Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 21.24: Deconstructing the Seven Point Plot Structure

2026-06-17T12:58:36Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.24: Deconstructing the Seven Point Plot Structure

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-24-deconstructing-the-seven-point-plot-structure

Key Points: Hook: introduce the characters. Plot point one: call to action. Pinch one: add pressure to the characters, forcing them to act. Midpoint: change from reaction to action. Pinch two: more pressure on the characters. Plot point two: I know how to win. Resolution: I've won! Hook, reason to care. Hook mirror to resolution. Hook, spiky bit and barb. Story question, story problem. Plot point helps on journey to resolution, pinches get in the way. The lie the character believes. Try-fail cycles and pinch points. Losing your mentor. Pinch narrows options.

[Season 21, Episode 24]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 24]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing the Seven Point Plot Structure.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And we have been talking this season about different forms of plot structure. I asked Dan if he would come in and talk to us about the seven-point plot structure, which is one of my favorite plot structures. But I have to go back and look at my notes every single time that I use it...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And Dan is the person who introduced me to it. So...

[Dan] So I deigned to come back...

[laughter]

[Dan] No. I'm very excited to be here. Glad to be recording with you again. So, seven point plot structure, that's my name for it. I don't know if it has an official name. It is essentially a TV writing formula for writing TV episodes. Which I found through a Star Trek RPG and turned into a class, which turned into a YouTube channel, and arguably more people know me for that than for my actual books. But it is a system that I still use. As a very quick overview of it, because we're going to spend the rest of the episode, I assume, taking it apart, it is seven points. It starts with a hook, and then a... Which is basically introducing the characters. Plot point one, which is more or less the call to action. Then there is pinch one, which is adding pressure to the characters. Forcing them to act. The midpoint, which is where things change from reaction to action. Then there is pinch two, which is another put pressure on the characters. Plot point two, which is, like, I've figured out how to win. And then the resolution, in which they win. And I've got a whole YouTube series you can look up. It is so old that it's back in the day when YouTube videos were limited to 10 minutes. And so it's actually broken into five pieces. There's obnoxious intro and outro music. It was just filmed live at a con. But it gives a very good overview of what the system is and how it works. And if you're not familiar with seven points, go watch those videos and then come back and listen to the rest of this episode.

[Mary Robinette] So, the thing that I love about it, is that when I use it, it helps me spot opportunities. But I wanted to dig into kind of the why it works aspect. So, in a lot of things we see some form of hook. I have been attempting to relabel this for myself, because I... I'm always like what's the difference between pinch point and plot point?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which one? So, hook. I find that a lot of people think that the hook has to be really flashy. And for me, I've been relabeling it in my own head as the reason to care. That sometimes people are like, well, we're going to establish the characters and their starting state, and so either you wind up with something that's in media res, and you don't have any idea what's going on because they focused on the hook part of this, or you find something that is actually pretty boring because nothing... It's like just the character waking up and going about their day. So, when you're thinking about hook, what are you thinking about when you're shaping that?

[Dan] I think of hook as a mirror to resolution. It is a starting state, and it is an ending state. So, really what you're doing with the hook is you are setting up a character arc. Where is this character going to start, because that lets me know where the character's going to go. I actually usually think of the resolution first. I build stories... I build the story backwards when I use this. Where do I want my character to end? What's the opposite state of that? So I want Luke Skywalker to blow up the Death Star and become a hero. What's the opposite state? Well, he is not a hero, he does not have a lot of agency of his own, we're going to set him on a farm in the middle of a desert where he has to do chores all the time. But he's dreaming of something else. And that dream is the key part. Because like you said, if it just started with here's a kid on a desert planet, that would be boring. And it's worth pointing out, that's not how the movie starts.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] The movie starts by showing you here's the big villain that we need to defeat. And so then you get to the kid, and, like, the first thing we see of him, he buys the droids or whatever, but then we see him staring off into space and he's looking at the two suns setting. He wants to do something more. And it is that desire that is really his starting state. Not so much living on a farm, not so much doing chores, but dreaming of something bigger. And that's the hook that pulls you in. It is, is this kid going to be able to fulfill his dream?

[Howard] I really like the term hook, because I feel like the beginning of whatever it is that I'm making needs to have hooked people. They need... A hook has a couple of components. One of the components is the spiky bit, the bit... The Star Destroyer is that spiky bit. It's got your attention. It is telling you a thing and you can't not pay attention to that call. And then learning about Luke and seeing this contrast between Star Destroyer and farm boy... That's the barb on the hook, for me, that says, oh, there's a conflict here and I need to see how it turns out and I can't get this hook out of me, I have to finish this movie. Or this book, or whatever.

[DongWon] I think of a hook having two stages. Right? The first is like the first... Yeah, the initial sort of like hit, and then when you're fishing, you need to set the hook. Right? Like, there is that jerk, that like gets the hook in a position that is going to be long lasting. Right? I don't fish. Don't yell at me if I'm wrong.

[laughter]

[Howard] But you are established, and your writing is violent.

[Dan] True.

[Mary Robinette] I have to confess here. And I probably... I can't believe we are this deep into writing excuses before I confess that for years, I thought a hook was referring to a shepherd's hook. And...

[DongWon] There's also, you need to get the shepherd's hook in position and then you need to yank them off stage. So...

[laughter][yeah]

[Mary Robinette] I think we... It's specifically about steering the sheep to where you want it to be.

[DongWon] That's interesting. I've always thought about a fishing hook.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it is, like, as a metaphor, these cause you to do different things.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] It's... So. Anyway. I'm just like, huh, all of these things don't have the barb. I... Like, I had realized at some point that people were talking about fishing. Anyway.

[DongWon] Yes, I think when we talk about the hook, there are the two parts. Right? There's the initial sharp bit, and then the setting of the hook. And I think the difference between what Howard was talking about and what, Dan, you're talking about are the two stages of that. The first stage is to mirror the resolution of the, like, Death Star plans attack on the Alderaan and all that, and then, when it's set, it's the character. Like, the thing that you're saying about what do we care about. We care about Luke's journey, we care about how Luke sees himself and the journey he's going to go on to become this epic hero. Right? And so, the two stages there I think are really important to that also.

[Dan[. Yeah. Very much so. And Howard hit it on the head when he talked about conflict, because I think that... To me, that is the most important element of fiction is conflict. And that's what I believe gets people hooked into a story, is not so much here is a kid in a desert, but here's a kid in a desert who doesn't want to be in a desert. Suddenly you have a conflict, suddenly you have something. And what you're talking about, I think of as the difference between a plot conflict and a character conflict. Which is not necessarily a part of seven-point structure. But you can kind of see it. And I think of the hook as this is where we begin our character arc, our character conflict. Luke is one thing and he wants to be a different thing. Will he succeed in that journey? And then the next step, plot point one, that's where we start our plot conflict. That's where he finds the message from Leia and he talks to Ben Kenobi, and he's like, there's this big adventure out there that is waiting. There's a princess that needs to be saved, there's a giant evil fortress gun that we need to blow up. And that's what starts him on his adventure. But we only really care about the plot adventure because we care about his character arc and who he is.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that when... That we see when we're talking in fiction is the issue of when these things happen. With movies, with TV, a lot of times these are rigidly described as the number of pages into a plot... Into a screenplay. The number of minutes. When you're looking at the call to action into the... When you're looking at the call to action, is it... Is there a specific distance that it has to happen from the hook? How do you decide when you make that transition?

[Dan] I think it depends very much on the genre that you're writing in. If you are writing a thriller, it needs to be paced very quickly. You need to get the thrill out soon. If you are writing horror, you can wait a long time. Because part of what makes horror work is we get to see this person and live in their life for maybe several chapters, and we have to really love them before we start doing genuinely horrible things to them. If you're writing epic fantasy, just the pacing in general is much more stately and we don't have to rush through things. And so I don't... If you are writing a Hollywood script, there's incredibly specific rules, down to what page the call to action needs to be on. But for books, I think it's a lot more fluid.

[DongWon] I think one thing that I find frustrating in modern media is actually how much the ability to be different depending on the genre has changed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Like, I'm looking right now, you're wearing a Jaws TV shirt. The time to shark in Jaws is so long compared to time to monster in a contemporary movie. Right? Predator, we're like halfway through the movie before the actual, like, horror stuff starts happening in a lot of ways. Right? And so I think the ability to have that slow burn pacing... Now, those have to be paced more like thrillers and action movies where stuff is popping up very fast, faster, which has this consequence of flattening the landscape. Right? So, being able to have that flexibility of when that plot point one and when that pinch point comes in, I think is really important for telling... For effective storytelling.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The way I have been reframing it in my head from call to action is here's the question, that this is the point where we introduce the first kind of story question, because I tend to frame things using the MICE quotient. It's like what is... What is the kind of problem that we're going to have to solve? So, with Star Wars, there's a disruption. And then there's also, the big disruption of, hello, here's our capturing of Princess Leia and all of that. But also, Luke also starts with a disruption in his world. That these disruptions are small, they aren't yet the big thing. And, like, that for me is one of the things with the call to action is it's the first thing that says you, character, you're the one who's going to participate in this. That there's often a place where the character could have nope'd out.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] How does that fit with your understanding?

[laughter]

[Dan] We are going to take a break. This is our cliffhanger. We're going to let you all hang on that question, and we'll answer it when we come back.

[Howard] Do you want to sail with us for the Writing Excuses retreat at sea this September? Well, the ship has sold out. But, occasionally, there are cancellations. If you want to be able to jump into a suddenly empty slot, you can. But you'll need to join our waiting list. Visit writingexcuses.com/retreats and follow the instructions to join the wait list. You'll receive an email within a few days to tell you more about current pricing and availability. This is our final annual cruise. We would be delighted to have you join us along the breathtaking Alaskan Coast. So don't hesitate. Visit writingexcuses.com/retreats and you can also join our mailing list there to learn about future events.

[Dan] One of... And this is such a bizarre title to bring into this particular discussion. But one of the movies that I often think about when I'm noodling around with 7 point plot structure is Horrible Bosses.

[DongWon] That is a weird pull.

[Dan] It is a weird pull. It follows the structure very, very well, but it does it in some interesting ways. And kind of the main through line of it... If you're not familiar with Horrible Bosses, it's three friends who all have horrible bosses who decide they're going to, I think, murder Jason Bateman's boss or something like that. Who's played by Kevin Spacey, so he probably deserves it. And the hook is we all have horrible lives, and the call to action is when Jason Bateman's boss refuses to give him time off to go to his grandmother's funeral.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] And that is right in the beginning. It is part of the hook. It is right up front as an illustration of how terrible my life is. But it gives us the call to action in the beginning, because suddenly there's a conflict he has to do something about. And then, his decision is, well, let me get my friends together, we'll kill my boss. Which is a terrible way to solve that problem. But some movies have those really close to each other. Like, in this case, they're right on top of each other. In a more Hollywood formula way, you would call that the big decision moment which usually comes much later. But that's a movie that kind of breaks the formula by moving it up really soon. I don't know if that's a good answer to your question.

[Mary Robinette] I think...

[Dan] But it's what was going through my mind while you were talking.

[Mary Robinette] I think it is. Because it's an illustration of this is a... One thing that is wrong, but then we move on to the next phase, where we put the real pressure on the characters and we force them into action. Which is... Plot point? No...

[Dan] Pinch point one.

[Mary Robinette] Oh my God. I can never remember these.

[Dan] So, the way that I differentiate plot points and pinches is that a plot point is something that helps them on their journey toward the resolution...

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Dan] Something that is going to get them closer to that endpoint. Whereas a pinch is something that gets in the way. And that can be an odd way to think about it, because obviously their character arc depends very heavily on those pinches, but it is something that is impeding them that they have to overcome.

[DongWon] So, just to break it down, going back to our Star Wars example. Plot point one is Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen dying, because that gets him out of Tatooine. Pinch point one is we need to find a pilot who will actually take us somewhere.

[Dan] Maybe. I think that there's a couple of examples. Usually what I do when I'm teaching this is I use the Tie Fighter fight in the Millennium Falcon.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Dan] Because it's right at the beginning. It's really kind of a dumb scene.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] Because it doesn't... Some Tie fighters show up, they blow them up, the end. It doesn't kind of lead anywhere.

[DongWon] But was it plot or pinch?

[Dan] That's a pinch.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Dan] The reason that it's there, and the reason that it is kind of a load-bearing moment in the story, is because it is forcing him into action. We need to eventually believe that Luke Skywalker is this incredible fighter pilot who can blow up the Death Star, and so we start off... We need something to get us from farm boy to fighter pilot. And that little scene where he gets in the thing and he blows up some Tie fighters shows us that he has at least some of the skills, and it forces him to act, forces him to step out of his role as farm boy and become something else.

[Howard] Got it.

[Erin] I had a question for you that is not any of this. So, apologies...

[laughter]

[Erin] For taking you off track.

[Dan] No, do it.

[Erin] But when you taught this the first time I heard you teach this, something you said about the lie the character believes about the world, that has always stuck with me. And so I'm curious where that... If you really said that or I hallucinated it, number one, and number two, like, where that falls in here, the idea of, like, the character believing a lie about the world.

[Dan] Yeah. So, the lie the character believes comes from a book about characters by K. M. Weiland. It's a brilliant book. And really great. I think what you are remembering is one of the Writing Excuses cruises. I taught like five different story structure methods over 5 days, and then at the end, we synthesized them all. And so it's a different system, but it does apply to this one. I don't know if they map one to one onto each other, though.

[Howard] One of the things that helps me with the seven-point structure... I've loved 3 act structure for a long time. When I overlay my diagrams of these, pinch point one and pinch point two, for me, often represent the beginning and the end of the try-fail cycle, with the midpoint in the middle. And so I just think about it in those terms. If I'm at a pinch point, and they are trying something and it's wildly successful, I may be constructing the plot wrong. I may have the tension wrong. Because I want to be in try-fail land where we fail more. And at the end of pinch point two, yes, I want things to be bad, but we need to have tried the best thing that isn't going to work. Or maybe the first thing that really does work. And so, for me, framing the pinches in terms of try-fail helps me structure things.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because that combines with something Dan just said, which is the difference between the plot points which are helping the character move... Moving the character towards their goal versus the pinch, which are things getting in their way, is that I recently realized that people are not understanding, when they think about try-fail cycles, I think about them as there's a barrier and you have to do a number of try-fail cycles to get through the barrier, and once you're through the barrier, then there's another barrier and you have to do a bunch of try-fail cycles. And what I will see people do is set up too many barriers, because they want to feel like the character has to really earn it. Using Star Wars as an example, the... Getting off of the ship when they go in to rescue Leia, there's really only two barriers... 3. They have to get past the Stormtroopers, they have to get out of the garbage chute, and then they have to get back onto the ship. Like, there are really only three barriers. But within each of these, there's a bunch of try-fail cycles of how to solve these things. And then there are consequences as they go. But thinking about that, I'm like, oh, okay. So the pinch point is... Like those are often barriers. Like what you were talking about with the Tie fighters. This is preventing the characters from moving towards the goal, whereas the death of Luke's aunt and uncle, that is moving them towards the goal. It's not a success for the character, but it's a push.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So then moving on from there, then we've got our midpoint. Midpoint, pinch point, plot point two, and the resolution. Can you go through all of those [garbled]

[laughter]

[Dan] All of those as quickly as possible. Midpoint, like the midpoint of Star Wars is what you just talked about. They arrive at the Death Star. They are no longer running away from bad guys, they are enacting a plan. Right? They have been... The tractor beam pulled them in, but now they're doing their own thing, they're trying to rescue the princess. One of my favorite midpoints, and I use movies for most of these examples because then I know most of my audience is familiar with them. One of my favorite examples of a midpoint is actually Toy Story. Because it is a try-fail cycle, but its failure is different. So the midpoint of Toy Story is Woody finally gets rid of Buzz. But instead of knocking him down behind the dresser, he has knocked him out of the window into a car, and now the car is driving away. And he... So, on one hand, he succeeded. He did what he wanted to do. But his goal is to eventually become... His goal is to maintain his role as the beloved favorite toy. And part of that is I can't be the kind of person who kicks another toy out of the window and gets them lost. And so in order to maintain his role, he realizes that his success just turned into a failure at the same time. And so the second half of the movie is very active instead of reactive. He's not reacting to this dumb new toy that he hates, he's actively trying to get that toy back into the house in order to be the good guy that he believes himself to be. And so, it's still part of a try-fail cycle, but it is a success that looks like a failure. Which I love.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. And that movement of reaction to action is really important. We are too... I think this is something we see with a lot of superhero fiction, which has taken over so much of media, is heroes are almost always just reacting to the villain. Which ultimately is very weak. I... We could do several episodes of me complaining about what superhero fiction has done to Media. But that's one of the things. You have to have that moment where they start enacting their own plan instead of just constantly reacting to the bad guys.

[Howard] Early days of Writing Excuses, I just started calling that protagging. It's when your protagonist starts being protagonistic.

[Dan] Starts to protag. Yeah. And then, what do we got next? Pinch two. Pinch two is... I mean, the easy pinch two is you lose your mentor. Pinch two is Obi-Wan Kenobi getting killed by Darth Vader. Spoiler warning.

[what?]

[Dan] Pinch two is Gandalf fighting the Balrog and falling and disappearing. And, once again, the purpose of the pinch is to force the characters to act for themselves. They cannot rely on the person who's been guiding them this whole time. They have to strike out on their own. What the pinches have done both times is get in their way, taken away some kind of advantage that they have, all ultimately in the service of turning them into the kind of person who can achieve the resolution.

[Mary Robinette] I find that one of the things that that does, because we see that kind of moment in a bunch of the different plot structures. And I think that one of the things it does is it also serves as a point of contrast. So that we'll see it in the cave, the darkness before the dawn kind of situations. But it serves as a contrast, so that when we get to our victory state, that there is a bigger movement from that moment, so that contrast makes the cathartic release bigger. So I think that that's one of the things it does. I sometimes think of it as there's the... It can be a bunch of different things. It can be the removal of the mentor, which is removing a crutch, which allows the character to become more fully actualized. But I think there's a bunch of different reasons that that particular piece is there.

[DongWon] Yeah. It also feels important that it comes after the turn to action.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? You switch from reaction to action, and then something goes deeply wrong, and you have that, oh, no, what have we done? But then that creates the opportunity for the doubling down, for the push, for the eventual catharsis. Right?

[Howard] One of the helpful ways that, for me, that the terminology works. I think of the pinch not as being smushed or actually pinched, but a narrowing of my options. You have taken away from me some of the paths... You took away my mentor. I can no longer... I no longer have a path that is Obi-Wan does all the work. It just... You restricted my options. Pinch point one. And then we have midpoint, which was everything you said, and then my options got narrower again, leading me into plot turn two, where, depending on the type of story we're telling, I've figured it out. I'm out of my try-fail cycle, and we are now... I have powered up all of the things that I know how to do, and we see if it works in our resolution.

[Dan] Yeah. The... Pinch point two of Toy Story is the moment where Buzz realizes he's a toy and suddenly doesn't care about anything anymore. He's like, if I'm not this great hero I thought I was, then I may as well just stay here in the creepy kid's house with all of the monster toys and nothing matters. And that makes Woody's job harder, because now the person he's trying to save doesn't want to be saved anymore. He can't just drag him back up the side of the house and through the window. But it's a good example of that I have lost more of my options. And now the single only option left to Woody is that he has to genuinely become friends with this person in order to save him. The one thing he hasn't wanted to do at all. Which goes back, if we had time, and we're already overtime, goes back to what you were talking about, Erin, with the lie the character believes. And that hinges on the thing the character wants versus the thing the character needs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] What Woody actually needs is to become a good person, rather than just be a respected person. And so, that's... The purpose of pinch two is to take away all those other avenues. And then we get to plot point two. We've been talking so much about try-fail cycles. Plot point two is really the try-try moment. The try-succeed moment. Where you finally get it together. You know what you have to do in order to win. You are able to... Luke turns off his targeting computer and he uses the force. That's what is going to help him succeed. Woody decides, you know what, we're just going to break the rules and we're going to talk to this kid and freak him out and that's how we're going to succeed.

[DongWon] So where is the line between plot two and resolution? Right? If plot two is the character resolving the want and need conflict into one thing. Right? Then how does resolution come into play? At that point?

[Dan] I think of resolution as a state rather than an action or a decision.

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Dan] And so, plot turn two is this is where...

[DongWon] [garbled] would call denoument in a different structure.

[Dan] Yeah. Yeah. Plot turn two is some kind of fuzzy combination of I know how to win and I actually carry it out and I win. And then resolution is here's who I have become now that I'm at the end of this story.

[Mary Robinette] And in mystery, what we see, I think, with this is we understand who the villain is. That's the... We get the clue that gives us, in plot point two, we get the final piece of the puzzle. This is the thing that gives us the clue, but then the resolution is we still have to apprehend and take them to justice.

[DongWon] Yeah. In the horror movie, this is the final reel, driving away into the sunrise, where you finally... From whatever happened.

[Dan] So if we were to break this out into Hollywood formula, for example, there would be a much bigger difference, like you say, Mary Robinette, between I know how to do this versus I'm actually going to do this. You have to carry it out and make it happen. And different stories will have those moments very close to each other or very far apart from each other. Again, it depends on the pacing that you're going for and the effect you're trying to create.

[Howard] I honestly believe that if you can write a story that follows this seven-point structure, and then you look at it and you realize, oh, but the minutes are wrong for it to be a screenplay, I need for it to be a screenplay, you've already done the hard part. Shaving things to move these points around is going to be easy. And it's one of the reasons why I feel like the seven-point structure is so useful, because it can get you from word zero to draft complete quickly and sensibly in a way that lets you easily edit for whatever effect you really want.

[Mary Robinette] And one of the things... We'll say this, and then we'll start... We'll move over to homework. But one of the things that I hope that you were hearing as you're listening to us is that this is a plot structure that, like the other plot structures we're discussing, that you can apply to a lot of different stories. But it also, like a recipe, still makes a specific kind of thing. Like, this is going to be really good for character stories, for action-driven things, for places where you want someone to succeed. But if you are doing something that is more experimental or literary, this particular recipe may not be the recipe that you work with. So, having said all of that, what homework would you like to give people for playing with seven point plot structure?

[Dan] So, the main way that I use this plot structure today in my writing is to figure out subplots. I know what my big overall plot is going to be, but I need to figure out how these two characters are going to fall in love or something like that. I need to figure out how this betrayal of a side character is going to work. And seven point is a good way to flesh that out. And it... Without just saying, well, there's going to be three tries and two fails, and then they'll succeed at the end. It gives you a nice up and down with the plot points versus the pinch points, and it helps me assemble side plots really well. So what I want you to do is take a book that you're working on or a story that you're working on that has a side thing. Don't worry about turning your entire novel into this. Just take that side plot, that subplot, and sketch it out in seven point. Let's say you want two characters to fall in love. Well, that's your resolution. What's the opposite state of that? How are you going to express that as a conflict we want to see resolved? What is the midpoint, where they move from hating each other to loving each other? How are you going to set up the pinches and the plot points to give texture to that relationship? And that will give you a really good sense of how this works.

[Mary Robinette] And we'll have a link in our show notes to the seven points that go in the seven point plot structure. So...

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

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Writing Excuses 21.23: Barrier Breaking: Interruptions

2026-06-12T09:19:00Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.23: Barrier Breaking: Interruptions

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-23-barrier-breaking-interruptions

Key Points: interruptions: family, coworkers, doorbells, cats, power outages. Give yourself permission to only get a tiny bit done. Hyperfocus. Breadcrumbs. Systems: office doors, remove social media apps and notifications. Triage mode. How do I manage myself and how do I manage the rest of the world? Systems, conversations. Phone settings. Know yourself. Retrain others or retrain yourself? Interruptions happen, adjust your expectations to match. Start your day with planning, not triage. Create your own swap file, with index cards or Post-it notes. Beware of systems that you think work, but don't.

[Season 21, Episode 23]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Barrier breaking: interruptions.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] So we're going to be talking about interruptions today, as another form of barriers. When we did the last of our barriers episodes, we talked about the environmental problems that you might run into. This is a very specific environmental problem, which is sometimes your family... We love them. We love them. But they do kind of interrupt us. And it's not always family, sometimes it's coworkers, sometimes it's just something else. Someone comes to the front door. You have to stop writing because you have to go to work. Your cat is adorable, and also very persistent. Power outages. There's a bunch of different things that can cause an interruption. I find that sometimes I don't want to start writing when I have, like, 15 minutes or a half hour because I'm afraid I will get interrupted. So what we want to talk about is how to deal with interruptions so that they are not a barrier to writing. What are some of the strategies that you all use when you are interrupted?

[Howard] It sounds maybe a little trite to say it, but writing 500 words is better than writing zero words. Writing 10 words is better than writing zero words. If I've only got 15 minutes, I... It's a mindset thing. I just have to give my permission, myself permission to only get a tiny bit done. Maybe I'm only going to get 10 words written. Maybe I'm only going to... Lately I've been doing sketch cards. Maybe I'm only going to get one marker color applied to one card. But you know what? That's work that wouldn't have happened if I don't sit down and try to do it. And if I don't get interrupted, hey, maybe I'll get two cards colored.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's interesting you say that, because I've used this exact... I mean, not about cards, but the same conversation with other people and with myself. And I only recently realized that part of what happens with me is that I have ADHD, which I didn't know for most of my life. I didn't get diagnosed until I was 50. And that for much of my life, I would get punished when I dropped into hyperfocus. Because I would miss appointments, I would... Someone would talk to me and I wouldn't hear it, and so I would avoid writing except in situations where I knew that there weren't going to be any repercussions for getting into the zone. So, where I wasn't going to have to get... Deal with getting interrupted.

[Howard] That's fascinating because there's two sides to the consequences there. I mean, side one, if I'm hyperfocused and I get interrupted, I often emerge from the zone angry. And I don't like being angry. And the flip side of that, the other consequence is, if I'm in the zone and I miss something, well, I've missed a thing. That's problematic. Or if I'm in the zone and I'm interrupted and I emerge angry and that spills on to other people, then I've created some external consequences that I don't want. And, for me, by far the most effective tool to dealing with this is being able to articulate the shape of the problem the way that I just did. Because now that I know that that's the shape of the problem, when I think I might be facing it, I'm actually going to emerge from hyperfocus a little less angry, and actually going to take a few more steps to make sure that maybe my phone isn't muted so that the alarms will go off for an appointment. I'm just a little bit more conscious of the fact that the hyperfocus has a downside.

[Erin] For me, I would say, one thing I like to do is think about, like, what is the zone? So, like, am I in the end zone, am I at AutoZone, am I...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Erin!

[Erin] In the strike zone? These are three different zones. So what happens is... What can happen is you can get interrupted...

[Howard] If you're writing romance... I'm not going to finish this sentence.

[laughter]

[Erin] If you are in the middle of something and you get interrupted, I think one thing that I fall prey to is thinking that you'll remember which zone you were in...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] When you return. You may not. You may take a wrong turn. And so a lot of times what I will do is give myself permission... Unless, like, the... If the house is, like, actually on fire, and I have to, like, grab my cat and run. Fine. I have bigger problems. But if it is not that kind of interruption...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I will try to at least summarize for myself, on the thing that I'm writing, in a Notes app to say it out loud, like, this is where I was and this is what I was thinking at this moment. So that when I come back, I can get back into the zone, and it makes me less upset, because I'm just basically saying I can pause this for a moment and get back into it versus it's going to be lost forever.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I do this too, I call it breadcrumbs. I don't know if you have a name for it. But I will jot down, like, 7ish words sometimes about this is generally where I was headed. And then when I come back, and I look at it, because this is the other trick. You come back and you look at it and even though it's like this is where I was headed, you're not in the same headspace. And so I will often come back and start with a sensory detail and a goal. Actually, what I'll often do is start by rereading what I had just previously written, then do a sensory detail and a goal to get in. But, yeah, I do the same technique of dropping a breadcrumb for myself.

[Erin] And similarly, like, to follow that breadcrumb, sometimes what I'll do is look at where I was and instead of immediately going back to write, I will actually, like, go take a walk or something. Like, I'll actually try to, like, think about where I'm like, okay, what was I getting at with these five words that I thought were very deep at the time, but now I don't understand them completely. And I will try to, like, think, okay, what was it? Let me, like, eat something really quick or have a drink of tea while I get back into the right place, and then I can go from there.

[DongWon] Yeah, it's interesting. This is probably my biggest productivity issue, is interruptions. And it's one that I have not, like, solved for myself yet. It continues to be a problem. And any... Whenever I try to put systems around it, in terms of, like, oh, I'm going to contain the interruptions. There's some I can do that with. Like, I have an office door. I can close it. And when it's closed, my partner knows not to interrupt me unless it's... The house is on fire. Right? And that's an easy solution. So there's, like, some simple stuff you can do. Right? Like, I have mostly removed social media apps from my life, and so those aren't interrupting me in terms of those notifications. But a lot of my work life is necessarily oriented around lots of interruptions. Whether that's I have random meetings throughout the day that I'm going to have to hop on Zoom for. Incoming emails of this is an emergency, this is a crisis. Text from people about, like, issues that are coming up, that's coming across by text messages, Signal, Discord, email, all of these things that are actually people calling me while I'm at work, I sort of necessarily need to be open to interruptions, to respond to things. And... So I spend a lot of my life in triage mode of this is a crisis, that needs to be dealt with right now, this can wait, this is a long-term task. The end result of living your life in triage mode is Category 2 sometimes gets dealt with, category 3's a black hole that disappears because it's out of my line of sight. And so, that is the biggest thing that's a problem for me, and is consistently an issue in terms of me staying on top of certain tasks, me getting back to people in a timely way. And it's a thing that I'm constantly working on and struggling with. And the thing that I also want to say is this entire topic deeply, deeply intersects with neurodiversions. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And, Mary Robinette, you kind of brought this stuff up with ADHD. This intersects with people who are on the autism spectrum. This intersects with people who have a variety of different neurodivergences, mental health issues, things like that that cause you to respond to different stimuli in different ways. And one thing that's really common is, task switching has a very high cost for some people and a lower cost for other people. I've spent a lot of my life thinking my task switching was quite low in terms of cost, but I've come to realize it's not true. And, in part, my life requires a very high amount of task switching, which means that there's a lot of, like, churn in my day. And then suddenly I'll be like, how is it 3 o'clock already? And I've only accomplished a quarter of the things I set out to do today? Right? And it's because I've had to do all these little tasks, I've had to respond to all these little emails, and I don't have a good solution to any of these things. Right? Some people suggest you bundle it, you package, like, certain types of tasks together, and that I only look at my email at this time and I only look at it at this time, but if I do that, that causes other cascading problems. Anyways, I'm just complaining at this point, so...

[laughter]

[Howard] You've raised an important point. Which is that there are two sides to the interruption problem period one is how do I manage myself when I'm interrupted, and the other is how do I manage the rest of the world so that it will stop interrupting me?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Which is like, my job requires that kind of interruption. If you have small children, it requires interruptions. If you have a dog, that dog's going to need to get walked and fed. There's all kinds of different things that are unavoidable as part of your life, that will be interrupting you at some point.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think the 'at some point' is also a thing... When you were talking about neurodivergence, it's like, yes, I have ADHD, depression, these things, but I also know that when I am fatigued, I get, like, all these symptoms ratchet up, and I know from other people that even if they don't, if they are somehow miraculously not neurodivergent, that fatigue or other stressors can cause the same symptoms of making decisions in that moment of interruption. So you had talked about having systems, and I think coming up with systems so that when it happens, like Erin's system can be one of the things that can help. So when we come back from the break, we're going to talk a little bit about some systems.

[Mary Robinette] So, systems. The reason I want to talk about this is I find that one of the things that can help is to have an answer to a problem before the problem arises. So that when it arises, you know, oh, this is how I deal with it. Like Howard was saying earlier, before the break, that he knows this is how he behaves when his hyperfocus is interrupted. You can have a system. It's like, okay, this is how it happens. You can also have that conversation with your family. And if you have that conversation with your family, or whoever you're cohabitating with, coworker, why are you cohabitating with a coworker? You're traveling with them on a business trip. Anyway. But if you can have that conversation with people before the problem arises, so, before they interrupt you, you can say, hey, I find that when I'm working, I need X. One example would be, like, you want to spend time with your family, but you also need to get writing done. If you sit down with your family and say, and I realize not everybody has the same relationship with family. I'm using generic terms here. But if you sit down with someone who cares about you...

