave me when I was going in first. She said, "What advice would you give to a friend who was going through this?" I was like, "Oh. That's a dirty trick."

[Laughter]

[Mary] Because I do, in fact, know the answer to these things. I just forget that I can apply that advice to myself. So, that's one thing. The other thing is that I will say, "Well, why don't you sit down and write about why you're not writing?" I'm like, "Okay, so what are the barriers that stand between me and the next scene that I need to write?" Eventually, what winds up happening is that I start noodling on the scene, and then suddenly the part of my brain that is delighted by writing is like, "Oh, wait. Waitwaitwait. Can I have the driver's seat now?" And away I go.

[Emma] If you can tailor it to whatever the fear is. But I do genuinely believe that a lot of it is either negotiating like adults or cajoling a toddler.

[Laughter]

[Emma] It's somewhere between the two, the kind of the inner toddler, like, "Well, I know you really don't want to do this now, but if you do this, then…" And then you can reward yourself. But the key is to try to constantly experiment and to be agile in your negotiations with your own fears.

[Howard] My… The place where I noticed fear the most in my own work is when I am moving from pencils to inks. I've laid down a bunch of pencil, and now I need to begin inking, which is the point at which I am committing to one of these many, many lines and deciding that the rest of them are wrong. We could brand that as a fear of commitment, if we wanted to tell a joke that's been told a million times. It's really the fear of being wrong. It's the fear of having made the wrong decision. The thing that broke me out of this was I found a good source of white gel pens. I tell myself, "You know what! I'm not actually committing. If this line is wrong, I'll just color over it with some white and make another line." Will Eisner did that, and he was using white paint and scraps of paper glued to his comic. I've seen those originals. The best people do this. I'm not actually committing. Then I will sit down and burn through white pens like they're candles.

[Chuckles]

[Emma] Well, that's the…

[Aliette] I actually have this file that's called like bits and pieces of the story. I will like put bits and pieces that I cut off, and also like the bits and pieces that I'm just noodling on. You know what, I'm not really writing, right? The funny thing is, with all the bits and pieces that I'm cutting off that never make it back into the story and all the noodling that actually does…

[Laughter]

[Aliette] It's just a crutch. I don't care. It gets me writing.

[Dan] I just finished a huge revision pass on one of my novels, and I did that. I kept… Because my editor says, "Cut this. It's unnecessary." But I love it. So instead of deleting it, I put it in a different folder. That kind of gives me permission to cut it out of the main work. I know I'm never going to go and use it. But now I have permission to cut it out of the work.

[Mary] I was just working on something that needed to be 45 seconds long. I got it down to 60 seconds. I'm like, "Oh, but I'm going to… I love these two lines that I have to cut to get it to 45." So I just turned in a 60 second version and a 45 second version. I'll let them make the choice about that. They chose the 45 second version. It's fine, like you don't miss the two lines. But I couldn't cut them myself. I had to let someone else do it. Which is often what it means by just putting it over in the folder.

[Dan] So, I'm sure, five authors up here, we could talk for hours about all the reasons we don't do stuff. But we need to be done with the episode. So, Emma, do you have some homework for us?

[Emma] Yes. So, aside from unpacking your own fears and trying very hard to overcome those, I would like to invite you to read a poem called The Listeners by Walter de la Mare. It was mentioned in a talk yesterday by Justin Ford, and it reminded me of how much I love it. I'd like to invite you to read it, and to write the back story that is implied in the poem.

[Dan] Nice. Okay. That is The Listeners by…

[Emma] Walter de la Mare.

[Dan] Awesome. So. That is excellent homework. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/13/13-19-backstories/

Key points: Backstory affects everything a character does, so it is one of the most important aspects of a character, but you also don't need to map out everything and try to fit it all in. A broad overview, similar to what you have of your friend's backstory, is probably enough. Then, when you are writing a character, you may find yourself inventing back story in the moment to explain their reaction. When you find you need more backstory, stop, make notes, and then later go back and weave it in. Sometimes you may want to build lots of backstory, but be very conscious of what the reader needs to know versus what you may need to know. Where can you fit in backstory? At the end of every action scene, as a pause or rest. Or when a character is interacting with something that triggers it. In conversation! Flashbacks are not just to give information. They should be presented at the right time to shape the interaction the reader is having with the story, to propel a story forward. Flashbacks that break the forward momentum of the story fail, while flashbacks that add to the momentum work well. You can use flashbacks to build a mystery and answer it, or to deepen it. Put your flashbacks in when the reader wants it. Avoid tangential zoom flashbacks. Think about what your character inherited, where they are now, where they want to be, and where they think they are. Those four parts are your character's cultural backbone. Then discover the rest as you write.

( When they were young... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Backstories.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We are talking character backstory.

[Hooray! Yay!]

[Brandon] This has been really hard to not talk about…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Before this point.

[Mary] That is, in fact, my backstory for this episode, is that I've been wanting to talk about this for months.

[Brandon] So, go! Backstories.

[Mary] All right. So the thing is, like, backstories are simultaneously one of the most important aspects of your character, and also the thing that you need to worry about least. Because a backstory is going to affect the way your character moves through the world, they're going to affect how they interact with other people, but at the same time, you do not actually need to map out their entire backstory, their entire life, and then try to fit it all in.

[Brandon] Yeah, because you will… If you work too much on it, you will try to fit it all in, and… Boy, the infodumps are really…

[Mary] So, generally speaking, what I try to do with my character is have a kind of broad overview of what their backstory is, in much the way that I have a broad overview of what someone else's backstory is. Like, I don't actually need to know more of my character's backstory than I do of Amal's or Maurice's. I don't need to know their entire life history, unless it is specific to the moment that I am encountering in that particular story. It's absolutely affecting the way they move through their life, and it's affecting the way I interact with them, but I don't need to know all of it to be able to have an effective, moving interaction, and satisfying one, with them.

[Amal] Do you ever find yourself inventing backstory in the moment, because as you're writing a character, you realize that they're having a very strange reaction to something, maybe more than you'd planned for, because you're caught up and then you retroactively invent backstory to…

[Mary] I'm, in fact, doing that right now with a novel that I'm working on. Where I knew that my character had previously been on this planet as a military surgeon. She's 78 now, she had been there when she was in her 30s during occupation. And she's back. I knew that about her. As the… As I've been working on it, I've realized that actually something went wrong when she was here previously. It wasn't just that she was a military surgeon. I mean, obviously, war is a lot of things going wrong for an extended period of time, but that there was a backstory that I actually needed to unpack. So what I've done is I've gone ahead and stopped and made some notes to myself, and then am continuing going forward as if I had already written that stuff. But this is the mistake that I see people make, that I have to go correct, is that I will see a lot of writers who make that discovery and never go back to weave it in previously. Which either results in the reader feeling as if they've been coy all the way through, and not… Or feeling as if the writer lied to them.

[Amal] Interesting. I had a moment like that reading a book that came out recently called Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. Where you're basically introduced to this character, who, in my case anyways, I just despised. Like, hated, hated this character. Then, you're kind of given a flashback very late in the book that does actually explain a number of the behaviors that made me detest him. But it felt like too little too late. It felt like no, actually I didn't… I feel like without having had… And that can actually absolutely be a decision. Like, maybe she just never wanted me to like this character. So it doesn't actually matter that I have this information, and so on. But timing those reveals needs to be a deliberate choice as well, I think.

[Maurice] So, I'm horrible at following any of this advice.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled to save myself]. I literally did 3000 words worth of world building for a story that was 6000 words long, so, I mean, that's the kind of guy I am.

[Mary] I mean, I've been there and I've done that.

[Maurice] I'm the same way when I'm building my characters and doing their backstories. I try to be conscious of the fact that yes, I've done all this work, the reader doesn't need to know all this, but I need to know this. Now, the one time when it did come in handy was with the first book of the urban fantasy trilogy. Because when I turned it in, it was a 60,000 word novel, because I was… I don't know, I was doing a thing. But when they accepted it, they were like, "Okay. But this is an adult urban fantasy novel. You need to add 30,000 words to it." I was like, "How I'm I going to add… The story is there, it's done." But what I ended up doing was, I have all this backstory material. All of a sudden, it's like, "Wait. 30,000 words? I now have room to flesh out and to show some more of that backstory for some of these characters." So you get an even deeper feeling of why they're doing the things they do. Because sometimes they're arb… And I realized that, when I was doing the draft, sometimes they are behaving in this nonsensical way. To me, it made sense, because I knew there backstory. It was like, "Oh, wait, I have gone to the other extreme of so not showing enough of this." It was like, now, forced to add that 30,000 words back, I was like, "Oh, why don't I bring the readers up along for the ride, so they can see this too?"

[Brandon] So, Maurice, let me push you on that. How did you get that in there without it feeling like an infodump? Because I think that you're absolutely right, you need this stuff. But it also needs to be natural.

[Maurice] Right. So, it became a matter of how am I going to dramatize this information? So, then it was like… So, basically, I would go through the narrative and see where the brakes were in the story, to go okay, now… There were like… For example, there was a… Wherever there was a big action scene, I needed to sort of reset anyway. So I've learned that during those reset moments, that's where I can slip in some backstory, because it gives the reader a pause, come down from that action scene and sort of reset the stage. During those moments, it's like, "All right. Here's a little bit more about this character."

[Mary] I also find… So I'll do things like that where I use it as a rest point. But I also will often handle the character's backstory in the same way I'll handle other pieces of infodumpy stuff, which is I will save it for moments when the character is interacting with something. So like if I want you to know how a mason jar works, I'm not going to go, well, a mason jar is a glass object that is used… What I'm going to do is I'm going to have the character pick up the glass, and I'm going to have them put water in it. I'm going to have them put a lid on it. I'm going to have them boil it. So that… I will have them interact with it. It's like, "Oh, that's how a mason jar works."

[Right.]

[Mary] So a lot of times, when I'm trying to slip backstory in, then I will have it arise naturally through conversation, or through something… Some environmental trigger, some concrete trigger that… Like with the mason jar example, my grandma use these all the time, these mason jars, and her dill pickles were amazing. That's the kind of… It's like, well, now you know that I had a grandma who canned things.

[Amal] Right. Exactly. The… It's funny. I'm thinking back to a short story I wrote called Madeleine which I've mentioned in another episode. Where, just talking about triggering things, literally the whole plot is that she has no control over the fact that she's encountering things and they are triggering these memories and hallucinations, which are also flashbacks… But are also weird, because there are new intrusive elements that are happening in them. But for… In order to choose what those would be, because they were… Like the fact that they were happening was the plot, I didn't want them to actually be moving in a way that advanced… Like… I don't know if that makes sense. Basically, I wanted them to feel as random and intrusive as memory kind of is on its own. And as unpredictable. So even though it didn't necessarily make plot sense… Like, it wasn't necessary to the plot that she be sipping a cup of warm milk, or that she needed to remember that when she was a small child, she sipped a cup of warm milk in the same way and blah blah blah. The… Like, I tried to just through moving through my own environment, kind of pick things, things that are sensory, things that are weird and interesting and stuff to try and trigger those things. Because ultimately, the point of those flashbacks was something beyond giving information about the character.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Which is Racing the Dark.

[Mary] Yes. So this is… Alaya Dawn Johnson is a wonderful writer. This was actually her first novel, which I had read years later. She wrote it, I think, 2008. It's YA and it is phenomenal. Especially when you're talking about character backstories. It's set in a series of island nations in which people have learned to bind the spirit. So they have bound the spirit of fire and death and water. They have been bound for about a thousand years at this point. Wind got away about 500 years previously and wreaked havoc. It's this young girl who is… She supposed to be a diver. That's what she does. Much like the pearl divers, but for this specific type of fish. The environment is changing in ways that make people think that a spirit might be breaking loose. It just… Things just keep getting worse for her, in ways that always seem… It's like and what other choice did she have? It's forcing her down this very specific path. It's just phenomenal. But her backstory, this… This… The fact that she was a diver is so important. Sometimes in things that she is able to do within the story, but also in the choices that she makes and the regrets that she lives. It's a wonderful story. I'm actually reading the second book in the trilogy right now. But Racing the Dark is the first one, by Alaya Dawn Johnson. I highly recommend picking it up.

[Brandon] Let's dive back into flashbacks. Because I love me a good flashback.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I just do. It's interesting, because when I first got into writing, I remember one of my professors saying, "Don't use flashbacks. Flashbacks are a crutch." That is kind of some writing advice, and yet I have series that use extensive flashbacks. In my current book, I would guess that there are 50 or 60,000 words of flashbacks.

[Mary] But you know how to use them. This is the thing, is that a lot of times when people are using a flashback, they're using it just to get information in. You understand that what a flashback is actually doing for the reader is allowing you to present information to them at a time when they need it. So, if we hearken back to a previous season, where I talk about the MICE quotient a lot, the MICE quotient is not about the linear timeline that a story… That a character goes through. It is about the order in which you present information to a reader. When you're using backstories, you are presenting it in order to shape the way the reader is interacting with the story, not just to hand them a piece of information.

[Brandon] Right. I mean, handing them a piece of information is really important…

[Sure]

[Brandon] But the issue is you don't want to frontload that into the story, you wanted when it will be relevant, and also when you're dramatically… You'll be like, "Oh, I can get the context of this scene now," and things like that.

[Mary] Which then you can use as momentum to propel the story forward. A lot of times, and this is when flashbacks fail, it is because they break the forward momentum of the story. When flashbacks work well, they are adding to the forward momentum of the story by giving the reader information that they need to understand the emotional context of what's at stake.

[Brandon] It also lets you build a mystery, and then answer it, or build a mystery and then continue it in an interesting way.

[Amal] I love that idea about momentum. I'd never heard it that way before. Because I found myself just now thinking of when I have found flashbacks successful. Interestingly, I'm more often thinking of film, because it feels as if it's a filmic device, literally showing you in a visual way things that happened before. I was thinking of like Ratatouille… Everyone's seen it, right? You said mice and I thought of…

[Chuckles garbled]

[Amal] Yeah, so in fact, it opened a flashback to Ratatouille. Where basically the climax of that film is absolutely about pushing that forward momentum. It's about… I think… I don't know if there's more than… No, there are a couple of them. But this flashback involves… To spoil the film…

[Mary] It's been out long enough.

[Amal] It's been out. So, basically, there's this restaurant critic and he is impossible to impress, he's made this restaurant lose its Michelin stars because he's so asorbic, and our hero, the rat, has to cook a meal that's going to impress him. So instead of trying to build up these airy things, he cooks a very, very simple country meal, ratatouille. He cooks like a vegetable dish. Then, to show how delicious this dish is, as the critic is tasting it, literally, the camera kind of like sucks you backwards into a flashback and you see him being a small child tasting ratatouille for the first time and loving it. It's all warm sepia tones. Like, everything about the texture and the light and the timing of the flashback is such that you realize yes, he's eating the best thing he's ever had in his life, partly because it's reminding him of being a child. It builds so much character stuff into that one moment. Which then resolves the film. It's... So it's not, you don't need to know any of that stuff about the critic beforehand, you need to know everything opposite that. You need to know the critic is a jerk, who... It's so great. Anyway.

[Maurice] I was just thinking about that… I tend to write a couple projects at a time, so like, I have a short story and a novel project I'm working on right now, and they both kind of hinge on this use of flashbacks, which I hadn't really thought about until this conversation, how much they're hinging on the flashbacks. So in the short story, you have this woman, she has a shattered psyche, and so as she's trying to… I love the idea, again, I love this idea of the forward momentum… As she's progressing through the story, there's stuff that she's dealing with in the present, as she's remembering the past at the same time. So there's kind of this going back and forth, going back and forth, but it is about building that forward momentum of what I'm trying to reveal about her and her trauma and her overcoming it. Within the novel project, and partly, don't get me wrong, I love a good flashback. I just love a good flashback. So I was just thinking about how I'm using the flashback now in the current scene I'm writing, which is almost, in a lot of ways, just to set the mood for the rest of the chapter. So it opens with a flashback in order to just… Part of it is to just you're going to get some insight into the character, which sets the mood for what's going to happen in the rest of the chapter. So I love the idea of flashback and how it just… We all have these secrets that lay buried deep within us, sometimes we're not even always aware of. So just that slow revelation of what that might be reveals a character to us.

[Brandon] Put it in when the reader is going to want it. I think of when my students do it poorly, or when I did it poorly when I was a new writer, is you're writing along and you'll be reading this story, and then… Tangential flashback, just zoom, and the author thinks that they're giving lots of character, but really what happens is your reader, you're in a scene, and then suddenly you're off reading about grandma's pickles…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And this extended thing, where really all you needed at that point was, "Oh, my mom… Or my grandma used to put pickles in jars like this. Hmm. Every time I take a sip, it tastes like pickle juice to me."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Or you need a… Don't do it this way, but a "Oh, no, not one of those!"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You need that hook that later on you're going to get the explanation to.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] That is my reaction to pickles most of the time.

[Brandon] Obviously.

[So good]

[Brandon] Depends on if they're kosher or if they're not. Anyway.

[Mary] Pickled okra, y'all. I'm just sayin'. Pickled okra is just... Ah'm just goin' ta go full out Southe'n on y'a. It is just...

[Brandon] We are almost out of time, so...

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Last comments on this?

[Mary] Yeah. I'm going to say that when... That you can spend as much or as little time building your character backstory as you want, but I do think that there are some things that you should know about your character going in. That you need to know where they are… That their cultural backbone, I would say. Which is how… And when I say cultural backbone, it's four things. The inherited one, what is the culture that they have inherited? What is the culture that they are currently living? What do they aspire to? And then, what is their perceived culture? That if you know those four pieces of your character's backstory, that most of the rest of it you can probably discover as you are writing. If you want to dig deeper into any of that, then I think you can. But don't feel like you need to create a 3,000 word biopsy for each of your… Not a biopsy.

[Laughter oh, my God.]

[Mary] Well, you know, their backstory was…

[Amal] An exquisite corpse.

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Mary] All right. So your homework is I want you to explore what these different tools do. So I want you to write a scene where a character has a flashback that exposes some aspects of their backstory. Then I want you to reset that scene again. And this time, in that same scene, they are going to talk to another character about their backstory, so that they're having to deal with the ramifications of it in real time.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 13.18: Naturally Revealing Character Motivation

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/06/13-18-naturally-revealing-character-motivation/

Key points: Character motivation is hard. Just announcing it doesn't feel natural. Often, we don't know what our motivation is, or we lie to ourselves about it. Also, consider scene objective versus super objective, goal in the moment and overarching goal. Ask why. Think about how the plot and the character connect to each other, why does this character want to solve this problem? Separate the goal, what the character wants to achieve, and the stake, what does failure mean. Use the Hollywood formula to set up a protagonist who wants something, and then introduce the conflict of the story. Separate events, the King died, and stories, the queen died of grief, where motivation, or why, is the key to the story. Use free indirect speech, aka internal monologue, to reveal the character's thoughts, feelings, and motivation in third person as part of the narration. Use focus and breath, what the character's looking at and how long they are spending on things. When you see a sign for milkshakes, but you say, "I'm thirsty," it isn't always clear to everyone else what you want. Consider goals and plans to achieve them, or goals and actions. If your character wants something, they need to act as if they are really trying to get it. When the character's motivation changes, lead the reader along so they can see the transformation. Make sure the reader knows why characters are doing what they are doing. Beware the sense of disbelief, violating the reader's sense of the world. Use free indirect speech, and unpacking transitions and transformations to let the reader know why the character is doing things.

( Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Naturally Revealing Character Motivation.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm in a hurry.

[Brandon] Okay. Well, we want to talk about character motivation.

[Yay!]

[Brandon] This is, in my opinion, the thing that new writers get wrong the most.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Brandon] When my students, who are good writers, are turning in books during class and I'm giving them feedback, it's often, "Can't understand why the character is doing this." "Motivations are off." "You are having someone move the plot without explaining why this character would move the plot." One of the hardest things, I guess, to figure out as a new writer is character motivation. It's so essential.

[Howard] I did it wrong as we were introducing the episode. First time around, 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart. And I said it very quickly and kind of stepped on Dan's line. That's me in a hurry. Second time around, I said, "And I'm in a hurry." Which is not the right way to do it. Because that's just announcing it, it doesn't feel natural. You want a character to look like they're in a hurry? Their speech is clipped, they're cutting people off, and you get this sense, at about the same time as the other characters in the scene do, you get this sense that this person has something else they want. Like maybe dinner, because I'm hungry.

[Mary] I narrated a book once where the main character thought, "I'm so in love with him," and walked into the room and said, "I'm so in love with you." I'm like, "That's not… Really? What a surprise!" I think one of the things that will happen to a new writer is that they will be like, "Oh, I need a character motivation." They forget how much… How often we lie to ourselves about what our motivation is. There's a thing that I talk about a lot called objective and super-objective, which is a term out of theater. People are always in theater going, "What's my motivation?" It's the joke among actors. But it's real, too. So the super-objective is kind of the overall driving thing that drives your character. While the objective is their immediate goal in a scene. So a lot of times, people only give their character this very superficial objective, like, "I would like to take over the world." Well, okay, but why?

[Brandon] Right. We talked about that in the villains podcast. Why?

[Mary] Why do you want to take over the world? Is it to prove a point? Is it because… Like, the example that I often use is that there was a point where I was really trying to lose weight. Because my super-objective was to be admired, so I tried to do a good job on the podcast, I like to look nice, and I finally realized that my problem was just that my clothes didn't fit, and that my objective was the wrong objective. It's like you just buy new clothes. So I think that that's one thing that will happen is that people will pick a motivation for their character that is just one dimensional. Then their character will just announce it all the time.

[Howard] You can flip that completely on its head and have a character who really wants a new car, and it's because they want to be loved, and they feel like the car is going to help them get the girl or get the guy. Then the twist in the story is their realization that I didn't want the car. I want to be loved, I'm going about this wrong. Now you have the discovery that your objective is not working in the service of your super-objective, is… Well, you can hang a dozen stories on that.

[Dan] So, one of the things that I had to learn that I was always getting wrong, so maybe this is something that other new writers can… Have the same trouble. Is, I would always take a lot of time to figure out what is my story about, what's the plot going to be? Then, who is the character, what do they want, all this stuff. But rarely ever thought about how those two were going to connect to each other. Until I started writing John Cleaver. I talked about this a few months ago, that figuring out how the plot and the character are going to interact… Yes, this character is in this story because that's what I chose, but also why? Why does this character in particular want to solve this problem? What is going to drive her to go on this quest? All of these questions, I think, is a level deeper than just figuring out who the character is.

[Mary] The other thing, I think, that I see a lot of times, and I realize we're still talking about kind of the framework for the motivation before we start talking about how to express it, is… Because I think if you don't understand the framework, you can't express it. The other thing that I see a lot of people do is that they will make the goal and the stake the same thing. So, the goal is what the character is trying to achieve, the stake is what failure looks like for them. These are sometimes n… Usually not the same thing. Like, I'm trying to get a car, that's the goal. If your stake is if I fail at this, I don't get the car, that's the same thing. That's the same thing. If I fail, my family is disappointed in me. Then those two things can intersect with each other in… Failure is my family is disappointed. That's what's at stake. So if you've got those two things playing against each other, and most of us have multiples… Then it gives your character, honestly, something to think about. It gives them an internal conflict, and I think that when we are trying to reveal character motivation, just having them go, "I want this car," there's no conflict there. I want this car, but I can't have this car…

[Dan] One of the things that I use a lot for this specific problem is actually Hollywood formula. Because of the way Hollywood formula sets you up with a protagonist who wants something, and you introduce that before you introduce the conflict of the story itself. So often then, the conflict becomes the means of that. I need to support my family and provide for them. That's my overarching goal. But then, this opportunity to win a car in a contest shows up, and so that's my immediate objective. So that's the conflict that comes up, but it's all driven by that earlier goal.

[Mary] Interesting.

[Howard] Then, the discovery as part of the contest that there are things I can do in conjunction with this fame and part of participating in this, that have nothing to do with the car, but people are liking me for who I am, and wow, this maybe feels a little better. Now it's an after school special on ABC in the 1980s.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] Nice.

[Brandon] The classic kind of really pithy way of putting some of this that I always heard in writing classes is the story of the King died. That's an event. The queen died of grief. That's a story. The idea is the story is about the why as much or more than the actual event. The motivation is that why. Digging into that.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Howard, you're going to tell us about the Ten Cent Plague.

[Howard] Yup. This is one of my favorite recent reads. It's by David Hajdu. It's called The Ten Cent Plague. It is the story of comics in America. The… It talks about the technological… In the 1920s, the technological revolution that suddenly made comic books a thing, and how an amateur group of creators broke into this market and created a pop-culture movement that so upset the status quo that there were book burnings during the 1940s in the United States. It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. If you are a writer who's interested in writing things that are important and in writing things that are awesome, learning about these artists is worth learning about, whether or not you draw pictures. The Ten Cent Plague by David, and I'm going to spell the name this time, H. A. J. D. U. I got it on Audible, had it narrated, and it's awesome.

[Brandon] Great. That sounds really, really cool.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Brandon] Let me…

[Howard] That's… Honestly, halfway through, I was terrified.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was actually frightened because I didn't know the names of some of these people and I did not know what was going to become of them.

[Brandon] Let me take, as we often do in the second half of the podcast, and try and dig at the how. How are we going to reveal character motivation? We've talked about how a lot of times the character doesn't know yet what their even… Their own motivation is. How do you reveal what the character doesn't even know yet? You may not even know it yet, if you're a discovery writer.

[Mary] So, my favorite tool is free indirect speech. Popularized by Jane Austen. Sometimes people will call this the internal monologue. But this is not the character necessarily talking to themselves. It is the motivation expressing itself through the narration. This is where… In free indirect speech, what you do is you take the character's thoughts, their feelings, and you put it directly into the text in third person as part of the narration.

[Brandon] So this is not the you shift into first person and think, "Man, I want something to eat today." It is…

[Mary] Man, he wanted something to eat today. The thing that it does, mechanically, as opposed to shifting into first person is it makes the… It ties all of the narration into the character's motivations. Which means that then you can start directing the reader's attention by what the character's looking at and how long they're lingering on things. Focus and breath, puppetry episode way back in season six.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Season three.

[Mary] Season three? Oh, wow. Right, I joined…

[Garbled…]

[Brandon] [garbled you joined in season 3]

[Mary] Wow.

[Dan] Season three. Yeah.

[Mary] Sorry. Eh, back in the day…

[Howard] Hollywood formula was season six. Howard's old.

[Mary] Yeah. Anyway, point being that by doing this it allows you to reveal the motivation in a more layered manner. Whereas when you switch over into first person, what happens then is that the narration and the character's thoughts become two different entities. Or two different experiences for the reader. So what will happen is that those moments, that character motivation moment, will pop out and stand on its own, and it will feel like nothing has built up to it. So it's one of… It can… Doing that can absolutely remove any ambiguity, and there are times when you want to do it. But I think that that slow reveal, the understanding of what's going on, is something that you can do if you're unpacking it all the way through in the narration through free indirect speech.

[Howard] I was in a seminar… 25 years ago, where they were talking about good communications skills, and one of the examples that was listed… Or that was given was you're looking out the car window and you see a sign that says milkshakes 99¢. You say to the person driving the car, "I'm thirsty." We do that all the time, where we don't reveal our motivations. We realize I really want the milkshake, but what comes out of our mouth is I'm thirsty. The response from the driver is often, "Oh. Yeah, I'm kind of thirsty, too. We'll get something to drink when we get home." Now you're having a fight and you don't even know why. I love that example, because it lets me look at things that the characters are looking at and have them say something that is directly motivated by it, but is not necessarily clear to everyone else.

[Mary] We do that all the time.

[Dan] I was going to say, we did a thing… I wish I'd kept this up longer, but we did anything with my kids for a while where once a week, we would sit them down and ask them what their goals were in life, and then see if we could help… Come up with a plan to achieve them. When they're little, their goals are probably not… They don't know what they want to be yet, unless it's a ballerina or an astronaut.

[Mary] Good goals.

[Dan] Which are great goals. What was fascinating to me is the complete disconnect that they had, and that, since I've been looking at this, I think even a lot of adults have between goals and actions, and making sure that you put that into your characters. That if your character wants something, then they need to act like they actually want that, and not just wait for the plot to drive them toward it.

[Brandon] I was going to say, we hit very hard the idea that sometimes characters don't know what they want. A lot of times, they do. It is perfectly all right to have a character whose motivation is established in the opening scene and its consistent for the entire story. A lot of great stories are done that way. But, yeah. This goes back to the kind of protagonist sort of thing that we talked about. Establish that motivation, and then have them try to do things to get what they want. Maybe what they want will change. That's… I think that's a lot of the trick with my new students is as the character's motivation is shifting, the reader… Or the author isn't leading us along. A lot of times, the character goes through a transformation when they realize what they wanted at the beginning of the story is much smaller than what now they want. They originally want to do well in school, and now they realize that monsters are going to destroy the planet, and school doesn't matter anymore, or whatever. Things like this. We… As an author, your job is to kind of lead along so that you can see the character letting go of that in that specific instance. Whatever it is, as they're shifting… Their motivations are shifting, letting that drive the plot instead of the opposite, letting the plot drive what the characters need to say. Readers notice that. It's one of the things that… The uncanny valley sort of stuff that readers notice and can't always put their finger on why the character feels wrong. They'll say, "The character feels flat." It's not the character's flat, it's that character's motives, motivations haven't been established for why they're doing what they're doing.

[Mary] I'm going to jump off of that and one of the… This is more of a diagnostic tool than a writing tool. When you have written something and you're getting that feedback of the character feels flat or I didn't believe the character would do that, what you've triggered in the reader, a sense of disbelief, you have violated their sense of the world. So you have to treat it… If you think about when readers' disbeliefs are triggered with a physical thing. I didn't believe they would survive a fall from a 13 story building. You're triggering the same sort of thing in your reader, where you're violating their sense of the world. You have to tackle it the same way. Which is by going back through and layering in all of the clues that you need to layer in to get them to that point. So… A lot of times, it is using very mechanical tools, like the free indirect speech, or if it's already in there, sometimes you've put the stuff in there and the readers are skimming past it. Sometimes it is as simple as inserting paragraphs to make sure that the important thing is the last line of a paragraph, or the last line of a scene or a chapter.

[Brandon] I'm working on a revision right now where I got that response from an early reader. The response was this character you established at the beginning of the story is very kind of… She's an intern, she's a clerical intern, who's now in the middle of a disaster. I'm like of course, you're going to go and kind of be heroic. It's that type of story. I didn't transition her between I'm just here to be saved to I am the person who is going to try to actually do something about this.