[DongWon] Family, housemates, whatever...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That... And you say, hey, I have writing done, and I found that I get distracted easily. Can you help me? Can we come up with a system so that you can know when I'm writing, so that I can guard my safe time. Or, I want to spend time with you. Can you sit down with me with a calendar and we can look at when I can write that doesn't take me away from spending time with you? If you can come up with those systems, so that when you get interrupted, it's only emergencies, then it's going to be a lot easier on everyone involved.

[DongWon] And the thing I will also point out is in terms of things like that, there's lots of digital tools that can help you. Your phone has lots of settings that allow you to filter who comes through your messages and who doesn't. Right? Have I done this on my phone? Absolutely not. That would take me spending 10 minutes to figure it out.

[laughter]

[DongWon] For other people, you can set it up so that only your mom can call you in case she has a health emergency or something like that. Right? Or, like, there's things that if somebody repeat calls, it'll break through your do not disturb settings. Right? So there are lots of filters and settings you can put on your phone of, like, I'm in work mode. Then if you have an iPhone, they've added, like, many different layers of focus modes, do not disturb, sleep mode, things like that.

[Mary Robinette] Android does the same thing.

[DongWon] Different layers of interruptibility. And I encourage you to figure out those digital tools and use them as they are helpful to you. Again, have I done this in my life? No.

[Mary Robinette] We'll do it after the episode. It'll take 5 minutes.

[Howard] 1987. Timothy Lister, Tom Demarco wrote a book called peopleware that was about... Basically, it was about how writing software is different than building cars on an assembly line. And they explored this thing, this very thing that we're talking about. Because corporations and large workplaces were not organized well. People didn't know how to build them so that knowledge workers, people who write code, was mostly what they were talking about, could get into the zone for hours at a time and get work done. One of these...

[DongWon] That's the problem with the open plan office. Somehow it...

[Howard] That's the problem with the open plan office. One of the first things that they said that you need to throw out is the intercom. The only thing that should go over the intercom is the building's on fire, please get up and leave. Because the intercom interrupts everyone. So you don't use that. And they drew a comparison between two companies, one of which did all of these things that were cool, but were very expensive in terms of protecting employees' ability to not be interrupted, and the other didn't. And one of the companies, none of us had ever heard of, and the other one was IBM who had gone on to make all kinds of stuff. And I worked in the software industry from 1993 until 2004. Started working there 5 years after this book was published. And the lessons that I learned as a knowledge worker in an office space trying to defend my ability to get into the zone... I wasn't writing code, I was writing product requirements. I was basically filling spreadsheet cells with amazingly good ideas that I had. Right. Said with sarcasm. But between meetings and phone calls and knocks on the door and everything... We all had rafts, truckloads of strategies for protecting our time. And when I left Novell, to be a cartoonist full time, it was so easy for me to be able to defend my time, because I was now defending it against a much smaller group of people who were much more invested in me being successful.

[Erin] It's funny. Like, I love that. I... I was like, ooh, 1987. I don't know. Like, seems like a cool year.

[Mary Robinette] I graduated from high school then.

[DongWon] I was five.

[laughter]

[Erin] So, I was thinking about... I'm going to leave that... We'll leave that in the past. But I think that a lot of it is knowing yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, I've talked before on the podcast about the concept of putting the shoe rack by the door, figuring out who you are, and then hacking your life as much as you can to match it. And what I find really interesting is I live alone, and so I actually am like a reverse, which is I like micro interruptions that stop me from wandering off mind-wise. What I mean by that is, like, if I think maybe an interesting email will be coming in, and I turn off all email on my computer, I will spend a lot of time going back to check...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To see if it came in. Did it come in, did it not come in, what's going on? I got a smartwatch so that it will ping me when an email that's important comes in, and I can, because I know myself, look at it and be like, okay, great, I'll deal with that in a few minutes, but I haven't missed anything. Because I'm alone in the house, and it's like I'm the only one paying attention to things. Same with, like, I had an apartment at one point that had a broken doorbell. And I actually got a little, like, camera that only was on the mat, so that when a package was delivered, I would know. As opposed to going back and checking every...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] 22 seconds...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To see, like, was the package delivered? Was the package delivered? Because I was creating, like, more interruptions for myself than the momentary interruption. And once I knew what the interruption would be, when it would happen, what it would feel like, and how I would deal with it, I was able to make it a part of my zone. It's like occasionally getting a buzz and seeing that there's a package there and then figuring out what to do with it. So, really, like, monitoring when you're feeling interrupted, what's happening in your brain? What's the thing that's holding you up, and then how can you attack that part of the problem?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think what we're talking about here is that you can either retrain others around you or you can retrain yourself. And you have a lot more control retraining your own self. It's nice if you can have a collaborative thing with other people, but, like, I'm going to give two examples. Because I find them funny. So, my dad, when I was... While my mom was alive, we had this rule that he could only call me if it was time sensitive and about Mom. Because I couldn't put my phone on do not disturb, like, I couldn't put it on airplane mode which used to be my mode for protecting time. So we had this rule. We are recording Writing Excuses. This is, unfortunately, you don't get to hear this because we did stop recording, but we were recording Writing Excuses. I'm in the booth. Phone rings. It's my dad. And he says, this is time sensitive and it is about your mom. I'm like, oh, my God. So I'm out of the booth, I'm halfway down the stairs, and he says, I can't find the egg beater.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I got the onions on the stove...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm making her some fried eggs, and I can't find the egg beater. And I'm like, you can beat eggs with a fork! And, you can? So, I love my dad. He's an engineer before he retired. I don't understand how we were having this conversation when he was in his 80s, but... The point is that sometimes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even when you retrain them, even when you have an agreement, even when they want to be helpful, they can still be a barrier. Sometimes you yourself are the barrier. So, coming up with a strategy for how to handle the interruption once it happens. The other analogy... Or other story is my cat, Elsie, the one who uses buttons to talk. Before she got buttons, I would get up and she'd want to play a little bit in the morning. But I would start working. And the morning was my working time. With buttons, I have learned that morning is the time that she most wants to play, and that if I don't play with her for half an hour or 40 minutes, which is not an unreasonable time to play with your pet, by the way, that she is going to be bored for the rest of the day. But if I get up and I spend that time with her, then the rest of the day is totally open for writing. She will go take a nap. So, sometimes it's often about, like, I can shift my behavior much more easily than I can shift hers in that case. But in both cases, like, I have to have a plan and I have to have strategies on what I'm going to do.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, that sort of dovetails with sort of two things I've been implementing in my life that do seem to help. One is, the first is just accepting that interruptions are going to happen, and to adjust my expectations accordingly and how I communicate those expectations to other people. Right? So this keeps me from trying to set unrealistic timelines for myself, and adjust my own expectations of what my day is going to look like. Right? If I'm planning my day around the ideal version where nobody sends me an annoying email...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Nobody texts me, and I don't get a random spam call about some loan offer that doesn't exist, then... If I plan my day as that, the thing that's never going to happen, then I'm always going to be disappointed and frustrated at the end of the day. Right? But if I learn to adjust my expectations to something more realistic and have more generosity with myself in terms of what I'm going to accomplish today, then I think that makes it that much more manageable and lets me be more realistic about how I'm actually moving through the world. And then the second thing is, again, kind of what you're saying is adjusting my own behavior around that. And a thing that I find is that if I take 30 minutes in the morning... The problem with working from home is, like, you wake up, you roll out of bed, and you're at work. You know what I mean? And if I instead say to myself, no, I'm spending 20, 30 minutes not working in the morning. I'm going to make my coffee, I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to sit with my notebook, I'll make some notes about what my plan for the day is before I open my email. Because if the first thing I do is get out of bed and open my email, then immediately I'm just in it. Right? And I'm just in triage mode, and I can't do any of that planning around it that will help me manage my day. Do I do this more than 2 days a week? No. But we're working on it. You know what I mean? And I think that's also something that's just like... You won't be perfect about these things. You have to learn to integrate that into your expectations and your processes.

[Howard] Returning for a brief moment to computer history. Modern...

[DongWon] The year was 1987.

[Howard] No. Modern computers are so much more resilient to being crashed, being interrupted, power outages, whatever. And it used to be, the horror story was, oh, no, the power went out and I lost my entire manuscript. Now, unless you're using ancient software on Ancient Hardware, oh, no, the power went out, and when it booted up, the file was missing the last two pages. The principal here is that computers have gotten much smarter about creating, and I'm going to use old terminology because I'm not in the business anymore... About creating swap files and putting pointers on things. The idea that when you task swap, and being interrupted is a task swap, you don't just drop what you're doing and move on to the next thing. You create a swap file, you store some... It's like the seven words that you write. It's whatever the reminders are. It's the idea that I am caching some stuff so that when I come back to it, I come back to it cleanly instead of coming back and finding out that my memory of it is completely corrupt. I have loved watching computers get better at this. I have despaired at myself getting worse at this as I get older. But I recognize that those same strategies apply. I started surrounding myself with index cards and Post-it notes. And I will create a manual swap file. Was doing this thing. And the note. And then I get up and I go... And I sit back down and I'm like, where the heck was I? Oh, someone left me a note. Oh, goodness. And We're Off to the Races.

[Erin] I will also say that, like, what you said about memory being corrupt, and, DongWon, what you said about, like, going for the ideal day, is also to learn that sometimes you create patterns that you think work...

[laughter]

[Erin] And you just... You're just...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Lying... Lied to yourself.

[Howard] Yep.

[Erin] But for some reason, it worked, like, one time. It's like one day you had a perfect day.

[Howard] It's so rare that...

[Erin] And you were like, it's going to be like this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] From here on out.

[DongWon] Oh, if I do this one thing, that solves it. And then 6 months later, I'm like, that didn't... That's not how it works.

[Mary Robinette] I just need another notebook.

[Erin] Exactly. One that I find is the... Like, I can outrun sleep is one that I often...

[Mary Robinette] I've never seen you do that.

[Erin] And...

[DongWon] Yeah. I've never done this myself.

[Erin] Sometimes, I've learned that there are times in which you are better off napping...

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] For 15 minutes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And getting back up if you really... I wouldn't do it everyday... Then you are trying to press through the sleep deprivation, because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Your brain is just lying to you that, like, oh, any second now you'll be finished if you just keep pressing through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But you never know it in the moment. And so, like, because being really sleep deprived is like being a little tipsy, and like a tipsy person, you have bad ideas about the world at that moment. Or like a hungry person in a grocery store. This is why they tell you, don't go to the grocery store hungry. You'll just start buying stuff. And so sometimes I have to remind myself, like, actually kind of, like, right down mental rules. And so when it is really late and I'm, like, I'm just going to push through for another hour, I will be like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] This is a lie. This is a lie, go to sleep.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Wake up and see if you still feel this way. And I will do it and be like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that my past self is trying to train myself out of the habits...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That I thought were working for me and are not.

[DongWon] Well, this dovetails with a whole other conversation about burnout that we don't have time to get into right now. But it's... That thing of, like, when you just assume that you can keep going, keep doing the thing and not putting brakes for rest into place, lead you to a place of burnout. And I do think this is really tied to interruptions, because it's that task switching, that friction, that I think eats more cycles than you think it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And so again, so much of it is adjusting your own expectations of what is accomplishable and adjusting the expectations of people around you. Now, sometimes, those expectations are your family or your boss or your agent, who's like, where's this manuscript? You know what I mean? Like, they're... Sometimes those are very hard to adjust, but as much as you can, find ways to carve out that space for yourself, and that starts with being able to be self-aware and honest with yourself about what is possible.

[Mary Robinette] So with that...

[DongWon] [garbled] as if I was good at doing that ever.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, aspirations. Right?

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You train towards what you want to be.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So with that, I have homework for you, which actually involves training you to handle interruptions in a low stakes environment. I want you to set a series of alarms for yourself. Ready? So you're going to set an alarm for 5 minutes. And then you're going to have another one that is 7 minutes. Then you're going to have another one that is at 9 minutes. And then another one that is at 15 minutes. [for 2 minute break, should be 11 minutes] So what I'm doing here is I'm giving you some random interruptions. After the first interruption, you're going to take a 2 minute break. That's what happens when we do that 5 to 7. That's a 2 minute break. You're going to get two breaks that are 2 minutes long. So when that alarm happens, I want you to jot a breadcrumb to yourself. Jot a note to yourself, Post-It, whatever, this is what I was working on. And then I want you to get up and walk around. And then start writing again when that...

[Howard] When the 7 minute alarm...

[Mary Robinette] When the 7 minute alarm happens. So that you've got another span where you're going to get a little bit more writing done. It's going to be annoying. But it's a good way to practice it at a time when you have control over the situation.

[Mary Robinette] And then, that means that you are out of excuses. Now go set some alarms and write.

comments

Writing Excuses 21.22 : The Order of the Telling

2026-06-05T06:21:01Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.22 : The Order of the Telling

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-22-the-order-of-the-telling

Key Points: The order in which we present information to the reader, versus chronological progress. Police procedural. Non-linear storytelling. Flashbacks. Use time to create tension. Storylets. Start in the middle, then go back. Parallelism, dual timelines. Order of telling as mechanism for characterization. What's the connection? Don't depend on time or date stamps. Sensory detail. Index cards, notes. Twine. Aeon Timeline. Spreadsheet. Write your scenes, then come back and write transitions.

[Season 21, Episode 22]

[Howard] The cruise ship sailing up to Alaska this summer is completely sold out, except for the cabins we'd reserved for Writing Excuses attendees. These cabins are only available until June 4th. On June 4th, any cabins not reserved by Writing Excuses attendees will revert to the cruise line, and will be sold to the general public. If you want to join the Writing Excuses hosts and 100 new friends on our final annual cruise as we read, write, critique, and learn while reveling in the stunning scenery, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. Don't delay. We're holding the very last unreserved cabins on the entire ship, and they will not stay unreserved for very long. Again, that's writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 21, Episode 22]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The order of the telling.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] And we are joined again by special guest and occasional house guest of mine, Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] Hello. You had me back.

[laughter]

[Margaret] Yay.

[Howard] Well, this week we are talking about the order in which we present information to the reader, as contrasted with the order in which events chronologically actually progressed in the universe of this story. And why those things might be completely different. One of my favorite examples of this is the standard police procedural, where the order of the telling is we discover a body, we start investigating, and we slowly begin revealing what happened. But in so doing, we begin telling the story chronologically about what led up to that body appearing at the beginning of the telling of the story. But there are plenty of other ways in which this, like... In which this might happen. And plenty of other reasons to do it.

[Mary Robinette] So, in addition to things like that, I really started thinking about this when we were talking about this episode as thinking about non-linear storytelling, because I read V. E. Schwab, and she uses this non-linear structure all the time, where we're jumping back and forth in a timeline. Which will happen sometimes in the structure, where you're talking about where we'll get a flashback. Sometimes it's the book that starts with something, and then jumps, and it's like 22 hours earlier.

[DongWon] The wreckers crashed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How did we get here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] A classic TV and film device.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So sometimes it's those, sometimes it's just there's a piece of backstory as in the example that Howard was giving us, that we don't get until later. Like, when I talk about the MICE quotient, I say it's not about the timeline. That's the order in which things happened. It's the order in which we present it to the reader.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I too am interested in why we do this, why we do these nonlinear things. I think it's about using time to play... To create tension for the reader. Does that seem like how it's working for other people?

[DongWon] I mean, I think there's a bunch of different reasons. I think that's a big one. I mean, one reason is the order in which things happen is often very boring.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? A to B to C. Like, if you're thinking about your daily life, you went to work, stuff happened at work, you had lunch, you did more work. Right? Like, that's not an interesting way to tell that. What's a more interesting way to tell it is, this awful thing happened with Frank, and then... But that was also due to the thing that my boss did that morning. You know what I mean? And then, like, you tell it... You give the information in the order in which you need it, to set stakes, to establish tension, and then fill in information when it's necessary. Right? I talk about this a lot when I talk about worldbuilding, infodumping. About the idea that you can tell anyone anything, so long as it's relevant to what's happening in the moment. Right? And so I think people get very rigid about timeline and what the character knows and when they know it. And this is one of the real limitations of having a specific POV that you're locked into that often locks you into a linear timeline, without the ability to jump to future knowledge, past knowledge, things like that. So when you start layering in more timelines, it gives you so much more opportunity to build drama, to build tension, and then also just to give the reader exposition in chunks that feel relevant to the story rather than modeling the reality of the situation.

[Erin] One way I think about this a lot is actually in... When I write interactive fiction. Which is... A lot of which is nonlinear. And there's a concept of interactive fiction which is storylets. And it's basically taking a story and kind of breaking it down into individual chunks that I've often seen described as, like, a hand... Like a card in a hand of cards. And so what the program does behind the scenes is it looks to see if you've met the conditions to get a specific card. And it will then offer you, maybe, like, one of three cards. So, like, if you fought with your boss and you saved the cat and you went to the grocery store, this card is relevant. This one is relevant anytime you went to the grocery store, no matter what else happened. And it offers things to you. That is something that you can't really replicate in prose, but what I like about it is it actually does make you think about what are the conditions for having this piece of information in front of the reader. And those conditions may not be just that we are later in the day, but that this other relevant thing has happened that makes this piece of content the best one for you to experience at this moment.

[Margaret] Yeah. I was sort of... When I was thinking about this topic, and I think, like Mary Robinette, the first place my mind goes is on the sort of, like I was saying, on the TV side of things. The action show, where, like, that the start might be a little slow, so what do we do, we start in the middle and then go back to the start. And now we have introduced the sort of suspense of... I think the Alias pilot does this fantastically.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where you start out with Sydney Bristow being drowned by who knows who, who knows where, who knows why. And then we go back, and she's like at UCLA taking classes. So we're like, this is interesting, I would like to know more about this.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where we're talking about the Act One setup. It's a way to keep it from being slow, is by saying, no, no, there's stuff coming up. And so it increases tension and stakes. But trying to reflect on other ways that we can use nonlinear storytelling, I was thinking about a movie that came out in... I believe this was 2024, We Live In Time. Which is Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh playing a couple, and there's... If it were told in order, this is a very melodramatic story. It is a bog standard, in some ways, romance of, like, boy meets girl, they have a very weird meet cute, but they meet, they get together, she has... And I mean, great, I'm spoiling something that comes out in the first minutes of the film, is that she has cancer and they're trying to have a baby and will they have a baby? And so, like, if this were told in order, our two questions hanging over the entire film are: is she going to get pregnant and is the cancer going to come back? But because they tell it, and there's no chyrons telling you where we are in the story, you're just going from moment to moment to moment throughout it. A minute into the movie, you know that she has a baby and that the cancer comes back.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And in a weird way, like, it deflates that tension, but because of that, it allowed me as an audience member to just sort of relax. It's like, okay, I don't have to worry about whether or not the cancer's going to come back. I don't have to worry about whether she's going to have a baby. I know that happens. And so now I can just sort of watch the moments happening. And that deliberate deflation of the kind of classical dramatic suspense...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Is only possible because they are telling it in this sort of out of time order.

[DongWon] It changes it from the question of what if to okay, what do we do in the face of inevitability?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right?

[Margaret] It's the how's.

[DongWon] Yeah. Which sort of leads me to think about one of my other favorite structures when it comes to playing with time which is the use of parallelism. Right? So a book I worked on, which is Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home, has two timelines in it. One is the character as an adult, as she goes home to care for her ailing mother, and the other is a timeline of her as a child, and her relationship to her father. Who, in the present timeline, we know has gone to prison for doing terrible things. Right? And so the parallelism of both those plot lines developing about her relationships with these two parental figures is part of the engine that drives that book. Right? Or there's a movie from several years ago that you talking about We Lived In Time sort of reminded me of, called After Sun, which is about a woman going back as an adult to a resort that she went to with her father as a child, and trying to understand her relationship with her dad, and you get these sort of parallel timeline structures of her as an adult and her as a child as we understand more about who she is in both timelines reveals more information that contextually cross-pollinates in really exciting ways.

[Mary Robinette] What I like about that is that it's, in both examples, this non-linear thing causes you to recontextualize scenes that would otherwise feel fairly ordinary, because it... You bring dramatic weight from the other timeline to it.

[Howard] There's a classic application of the repeated flashback structure where the current story that we are telling, we will flash back to a prior experience that was formative or similar, and we are running that story and the current story forward at the same time in order to mirror... Not just in order to provide context, although it certainly does that, but also to mirror and to echo voice, tone, emotional content, the emotion of the flashback event is ramping up to its own climax as we are ramping up the main story. And the flashback may have had a tragic ending which set up the beginning of the current story, which may have a triumphant ending. Which provides a wonderful contrast, and at the end of the story, you sit back and you look at it and you say, oh, well, that was a perfect use of flashback, because if you told me tragedy up front, I would have been miserable and wouldn't have wanted to read the rest of your book. Let's go to a break, and after the break, I want to quote William Faulkner.

[Howard] In Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner famously wrote, the past is not dead. It isn't even past. I love that line, because what it says to us... And it's... The theme, kind of the whole work there, what it says to us is that everything that's happened to us is kind of still happening, because it's in our memory. It colors who we are. It shapes what we do. It's formative, it's contextualizing, and it exists. When we talk about non-linear storytelling for the writer, it exists as a tool for shaping the story, giving context later on.

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's really interesting about that is, I know for me, when I think about timeline and linearity, it's very... The default, my default mindset is, this is something that relates to plot. Right? It is the order that events happen, events happening, it relates to plot. But what I think you're really underlining is that the order of telling is also a mechanism of characterization. And it allows you to show contrasts between who were people in the past or before they knew something or after they knew something. Because we are all shaped by those experiences and fictional characters included.

[DongWon] That goes to one of my favorite examples of a way in which you can play with time on a micro level. Right? A lot of what we've talked about are macro structures, but in Shonan anime, for example, you will have a fight scene that takes like six episodes to resolve. Like, 10 seconds of action that takes six episodes. And one thing that you'll... The one thing that's extending that is the sort of microflashbacks or playing with the length of time as these characters have monologues or conversations or moments that reveal deep things about character. Right? Shonan anime's all about the melodrama of the action of violent conflict as illustrating character growth and development. Right? Like, the recent anime Frieren is incredible at this. It's not really Shonan, but still, it does this very, very well. And it's a way to play with time to sort of do the thing that, Howard, you're talking about, in terms of past is not even past, and sort of what you're talking about in terms of using it for character.

[Erin] Yeah. I think one of the things to think about when you are doing something non-linear is what is your connection? Like, what is the thing that is connecting one thing to the next, if it's not time? And sometimes it's character development, sometimes it's emotion, sometimes it's theme. But it is something to think about, because, I think where nonlinearity can get a little, like, tricky and something I think about a lot in interactive fiction is smoothing through transition points.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because we have a lot of language to go linearly from one point to the next. So you can say, like, 3 hours later. You know what I mean? There's like a thing that exists that we know about. But if it's like three emotional revelations later, it doesn't feel like it has exactly the same ring to it. So, like, how do we move through, and part of that is knowing what is the connective tissue from one scene to the next. If it isn't time, and it's character development, how do you end your scene in a way that there is something that the character is about to learn or is about to know about themselves or the world that you can then pick up in the next...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Scene so that even though it happened 16 years before, it feels like you're actually still on some sort of through line.

[DongWon] Linear timelines are not always the most interesting way to get from point A to point B. Right? So...

[Mary Robinette] With those transitions, one of the cheap tricks you can do is to have a visual link.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even in prose, if someone picks up a coffee cup in one scene, and then in the next scene, someone is putting down a coffee cup, even though they're separated by a giant span of time...

[DongWon] In film and TV, that's called a match cut.

[Margaret] Yeah. And I think another trick of very prose-y way to explore that is, if you're thinking about a writer like Virginia Woolf, and that very stream of consciousness style and... Orlando. Centuries pass in a paragraph, but you always do have that action that carries us through, you have the theme that carries us through. And I was thinking that this actually sort of dovetails with what we were talking about several weeks ago about the perils of Act 2 in a three act structure, of nonlinearity can be a way to sort of force yourself and your reader to be thinking in those process sorts of terms, maybe. Like, if the outcome is known, or the outcome has already happened, it forces us back to that space of progress... Of process.

[Howard] I now have the rubber meeting the road question. What are some technical tools that you use in order to keep things straight in your own head when you are running the telling in a different order than the worldbuilding, the actual events? What do you use? How do you do it?

[DongWon] One thing I want to flag is people will love to display at the start of each individual chapter the date or the time or something like that. That doesn't work. People don't read those and people don't remember those. I mean, there's some percentage of readers who do, but a lot of readers, enough readers, will be very confused because you're relying on just that to communicate the order in which things happen, and, boy howdy, me personally, it never works.

[Mary Robinette] I can tell you that the number of times that I've had people say, when does this story take place? And at the top, it says, 1952.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, yeah.

[Margaret] Yeah. No, it's like the slug lines, even. As a screenwriter, submitting this to other people who read screenplays, nobody is reading slug lines.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like, they're useful when you want to go back and clarify.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But for me, the thing that I try to do is grounding the reader with some sort of sensory detail that is thematically linked to the story, but also tells you something about the time and place, preferably something that the character's interacting with. So if I want to indicate that one story was in springtime, then I'm going to be having them cutting tulips. And if I want to indicate that another story is... Another part of the story is in winter, they're putting a scarf on.

[Margaret] For my own head, I'm... It's like keeping track for the reader, and also just for me as a writer... And, as tempted as I am, it's like I'm a screenwriter. My solution to all things is index cards. Which is sometimes true. But actually, if I'm just working on something for myself, I tend to leave myself a lot of, like, notes. And whatever program you're in, there's some ability to leave yourself that sort of marginal note. And so, I'll go through, it's like, hey, remember to set this up in the earlier scene, or it's like, this shouldn't get mentioned in the next scene, because to them, it hasn't happened yet. And so I just leave these flags for myself, if I can see the pitfall of I might be messing up my continuity, I will try to just leave these flags, and then do a read through later of making sure that my plants are where I want them to be, so that I can pay them off later on.

[Howard] That's an extremely relevant question, because as we are recording episodes, we're often recording them out of order, and we need to remember not to refer to episodes that we've previously recorded, but that you haven't heard yet.

[Margaret] I don't know what you're talking about, I love risotto.

[laughter]

[Erin] Love it. I will say, one way that I do this that is totally unhelpful to anyone who's not me, but I will share anyway, is that I actually sometimes, in terms of figuring out what order I want them... If I'm like, I want this to be non-linear, but I'm actually not 100% sure which nonlinear order I want to go by, what is my connecting thread? Do I want to follow a character, a timeline, the violin that's in every scene, and, like, the... Which we haven't talked about, the lawn linear where there's not much connection...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] From one to the next, the connection is all thematic and, like, the characters change completely, I will put it in Twine, which is a program people use for interactive fiction, and I'll basically create index cards in there that give a summary of, like, what the scene is. And then I will connect them with each other, and play it like a game. And be like, okay, if I go from scene 1 to scene 5, here is the order of things people will get. One, five, three, two. That works that way. Okay. Now. What happens if I went one, two, four, eight? Okay, that's going to be this different story. Which of those is the story that actually I wanted to tell? Because with enough craft, theoretically, I can make any of them work. But it's like what am I trying to have the reader walk away with, which is something I always think about when I'm telling a story. What is the end thing that I want them to, like, take away?

[DongWon] I will say that there is one edge case where it can be useful or interesting to deliberately confuse your reader, for them to not know when things are happening. One is that can be misdirection, of they think something happens in the present timeline, and you later realize it was happening before. And the other is, maybe just an aesthetic one. Right? You mentioned Virginia Woolf. A lot of times in her books, it's very unclear when something is happening. Is this a memory or is this happening now? Or is this something that's going to happen? I don't think it's ever going to happen. Anyways. Whatever. It's often very interesting, and there's... She does make clearly signal to the reader, don't worry about this, it doesn't matter when this happened. What matters is the character feels this, and the emotional quotient of it. And you can use that as a writer in specific circumstances. Obviously, don't overuse it, because confusing your reader on purpose is often a very unpleasant experience.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to flag one other version of the nonlinear timeline, which is the nonlinear timeline between works. So when you're doing prequels, when you're doing interstitial materials where you, the writer, are writing it non-linearly, but you know that someone at some point is going to stack them up linearly. Aeon Timeline is a really useful thing for tracking exactly when something happened. The Lady Astronaut books... I wrote those non-linearly. So if you read them in the sequence that they came out, you start, like, at the end of the story and then you go back... It's like... It is all over the place. And so I use Aeon Timeline now, but I did not originally, which is why, if you actually try to stack them, the times don't line up. And fortunately, most people don't actually notice. The other thing that I'm going to say is, going back to something that Erin talks about, which is the idea of the information arc, that tracking the information that you need when you're moving things around is really extremely helpful. Thinking about when does my reader need to know this information. And sometimes, when you are moving things around, you'll think, oh, I can't move it because they need this information that they haven't gotten. But you can also look at it and go, okay, well, what happens if they don't have that information yet? And that can be kind of a fun thing to play with.

[Howard] I have a... Talking about the tools and multiple works. I have a spreadsheet of the chronology of the Schlock Mercenary universe which I created in order to create the 70 maxims annotated book. Because there's this in universe artifact that got passed around to people, and as the people... As it was passed around to people, chronologically, they made notes in the maxims that pertained to their life. So as you're flipping through, you will have a page that's got four notes on it, and those notes may have been written 50 years apart, and I had a spreadsheet to keep track of that. And once I built the spreadsheet, first, I looked at it and realized, oh my goodness, there's a story here that I need to tell, because these two people were on different sides of the same war. Wow, that's interesting. And the second thing was, I want to expand this spreadsheet to cover the entire chronology of my story, because I appear to have lost track of some things.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I need to stop doing that.

[Margaret] Were you... I'm curious, as you were doing that, were you also tracking... Because some of the characters you're annotating are characters in the Schlock Mercenary stories. Were you also tracking, like, when in the timeline of the other comics they would have been in possession of this book, making that note?

[Howard] Yes. Yes, I was. And it was... Yeah, it...

[Mary Robinette] Choices were made.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] Choices were made. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun doing that, but the big value of it, for me, besides the fact that I sold a lot of those books...

[laughter]

[Howard] The big value for me was that I learned how important it is to track chronology even if you think it's going to be linear.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Just tracking it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And a spreadsheet is a great tool to start with.

[Mary Robinette] So we've been talking a lot about this non-linear thing, and there is one other piece that I want to talk about, because it's the experience of writing something non-linearly. When you know that you want to write something non-linearly, one of the hard things is the transition from one scene to the next. And that's hard anytime. But I want to give you permission, if you're doing something non-linear, when you've accomplished everything in that scene, that you can just stop writing the scene, and not worry about the transition until the entire thing is done, and then come back and do the transitions. Because those transitions exist to move you from one scene to another, regardless of whether you're doing something in a linear timeline or not. And so it can be very, very hard to figure out, well, how do I get out of this scene when you don't actually know what scene will follow it. So you do have permission to just stop writing it, and do the transitions later.

[DongWon] And then, one thing I wanted to say as we head towards the end of this particular timeline of this episode, is if this is all sounding very newfangled and complicated to you, a very contemporary technique... I just want to point out that nonlinear writing has been in fiction since the origins of the novel. The first novels were using epistolary as a frame or throughout the book, and epistolary is one of the classic forms of nonlinear storytelling, because they were presenting them as found journals or found letters or all of these different framing techniques. So when we think of the novel, from the very start, it was always non-linear. And actually, strict linearity... Linearacy... Is a very modern construction. And so when you think about playing with time and playing with perspective, I encourage you to think broadly and explore and have fun with it.

[Howard] I think that brings us to homework. Margaret?

[Margaret] Well, if we're taking things in a linear order, I believe that does come next.

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] So, for your homework this week, what I'd like to encourage you to do is find a story, a TV episode, a movie, some contained story that is using... Experimenting with some form of nonlinear storytelling. And enjoy it, go through it, and then go back through and track the gaps. Where is the... Where are character knowledge things changing, and where are we seeing characterization because of our knowledge spaces have changed, and where is audience information changing, and how does that affect where and how we are reading or experiencing what's happening next. Give yourself a little kind of universe outline. Unpack it there.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Great. So it's time now to pause for our book of the week, since we're in the middle of the episode. And that book is The World Wasn't Ready For You by Justin C. Kay. He's got this great story with the same title, which is a nonlinear story, and it totally recontextualizes. And I want you to be thinking about it as you're listening to this entire episode.