[Dan] Now, a fantastic example of that transition is Hans Solo in episode four. He wants to get paid, and that's all he wants. For most of the story. Even when they are in the Death Star, the ship has been captured and they've managed to escape the ship, but now they're just in a room. He's like, "Screw the princess, let's just get out of here." He is only willing to go along with the plan because Obi-Wan Kenobi is essentially holding his ship hostage. I will get the ship unlocked, I'll turn off the tractor beam, but only if you help with this. So they keep his monetary motivations incredibly consistent throughout, while also showing what is going to eventually become friendships that will make him change.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and call it here. Did you have one more thing, Mary?

[Mary] Oh, I was just going to quickly say, that the thing is, when you've got something like that, is you need to unpack it. That's one of the things that a lot of times with something like this, that we think a single line of free indirect speech will do it. It won't. You actually have to… With a change like that, you actually have to unpack it and let it fill an entire moment.

[Brandon] Dan, you have our homework.

[Dan] Yes. That actually is our homework. Take something that… Two options here. We're going to play around with free indirect speech. Number one is take a motivation or a character thing and put it into free indirect speech. Alternatively, if you've already done that, take something that is in free indirect speech, and then pull it out and unpack it and turn it into a longer thing and explore that motivation more.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're all now motivated to go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.17: What Writers Get Wrong, with Jamahl Crouch

Writing Excuses 13.17: What Writers Get Wrong, with Jamahl Crouch

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/04/29/13-17-what-writers-get-wrong-with-jamahl-crouch/

Key points: Street art isn't just a vandal running around on a skateboard, it's a form of art to be mastered. Creativity is key. Street art is free-flowing. You can make mistakes on purpose and build on those mistakes. Doing street art makes you flexible as an artist, because you don't ever get the same surface. There's a lot more to street art than just a dude on a skateboard spray painting a trashcan. The goal for the street artist is to be better than they were yesterday.
( Tagging the building... )

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. Were are you going to give us some homework or a writing prompt or something?
[Jamahl] Yeah. Just… Definitely the most accurate one I said was… Definitely watch Get Down and just kind of watch those scenes with the graffiti artists in there. Then try it yourself. That’s the best part. Just get a can of spray paint. If you go out in your backyard or your neighborhood wall or abandoned building. Just try it out yourself and just see how it feels and go from there.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Brandon] That is probably the most unique homework we’ve ever given on Writing Excuses.
[Laughter]]
[Howard] You told them to go outside.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Jamahl, thank you so much for being on our podcast.
[Jamahl] Thanks for having me.
[Brandon] Thank you to our audience at GenCon.
[Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.16: Avoiding Flat Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/04/22/13-16-avoiding-flat-characters/

Key Points: Flat characters, in theater, a cardboard cutout, a mannequin, but in your book, a character without depth, that doesn't feel like a real person. Spear carriers, however, are just that, a group to fill out a scene. In different situations, characters may act differently, but still be consistent because you, as author, know why they are doing it. Motivation! If readers say a character feels flat, it may mean that you haven't put enough on the page for the reader. Layer more backstory in. Sometimes it means you as author haven't figured out why this character is there, what role they are playing. Beware the boneyard dialogue, where you have written a scene and it is in your head, but not in the story. One fix is to make sure characters reflect on why they have done. Watch for multiple characters who all tell the same punchlines, the Marvel formula or Joss Whedon problem. If all the characters are answering the same questionnaire, it may feel flat. Let the characters ask each other questions. Ask questions that most characters are unlikely to answer the same way. Use a verbal silhouette test, to check whether your characters are different enough. Build your characters around their differences!

( Gingerbread people? )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Avoiding Flat Characters.

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Valynne] I'm Valynne.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] All right. Flat characters. This is a term that I think new writers use sometimes without knowing what it even mean. They know they're supposed to use it, but…

[Howard] You're supposed to use it because you don't want to create flat characters.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] I think the term comes from theater, the idea that a character is a cardboard cutout. That the actor on stage could have been replaced with a cardboard standup, because all they were doing was filling space on the stage. In your book, flat implies that the character has no depth, that all they did was serve a very specific story purpose and they didn't seem like a real person. They were… Spear carrier is not the same thing. This is not somebody who walks on and doesn't have a name. This is somebody who is supposed to feel like a person and they feel like a mannequin.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] Let's make that distinction right now, because that's one of the questions on my list here. Is it okay to sometimes have flat characters? What is the distinction? When do you want them to be round, when do you want them to be flat? What is a spear carrier? What do you mean by that?

[Howard] Well, spear carrier, again, is a term that comes to us from theater. You have a battle scene that needs to take place, and so you have a bunch of extras who are literally carrying spears onto the stage as a group. None of them have any dialogue, except maybe to all scream, "Yah!" and then we're done.

[Valynne] I think when you have… Anytime you have a group of people… Where you have a high school football game or something that requires a lot of people, you don't need to go and make one of the attendees someone that is memorable. They just… Their function is just to populate that seat.

[Howard] In fact, on stage, you could create a cardboard cutout of the Etruscan Army with all their spears and march it onto the stage and somebody screams, "Rar!" Then we have the drama, and we're okay with that. As long as the people who are giving us the drama could not themselves be replaced with cardboard cutouts.

[Dan] I think drama is a better word to use than memorable. Because flat characters can still be very memorable.

[Brandon] They can be. Yeah.

[Dan] Here's the one joke that I have, and I come out, and I say it every time. We're going to remember that guy. 90s Saturday Night Live depended entirely on one-joke flat characters. But it's when you start adding depth… You think of it in dimensional terms. We have one dimension, this is the one thing this character does. That's what makes them flat. As soon as they start acting in a different dimension, because they also have this other interest or this other aspect of their personality, your adding more dimension and more layers and more roundness and more depth to them.

[Brandon] All right. So let me ask you this. I'm going to point this one at Valynne first.

[Valynne] Okay.

[Brandon] How do you do this without making characters seem inconsistent? Because in your book, you have characters who act differently in different social situations quite frequently. You do this very astutely. How do you make that feel like they're all the same character, rather than they've gone… Characters can feel erratic if they just act completely out of character.

[Valynne] So, once again, I think a lot of it goes back to what you know as the author and their back story. You don't necessarily have to put all of that on the page, but you need to understand what is behind everything that character does, everything that character says, why they react to things the way that they react to them. So sometimes in different situations they may act differently, and it's okay as long as you know why they are doing that. If you know, that will come across the page a lot stronger, and not be so inconsistent and oft… I think inconsistency often can be very offputting because we don't know what to expect from the character.

[Brandon] So, motivation. It comes down to expressing… I would agree with you. I think that is one of the ways you can have a character who acts completely hyper one situation and completely introverted in another situation, if their motive for doing that is the same. They get uncomfortable, and sometimes when they get super uncomfortable, they just start talking. Right? In another situation, they might say, "Okay. I've gotta shut up now. I'm intimidated." Or something like this. If the motivation, underlying motivations, are clear to us, characters won't feel erratic. They'll feel actually consistent.

[Dan] Right. And have a lot of depth to them.

[Brandon] So, let's say that we're writing a character, and our writing group is saying, "This character feels flat," or alpha readers are saying that. You thought you had a rounded character. Has this ever happened to you? How did you address it, and what did you do?

[Dan] Yes. Yes. What I think I am guilty of most often when someone accuses me of having a flat character I thought was really round is that they're round in my head, and I haven't put it on the page. I know all of their other facets and I know that this particular line of dialogue they had was interesting because of all of their back story and how it informs what they are saying now, but I haven't bothered to tell the reader any of that information. So often, it'll take a quick conversation. Let me ask you about this? Why was he flat? What about this, and what about this? If I can tell that that's the reason, the writing group or the alpha reader says, "I didn't know any of that. That sounds cool." Then it's time for me to go back and layer more of that into the story so that you see all of their other facets instead of just the one.

[Valynne] I think when that happens to me, it's because I haven't really understood as the author why I'm putting that character in the story. So I put the character in, I haven't completely figured out what role that character is going to play. I think sometimes that's okay if you're just writing and trying to figure out where it's going to go. But usually, if you don't figure that out early enough, then it's just going to come across as flat because you don't know what that character is doing in there.

[Howard] For me, most often flatness is caused by boneyard dialogue. Which is that I have written a scene, and it's not working, and I throw it into the boneyard. But that scene is still in my head, and the reader has not gotten it. I need to remember that "No, no. This bit of back… That's boneyard dialogue. The reader does not have that." The solution for me is, and it's the punchline crutch, when someone does something heroic, when someone fails at something, when a character who is supposed to do X in the story does X and that's all they do, then they're a flat character. But if they do X, and then in a witty, insightful sort of punchline-y way tell us how they feel about X, they now have depth. It's… I mean, it's a simple little trick. You existed to do one thing. They did the one thing. And then they had a feeling about it. They… It's not just, "Oh, I was the hero." It was, "Oh, I didn't think I could do that." "Oh, wow, that turned out way better than I thought." "Oh, wow. I'm not going to try that again, am I?" Those sorts of things often give just enough depth to a character, you can look at them and say, "Oh. Oh, that's a person."

[Brandon] Wow, that's a really insightful comment. Something about flat characters that's been bothering me is something I see a lot in cinema, particularly lately, where it feels like the writer noticed that the Marvel formula of action plus humor works really well, and they've been going so far as to have everybody have a punchline in a lot of these films. So dramatic moment, punchline. It can work really well. Obviously, the Marvel formula has been hugely successful. But I've been noticing that they give the punchlines to a variety of different characters, and all those characters start to sound the same to me. Because every one of them is making the same types of punchlines to undercut, comic drop as you would say it, the dramatic moment. It's really been bothering me. I'm seeing it in a lot of films.

[Howard] If it's done… It's… You have to do it for the right reason, and you have to do it well. There have been plenty of times when boneyard dialogue exists because I wrote that scene and realized, "Nope, that punchline undercuts everything that's happening." I just need to write something else.

[Brandon] Define boneyard dialogue again for me.

[Howard] Boneyard dialogue… If something is in my boneyard, it's something that I've written…

[Brandon] And cut out.

[Howard] And I cut out and I throw it into a folder that's… Right now, the folder is called Boneyard 2018. That is the scripts I wrote for 2018 that I am not using. I will go in there all the time, mining for bits of things that I actually need. Because I write those things in character voice. That's part of the character voice. I'm going to keep that. So, it's the boneyard.

[Dan] I think this is kind of a… Maybe a Masters level look at flat characters, that if you have a bunch of really well-rounded characters who are all well-rounded in exactly the same way, they're going to look flat when you put them all in the same room. Which I had not considered before.

[Brandon] Let's talk about that after the book of the week. Because we need to stop for that. The book of the week is Artemis.

[Dan] Artemis by Andy Weir. This is his second book after the Martian, which was awesome. I tell people… The way I recommend Artemis to people is that it feels less like a sequel to the Martian than like a prequel to Leviathan Wakes.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It has the same kind of Andy Weir typical really fun voice, the really approachable use of extremely hard science fiction, but instead of a mission to Mars, it is a city that's actually been established on the moon. Then he tells a… Basically a noir story there. That there's… Things are going wrong and this woman is caught in the middle of it and trying to figure out what's going on. Trying to figure out which shady groups are paying who to do what. All done as hard science fiction noir on the moon.

[Howard] Is it set in the Martian universe?

[Dan] It is set in the Martian universe. Although the connections… You don't have to have read the Martian to understand it. But it's really good and I really enjoyed it.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] The Leviathan Wakes guys and Andy Weir met at a convention and got to talking, and decided that the Martian…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Totally functioned as a prequel for Leviathan Wakes.

[Dan] They are now, I believe, canonically… At least the authors consider them to be canonically connected. You can see that DNA in Artemis. It's really interesting.

[Howard] That's fascinating.

[Brandon] All right. So let's get back to this question. What do you do if you find out you are writing the same types of characters repeatedly in your books, and it's starting to feel flat, either in a scene, like Dan said, all the characters are feeling the same, or across your career? I'll call this a good problem to have.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But the Joss Whedon problem, right? Sometimes Joss Whedon's characters all feel the same. They're some of these ones that always… You never can tell who will have the punchline sometimes, because they could all say the same punchline. How do you avoid this, what do you do? I've noticed it in my own writing.

[Howard] Let's look at the… I don't want to talk down to anybody, but the gradeschool version of this problem is when each of the characters appears to have filled out a questionnaire. What is your favorite color? What is your favorite pop song? What is your favorite subject in school? If that is the way your character biographies read, where they are all answering the same question, they are all going to feel like the same person, because… Yeah, I mean, even though they've answered differently, you've given us exactly the same shape of information about each of them. So, the trick is instead of having them all fill out the same questionnaire, you have them ask each other the questions as they are filling out their biography. What does John want to know about Betty? What are the three questions he would ask her? What are the three questions that Betty will ask to Mary? How will this… How will they interact? Then you end up with silhouettes that are very, very different, because the information they're asking for is different.

[Valynne] I think in doing that, one of the things that I've noticed is… Well, I do some crazy things when I'm…

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] Trying to figure out a character. But the questions that I try to ask are questions that there's less of a chance that the characters can answer the same. So if I said, "What is your favorite color?" the chance that two characters could say the same thing is... It could happen. Whereas if I say, "Okay. What is their most embarrassing moment? What is their proudest moment? What is something... What is a secret they have never told anyone?" Those are things that help me start to make them seem not like each other, and add a little... Add more facets to the character.

[Dan] Howard said something last year that I have started using all the time, which is to consider your characters in terms of a verbal silhouette test. Which comes from cartooning. The silhouette test is saying just in outline all your characters have to be distinguishable from each other. So when I'm putting together a group of characters, I always think of that, and think, "Well, I want to make sure to have very distinct personalities and very distinct wants and roles and desires," and kind of build around the need for them all to be very different from each other.

[Brandon] All right. This has been a great episode. Listener, I didn't mention this at the beginning. I forgot to. But this is a very similar episode to what we did two weeks ago with the Chicago team. I intentionally put a similar… Two similar topics because I wanted to see how different teams approached the same topic. So if you got a little déjà vu, that's the reason. But I really like how this went in many ways completely different directions from that one.

[Brandon] Howard, you're going to give us some homework.

[Howard] I've got the homework. We talk a lot about the flat characters. We complain about the flat characters that we've seen in movies or read about in books. Take a memorably flat character from something you've recently consumed. Identify what story purpose they are fulfilling. Then write a back story for them that would satisfactorily make them interesting while still allowing them to fulfill the story purpose they filled in that story.

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

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.15: What Writers Get Wrong, with Mike Stop Continues

From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/15/13-15-what-writers-get-wrong-with-mike-stop-continues/

Key points: Gay people just want to read about people who happen to be gay, not about gay topics. Gay people often lean into stereotypes. Gay people create their own culture. There is a whole spectrum of ways that you enact being gay. Even passers support flamboyant gay people. The media does seem to have more flamboyant gay characters than subdued gay characters. Pay attention to the order of reveals. Happily married, loves sushi, and gay OR gay, happily married, loves sushi? Look at characters as a mystery, reveal clues, and then the big reveal. Be aware of you and your readers' defaults. Do your research, get gay readers from within the gay community, and talk to people on the Internet to write better gay characters. "What's his secret?" Mostly, just make characters who happen to be gay.

( Behind the curtains... )

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, What Do Writers Get Wrong, with Mike Stop Continues.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Aliette] I'm Aliette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Joining us today, we have special guest, Mike Stop Continues. Mike, that is an awesome name. Please tell us about yourself.

[Mike] Thanks. So, I'm the author of the King Cage superhero series, which takes place almost entirely beneath New York City, and Underworld, a young adult coming-of-age story that takes place in rural Pennsylvania.

[Dan] Well, awesome. Okay. So, this is part of our series of what do writers get wrong. Mary, tell us about what that series is about.

[Mary] So, with this series, what we're doing is, we're talking to different people who… About their life experience and using that… Using them, yes, we are using them…

[Chuckles]

[Mary] To help you as writers better represent people in your books. So, Mike, for instance, has multiple facets that we could talk about. What are some of those facets?

[Mike] So, in addition to being an author, I love sushi, I've got no sense of smell, and I'm a gay man who's happily married.

[Mary] What are we going to be focusing on today?

[Mike] Me being a gay man.

[Mary] So, what writers get wrong about being a gay man. Awesome.

[Dan] I am excited to talk about this. So the first question is given away in the title. What is something that you see often, portrayed in television and movies and in books, about being a gay man that writers get wrong?

[Mike] The biggest thing is that most gay people, most gay men, just want to read about people who happen to be gay, not about AIDS or coming out or about homophobia or about any of that stuff. They just want to see characters who happen to be gay.

[Mary] I think that is the case with a lot of the topics that we're going to covering, which is one of the things that I just want you readers to remember that, that people can exist in your story without having a reason to be the way that they are.

[Mike? Exactly.]

[Mary] Unless you are justifying why they are.

[Dan] I want to push this question even a little further. I think that's a great answer, but I want something juicier than that. What do you absolutely hate when you see gay men, gay people, portrayed in media, and you're like, "That again! Grrr."

[Mary] Like, the clichés that are actively offensive.

[Mike] Well, that's the funny thing about… There are obviously some characters that are taken way too far. But, in general, I think that the thing that's different about gay characters is that a lot… You meet a lot of people who lean into stereotypes in the gay community. Like, the fun part about that is that since all the gay people come from all different parts of the planet, we have to create our own culture. So, to do that, we sort of play with it more than other people do. So you'll end up with people who lean into stereotypes, who enjoy them. So that's something that I think that sometimes… Sometimes it's just wrongly done, but most of the time, we relate with those characters because we know those people. It's… There's a whole spectrum of kinds of… I guess the way that… the way that you enact being gay, right? So…

[Mary] Can you talk a little bit more about what it means to lean into a stereotype? Because I think that a lot of people aren't familiar with that, necessarily, as a term.

[Mike] Okay. So, for instance, you've all seen the… Like, the flamboyant gay character. Right? Someone who's… You know, like you could say that they're flaming or you could say lots of things that are negative about them. But, in general, they're… They're actively… They're proud, and they're loud, about being gay. Right? Now that's something that… That… That we learned to do because most of our lives are spent being… Feeling ashamed, right? And being closeted. Not being willing to show anyone that we were gay. So once you come out of the closet, you sort of want to have the exact opposite experience. So really, they're… And we all do it to different levels, like… You know, in small ways… I guess those of us who end up being classified as passers, right? In small ways, we all find ways to let the people around us know that we're gay. But some people… Some people like to do it more. No matter what gay person you encounter, no matter what their… No matter what their tells are, we all support that. So, you know what I mean? Like, that I think is the big thing that gets mistaken a lot. So, like when someone like me goes out into the world and somebody discovers I'm gay, they typically will say something like, "Oh, I never could have… I never would have told. I never…" "Oh, excuse me. I never would have known." Then they'll… Occasionally, say something that's less nice about people that they did know were gay from how they behaved. That's… I mean, sometimes… Like if… No gay person will ever be okay with you saying that. You know what I mean? So, like… We like that they do that, because… Because they're as proud as we are, it's just that some… We just all express it in different ways.

[Mary] You use the word that I wasn't sure that I recognized. You said labeled as…

[Mike] Oh, passers.

[Mary] Passers!

[Mike] That's obviously…

[Mary] I just didn't hear it clearly. But again, we should probably define that for our listeners.

[Mike] Right. So that's… That's a term borrowed from African-Americans, right? African-Americans who could pass as being white. It's the same thing in the gay community. We have gay people who can pass as being straight. So… There is where that word comes from.

[Aliette] Well, I mean, one of the things I see a lot with like Asians for instance is like you tend to always have the same representation over and over again. I wonder how much of that is happening with like gay people on screen. Do they always seem like they're the same kind of person? Because you mentioned, there's a whole spectrum, and different people have lots of different experiences. I wonder, when people say, "So-and-so was gay," and "I guess that they were gay," and they say these rudely offensive things, basically, I wonder, like you get that from media, right? So how much of that do you think [inaudible change]…

[Mike] Right. So, in media, we definitely do see flamboyant gay men more than… More than, I guess, let's say passing gay men, right?

[Aliette] Subdued? Maybe subdued or quieter?

[Mike] Subdued. Yeah. And that's okay. But I can say from personal experience that I was like in my late 20s when I first saw Capt. Jack on Doctor Who, and I cried, because that was… I wish I had that character in my life when I was younger. So, like, it's important that there are lots of different kinds of gay characters out there, and that's why the best and most important way to do that is just make a character who happens to be gay.

[Howard] Yeah. In my consumption of media, some of my favorite… Some of my favorite characters are the gay characters who didn't have a tell until something came up where it was important, and I'm allowed to realize that… Just like you, I am married and I love sushi. We are very, very similar…

[Laughter]

[Howard] On a couple of key counts. And I'm allowed to identify with characters who, in one aspect, yes, they're unlike me. But I can still identify with them. Part of what… I think part of what we struggle against is that culturally, a great many of us will be pushed away by the flamboyance, by the initial representation, because for fear or for any number of other reasons, we don't want to identify. My feeling is, no, I want to identify because that's how everybody gets to be a human in my head.

[Aliette] But, I mean, isn't there a risk if you do, like, that reveal really late, that the reader's going to feel like it's a little bait-and-switch? Of like, oh, I didn't think they were gay, and then… Because I've had people say, "I didn't realize that the character was gay," or queer or [Persian?] until fairly late in the book, and then, you're pushing back against their own preconceptions. They build this sort of mental image, and you're like basically coming in and crashing their party and saying, "No no no no no, I'm the author and I'm right." So I feel like… Do you think it would work if you had a… Like a normal… Like a person who was… Sorry. Who was married, loving sushi, and was out… Who you said was gay from the start?

[Mary] So, it looks like Mike had something to say.

[Aliette] Sorry.

[Mike] So, I mean, recently we have lots of gay characters in media… Or, not enough, but more than we've had before.

[Laughter]

[Mike] But… But… But if you look at, for instance, like a… Like gay film criticism, we look at movies that don't overtly have gay characters in it, and we spend a lot of our time, and historically have spent a lot of our time, dissecting characters that seemed to suggest that they were gay. So we get used to… We get used to looking at gay characters… Okay, looking at characters as a mystery. So I've heard from many author that exact criticism, Aliette. But I think the way that you can do it, maybe better… Not you. I think the way that writers can do it…

[Aliette] Aaaa… I'm really interested.

[Mike] Is to frame it like a mystery. Have a few clues that once you get to the point where you… Where it's… Where the character becomes obvious, then you can say, "Oh, I should have known," based on these few little things that came up beforehand.

[Mary] I just want to flag…

[Dan] We… We… We… Go ahead.

[Mary] Need to stop for…

[Dan] We need to stop for a book of the week. Like three minutes ago. But. You finish your flags.

[Mary] So, the thing that I wanted to… I just want to flag that one of the things that we're talking around here is that we have a default, and the default is straight. This is the same way in fiction that the default in America in 2017 and for quite a while after that and probably quite a while in the future, the default is white. Like, when you guys are listening to this podcast, you guys cannot see us. But we were talking the other day, and the core podcasters, Dan, Howard, Brandon, that other guy, and me…

[Chuckles]

[Mary] We're… This podcast is 100% white. This podcast is also 100% straight. We're only 75% women. Er... We're only 75% men. Excuse me, 25% women.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I was excited for a minute.

[Mary] But the thing is… The thing is that the fact that this podcast is all white and all straight is not surprising to you. Because you have a default set in your head. So one of the things to be aware of when you're doing this is that… If you feel like I need to mark my character as gay, you should also perhaps be considering that one of the ways you can address that default is by also marking your straight characters. And marking your characters who are ace or bi or… Or… Pansexual as Capt. Jack is. So be aware of your own tendency to default to an unmarked state, and this is a good time to examine that.

[Mary] Now we have a book of the week.

[Dan] We do. Thank you for handing it to me. I'm going to hand it to Mike. Mike, what's our book of the week?

[Mike] So, the book of the week is my first novel, Underworld. It's about two brothers growing up in rural Pennsylvania who are chasing… Who are chasing the same girl. One because he loves her, and the other because he doesn't want to be gay. So, I think it's clear what the… Why that's the… Why I said… Why I picked that as the book of the week.

[Dan] That sounds awesome. Tell us the title again.

[Mike] Underworld.

[Dan] Underworld. Awesome. I actually first heard that as two boys growing up in rural Transylvania, but I'm…

[Laughter]

[Dan] [garbled switching] it to Pennsylvania.

[Aliette] I also heard Transylvania, but…

[Laughter garbled]

[Aliette] As a default.

[Dan] Two young vampires growing up in rural T… Okay. Underworld.

[Mary] No. Two young men who people assume are vampires…

[Mike] Well, now they do.

[Dan] Now we're getting…

[Dan] We don't have much time left, and I would really love to focus, if we can, on some constructive advice. I'm going to start with the question, what have you seen… Can you give us a quick example of something you've seen in media that made you think, "Wow. That writer really did his or her research. They know what they're talking about."

[Mike] Actually, yes. This book has a tremendous trigger warning. It's by Hanya Yanagihara. She wrote… She. It's a woman. This is what is so special about this book. Wrote this book called A Little Life. It's one of the best gay love stories I have ever read. It's beautiful. On every level, this book is beautiful. The thing that showed that she understood the subject matter was that her characters' discovery of their love for one another is so organic and so real that there was… That even though… That there was no question in my mind that this woman had spoken to many gay men about how the… What their experience of romance and what their experience of sex was. It was beautiful. Brilliant.

[Dan] Cool. So what are some things then that writers can do… And I'm going to make this question difficult, because you're not allowed to say do your research and you're not allowed to say have gay readers from within the gay community. What can writers do, other than those things, to help write better gay characters?

[Mike] Okay. So. Oh, gosh, I don't know if I'm going to be breaking your rules here, but…

[Chuckles]

[Mike] One thing that I do when I need to learn about people who are not myself is I go on the Internet and I find those people. So, for instance, if you go on Reddit or you make an account on OkCupid or like anywhere that people meet other people, it's really easy to meet other people and to start talking to them about whatever it is about them that you're interested in. That doesn't mean... like I just mentioned OKCupid because it's great for talking to people about... especially intimate issues. They're more willing to talk, I think, there. But don't catfish people. Don't pretend to be a gay man to talk to gay men. You know what I mean? Like, be yourself, and just say, "Hey, listen. I see your profile. You're very much like a character that I'm interested in writing. Can I ask you some questions about your experience?"

[Mary] That's a really great idea that I'm totally stealing.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The takeaway, I think, Mike, from your answer to Dan's questions with its completely unfair precondition...

[Laughter]

[Howard] Is this is a difficult thing for which there are no shortcuts. There is no easy button. You can't just make sure you include this word or this sentence. It doesn't work that way. You have to do some homework, you have to meet some people, you have to talk, you have to learn how people... How people be.

[Mary] So one of the things that we often talk about is the whole write what you know, which I think is better expressed as extrapolate from what you know. When you were talking about how you would search for representations of yourself in media, what are the tells? What are the things that make you feel like you are present in that?

[Mike] In non-gay characters?

[Mary] In characters that are not demarcated.

[Mike] Okay. Right.

[Mary] Yes.

[Mike] So, actually anyone who seems… For me, as a gay man, anyone who seems uncomfortable with women or any man who seems uncomfortable with women. Any male character who has… Who seems to be portrayed as having a secret. You think, "What's his secret?" Especially… I can think of two Hitchcock movies that are brilliant with this. I think they both unquestionably have gay subtext. One is Strangers on a Train and the other is Rope. The main character in both of those movies is a gay man. The movies, there's no suggestion that… Or there's no overt suggestion that the movies are about being gay. But both of them definitely are. So I highly recommend those as a way to see that thing. Because I'm having a little bit of a hard time articulating it.

[Mary] It is difficult, I think… And this is also one of the things for you, readers and listeners, is that… Remember that your experience is normal. So when you're going to someone from within a community, you're asking them to describe their own normal, which is like asking a fish to describe water. It's often very difficult to pinpoint the parts of your life that other people don't experience. Which is why I thought, well, if we can talk about the things that you see, that these are potentially things that other people can extrapolate from. Like I extrapolate from what it's like to have a secret, even if it isn't that secret.

[Mike] Actually, one more [thought?] that I had similar to that is that… Like I said earlier, since gay people come from every walk of life and they come together, they are… There is very different subcultures within the gay community. So if you're interested in writing gay characters, the one easy way to do it is just to make a character who happens to be gay. But if you're interested in going deeper into the community, learn the different subcultures that exist there, because just like in the world that you live in, there are lots of different smaller groups that you might find interesting enough to write about.

[Dan] That is super interesting. I wish we had time to go into some of those subcultures, but we're unfortunately out of time. Thank you very much for being here.

[Mike] Thank you.

[Dan] This was a really interesting discussion. So, do you have some writing homework you can give us?

[Mike] Yes. So take your work in progress. Take any… Start with a scene. Take any character in that scene, and make that character… Change their sexual identity. So it could be to gay, to lesbian, bisexual, asexual, pansexual. Whatever it is. Rewrite the scene. But see just how little you have to change to make that character a different… Have a different sexual identity. You'll be surprised. It might be zero words. You might have to change literally nothing.

[Dan] Awesome. I think that sounds fantastic. Well, thank you again. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.14: Character Nuance

Writing Excuses 13.14: Character Nuance

From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/08/13-14-character-nuance/

Key points: Characters who contradict themselves have built-in conflicts, and are more realistic. Motivations, backstories, and emotions are often intricate and self-contradictory. Let your characters wear different hats! External presentation and internal story are often different. What we believe about ourselves and what we try to project to others are often inherently contradictory, which makes us human. Imposter syndrome, the more your career improves, the more awards you get, the less likely you are to think you deserve them. Your internal map may not keep up with external changes. These are ripe areas for character conflict. Nuance lets you signal to the reader that the character is presenting, lets you hang a flag on contradictions. Think of the character as an ecosystem, and you present different features at different times. A character with questions feels more real. A character's beliefs, their motivations, may not always match their MO, their how, their toolkit. Characters should have multiple goals. Think about creating your character as world building, answering why, the past, how, experiencing the current moment, and with what consequence, what effect. Putting different hats on your characters? Think about the worlds that you jump between. How you code switch, changing vocabulary and speech patterns, shared experiences. "While you are telling a story about your character, your character is also telling stories about themselves to other people."