[Howard] This is... has been... Will have been... Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

comments

Writing Excuses 21.21: Rhythm and Words

2026-05-27T12:46:27Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.21: Rhythm and Words

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-21-rhythm-and-words

Key Points: Rhythm, a form of sequencing. Accidental couplets! Negative space. Blocks of text. Put the reader on a horse. Iamb. Spondee. Trochee. Read your work out loud. Internal rhymes. Swearing.

[Season 21, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Rhythm and words.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] Today, we're going to kind of continue our conversation from last week about sequencing, where we got kind of micro at the end by talking about rhythm, which is a form of sequencing, honestly. And as somebody who loves music, I love thinking about sequence, like, how rhythm works and how rhythm creates, like, a sense of movement through a piece. And, I'm curious, like, how much... I think a lot about the rhythm of sentences. Like, obsessively so. I will change words over and over and over again to get the right emphasis, to find a word that is, like, this means big, but I also want a three syllable word with the emphasis on the second syllable so that the way that I rhythmically wrote it is the way that other people read it. So my question to you is, am I just controlling or do other people do this too?

[DongWon] No, I think you're absolutely spot on to be paying attention to that, interested in that. I think a real failure state of people who are trying to write elevated prose quote unquote is they reach for the bigger, more complicated, more flowery language. Right? They make it a language thing versus... Or a descriptive thing. They're just going to go all in on talking about the architectural details of this mansion or whatever it is, when one of the main ways to grab your reader and make something feel really beautiful, make... Put us in an emotional state where we really appreciate the thing is to use musicality and rhythm. Right? Is to use breaths and pauses and word length to pull us through and give us something that feels beautiful.

[Howard] I think a lot about the rhythm, and I also think a lot about the syllable sounds. And when you're reading silently to yourself, I suppose it could be argued that there's no noise. But those syllables still have... They still have sounds. You can have a jumping marsupial or you can have a kangaroo. And kangaroo is... The K and the G just kind of make it a funny word. In the same way that jackalope is kind of a funny word. I don't know why. I just know that when I am looking for... When I'm looking for the right rhythm to make a point, I'm also looking for the right sounds to go with that rhythm in order to make the point even better.

[Mary Robinette] I also think about it, as well. I... Going back to what you were saying, I think the... As you said, a lot of people think more is better, and it's not always. Partly it's coming out of puppetry and art, but I think about the negative spaces. There is a thing with puppets where we have a zero position, the spot that they return to. And then the movement comes out from that spot. So I tend to think about that a little bit on the page, about what is the zero position or the resting state of this prose, the natural sentence length for this thing. And then, using my repetition... Not my repetition, my rhythm to break from that. So I'll go into a sentence that's much longer than that for one type of emphasis, or a sentence that's much shorter, or a paragraph that's much shorter. And, likewise, Erin, I also will massage the words so that the stress falls into the right spot. In part because, when I'm narrating, I'm sometimes narrating other people's stuff and they have accidental couplets in their fiction. And I... It's like trying to fix that as a narrator is so hard, and it's drawing attention off into things that you just don't want attention drawn to. Just 100% an accident.

[Howard] One of...

[Erin] Accidental couplets in their fiction?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.

[Erin] That causes friction.

[choke]

[DongWon] Good Lord.

[laughter]

[Howard] Anybody want a peanut?

[DongWon] One thing I think about a lot when it comes to this as well is negative space. Right? There's this Japanese concept of ma, which is sort of the space around the thing, or considering the negative space as its own thing that should be considered and has value and weight in a scene. And this can be applied in a number of ways, both in terms of, like, thinking about what you're not describing, think about where the breaths are in your sentences. And then, literally think about how it works on the page. Right? One thing I see a lot is really dense blocks of text. If you have, like, an entire paragraph that's just dense description with no line breaks, with no paragraph breaks, it's very hard to ingest. Right? My... One of my deep interests in my sort of academic background is in British modernism. It's like one of my favorite periods in literature. I'm endlessly fascinated with the modernists. They... One of the things they did was start to play with that negative space in very deliberate ways. You'll have... I mean, Ulysses famous... Or James Joyce famously, in his books, will have entire pages that are just one sentence with no breaks, which was designed to create a very deliberate emotional effect in the reader, which is one that is a state of complete overwhelm and being subsumed in the interior monologue of a character. Because there are no breaths in it, it is incredibly difficult to read, and overwhelming to try and process what he is talking about. Because there's no space for breaths in it. Right? And so, when you think about how to use that negative space, when you think about sort of, like, poets who started to break traditional line structure, and sort of give that blank space for half of a line, or breaking in the middle of a word, those kinds of things, you'll start to sort of see the potential of using the physicality of the page, using those points where you can take a breath as active things that you are including in your fiction.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad that you talked about the visual aspect of the negative space on the page, because even if you're not doing poetry or you're not doing something that's experimental, you can still sort of get a sense of the rhythm of your piece by just backing the view away.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, you can set up your word processor so that you can see multiple pages all at once. And if you look at it, and there's, like, a... There's a certain sameness to it, to your paragraphs, then you're using the same rhythm over and over again. There are times that's actually 100% appropriate. But, as we've talked about with other forms of pacing, when you're rhythmically all the same, it can become fatiguing without anyone knowing why it is fatiguing.

[DongWon] A very simple example. It makes me insane when somebody sends me jacket copy that is one big paragraph. Right? Or if you're writing a query letter... Here's my biggest query letter pitch, or my pitch sort of note for you. Right? Simple tip. Make sure no paragraph is longer than three sentences. Make sure each paragraph is short and to the point, and give me negative space so that I can read it quickly and process it quickly. If you give me one long paragraph, it's so hard to process it when you're trying to go fast, as one is when reading jacket copy, when reading a pitch.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm just going to flag that this is definitely a tool for submitting to a specific agent...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And that other agents may have different preferences.

[DongWon] Always. They are wrong...

[laughter]

[DongWon] And they should feel bad about it.

[laughter]

[Howard] There is... There are circumstances in which the words that you put on the page, you have 100% control over the way they flow, where the line feeds are, where the breaks are. The most common case of this is squarely in my wheelhouse, and that's in comics. A comic dialogue bubble... I find that most of the skills that I have for wordsmithing something, for massaging the text, grew out of necessity, because when I'm trying to put things in the bubble, I want to be able to break the words so that they will easily form an ellipse, they'll be contained by an ellipse, or be... If they're up in a corner, that they will be kind of an elliptical shape on one edge and a corner shape on the other. And that there won't be rivers and valleys, the spaces between the words. You won't have a stack of O's, or E's, or I's right on top of each other. And this seems like a really silly thing for a writer to need to think about. But there are definitely circumstances in which you realize that what you've written won't work, because the way it is being printed on the page, it is full of rivers and valleys and stacked letters. Which creates a distraction, and it will no longer be read the way it would be spoken if you didn't see it on the page.

[Erin] I find it really interesting that we've been talking about these, like, blocks and blocks of text on the page, because I recently went to a writing group, and somebody noted that one of my sentences was 87 words long.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah, let's go.

[Erin] And I'm going to explain why that's totally okay, using poetry, after the break.

[Mary Robinette] One of the challenges of writing is finding a subject matter expert, right? Particularly when you are still in the early part of your career. So, I'm going to give you a hack. Masterclass. For instance, Chris Hatfield's course on space exploration feels very much like sitting down across from him. And I've met him. His class covers training, Mars In situ resource management, what it's like to launch. It's pretty great. I was also reassured to hear him talk about his first day in the office as an astronaut candidate, AKA as-can, because he had imposter syndrome too. So, it's not something that just hits writers, apparently it hits astronauts. And one of the great things about Masterclass is that it fits into real life. Audio mode, short lessons on your phone or TV. You don't have to carve out hours. You just have to start. Unlike other learning platforms, Masterclass puts you in the room with the people who define their fields. Not just experts, but the best in the world. They have 200 plus classes across 13 categories. Business, writing, cooking, creativity, wellness, and more. With plans starting at just $10 a month billed annually, it really does fit into any schedule. Audio mode turns your commute or workout into a classroom. Download lessons for offline access. Learn on your terms. And it actually works. Three oj four members feel inspired every time they watch. 83% have applied something they've learned to their real lives. It's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. So if you're trying to research something and don't know a subject matter expert to reach out to, you can always take a class. Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any yearly membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. Go learn about space from Chris Hadfield or apply the principles of improv to your life with Amy Poehler. Go to masterclass.com/excuses to see the latest offer.

[Erin] As promised, one of the reasons that I love rhythm is that I love long blocks of sentences. I want to beat you over the head with large blocks, and large blocks on the page.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so, one of the ways that I do this...

[DongWon] Once again, I feel like I need to not be sitting next to Erin anymore. I feel very stressed.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yes. [garbled] And one of the ways I do this is if you can create a rhythm in the way in which somebody will read something... This is why I think so much about stress, it's sort of... You don't notice it. It's sort of the way that, like... I feel like sometimes I'm just putting my reader on a horse and then just like hitting the horse in the butt. Is that how you get horses to go?

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And then sometimes it's like... And they're just galloping off. And when you're galloping on a horse, something I haven't done since I was three, but I'm going to assume there's some sort of rhythm.

[Mary Robinette] Why were you galloping on a horse when you were three?

[DongWon] Three is so young to be galloping on a horse. [garbled]

[Erin] Anyway...

[Mary Robinette] That's true.

[Erin] But anyway, so what you are doing is, the horse has some sort of rhythm and it's just carrying you along.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I want my story to be your horse.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That sounds weird. And so I like to think about it, like, some of the things that poets use. Which are like the actual, like, if you ever talk to poets, they will explain, like, this is in, like, trochaic foot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or iambic pentameter, or all of these other things, and I'm going to share with you some of my favorites, because I want to...

[okay]

[Erin] Okay, so iamb. Iamb's from Shakespeare. That's dahdum, dahdum, dahdum, which is... My favorite two examples of this are, but soft what light through yonder window breaks, but also, thank God Almighty, we are free at last. And I think there's something about them... I don't know, somebody tell me if you think this is true. That, like, makes you feel... There's something about them that is a lean in. Because the emphasis is on the second syllable, and because it's a double, which is like, a lot of, like, just like a horse. Dadum, dadum. There's a lot of feeling like you're leaning in to what the other person is saying, and you need to understand what's going on. And so it makes sense when you're speaking to Juliet on her balcony or trying to convince a large number of people, as the second example, like, that this is... Like we have made it to the promised land. Preachers love a good iamb... And preachers love rhythm in general. If you want a good example of rhythm, listen to a Southern Baptist preacher.

[DongWon] Oh, my God.

[Erin] They are great at it. Like, they will take everything and make it sound rhythmic. They'll be like, I went, to the grocery store. And you're like, oh, my gosh.

[DongWon] I mean...

[Erin] This is amazing.

[DongWon] Rap and hip hop as well. Old school boom bap. That's an iamb. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Speaking of, actually... I'm going to skip ahead to a spondee, which is where both have the same. So, as opposed to emphasis being on the front, which I'll get back to, or emphasis being on the back, it's like everything is the same. It's paired, but it's like there's no emphasis one way or the other. And my favorite example of this is, that butt was stuffed.

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] because he's doing all this other rhythm, but then he stops and he uses equal emphasis because all of those words are important.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And also because it draws attention, much like the butt does to Sir Mix-a-Lot to that section of the rhythm.

[DongWon] And it brings it to a screeching halt in that moment, and we have to take a beat to process it, and then it picks up again. Right? [garbled]

[Erin] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] As opposed to if it had all been straight emphasis all the way through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You would have not... Who would have cared?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Who would have noticed that butt?

[Howard] Stuffed or unstuffed.

[Erin] Wow.

[laughter]

[Erin] I'm sorry. I've taken us off the... We're on a horse now.

[Howard] This epo... Are we in Mississippi or is the horse named Mississippi?

[Erin] I'm so glad...

[DongWon] We've been from James Joyce to Sir Mix-a-Lot, and I'm delighted. Yeah.

[Erin] And then, the other one, the last sort of, like, doublet that I really like is the one where your emphasis is first. So, datum, datum, datum. This is the Poe.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so it's also used... Taylor Swift, was it? Like to meet you, where you been...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I feel like there's a lot... Taylor Swift often uses those things because I think it... I don't know, it makes it pop more.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's in your face a little more, and it feels a little more... I don't know...

[Howard] Like the trochaic tetrometers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Is that the same?

[Ooh!]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I like that. It is...

[Howard] Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble... Where the accent is first.

[Mary Robinette] Double Trouble.

[Howard] Double, double... Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, Double Bubble, I guess, if you're doing...

[Howard] Double bubble chewing gum.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But Shakespeare, there was a... There's a great TV show called Slings and Arrows. I think they only had three seasons, and it's following a theater company. But, in one of the episodes, they're doing Lear, and this older Shakespearean actor is railing at one of the younger actors who is trying to ignore the meter. And he's like, no, the meter tells you where it is important. It's... Shakespeare would put the emphasis on the important words, and... But soft, but is not important, but soft, what light... And that is kind of an interesting thing when you're thinking about your own prose, where do you want to throw the emphasis, and when do you want to break that rhythm to draw people's attention to it?

[DongWon] Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... It's... Are the and's important or is the tomorrow important? Right? And how you read this, standing on that, changes the meaning of the lines wildly. Right?

[Mary Robinette] There's also really fantastic hilarious thing where diff... Where there's an actor who's attempting to do Hamlet, and different things, people who have played Hamlet, come out and give him a, like, read on, to be or not to be, and each of them takes a different word to emphasize, which changes the meaning. And that's something that's very easy to do in spoken word, but on the page, when you're playing with rhythm, not only are you looking at these beats, but you're also looking at italics as a tool that you can use or wildly misuse.

[DongWon] It is worth sitting down with a breakdown of a [Ken Meyer? Garbled] song and just see how he uses rhythm to shift your attention and your emotional state when he moves from doubles to triplets, when he moves back. Like, the number... The complexity of what he's doing with rhythm. Same with M&M. If you go and look at the complete breakdown of how they're using rhythm, when they're using twos, when they're using threes, things like that, can be so useful for understanding the musicality of prose. Right? Once you... I mean, it sounds like we're getting... We're talking Shakespeare, we're talking literature. we're talking music, like, all these different things that may feel far from trying to write contemporary science fiction or fantasy prose, but I promise you that the more you internalize these tools, the more you can apply them unconsciously in moments where you need that [garbled]

[Howard] Knowing the names of them, knowing that a trochee is double, accent unaccent. That a spondee is all the same, that an iamb is unaccented accented. Just having words for it means that when you are troubleshooting what you are writing, you have names for the problem you're trying to solve, and you can sort things out in your head more quickly.

[DongWon] I will say your mileage may vary on that.

[Erin] Yeah. Yeah.

[DongWon] For me... I struggled when I was being formally taught poetry, because I had to learn all the names of things. Once I learned to sit and appreciate poetry, then I had a very different relationship to the rhythms of it and... But for a lot of people, learning the structure and the names will be very helpful.

[Mary Robinette] And you don't have to, either, because again, most of this is stuff that we have actually internalized...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then reverse engineered to come up with names for. But the simplest thing you can do to check the rhythm is to read your work out loud.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And if reading your workout loud is not something that works for you, have a machine read it out loud, because if it is possible for that machine to get it wrong, and it is, it will do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So, reading out loud is a very, very useful way... That's where you will stop [garbled] oh, I do have an accidental couplet here, or I've... Like, internal rhymes can be really... We didn't talk about this much, but internal rhymes can be a really. really powerful tool, but you can also, like, completely break things by... I'm constantly accidentally writing, she rose on her toes. I'm like, oh...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's like drawing attention to something that I...

[Howard] As long as she doesn't do anything with her nose at the same time.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's also really useful to think about is think about cussing. Like, where... Basically, swearing is all about rhythm.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Like, where you're putting the cusses in your sentences, where you're putting that, or how you're sequencing and ordering them. Someone who's bad at it is always putting them at a wrong place and you can feel it. And there's no impact to it. When you get someone who's like phenomenal at swearing... This is why Shakespeare swearing is the best thing in the world. Because when you can just, like, get the rhythm of it. Right? It's so dependent on that. It's... Swearing is so dependent on the musicality of the words that we choose. And that's why certain swear words are just more fun than other ones.

[Mary Robinette] Thou art a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three suited, hundred pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave. A lily livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue, one that I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou denies the least syllable of thy addition.

[DongWon] You can say that one more time.

[Mary Robinette] That's...[garbled]

[Erin] [garbled] your face.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I know. King Lear. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not surprised, I don't think. King Lear, Act 2, scene 2. Kent to Oswald, and I have it a little bit wrong, but it's pretty close.

[Erin] I will say that... Before we head to the homework or start insulting each other...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That I also like, in addition to looking at hip hop, looking at covers.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] We see an artist, like a really well-known song, like, 10,000 people have done this same jazz song. One way to distinguish it is by playing with the rhythm. If you ever have a song and you're like, wow, this new interpretation made me think about the meaning of the song differently, because the emphasis is in a different place, you are actually seeing what is happening when rhythm is tweaked in real time. And so, with that, I'm going to take us to the homework.

[Erin] And your homework for this is to listen to a piece of music that you really like, and think about how does the rhythm work within that. Are they emphasizing the first word or the second word? Does it get faster and then slower? You can use really official terms and be very poetry class, or you can just be like, fast here, many words, yay. And then I want you to take a piece of your writing and see what happens if you use that same rhythmic structure in your own piece, and how it changes, like, a piece of description that you have in your own writing

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.20: Sequencing from Mega to Micro

2026-05-21T12:24:53Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.20: Sequencing from Mega to Micro

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-20-sequencing-from-mega-to-micro

Key Points: Sequencing. Why do we put things in the order we do? Broad to narrow, funnel. Deliberate or instinctive? The more you know, the more deliberate it is. Broad to narrow, or reverse. Recency primacy. Cause and effect. Sequencing in sentences. Turn noun into adjective. Garden Path sentences. Set up patterns and break them. Readability. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell it to them, and tell them what you told them. Important things! Cognitive psychology. Turn the paragraph upside down. Gossip!

[Season 21, Episode 20]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Sequencing from mega to micro.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] And today we are talking about sequencing and why do we put things in the order that we do. And I thought I would actually start by... It's funny, the first thing I thought of when I was thinking about how to lead off this episode was our actual tagline. That we've changed, because we could say, for writers by writers, tools not rules, or, by writers for writers, rules that are bad and tools that are good...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But instead we say, tools, not rules, for writers, by writers, because I think we just think it sounds better.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so one of the things I'm wondering about sequencing is how much of it do you think is, like, things we absolutely, like, can figure out by like dialing them up and having rules, and how much of it do you think is, like, some sort of intrinsic thing that we know. Like, having rhythm.

[DongWon] A thing that I think about a lot... I mean, I do think the rhythm is really important. Right? And I think we're going to dive into that in even more detail in the next episode. But I do think part of why that tagline works so well is the rhythmic beat of it. But then there's also a narrowing funnel of the concepts, as you start from the broad statement of why do we do this show. Right? What's our core principle? And we worked a lot on this tagline, and we did a whole exercise last year of all of us trying to come up with what is this show's mission statement at this point. Right? Like, Writing Excuses has been around for a while. Sorry, I don't know why we're doing [garbled a beat around the curtains that we are right now] and...

[Howard] I find that... Sorry.

[DongWon] Trying to drill down into what is our goal with this show. And then, tools, not rules, just really emerged as a core principle for us. Right? Of this thing of we're not trying to be prescriptive about writing. We want to give you a deep understanding of as many different aspects of writing as we can, so that when you're confronted with a situation, you can... You have some things to reach for. Right? So, to start with the broadest aspect of what we do and then narrow down even further into why you and then why us. Right? So there is, like, this mega to micro, to borrow the show's title, in the tagline itself. Which I think is a really good microcosm of the macro thing we're talking about.

[Howard] To speak more specifically to the question, how much of it is deliberate and how much of it is instinctive, the more you know about the things you do, the more deliberate it becomes. A great example of this is the order of adjectives in the English language. Most English speakers don't even think about it. But if you order adjectives weirdly in a sentence, English speakers will be like, wait, what... You did that wrong. We don't know what the rule is, but there appears to be a rule. But once you think about it, and once you really look at it, you realize, oh, there are... And I can't recite the rule. All I can remember is my favorite social media post about it, which was from the fake AP style book, which said the order of adjectives is increasing order of awesomeness. The blue Italian rocket-propelled monkey-piloted motorcycle...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Is the correct order of adjectives. And I love that, because it made me laugh, but I also loved it because it made me think about a thing that I hadn't thought about before in a way that forced me to create a rule for it, so I could be more deliberate about a way I was writing.

[Mary Robinette] This is... I think this is one of the really interesting things, that a lot of times there are rules that we have internalized and we don't know. And this is a good example. You can go look this up. I also don't remember it, but I remember being blown away because it was like, oh, oh, yeah, there actually is a thing with this. But, it's not just that, like, you've been honing your tastes your entire life as a reader. So there are things that you know intuitively about sequencing that you wouldn't be able to articulate. For me, the things are... When it's not working, that's when I kind of step back and I start thinking about, okay, well, why isn't this working? What are the rules? Or, the tools that I have? So there is the large to narrow, but sometimes you do want to invert that. And when you do, you want to do it with deliberation, while understanding, like, what it does. So if you start very broad and you funnel down, you're bringing the audience's attention to a single point. And then that point takes on a lot of emphasis. But sometimes you start with an important point, and then you broaden outward in order to take them out into the larger world. So it's a lot about where you're trying to direct the reader's attention, and sometimes it's broad to narrow, and sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes it's the thing we talk about, the recency primacy effect, and sometimes it's cause and effect.

[DongWon] Well, there's also an emotional quotient to it, too. Right? There's this really important principle in architecture, popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright, that's about compression and expansion. Right? So in... If you walk into a Frank Lloyd Wright House, you generally walk into what, to modern audiences, feels like a very compacted space. The hallways tend to be quite short, the [garbled] aren't wide, there's not a lot of space to put stuff in them, and then you... What you do is you walk through that and then you walk into a large open space. Right? We think of open concept when it comes to Frank Lloyd Wright, but really, there's a lot of compression and then that expansion, so that then the living space feels like this huge airy space, even when by square footage, it may not actually be that big. Right? And then part of the sin of the McMansion is it's just all open space. You walk into a huge foyer, you walk into a huge kitchen, you walk into... And everything feels the same. Right? You get this... I'm back on my risotto issue here, but everything... There's no differentiation from room to room. And so without that compression/expansion, you don't have the emotional, either relief of, ah, I'm now in a great space. I'm now in this next emotional sort of scene as you go from narrow to broad. Or you don't have the sense of I'm leaving this space and focusing down back onto a single thing. And then I'm getting set for the next expansion. Right? So that's sort of, like, funneling in and out of the compression/expansion. It's something I think about in fiction as being very important for giving the differentiation between scenes, and then, therefore pacing as you're pulling people through.

[Erin] Yeah. It's interesting, I was like, there are other... They're both directions...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, they both have... Feel like they have... Some sort of, like, intentionality. You're going from one to the other. I often think about, like, the broad to small. I think it's why the adjectives getting increasingly cool works, because each one... We love details, I think, as humans, and so each detail usually, each cool thing is more specific than the last cool thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, the coolest thing about this is that there's only so many monkey-propelled... What was it, rocket launchers? Sorry.

[Howard] Rocket-propelled monkey-piloted motorcycle.

[Erin] Yes. You know what I mean? So it's like, there might be many rocket-propelled, but only so many are going to be...

[DongWon] That poor monkey.

[Erin] Monkey-operated. So, each one gets more and more specific. I really like the broadening because I feel like what it does is what a camera does a lot of times when it pulls back on a scene. Which is, you assume a certain amount of context when you give a specific detail, and when you broaden outward, it turns out that that context is different than you anticipated, it gives you a little bit of a shock and it's like, oh, wow, I never would have thought that this is where this happened. Or this is where this person was.

[Howard] One of the things that we talked about... Oh, gee, a decade ago in Writing Excuses... Is sort of a pyramid theory of giving information, in terms of description. Where you begin with lots of description as you're setting things up, with less and less as you get to the top of the pyramid. The reason being, I think, twofold. One, it sort of accelerates your pace through the scene or through the chapter. And second, it draws focus away from the details and toward whatever the specific events are. And, again, this isn't a rule, it's just a way to think about when to use description and when not to use description.

[Mary Robinette] Well, it's also a more basic mechanical thing, which is at the beginning of a scene, the audience knows less about the space...

[Howard] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And less about the people at the beginning of a book. That's one of the reasons that the ends of books are shorter than the beginnings, is that they often just take less description, because we've already done that load-bearing work for the reader. Which is, again, going back to the sequencing question, it's like when do you do these things? And why, and how do you make those decisions?

[Erin] Yeah. We've talked a little bit about the broadening, like, why might you broaden, why might you narrow in? But, Mary Robinette, you actually mentioned two others, cause and effect, and I can't remember the last one.

[Mary Robinette] Recency primacy.

[Erin] Recency primacy. Like, why... Is there a reason that you would use... I mean, cause and effect feels like this is something we generally understand, like, first you say why something is happening and then what occurs after it has happened. But, like, why would you focus on that as opposed to broad and narrow?

[Mary Robinette] So, a lot of times what we're dealing with is an order of information thing, where the reader isn't getting information at the time they need it. And even if it's just in a single sentence, it can cause a little bit of confusion. So I just did an exercise with the people in the Writing Excuses Cruise. At the time that we are recording this, we have just gotten off the cruise ship. And I showed them a piece of fiction that I'd written in high school. And it's not good. It's not terrible, but it's not good. And one of the sentences in it is something like, Agony seared her hand as the wood slapped into it. And, like, just flipping that, like, you know that she's experiencing pain, but you don't know why yet. And just flipping it, As the wood slapped into it, agony seared her hand, you understand there's a stronger connection. There are times when you want to invert that, because you want the surprise. Like, if someone opens a door and gasps, you don't yet know why they gasp, and so delaying that moment gives the reader the same surprise that the character has. So that you like [gasp] I'm gasping too. Why am I startled? And so you get to make those decisions about when you want the reader to have the same information at the same time the character does, when you want them to experience the cause and then the effect, and when you want them to be surprised and experience the effect, and then the cause. For instance, one of the effects of this is that we should probably take a break.

[Erin] But wait, what's the cause? No, I'm just kidding.

[DongWon] Time.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] For many writers, worldbuilding is also an opportunity for world breaking. A shattering of existing norms and assumptions of what is and isn't possible. If you've read the work of NK Jemisin, author of The Broken Earth trilogy, and 42nd Grand Master for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, you'll know what I mean. This June, in Chicago, you can meet NK Jemison yourself and attend a master class on worldbuilding and world breaking at SFFWA's 61st annual Nebula Awards conference. I'll be there too, along with other powerhouses in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. This year, for the first time ever, SFFWA's Nebula Awards include top prizes for poetry and comics. We are excited to welcome these mediums into the fold. The Nebula Awards conference is an annual opportunity to gather as professionals and professionalizing writers. Have you bought your tickets yet to join the conversation in person or online, and to celebrate our latest stars at the Nebula Awards banquet? If you're in Chicago already, you can also freely attend our mass autographing session on Friday, June 5th. All details are available on sfwa.org. So tell your friends, nod to your fellow creators, and reach out to fans. Let's break down some old worlds and build new ones together in Chicago.

[Howard] Thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. Sandra and I have been homeowners for 30 years, and it's been wonderful. Of course, it's our biggest investment and we have to literally live inside it without breaking it. We'd been in our house for 2 weeks when the water line to the EVAP cooler on the roof broke, destroying 64 square feet of ceiling and almost 200 square feet of hardwood floor. Regular homeowners insurance usually doesn't cover that kind of thing. And that's where HomeServe comes in. You don't want to be on your own for things like plumbing failures, HVAC breakdowns, or electrical issues. You could be searching for a contractor in a panic, or you could already be on the phone with Homeserve's 7x24 hotline scheduling a repair. They've helped homeowners like you for over 20 years with a trusted national network of over 2600 local contractors. Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just 4.99 a month. Go to homeserve.com to find the plan that's right for you. That's homeserve.com. Not available everywhere. Most plans range between 4.99 to 11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply for covered repairs.

[Howard] They call it the best 4 days in gaming, and I am disinclined to argue. Gen Con Indy is my favorite convention. There's a symposium for writers, and it might well be the best 4 days in writing. Will you be there? I will. As will Mary Robinette, Erin, Dan, and Sandra. As you're putting together your Gen Con schedule, be sure to look us up by name so you can sign up for our events. There will be a Writing Excuses podcast Q&A session, a Thursday night networking party hosted by Writing Excuses, and a session with Howard Tayler... That's me... And Maurice Broaddus called A Conversation With No Chaperones. I can't believe they're letting us do that one. You can also visit me and Sandra, along with Jim Zubb and Stacy King, at booth 1349 in the exhibit hall. Along with our usual racks of merchandise, we will have some Writing Excuses loot. Gen Con Indy runs from July 30th through August 2nd in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can buy a membership right now, and then you can start creating your wish list for panels, workshops, and other events. On May 17th, event registration goes live, and your wish list will have you pre-registered for things. Get your tickets today and reserve your spot. We would be delighted to see you at Gen Con.

[Erin] All right. Now that we are back from our break, because time is a straight line, most of the time, I'm curious about talking about this on, like, a little bit more at a micro level. Because I think a lot of times where I like to play around with it is in actually sequencing words within sentences. Not like thinking about the order of adjectives and playing with surprise. I think one of the most fun things about talking about sequencing is that once you understand that there's a way that a lot of times people expect sequencing, cause and then effect, a lot of times broad and then narrow, if you play with it, you get the surprise, you get something really interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Something that I like to do a lot of times with sentences is think about a noun that I would put later in the sentence, and turn it into an adjective that modifies the thing. So instead of saying her voice which had been roughened from too many years of whiskey, I will say her whiskey voice, or her whiskey rough voice. Which is a way to give the same information, but because it moves it over, it feels like it's more laden with meaning. And also, as a short story writer, I've saved three to four words that I can then bank for later in the story...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] When I truly need them.

[DongWon] But you're almost using surprise in a certain way. You know what I mean? By that reordering, you're like shifting expectations, but still giving us the information.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] A really useful tool for this. Study Garden Path sentences. Garden Path sentences are sentences where you begin reading the sentence and it is leading you to a place where the rest of the sentence is not going. The classic example, the old crew the boat. Oh, the old, and crew is a verb.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Not the old crew, it is the old, are crewing the boat.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Understanding the principle of a Garden Path sentence, one, helps you to not write them accidentally, and helps you to create Garden Path-ish things where you send the reader down a Garden Path you want them on in order to button hook them into something else.

[Mary Robinette] There's a good example of this that I was already thinking about. Sorry, thank you for queuing this up for me. Douglas Adams uses this a lot.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] The ship hung in the air, exactly the way bricks don't. Like, you are not expecting... You're not expecting that turn. But, sequencing wise, he's putting the surprise at the end. If it had been, bricks don't hang in the air the way these ships did. Like, there's... That is a plunker of a sentence...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're not... There's so many reasons that that doesn't make...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That doesn't work. But it does show you how important order is and sequence, because it's all the same content, it's just entirely wrong because the important, the fun thing, the surprise, comes at the beginning.

[DongWon] Well, I think one thing that is also really important at a line level, or basically at any level, is mirroring. Right? And repetition. Right? I know that when I write, especially nonfiction, I tend to over rely on repetition, but I do think it's really useful to set up a pattern and break it. Right? And that's something that you can do on a structured level in a sentence, of giving us, like, this list of things through repetition of, like, I walked a long way... I don't know, I can't think of a good example off the top of my head. I'm sorry. But, like, I think having a thing where you have one beat, second beat, and then the third beat you break the pattern, can set up that surprise in terms of using simple checks like rule of three, but doing it in a very deliberate structural way.