( Hang your hat on the wall... )

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. It's another one of those topics we probably could have gone on for hours and hours. I'm going to use a director's prerogative and say our homework is going to be… Yeah, we're going to do the thing Amal suggested.
[Yay! Sorting hat chats!]
[Brandon] Sorting hat chats. Go look it up. Read it and sort yourself or one of your characters into one of these houses with subhouses. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 13.13: Character Voice

Writing Excuses 13.13: Character Voice

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/01/13-13-character-voice/

Key points: Voice, mechanical, aesthetic, and personal. How much character voice expresses itself depends on the project. Often in 1st and 3rd person, the narrative is partial voice, while the dialogue is full voice. Pay attention to how they curse or praise. Backstory or background is important to find out what the character might do that is interesting, unique, fun, specific, a distinctive voice. Vocabulary and word choice. Some narrators have a distinctive voice, too. Set your rules for that! Separate what the narrator tells you because you need to know it, and what the narrator hides to let the story unfold. For a spunky sarcastic teen narrator in YA, make it particular, personalized. Voice can make description and infodumps tolerable, even enjoyable. Beware the brilliant asshole, who has failed the area of intention, where the author's needs and the character's needs intersect. Also, pay attention to emphasis, bringing up the voice when you want the reader to pay attention to how the character is feeling or an important plot point.

( Singing a song ... )

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and call it there. Mary, you have our homework.
[Mary] Yes. What I want you to do is take a section of text that you have already written. Okay? So this is a default. Preferably something that you wrote in more-or-less neutral voice. I want you to rewrite that scene. I want you to rewrite it with three different characters. One of them is 80 years old. One of them is 12. And one of them is from a foreign country.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 13.12: Q&A on Heroes, Villains, and Main Characters

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/25/13-12-qa-on-heroes-villains-and-main-characters/

Q&A Summary:

Q: How do you make planned power increases not look like an ass pull?

A: Harbingers, clues, foreshadowing. Natural consequences. Power has a cost that must be paid, either beforehand by earning and foreshadowing, or later on.

Q: What do you do if your side characters or your villains start to outshine your main character? Aka the villain problem.

A: The villain has a plan, and the hero is just reacting. Give the hero something interesting, or let them take the lead and start acting. Focus on the main character and the storyline, and look at why the side character is taking over. Watch to see if you start enjoying writing the villain or side character more than the main character, then look at what's happening.

Q: How do you know when a character, main or side, is unnecessary and needs to be removed or killed off?

A: Look at the storyline and make sure that every character is contributing something important. Can you take the character out without changing the storyline? Do it.

Q: What are some tricks to disguise a viewpoint character as a hero, when they are really a villain?

A: Think about it this way. Is this person going from hero to villain because it's a fall, or a deception? Is the mystery part of your story?

Q: What is more fun for you? Creating a hero or a villain, and why?

A: Villains! Making them sympathetic, understanding their motivations. Heroes! Because we get to know them better, we can add so much more texture. Spaceships!

Q: How many side characters can you reasonably juggle within a single novel?

A: How big is the novel? How talented are you? Can you make the characters memorable? Make sure the story is good, don't worry about the size of the cast.

Q: What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of making your villain a POV character?

A: If we can see inside the villain's head, it's hard to retain mystery. You may be able to make the mystery or tension focus on how the character is going to get out of it, the consequences of the actions.

Q: When your villain/antagonist doesn't show up until late in the plot, how do you build them up early on despite their non-presence?

A: Put things they have done in early. Signs, clues that create tension, and make us wonder what is happening.

Q: One of my protagonists is, well, a bit of a jerk. She's arrogant, and insults some of the other characters. I don't want my readers to hate a protagonist, though. How can I make… create ways for them to like her?

A: Give them other things. Make sure we understand why they are a jerk, and give them other things that we do like.

( Q&A by the dozen? )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on Heroes, Villains, and Side Characters.

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Valynne] I'm Valynne.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I've got questions.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, Brandon's got the questions.

[Brandon] [garbled And hopefully you've got some answers.] I've got the questions.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Thank you all who sent in questions. I'm just going to start throwing them at people. We're going to start with Howard's favorite on the list. How do you make planned power increases not look like an ass pull?

[Howard] [laughing] That's… I read that one…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And have noth… I had never heard that particular phrase nouned before.

[Dan] Nouned. See, the back story that you guys don't know is that right before recording this, we told Valynne she had to not swear. So…

[Laughter]

[Valynne] I've been very good.

[Howard] Oh, that's…

[Brandon] Can you answer the question?

[Howard] The question, then. How do you make… What was the word, powers?

[Brandon] Yeah, how can you…

[Dan] It was planned power increases.

[Howard] Planned power increases. How do you make… How do you make the increase in abilities of your protagonists look like something that is organic to the story rather than looking like something that… Rather than looking like a deus ex machina. Rather than looking like something that knocks the reader out of the story, because they don't feel like it fits.

[Dan] Just arbitrarily leveled up.

[Howard] Yeah. Honestly, the key to this is whatever power is, whatever that ability is, the fact that it was going to manifest had to have some sort of harbingers. There had to be something connected to that that was already in place. He's going to develop the power of magical body odor? For the week prior to that, people are asking, "What is that smell? What is that… Have you bathed? What's going…" And then, all of a sudden, it manifests.

[Laughter]

[Howard] And we feel like, "Oh. Yes. This is a thing." By the way, the body odor superpower is, in point of fact, an ass pull.

[Valynne] Well, I think the point of that is just thinking about what the natural consequences would be for something should it manifest.

[Dan] Yeah. Power has a cost. That cost can come before hand, by earning it, or foreshadowing it, or later on.

[Brandon] Thank you to Rohan, by the way, who sent that question in and gave us a new word to use.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Melina and Tiffany both asked variations on the same question, which is, "What do you do if your side characters or your villains start to outshine your main character?" This is the classic, what we call, the villain problem.

[Dan] Often what is going on when this happens is that your villain has a plan of action, and all your hero is doing is reacting to it. That can make your heroes look very pale and weak in comparison. So give your hero either something interesting to pull them through the first half, or really make a concerted effort in the second half of your story for the hero to take the lead and start acting… And kind of taking the fight to the villain.

[Brandon] Valynne, have you ever had this happen, because they've heard from us on this topic. Have you ever had a side character or a villain outshine your main character?

[Valynne] I think that any time I've had that, I get more interested… It's because I'm more interested in what's going on with the side character. So not only is it pulling my focus from what the storyline should be, I think sometimes it may just be that's a different story. So I have to refocus, and take a look at my main character and figure out what I am not doing that my side character is doing. Because that's usually the answer to why the side character is taking over. Sometimes it's that the side character is just a lot more humorous. That doesn't necessarily mean I need to add humor to my main character, but figure out why humor is… What is that humor… What is it accomplishing? That my main character, for whatever characteristics… What characteristics in my main character can I amplify to bring that out?

[Howard] For the reader, this sort of problem… We can tell when we like the villains and the side characters more than the protagonists. For the writer, the first symptom, the first twigging you get to this being a problem is when you are enjoying writing the villain and the side character more. If that has happened, pay very, very close attention to what is going on.

[Brandon] So Noah asks a kind of related question. How do you know when a character, main or side, is unnecessary and needs to be removed or killed off?

[Valynne] I really think that you have to look at your storyline and make sure that that character is contributing to something important. Sometimes it's not always as apparent as we need it… As we expect it to be. Sometimes it is that that character is the breath of relief. Because there's humor in that character. Sometimes there is some knowledge that that character adds, but we just need to make… If you took that character out, would the storyline be the same? I think, in any event, if you could take that character out, you probably… Without changing the story? You probably should.

[Dan] Yeah. I'm going… Right now, on my Patreon, I'm kind of serializing annotations on one of the early, early books that I did in a writing group with Brandon. There was one character who was pointless. So clearly pointless, in one of these chapters. Then, in the next chapter, got into a huge fight. It was so obvious. Like, it was just glaringly obvious that the writing group had said, "This character's dumb. Give him a reason to exist." I'm like, "Well, I'll make him the fighter." In hindsight, I wish that I'd just cut him out of the book. Because he didn't need to be there. The fight was extraneous because… It was a disaster.

[Brandon] All right. Asoff asks, "What are some tricks to disguise a viewpoint character as a hero, when they are really a villain?" Thought that was a very intriguing question.

[Hmmm...]

[Howard] Well, if we tell you the tricks, then…

[Laughter]

[Howard] You'll know when we're doing it.

[Brandon] That's the subtitle…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Of Writing Excuses…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] The entire podcast.

[Dan] I don't know if that is the right way to think about this. At least, it's not the way I think about this. If I have someone who is going to start as a hero and become a villain, then I think to myself, "Is that because they… This is going to be a fall? Or is this a deception?" If it's a deception… I mean, either way, really, I just write them as if they were a main character. I don't think that you need to put in any clues, necessarily, that say this person, keep an eye on them, they're actually bad, unless discovering that mystery is part of your story. You can just go ahead and write them as if they were a main character, and then have them do something awful at some point.

[Howard] This is a good job, also, for alpha readers. If the alpha reader says, "Wow, that came out of left field. I was totally not expecting that." "Well, how did you feel about not expecting that?" "Oh, it was fun." Great. You did it just right. "Oh, it was… Knocked me right out of the story." Okay. Maybe I need to put in some clues.

[Brandon] Here's a quick and fun one from Veronica. "What is more fun for you? Creating a hero or a villain, and why?"

[Valynne] Villains. Villains are… I love villains. I love them mostly because I like to make them sympathetic. I like people to understand their motivations and think, "In that scenario, I might do the same thing, even though it's horribly wrong." Or… I just love… I love villains…

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] Personally.

[Dan] I actually would say, for me, it's a hero. I have so much more fun writing them, because we get to know them better. Which means I can add so much more texture to them as characters. If I'm going to spend that much time introducing you to someone, I'm going to consider them a main character, whether that is hero or villain.

[Howard] Spaceships.

[Gasp]

[Brandon] Spaceships. Option C.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] None of the above.

[Brandon] All right. Let's stop for our book of the week. Which is The Woman Who Smashed Codes.

[Dan] The Woman Who Smashed Codes is the book I am reading right now. So, full disclosure, I have not finished it. If the second half is terrible, I apologize. But the first half is amazing. It is a nonfiction story, nonfiction history book about the woman who helped create the NSA. She and her husband were kind of like the American version of Alan Turing. In the first and second world wars, they cracked all of the codes, they worked against Enigma, they hunted down Mafia, and all kinds of things. It's an incredible interesting story, but history has mostly erased her. We all remember… Or I guess those who know, William Friedman, who created the NSA and has a big bust of himself. His wife was, according to most historical documents, as or even more important, but has kind of been forgotten. This story of her and what she did and how she helped turn America into this kind of intelligence gathering nation, which it never had been before, is fascinating. It's by Jason Fagone, is how I'm assuming that name is pronounced. It's called The Woman Who Smashed Codes.

[Brandon] Excellent. Next question. Owen asks, "How many side characters can you reasonably juggle within a single novel?"

[Howard] How many pages do you have?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] How many… What's your word count?

[Dan] Is that a Dan Wells' novel or a Brandon Sanderson's novel?

[Valynne] I think it depends on how talented you are. If you look at Harry Potter, every single one of her side characters, you remember. If I am the one writing it, I probably can't juggle that many at all.

[Dan] Rowling… Harry Potter's a great example to pull out, because she's so good at this. Sometimes those side characters… the only thing interesting about Shamus Flanigan is that his potions always explode in his face. But we remember him, and we remember the potions exploding in his face. Then she finds a way, in book 7, to make that important. So it doesn't often take much.

[Brandon] I will make the point of… This is something that I got better through my career. The original reason that the Way of Kings which I wrote in 2002 and workshopped in my writing group, the reason it failed is because I tried to put into many characters, and couldn't juggle them at my skill level at that point. When I pulled back… We've made this point before on Writing Excuses. When I pulled back and did a more focused story, the story was way better. It's not that… You are… Large casts are not inherently better than small casts. We want a good story, no matter what it is. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to force and stretch yourself. Sometimes the right thing to do is say, "Well, what's the story that I can really tell right now and do a good job with?"

[Howard] Skill set is… It's the compression skill set. How much… How much work can you make that paragraph do? How much information… How much storytelling… We talk about how a scene has to have more than one job. If you've got lots of side characters to introduce, your skill with the prose has to be sufficient to carry all of those people through that scene believably. That… You just… You gotta learn how to make the words. It takes time.

[Brandon] Jake asks, "What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of making your villain a POV character?"

[Dan] In my experience, it is very hard to retain mystery if we can see inside the villain's head. So if the villain's plans need to remain mysterious in some way, or if we… Part of the joy of the book is figuring out what's going on, I… Which is how almost all of my books are structured. Then you can't get into the villain's head. So that's why I rarely ever do it.

[Valynne] I think that if you are going to do that, and if you're in the villain's head, I think that the mystery then therefore needs to be how is this character going to get out of it. Because you already know what's going to happen if they're the villain, but then you need to be more focused on how are they going to carry this out, and are they going to get away with it or are they not. The consequences of their actions become the mystery.

[Brandon] Excellent. All right. Corey asks, "When your villain/antagonist doesn't show up until late in the plot, how do you build them up early on despite their non-presence?" I might add to that, if you're not choosing to do viewpoints from the villain, how do you make sure they have a presence in the plot?

[Howard] The Schlock Mercenary book I am working on right now does exactly that. I accomplished it by putting things that they have done in the opening scenes. We might think that someone else has done them. But when we get our reveals, it becomes apparent that, "Oh. There's a bad guy here who is not the bad guy we thought was the baddest guy."

[Valynne] I think that there need to be things that… Just as you said, there need to be some little signs of what is going on that are… Something that is creating tension. So that when we find out the source of that tension, they all lead up to that person.

[Brandon] All right. We're going to end here. Liliana asks a question that several others have asked under different phrasings. I like hers the best. It says, "One of my protagonists is, well, a bit of a jerk. She's arrogant, and insults some of the other characters. I don't want my readers to hate a protagonist, though. How can I make… create ways for them to like her?"

[Dan] One of the books that I wrote last year is a YA horror in which I did that. I wanted the main character to be a jerk. She's a teenage girl, she just kind of… I do this increasingly as my daughter gets older, but… I made sure to give her other things. I made sure first of all that we understood, and this is something Valynne's talked about a lot, that we understood why she was a jerk. Why does she chafe so hard against everyone else in the story? Then on top of that, give her other things that we do like about her. So that we can kind of say, "Oh, yes, she's not nice, but she does this, and I really like that."

[Brandon] All right. Just a few things to mention. Jeb asks, "Tips for making a good ensemble of characters?" We did an entire month on ensemble stories, two years back. So go look that one up. "How do you decide to play character archetypes?" Victor asks. We will be doing several podcasts this year on archetype and cliche. So watch for that. There are a couple questions about making characters too good at everything or things like this. We have a podcast coming up about what we call iconic heroes. I think that's a term we got from Zub.

[Howard] Jim Zub.

[Brandon] We'll do an entire podcast on that. So some of these questions we will answer. Some we have just answered. Those who are asking about anti-heroes, listen to last month's episode. These were great questions. Thank you, guys, so much.

[Brandon] Valynne, I asked you to prepare a writing prompt for us.

[Valynne] So, my writing prompt is going to be, write about a female gamer who is trying to right social injustices with her gaming skills.

[Brandon] That is awesome. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Writing Excuses 13.11: Writing Secondary Characters, with Charlaine Harris

Writing Excuses 13.11: Writing Secondary Characters, with Charlaine Harris

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/18/13-11-writing-secondary-characters-with-charlaine-harris/

Key points: Secondary characters can be very rich. Make them interesting and vivid, and use them again, later on! Create a character when you need them, and they have a function, but make them multidimensional and interesting. Use the interaction with the main character, and what the protagonist tells us about them, to make the secondary characters come to life. Contradictions, and life outside the story, help make a character rich. Beware flanderization, turning a character into a quirky caricature. Change who they are, give them new problems and obstacles, kick them out of their rut. What are their goals, and what are their failure modes? If the secondary character starts to be more interesting than the main character, you can kill them, or you can complete their arc. Or you can change what they want, dial down their want, and dial up the main character's stakes. What does the character really want? What are they striving for? What do they need more than anything else in the world? Keep those in mind, and your secondary characters will do the work they need to do.

( No small parts, only small actors? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. This has been awesome. I'm going to give us some homework. Because I thought it would be very interesting to force you to take something you have written already, and take the protagonist and make them a secondary character, and make the secondary character the protagonist of a different story. Make your main character fade to the background, make one of your secondary characters come to the front, write a new story doing that.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brandon] I want to thank Charlaine. Thank you so much.
[Charlaine] Oh, thank you for inviting me.
[Brandon] I want to thank our audience at GenCon.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.10: Handling a Large Cast

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/11/13-10-handling-a-large-cast/

Key Points: The length of the story often influences the size of the cast. When you have an ensemble cast, you may need to give them all weight. Name, distinguishing characteristics, backstory, motivation? But with short stories, you often want bit players who come in, do something, and leave. With large casts, you may need spreadsheets or even a wiki to keep track. If they have a name, they need motivation, backstory, and all that. Or write one group straight through, another group straight through, then weave and blend them. Big casts often start with one character, then expand, and grow over time. You don't really start with a huge cast on page one! Small casts, characters often wear lots of hats, and you can show they are skilled in one area, but ... the story challenges them in an area where they aren't so good. You can also use the relationships between your characters more. And delve deeper into your characters, and their interactions. Think of screen time -- how do you balance and give each character enough screen time?

( How many people can fit in here, anyway? )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Handling a Large Cast Versus a Small Cast.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We're going to talk a little bit about nuts and bolts on this episode. We want to find out specifically from Maurice and Amal how you do your writing. How you actually physically go about doing it?

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Okay.

[Amal] Do you want to go first?

[Laughter]

[Mary] They're both backing away from the question.

[Amal] I mean, the thing with me is that I have never written a novel. Like, not even as a kid, writing… The longest things that I wrote as a kid were role-playing character backgrounds, in like over 10 pages in nine point font. That's like the thing that I did. But… So I write a lot of short stories. Because short stories are so, to me, flexible, I've tended to have a different approach to most… Almost every one. Except for the butt in chair part. Like I just sit and write. But I've… There are some that I've outlined, some that I haven't. There are some where I've come up with the characters first, sometimes I've come up with the plot first and the characters kind of arose from it. The biggest cast of characters I think I ever had to manage was when I was actually writing an episode for Book Burners, which is a serial box serial, which is like TV but written. So I had a cast of characters handed to me, and keeping track of that was really interesting. It was a completely different challenge. Thinking about things like A plots and B plots, which I don't know if I've ever otherwise done in a short story, at least until that point…

[Brandon] Specifically about characters. What do you do? Do you do anything? Do you like free write characters or do you just see where it goes?

[Amal] I think a lot of the time, I have a scene in mind, and I have a feeling or a texture that I want to generate out of this conflict or out of this conversation or I really want to experience this thing and make other people experience it. Sometimes that feeling comes from a character I have in mind, sometimes it… The feeling dictates the characters. Yeah.

[Brandon] When do you add another character?

[Amal] Gosh.

[Brandon] Just when it feels right?

[Amal] Just when it feels right. Yeah.

[Brandon] Are you usually doing smaller casts or…

[Amal] Yeah. Usually the casts are not more than four. That's… It's really interesting to take stock of how the length of the story has tended to determine that. Although, that said, I did just recently finished a novella with Max Gladstone where there are two characters in this novella. It's epistolary, and they're time traveling spies. Fighting a time war. But… As one does. But so, there are two characters, and there are two background characters beyond that who are their… Like motivating them. That's sustained over novella length. But I think that's generally the exception to a rule of the shorter the story, the fewer the characters. Somewhere at novelette length, you start having the flexibility to like put different groups in play as opposed to just two different characters in play. But I've tended not to think that way, because I think most of the short stories I've written have tended to be structure-driven as opposed to character-driven.

[Mary] One of the things that I've found with both writing short fiction and writing novels, and also dealing with puppetry, is that at a certain point, you become very con… Trained to the constraints of the form that you're working in, and will begin to naturally gravitate and move down the decision tree to make choices that fit the length that you're supposed to be working with. Like, one of the constraints that I had when I was working with puppet theater was that there were two performers. Which meant that we were limited by the number of hands to the number of characters we could have on stage at a time.

[Amal] Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. That's like the most beautiful physical manifestation of this problem. How many hands do you have?

[Mary] Right. So I would naturally… I'd be like… I would naturally say, "Oh. Well, let's think about doing Snow Queen." Because this is a thing where she encounters a lot of different characters, but only one at a time. Whereas Aida, there's like a cast of thousands. That's not a good choice, because I just can't get that many people on stage. I feel that way, that when I am… The hardest thing for me when I am jumping back and forth between short fiction and novels is remembering which metric I'm using. Because I can… Like I'm working on a novel right now that has an ensemble cast, but it also has an ensemble cast of a lot of onlookers that… And because it's a murder mystery, I actually need to give them all weight, because you don't know which one is…

[Amal] Right.

[Mary] So, it's interesting because everybody that comes on stage, I actually have to give the same amount of weight to. Whereas normally, when I'm doing a shorter piece or something, anyone who's not important, I try not to give them a name, I try not to give them any distinguishing characteristics, I just want them to come in, say their bit, and get out again. Here, I have to make sure that everybody gets a name, that everybody seems to have a back story, that everybody seems to have a distinguishing characteristic. It's a very different metric.

[Brandon] By shorter story, you mean under 400,000 words, instead of over? Right?

[Laughter]

[Mary] Right. Yes. Yes.

[Brandon] Right. Okay. I get that.

[Mary] Yeah, yeah.

[Amal] What's the smallest cast you've ever dealt with, Brandon?

[Brandon] I've done two person casts before, but that was in my flash fiction.

[Amal] Okay.

[Brandon] Lar… Anything more than… I mean, The Wheel of Time had 2400 characters…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Stormlight's got something around eight or 900, or something like that. So…

[Amal] Wait. Wait, wait. Sorry, I'm having difficult… Sorry. Say those numbers again.

[Brandon] 2400 characters. Yeah.

[Amal] I hope you can hear the face I'm making.

[Brandon] The book I just finished was 540,000 words long. We cut it to like 460. But… Anyway…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's move on to Maurice.

[Amal] So amazing.

[Brandon] Maurice. What is your…

[Amal] Like, how do you do that?

[Brandon] Sorry. We're doing this podcast and I'm thinking, "Wow, they use very different methods."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because for me, if I'm going to track this cast, I need… I need spreadsheets for the small stories. Right? Because even the small stories, it's going to be… I'll generally do two or three about the same characters, and I'll have 60 characters in… Across the series of novellas.

[Mary] You really cannot see our mouths just hanging open.

[Brandon] But, Stormlight, it's a huge wiki with tons of characters.

[Mary] Wow.

[Brandon] And things like this. That's why I have two continuity editors.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And whatnot. So, yeah, it's a very different experience for me. Maurice, how do you track your characters? How do you come up with them, how do you design them, how do you…

[Maurice] So, I come from a gaming background. So basically, my rule is once I bothered to give you a name, I'm going to roll you up as a character.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Do you actually do that?

[Maurice] Well, I don't roll them up, but…

[Laughter]

[Mary] I think we'd love it if you did.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] But, yeah, once we get to the stage where I'm naming you, then I go through all the things that I would do for any character. I'm figuring out what your motivation is, I'm figuring out what your back story is, I'm doing all those things because if you have a name… Because naming… For me, naming is one of the hardest things. So if I'm going to go to the effort of giving you a name, you come with everything that comes with being a character.

[Brandon] You actually have these sheets? Like you…

[Maurice] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Oh, wow. Really? Oh, these are cool.

[Maurice] So. Well, I mean. They look a lot like these. So I have a sheet… It's basically divided into quadrants, where I just jot down information for each of my characters. So I can just track them that way.

[Mary] Can we put one of those templates on the website in the liner notes?

[Maurice] Sure.

[Mary] Great. That is so cool. Because that's… I want a copy of that.

[Amal] Like I've done that for my characters in retrospect. For, like, for my own fun sometimes. But… Come up with a character. This is also within the context of role-playing, but role-playing free-form online. And sometimes, just enjoying taking a character sheet from say World of Darkness or something like that, and just turning that character who is fully rounded and stuff into a character on a sheet.

[Maurice] Well… All that being said, what the… Probably the largest cast of characters I've had to deal with was for my urban fantasy trilogy, which I'm calling… I basically call my accidental trilogy, because I never intended to write a trilogy. But it was all based on the Arthurian saga. So in a lot of ways, that work has been done for me. I can just take all the characters and then just sort of… Well, here's how they've traditionally been portrayed. Now let me just do my tweaks and… How would they plug into the hood, basically. But that was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I mean, it's not the numbers you have, but it was still a couple dozen characters per book, which is larger than I had ever done before. Tracking them was tough.

[Brandon] I throw those numbers around to be awe-inspiring, but usually there will be like 30 main characters. Right? Maximum. But… That's what gets really tricky, is remembering this character's motivations and things like this. I… usually, when I'm writing these books, I'm writing one group straight through. Then I'm writing another group straight through, and another group straight through. At least to a kind of breakpoint. And then weaving it together. Then you have to do all these passes to make sure that the different stories blend together in a way that's dramatically and pacing wise works. It gets very complicated there, but I find that if you jump each scene to the new characters, it always feels like you're stopping and starting and things like this. So…

[Amal] Brandon, can I ask you a question? Do you find that with these really large casts, that that… Like thinking back to what Mary was saying about the constraints kind of dictating what kind of story you tell. Do you find that you sort of have to tell a big… Okay…

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Amal] But that because you're choosing to tell a really big story, that you have to have a commensurate number of characters? Or can you imagine a situation where you have that number of characters for a small-scale story?

[Brandon] I have no idea how you'd do it. I suppose we can imagine it. It's certainly a challenge that you could put up before people. With me, I grew up reading epic fantasy. I wanted to write epic fantasy. I was reading these stories with these huge casts, like Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. I would read these books, and when I sat down to write, I just naturally started doing this. The big problem was, and I tell this to people a lot, was I jumped in, just trying to write that large cast from page 1, and I failed spectacularly my first few tries. What I realized is a lot of these casts grew organically over time. The author didn't say I'm going to have 2400 named characters in The Wheel of Time or whatever. Robert Jordan told a story about one character who interacted with a lot of people, and did some expanding on who these people were, and then started telling their stories. I think the form is very important to this. When I write a Stormlight book, which are the really big ones we joke about. Most of my books are kind of normal length. But when I write these, the 500,000 word ones, I actually plot them as a trilogy, with a short story collection included. I write them as three books and a short story collection, which I am interweaving as I go. I put together… The idea behind it is that when you pick this up, you're not just going to get a story, you're going to get a lot of stories, all woven together toward a big goal at the end.

[Mary] But you can talk about the difference between the way you are handling the stories in the short story collection versus the way you are handling the larger casts.

[Brandon] Yes. Ethnically.

[Mary] Does it… Do you go into those differently, or do you use the same…

[Brandon] Definitely. Absolutely, differently. It's the same setting. Like, the most recent one, there is a short story in it about a lighthouse keeper. His family has kept this lighthouse forever. A disaster has just struck. He is going through the town, helping people with the problems from the disaster. It just goes to the four different people. Really, he's collecting their wood so he can keep his lighthouse burning. But you interact with a ship captain whose ship is not there anymore. And help out the sailors, but end up with their wood. You go here to the woman whose farm was just completely destroyed. But their shed was broken, so I got some more wood. Then he goes up and stokes the flame to the lighthouse. That little sort of story has no connection to the big story, except for the fact that the disaster happened in the big story. The main characters, their job is they can like stop this. They can work with this disaster. He can't. He's the lighthouse keeper. So it allows me to just tell these different types of stories, all in one package. That was a huge tangent.

[Mary] No, no…

[Amal] No, I like that.

[Mary] Actually it wasn't a huge… That was exactly on point. Because this is… The thing that I like about that example is that one of the things that I find with a lot of fiction… A lot of processes, that it's a very fractal thing. That you've got something that you do on this big scale, and it looks totally different because the scale is huge. But when you start drilling down into it, on a scene-by-scene basis, you're doing exactly the same things. In this scene, I can only have this many characters, because this is how many words I have.

[Brandon] Well, it's beyond that. There's a sort of reader, at least me, maybe writer, brain space. Right? Like I can track maybe four or five characters in a conversation. If there is more people trying to participate in this conversation, I have trouble bringing them up enough to remind you that they're there. I've got to arrange these situations so there is a smaller number in each given scene.

[Mary] Yeah. It's like I totally forgot Howard is even in the room.

[Brandon] Oh, yeah. Howard, put your pants back on.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's… We haven't even stopped for the book of the week yet, and we're [inaudible approaching the end, so…]

[Mary] Sorry, this is a very interesting conversation for us.

[Brandon] Let's talk about To Steal the Stars.

[Screech! Oh, my gosh!]

[Mary] So. We both want to talk about it?

[Amal] You can start.

[Mary] Okay.

[Amal] I learned about it from you.

[Mary] That's fair. So this is a podcast. It is an audio play called To Steal the Stars. It's coming from Tor Labs and Gideon Media. This is one of the best acted and best produced…

[Amal] And best directed.

[Mary] And best directed and best written pieces of audio drama that I have ever heard. I say this as someone who used to perform in it, review it. This is phenomenally good. It is hitting all of the right science fiction and character buttons for me.

[Amal] I was thoroughly unprepared for how hard I would fall for this. If you describe to me what the contents are… Like, even the genre of this audio drama, I'd be like okay, cool, that sounds interesting, but I wouldn't necessarily dive into it. People describe it in a lot of ways. People will talk about it as noir, as a noir thriller heist, as a near future noir thriller heist thing. All cool, all fine. But, it doesn't prepare you for how incredible the characters are, how tight the pacing is, how… And just all of those beautiful grace notes of the directing. Like, I can't get over the fact that there's a part where two people are having pillow talk, and it actually sounds like normal people. Like, it just… It's so hard to do that. It's hard to do that on the page, fiction wise, it's hard to… I mean, representing people in intimate situations is chancy at the best of times. But this was the best of times, and also the worst of times. It's just amazing.

[Mary] In context, I'll let us segue back in. One of the reasons that I think that it's really good for you to listen to is because as radio theater, each character has to have a completely distinct voice. It's not just the actor. It's the way that they are approaching the words, the way the script has been written. Each character has a distinct motivation, they have a distinct characterization. Some of the episodes have very small casts, some of them are quite large, with multiple voices all happening at the same time. It's a really interesting way to start thinking about an aspect of a cast which is the way characters actually speak.

[Amal] I think it was also all recorded in an actual hangar… Or not in a hangar, necessarily. But it was all recorded in one space, and they were… The actors were allowed to occupy that space and spread out.

[Mary] Oh, really?

[Amal] Yeah. So it wasn't in a studio the way we are. So the reason… Part of the reason the audio is so fantastic is that you get the sense of people's movements through a very large, echo-y space. They're evoking a top-secret hangar, basically, where secret objects are kept. You really get the feel of how these voices enter and leave the space, of how close people are, how far they are apart. And the performances have more room to breathe. So it's… Ach. It's just so good. It's so good. And it's going to be a book that comes out… I think November 7th? Of last year, from when this is airing?