[Erin] Something that's really cool about patterning, too, it's like you're creating your own sequencing rules. You're telling people, oh, we are in a new... In this particular set of sentences, you're going to get this word over and over again, and each time, it's going to be slightly different.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because a lot of times when we use repetition, we might use the same word, but, like, something different is on the other end of the verb.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or we might use, like, the same general sentence construction, but the length changes. And so each time you're getting something slightly different. And then just as you teach us the sequence, you rip it out from under us. Which is great. It's sort of like a pact with the reader.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I feel like a lot of sequencing is, like, you making promises to the reader about the way that they will be experiencing the story, and then being like, haha, no, or, yes, and like using that to actually... Not control reader emotion, but to take readers on a journey that makes things not feel flat.

[DongWon] Yeah. One thing I also think about with this is the idea of readability. Right? There's a thing in commercial fiction that we talk about in terms of windowpane prose. Right? Prose that is invisible in a certain way because it's so readable and you just read very quickly and you can absorb very quickly. And so, something like your Garden Path sentence is sort of very anti-readability. You have to slow down and think about it. And you're sort of putting the brakes on your reader as they're moving through it, and they have to, like, stop and parse what you're saying, versus sometimes doing something that is maximizing that speed of reading, can be a really effective technique. And there's just as much technique that goes into doing that as writing the beautifully crafted sentence.

[Mary Robinette] I just want to flag for readers that windowpane or transparent prose is a fashion based thing, because Jane Austen was writing windowpane prose in her day.

[DongWon] Yes. 100%.

[Mary Robinette] So when you're thinking about these things, like, don't think do I want to write transparent prose or not? Think about where am I putting my embellishments and why? Because the transparent prose, the window pane prose, if you're writing stuff that feels natural to you, you're probably writing something that is currently fashionable in some ways.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yes. Exactly. And one thing... One really useful thing for getting that sort of like quicker comprehension and building sort of towards that sort of speed of reading for your audience is honestly using, like, high school composition essay techniques. Right? of... there's a thing I think about a lot, of tell someone the thing you're going to tell them, then tell it to them, and then tell them what you just told them. Right? This is really useful for an action scene, for example. Where you kind of frame it up in a way of here's the thing that's about to happen, and then you go through what happened, then you tell them what happened at the end. When... A lot of times, I find when reading a scene, if they don't do that, I will not be quite sure what I'm supposed to take away from the scene or what to expect when I'm in the scene. And so having that sort of, like, intro and conclusion short of sentence, or, like, hint, can be incredibly helpful at a scene level and at a sentence level, in terms of how am I supposed to ingest this.

[Mary Robinette] So this goes back to the question of repetition and cause and effect and sequencing...

[DongWon] And recency [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] And recency...

[Erin] And everything.

[Mary Robinette] And everything. But specifically, that you don't want to do that all the time. You want to do that for the important things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And what that does... The repetition causes people to pay attention to it. We typically notice repetition because we are wired, as animals, to notice things that are important, and repetition is unnatural. So you hear repetition in the wild when something is walking towards you, potential predator. You hear it when it's water dripping, and that's an important piece of information. So once you've identified that information, then if it's not important to you, then you discard it. You're like, okay, I can tune the repetition out. So when you're using repetition in fiction, you want to make sure that you're using it to catch the reader's attention, and that you're not doing it accidentally.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And what DongWon is talking about with this you tell them, you tell them again, and then you tell them what you told them... That is a form of repetition to draw the reader's attention to it. But if it's not an important thing, like, again, in this workshop, I was showing them some of my earlier prose, and I had this thing where I described the same action three different times and it was... I did this multiple times in a scene. But only one of the actions that I was describing was plot relevant. So, as someone who was editing it as an adult, I took out the other two repetitions where I was describing the same motion multiple times because what that was was me figuring out the right way to describe it.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think there is the repetition aspect. There's also a fractal aspect of it, too. Right? Sort of at an individual moment level, there is that tell them, tell them again, and then tell them what happened. But then there's also sort of the scene level, and then literally the book level. Right? The introductory scene of a book, that opening scene, really should mirror the structure and sort of genre flow... Not should, but can, in a useful way, mirror the structure and genre and beats of the book. And then your conclusion sort of tells us what are we taking away from this. Right? So in that sort of, like, fractal microcosm, macrocosm thing, you can sometimes either show in micro what the book will be. One great example I think about this is the opening of The Haunting of Hill House, which has this sort of long rambling sentence at the beginning that really encapsulates the entire experience of reading this book. Right? And it sets you up so well, both plot wise and linguistically, for what you're in for in this very specific way of, like... We're going to be doing some weird psychological stuff, here is some big things about the world, here's a description of the very normal house. The house is really scary. Right? Like, that's sort of the beats of that opening line, and then that's the beats of the book. Right? So, this sort of fractal microcosm macrocosm kind of thing can really play into a version of this mirroring, repetition, and all these different aspects.

[Mary Robinette] And I think one of the reasons that this works, and this goes back to the sequencing thing, is that recency...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Recency primacy effect. Because we... We like symmetry. Humans respond really, really well to it. So, recency primacy effect... We've been tossing those words a lot around in this episode, and we do talk about it in other episodes, but I'll redefine it here. It is that you notice the first thing and the last thing. Those stick the most. So when you've got this outer frame of... On this fractal macrocosm, you're completing a circuit. Because the recency and the primacy are both the same thing, and so that completes a circuit and it enhances them. And you can do that on a scene level, you can do that on a sentence level, at a paragraph level, where you hit something a little bit harder at the beginning and the end. Like, I've used this example when... In other episodes. The difference between... And it's a subtle difference... The man walked into the room. There was a blonde in the chair. Versus. The man walked into the room. In the chair was a blonde. But then I can complete this by doing... By lingering on that. The man walked into the room. There was a blonde in the chair. She had hair to the base of her spine, and, like, it didn't stop. So I'm hitting the blonde and the hair... Like, I'm hitting the blonde twice in that. Yet... I see your face, Erin.

[Erin] What are you talking about?

[laughter]

[Erin] Go ahead, hit me some more.

[Mary Robinette] You're right, I should have just stuck with the metaphor from the previous one of chasing balls.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the point of that is that, like, I can do the same thing with a man walked into the room. In the chair was a blonde. The chair was a fine bit of hardwood, probably from the early 1800s. And at that point, the woman in the chair becomes unimportant. The chair is the important thing. Because of this... This balance. And it is this... It's a question of sequence.

[DongWon] One thing that is standing out to me as we talk about this is a lot of things we're talking about are concepts in cognitive psychology. Right? There's the idea of the recency bias, you're more biased to say your favorite thing was something that you saw recently. Right? There's a framing bias, which is the first person who states, like, the frame of the thing tends to define the field of play. This is a tool in negotiation, where you say this is worth a million dollars, and then someone now can't be like, this is worth $20. Right? Because you framed it in a certain way. And so, I think the microcosm macrocosm thing that I was talking about is a framing thing and a recency thing. Right? So you can use your understanding of the way people's brains work and how we process information as these narrative, like... Okay, I hate to call them hacks, but you're also kind of hacking somebody's brain.

[Erin] These are tools.

[DongWon] These are tools and techniques to get information across in really efficient ways that are very impactful and meaningful.

[Howard] One of my favorite tools, and it shortcuts all of the thinking about why and how and goes straight to the mechanics, is turn the paragraph upside down. Just reverse the information in the paragraph and see if it works better. There are so many paragraphs that I've written where I look at it and I think, man, what is wrong with it? Wait, Howard, you have a tool for this. Turn it upside down. And I just reversed the order of information and realize, oh, now it's right. Do I know why it's right? No, but I know that tool worked.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah, it's funny. One more tool before we wrap up here is, like, I also think that it's... Some of this stuff sounds really complicated, but as we've been talking, one thing that I've been thinking a lot about is gossip, and also, like, how we convey information. People... The tell someone, tell them again, and then tell them what you told them is also like, oh, my God, I hate John so much. Okay. So today he, like, came...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And he poured water in the copier, and it was horrible, and he burned my house down, also.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And that is why I will never speak to him again.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And it's like we tend to do this, this is how we convey information. And a lot of it is because a lot of what we understand about writing comes from old... Like, at some point, you had to catch someone's attention verbally and say like, hey, this is why you should pay attention to what's going on. Okay, now I'm going to explain it. And, like, don't forget, this is the thing that I just told you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because if you're listening to somebody say something, you can't... There's only so much you can hold in your head about, like, what they just said.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so the thing that caught your attention first, and the thing that they left with, are the things that you're going to take with you.

[DongWon] You gotta tell me how you feel about the person before you tell me the story. Right?

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly.

[DongWon] If this story is about, oh, it's so sad that my sister-in-law had to go through all these terrible things, or if this story is I hate my sister-in-law and here's all of the things that she did... Those are... Can have the same facts, but be very different interpretations of the story. Right? So, if you want to, like, learn a lot about storytelling, honestly, go look into the podcast Normal Gossip, which is one of my favorite things in life. And it's just... The rhythm of how they tell stories is so important and you can learn so much from that.

[Erin] Yeah. In fact, I was going to say, like, if I'm in love with John, I'm like, John burned my house down. That's a very different story.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think it's a little bit of the cause and effect, again. It's like you don't want to give someone an answer before the question exists.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] And with that. we are going... This is jumbo sized... We are going to wrap up with homework. And this homework is worth $1 million.

[gasp]

[Howard] It's only worth 20 bucks. Guys, it's only worth 20 bucks.

[what]

[DongWon] I'm very confused by this framing.

[Erin] No. All right. So, take something... This homework's probably unsurprising, but take something either that you've written or something interesting that you've heard recently. Something somebody's told you that you're like, wow, what a juicy story. And go ahead and write it down in the order that you currently have it, or the order that you received it. And then I want you to rewrite it two ways. One is to take Howard's beautiful example that he stole from my brain which is to do it upside down. Do it backwards. Figure out how that would work. And then I want you to find some very unexpected way to sequence it that feels wrong to you. What is the worst way you could possibly sequence this information? Write it that way and, I don't know... See what happens.

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.19: Getting Everything Connected

2026-05-15T08:39:40Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.19: Getting Everything Connected

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-19-getting-everything-connected

Key Points: Causal chain. Everything has a consequence, and actions lead to the next problem. Unity of effect. Kuleshov effect. Geese plague. Engage the reader's pattern recognition. Emergent narrative. Pineapple reticule. Trick the reader into believing everything is connected.

[Season 21, Episode 19]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Getting everything connected.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Erin] And I'm going to be talking about getting everything connected. Which gives me the opportunity to use a phrase that I did not learn until I started, like, taking writing classes, which was the causal chain.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Which is the idea, I believe, that each thing in your story links to the next thing, with some sort of... I don't know, chaininess in between it, that perhaps one of you has a better way to describe or explain that than I do?

[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that... There's two things when we're talking about a causal chain. One is the idea that everything has a consequence, and that each thing that your character does leads to the next problem. So that there is this continual link and if you pull one thing out of the story, that the whole story collapses, and that if you can't... If you can pull something out, then it's not connected and you should pull it out. Then there's another thing, which is not exactly the causal chain, but that Edgar Allan Poe called unity of effect. Which is that things are thematically connected...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Together. Or tonally.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, one thing I think of... Causal chain is one of those things that I think of as an artifice of fiction. Right? It's one of the places where fiction is different from real life, because in real life... Not that, I mean, things are causally connected because we live in a universe. But also, it often doesn't feel that way. Right? What... The world is complex enough that what happens to me now feels very disconnected or impossible for me to predict based on what happened 5 minutes ago, because some event will happen overseas or on a national political scale that affects me personally that I truly had very little control over. Right? But, in fiction, when something is happening on the page that feels really disconnected from everything else, it will feel random, and it will be an unpleasant narrative experience for your audience. Your reader wants a causal chain. They want everything to feel connected, either in a plot oriented way, in terms of action A had a consequence, that consequence leads to action B, or in a thematic way of somebody's dealing with personal strife at home and they turn on the news and war has broken out...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Overseas. Right? So, I think there's ways to do it, of having that randomness, but that randomness needs to feel integrated in a... The bigger why of the book. And if that's missing, it will feel purely random and unpleasant.

[Erin] One of the funny things that... This is not a writing thing exactly, but it occurs to me that when you hear people talk about their writing careers, to sort of connect that part, you will see people attempt to create the causal chain out of the randomness of life.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Oh, boy. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So it's... They'll be like, well, obviously, I took that one class on a Tuesday that day, and therefore... And, like, and this and this and this, and it all led to why I'm a best-selling writer today. And in truth, life is a lot more random than I think we want it to be. I think also a lot of conspiracy theories are built out of the idea that we want things not to happen at random, that we want there to be a causal chain. And so, I think, one thing I'm curious about is do you think there are ways to exploit the human desire to create cause even where cause doesn't exist, in order to create momentum in a story?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's... In life... I tell my clients all the time, don't narrativize this. Right? Just because this book didn't work, doesn't mean that the next book's not going to. Or just because this book did work had nothing to do with the previous book. You know what I mean? And it's like there's such an urge, because we are creatures of pattern recognition. Right? I talk about this all the time. We want to find story, we want to find patterns everywhere. And so when you encounter events in life, you will build a story out of them. It's impossible not to. It's important to resist it sometimes, so you don't take away the wrong lesson from it. But, when you're writing fiction, you can... You should be using that against your reader. Right? You should be letting them draw the connections. Right? And so going back to what we were talking about, contrast and juxtaposition, in our last episode, the reason that works is because of the urge to narrativize, is because of the urge to draw... To make A and B connect, even when A has nothing to do with B. Right? So if you show me two different things, I'm going to try and connect them reflexively. And if there's truly no connection, then I will realize that later and be annoyed and it will feel like you made a mistake. But if you make me connect those two different things, that feels like magic. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's a thing they say about, I think Philip K Dick, that... Maybe it was Harlan Ellison. Who knows? Some... One of them had a list of titles, random list of titles, and when they wrote a short story, they would just slap a random title on it...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And the reader would draw a connection and be like, oh, well, that's why it's called this.

[DongWon] I haven't heard that. I would believe that about both of them, though, given their titles.

[Erin] Well, it's the Kuleshov effect. A chance to talk about the Kuleshov effect! The... Which is, like, a film thing from the early days of filmmaking, where a guy, he would show a picture... let's say it would be, like, a grave, and then a man's face. And then he would show an apple and a man's face. And then he would show, like, a wedding and a man's face. And he would say, okay, well, what is being shown here? And they would be like, in this first one, you can see how sad he is, in the second one, you can see how hungry he is, and then you can see how joyful he is. And it's the exact same clip of the exact same man...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Making the most neutral face ever.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And... But because we want to make the things connect, we will actually say... Like, see in someone's face an emotion that is not there. And I think that's just such a fun thing. I think it's used a lot more, to be honest, in games where people...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Will take something that's, like, a visual and associate it with an action that is happening and use that to make the player fill in the rest of the gaps of the story and find space for themselves within it.

[Mary Robinette] And I think... As you were talking about that, I was thinking, oh, you can also use this... The reader, like, making those connections, you can also use that with the logical causal chains of worldbuilding. Also, that's like, well, if it's like this, why isn't it like that? Or, they've done this, ergo, that must be the way it works. And the author's like, no, no, not what I planned, but...

[DongWon] I mean, I talk about worldbuilding as playing a game of Go sometimes. Right? And the thing is, when you play Go, or Baduk as we call it, is you're trying to capture territory on a board. Right? And so one thing you will do at one stage in the game is start putting pieces down in random open parts of the board, where you haven't had a big fight about it yet. And what you're telling the other players, I'm interested in this area, but we're not dealing with that right now, I'm just letting you know that we're going to have a fight about that later. And so sometimes when you're doing worldbuilding, it's in game principles, we call this [draw maps?] simply playing spaces. Right? Where you will put a marker down somewhere and be like, yeah, there's something about how magic works over here, or there's some geographical feature over here, and then we'll come back to that and build out that detail. But sometimes you can just do that for your reader, too. Let your reader fill all that in.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] No need to tell them the thing, let them do the work of drawing the connections and building that out. And that gives them participation in buying into the story in a way that is hard to get otherwise. I think this is... Going back to video games, part of why FromSoft fans are so feral about their games, because in the Dark Souls games, there's no... Very little, like, narrative that's told to you, you're forced to assemble it all from the two line descriptions of items. But when you start piecing it together, it feels really magical to feel that world cohere, even though what you're getting is a bunch of random little points on a map.

[Mary Robinette] What I love about that analogy is that we can go from that back over to plot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Where you can put a little... Something that looks like a little random point on a map that later leads to something huge that you deploy. And so that link is still there, and it is a fun thing to play with as a conscious tool.

[Erin] Yeah. And it's interesting because I think in novels, you see that more. In short fiction, I love the random outside world building point as a way to make the world feel bigger.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] In a pl... And, say like I'm not going to explore that in this story. Like you're playing the game, you're like, in another story perhaps, we would talk about what's going on there, but today we are not. Like, it's like, you're, like, talking about, like, I suddenly met this orphan whose parents were killed in, like, the geese plague of 2028, and you're, like, not going to ex... I've given you just enough.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And what I think makes these work is they usually have a chain or two within... They have a couple of links within themselves.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Usually, they have like a word that tells you something, like a geese plague, you know what a geese is, you know what a plague is, that sounds bad together. Who knows, do they cause it, were they the victims of it? But it gives you enough that you can create a couple links of chain, and then store them somewhere else and think, hum, that's a chain that's a causal chain of another story. Or, in a bigger story, eventually these links of chain will connect with the links that I already have, and it'll be this amazing moment of revelation that, oh, my gosh, that's why that is suddenly important. What else is important is our break, and when we return, we will talk... DongWon has a hand up and we'll talk about something.

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[Erin] We are back. I'm so excited to hear whatever dis...

[DongWon] The thing that I raised my hand to talk about before we went to break... I did not expect to get called out so explicitly.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] My medium of storytelling is through TTRPGs in actual play. Right? And so one thing that I was thinking about as we were having this conversation is the beauty of AP is that it ends up having this really coherent feeling narrative at the end, even though it's all improvised. And so how do you take a bunch of random stuff that comes from worldbuilding and the decisions that players are making and make it cohere into something that is fun and satisfying to listen to? Right? And I think the failure sense of AP is that sometimes they do feel a little random, but when they really work, they cohere into something that felt planned, and I think that comes down to what you were talking about in terms of the Edgar Allan Poe thing, in terms of thematic consistency.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And character consistency is also tied into that. Right? And so, for me, the things I'm looking at early on are establishing really clearly for myself and the players what's the thematic questions we're engaging within, and then they're building their characters in conversation with that. And so as they make character choices, it all is going to be pointing in a general direction until the really magical moment when everything coheres and snaps into place, of, like, oh, here's our plot. You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It is... It's something that... I've been thinking about this since I've been reading a lot of fiction that's coming out of countries that are not Western dominated. Because... Especially when I'm reading Japanese fiction, there's... The plot is often there's this guy in a four and a half mat tatami room and he's fucking up at school and that's about it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But there's this... There are these links so there is this unity of effect that's happening. And... Sorry. My brain made a whole diagram in my head while you were talking. I'm like, that is a visual diagram and I don't know how to translate that into...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That usually doesn't usually happen to me on the podcast.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, oh. But I think it is one of the things that made me start thinking about this idea of thematic links...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And unity of effect as one of the ways that you can have things that are in a story that look like they're not connected, but... Like, that on a surface, or a plot level, aren't connected, but are integral to the... Integral...

[DongWon] Integral.

[Mary Robinette] Integral to the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think you're talking about Japanese fiction. One of my very favorite films of the last 5 years, maybe the best film I've seen in the last five years, is this Wim Wenders called Perfect Days. I've mentioned it on the podcast before. It's a Japanese language film made by a German filmmaker that is mostly about a man who cleans toilets in Tokyo. He goes around... It's literally partially funded by this... The Tokyo Toilet Bureau or something like that.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Amazing.

[DongWon] He literally goes around and cleans these incredibly beautifully designed public toilets around the city, and has a series of encounters with people. It is the most plotless movie I think I've ever seen. There's no A to B to C in the movie. There's no, like, causal connection. Like, sometimes he meets somebody and that person comes back later in the movie, but it's not like that is building to a big conflict or a resolution. It is purely a sequence of events, but each one feels thematically resonant because the movie's deeply interested in character and deeply interested in this central question, which is about communication and connection and suffering. Right? And the question of how did this guy get to be this way, why is his life so magical and special, and why do I want to be him in spite of seeing the ways in which he suffers, is like the questions of the movie. And by repeatedly showing me scenarios in which he gets to express that in different ways, the whole thing feels very coherent. Like, one of the most, like, coherent pieces of art I've seen, in spite of the fact that this thing literally has no plot. Right? And so, I think it's really interesting to think about causal chains and causality in a story that has none.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And so if you want to, like, see how to do that, I would... Go watch this movie. If you don't like art house cinema, you will be like, why did he make me do this?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But go with this lens of trying to understand how to make a plotless piece of art that feels coherent.

[Mary Robinette] I am so glad you started talking about that, because I think I can finally articulate this diagram...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's playing up in my head. That it is, when you're talking about logical causal chains, when you're talking about thematic links, unity of effect, what we're talking about is engaging... Actively engaging the reader's pattern recognition. That all of these things say to the reader, I am making a space for you to link things together in your head, to find patterns where there aren't necessarily ones, whether... And so that when you are doing this successfully, you are kind of more actively collaborating with the reader than if it is all just... If it is only A to B to C. That sometimes those logical causal chains are the thing that Erin was talking about, where you have three links here...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And later three links, and then the reader assembles all of them into a beautiful charm bracelet at the end. And I think that that's... That's a fun thing to think about, like, how am I making space for the reader within this network that I'm providing?

[Erin] And am I ever accidentally making space?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] Because I think you can also, like, accidentally create something you didn't mean to, and games often call this emergent narrative. Which can be amazing when a narrative comes out of nowhere. But... I love telling this story, so I'm sure I've told it before, but my good friend played Dragon Age 2... 3... Dragon Age Inquisition, and went and killed... There were several dragons, and he killed them all.

[DongWon] Yeah, you told this.

[Erin] And he just leveled up to kill more dragons, and then at the end, he was like, I didn't get like a trophy or anything? And I was like, because the game is about saving the world. And he was like, it's called Dragon Age, they had seven difficult to kill dragons.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That was a cool number. It felt resonant. I did it. And I get nothing. And, like, I am very disappointed that this game didn't know that I was going to draw these patterns.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And I kept thinking, like, what would I do other than just make a trophy for that? But, like, maybe you don't call it Dragon Age, maybe you don't make it seven dragons because, like, we love those odd numbers that feel like...

[DongWon] Yeah. If it's six dragons, it might not...

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Have felt that way. We were talking about this a while ago, about the way in which the rule of three and patterns and things like that are part of it.

[Erin] Yeah. So something to think about is, like, are you creating a unity of effect within your story, and if so, is it the effect that you're meaning to unify around or not?

[Mary Robinette] This is... I'm going to also tell an anecdote, which is when I was working on Of Noble Family, I like my characters to be doing something, and so I was like, the pineapple reticule, she's going to be making a... It's a handbag, so she's knitting this thing. And then my readers were like, I love the pineapple reticule. So I tossed it into the next scene, I'm like, she's not done with that, she's still doing this. And they're like, oh, my goodness, pineapple reticule's amazing. And then in the third scene, I'm like, these take a long time, this is only like 3 days later. I get this comment, I love the pineapple reticule, I can't wait to see the payoff. And I was like...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, no, because I had accidentally set up...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] A rule of three...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And they were looking for a logical causal chain that was not there. And, like, I briefly looked, can I have her smack someone or stab someone? And it was like not that kind of book. So I had to pull it out because of that accident.

[DongWon] What I love about this conversation is we started from this point of how is everything connected, and the answer is sort of, it's not, you trick the reader into believing it is. Right? And there's a way in which, I'm going to return to our favorite metaphor, which is a book is an act of hospitality. Right? And there's a way in which when you are writing your story, if you crowd the entryway or every room or the sitting room with so much stuff that there's no space for the reader, they're going to actually have a bad time. If you try to draw all the connections for them, it's... It feels over prescribed and it feels airless. Right? But if you make a space that the reader can move through the space you've made for them, find their own place to sit in there, then they will have a different relationship to it. Right? And I'd add as an extreme, that's making room for fanfiction. Right? But it's also, like, making space for them to draw their own conclusions about stuff, to come to thematic ideas, or those elements without necessarily having to draw it for them explicitly. I think the movie Sinners does an incredible job of this, of making space for the audience to reach their own conclusions about what's happening there and who's right and who's wrong. And I think some of the critiques of that movie is that I think it's very smartly very resistant to a simple reading. Right? And I think sometimes making sure that there's room for the reader to engage with your story and have their own say about their experience of it is the key to making things feel really connected. Right? It's letting them realize who the murderer is two sentences before the detective says it. Right?

[Mary Robinette] And at the same time, not playing coy with them. Like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Not saying I want you to make a necklace, but tell them we're not feeling sorry...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have to give them the tools, you have to make sure that they understand kind of what the goal is, but letting them have some participation in there. It is a delicate balance sometimes.

[DongWon] Yeah. Because the risk is, their necklace is not going to look exactly the way you envisioned it.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] But that's always going to be true. Right? Once it's out of your hands, once it's published, it belongs to the reader in a certain way. And so I think sometimes it is accepting that, yes, their version's going to be a little bit different than what you had in your head, but that's okay. Because it's still all the things that you put in place for them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And with that, we are going to move to the next step in our causal chain, which is the homework.

[Erin] For this week's homework, I'd like you to take a story that you have, and take all the scenes and maybe, like, put them on different index cards. And kind of write what happens in the scene, like, they go to the store, the world explodes, the geese attack, whatever happens. And just shuffle them all up, and pick out two at random. And write a scene that would fall in between them, that would help you create either a unity of effect or a causal chain that would make them work in this random order that you now have them.

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.18: Deconstructing the Three Act Structure

2026-05-09T11:45:31Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.18: Deconstructing the Three Act Structure

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-18-deconstructing-the-three-act-structure

Key Points: Three act structure: setup, confrontation, and resolution. Describing normal: establishing the main characters and their relationships and the world they live in. The ordinary world. What's going on, who are the characters, why should I care about them, why am I invested in this story. What is the status quo? By page 5, what story are we reading, what is going on? What is the main action, what are the stakes? Pose a major dramatic question. KPop Demon Hunters. A reason to care. Ground the reader. Set up the overall theme, who we're going to spend time with, where we're going to be, and genre/mood. Stakes.

Act 2: rising action. The protagonist attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point. Where your try-fail cycles happen. The meat. Act 2 commercial break: dark night of the soul, big crisis, big reveal. The solution that creates the next problem. Purchasing the frame before you know what the painting is. Traversal and transformation.

Act 3: resolution. Climax. Confluence. Punch the reader, then give them a moment to breathe. The scene of aftermath.

[Season 21, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing the Three Act Structure.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm very delighted to have a long time friend to the podcast back with us, Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] It's delightful to be here. Thank you for having me.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the reasons we wanted to bring Margaret into these is that, besides writing prose, Margaret is also a screenwriter working in Hollywood. And today we're going to be talking about the three act structure. Which is a classic structure. One of the ways that it was popularized was by a book by Sid Field in 1979 called Screenplay, The Foundations of Screenwriting. So the way he describes it is that the three acts are the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution. Act 1, Act 2, act 3. I would get very salty about the whole idea of a three act structure, because I'm like, three acts, three act breaks, came from theater, and you need them to move scenery around. So, when you said that you have actually read this book...

[Margaret] Oh, I have indeed.

[laughter]

[Margaret] I am aging myself by admitting that, but, yeah. No, when I was first coming up, taking my first screenwriting courses, that was like... That was the Bible of the time.

[Mary Robinette] Can you talk to us a little bit about what you think it... Like... The... Let's... I guess...

[Howard] No, what is the three act structure really, Margaret?

[laughter]

[DongWon] You also said that in a way like you had no opinions about this book whatsoever. So, yeah.

[Margaret] I also want to clarify that, like, it came out in 1979... I was not reading it in 1979.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] It just took a while for there to be a lot of popular screenwriting books. Like, that market was wide open for a long time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So as I understand it, the first act is about establishing the main characters and their relationships and the world they live in. Sometimes this is called describing normal. I've seen several failure modes of describing normal in early manuscripts, early career manuscripts. Can we talk about, like, what... Why we want to do that in that first act?

[Margaret] Yeah. Sure. We can do that. I didn't mean to cut you off there. It's a... No, I think, we talk about the failure mode, if it's like the ordinary world, if people are familiar with Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, which was also very big at the time, of, it's like, oh, it's the hero's journey, and we've had many discussions on this podcast about the hero's journey and the strengths and weaknesses thereof. But there's this idea that you're starting in the ordinary world. Like, to get the audience on board with what's going on, who are the characters, why should I care about them, why am I invested in this story, you have to let them know what the status quo is. And, I think, for writers who are early in their own Journeys, it can feel like, well, nothing's allowed to happen starting out, because I have to set up what's going on and where things are. And it's a... And you do have to set up what's going on and who are these people and what does their day-to-day look like, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that things can't be starting to change or starting to be in flux. Exciting things can still be going on. But I think there's this idea of, like, okay, in a screenplay format at the time, the first 25 to 30 pages were just sort of tooting around to find the plot as it were. And that just... there was also a time when pacing was slower on these things. And now that's... If you are a writer of a spec screenplay, that's not going to fly. Like, you've gotta let your reader know...

[Howard] You need to do something a little more interesting well before the 22 page mark.

[Margaret] But by... Honestly, before page 5, like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] You've got to let people know, like, what story are we reading, what is going on. And that's just the way that storytelling, American storytelling specifically, and I think this is also somewhat true on the fiction side as well, has just evolved. There is an expectation of you're going to let me know, like, what is this story going to be about, what is... At least an idea of the main action that might evolve, but, like, what are the stakes. Because that really is what gets your reader invested, of knowing, okay, what am I worried might happen and what do I hope will come to pass instead?

[Mary Robinette] And as I understand it, in the original idea, that this establishing of stakes is basically posing a major dramatic question. Like, is the boy going to get the girl? Are they going to stop the terrorists? And that the answer is going to be either yes or no. When I'm dealing with openings, and as I said, I bounced very hard off of the idea of the three act structure, but I... When we've been doing the deconstruction of it, I'm like, oh, okay, I see the elements that are common in other things. But I do have, like, a thematic problem, even if it's not the big problem, and it usually escalates from there. Like, if it's a story that's going to be about a haunted house, there's a squeak and they can't figure out where the squeak is coming from. And so there's that disruption of normal, but it's not the big one yet.

[Erin] As you were saying that, it made me wonder if this is why so many, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like so many rom-coms start at a wedding that is not the protagonist's wedding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it establishes, like, this is the thing. Like, we are all about love. But this person doesn't have it. But, by the end, they will. And like therefore you know, in that first five pages, exactly the realm that you're in, at least.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. It's like my sister's getting married, and I'm stuck at her wedding without a date. And it's like that sets up that dilemma.

[Howard] And by the same token, when we've started... When we talk about cold opens with action, we have an action scene that resolves in some sort of success, typically, and that describes to us what normal is. This is an action movie that will end with a heroic resolution of the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes when we talk about establishing the normal, it can sound kind of flat. Right? It can sound kind of like, there's the character going to school and experiencing his normal life or whatever it is. But I think a recent example of an action cold open that establishes the new normal, or the existing normal, in a really effective way is KPop Demon Hunters. Right? We start with this incredible physical fight scene on an airplane that they jump out of, and then they perform their concert and we get all of the stakes that are being set up in terms of establishing the Honmoon, like all the big global stakes, the worldbuilding, but then also the personal stakes over that opening sequence, of what do they stand to lose, what do they stand to gain, which ends in a reveal of the true stakes for the main character of her needing to keep her secret, and then accomplish this stage thing so that she can go back to being normal, or... Also, because we're talking about how pacing and expectations for storytelling have changed, but also, even if you're looking at some sort of classic Hollywood examples, which is the sort of movies that Sid Field was talking about when he did this sort of structural breakdown for screenplays. You look at a movie like Chinatown or Citizen Kane. Like, Chinatown starts with our lead character, he's showing photos of the wife having an affair to his client and his client being like, I'm going to kill her. You're allowed to do that, it's an unspoken thing. And you think you have that kind of money and class, you jerk. Like, no, rich people are allowed to kill their unfaithful wives, you, you are not. And that sort of... It sets up his job, it sets up the theme, we know immediately what he does. And it's not long after that Faye Dunaway shows up. Or that... It's been a while since I saw Chinatown. But, like, since he gets... Gets involved in what's going to be the main case of the film...

[Erin] Your mention of KPop Demon Hunters made me think that, like, musical theater is like this is... Most music, not all, but...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Many, many musicals start with this sort of like here is the world and let me know...

[DongWon] It's a thing we do. Yeah.

[Erin] It's a thing, and it's interesting, because it works on a couple different levels. One is to literally tell you, like, here's the setting, here's the general vibe. But also musically, it gives you a sense of if you're at Les Miserables or if you're at Hamilton, you're going to get very different opening songs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If, like, Les Miserables began with a hip hop opening, you would be really confused for the rest of the time [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] And people are like, when are they coming back?

[laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled what garbled name is garbled worst nightmare garbled] I feel very torn.

[Margaret] I'm 100% in. When you said that, I immediately thought of Bonjour from Beauty and the Beast...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Which is literally let me run down this whole town for you...

[Erin] Can we talk trash about the entire town? That's really pretty...

[DongWon] He has a beef with everybody, that Baker, on sight.

[Margaret] Make a different bread and rolls.

[laughter]

[Erin] My question for this is, like, what is the version of that that we're doing on the page? Like, How do we let people know whether they are in Hamilton or whether they are in Les Mis... What's the kind of story that they're going to be getting?

[Mary Robinette] Like, I talked about this a lot, and from a purely crass commercial, you have to help the editor when you're starting out, that within the first 13 lines, you need to have some reason for us to care. That... Like, my first three sentences, I'm attempting to ground the reader, because sometimes people just don't read past those first three sentences. Sometimes it is setting up the overall theme of the thing, but I want them to know sort of who we're going to spend time with, sort of where we're going to be, and the genre/mood that we're in, which is what we're talking about establishing with these. It's just... I think we're talking about establishing the same things, it's just the metrics that we use for marking how and when we get them in are somewhat different.

[DongWon] It's all about stakes. All of it.

[Mary Robinette] So we're talking about all of these things that were supposed to happen in act 1, and one of the things that is confusing about it, I think, was confusing about it for me, was thinking that act one had to be a third of the book, and that is not the case. So, you can do an act one that is very fast, and then get into the middle of it. And that, I think, is going to take us to our break. And then after the break, we're going to talk about Act 2.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So we're going to talk about Act 2. As we've mentioned, these things don't have to be proportional.

[laughter]

[Margaret] Act 3 is going to be 1 minute at the end. So brace yourself.

[DongWon] Acts 2 and 3...

[Mary Robinette] So in Act 2, according to this original, Act 2 is the rising action, and typically it's describing... I'm honestly looking at Wikipedia for this. Typically, it's depicting the protagonist's attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point. The turning point is often like an inciting incident or something that causes or forces the protagonist to get more active. So now they are. Now they're dealing with this, they've got this big problem, we're doing some more character development, and they're attempting to deal with the... Confront the problem. In this confrontation. So what are some of the pieces of this act 2 that we've got to juggle and look at?

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's interesting about that description of Act 2 as the rising action, which... Looking back with experience, like, oh, yeah, I can see what that's going towards. But it's also in the filled in analysis, Act 2 is about half your screenplay pages. So, at the time, you thought of a screenplay as 120 pages, Now if you're writing a screenplay, 120 pages is probably too long. But you'd have like 30 pages in act one, 60 pages of act 2, and then 30 pages of act 3. And act 3 is clearly where the big exciting climax happens, the quick resolution happens, like, that's all going to be very exciting stuff. And it's like so what the heck do I do with this vast 60 page desert in the middle of my screenplay that is described as rising action. And I think... I was talking to Howard one time when I was visiting you guys and you were talking about who is it described Act 2 is where all the fun exciting things that are going to be in the trailer happen. Because it is the bulk of...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] The movie or the story or the novel, like, this is actually where the process is the point. It's the...

[Howard] It's where your try-fail cycles typically land.

[Margaret] It's where your try-fail cycles happen. It's... I frequently would break down for my students, talking about Shakespeare on a kind of five act model, and that's... You look at Romeo and Juliet. They meet very early. They get married in Act 2. People forget how quickly that happens in that play. Like, there's that idea of like, oh, it has to be rising up to the big thing. It's like, no, other things can be happening. It's as Howard said, the try-fail cycles...

[DongWon] It's one thing I think about a lot when I'm reading pitches. Right? Because the pitches will often be very good at establishing act one information of who are these characters, what are the stakes, what are the world. And a lot of times, I'll come back with, okay, but what are they doing in this book? Like, what's the actual, like, meat of the book? Like, cool concept, love the concept, love these characters, the vibes through the roof, but what are we actually getting into? And I think being able to give some indication of that and having a sense of that. And sometimes when you hear about what the meat is, you're like, oh, that sounds actually very boring. Never mind.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? And so, I think being aware that the bulk of your book is this act two place, and that needs to be interesting and dynamic and engaging is actually something that's quite difficult to do. This is when we start talking about soggy middles and things like that.

[Howard] The classic, Margaret, correct me if I get the numbers wrong... 47 minute TV episode... Is it 43? I've...

[Margaret] Yeah. 47 [garbled] 47's good enough.

[Howard] But the classic application of 3 act structure there is act one, commercial break, half of Act 2, commercial break, the other half of Act 3, commerc... Or the other half of Act 2, commercial break, and then act 3.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And it's really useful for me in thinking about three act structure, to deconstruct it in that way and to carve Act 2 into two pieces. Because in a lot of... In a great many TV shows, that act 2 commercial break is your Dark Night of the Soul, it's a big crisis, it's a big reveal, it's a big something, and just being able to put a pin in that and say, hey, about halfway through Act 2, I'm going to start the other half of Act 2, and I'm going to start it with something big.

[Erin] That's what... Thinking about it that way makes me wonder... I think a false solution... When I was thinking about what's happening at like a... I also love this where there's only like four... with commercial breaks in a show. I'm like, oh, that was beautiful. Those days...

[Margaret] Those halcyon days.

[DongWon] Indeed.

[Erin] Now they're like every 3 seconds. Jump scaring me with RSV.

[laughter]

[Erin] But like the... Sorry. You can cut that. But like it's the false solution. Like, I think about, like, Law and Order episodes, for example, where it's like the act one that you're talking about, it's like finding the dead body and they're like, aha! We've caught the person. Like, and then it's like, but for blah blah legal reasons, we can't just throw them in jail. We have to do the other half. And, like, figure out... And do all of our legal shenanigans to get something happened. Or, in Star Trek, when you solve the first thing, but then it breaks something else on the ship.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When you reverse the polarity and now you're like, oh, no, now negative is positive and positive is negative. How do we deal with that?

[Margaret] Yeah. When I was teaching screenwriting and I would frequently teach the writing the television pilot class, and most prestige TV that stays these days is in a format where you don't necessarily have that network commercial breaks...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where you don't... There were three, there were four, there were five. However many we can put before we get in trouble with the FCC. And I would always say, like, write your pilot with act breaks ...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And then pull them out. Because what these breaks do, it's like when you're writing to the break or to the turn at the end of the act, it's that thing that's going to propel us forward into what's happening next.

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes describe this as the solution that creates the next problem.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to flag as we're getting deep into this conversation is, I think there's a lot of failure states of this three act structure. Right? You can have soggy middles, you can have boring openings, like all these things. But, to return to the KPop Demon Hunters again, that movie is one of the most classic examples of an application of the three act structure. Literally, the first... I think it divides very evenly in terms of the percentages that we're talking about, in terms of 1/4 being act 1, half being act two, 1/4 being act 3. And, part of the reason I think that movie is... Hits so hard, is because of its adherence to really classical storytelling structures. And it does it in a really dynamic, fun, contemporary way. But I think that's a great example of when you can see this working. Right? And when it hits, by God, it hits. You know what I mean? Our brains love that structure. It's very satisfying to have that normal, Rising, conclusion.

[Mary Robinette] I think the failure mode of that is where we don't think about what happens in the middle.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I often think about the things on the outside as framing what is happening in the middle. Like, as you say, the bulk of the story happens in the middle, and so the beginning and end set it up. But we spend a lot of time thinking about how is it going to start? What's the big thing that's going to happen at the end, the conclusion? And for me, since like... Switching from my background in theater to my background as an art major, it's like purchasing the frame before you figure out what the painting is.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So when we're thinking about this midpoint, one of the things that I find very... The midpoint, the... Or the Act 2 is I find it very useful to think about what problem are they trying to solve and how are they trying to solve it? And those give you things that you can escalate, as opposed to how long do I have to wait until I get to my really cool thing, my climax?

[Margaret] Yeah. Something that I've found useful in working through Act 2 was actually something that I came across in a book I read in college about directing for the theater, and one of the things that this author was talking about was, like, you have a play and it's like everything's going great, and it's a tragedy, so it ends on a down note. And it's like you've been working on act one, working on act one, and then you go and you work on the second act and you're working on Act 2, and then you put it together the first time and all of the energy in act 1 is just gone, because all your actors are thinking about the fact that they know how this is going to end. And I think as authors, we can do that as well. It's like whether you're an outliner or you're going back later to sort of shape things, and you got through this more by the seat of your pants, it is that feeling of, like, well, I know where this is going, so I know that all of this is just marking time to get to what's really going on, and you really have to sort of... For me, I have to force myself in terms of, like, I know, but my characters don't.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] So what are they doing with the best information they have at the time? Because, like, they don't know where they are in the book. We know, the reader knows...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] But they always have to be going, no, no, this is the bit that's going to work.

[DongWon] Sometimes you can really feel that in terms of, like, the writer knows the inevitable conclusion to all of this, so it becomes a real like yada yada yada to the middle point. Right? Of just like... And I've seen people do this on a micro level, too, where an action scene is happening, and they'll just be like, yeah, yeah, some fight stuff happens, and then here's where we're at too at the end of it. You know what I mean? And it's like, I don't know, that's the end of the bulk of it. You can't ignore Act 2. But, with that, should we start talking about moving on to conclusion?

[Erin] One quick thing first, I just want to say, I was trying to figure out, well, how do you not do that? And I think one way to trick yourself into creating small little, like, act 1, 2, 3's within...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Your act 2. Like, because in some ways, like, try-fail cycles are like figuring out what it is that it is wrong, trying it, and then failing, and the fail is the fun act 3...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And then you just build one upon the other. It's sort of like in a relationship, you're like, oh, my relationship is stale, we're going to introduce date night, because we're going to actually, like, create...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] A little mini version of our tomance that's going to happen in the middle of our bigger lives together.

[Mary Robinette] I use that... That idea of the mini things when I'm looking at the big thing in the middle, I will look at barriers or obstacles between the protagonist and the goal. And then each barrier has try-fail cycles that go with it. So the barriers are like a macro version. So, like, in order to get to something, I need to get through this door. But then there's the smaller try-fail cycles that are involved in getting through the door. I try the knob. It's locked. I try the key. It breaks off in the lock. I get a crowbar. I get it open, and now there are bees on the other side of it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is my next barrier.

[DongWon] In a few weeks, we're really going to dig into using microcosms...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To sort of illustrate all this on a macro scale, and I think it's going to be a really fun conversation.

[Howard] Two words that helped me understand why Act 2 has to be there are traversal and transformation. I have to traverse the terrain, I have to climb the mountain, I have to do whatever. There are obstacles. And I have to transform myself along that journey. Those two things have to happen. If the story doesn't require them, then you go from act 1 to act 3 and you're done. If the story does require them, then allow us to enjoy them. The traversal is interesting, the transformation is passionate. And that's why I love having just those two words on tap for me to remind myself of why Act 2 should be there.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because I think that that is an important thing, that these are ingredients of the three act structure. But not every story is a 3 act structure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And this is one of the reasons we wanted to do this deconstruction. So, let's move to our last Act, which is act 3. And act three, according to Sid field, is called the resolution. So, the resolution, according to the Wikipedia of the resolution...

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] He really came up with Dynamic names for all...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Of these, didn't he?

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Margaret] [garbled] this [garbled] is going to be exciting.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I actually really like it, because they're so much more descriptive than the seven point plot structure, which we're going to get to with Dan later, which is...

[DongWon] Like pinching and other things...

[Mary Robinette] I don't know... I don't want that much pinching.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, in the act 3, the third Act, we've got the resolution of the story and it's subplots, but we also have the climax, which is where things are brought to kind of the most intense point, and we answer our dramatic question, according to Wikipedia, leaving the protagonist and other characters with a new sense of who they really are, and thank you to whoever this anonymous Wikipedia person was. So, these are beats that we see in other things. With act 3, that idea of the climax happening there, that's again a thing I think a lot of people sort of struggle with, and then struggle with what to do after that. Because now everything has been solved. So what are sort of some of the, I guess, the nuances of act 3?

[Margaret] Wow. You're saying that and I'm thinking, oh, I should say something smart, and I'm just going like...

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to take a second?

[Howard] If I may...

[Margaret] Go for it.

[Howard] I don't like the word climax, because it's in so many other domains. I prefer the word confluence. I prefer thinking about all of the things that have been happening arriving at one point so that lots of things are kind of happening at once. That's not a perfect description of it, but in my mind, it helps me sort things out a little better. And helps remind me that I have a lot of threads that have to be tied together.

[Mary Robinette] You remind me of when we had Lou Anders on many seasons ago. You all can... We'll link to it in the show notes. But the Hollywood ending. That at the end, the hero reconciles with the viewpoint character, defeats the villain, and solves the problem. Which is basically what we're talking about happening here at the climax. That the, oh, we feel better about ourselves, or not, depending on the type of...

[Margaret] Depending on how it goes. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Depending on the type of the show. Bad guy gets just desserts and whatever the problem is, everything's okay now. Or not.

[Margaret] Or not. Yeah. It's... When I was... My first TV show I worked on, the middleman for the time ABC Family, which was a delightful and bonkers experience, but one of the writers in the room introduced a term of art that has always stuck with me, because we'd be breaking the story, working out what's going to happen, what are the scenes, how is it going, and there'd always reach the point where, like, we're getting towards the end or working backwards, and it's like, okay, we know what the big conflict resolution is going to be, it's like we're confronting the boy band which is actually a bunch of intergalactic dictators trying to get back to their home galaxy, we have located the cursed cue ball of the Titanic and we have to prevent this guy from playing it or else all of us will be drowning in the icy waters of the North Atlantic... Actual episodes. And then, Anne Huntsman would always be there, it's like, and then it's the mad dash for the logo.

[laughter]

[I love that]

[Margaret] Referring to logos, the showrunners' sort of vanity card at the end.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like, we do that and then it's like you've got a little bit of time to, like, if you want to put that nice little button, nice little sort of like... Maybe there's like a B story that you have to resolve, like [Wendy and Lacey] her roommate, has had a conflict and she comes back from saving the world and is like, yeah, here, we're going to have our moment. And then just, boom, you're cutting out.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Margaret] And I think in short fiction, that's really useful...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] To remember because there is that expectation of, like, we're hitting you, bam, and then there'll be a nice little graphic at the bottom of the paragraph to let you know that it's over.

[Erin] It's funny that you said like hitting you, because I... To continue with a lot of violence that I have in my soul...

[laughter]

[Erin] One of the things that I think is... That I sometimes see in writer's work, is that... It's like you punched someone in the stomach, and then you walked away before you actually got to see the expression on their face.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So you do want to linger, like, just long enough to kind of get it, because if you punch the reader and then, like, they don't have a chance to actually, like, process it on the page, sometimes they process it at your page...

[gasp]

[Erin] Which you don't want, and then they hate you and your story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You want to give them a moment to breathe. Not a long moment.

[Margaret] You want that scene of aftermath.

[Erin] Just a moment.

[DongWon] There's a really great video essay that's about Hong Kong action scenes, on every trim, a painting. Where he talks about how you see the punch [garbled] land three different times. Right? Because you see it, and then you see the thing, and then you see the consequences of the thing, and it's really important to make space for that. Right? And one of the nice things about novel versus screenwriting is you have a little bit more space for that denouement. I mean, we talked about this a bit in the hero's journey episode, but the scouring of the Shire. Right? You have time to go back and sort of see who are these characters now that they've gone through their transformation and to close out that arc. I mean, Lord of the Rings has a thousand character arcs that need to be resolved, which is why the ending of that book takes so long. And in a novel, you don't always want to go that deep with it. But, you have a little bit more space and a little bit less of a sprint to the logo, as you put it, then you might have in other media.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of the sprint for the logo, I believe that it is time for homework. So, for homework, what I want you to do is I want you to take a fairy tale. Just a classic fairy tale. Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks, any of those. And diagram it out as a 3 act structure, just to see what it would do. Do you need to add elements to it in order to make it fit that? So, give that a try on something that's already existing out in the world. And with that, you are out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 21.17: The Up and Down Escalators

2026-05-02T09:55:55Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.17: The Up and Down Escalators

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-17-the-up-and-down-escalators

Key Points: tension and release, macro level, escalation and de-escalation. Where are you using tension, and when do you take your foot off the accelerator? Not just tension, stakes, romance, pacing. Flat stakes or escalating too quickly. Reality checks. Personal stakes. Distraction. Escalate something else. Competence de-escalates and models good behavior. Romcom miscommunication. False escalation, the almost kiss. De-escalation for transitions. If it works, we don't have a movie. PUDs. De-escalation of one thing usually means escalation of something else. Use beta readers to identify changing stakes or escalation off track.

[Season 21, Episode 17]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The up and down escalators.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] This week, we're going to sort of continue our conversation about tension and release from last week, but shift it a little bit, and sort of zoom out from the sort of micro building and releasing tension, and instead talk about how you're using tension in your... Well, intentionality in the story. Right? And that is about creating a feeling of escalation and then, when you want to, move that into a de-escalation. So, instead of thinking about the individual moments of tension and resolution, this is more about what on a meta level, where are you using tension in your story and when do you want to, like, take your foot off the accelerator a little bit, and sort of ease off of it in those individual moments?

[Mary Robinette] One of the reasons that I started thinking about this is that it's a thing that you can apply to not just tension but to other aspects of the story. For instance, if stakes feel flat, you can escalate stakes. If a romance is moving too fast, you can de-escalate a romance, make them less attracted to each other at that moment. And you do have to make a decision. This is why it's so closely linked to tension, because both of these are also tied in with how the pacing is working. So, a thing that I see happening sometimes is that at the beginning of a story, the... We have stakes and they're kind of flat. It's like if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't have won this beauty contest. It's like no one cares.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So sorry. But if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't be able to afford to buy my grandmother's medication. That's an escalation of stakes. And then the follow-up danger to that is the people who escalate too quickly.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] It's like, I won't be able to buy my grandmother's medication, and then she will become a terrorist.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like, well, that happened...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like...

[DongWon] This is Erin's [garbled]

[Howard] That is the meme.

[DongWon] [garbled interrupted stakes]

[Howard] That is the meme, right there, the, well, that escalated quickly.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Or... And that's exactly it, that sometimes you're like, what just happened?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, thinking about how to use these, escalation and de-escalation, on purpose so that you aren't suddenly...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Terrorist grandma.

[Howard] We're laughing right now because, well, because it's funny to us. But it reminds me that one of my favorite... In humor, one of my favorite tools for de-escalation is the character who says, wait, wait, wait, is this really a big deal? Because I don't think it's a big deal.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And they issue a reality check, and everybody takes a step back and realizes, oh. Oh, the beauty contest doesn't matter. Oh, grandma isn't going to become a terrorist. Oh, I actually have that medication right here. Now you just go be pretty and relax, and off we go. I love de-escalation via humor.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Just because...

[DongWon] And I think sometimes there's such an instinct to keep ratcheting it up...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] To increase your stakes, to increase all these things. And so much of my critique of... Especially superhero fiction is the stakes get to a ridiculous level so quickly. And I think the superhero stories that we've seen succeed in things like the MCU are ones that are about personal stakes. Right? The Guardians of the Galaxy movies work because it's about Peter's close relationship to his father, not the fact that his father is a planet that's going to destroy the universe. That part, nobody really cares about. What we care about is how he feels about his dad, and how his dad feels about him. And so when you escalate your stakes too quickly and too dramatically, then you can really lose focus on what makes this story interesting.

[Erin] I think you can also, if you escalate too much, lose control of your reader's emotions...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And have them go in a direction you don't want them to. Howard, you talking about comedy reminded me of something I saw recently, where a comedian was doing crowd work, which is very popular these days, and I think she asked someone in the crowd, like, about their relationship, and they said, "They said I love you after like...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Two days." or something...

[DongWon] I've seen this [garbled]

[Erin] And the audience starts laughing at this person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But she then refocuses, and she's like, wait. But... We've all been there. Right? Right? Right?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And uses repetition to refocus the audience, and, like, de-escalate it from something that is shocking and bad to something that is hilarious and fun and is in the realm of comedy. And by shifting the focus back to herself from the audience member at a key moment, she is able to de-escalate it just a little bit.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you think about... If you're trying to de-escalate a fight, or, like, if you've ever had, like, a rowdy friend at a bar, like, one of the things you do is distraction. Like, they're mad and they want to, like, beat everyone up, and you're like, wait, look over here. Like, let me tell you this story. Or, do you want some water? And you, like, move the focus elsewhere...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And that helps to de-escalate it. Otherwise, the emotion of that friend, like the emotion of that audience, could get away from you.

[DongWon] Well, you can also de-escalate by escalating something else. Right? And the one time I've been in a street fight was a friend of mine that I was out drinking with decided to start something with some guy. And my one experience of being in a street fight was I slapped my friend in the face and told him to stop being an asshole.

[laughter]

[DongWon] I escalated things with one person and completely de-escalated with the other person. The fight stopped. Like. At no further point was the other guy going to be a problem. Because I redirected the energy back into our existing relationship. Right? So you can use an escalation of something else to deflate a thing that is becoming a problem.

[Mary Robinette] I think the other thing that happened with that is that you ceded territory.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, like, I'm actually not on his side...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even though he's my friend.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But, like, de-escalating is super hard in real life, and it's really hard in fiction, because so much emphasis is put on making things tighter, making things faster,...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Making things tenser. It's like actually sometimes you want to slow things down, you want to de-escalate the tension, because of some of the stuff we've been talking about, making sure that you give your audience a breather. But also, sometimes, it is about ceding territory for one... From one plot point to another in order to make space for that tension.

[Howard] One of my favorite things in fiction is people... Not just people who are really competent, but people who model good behavior. And watching a fight scene develop where I realize, man, this would not actually be that hard to de-escalate. You just have to not say the stupid thing that's on the tip of your tongue, and instead be the character that you were two pages ago. And a lot of books, a lot of media in general, will model bad behavior in order to generate those kinds of scenes. I love it when competence de-escalates things and gives me room for the realization that, oh, well, these are now competent people. Anything that actually causes them a problem...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is going to be a big deal.

[DongWon] People love to complain about the trope you see in romcoms about the miscommunication. Right? Somebody says something and it's misinterpreted like... I don't know, the line's crackling or something. Right? The reason those scenes are irritating is not because miscommunication is ineffective as a narrative tool. I think it can be very effective. People are irritated because there wasn't enough escalation of stakes between the characters ahead of time. Nothing felt truly at stake. And so it feels like, oh, you're just relying on fake conflict to create this escalation of tension which wasn't there in the first place. Right? So I think in that case, it's a misdiagnosis of the problem. The problem isn't the trope, the problem is the lack of build to get us to a place where we actually care that these people are fighting. The problem is it feels like the relationship's already resolved, so we don't care about the fighting. So that's the case where you might need to increase your escalation, and not worry about the de-escalation so much.

[Erin] I also think one tool you can use is the false escalation, Which is my... One of my favorite false...

[DongWon] This escalation goes nowhere?

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yes. One of my favorite false escalations...

[whee]

[Erin] Which, again, comes from my soap operas, is the almost kiss.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Almost kisses are great, because, like, it does escalate it a little, but it seems like you're going there, and then you, like, take the off-ramp, which escalators don't have, but in my new world, they do...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so you jump off the escalator before you can get to the top, and you're like, oh. wow. Like, I didn't want that. But you learned something about yourself. So I think what's really nice in escalation and de-escalation is that while it is often about something external, thinking about how it reverberates internally. So you've set off a new escalator internally for that character, even though you... They jumped off what was happening externally. And I think a lot of times when escalation and de-escalation fall flat for me, it's because it... Everything comes to a stop. But even de-escalating a situation... If you slap your friend in the face...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] To stop the fight, at some point, your friend might be like, whoa, that was a lot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, in that moment, in that...

[DongWon] I'm a good friend.

[Erin] In a future moment, like... Because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then the audience is thinking, oh, well, that's interesting.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Here's a new thread to follow...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Whereas if something happens that doesn't go anywhere, or isn't rooted in relationship...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then it just feels like you stopped the tension to stop the tension.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to for some other reason.

[DongWon] If this were a novel, then what needed to happen after this scene was a conversation where we talked about why I was having a problem with him and the way he behaves in public spaces. Right? Oh, and like, just something about our friendship, something about our relationship that leads to us kissing or something. I don't know. But, like, in real life, that doesn't necessarily happen.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] We never talked about that. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] It never became a thing. But if you... So there's a way in which... Have you ever been on an escalator where someone gets to the end of it and then they stop and look at their phone...

[Mary Robinette] Ouch.

[DongWon] Instead of moving. And then you're like, I'm going to run into you unless you move. And I think that feeling can happen a lot in fiction, where sometimes somebody gets off the escalator, but then doesn't move out of the way and everything has to come to a full stop.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You've made me think of a thing that I want to talk about when we come back from the break, which is using de-escalation to... As a form of transitioning from one scene to another.

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[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, one of my favorite tricks... There's a thing that happens sometimes where you've got this really high tension scene, and then the next scene that needs to follow it is a pretty low, low tension, very quiet scene. And when you're writing it, or when you're reading it, you've had this experience where it's huge, and then you drop into this other scene, you're like, why do I care? This frequently happens when you have to switch POVs, because, like, one person is involved in battles and the other is making tea, and so what you can do is that you can do this false de-escalation. But you do a de-escalation at the end... As you're heading towards that transition, you do a de-escalation, and then you ratchet tension again. So that you bring it to the level that you're at for the next scene. So it's... People are like, oh, we're going down. Things are going to be okay. And then you just bring it up just a little bit, which you can do basically by like, ah, look, it looks like we've all defeated the villain, and we have another gem from Rohisla...

[laughter]

[Erin] The guy from terrorist Havana.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. And then someone else says, but that's not a real gem from Rohisla, and then you cut your scene. And now it's not battle tension, it's question tension, and then the next scene we go into is also a question tension scene, but it's not the same question. And so you're like, but now I have two questions.

[DongWon] Top of mine right now... I'm in the middle of launching the new series Alien Earth. Right? And I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise, and the thing about these movies is they always take place in one location. One spaceship, one planet, one space station, whatever it is. It's sort of a defining thing. And so in my primate brain, I expected this entire TV show that's many hours long to take place in this one ship that crash lands. And then, in the third episode, spoilers, they leave the ship, and my... I was shocked by this. And I was completely disoriented. But they made the transition incredibly smoothly, because of this exact technique. Right? There's a resolution to the primary conflict that carries you through the first three episodes, which then immediately leads into a question of what happens next? If they had had the final battle of that entire three episode arc at the end of the second episode, so many people would drop off of watching. Instead, they slip it into the first 10 minutes of the third episode, and then, now the doors open and you're already walking through it. The escalator seamlessly moves into the next one, and you're still on a people mover and you're still going.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It reminds me of watching... I think the movie was ParaNorman with my son, who was 10 at the time. And they have this plan, and I turned to my 10-year-old and I said, "Do you think it's going to work?" and he looks at me with that you gotta be kidding me dad. He's like, no. If it works, we don't have a movie.

[laughter]

[Howard] This is a 10-year-old.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] If it works, we don't have a movie. And that thing in Alien Earth, episode 3, you ask, well, oh, gosh, well, they defeated the xenomorph that was on the... That was loose on the ship. Is everything going to be okay now? No, there's eight episodes in this series and we're only on three.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Something else is going to go wrong. We've de-escalated, but the tension is still quite high.

[DongWon] Well, you realize the stakes of the escalation are different than you thought, and it's not about... Yeah.

[Howard] One part of that is the meta...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The understanding that there is a lot more story to come.

[DongWon] 100%.

[Howard] That's... I guess I'm a big fan of meta.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Not the company?

[Howard] No.

[Mary Robinette] You've actually reminded me of actual escalators. So, at the latest WorldCon, as we're recording this, was at the Seattle Convention Center. And they had these, like, endless escalators. It was unbelievable, because you would go in and at first it seemed normal. You would go up an escalator, and that's fine. And then you would go around the corner and then you would look up through four more flights of escalators that were directly in a row, and you're like, what. Is. Happening. Now?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think when you're thinking about your story, there is something to be said for letting people know that there's another escalator past this one, that like, oh, no, things are going to keep going up. That this can be a form of really nice tension, but it can also be a form of dread...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] As well. And so it's thinking about, like, what are you doing and why? How much of this do you want them to know?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, the thing with of course it's not going to work. Like, well, obviously we're going to go up yet another escalator. It was unreal.

[DongWon] Well, thinking about the meta, there's something that's really important to keep in mind. There is a term that we use in hiking, called a PUD. Which is pointless up and down.

[laughter]

[DongWon] It's when you get to a ridge, and you know you have to get to the next ridge, but you've got to go down first, and you're like, God damn it, this is going to be so frustrating, I have to go down just to go back up. Right? And I think you see that a lot in stories, and this is sort of where, again, going back to the romcom miscommunication trope, that often feels like a PUD. Right? Because you know where this story's going, so it just feels like you're spinning your wheels for a little bit, because this has to be a movie and we're only at minute 40 and you know this is a 90-minute movie. Right? And so knowing you have to go back down just to go back up means that there wasn't enough escalation of the actual stakes, of when you need to go from floor one to floor three. Instead, it feels like we're just staying on floor one, and why did we have to go down.

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that I really like about the PUD is that the problem isn't the going down and back up, it's that you don't learn anything by...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Going down. And that's the thing that will happen with that trope. We aren't earning anything by their breakup. It's... There's usually nothing of interest on the other side of that argument. And so that's, I think, one of also the problems when people are just repeating something that they see in media without understanding the stuff that's behind it.

[Erin] And I was going to say that you don't learn anything by going up and down. So if you thought you were doing a PUD, but then it turns out there's like a magnificent view that you weren't expecting, then you'd be like, wow, I still had to go all this way, but I would have never seen this, I didn't realize it was around this corner. And so ideally if you're going to use a miscommunication, you should learn something about the character or they should learn something about themselves that therefore means that when they come back together, they both have a better sense of who they are.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If they're just arguing over, I don't know, whether the sky is, like, blue or teal, that is not going to tell you anything about who they are. But if they're arguing about something important, which that may be, depending on who you are...

[DongWon] If there's a Disney park at the bottom of the escalator going down that turns out to be a surprising delight, then it's fine to be down there. Right? You need to have true character development along the process to make it work.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] At risk of overextending the metaphor...

[DongWon] We've already done that.

[Howard] I overextended a knee going down on a hike. I mean, people who hike know this. Down is not necessarily easier than up.

[DongWon] Oh, it's worse. Yeah.

[Howard] If you do down wrong...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You do down for quite a distance...

[laughter]

[Howard] Before you stop doing down, and you injure yourself badly.

[DongWon] Down is where the real pain is. Yeah.

[Howard] And...

[Mary Robinette] This is why I don't ski. I just skid.

[Howard] So, bringing it back to the metaphor, de-escalation does not necessarily need to be easy on the characters...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] It does not need to be pointless. There can be lessons learned. It's... Because hiking down is not riding an escalator down.