[Mary] I know, it's time travel.

[Amal] So it's out now.

[Brandon] All right. So we are almost out of time. Even though we just did that. But I wanted to throw one more question at you guys. Which is, let's focus on the small casts. I've talked about the large casts. How do you make a small number of characters wear a lot of hats, if you've got a very limited cast, or a very limited space, to do so?

[Mary] So I'm doing a story right now, which is basically two characters on a heist. Normally, heist stories have a huge number of characters. So what I have them doing is that I have them each with a primary expertise. Then, I have given them each area of competence that is… They're okay at, but they're not great at. What that does is it allows me to… The nice thing about having a character who has multiple hats is that you can demonstrate how this person is really skilled, but by having them encounter things that they're not so good at, you can actually ramp up the drama significantly.

[Amal] I think the smaller the cast, the more it becomes important to take into consideration their contrasts to each other, to have one character's strength be the other's weaknesses, or to have them complement each other. Which is the same thing, actually. But, yeah, so, just to… The fewer characters there are in the story, I think the more loadbearing the relationship between the characters needs to be, and the more nuanced and encompassing it has to be. The more characters you have, the more variation you can have on those lines.

[Maurice] Yeah. When I'm dealing with smaller casts… Actually, it's a problem that I didn't realize was even a thing until I started doing the massive urban fantasy, which was the whole issue of screen time. When I have this large cast, it's like, how do I manufacture enough screen time for some of these characters, who… I've bothered to roll up and create these characters, they now need screen time. How do I balance that? But in a smaller cast, I have this space, and again, they get to occupy this space, so they do have sufficient screen time. So now, what are we going to do with that? Because you now have to occupy all of this space all on your own. So, for me, I'm thinking of my story, The Ache of Home, which is up on Uncanny Magazine. Cast of three. Each of the characters are so completely distinct. I could tell who's talking without any dialogue tags, basically, because each one is so distinct. Each one has a different role. Like, even my main character, she is… She's a single mom. She's struggling in the neighborhood. Yet, she also has this magical ability to tie in with the green. When her co-protagonist, is this gentleman, he's recently out of prison, but his tattoos tell the story of his life. He can peel the tattoos off, they become magical objects.

[Amal] Oh, that's so cool.

[Maurice] They're just… So they have all this screen time, and frankly, I just have more time to just delve deeper. I think ultimately that's what it is. I have more room to delve deeper into these characters and their interactions.

[Brandon] Awesome. You were going to give us some homework, Maurice, that's kind of along those lines?

[Maurice] Oh, yes. Very much along these lines. So, it's out of my dialogue class I teach. I call it, it's a talking heads exercise. Again, one of the roles of dialogue is… By the end of dialogue… Dialogue, you have characterized… You use dialogue to characterize… To develop characterization. So one of the goals is that by the end of… You should be able to write characters with such a distinct voice, I shouldn't need dialogue tags to tell them apart. I was thinking about that when you were talking about the audio plays. Very much… It makes you very conscious of that. How do my characters sound, distinct from one another, even in those brief interactions? So that what I… So the exercise is. So you have a married couple. They bump into each other at a coffee shop, when neither one was supposed to be there. One's supposed to be at work, one's supposed to be doing their other thing. They bump into each other at a coffee shop. So, obviously, they have an agenda and they have a secret they want to hide and the other one's trying to get that out of them. Write that scene.

[Brandon] Write that scene with no dialogue tags?

[Maurice] With no dialogue tags.

[Mary] Awesome.

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

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.9: Quick Characterization

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/03/04/13-9-quick-characterization/

Key points: Quick tips for characterizing side characters? Give them something weird and memorable, something in conflict with the reader's expectations. Also something that conflicts with the POV character's expectations. Or use the tricks people use to remember names, e.g. alliteration. To make a character come to life, write a brief scene or piece from their viewpoint. Play two truths and a lie with your characters! Beware of turning characters into a single quirk, a.k.a. Flanderization. Figure out what makes the character do that thing, then pay attention to how that motivates other things. Use peekaboo moments, add a splash of color to a scene highlighting something unusual about this side character. A juggling guard? Just a momentary glimpse of the motivations and passions of the side characters. To quickly introduce characters, have the characters, justifiably, talk about each other. Beware of overdoing quick characterization of side characters! Finally, make sure that the side characters are doing something when the protagonist walks on stage.

( Rounding out the flat side characters... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Quick Characterization.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are talking all this month about side characters. It's a topic we've touched on before on Writing Excuses, so I want to dig into something specific about side characters this week. I want to talk about how we characterize people quickly. Because sometimes, you just don't have a lot of space to dedicate to these side characters. So let's say you only have a couple sentences to characterize someone. Dan, how do you go about doing it?

[Dan] Kind of the cheap and dirty hack that I use is just to give them something that is, in my opinion, unexpected. Based on what their role is or what their situation is in the story, I will throw something else weird on top of that so that you'll remember, "Oh, yeah, this is that kid, but also he really likes this one strange thing."

[Brandon] Right. They put them in conflict with the reader's expectations. It's a really good way to make someone memorable.

[Mary] One of the things that I try to do, actually, is that thing, except not just the reader's expectations, but the point of view character's expectations. I… Because using that allows me to kind of slide past some of the I am telling you what this character looks like. It also allows me to then convey information about my main character, which, when I'm writing short fiction, I have to be able to get every sentence to do double duty. One of the sneaky tricks that I will use sometimes is I will use some of the tools that people use to remember names in real life. Which is… If the character says their name, I will slide a detail in that is alliterative without…

[Brandon] Wow!

[Dan] Without calling attention to it?

[Brandon] That's interesting.

[Mary] Yeah. Monty with the mustache.

[Unsure] [inaudible now]

[Brandon] Oh.

[Dan] So, like an example?

[Mary] Monty with the mustache.

[Dan] Monty with a mustache. Okay. Awesome.

[Mary] I mean…

[Howard] Howard with the hairless…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Hairless Howard. I get… And there are other memory palace kinds of things that you can do with that, too. So…

[Brandon] Right. Make the guy named Jim a butcher.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Actually, that would totally work. So, I was… I'm terrible with remembering names. That's when I meeting someone in real life. So I was taking a class on how to remember names… It doesn't help me actually that much. It's a little better. But I suddenly realized that these were all very useful tools for cementing a name with a reader. So… If I have a character who is a jeweler, then I will… One of the details that all call attention to is the earrings that are hanging from her pendulous earlobes…

[Brandon] Nice.

[Mary] If I have named her Patricia, pendulous…

[Howard] Pendularia…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah. Penny. That is a very sneaky… I do not deploy that all the time, but that is a trick that works distressingly well.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I think I got better with side characters once… And this is kind of coming back to the name thing. Once I realized that I wasn't good with names, and I wanted to be, so I started practicing any time I was in public. I learned the names of all the people working the line at the place where I got salads. In the course of doing that, they always gave me the best strawberries. Because I was the guy who came in and knew everybody's names. But in the course of learning their names… They were all wearing identical clothing. They're all working this salad line. But in the course of learning their names, I forced myself to remember some of these details. I taught my brain that this is important. So I started retaining that information. It's fascinating that the two seem to be related. If… I will often see in movies, when I can't tell two side characters apart, I know they've done it wrong. Because I'm pretty good at tracking those things, and if I can't tell, then it's just… It's not been done right.

[Brandon] So…

[Dan] Well…

[Brandon] Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] The… One counterexample being something like Crabbe and Goyle from Harry Potter, who are supposed to be interchangeably faceless.

[Brandon] How do you characterize people without viewpoints? Let me explain this. I find it, as a writer, really easy if I give myself a brief viewpoint through someone's eyes to dig into their back story, to kind of discovery write…

[Mary] Luxury!

[Brandon] Who they are, right? And just suddenly they come to life. If I don't have a viewpoint, then I have a lot of trouble with that. It's like…

[Mary] I will go ahead, sometimes, even when I'm doing short fiction, I will go ahead and do a little bit of an exploratory scenelette thing from the other character's point of view. Usually the same scene that I'm writing. Especially if I've got a character that is being very flat, which still happens sometimes. It's just you're not getting traction on them. So I'll do exactly that. I'll write that scene from their point of view, which helped me figure out what their motivations are, and some of the physical… The body language that they're going to be using. Then I'll flip back to my main character, do the scene again, incorporating the information that I've learned. Which will often… I don't do that every time, but it's a very useful exercise to engage in sometimes.

[Brandon] I've seen you do something similar.

[Dan] Yeah. So the thing that I do, all the time… And this is… This is such a dumb little thing. I will play two truths and a lie with my characters. Because then I get to know things about them, and I get to know what kinds of things they would lie about. It's fascinating. I've done it with… I think at this point, all of my young adult series. The one I'm writing right now, I actually put a scene into the book because I find it so interesting. But just to watch them tell truths and tell lies. Inevitably, I'll have one character that tries to cheat. It just tells me a lot about who they are, very quickly.

[Mary] I want to point something out that you said about what are the things that they would lie about and why would they lie about them? I think that when we have characters who wind up dropping into being just a single quirk, then I think one of the reasons that that happens is because we've thought, "Oh, I'm going to do that quirk. I'm going to give him this quirky thing." That the flanderization…

[Brandon] Right. We'll talk about flanderization in a minute. We can just dig into it right now. Why don't you tell us what flanderization is?

[Mary] So, flanderization is referring to the slow evolution of a character into just being a quirk. It relates to what happened to the character Flanders on The Simpsons. That he started out as being this very rounded character, and then eventually became a single joke.

[Brandon] Because when people saw him come on the screen, they all wanted him to do his thing. So he did his thing, and the writers all just had him do his thing. Then he stopped being a person, and started being a quirk.

[Mary] So, I think one of the things that you can do to keep that from happening is figure out why your character does that thing. Then, only deploy it when the triggers happen. If you want them to do it, then you have to give them the trigger, and the trigger then has to be coherent to the rest of the story. It also makes the character more rounded, because you… Whatever reason they have to do that thing, that same reason is going to motivate a lot of other different choices.

[Brandon] Month, we're going to dig into this kind of idea really deeply. We'll do an entire podcast on the idea of characters who are self-contradictory, or characters who wear different hats in different social situations and act differently in those social situations.

[Mary] Spoiler alert!

[Brandon] We will dig…

[Mary] Everyone does.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Into this a lot.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You are actually going to tell us about Brimstone.

[Mary] Yes. Brimstone by Cherie Priest is fantastic. It is a story set right after the 1st World War. There are two main characters. The… One of them is a young woman who is a medium. She has traveled to this new small town to learn how to use her powers. It's a real town that really had a spiritualist movement in it, and still does. The other character is a man who survived the war and has come back with a ghost. But he doesn't realize he has a ghost. Things just keep catching on fire. It's their interaction and figuring out what it is that is haunting him and has come back with him from the war. The characterization in this is so rich. It's a huge cast, because she's in this small town, filled with spiritualists that she's meeting. There's… It's this very huge community. Each character feels distinct and individual. Even ones that are on stage just for a few moments. It's… Even the ones who actually never come on stage, because they're dead already.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It's wonderful storytelling. It's…

[Brandon] Brimstone.

[Mary] Brimstone.

[Brandon] By Cherie Priest.

[Mary] By Cherie Priest.

[Dan] And if you've never read Cherie Priest, she's one of the few writers who can hook me from the very first sentence of a book. The just… The writing itself, the language is incredible.

[Mary] It's written in an epistolary form so that each character is… That what you're reading are there journals.

[Yeah!]

[Brandon] So one of the things I've learned over the years for characterizing side characters in specific, doing things quickly, is what I call peekaboo moments. It's a measure of great gratification to me as a writer when occasionally someone will come up and say, "Oh, this little side character just came to life for me." Almost always it somebody I've done one of these peekaboo moments, where you are writing a story. In general, you'll describe the scene and then focus in on the main characters and have the conversation or the conflict and things like this. Everything else fades to background, even some of the side characters who are coming in and interacting with them. What I like to do is occasionally say, "No, we're going to add a splash of color to this specific scene, to this specific person. We're going to fade them from the black-and-white background into the characters paying attention to them, saying, 'Oh. This person wasn't what I thought they were.'" This guard, who's standing guard at the door, isn't the person I thought they were. They are, between… While they're waiting, they're standing there juggling or something like this. What I tried to do in these peekaboo moments is show a moment of humanity and back story and passion from somebody who's not related to the main story at all, just so that you get a glimpse that hey, all these people populating this world have their own motivations and their own passions. I find that the occasional use of one of these can really add a lot of vividness to your story. Or using them with a character who's often in the scene, but is never the main character. The reader will take that character and take that image of them and bring it to the next scenes where they're going to be like, "Oh, yeah. This is the person who has twin daughters and is always on the lookout for two copies of things, because they like to give it to their twin daughters." I don't know. Something like that, that human… Gives humanity to the background characters.

[Dan] There's a… One of my favorite movies is Brick by Ryan Johnson. Which is a… Basically a film noir, but set in a modern high school. As much as I love it, I could not tell you who any of the side characters are, except for one drug dealer, who pauses somewhere around the second act break and gives a little monologue about how much he likes the Lord of the Rings books. He's such a beautiful character, because of that moment. It's amazing how much richness that adds.

[Howard] One of the tricks that I use is having the characters, justifiably, talk about each other. The 18th… 18th, good Lord!… Schlock Mercenary book, one of the opening scenes, the company's about to take a job, and our protagonist is talking to her sister. Her sister's saying, "You know, I need medical help." She's like, "I'm not a doctor. Why are you calling me?" "You work for a mercenary company. You got battlefield medics, don't you?" "Well, yeah, our doctor. I guess she's okay. But our battlefield medic is like a walking cutlery station." Then we have the battlefield medic show up behind her and say, "Saved your life." Schlock says, "She also hears really well."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Now we have, in two panels, insight into five characters. Okay, it helps that I'm able to illustrate them, so some of this context is…

[Luxury! Chuckles]

[Howard] But the… I did it specifically. I've got a spreadsheet for this. I did it because I knew these characters are all going to be critical to this story, and I need to introduce the reader to them early in a way that is memorable.

[Brandon] But doesn't take a lot of panel space.

[Howard] But doesn't take a lot of panels. Yeah. It took two panels. And while this is happening, we are moving the story forward by establishing why this job is going to make sense for the company to take.

[Brandon] There are some books out there, and I was going to give the kind of warning, that you can't do this too much in most books. If every scene, you're spending a paragraph on five different side characters, then suddenly the point of quickly characterizing…

[Mary] A paragraph!

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But there are some books that this is kind of the way the book is. We've recommended the Gollum and the Jinn.. the Genie... The Gollum and the…

[Mary] Jinni.

[Brandon] The Gollum and the Djinni on the podcast before. I read that because you guys recommended it.

[Mary] [inaudible]

[Brandon] It is a story mostly about the side characters. On this page, you will spend three pages on this side character. On this one, you'll… They just kind of are there, populating the story and constantly interacting with the main characters. But the main characters are almost there as an excuse to explore entire community… [cough] Excuse me.

[Mary] I think one of the reasons it works in that book is because everything is new to the main characters. So that's one of the reasons that it works, is because of the POV focus on who is this interesting person that I've encountered that is unlike anything that I've ever seen, living in a glass bottle for a thousand years. So this is… There are many other books that do that where I think it does not work, it's not compelling and engaging.