[DongWon] I think, going back to our last episode when we were talking about tension and release, I think one thing we are sort of indicating here is that de-escalation of one thing usually means escalation of something else. If all you're getting is de-escalation and no escalation, then it truly does feel deflating. Right? And to avoid the feeling of deflation, you need to make sure that when you're taking your foot off the accelerator on one level, you need to be presenting the reader with something else to be interested in. Right? And so, in the romcom example when you have that moment of break up, what questions are they actually grappling with to understand what their relationship to the situation is?

[Howard] You mentioned Guardians of the Galaxy, the second one with his dad.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] There's a point in the first one where they're talking about the power stone, saving the Galaxy, and Rocket says, "Why do we care? What's the Galaxy ever done for us?" He's passing on this escalation of the stakes. And then we draw these characters back in by making it personal. They're not going after the infinity stone, they're rescuing Peter from the pirates. And that lesson... I learned that lesson years and years earlier. Yes, it's important to have big stakes sometimes, but if you really want to get the characters moving, the thing that escalates the stakes for them is their connection to those stakes.

[Erin] And to go back to something I was thinking about from the previous episode, the escalation can be in the minds of the characters. It cannot...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] The characters don't need to know the stakes are escalating, just the reader does. So, to go back to the gems of Rohisla, if you have discovered one, and it's the final one in the scene that I'm in, and then we flash over to Mary Robinette who's like, I'm glad we put that fake gem of Rohisla out there.

[laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean?

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] The stake's now like... Nothing has changed for me and my scene...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I'm still in celebration mode. But the reader knows that there is some new piece of information, when will I discover that? And so it raises the stakes on the level... On that meta level of consciousness the reader brings to the table, which makes the reader such a fundamental partner in discovering the story.

[DongWon] Well, the thing that everyone forgets about MacGuffins, or maybe not everyone, but, like, the failure state of a MacGuffin story is when the creators forget that the MacGuffin is a trick. Right? The point of the MacGuffin is to keep the reader's eye on something, not to be the actual stakes of the story. Nobody actually cares about the goddamned eagle, it is the experience of the characters going along the way and their relationship to each other. That's the thing that actually matters. It's his view of humanity as it develops over the course of the story, not the Maltese Falcon.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And things like that, the... With the Maltese Falcon, it represents a proximity to success.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which is often one of the things that escalation and de-escalation can do, is that frequently when you're escalating something, when you're raising things, it feels like we are moving closer and closer towards the climax of the story. And sometimes when you start de-escalating things in sort of the wrong places, people are like, oh, is it over already? Which isn't to say that you shouldn't de-escalate in the first part of the story, it's just recognizing that it has this effect of causing us to think about how close we are to the success or [garbled] complete failure. [garbled]

[Howard] One of my favorite tools for identifying that is the beta readers. Asking them how they feel, how they are responding to each chapter as it unfolds. And a beta reader who is adept enough in the lingo to say, the stakes feel like they've changed. The stakes feel like they've escalated in a weird way. The stakes feel like you're now telling a different story. That's a super useful barometer for me, because often I know what I have planned, but I haven't communicated, via tone or whatever, that this escalation de-escalation is part of a structure that actually is going to hold together.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I was going to say, I think, like, even if they don't know the language, a lot of times people know it without being able to know it.

[Howard] If they can find a way to tell me, yeah.

[Erin] If somebody's writing, like, oh no, oh no, oh no. And then the next chapter is, like, this chapter feels long...

[laughter]

[Erin] What they're saying is, like, in the previous chapter, the stakes were escalating.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Now that they're not anymore, I have lost interest.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] So we have to, like, read through sometimes to figure it out.

[Mary Robinette] It's like the... This is the worst metaphor in the history of... It's like the O'Hare Airport. You go down this escalator, and they've got some stuff up to kind of distract you from the fact that you're descending, and then you've got this endless corridor with another people mover that is totally level, but there's neon lights over your head like luring me on, and it's playing music and the lights along the sides are lit up, and the first time you go through it, you're like, amazing, this is so cool. And you're not paying any attention to the fact that you've just descended into the bowels of hell.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And then on the other side, they don't need to do any of that when you go back up the escalator, because you can see the light and you know that you're going out of that. So, I think that when you do do a de-escalation and you've got one of these scenes, you do have to distract the reader with something bright and shiny to keep them from, oh, this scene is really long.

[DongWon] In New York City, at the 42nd Street subway station, there is a connecting tunnel that goes from the ACE line which is the 8th Avenue line to the Broadway line, the NR line. That tunnel is very long and is packed with commuters. And I used to take this tunnel every day to get to work. And as you're walking along this narrow underground jam-packed sweaty billion degrees tunnel, on the beams overhead are signs that are put up that are a poem that you see, line by line, as you walk down this tunnel, that I don't remember the exact text of, but it is a very bleak poem about the experience of being a commuter and having to wake up every day to do this thing. And you... Encountering that message as you walk...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Through this. It's such a different shift of escalation, because you were already feeling like it's eight in the morning, I'm on my way to work, this already sucks, and I'm being told that my life is meaningless and empty because I'm doing this every day.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is a very big bowl of risotto.

[DongWon] It's an incredible shift of escalation that I genuinely love, because it was this weird moment of reflection every day, of reminding me what's important, which wasn't the fact that I was commuting to work, it was the greater context of what am I doing with my life, am I living with purpose, and all of these things, that I think is actually incredible art, even though the rage I would feel at seeing this thing in the morning...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Was boundless.

[Erin] I will say, before you give the homework...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which I'm sure you're about to do, that the minute you said tunnel, I was like, oh, that poem.

[DongWon] You knew what I was going to say.

[laughter]

[Erin] That [garbled] poem about the meaninglessness of life.

[DongWon] That God damn poem. Anyways. On that escalation, I'm going to ratchet things up even further and give you a little bit of homework.

[DongWon] What I want you to do is to look at the outline for your work in progress, whether it's a short story or a novel. Take a look at the high level beats, not like super detailed, but sort of the major beats of your story. And make a mark as to whether or not you are escalating or de-escalating each of your individual plot lines. And then, once you have that map of the terrain, look for PUDs, look for things that are just meaningless drops, look for things that feel deflationary without a rising escalation happening on another level. And once you start to see that structural map of it, I think you'll have a much stronger sense of how to make sure your reader's experience is still pulling them through the story at maximum speed.

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

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Writing Excuses 21.16: Tension and Release as Call and Response

2026-04-24T03:20:58Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.16: Tension and Release as Call and Response

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-16-tension-and-release-as-call-and-response

Key Points: Tension and release? Conflict, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, anticipation, micro-tension. Conflict resolution, end of the fight (physical or emotional), escape for a moment. Safety versus danger, known and unknown. Movement! Release is pacing. Risotto! Genres of the body. Flow. Leapfrog! Season to taste. Frogs in a bag storytelling. Modulation.

[Season 21, Episode 16]

[Howard] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 21, Episode 16]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Tension and release as call and response.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Today we're going to be talking about tension and release as a way to kind of guide your reader through your fiction. A lot of times we talk about conflict as being a thing that a story must have, but I've been thinking more and more that it's tension. We did a whole thing about tension season before last, last season... Previously...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] On writing excuses. So, we're just going to do a quick kind of reminder about what tension is, and then talk about specifically how you can use tension, but also the release of tension, as a way to control how your reader experiences the story. So, I'm going to start with some of the idea... Some of the pieces of tension that we talked about previously. There's conflict, of course, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, anticipation, and then micro tension, which is small pieces of tension. So those are types of tension. What are... When we're talking about, like, release of tension, what are some ways we can think about sort of the opposites of these?

[DongWon] I think, I mean, conflict resolution being sort of the most obvious one. Right? And the end of the fight scene, whether that's a physical fight or an emotional fight. Right? Like, coming to some kind of conclusion where you have that mini-resolution. Right? And this doesn't have to be resolution of the core tension of your thing. Right? The monster can still be hunting them. But you make it to a safe room, you bar the door. You escape for a moment. Right? Or you have a beat where you think you defeated it. Right? And I think all of these can be small releases of tension that give your story... It adds to the pacing. Right? It pulls you through it. Because, to me, tension and release is controlling pacing, is controlling flow.

[Howard] And part of what you said right there, if you resolve the fight, but maybe not the emotional conflict, well, those are two different sources of tension. It's entirely possible to relieve... To release some of the tension. Oh, okay, good, they're not shooting at each other, but they still need to have the big talk...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And they haven't yet.

[Erin] A lot of times, I think about tension, especially in horror, but I think it works in other places, about safety versus danger, and the known versus the unknown. So if you move... And a lot of that is about tension as movement. So you move from one known state, a lot of times, to another known state. So you go from dangerous and known, I know I have to give a speech and I'm super par... Like, I just... It's just going to be so horrible, I know it. But it's dangerous. To dangerous and unknown. In the middle of my speech, the zombie apocalypse occurs.

[laughter]

[Erin] Which is great, I don't have to do the speech anymore.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] However, new problem. But it does resolve the emotional tension of the speech.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then you move on to a new place.

[DongWon] And the reason why release is pacing, in my mind, is because... Okay, so, my worst food opinion is I don't like risotto, and part of why I don't like risotto is that every bite is the same as the one you just had. Right? It just continues to be the same flavor going forward, and the same texture going forward. And so, if you have a book that has, or you have a story that has no release of tension, it can feel very same throughout. Right? Differentiation allows us to observe the passage of time. Right? And so, when you let people have those moments of release, it makes them feel like your story's moving forward, even if the main overarching thing is still not resolved.

[Howard] I was just thinking of... I don't know if it was in Alien Earth or not, but there's a moment where the xenomorph has gotten away...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Now we're all tense, because we can have a jump scare at any point, where the xenomorph leaps out. And then, someone says, oh, we know where it is, it just killed so and so. That's actually a release of tension.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because now I know it's not going to jump out...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Right here. And then they go after it. And now I'm tense again, because they are approaching the place where we could again be jumped by the alien. And so it is a very nice rolling forward of tension and release as we make me tense, and make me relax.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and I think it's not just that it's boring, I think it's also fatiguing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] For the reader if things are at the same level of tension. Like, if you think about a set of stairs, there are landings on stairs in order to give your muscles time to recuperate before you do the next set of stairs.

[DongWon] Exactly. That's why the StairMaster at the gym is the worst thing ever invented.

[laughter]

[Erin] Is it worse or better than the risotto?

[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.

[DongWon] It's better than risotto.

[Mary Robinette] I'm so tense about wondering why.

[DongWon] I know. I know. My dislike of risotto knows no bounds. But the reason we keep going to horror, I think, is it's one of what is sometimes called a genre of the body. Right? It's a genre you feel in your body as you have the tension. Romance, erotica, there's a few... Humor, all of these are sort of categorized as sort of rom... Or genres of the body. And so they're great examples of looking at how tension builds. Right? Humor is also tension, as you tell a joke, Howard, what you called the comedic drop, is you're building tension until you have the reversal, you have the drop that lets the humor sort of be resolved. That's why you can use humor in a horror story to get that little release valve of tension before you ratchet it up again.

[Howard] It's why horror is one of my favorite things to write...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because the whole humor tool box applies.

[DongWon] It's the same skill set, it's just a different resolution.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's why Jordan Peele is one of the greatest horror auteurs of all time, because he's also one of the funniest people of all time.

[Mary Robinette] But you can also use it in things that are not particularly funny...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Or overtly horror. The Spell Shop by Sarah Beth Durst is this cozy, and it's just delightful and charming. But one of the things that she does in it that I think is so fascinating is, like, I could not stop turning the pages, she's so good at the tension and release. And one of the things she does is uses juxtaposition and questions to pull you through. So the opening of the story, our main character's a librarian, there's a coup that is going on in the city. We do not actually see the coup, we see smoke rising in the distance. But all she has to do is get out of the library with her sentient house plant. And just the juxtaposition of librarian, sentient house plant, smoke from coup in the distance, and you know that at any moment, those things could intersect...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And even though they don't directly intersect at the beginning of the book, that is still looming over you for much of the book. And it allows you to be like, any moment now, this anticipation, this juxtaposition of this extremely cozy thing with some real horrors happening in the background...

[DongWon] Well, what's useful also about your list of different types of tension is that you can alternate between them to keep flow moving through the story. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So the game Blue Prince is a great example of this, because you have the tension and release of receiving a puzzle, and then solving the puzzle. Right? And that is one kind of resolution. What made me think of it is in the background, there's also this revolutionary narrative happening, and the succession narrative happening in the background. So as you're getting story elements, that is pulling you through, as you want to know what's happening in the world, who are these characters, why is this house the way it is? At the same time that you're getting the tension and release of the puzzle solving. Right? The game Hades uses a similar structure, in terms of the tension and release of doing a very difficult combat and then dying and then getting more story. Right? So if you alternate them too, as you let pressure off one valve, you have the other one still pulling you, and then you release that one, and the other one's... You can alternate them.

[Howard] I think of it as leapfrog.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] The frog jumps, we're tense, the frog lands, and we've relaxed, and now another frog is going to jump over it. And that pattern... I mean, obviously, if that's the whole pattern all the way through the book, it will get a little stale.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] But as a structure for helping you understand tension and release in your own work, that's a fine starting point.

[DongWon] Well, this is...

[Mary Robinette][garbled] more frogs.

[Howard] You just need more frogs, literally.

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] Because I think, like, again like we talk a lot about how humans are pattern recognition creatures, and if you have the exact same type of tension resolution, tension resolution, the reader already sees the resolution when the next tension occurs, and therefore they don't feel tense. They're like, it's when you have like the hero who's played by a really big name actor in danger in the first 3 minutes of a movie and the person's like, I'm not really buying that, like, I doubt that you got Val Kilmer in order to kill him in minute one. And so when it does happen, it's very shocking.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think playing with different types of tension says, okay, we're going to do this a little bit differently. We got a question recently at a live event about how to make try-fail cycles feel different. And some of it's having a different fail to the same try, or a different try, but the same fail. Changing one thing changes the pattern enough that then humans are like, this is new, and yet again, I'm feeling my emotions.

[DongWon] Well, all this kind of plays into a thing that we're talking about with the difference between shorter fiction and longer fiction. And as you go from a short story to a novel, you need to layer in more plots. You need to go from an A plot to an A plot, B plot, C plot, D plot. And that, having those different layers, lets you alternate when you're building and when you're releasing tension to sort of create this movement and flow that we're talking about. Speaking of tension and release, we've got to take a break for a second. But when we come back, I want to hear from you guys about how you decide where to put those releases.

[DongWon] In life, there's always going to be something you want to get better at. Whether that's a hobby or your writing craft or understanding better how to pursue your career goals. At Master Class, you can learn about writing from a luminary of the genre like N.K. Jemison, who is truly one of the most insightful and thoughtful crafters of imaginary worlds working today. And it fits into real life. There's audio mode, short lessons, and you can follow along on your phone or TV. You don't have to carve out hours, you just have to start. Master Class features the world's best instructors. Unlike other learning platforms, Master Class puts you in the room with the people who defined their field. Not just experts, but the best in the world. There are 200 plus classes across 13 categories, like business, writing, creativity, Wellness, and more. With plans starting at just $10 a month billed annually. It fits into any schedule. The audio mode turns a commute or workout into a classroom. You can download lessons for offline access, and learn on your terms. And it actually works. Three in four members feel inspired every time they watch. 83%, have applied something they've learned to their real lives. And lastly, there's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. Master Class keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. Head to masterclass.com/excuses to see the latest options.

[Mary Robinette] Writers know something a lot of people don't. The darkest, strangest spots can be some of the most personal ones on the page. We make space for them in our work all the time. But what happens when a dark or disturbing thought shows up and won't leave? Not as a story idea, but as something that just takes over. Something that feels completely out of character for you, but your brain keeps circling back to, no matter what you do to try to feel better. That experience is actually one of the hallmarks of OCD, and it's more common in creative communities than most people realize. OCD involves persistent, unwanted intrusive thoughts about anything that matters to you. Your identity, your relationships, your fears about who you are. Along with mental or physical behaviors you feel driven to do to get relief. The harder you try to push them away, the stronger they get. These thoughts can feel very real. Which is what makes them so upsetting. And because OCD is so widely misunderstood, many people live with it for years without knowing what it is. But it doesn't have to be that way. Because OCD is highly treatable with the right kind of specialized therapy. OCD needs ERP, or Exposure and Response Prevention, which has proven to be the most effective treatment. And that's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's leading provider of OCD treatments, and it's covered by insurance for over 138 million Americans. All of their licensed therapists specialize in ERP therapy and will help you learn to take the power away from intrusive thoughts in live, face-to-face virtual sessions. They also provide support between sessions when you need it most. So you're never facing OCD alone. If this sounds familiar, visit nocd.com to book a free call with their team. That's nocd.com.

[DongWon] Okay. So when we went to break, I kind of wanted to hear more about your decision making process. Right? So, when you're putting together a story, what is the thing that's telling you, okay, I need a release here, I need to build tension here? What are those things that are, like, mechanically going into your process there?

[Howard] I'm a big baby.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I do not like being tense. I am not as tense when I'm writing as when I'm reading it. And so generally speaking, I... I like my food much saltier than Sandra does, and so I know that if it's the right amount of salt, I've screwed up. It's reverse for tension. If I feel like this is too tense, then I need to turn it up a couple of notches, and that will be accurate. And that's where my barometer is now. I don't know if that's where my barometer will be in 6 months or 6 years or whatever. But it's... I'm... Life is a moving Target. I just scale things in that way because I've discovered that my tastes are such that I like a little less tension. And so when I'm writing for a wider audience, I'm going to put in more tension than I want.

[DongWon] I like that you're almost, like, checking yourself somatically as you write, of like where am I feeling tension? Is this too much? Then it's like, oh, then that's the right level. Right?

[Howard] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about it... I mean, the challenge in leaning on Howard's metaphor is that it is a season to taste. For me, when I'm using tension, I'm often using it to control pacing, and also to control the effect on the reader. So if I have... If I have a slow scene, it's a quiet scene, it's people in a room and they're having a conversation or, I don't know, making tea. I'm very likely to then try to insert some other kind of tension in order to make that moment kind of tick along, even while giving people the illusion that they're resting.

[Howard] I love this contrast. Because I'm speaking to how am I feeling while I'm reading, and Mary Robinette is speaking to how is the structure of the book working in terms of pacing. And to be honest, I use both tools.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I think a lot of us end up using both tools.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's why it's so important to call out all of them.

[DongWon] Yeah... I...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, this makes so much sense to me with both how each of you individually talk about process, talk about fiction. Erin, I'm kind of curious, like, you write incredibly tense fiction. Like, an Erin Roberts short story has me sweating from line one to the end. Like, how do you think about maintaining that level or increasing it? Do you ever, like, choose to intentionally decrease it? Or do you just make me suffer the whole time?

[Erin] I often go in writing, thinking, how can I make DongWon suffer?

[DongWon] That's... It's successful.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I think that part of it is that I have trained myself... I was thinking, to love tension. Some of this is a lifetime of watching soap operas, which have to create tension all the time in situations that are very familiar. Like... It's a lot of it like who's in love with who and who lied to who about this.

[Howard] So many frogs.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But there's so many frogs [garbled] Like, it's basically putting a whole bunch of frogs in a bag and shaking it...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Is a soap opera. And so...

[Howard] And then you nickname each frog.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well...

[DongWon] The frogs in a bag method of storytelling is what we're saying? Okay.

[Erin] And so I think because I, like, sort of grew up with that as a level of storytelling, I always want more tension. I'm like, they're spending too much time feeling safe. I don't like it. Throw something at them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think also I've learned a lot about tension from singing and seeing other people sing.

[DongWon] Ooh, I love that.

[Erin] When you talked about risotto earlier, I was like, this is how I feel... If you ever go to karaoke or even professional singers who don't modulate...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like they haven't...

[DongWon] Who just belt. Yeah.

[Erin] They have a beautiful belting voice...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But they just belt for 5 minutes straight. After a while, you just tune it out.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And when I'm singing, I like to belt, like, I will watch the audience for, like, when I feel that they're kind of done with it, and immediately modulate what I'm doing in real time to try to, like, do something different, like, oh, that's a perfect time to get quiet. That's a perfect time... Now you know what I can do, like, I'll do something else. And so a lot of it, for me, is very like gut feeling. But in order to do that as someone who's writing a story, I will read my stories to myself, or have the voice of, like, Microsoft Word, read it to me, and feel like, if I'm not feeling tense in this moment, I need to add something else here.

[Howard] Man, if Clippy can make you tense...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You're doing it well.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Clippy makes everyone tense.

[Mary Robinette] You just made me think about a thing about why we modulate in a song, and we do it for emphasis. There are times when we go quieter because we want someone to lean in, and that's also I think places where you have their quieter scenes, where it looks like the tension is dropping, but there's this undercurrent underneath it, that you're like, I have this creeping sense of dread, versus other times when you do belt full out because you're trying to emphasize a different kind of thing. I think thinking about the emotion of the scene is really, like, why you are choosing one type of tension over another, and whether you're doing it as a release or a tightening.

[Erin] Just a yes-and to that. Like, from the singing part of things. When do you... When people sing quietly, they're able to enunciate more, you're more likely to hear the lyrics of what they're saying to actually...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Get a sense of what the words are when someone sings. The louder you sing, the broader your voice becomes, and a lot of times, people don't listen to the words as much, they just listen to the sound of it and the feel of it. And so in writing, I think, in those small scenes, if there's a small detail of tension, like the tension is actually, like, whether or not this person wore the thing on their left wrist versus their right, the small detail that works better in a quiet scene. In the middle of a large fight scene, it's going to be hard to pay attention to, like, what side somebody had something on, because the bigness of it is actually drowning out some of those small details. So having both of them allows you to give both types of tension their demesne.

[Howard] And in the spirit of yes-and, I've got an oh, wait.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] When I was studying audio engineering, I had things exactly backwards, and the instructor in the studio had to come over and tell me, no, you're pushing the faders at the wrong time. I was mixing something where the singers would be really loud and then really whisper, and then really loud and really whisper, as sort of a call and response. And I was turning them up during the loud, and down during the whisper. And he said that no no no no no no no. What you're trying to mimic is the lean in. When people lean in in order to hear something, they concentrate on it, and their brain makes it louder. And so when the soft singing happens, turn it up. Let us lean in. When it's loud, bring down the fader and let us sit back and it washes over us. I do not know how this applies to writing, but it's fascinating to me.

[DongWon] Well, as pattern recognition machines, what we do is recognize edges. Right? An edge will always stand out to us more than the middle of something. Right? So when you have that micro tension response, it gets us to lock in and focus, like, when we're like, oh, wait, what was that punch line? You know what I mean? Even though if the scene isn't overall a funny one, having that little bit of just like friction there lets us refocus and pay attention and lean in, as you were saying, to hear the thing better, and then we can go back to sort of what the baseline of the scene is.

[Erin] Yeah. Thinking of that and the call and response you were talking about, since we put that in the title, is the like... It creates a pattern that you then break. It's like lean in for a hug, this is great, lean in for a hug, this time I stabbed you.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so it's like...

[DongWon] Surprising, yet inevitable.

[laughter]

[Erin] If you know me, yes. So, like, I think that is a thing that allows you to almost lull the reader into thinking that there isn't tension, that we're in a low tension moment, and then allows you to ratchet it up really quickly, which makes that edge that much sharper...

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] To not cut your reader with, but to cut through their attention with.

[DongWon] Cut me, apparently.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And it is that... The thing that we'll see often at the end of a story, that we get this big cathartic snap because of a big tension release.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that's also why you'll see in a lot of places where you get, like in the horror thing where they're about to get out and everything looks great. It's that contrast can provide you with more of a reaction to this new tension.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of new tension, it is time for homework, and I want you, listeners, to consider adding some new tension to your story. I want you to look at an existing thing that you've already written, and I want you to look at it and see if you can spot what in that scene causes the tension. And if there's not anything, that's a good sign that you should add something. Try listening to one of the earlier episodes where we do a whole module on tension that's several episodes long. See if you can add a bit of juxtaposition, see if you can add a question. If there is tension already, what happens to that scene if you change it?

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.15: Using Contrast for Maximum Effect

2026-04-18T02:39:43Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.15: Using Contrast for Maximum Effect

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-15-using-contrast-for-maximum-effect

Key Points: Contrast! Light emotional beat, then dark. Or vice-versa. Dark night before the dawn? All is lost, then success. Or escape, then eldritch horrors. Foils! Bad, worse. Gradations! Clink-boom! Contrast makes the audience pay attention. Songs in a minor key. Juxtaposition. Ironic distance. Whiplash! Compress/expand.

[Season 21, Episode 15]

[Howard] Locus magazine is one of the finest and most respected resources for readers, writers, editors, illustrators, and assorted aficionados of speculative fiction. Locus tells the stories of, and about, storytellers through author interviews, book reviews, curated reading lists, industry news, and more. The annual Locus Awards recognize and celebrate excellence across science fiction, fantasy, and horror, showcasing new and diverse voices in the speculative genres. Right now, Locus is holding their annual fundraising drive. I'm proud to support Locus, and I'd love for you to join me. Visit locusmag.com/igg26 to explore the awards available to this year's supporters. If you're looking for a long enough lever to move the world of speculative fiction, look no further. Locus is that lever. It's the rising tide that lifts all ships. It's the shining city on the hill. Visit locusmag.com/igg26 to help Locus keep the lights on and the future bright. locus mag.com/igg26.

[Season 21, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Using contrast for maximum effect.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] And this week, we're continuing our conversation about moving through the middle of your book. And, one of the things we wanted to focus on, having talked about soggy middles, try-fail cycles, is ways in which you can use contrast to heighten the impact of certain scenes in your book. Right? And when we say that, we sort of mean contrast in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes that is putting a big light emotional beat next to or in advance of a dark beat, just to sort of give you a sense of loss when you get to the darker moment. Or even the other way around. Right? Having the dark night of the soul before your triumph and success. Right? The night is darkest before the dawn kind of thing. Right? And I think some of the examples that we're going to use will have a feeling of being a little cliched, but I think we're reaching for the ones that are very obvious in that way. And, in the back half of this, we want to talk a little bit about ways in which you can sort of make it feel a little bit more subtle, and a little more integrated, and not just the, like, yeah, the dark cave before the hero's success. So, when you're thinking about moments of contrast, what are some examples that you'd reach for, either in your own fiction or stuff that you see out in the world?

[Mary Robinette] So, this... For me, this came about because I was on a panel and one of the people on the panel said that there... That you always had to have a all is lost moment. And I always bristle a little bit about the... Anytime it's like you always have to.

[DongWon] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] Tools, not rules. Exactly. And so what I started thinking about was, like, yeah, the thing you have is the moment where it does look like they have lost everything, and I think it provides this big cathartic beat when you come out of it. There's a bigger contrast between the moment where, oh, no, I've lost everything, and, look, we succeeded. But, when you look at horror, you also get this beat of contrast where it's... It looks like, oh, they're going to get out, and then they get sucked back in and devoured by eldritch horrors. So I think that the contrast does this thing for you, and that you see it in a bunch of different ways, in this really big macro scale, but also a lot of other places. So, I also think about contrast like with foils, like a contrast for the main character.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, those are things I think about with contrast.

[Erin] Oh, let's say you have, like, contrast is like a foil, like a thing to show what the character is like. I was trying to think about how contrast is handled in long running formats, like wrestling and soaps. Where, like, there is no dark night of the soul, because, like, the show is on 300 days a week...

[laughter]

[Erin] And so, like, there might be one person's dark night of the soul, but, like, it will...

[DongWon] That's a really long week, by the way.

[Erin] [garbled] Eldritch horror has consumed my sense of time. But I think, like, that is a... Something like, I was like, well, how does that work? I was trying to think about it. But what they really do use is, like, the idea of, like, this not that. So...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In wrestling, you have your heels, people who are just evil, and your faces, who are like the good people, and people do, like, a heel face turn or a face heel turn. But one of the ways that they do that, when they want to shift what a character is or how they're perceived is by, if you're a bad person, and then somebody worse shows up, then all of a sudden, ooh, you're not as bad as we thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And it makes it easier for you to turn face. And so, like, thinking about using contrast as a way to also reset audience expectations of what's happening on the canvas.

[DongWon] I love the idea of having... Contrast not just being opposites, but also, like, gradations. Right? You can have this guy that you thought was the worst villain, and then the real villain shows up, and you're like, oh, no, the bad guy was just a henchman. The bad guy is actually the nice one. What is truly evil is whatever is happening over there. Right?

[Mary Robinette] It's one of the things that makes us love people who are doing heists. They're criminals.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But they're not bad.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like the way the person is whoever that they're heisting against.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly. Like, Danny Ocean is not a good guy, but Andy Garcia's character, like, that dude's evil.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And so I think having that differentiation really matters.

[Mary Robinette] Something else that I was thinking about was... As a contrast moment was in Memory of... A Memory Called Empire...

[DongWon] A Memory Called Empire.

[Mary Robinette] Which we've talked about in a... At length a couple of seasons ago, but more recently, there's the scene at a restaurant. And it's... They're having a nice meal, and then there's an explosion. And this is a classic kind of setup where there's everything's really lovely, and then things go terribly wrong. And it's often so predictable. But one of the things I love about the way Arkady Martine handles that is that she makes it about something else. But, specifically, she makes it about something else that is also a contrast.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It is the difference between the way food is prepared in one place versus another place, and so you focus on that contrast in the scene, and you're enjoying the nice meal, and then there's this other... This other bigger contrast. So there's a lot of fun things you can play with.

[Erin] I also think contrast can be in a single moment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Erin] All my examples are a little... Very me.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] There's a famous... And I'm going to get it wrong now, so, gee, [garbled Tran don't at me?] but there's a famous General Hospital moment called clink BOOM in which one pair of characters clink glasses after getting married, while another one dies in a car bomb explosion. But what's interesting is that you see both of the things coming. Like, neither one is a surprise. The wedding is being prepared, someone's creeping around, they do that camera angle where you can show that somebody's being followed, but what you don't expect, despite the fact that both these things are coming, is for them to come at the exact same time. So it makes something that you would have thought was, like, super not surprising all of a sudden surprising, because you have to deal with it in a contrast that you weren't used to.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that that's a really good example of why it works, because both of those feel earned, like, even though you see it coming. In Downton Abbey, when they get rid of Matthew, the... It's this big contrast moment. Lady May is having a baby, and then he is driving, and then there's just this random car crash, and he dies. And it's unearned. It doesn't... It comes completely out of nowhere. Which, like, is a thing that happens. But it exists only because there is a contrast... Contract dispute. And it just... It felt cliched, it felt like this is a thing I've seen, this is... There's no surprise, there's no interest, and also they're telegraphing it so much leading up to it, that... Like, if he'd been racing home and desperate to get there, then actually I would have been a little bit shocked if he had died in a car crash, because I was expecting the happy ending to be him arriving at home. And instead, he's tooling along, and he just doesn't know that she's in labor, and it's... Like, birds are singing, and he's enjoying a nice car ride, and I'm like, oh, this dude's dead.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, and sometimes you can just use contrast to heighten moments that wouldn't be heightened without them. So... Just by defying the audience expectation.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And this is a thing that's been used so much, it's becoming cliched. We can think of all the moments in action movies where everything, like, slows down, and they're getting, like, a moody pop song...

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] Over a scene of a bunch of people dying. Right? I think, like, this is a gamer reference, but, like the Gears of War commercial that used Mad World, like, played in this moody slowed down way while a guy is, like, chainsawing aliens in half. And you're like, all right, what are we doing? At the same time, it was like, this is cool as hell. I want to play this game. Because that felt novel and interesting at the time. But the contrast between the two actions gets your audience to pay attention in a way that they might not have otherwise. And can give the feeling of more weight and impact then it necessarily would have been if you just shown the thing in a more quote unquote normal way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was the way it was used in the much older film, Good Morning Vietnam.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the first times they see that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Contrast between the music and the horrors of war. And that one is very generated by the story. It's like, this is music he's playing at the radio station...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] While these things are also happening.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] The thing, and this will not help you right at all, sorry... But the thing that I love about those is that they're often the song in a minor key. And what's interesting about that is that is a contrast right there. Like, I will say, if you want to creep yourself out, listen to Don't Worry, Be Happy...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In a minor key. Because it's so... The lyrics are so bright and the music just sounds so creepy on some primal level. And you start creating story... What I think is really interesting about listening to it is I'm like, I don't trust you that you're telling me to be happy, because the music is not matching. And so I'm actually going to create, in some ways, like, what could be going on here? What's happening with this character? And I think that sometimes contrast can also leave space in us for the reader, in between the two poles, like, something is... There's some, like, gap that needs to be bridged, and the reader can kind of step in to bridge that gap.

[Mary Robinette] I think you've hit on something that there is a distinction in kind of the ways we're using contrast. But what you're talking about right there is creating something that is unsettling because of the juxtaposition of two contrasting elements.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Whereas the other type, where it's like these are very happy moments followed by a terrible moment...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a contrast there where you're trying to create more emotional distance for the character... For the reader to travel, so that you get a bigger cathartic snap. And they're both forms of contrast, but just for different effects.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think this hits on a really important point, and one I want to get into more after the break, but how is distance important for juxtaposition and contrast?

[DongWon] Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed contemplating distance...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] In that little bit of a break that we had. And one thing that really strikes me, as we're talking about both these examples, as you were discussing right before the break, Mary Robinette, is in one way, we have ironic distance instead of, like, expectation setting. Right? when you have, like, the moody music over, or, like, a happy song in a minor key. That creates an ironic distance. That's something internal to the reader, and the reader's expectations, that's creating an emotional distance from the work in a lot of ways. To then have the emotional impact of them coming back into it. Versus the contrasting sort of things within the story of, like, a happy scene followed by a dark scene, or sometimes vice versa, that creates impact from shortening the distance between two different types of emotions. Right? So how do... How are you thinking about distance in these ways, and are they connected in terms of these two different modes?

[Mary Robinette] The way I think about it is using the... Using the... The first moment, say, to kind of set expectations, to place the reader in a specific spot, and then the second moment is kind of like a whiplash or a catapult situation. Where, in order to move from one state to another, you have to move through it fairly rapidly. And, like, the faster you go across a bigger distance, kind of the bigger impact snap it can have.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes that will backfire, because it didn't actually load it enough to get that snap. Like, everything that's surrounding it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But that's kind of the thing that I'm thinking about. I will say sometimes do this by not necessarily having a happy moment before having a big tragic moment, but sometimes making you think, oh, we're dealing with this story problem, and, oh, no, it's actually this one. But there's a contrast between the kinds of things that the character is trying to solve. And the... I don't know. I don't know another way to describe it, other than whiplash. Which can be a negative. But in this case, I think it's a little bit more like a slingshot effect around a planet...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] As if we've done that, all of us.

[laughter]

[Erin] I have. No. So, here's a question. Do you think it matters whether it happens... To the characters but not the reader? So what I'm thinking, we talked about a few episodes ago, the thing that happens where the, like, spaceship is exploding, and then the story rewinds and says, like, 12 hours earlier...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So at that point, you know that, like, every happy moment that's happening in the 12 hours leading up to this, is just the prelude to disaster. The characters don't. They're moving forward in real time. And I'm wondering, like, does that create... Is that the same effect, is that a different effect?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think it is the same effect. Like, there's a story that Justin C. Key wrote, a short story, in which you know that you are reading about someone who is dead by the end of the story. And it is... It's an examination of their life together and it's a form of mourning. And so you're seeing these memories, and there's this bittersweetness because you are existing in both states. And so... And I do think it is... It... I know that it wouldn't work without that contrast, without that awareness. Otherwise, it's like, oh, look, they're at a soccer game. That's cute. And so having that... Preloading that knowledge for the reader does provide that contrast for them as they're experiencing things.

[DongWon] The deep dive project we did last year, Charlie Jane Anders All The Birds In The Sky is all about contrasts. Right? A lot of times, what she's doing is either doing the Greek tragedy thing, of, like, this is going to end in disaster and we know that that's creating contrast in the overall narrative tension way, or directly contrasting two extremely different people by showing us their relationships and the conflicts they have around that. And that lets us see all the unreliability in each of their narrations. Right? We can see the ways in which... I believe her name is Patricia is being unreliable in reporting about her own relationships be... Through the contrast of how other people see that, how other people experience those relationships.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As we were talking, I suddenly had a... Small revelation, which I always enjoy. It's why I like doing this podcast with you guys.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Um, there's a thing in puppetry we call compress/expand, in animation they call it towards and away. And the idea is that if I'm going to jump, I have to bend my knees first, so that's the compress, and then I expand. And so, one of the ways you can think about these contrasting moments is loading energy. And that is also, I think, why some of them don't work. Because it's so obviously not loading energy of any sort. This is the thing where you're at the beginning of the movie, and it's like, look at how happy this couple is... I'm so sad, she's going to die. Because there's nothing else happening in that scene. It's not doing anything. That scene itself is just existing. So it's not loading energy...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In any sort of way. In terms of your expectations, in terms of tensions that you can have. And then when it releases, it's like, but I didn't... I'm set for that.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, that loading comes from stakes. Right? And that emotional investment in how the character sees themselves, how the character feels about other characters. And if you're loading that up with the tension, then when you have that contrast, either through success or failure, that's where you get that big release of energy that makes for an exciting story moment.

[Erin] But how do you not make it feel like, oh, I'm about to have this moment of horrible thing, like, now I've just like lo... How do you earn that, like, the happy moment before the sad... Or the sad moment before the happy?

[DongWon] That is a bit like...

[Erin] In order to...

[DongWon] This is my last job...

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly.

[DongWon] And then I'm going to retire.

[Erin] But, like... I just got my place fixed out in the country. Yay.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I think by doing exactly what Arkady Martine did in A Memory Called Empire, which is that you make that scene about something else. So, you're faking the reader out. It's like the scene appears to be doing something. It is doing something, it is carrying energy for this story. It's doing all of this load-bearing thing, stuff about the differences in their world, about her feelings, about being in this space, about exploring this, her, like, horror that people just eat an entire piece of an animal, coming from a space station, that's just weird, and so it's doing all of these other things. And so, in a way, it's a form of misdirection. You make the reader think that's what this scene is about. And then they don't notice that you're setting them up for this other thing.

[DongWon] But it feels inevitable when that other thing happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? Because you've been lingering in this response and the tension is coming from all the micro contrasts of the scene that are leading into the bigger contrast.

[Mary Robinette] How do you do it?

[Erin] I don't.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You do.

[Erin] I don't... I don't know. To be honest, off the top of my head. I think... I don't think I use contrast as much, because I think I tend to... A lot of times, I like to center my stories in a mood. And so the mood will predominate, so even though there's differences in what is being experienced, it doesn't... The highs and lows are not quite as high or low.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean... I do... I shouldn't have sprung that on you like that, because I do think that you use contrast, but in short form, it shows up differently, I think.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In short form, what we're often looking at is a contrast between the beginning state and the ending state, or the contrast in the middle between the way a character handles things at one point and the way they handle it in a second point. I'm thinking about the contrast... Some of the contrasts that are in Sour Milk Girls. Like, there's the difference in the way we are talking and interfacing with memory at the beginning versus where we moved to at the end. And the reader's understanding of what we are talking about shifts. For listeners who are just coming into this episode, you can go listen to our deep dive on Sour Milk Girls a couple of seasons ago. It will be correct in the show notes, but I don't remember.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think that that in short fiction, because we aren't having to... We don't have as much room to work, that it is often a contrast between beginning and end. Sometimes we use contrast in terms of, like, what I sometimes call an avatar of success. Like, at the beginning, your socks are cold and wet, and at the end, look at how dry and warm they are.

[Erin] Thinking actually about the story that we actually just did recently, which is yours I believe...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which...

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we definitely...

[Erin] Possibly.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, time travel, yes, we have done that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The story, and, like, the contrast... Where I actually think... In thinking about the difference between the beginning state and the end state, and the difference in the way that, like, the character holds power at the beginning and at the end, what is interesting, because I think in some ways, I don't know that contrast is within the character so much as it is within our understanding of what the character's capable of.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to point out that and say at the end of the story, I am using contrast very consciously because I had forgotten that I did this. So, but it's an example of how you can do it in a very tight space. There's a... The very last scene, she is having... She's prepared welcome snacks for her asshole cousin, and it looks like the tension is just, oh, he's here, I have to be hospitable to him because he's my asshole cousin. But really, it's setting you up for, look at how I've been exercising my power this entire time.

[DongWon] Exactly. And I'm going to introduce a little contrast into this episode by transitioning from us talking about the concept to you doing some homework. So what I'd like you to do is to look at a pivotal moment in your book, and add a beat, either before or after, that inverts some element of the original beat. You can switch the tone, the mood, introduce a character or a character that's a foil to your protagonist, or switch up the location in a way that allows you to highlight some interesting aspect of your first scene.

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.14: Because at First, They Don't Succeed

2026-04-10T09:51:23Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.14: Because at First, They Don't Succeed

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-14-because-at-first-they-dont-succeed

Key Points: Try-fail cycle! Failure is interesting. Failure is humanizing. Yes-but, no-and. Yes-but, movement towards the goal, but with a consequence. No-and, movement away from the goal, with a consequence. Four-way box, known-unknown, safe-unsafe. Yes is all about momentum. Try-fail cycles and barriers. Try-fail cycles scale to the story. How many try-fail cycles? Season to taste! Rule of three, but if you want harder, add some, easier, cut some.

[Season 21, Episode 14]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Because at first, they don't succeed.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] And we are talking about the middle again. This time, we're going to talk about a different tool for working through the middle. It's something called a try-fail cycle. You know the old saying, try, try again. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That thing. That is literally what we're talking about. A character tries something, and then they fail, and then they try it again, and they fail. And eventually, they succeed, and you move on to the next problem. So your characters have goals, and in the middle, they spend a lot of time trying to achieve that goal, and then failing. So let's talk about what a try-fail cycle does for us, kind of why we use them, and then some of the tricks.

[DongWon] I mean, I think fundamentally, failure is interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? I think failure is one of the most interesting things...

[Mary Robinette] I'm so evil...[garbled]

[Chuckles]

[Erin] [garbled]

[DongWon] I mean, like... I mean that in a really broad way. Like, even in my personal life, as unpleasant as it is to fail, the most important lessons I've ever learned, or the most growth I've ever experienced, have all come from failure. Right? And so your characters also need to fail for us as the reader to understand them and to root for them. Right? Competence porn can be really exciting and fun, but also, at some point, that needs to run into friction. Competence is useful for showing on screen to establish how bad failure is when it arrives, but in general, seeing how characters confront and overcome adversity is where we get to get into the meat of who they are and what matters to them, and why I care about this story in the first place.

[Erin] Also, if you want to write a really long book, and they succeed really early...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] It's not going to... It's going to be... I mean, I guess you're going to have like a series of increasing... Like the opposite of a series of unfortunate events, like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] A series of successes. But eventually, like, don't you run out? I almost feel like that... It's like that old chessboard puzzle where if you put one grain of rice on the first square and...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then two... Eventually, you reach the moon if you double it each day. Like, you can only succeed at so much...

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Before you like... Won life.

[DongWon] I mean, I've read that manuscript. Right? I've seen that book. And it comes from this place of you want your heroes to be successful and continue to over... Just continue to achieve. Right? And it's exciting as this, like, power fantasy thing. But it makes a really flat reading experience, because it just feels like you're playing calvinball all the time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And I don't know what the rules of this world are because they just get more powerful and defeat people over and over again, and it's like, okay, where are we going?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think at the heart of it, we like to root for someone. It's something that is... It gives you an opportunity to invest, it gives you a source of tension, like, you want them to succeed. And some of my favorite theater experiences have been when the show has been going along, and then something goes wrong, and the actors, like, they have to recover from that, and watching that is so cathartically satisfying. And I think this is the same thing with writing, that you want them to fail in ways that they can recover from, if you are planning to write towards a happy ending, I should say.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Having them achieve their goals.

[Erin] I do wonder if like... Is the human brain, like, they... Do we want some amount of failure in life? So I think about if I was telling you about somebody... Maybe this is only true in, like, my gremlin heart. But if, like, I was telling you about somebody and I was like, they are great. They're rich, they're famous, they've like done all the great things, and I'm like, and their marriage... I feel like everybody would be like, oh, is something wrong? But, it's also great!

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And you'd be like, really? Like, they're...

[DongWon] I think...

[Erin] There's nothing they're not doing perfectly, there's nothing that's bothering them? You know what I mean? I think this... Interestingly, in an era of social media, it's interesting to see... I wonder if this will change. Because, I think we are actually being taught more to only see people at their most successful. And, like, I'm curious about the ways it may change the try-fail cycle in fiction.

[DongWon] Well, I mean, I think in part this is, like, where people's resentment of nepo babies comes from. Right? I mean, I think there's a lot of, like, valuable stuff in there about privilege as well, but I think the degree of the frustration is, like, the sense of like, oh, you've always had it easy, you've never had to overcome adversity. Right? And I think the backlash to creators who are presented as flawless, very successful, over and over again, when some little crack in the armor happens, people descend on them so vociferously, I think because of this exact impulse. Right? I think there's a thing of the artificiality of presenting success at all times, that when that cracks, people really just go all in right away. So, I do think even though we're in this era of still needing to present success online in a certain way as an influencer, as a celebrity, that there's still that human instinct of wanting to take someone down a peg.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think it... It is... It's that, and it's also the... Like the shelter dog with three legs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, oh my goodness, poor thing. Or the way we will help a wild animal, like, oh, no, this pig got stuck in this barbed wire fence, we've got to rescue this pig. Mmm... I love bacon. Like...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's like Charlotte's Web.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's a... One of the things about a failure is that it humanizes someone.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] And... Even if they aren't human to begin with. So, I think that it's important to give your characters failure. I know that... I've heard people say, oh, but I don't want to. I love my character so much, I don't want to be mean to them. I'm like, sometimes you do actually have to do that. So, I want to talk about some methods that we can use to do this. Some of which we've... I've talked about on previous podcasts, which is this idea of yes-but, no-and. So, this is the idea that inherently when your character goes to try something, the reader has the question, is it going to work? And yes means movement towards whatever their goal is, no means movement away from it. Yes-but is movement towards the goal, but with a consequence. And when you've got no-and, it's movement away from the goal, and then with a consequence. So, in the first like 2/3, 3/4 of the book, you are mostly doing yes-but, no-and. And then anytime you need to switch to the character's solving the problem, then you start to give them bonus actions. So you move from yes-but to yes-and. And I want to give... I realize this is all fairly vague. So let me give you a slightly more concrete example. I'm going to use a milieu story. So, milieu stories focus on thresholds, the character has to cross a threshold when they enter the story, they cross another one when they exit. But basically about navigating. So if we imagine that I've got a character who's trying to reach New York for an audition.

[DongWon] Ruby Keeler.

[Mary Robinette] Hmm?

[DongWon] Ruby Keeler.

[Mary Robinette] Ruby Keeler.

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, all the way. So then I look at, well, what's stopping them? Is it a lack of funding, is it the mechanical failure of transportation, cultural stigma against New York, not sure how to apply for a spot? Whatever it is. I look at what this is. So let's say that they have to get to the airport, they have to get to their airplane. That's the first thing. The first threshold they have to cross. So they have to go through security. Can they go through security? No, and they realize they left their passport at home. So, now can they go back and get their passport? Yes, but now they are running late and they may not make their plane. So, can they get through security? Yes, but now they are even later. And are they able to get to the plane? And then when they get to the plane... It's like, yes, they can run down the thing, but the door's shut. Are they able to get on the plane? No. So there's a solid no closure there. Yeah. So that's a yes-but to get to the plane. Then the next thing I have to figure out is what happens after that. Because after they have a success or a failure, they change their tactic and then try something different. So, that is where I look at this list, lack of funding, mechanical failure of transportation, all of those things, and I look for the one that is kind of still keeping me in the milieu thread for this part of it. All of the other things that were happening were all still, like, about the environment. Where you run into story bloat is when the consequence is from something else. It's like, are they able to go to New York? No, the plane is closed and they have a cultural stigma against New York. It's like, okay, well, now I have to open this, like, character thing that may not have been in there. But, having said that... I know I'm talking a lot. You can...

[DongWon] No. Please.

[Mary Robinette] But, having said that, if I only stay in a single mode, if I only stay with. like, one of the MICE threads, it can be pretty boring and pretty predictable.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things you can do is introduce one of the other plot conflicts that are going on. Because now your character has two opportunities to fail with everything that they try to do. Which introduces uncertainty, it gives two things for the reader to root for. So if I say, no, my character couldn't get on the plane, and instead of saying no, they couldn't get on the plane... No, they couldn't get on the plane and they're going to have to rent a car and lose money. Okay. That's still... We're still dealing with the character... The threshold. But if I said... Excuse me, the milieu. But if I said no, they couldn't get on the plane and they have to borrow a car from their parents and their parents don't believe in them as an actor...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Now you've opened up this character thing, so what you're doing at this point is you're sacrificing one goal for the sake of another. And that can introduce a lot of interesting tension and things like that. We're going to take a pause for a break. And we're going to come back, and I'm going to let the other two talk.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So... Welcome back from break. Erin! Would you like to say something?

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I do want to say something, and I don't know if it makes any sense. Which just makes it even more exciting.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But I was thinking about a four... So I love a box, just like in general, I love, like, a four box, like, in thinking about writing. And I was thinking about horror and the way that place is used...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And the way that I did it was how known is this place, and how safe is this place? And you can move people in horror from, like, this is a known place that is safe to this is a known place that is unsafe. Somebody broke into your house. Then you, like, run out and you're like, oh, I went to an unknown place that appears to be safe. Wait, now that's unsafe. And so you end up playing with... And so, I was... I had never thought about it like that before, that in some ways, that's a way to take yes-but, no-and...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And see, like, how can you use it on multiple...

[laughter]

[Erin] You're showing me a box.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like, how can you make it work...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] On these different levels at the same time, because I think that that is a really fun way to think about it, and, like, to extend this, like, way of thinking about it. Because I've also heard... My dad always talks about it, like, writing stories with yes-but. He's an English teacher. And so, like, that's a way to do it. But I love this idea of adding a box.

[DongWon] Let's... Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Just a small... The yes is all about momentum. So you can control the amount of momentum a story...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Feels like it has by whether you're giving them yes's or no's before that consequence.

[DongWon] And I think what's really interesting is thinking about momentum. You kind of hinted at this early before the break, too. But things that you can do in act one will feel very delaying in act 3. Right? So the try-fail cycle you set up of her, like, forgetting her passport and all of that... If that was in act 3 B, I would be like, what are you doing? Why isn't she in New York yet? Right? Or also, sort of with your grid of, like, known and safe, like, making progress through that grid, there also has to be an accumulation of knowledge as we're beginning to understand the space and the danger more. If they stay in the same place of unknown unknown... You know what I mean? Not that that was the grid that you created, but... They don't know what the monster is and they don't know the space. I think as time goes on, that horror movie's going to feel very flat and random. Part of it is starting to figure out what the monster is and starting to get more control over the space. Right? Like, then if you look at, like, an Alien movie, it's always about understanding the creature better, and then moving through the space. And really what you're doing is the audience begins to understand the space better as the character understands the monster better.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think what... Just not to derail this entire episode into horror, like, one of my favorite things to do is to take somebody into a space they believe is known.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, this is the... You seek sanctuary in the church, or you make it to the school, or somewhere that you're like, I completely understand this space and I know the monster now. I've made it to known and this is great. Known and safe, and then it's like, actually, something is wrong. The place isn't what you thought it was, the preacher...

[DongWon] The priest is the one who summoned the monster.

[Erin] Exactly. The preacher is a [garbled] He's got red eyes. Oh, no. Like, you know enough to realize he's actually...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The villain. And I think that's where it's really fun, because you can play around with the way you're answering those questions.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and the other thing is... Like, with the oh, no, it's [garbled] the priest...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] One of the things, I know I did it, and I see other people doing it, is not understanding the difference between a try-fail cycle and a barrier.

[DongWon] Yes. I've been thinking about this because you were talking about this the other day, and...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, what I see, and this is, again, going back to the soggy middle, one of the things that I see happen particularly to short story writers who are like, oh, and suddenly it's a novella, is they put too many barriers in.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, the difference is a barrier is something that is between you and the goal. Like, maybe a literal door. Sometimes it's a priest. The try-fail cycles are the things you do to try to get through that barrier. So, if I've got a door, the smartest thing I can do is try the knob. Does it work? No, and I don't know where my keys are. Can I find my keys? Yes, but one of them breaks off in the lock. Am I able to... Like, do I grab a crowbar and just pry the door open? Yes. I'm through the door, and then I can do a... Yes, I'm through the door. Am I able to get to the barrier and so... Am I able to get to my goal? And now I can do a big try-fail cycle...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is, am I able to get to my goal? No, and there are bees.

[DongWon] Well, you can also play with an evolving understanding of what the barrier is.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] You can start... I mean, I think about this as a GM a lot, where the players will be like, oh, the barrier is the door, and I'm like, no, the barrier is you don't know what's in that room.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And you get into that room to find out. And so, if you can't get through the door, you need to find another way in. And sometimes I see players get stuck there, and I as GM realize, oh, I need to signal better what the actual barrier is.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Because everything I've done is see, this door is the barrier. So all they're thinking about is the door, instead of communicating to them, no, your actual goal is that there are papers in that room that will lead you to the next step of this quest...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Which is to figure out who murdered the queen. I don't know...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] [garbled] stuff up. Like, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I think it really is focusing on the barrier over the goal.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You're reminding me of shaggy dog stories. Like...

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] People tell in camp. Where the entire... Google this if you've never experienced it. But, like, it's literally like a joke in which...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] It's like a series of locked doors, and each time you open the door, the next one's locked and you have to run back and get the key and... That's the one that we used to tell in camp. Why you didn't get all the keys at once, it doesn't make any sense because each time... It's like another door. And the entire point of that is to frustrate the person who is being told the joke...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] And make them angry and then laugh at them. Which is mean. But, like, that's... You don't want your reader to have that feeling where it's like you're just introducing door after door after door, and not only does it feel like it's too many barriers, but it also feels like the character's not getting any smarter. They're not bringing more keys, they didn't go buy a lock pick. Like, after the 10th locked door in a row, they're not like, wow, this feels odd, like, what should I be doing differently?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, if the try-fail cycle is exactly the same and the barriers are exactly the same, it feels like the character doesn't grow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You could have the same barrier and a new type of try-fail, you could have a try-fail and a new type of barrier, but I think that both the same kind of feels very stagnant.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And something I just want to point out is that you can apply this to character growth also.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And that is one of the things that the character can be like, oh, I should maybe try to change. I'm going to try something. And then like, I'm going to try standing under your window with a boombox.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Does that work? No, I look like a creeper.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And now you've called the police. Like...

[DongWon] I just want to point out, also, that try-fail cycles can be scaled to the type of story that you're telling.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? Like, if you're writing a quiet story about working in a coffee shop, then your try-fail cycle is making the perfect latte. Right? Or figuring out how to carry the milk you need without dropping it from the back room to the front. You know what I mean? Like, there are all these little things that you can do that scale to the size of the challenge that your characters are facing, but it still needs to feel connected to that character's growth. Right? If their central question is are they able to balance the 18 things that they need to be doing in their life, then put challenges in front of them that have them fail at multitasking, and then figure out as they go, they're trying out different strategies.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] When this gets boring is when you're asking your reader to go along with the exact same thing over and over again. It's like a video game [fetch Quest] Right? It's like you went from point A to point B, you deliver it, and then like, okay, now bring this back to point A. And you're like, God damn it, I'm quitting this game right now, because I don't want to walk all the way across this map again for no reason. Right? Versus giving them a different kind of challenge to do that lets you see different parts of the map or explore the space in a different way or interact with things in a different way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I want to, briefly before we depart this episode, talk about how many try-fales cycles you should have. Because it's a question I get asked all the time. And the answer is that it is...

[DongWon] Enough.

[Mary Robinette] Season to taste. But you should understand the effect of the try-fail cycle...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because the answer is... It does depend on the kind of story you're telling. So we have previously talked about the rule of three, that people expect there to be basically three try-fail cycles. You're going to... Three times is funny, third time's a charm, that kind of thing. So they're expecting this one, two, got it kind of beat. Or one, two... Anyway. The thing that you can do is you can manipulate that. So if you want something to feel really, really hard, then you give them four or five try-fail's. And if you want it to feel easier, then you give them one or two. You can also look, when you're manipulating the speed with which they accomplish something, at whether you are giving them successes with a negative consequence or predominantly failures. So if you are... Like, predominantly no's. If you are experiencing something where it just feels very slow, there's a chance that what's happening, even though there's a lot going on, there's a chance that what's happening is you're only giving the character no, and then this happens, and no, and then that happens, and no, and then that happens. It feels like they are never making progress towards a goal. On the other hand, if they are making progress towards the goal, but it feels very easy even though things are going bad for them, you may be giving them a lot of yes, yes, yes. So you do have to sort of balance those two, and there's not an exact metric on which ones you use at any given moment. It's just an awareness that yes is generally related to momentum, no is generally related to backward movement. And that can kind of give you some metrics with which to control how you're handling stuff in the middle.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. We have some homework for you. So for your homework, what we are going to do is think about some barriers. I'm going to ask you to look at the active MICE quotient elements in your story, and I'm going to give you a little refresher. So, milieu stories begin when a character enters a place, they end when they exit it, but all of the problems are about trying to leave. So in a milieu, you just keep them from leaving. Inquiry. Somebody has a question. You keep them from getting the answer. Story is over when the character gets the answer. Character stories, they want to become a new person. You stop them. Give them more angst. And event, they want to establish a new status quo. You stop them from doing that. So those are the goals. You're keeping your eye on that major goal, but you need some barriers between them and the goal. So, what you're going to do is you're going to look at your MICE quotient, make a list of barriers that go with each, and then, from that list, you're going to select a smaller subset that plays well together. So, if you try to do every barrier that occurs to you, it will be too many. This is a way to have this feed from one thread to the other so your story isn't predictable and you're doing lots of new things. Don't worry, in the liner notes, if you visit writingexcuses.com, you will see a chart that shows you, with a reminder of what their goals and what your job is to do to your character as the author, what try-fail cycles to present them with. So...

[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go try again.

comments

Writing Excuses 21.13: Does The Middle Have To Be Soggy?

2026-04-02T12:48:55Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.13: Does The Middle Have To Be Soggy?

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-13-does-the-middle-have-to-be-soggy

Key Points: Soggy middle? But most of the story is the middle! What are people doing in this book? Soggy means nothing's going on. Writers get soggy because (1) mode switch from let's make it worse to let's have some successes, and (2) you just want to get done! Mooshy middle? When verbs don't match expectations. No forward momentum! Stalling! Busy work, or just frustrating. External obstacles, but no internal growth. Romance, with a nothing burger. Give us good reasons for obstacles! Repetitive beats. Tools? Same but different. Emotional implications. Change responses! Go ahead, have the big thing, then follow the ramifications. If there's a good reason to stall, look at the escalation. Build in side quests with MICE. Try-fail cycles! Make it interesting.

[Season 21, Episode 13]

[Howard] Locus magazine is one of the finest and most respected resources for readers, writers, editors, illustrators, and assorted aficionados of speculative fiction. Locus tells the stories of, and about, storytellers through author interviews, book reviews, curated reading lists, industry news, and more. The annual Locus Awards recognize and celebrate excellence across science fiction, fantasy, and horror, showcasing new and diverse voices in the speculative genres. Right now, Locus is holding their annual fundraising drive. I'm proud to support Locus, and I'd love for you to join me. Visit locusmag.com/ igg26 to explore the awards available to this year's supporters. If you're looking for a long enough lever to move the world of speculative fiction, look no further. Locus is that lever. It's the rising tide that lifts all ships. It's the shining city on the hill. Visit locusmag.com/igg26 to help Locus keep the lights on and the future bright. locus mag.com/igg 26.

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[Season 21, Episode 13]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Does the middle have to be soggy?

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] And we are talking about the soggy middle, which is a phrase that you hear over and over again. Middles are often seen as the Sogging... Sagging... Sogging...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Of any storyline. But the truth of it is that most of the story actually happens in the middle. Like, whether it's novels, whether it's short form, most of it is middle. You've got a frame, which is your beginning and end, but most of it is the middle, and it's like, how do you handle that? Transitioning out of the beginning into what's happening into the middle, what I call the end of The Middle, and then towards the end. So does the middle have to be soggy?

[DongWon] I mean, I should hope not. Because soggy feels like a very unexciting slog of an experience. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And, I think, when I'm reading an opening or I'm reading copy or, like, I'm talking to a writer about a project, a question I find myself asking a lot is what are people actually doing in this book? Right? Like, give me some idea of what the action of this book is. Are they mostly walking from point A to point B in a Lord of the Rings style? Right? Is it big council meetings? Is it... Look, like, for this book in terms of what are your characters actually doing to engage with the world and advance the plot? Right? And so I think when the middle feels soggy is when there's a really unclear answer to that. Or you've chosen a thing for them to do that's very boring. Right? So if they just walk from point A to point B, but nothing happens, or there's not an interesting question embedded in that...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's when it starts to feel like, wait, what is the point of this?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I probably should have said, what do we mean when we say soggy?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it's that, that there's nothing going on. I think, personally, that there's a couple of reasons that the middle will often feel soggy to the writer, even if it doesn't last that way until we get to publication. So, one of those is that there's a mode switch that happens at the end of the middle where we have to transition from let's make things worse to now we start to have some successes. We have to start, even if your headache's doing horribly, we have to start closing story questions and wrapping things up, which is harder in a lot of ways. And so it can feel like a slog, because you have to change your mindset about how you're handling it, and a lot of times, you're also entering a phase where you just want to be done with the book. So I think that some of those are some things about why that can happen to the writer.

[Erin] Yeah, it's funny. I've always heard it called the mooshy middle. And I actually don't know if that is the same thing, or just a different thing that goes wrong. Middles are bad. No...

[laughter]

[Erin] Middles are most of the story.

[DongWon] Let's examine the difference between mooshy and soggy...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Wow. Sounds like a fun Saturday night. But I think that like... I was thinking about what DongWon said about the action of... Like, what's the action of the story? Because it makes me think about when games fail, when, like, video games fail, because most genres will have, like, something that's an action, like, are you fighting? Are you talking? Are you jumping?

[DongWon] What are your verbs?

[Erin] And so... Are your what?

[DongWon] What are your verbs? Yeah.

[Erin] What are your verbs? And so, if the verbs don't match, like, what they feel like the story should be, it can... At first, you're just like, oh, I'm learning these verbs, this is really interesting. But if you're like, wait a second. This seems like it should... I should be running, but all I'm doing is talking. I can't actually... Like, this is a story about forward momentum, and I'm still. Then it starts to feel like, okay, the time is slogging down, like, I don't want to be here anymore.

[Mary Robinette] So I think that's a great way to frame it. I see it... that lack of forward agency. Because I think one of the things that will happen is that sometimes people will do that on purpose, because there's some big piece that they're trying to get to...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And, so, like, oh, I have the big battle, but it's not time for my character to get to it yet, they have to work harder or something.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like I need it to happen at the three quarter part of... Whatever thing they have said in their head about why they can't have it happen now. And so they will do something that I see as stalling. Where they include actions that are not... Like, not things that the character needs to do in order to progress. They deliberately put in something to slow the character down, but it's so obviously... It's so obviously a hurdle that could be easily surmounted that it seems like it's there just because they feel like, for whatever reason, it's not time for the big thing to happen yet.

[DongWon] And then it can feel like either busy work. Right? Of just we're doing a bunch of stuff because we're supposed to be doing it, not because it's inherently interesting. Or it'll just feel very frustrating, because it's, like, obviously the answer is X. We know the answer is X. The character's not allowed to realize if that's the answer.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So now we're just wandering around for a long time. A very specific example, but I've been watching The Silo TV show, and really loving it. And the second season, about a third of it is kind of I can tell exactly where this is going and now we're going to spend a lot of time spinning our wheels to get there. And I think that's when it feels soggy. I think it feels soggy when it's like I know I can see where you're going, I know where this road goes, but we're not there yet.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And there's not an interesting reason why we're not there yet. And I think when you're trying to stretch that out, that's when it starts to feel very like, what are we doing?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Sometimes it feels like also there's a difference... Like, external versus internal. And what I mean by this is, like, the big fight is external. I feel like a lot of times people are, like, trying to delay an external thing that's going to happen.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Therefore, they throw a lot of external, like, obstacles in the character's way. But there's no internal growth. Like, so it's like your growth is paused, while you just do this thing and that thing. It's like a training montage. But there's a reason that training montages are montages, and not like actually we go to the gym with you for a year while you master karate. Because, like, it's not that interesting, like, outside.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] It's not just a fun thing to watch.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And the same thing can happen with an emotional plot line, too. Like, in a romance, where they have the artificial breakup in order to prevent having the big cathartic make out scene happen too early, when it's clear that they really want to, or introducing some weird action moment in order to stop that forward character growth. And that can be, like, come on, we just... Let us have the thing we want.