[Brandon] I would agree.

[Mary] Can I offer one other trick? Think about… One of the things that I will do sometimes is think about where the character was or what they were doing before the protagonist walked on stage. Because I think one of the things that will make a character seem flat is when they have just been waiting for the main character to appear. So, it's… You don't even have to give the character a name or anything like that, but if my main character walks in and the clerk behind the counter wiped mustard off her mouth and then smiled brightly. "Can I help you?" That character already feels more real and compelling than just…

[Brandon] That's a really good tip.

[Brandon] I think we're out of time. Howard, though, you've got a cool thing that cartoonists use.

[Howard] Oh, yeah. The silhouette test. It's not… Cartoonists, comic book writers, anybody who's working in sequential art where there are characters.

[Mary] And puppeteers.

[Howard] Yes. Puppeteers. If you're going to keep these characters straight, they have to be able to pass the silhouette test. Which is where all of the details of the characters are removed, all you can see is the outline, or all you can see is the filled outline, just the silhouette. If you can't tell them apart, something has to change. I… I have… I ask myself this all the time. What is the prose equivalent for the silhouette test? What I've kind of boiled it down to is the adverbs and adjectives that I will so rarely let myself use when I'm describing characters. Which are the ones that I would only use on character A and would never use on character B? Just make a quick list of those adjectives and adverbs. Once I have those, when I am writing the characters, those adjectives and adverbs need to disappear. Because you expand them out into other things.

[Brandon] So your homework…

[Howard] Come up with those.

[Brandon] Is to come up with those. Yeah, you don't necessarily want to always describe somebody who comes on scene as greasy. But if on one scene, they're the person who's always eating a big hamburger and dropping bits of it to they… To their jeans, then that image you can use repeatedly.

[Howard] So, the homework. Take your cast of characters, and make their adjective/adverb list, so that, in terms of those words, they are passing the silhouette test for you.

[Brandon] That's great. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.8: Making Characters Distinctive

Writing Excuses 13.8: Making Characters Distinctive

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/25/13-8-making-characters-distinctive/

Key points: How do you make your characters flawed? Start with the characteristics you expect, the stereotypical stuff, for your protagonist or character. Flaws, or quirks, come from things that don't match that. Think about the character's situation, how does that affect their dialogue, actions, and thinking. Give your characters something to get in their way, and add texture. Look for try-fail cycles where the protagonist fails because their competency is not what they need to succeed. What flaw can they have that is important to the story? Do you use a tragic flaw, that causes the character's downfall, or just weird flaws that the character is constantly fighting? Tragic flaws are good when you want things to go horribly wrong. Think about flaws that can go either way. Use an ensemble cast to practice and play with flaws. Distinctions are not necessarily flaws. Look at Sanderson's second law of magic, what a character can't do is more interesting than what they can do. When you are creating distinctive characters, the flaws help! Sometimes flaws are what make characters lovable. How do you avoid just stapling a quirk to a character? Look for the things that are important to that character. Look at what's behind that quirk, what's the explanation for it. Find things in the environment or setting that differentiate this person from everyone else.

( Flaws, quirks, how is this distinctive? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. This is been a great discussion. Howard has our homework.
[Howard] Okay. We are talking about distinctive, distinctiveness, failings, quirky, whatever. Make a shortlist of five of the people you know best. They can be family members, they can be friends. Include yourself in that list. Imagine them as characters in a story. Then, next to their name, start writing the attributes that make them distinct from each other. The things that might be failings, the things that might be quirky, the things that might be weird. Include the things about yourself. Don't show this list to anybody else, because they'll find it highly offensive. You now need to keep this a secret for the rest of your life.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 13.7: What Writers Get Wrong, with Lou Perry

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/18/13-7-what-writers-get-wrong-with-lou-perry/

Key points: What do writers get wrong about the law? Objection! Sustained! No basis? Actually, objection, leading the witness is okay, BUT you have to be leading the witness, on direct examination, not cross-examination. You are allowed to lead opposing witnesses, even be argumentative with them. Judges don't usually do off-the-cuff rulings. Note that sometimes you have to make a choice between the narrative and accuracy. But the middle ground might work, with the real thing between scenes or offscreen. Legal actions take time. Other pet peeves? Fiery closing arguments. Don't imitate Law & Order. Slow, boring, meticulous does the job. Small town lawyers are likely to be general practitioners, while big city firms are more likely to have specialists. Cross-examination of a dishonest witness might make a good piece of courtroom drama to put in a story. The best way to learn about courtrooms is to go to the courthouse and watch a trial.

( The prosecution rests... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What Do Writers Get Wrong, with Lou Perry.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm ready to learn something.

[Brandon] We have special guest star, Lou.

[Lou] Thanks for having me.

[Brandon] Our pleasure. Thank you for being on the podcast. We are again live at GenCon.

[Whoo! Cheering.]

[Mary] Right. So, Lou, in order to make our audience understand that you don't exist along a single axis, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[Lou] Sure. Well, I'm here because I'm a lawyer, but I'm also a father and a husband, a writer, a reader, and as of a few months ago, I got way too into [Eight mander?] girls softball.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And became a rabid, rabid fan.

[Mary] So, what are we going to be focusing on today?

[Lou] Unfortunately, not the softball. We're going to be focusing on the law and what you folks get wrong with it.

[Laughter]

[Mary] So what writers get wrong with law.

[Brandon] This is probably a long, long, long list. We'd probably need an hour to get it all.

[Howard] And an attorney.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I mean, like representation.

[Lou] Yeah, it's gotten to the point for me where I don't watch legal shows. I try not to read anything that has anything to do with the law. I've closed books before when that comes up and I wasn't expecting it.

[Dan] Is there one particular cliché or pet peeve that stands out above the others? That you're just like, "That again!"

[Lou] Yeah. Objecting with no basis.

[Laughter]

[Lou] And then the judge making a ruling with no basis.

[Laughter]

[Lou] Objection!

[Brandon] Tell us more.

[Lou] Sustained.

[Dan] We're just idiots. What do you mean by that?

[Lou] So, often times in trials, somebody'll be making an argument, and the opposing counsel will object. There are bases for objection, there's rules of evidence. In the lazier pieces of fiction, what you find is people just randomly objecting and there randomly being rulings on those objections, not based on any reason.

[Mary] So, in the real world, what would an objection sound like?

[Lou] Objection. Leading the witness. Now, you actually have to be leading the witness to have that objection. It has to be on direct examination, not cross-examination. A lot of times, I see, especially in TV shows, prosecutors will be objecting to a defense counsel who is leading a witness, but the witness is the prosecutor's witness. So you're allowed to lead opposing witnesses. You're also allowed to be argumentative with opposing witnesses, because that's what cross-examination is.

[Mary] Got it.

[Brandon] Okay. Wow.

[Mary] So then when a judge does the sustained or doesn't… When you say that there's a ruling, I take it that that's more than just that one word, he would actually…

[Lou] He usually will make a more robust ruling. Sometimes there'll end up being a ruling in writing. Sometimes there'll be a recess. Sometimes there will be a conference outside of the jury, and they'll come to… Attorneys will come to some agreement. Sometimes there will just be an off-the-cuff ruling.

[Brandon] So there is never a time where there's like objection, overruled, objection, sustained, like over and over again. Does that just not happen, right?

[Lou] I have never seen that happen.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So what you're saying is that the law is really complicated?

[Lou] It's very complicated

[Whoa!]

[Howard] What you're also saying is that unless we've been in a courtroom, we've never seen anything remotely like a real trial.

[Lou] I think that's correct.

[Mary] Is there anything among lawyers that you're like, "Oh, this one. This one actually has it mostly right."

[Lou] You mean in terms of fiction that I've [garbled read.]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary] Fiction or film, media, any…

[Lou] John Grisham does an okay job. He was actually a lawyer. He knows what he's doing, but he's making choices to serve the narrative which sometimes annoys me.

[Laughter]

[Lou] But he gets it right more often than he gets it wrong.

[Mary] Okay.

[Lou] He does get it wrong, but I think it's on purpose.

[Dan] That's actually a good point to make, that sometimes, even as an expert, you do need to make choices in favor of the narrative over accuracy.

[Lou] Absolutely.

[Brandon] But you will lose some readers every time you do that. Often finding the middle ground is the best thing to do. Saying, "All right, let's indicate that the real thing happened, kind of between scenes or offscreen or hint at it," and things like this, so that the person who is an expert can look at it and be like, "All right. It's okay, they're covering their bases. I can go on and enjoy this."

[Mary] What are some of the things that signal to you… I mean, you've said that you will already just not read a book if there appears to be legal stuff in there. But are there early indicators that this one might be okay? I do the same thing, like I avoid puppet books for the same reason.

[Lou] An early indicator, I think, would be…

[Mary] The author's bio?

[Lou] Maybe the author's bio.

[Chuckles]

[Lou] But if I am in a book where legal things are happening, if they're getting just the general sense that these things take time, there's no big surprise thing happening in a legal action that's going to ultimately cause the case to speed up, things go very slow. If that's happening, I can generally be on board with it. But at this point, I have just kind of given up. So…

[Mary] So what are some other things… Because one of the things I have to admit that I really enjoy about this particular series is watching people rant about things.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] What are some other pet peeves that you have?

[Lou] Sure. Fiery closing arguments. Those tend to really annoy the judges, I think.

[Mary] Really? Why is that?

[Lou] Because they think you're imitating Law & Order.

[Laughter]

[Lou] They probably feel much like I do about Law & Order, they probably hate it. The trick there, though, is your client really likes it. Because they've also seen Law & Order.

[Laughter]

[Lou] So those fiery closing arguments do happen. It's just debatable…

[Howard] So television is why we can't have nice things.

[Lou] Television is why we can't have nice things. Correct.

[Dan] I remember I was on jury duty several years ago, and was surprised by how different it was from what I thought it was going to be. But that was one of the things that really stood out to me, was the really slow, boring, meticulous lawyer absolutely won that case. He didn't give the big fiery speech, he wasn't trying to be charismatic, he was just trying to present his case as thoroughly and relentlessly as possible.

[Lou] I think that's right. That's usually the way it should be done.

[Mary] Now is it different when you have… When you're talking to a judge versus talking to a jury?

[Lou] A bench trial would be very different. I think you would find both parties, both lawyers, doing exactly what Dan was talking about. Being very meticulous… Understanding that the judge has seen this all a thousand times, and you're not going to impress him with some turn of phrase or some fiery speech. Juries are just another factor that you have to put in. You have to understand who you have in your jury and whether or not they're going to respond to that sort of thing.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You're going to pitch a book to us.

[Lou] I am going to pitch a book. The book I'm pitching is called Ghouljaw by an Indiana native named Clint Smith. It's out from Hippocampus Press. It's Midwestern, weird fiction, short stories. Very good stuff. Kind of literary. Also kind of schlocky and funny, in parts. I really enjoyed it, and I think everybody else would, too.

[Brandon] Awesome. Well, let me ask you a question on that. Can lawyer or law fiction or things like that get so schlocky that you can enjoy it again? Can it just be so far off?

[Lou] I think the Frank Castle scene in Daredevil was so far off and so goofy and just so wrong and so angering…

[Chuckles]

[Lou] That I came around to the other side and sort of enjoyed it.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] I don't know that that was what Brandon was hoping for.

[Laughter]

[Mary] I have to admit that I'm surprised that you watched Daredevil at all.

[Lou] Well, there's a fundamental tension when it's involving comic book…

[Laughter]

[Lou] Heroes from my childhood. So I will watch that. I mean, that also had ninjas and stuff.

[Mary] Fair. Fair.

[Dan] Now that's a question. Let me ask really quick because I remember years and years ago being in a WorldCon panel about fencing where people were just griping about how bad the fencing was in Princess Bride. But then, at the end of the panel, one of the people asked, "Okay, but be honest. How many of you got into fencing because of Princess Bride?" Every member of the panel raised their hand.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So like, what are some of the… I mean, is that how you got into law, in some ways?

[Lou] No. I got into law… I was an English major in undergrad, and…

[Mary] Realized you wanted to make some money.

[Lou] I wasn't finding much in the way of a job market, and I went to law school, and it turned out to be the right fit. I think writing and the law kind of go hand-in-hand. I found I did pretty well in law school. Not because I was the smartest or the best student, but I think I was a better writer than some. That was due to the English degree, and due to the… Always reading.

[Howard] It's amazing how much good written communication can jumpstart your career in any field where people at work think for a living.

[Lou] That's right.

[Brandon] When I was in my degree program, the English major, one of the number one follow-ups to an English major was a law degree. Which I… It just shocked me, because I was just like, "Isn't everyone here to read Jane Austen and dance through the flowers?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's why I was there. But apparently that's a really good preparation for a law degree, which should, alone, tell us a little bit more… A little bit about how different being an attorney is from how it's presented.

[Mary] Now, one of the things that I understand is that there are multiple different types of attorneys. So can you kind of break down some of the things? Because I think that a lot of people… One of the mistakes that I will see is that they think that all attorneys are the same thing. That if you do corporate law, it's the same thing as being trial law, it's the same thing as…

[Lou] Yeah. I mean, it really depends on where you're living. If you're in a smaller town, you're going to do a lot of stuff… You're going to be a general practitioner. If you're in a bigger city, there's a good chance you're going to be in a decent-sized firm and you're going to be specializing in one certain thing. Maybe it's corporate law. I do intellectual property litigation. It could be nonprofit law. But generally, everybody has kind of a niche practice. But then you go out into the smaller counties in Indiana, and those guys do everything. They do criminal law, they do corporate law, they do IP law. They do some of it better than other portions of it, but they just do it all.

[Mary] So, let's say, since you have admitted that you will avoid them like the plague. What would make you… If one of our writers did this… What would make you go, I would read it if you did this?

[Lou] See, that's a tough question, because if you got the law all right, it would be a very, very boring story.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I guess… To approach it differently, what if… You have a story which is overwhelmingly in a different area, and the story crosses through at some point a courtroom. What pieces of the courtroom, what pieces of that activity, can I show that will convince you that this is okay, without boring my readers to absolute tears?

[Lou] I think a cross-examination of a dishonest witness is a very fun thing to do, and to watch. But it's got to be done in a not terribly dramatic way. But I think there are a lot of ways to build tension and to get a lot of character across and also to tell a lot of story through what's being said and not said.

[Dan] So, given that we don't have much time here, and can't necessarily go into it all right now, what are some good resources that our listeners could look to to find out how to do something like that correctly?

[Lou] I think if you go to your local county courthouse and just sit around and watch a trial, I think that would be a very good thing to do. You can get deposition transcripts. You can read those. That's probably not the most scintillating reading.

[Chuckles]

[Lou] But it's… They're all out there. A lot of stuff's online. That's what I would do.

[Brandon] Excellent. We're out of time, but you did have some homework for us.

[Lou] I did. It's going to be very unpopular.

[Laughter. Good.]

[Lou] I was thinking about this. I'm going to suggest that everybody go out and pick a Supreme Court opinion, preferably where Justice Scalia is dissenting. Read it. Read the opinion, that's likely written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Then read Justice Scalia's dissent. Try to keep an open mind about what he's saying and why he's saying it. Also pay attention to the law that's at issue. I think you'll find that you can see where he's coming from and you'll see where Ginsburg is coming from. And you can see the fundamental problem with the law as written.

[Brandon] Excellent. Wow.

[Mary] Cool.

[Brandon] Well, thank you so much, Lou, for being on the podcast with us. Thank you to our audience.

[Clapping]

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