[DongWon] And I think the thing that breaks a romance plot, for me personally, is when the thing interrupting the romance, when they have that fight in the middle, and then it's like, are they going to reconcile? When it's clearly a nothing burger thing. Right? When it's just a miscommunication or it's just somebody's like inventing something in their head, and you're like, this is nothing. They're going to get together, because they should be together. I think when that works, there's a real difference in perspective. There's a real mode in which somebody says or does something. I think about how my favorite Austin adaptations are ones where Darcy's genuinely unpleasant, when it's like, oh, I get why you might not like this guy initially, because he's kind of... Like the Fire Island one. Which is, like, a really lovely, very fun, frothy queer one. But the Darcy analog character in that is like a genuine dick for the first half of that movie in a way that's like really fun. And then when you see the turn, it gets exciting. Right? But if you don't actually put that friction there, if you don't have the commitment to like, oh, my hot love interest is also sometimes a jerk. You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's another version of the, like, unattractive girl takes her glasses off and suddenly she's beautiful. Right? It's like...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] We can tell she's beautiful the whole time. That is a famous Hollywood starlet. You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And so you need to give us this, like, really tangible reasons for that obstacle to exist, and believable reasons. When they feel thin and flimsy, that's when things go slow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm going to mention one other failure mode, and then we're going to go to the break. And then, after the break, we'll talk about tools to address now. The other failure mode that I see, and the thing that I think causes a soggy middle, is repetitive beats. Where it's either, oh, are we fighting the zombies again? But in exact... It's like now instead of in the kitchen, we're in the pantry.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, it's still food stuff that we're fighting them with. It's like you haven't actually changed anything.

[DongWon] This is me trying to play Last of Us, where at some point, I was like, I cannot clear another room of zombies. I don't care about this anymore.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] I was going to say...

[DongWon] I know, I'm wrong.

[Erin] No, no, no.

[DongWon] This is a minority position.

[Erin] It's not about Last of Us, but I am interested when we get to tools after the break, because having written a thing where you just fight zombies all the time...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] We had to think about how do you make it more interesting the 18 million times you do it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because it's fine for it to be...

[DongWon] It's doable.

[Mary Robinette] It's fine for it to be the same problem, it's just the, oh, and we're doing that again. So, repetitive beats, either physical action or the emotional action, where the character is like, oh, woe is me. I am... I will never be popular. I should make some changes. Oh, but I will never be popular. It's like, okay, but...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Who cares?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] You should just... Not that it's that easy to change your mind in real life, but also... I want better for my fictional characters. So we're going to take a little break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about some tools to use to address these things.

[Mary Robinette] Welcome back. We are still in the middle of the podcast...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And hopefully, it's not too soggy or mooshy. What we are going to talk about is some tools that you can use to address things like repetitions, stalling, mode change. So, one of the things that you can do with the repetitive beats is a tool that we've already talked about, which is the same but different. Like, with the Zombies Run, you had to use the same but different...

[Erin] Kind of.

[Mary Robinette] All the time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] All the time. And we had, like, a list because it was, like, first of all, you don't have to do a lot, as I said, when I was using this example last time, to change it. So one thing we said is, like, closer. So, like, same zombies, same place, but they're closer than you thought. There are more of them. They do something you didn't expect. They are different in some way, usually worse. Or they have an emot... There's an emotional, like, implication to what they did that is really, really bad. I still think of one of my... I guess, to spoil Zombies Run, I guess... Close your ears. There's a character who turns out to be immune from zombies, whose mother became a zombie, and mother was killed. And...

[Mary Robinette] Whoosh.

[Erin] There's this huge question of, wait, could he have kept his mother around, because he didn't realize he was immune at that time. And so anytime there has to be something where it's like he's immune, and therefore he can just run through it, but it becomes this big emotional weight...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Of what does this say about the way I handled things with my... Had to put an ax in my mother's head type of thing. Like... And therefore it's different and it's worse each time that I think about it. And so it changes the character of it, even though the one person who's immune running through a crowd of zombies is theoretically the same.

[Mary Robinette] I think that this is a really smart thing, and it's a tool that you can use even if you aren't dealing with zombies, is that one of the things you can change is your character's response to the thing happening again. So, this is what you see often in time loop stories, where there's literally the same beats happening again, but the character's often having different emotional responses.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so that's an example of same but different.

[DongWon] Because you need to feel that growth of the character over time, too. So, they're encountering something that's the same but different, they need to have changed. One of the things that has to be different is the person experiencing it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And then there's the other thing, the stalling, which is where you are putting off the big thing because you need to save it for later. One of the secrets that I have found as a writer is that actually you can just go ahead and have the big thing happen.

[DongWon] 100%.

[Mary Robinette] And if you... If the story is going to be over too soon because you let the big thing happen, you can then look at the ramifications of the big thing happening. You can have an escalation from that thing. But you don't need to stall for getting to it.

[DongWon] Don't force it.

[Mary Robinette] Don't... Yeah.

[Erin] Do you think that ever like messes with people? Like, if there's a certain... Like, if you're in a structure in which people are used to certain things in their genre, like, they're like, this is going to end with the glorious space battle, or the make out session, or the marriage, or the romance, and you do end up moving it forward, like, do you risk losing people that way?

[DongWon] I mean, I think, yes and no. I think what people fall in love with with Game of Thrones, was it did this exact thing. It moved the death of the hero way early in that series. And then it was so thrilling, because it was like, damn, we are in new territory. The person who I thought was the hero of this story got his head chopped off, like a quarter of the way through that book. Spoilers, I guess. I don't know the entire concept of the series. But when that happens, it is the thing that really catapults us into this new territory of, like, we're in a new kind of storytelling. Right? So that's what's really exciting. On the flip side, I think Game of Thrones is one of the best examples of what we might call a soggy middle, because people have been very frustrated with the last couple of books. I personally adore them, but I think the reason people are frustrated is a shift in readers' expectation. I think the readers, in spite of having been told we're in a new type of thing, keep expecting it to return to the expectations of the genre. And I think the last book in particular indicates a real lack of interest in the Epic Fantasy tropes of... The heroic ending that we're all expecting. And what instead these books are interested in are kind of soggy middle stuff, of just a bunch of characters wandering around the world interacting with things. Which, once I realized that, I had a great time with it. Because I'm like, oh, I'm just going to spend time with these people in this world, and that's really fun. So long as I don't care about what happens at the end of this story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. And that's... A lot of it is really the let me signal to you what I'm reading. Like, I just finished reading this Japanese novel called Tatami Galaxy, and it's a Time Loop kind of story... Sort of. Anyway. So there's a bunch of things that you see happening more than once, and it really is this character just bumbling around. But once you realize, oh, that's what this story is about, about someone who can't get their act together, then you're like, I understand the ride now, and this is... And carry on please, and amusing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the other things that you can think about when you're doing the stalling, is it's like, no, I do actually have a really good reason for wanting to delay this until this point. Then you can look at the kind of escalation that you've got leading up to that, because a lot of times what will happen is attention drop because we all know, as we've said prev... As DongWon said previously, we all know what it is that they're supposed to do. So... And that's where you're stalling by doing repetitive beats, so one of the things that I will look at often is... I will look at what the MICE quotient elements are that I have active. So it's... Just a refresher, milieu, inquiry, character, and event. And each of those can be a major story driver. So if I have something that is predominantly a milieu story, like Silo, there's a lot of, like, we are in this place, and we have to explore and move around this place, then I can, just for a chapter, introduce a totally different type of conflict that's going to be resolved. This is often what you will see, I think, in some shows, where it's like, and suddenly, we have the musical episode.

[DongWon] Or the bottle episode.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So you can do something like that in the story as long as it feels like there's still a connected causal chain.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's introducing this other, like, this other aspect of whatever it is that's gone wrong. So, if you have had a character who has been dealing with this major status quo shift the entire time, they're trying to defeat the evil Overlord. And then you do this one chapter where they have to deal with an orphan, as a symbol of this larger status quo, now they're dealing with this character issue. And it's just a ramification of that. You have to resolve that cleanly.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Before you can move on. Otherwise readers are going to be like, but what about the orphan?

[DongWon] Well, and I think one of the ways in which that really works and can reinforce the overall arc of your story, is by using them sort of like microcosm, macrocosm. Right? A smaller iteration of the bigger question. It needs to feel connected. But so long as we as the audience can sort of see connective tissue to the central questions of your book, and we can see that this is exploring some offshoot or experiment or aspect or consequence of it, I think that can keep us engaged through the action of it, even if the try-fail cycle of this subplot is not connected to the overall success. Right? I think a show that does this incredibly well is Scavenger's Reign which is one of my favorite shows of recent years. Each episode is very episodic, of, like, here's a new situation, here's a new monster, here's a new thing they're dealing with. But how they deal with it is central to the thematic questions of the show, of what is it to be in community with other people, what is it to exist within a larger system? Right? And because each of the try-fail cycles that they encounter are addressing that bigger question, it always feels engaging and exciting. And also, there's a part of it like they're just good little stories, too. You have to make sure that if... When it feels like you're wasting my time is when you're actually wasting my time. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And executing on these sort of mini arcs, you have to put as much thought and character into them as you would for any other arc, even if it is kind of a side story or a side quest.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think that's the key, is one of the other things that will happen with these is during that stalling is you can do a side quest that isn't connected and isn't... Like, I read something where they were... The side quest was we're going through these very tall poisonous plants. No one venture off the path and touch one of the poisonous plants. And, shocking everyone here, is someone ventures off the path and touches one of the poisonous plants...

[Erin] What?

[Mary Robinette] And someone is like, fortunately, I have this antidote, and they give it to them and they continue on their way. And I'm like, what was even the point of that?

[DongWon] Yeah. That's nothing. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But the thing with the side quest, like whether it's the orphan or whatever it is, is that... That keeps it from being just a side quest, that keeps it connected, is if it has impact on the character that affects the way they are dealing with everything that follows...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That. That's... It's like I sometimes say it's like if you're on a road trip and you have to pull off the Interstate to get gas, you may as well make it interesting.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And if you're on a road trip and there's a roadblock, you may as well make it interesting. But there's no point in going to go look at the world's largest ball of twine if it's going to take you 500 miles off your...

[DongWon] Yeah. The character needs to change or our understanding of the character needs to change.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. [garbled]

[DongWon] If neither...

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Or of the world.

[DongWon] Or of the world. And if none of those things are happening, then, truly, cut it. This doesn't belong here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You need to find another way to pad out the word count of your book.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So I'm glad as we were coming towards the end of this, that you mentioned try-fail cycles, because next week, we are going to be talking about try-fail cycles. Which is another way you can adjust pacing and things in the middle, and we're going to get really granular at that. So, I'm going to give you some homework.

[Mary Robinette] I want you to grab a book or a short story, and I want you to read the first page, and the page that's in the exact middle, and then the page at the end. And what story threads from the middle... From the beginning are still alive in the middle? Like, when you look at the beginning, it's like there's this character and they seem really unhappy. Is that character still around in the middle? Sometimes that's going to be a product of, like, it being a multi POV, but, like, what's going on, and how do you think that is working?

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

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Writing Excuses 21.12: Breaking Down Barriers - Environment

2026-03-27T09:28:45Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.12: Breaking Down Barriers - Environment

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-12-breaking-down-barriers-environment

Key Points: Barriers? Environment: Desk, office, light, sound, etc. Standing desk, monitor, window, comfortable keyboard, sound. Desktop with dual monitors, and laptop. Clean desk, dual monitors. Dark cave and natural light. What am I running from? Check senses. Desk, story, or world? Sound or quiet? Pavlovian training. Windows, chairs. Playlists. Tiredness. Troubleshooting? Run through your senses. What is distracting you? Pay attention to signals. Figure out what to do to fix it. What do I need to do to fix this? What are you avoiding? Watch out for your phone's distractions. Turn off notifications, customize do not disturb. Smart watch buzzes! People in your environment? Signals for interruptible or not. Reading glasses.

[Season 21, Episode 12]

[Howard] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses At Sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 21, Episode 12]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Breaking down barriers - Environment.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] This week, we are talking about the barriers to your writing process. We started off a little earlier this season talking about this sort of track of the curriculum this season, that is talking about, like, how do you find tune your process, how do you keep going, how do you make sure that you're in a space where you can keep working on the stuff you want to be working on. And so, we're going to be doing a series sort of following on to the process conversation about what are your barriers to writing? What are the things that are getting in your way? How to analyze them, how to figure them out, and some solutions from us on how to deal with it. So, the first one we wanted to start with is kind of the most obvious, what are the environmental factors getting in your way? And that could be everything from what's your desk setup, where is your office, what's the light like, what's the sound like, these kinds of things. Right? So, I guess what I just want to start off with is for each of us, what is your ideal working environment, and do you feel like your current workspace fulfills that?

[Mary Robinette] My workspace... Like, I honestly don't know what my ideal would be...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because I move around so much when I'm writing. Currently, what I have, and I quite like it actually, I'm in a furnished apartment and it came with a standing desk with a giant monitor. And I find that I love that. I've had a standing desk before, and I really like it because it reduces... Like, I can just walk to the desk, I don't have to worry about pulling things out and stuff like that. But, for me, the things that I found that I need for a long-term writing solution is I have to have a window. If I can't see outside, I get, like, a little squirrely. I need a comfortable keyboard, I need a monitor that I don't have to strain to see. And then I need the right kind of sound. Which varies, depending on project. So, control over my sound...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I guess would be the better way to say it.

[DongWon] That makes sense.

[Erin] It's interesting, because I have two different sort of setups in my apartment. One is sort of my desktop setup, which is a desktop with dual monitors that are exactly the same size. It's just two of the same ones. And I do feel like I'm probably the most productive when sitting up in front of my desk doing that. However, there are times when I just get sick of working. I can't explain it, but I'm just like, oh, more writing.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I don't think you need to explain...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Getting sick of working. I think it's a very normal emotion.

[Erin] Why? And, so, I also have a laptop that I use mostly when I travel. But sometimes I will take it and I will just sit in front of the TV. Which is interesting, because I know I am not as productive. But it's, like, I can work on half productivity but less annoyance at the fact that I have to be somewhat productive. If I sit on my couch and, like, type on the laptop while, like, 18 seasons of American Greed play in the background or some other show, that Cupcake Wars, that, like, is so repetitive that it doesn't really require my full attention, but every so often, something interesting happens and I can look up and be like, [garbled] cheated him out of all that money...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Or, they made a cupcake, and then go back to what I'm doing...

[Mary Robinette] I forgot that when I was in Chicago, I did have something that kind of felt like the ideal thing. I had a desk for work, like, etc. And then I had a chaise lounge that was wide enough for me and a cat for writing. And was next to the fireplace, and a window, and it was glorious.

[DongWon] Yeah. For me, I think a little bit similar. I have my own office in the place I just moved to, and I have dual monitors. One is horizontal, one is vertical, because a lot of what I do is look at contracts. So a vertical monitor is very helpful for comparing documents. I think the biggest thing for me is I need my desk. I need very low visual clutter in my workspace. So my desk is, like, clean. There's, like, nothing on it, aside from the devices that need to be there. And then... I think that's like one of the biggest things for me is just, like, not a lot of visual diversity where I'm looking. My biggest struggle is around natural light. I like to work in a little dark cave. Also, I really like natural light. Right?

[laughter]

[DongWon] So I think finding an easy way to balance those two things is the thing that I have yet to quite figure out at this stage. In part, my office is also, like, where the projector is set up to watch TV and stuff. And so it has really intense blackout curtains that I could just open. Do I? No. Which results in having a secondary thing which is I often take my notebook and go outside and sit outside and work if I'm doing something that's not computer based.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I'll go sit... We have, like, a little picnic table outside so I can sit at that and work. Or just making deliberate time to be, like, I'm going to sit in the garden for a little bit because I've been in my little cave all day. So I think balancing those is part of the trick and figuring out what do I need right now in terms of natural light, in terms of having, like, this little dark space that I can focus and concentrate in. It's an ongoing, sort of, like, how do I balance this?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I find that when I'm... It was interesting when you asked me what my ideal place is, because I've spent more time thinking about what gets in my way than...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, like, what am I running from instead of what am I running to? If that makes any sense.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So what I tend to do, because I have ADHD and I do get distracted with shocking ease, in hindsight, that was my whole life. But, like, I will run through my senses to kind of check to see, is it... When I'm bouncing off, going, it's like, is it a thing that's happening with the desk? Is it a thing that's happening with the story? Is it a thing that's happening with the outside world? When it's a thing with the writing space, the recommendation I have for folks is literally run through your senses...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sight, sound, touch, scent, and taste. And, like some people, like, I cannot write with the TV on.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's a...

[DongWon] Sound is a big one for me. My last apartment before this one was next to a major road. And having moved, I can tell how much just the constant road noise was draining me at some level. That I had [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And now, like, having a nice little quiet room has been so much better for me.

[Erin] Speaking of sound, I'm remembering the time I tried to, like, Pavlov dog myself into writing more constantly, years ago, where I had a specific song that I would always listen to at the beginning of every writing session, to the point where, like, I just associated it so heavily with writing that I could put it on... It had nothing to do, it was like a random Tracy Chatman song, but I was like, okay, like, this song is on, it's time to write now. Because it... listening to y'all, I'm realizing that I'm sort of, like, a disembodied, like, consciousness...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In that I think, like, a lot of times I just screen out everything that is happening around me and, like, unless it is really big, I will not notice it. Like, I wear noise canceling headphones in my house 99% of the time. And so when storms happen, it startles me, because until the actual thunder hits, I have missed the 18 other cues...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That we are in the middle of a storm.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Oh, it got darker. Like, oh, this happened. Like, I've missed all of that until... It's like Googling, and I'm like, what's happening? Are we under attack?

[DongWon] [garbled] totally...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Oh, no, it's thunder.

[DongWon] Capable of working anywhere.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I've seen you work in, like, noisy bars, in airports, in hotel lobbies, like, in your hotel room, that I wish I was more flexible where and how I could work. There are a couple of tricks that I have for, like, working in places that aren't my normal space of working. You know what I mean? And, for whatever reason, this last couple weeks, we've been staying at this retreat center, and there's certain spaces here I work great in, and certain spaces I don't. And my room, unfortunately, is one that I don't work great in. And over the past few days, we've been limited to our rooms, and I've noticed that my ability to work is gone. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I finally realized that I needed to sit facing the window because I've been sitting with my back to the window, facing into the room, and I was like, oh, look outside, it's better.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Also, those chairs are not comfortable.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is like one of the things that was happening to me in Chattanooga, that I didn't realize how uncomfortable my chair was. That it was...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Just uncomfortable enough that I was getting up, but not so uncomfortable that it was causing problems. And when I switched chairs, weirdly, the chair that worked best for me was, like, one of those old wood schoolhouse chairs...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which just ergonomically fit me exactly right. So that was better. One of the things that I... I've also done the pavlovian training of myself. I have a writing playlist which is instrumental versions of power anthems which I love. Like violins with '80s rock power. It's just amazing. But I also... I started doing Brain FM, which is binaural sound, and I was like, nah, this is science driven. I was just like...

[DongWon] Sometimes, who cares?

[Mary Robinette] But sometimes who cares. And it is deeply annoying, because it works really, really well.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I turn it on and I do get more focused...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And I get more work done.

[DongWon] 90% of the time, I want it quiet. 90% of the time, it's just me working in silence. But there are certain times where I'm getting in a headspace where it's like my brain is too noisy, and I need something to, like, suppress that almost...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] In a weird way. And so a friend of mine made this playlist that we call work heavy, that is just like really pounding driving... It's like industrial horror rap basically.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And it's like, the lyrics are fast enough and loud enough that you don't really make them out, but also, like, if you stop and listen, you're like, what's happening?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What am I listening to? Anyways, they made this thing, and I use it all the time. And it really helps me, like, power through a block in a certain way. Because... It's just sometimes it's also, like, the beat and the aggressiveness will just be like, okay, I'm going, I'm doing the thing.

[Erin] It's funny. I'm thinking about like how tiredness also affects all of us.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because when I... I also, like, I have a regular playlist that I listen to. And normally it's fine, like, I would ignore it, even though it's songs with lyrics or what have you. But the more tired I get... Late at night, if I'm still working, I will easily get distracted by the song.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think because I want to be sleeping. And so my brain's like, I don't want to be doing this anymore...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I'm done with you. And so I actually have to switch to instrumental. It's the only time that I listen to instrumental, is, like, late at night when I'm still trying to focus, because I think I do focus more, and it's the one time that I need the extra boost to, like, carry me through my actual physical state, which is like...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Oh, this is not quite working for me.

[Mary Robinette] And just for our listeners, we are going to be doing a whole episode about physical fatigue later.

[DongWon] Yeah. But let's take a break there. And when we come back, I want to talk more about how to troubleshoot these problems.

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[DongWon] Okay. Welcome back. Yeah, so, we've been talking about understanding what your ideal workspace is in terms of these different sensory things. Right? Like visual, sight, sound, sort of physicality sitting in your chair and things like that. How do you start troubleshooting when something goes off? Like, when you're having a problem, how do you work backwards to is this an environmental factor?

[Mary Robinette] I really... So, I really do sit there and run through my senses.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And sometimes it will involve sitting in the chair and going, what is distracting me right now? What's pulling my attention? And, like, I will sometimes journal it. It's like, is there a problem with the story? And it's... I become aware that it's an environmental thing when there's not a problem with the story, and I know where I'm going, but I still keep getting up.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's usually a trigger... Or a cue. And if I... If I'm doing some journaling, like, is there other stuff? Because sometimes it is the fate of the world. Which, we will, again, be talking about later. But usually if I sit or stand in my spot, like, what is making me feel unsettled right now? I also have to have a clean desk and for the long... Most of my life, I was not, but now I realize how important that is. So, that kind of thing.

[Erin] Yeah. I think for me, like, being... Because a lot of times, I'm ignoring my body... When something comes through, like, I need to pay attention to that signal. So, like, I will be sitting at my desk and be like, it is hot in here...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And realize suddenly, I'm like, oh, I forgot to turn on the air. Whatever. It's Texas. Like, it's hot and I'll be like, but, wait, keep working. And I have to remember that the three seconds it's going to take me...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To go adjust the air or put a fan on is worth all the lost... Because it feels like, oh, I don't want to step away from what I'm doing, but then I'm going to think in like 30 minutes or 10 seconds, God, it's really hot, I'm so hot right now. Like, this is so annoying. And so I think it's like, for me, it's less being able to recognize the signal...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And more knowing what to do with it. Because I think it can be... This will sound weird, but, easy for me to ignore things...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, I have not eaten.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So sometimes I'll also think, like, have I eaten today?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Am I hot? Like...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] What is happening? And try to, like... But I never thought of it sense-wise, which is interesting... Like, what the senses are. Because it may be that I'm noticing it without even realizing it.

[Mary Robinette] Well, that was the thing that I... That was the thing that made me realize that it was my chair, was that I was like, what is... What is it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And just bumped through the senses.

[DongWon] I mean, the thing that I struggle with sometimes is exactly what you're talking about, Erin, in terms of overcoming the threshold of I need to deal with this. Right? The, like, I'm uncomfortable right now, but, like, I need to get up and go get a glass of water... I need to turn the fan on, because my room is hot. Or, I need to spend 5 minutes researching a solution to the problem that I'm having of, like, my pens are all over my desk and it makes me insane everyday. What's a better place I can put my pens? I need a caddy or a thing or something. Right? This also leads to the flip side of it, which is sometimes I end up buying 18 different productivity things that make no difference at all to my life.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And I'm someone who's very easily swayed by the aesthetic thing that looks nice, and then does not meet my function for whatever reason. There's an old YouTube video that I think about all the time that has a key line in it which is sometimes expensive things are worse.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think about that a lot sometimes when I'm like, this notebook is very beautiful. It's not meeting my needs as a physical object that increases my productivity.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will, in those cases, what I will also check is, is the thing that I'm working on something that makes me want to flee? Like, if it's something that makes me want to flee, then you're not actually thirsty.

[DongWon] Yeah,

[Mary Robinette] You just want to get away from this.

[DongWon] You're just being avoidant.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You don't actually need a new pen light, like, it's... Right now. And so, I... When I am good person...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I'm laughing because I just remembered a week ago when I changed the ink in my pen for no reason...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And clearly, I just didn't want to do whatever it was.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have done that, and been like, well, Now I need to clean all of my fountain pens.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But I find that if I can... If my desk is clear, then my notebook is there and I can make a note to myself that I need this thing. So, like, running through the... You had said, let's talk about some of the things we can do to...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Solve problems. I've already talked about some of the sound things. Sight things is one of the things I actually want to flag for people, because our phones are visual stimulus...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And they are designed to get your computer... Your noise. So all of the things that are happening on your computer. So, Nurse made apps like freedom.to. I have a minimalist app on my phone. Just turning off notifications.

[DongWon] Even just customizing your do not disturb setting so that you can turn it on, and then you know that, oh, if the school calls, it'll still come through...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Because I set up my do not disturb properly. Right? Even just taking the 5 minutes to do that could be really helpful.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have a bowl that I put my phone into that's on my desk. It's an aesthetically pleasing Bowl. But the action of pulling it out of the bowl is so specific that I notice it, whereas when it's just on the desk, like, that's... You set the phone down all the time and pick it up. So it wasn't enough of a this is different. You set it there because you didn't want to use it. I know some people use a bag to stick their phone in. Which is just one... It's... You have to figure out what the barrier is...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And the opening the bag to put the phone in was too much of a barrier...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So the bowl works better for me.

[Erin] It's funny because I feel like I'm the opposite way, but the same. Totally makes sense. Which is, like, I wear a smartwatch because I think digital watches are a neat idea...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] To call back to a previous episode, and I just like the fact that it will buzz if something is happening that I need to pay attention to. So, to me, I think the danger is... If I'm just getting an email, I actually don't find that distracting. I can easily process, is this something I need to do, is it new work, is it...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like a thing... Cool, I'll deal with that later, and I use, like, a very not complex, but I use, like, a tagging system in my email to say, like, I have to respond tag.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So I'll just be like, okay, tag that to respond, then I won't forget about it. And I know it came in. But I don't check my phone to see if anyone has texted me or called me, because if they did, I would know, it would have buzzed. So there's no reason to just look, and I found that before I had the watch, I would pick up the phone, thinking, like, oh, maybe somebody in my family texted me, and, oh, let me check the state of the world while I'm holding this. Oh, God.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But the notifications won't tell me about the state of the world, they will only tell me about the state of...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] People who are trying to reach me in this moment. And I can easily, like, for me at least, distinguish between what's important there and what isn't. And I don't freak out thinking I'm missing things, which I think is a thing for me.

[DongWon] I also do literally the opposite. But because my job requires me to not miss messages when they come in and get those notifications. So, I literally have a magnetic charging stand, so my phone is directly under my computer monitor so that if it buzzes, I can look down and be like, oh, my mom texted. I can respond to that later. Sorry, mom. Or my boss is calling me, I need to pick that up and see what he needs. You know what I mean? Like that.

[Mary Robinette] It's funny, because I developed the bowl because my... The thing I used to do was put my phone in airplane mode when I was working. And with Mom, I had... They had to be able to reach me. So, the phone would buzz. Like if somebody needed to get to me, the phone would buzz, and it was... It's much louder in the bowl than it [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But there's a... It's a limited number of people. And the vast majority of things... If they have to wait half an hour or an hour,...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's almost nothing that's that urgent, that is a business thing. So...

[Erin] Yeah. I think for me, the reason also... I was thinking about environment. I'm sure we're going to talk about this in another barrier later, but, like, I think part of environment is people in your environment, like...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Who is in your environment physically. And I think, as somebody who lives alone, like, I think I also like the buzz because it reminds me that, like, I'm actually a person in the world, and people want to reach me, even if it's just to tell me about the great sale...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That I can only get 20% off today. But it makes me feel connected in a way if I'm like, this is the fifth day in a row that it's just going to be me in my house working. And I think that is why I'm like, oh, at least somebody...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] At least the people at the sale care about me type of thing. That sounds bad. But it's nice to see, like, a family member's texting me. Let me see what's going on there. And so I like being able to have it right at hand.

[DongWon] Yeah. I'm sharing space with a new person in my life, and so when we moved in recently, we had to have a conversation about, like, okay, what are our signals for I'm interruptible or I'm not interruptible?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What level of contact do you want throughout the work day? And, for me, it's... The problem with me is it's variable. Some days I'm like, yeah, you can come in and chat and it's fine [garbled] . There's other days where I'm like, I need to be focused on this. So even just coming up with a couple really clear signals to roommates, partners, or whatever it is of door closed, door open, maybe a certain light in the hallway on or off, those kinds of things. Just come up with some system that lets you signal to other people, hey, I'm interruptible, I'm not interruptible. The biggest thing I hear from people is they just constantly have these interruptions and it derails them. So finding ways to protect your space from your loved ones is also really important.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We're going to do a whole episode on how to manage interruptions, because they do happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so, like, how to deal with it when someone has interrupted you. But I have the same thing. Like, I had to... It's a... Even if you have them trained to not interrupt you, sometimes it can still be a visual distraction and make you go, what is going on? So, like, I had to set my desk so that I could not see the door, because my husband would come to the door, and I had a thing on the desk that said I was writing. But he would come to the door and you'd see this slow lean in...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Peering, as he was trying to see what it said, and then slow lean back out, and I'm like... By that point, I've already noticed him.

[laughter]

[DongWon] That's like a cartoon. This is really funny.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But it's also, you like the person, you want to talk to the person...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So it's like distraction is not necessarily them being an intrusion.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Sometimes it is also like protecting our time from ourselves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Having a reasonable response to a piece of stimulus. So you remove the stimulus by...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Not removing your spouse, but just setting it so you can't see them.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I also want to mention, really fast, reading glasses. Because this is a thing that will creep up on people. If you find yourself... You've identified everything else, and you get drowsy when you sit down when you are writing, there is a fair chance that you're having eye fatigue. I was having this thing where I would literally fall asleep while I was narrating, actively speaking. Because of the eye fatigue. And, like, you can solve that with reading glasses that you can pick up at the grocery store. Yeah. Shall we?

[DongWon] Yeah. So, with all of that, I have a little bit of homework for you. Which is, I would like you to use your senses and make a list of all the things that you experience in your writing environment. Sound, smell, texture, weight... Make an inventory of your body's physical experience of your writing space. And then, once you've made that list, consider what serves you and what is a barrier?

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.11: The Cold Open - Action

2026-03-20T04:31:16Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.11: The Cold Open - Action

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-11-the-cold-open-action

Key Points: Starting with an action scene. Demonstrates competence of character. Start in media res? Stakes! A reason to care. Moments of humanity. Establish voice, worldbuilding, and character stakes. Point of view. Prologue or cold open? Prologue means two starts! Go ahead and use your cool technique in the action cold open. Tension! Make the reader like the character. Information and reader emotional reaction.

[Season 21, Episode 11]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Cold Open - Action.

[Erin] Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And we're going to talk about starting your story with an action scene. There are lots and lots of good reasons to do this. My personal favorite is that a good action opening... A good one, for me, demonstrates the competence of the character you want me to like, and now I'm on board. And one of the best examples of this, I think, is the Pierce Brosnan GoldenEye James Bond, where they begin with him bungee jumping on a dam.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And James Bond almost doesn't qualify as a cold open, because it's not cold. We know we're watching a James Bond movie. We already know he's competent. But the reason, for me, that a cold open is so important, an action cold open can be so important is that I need you to tell me why this character has earned the ability to be awesome, and a good action scene can do that.

[DongWon] Yeah. I'm going to fulfill my role as the show's resident hater, and talk about why action scenes as cold opens are really hard to do well. Right?

[Howard] Yep.

[DongWon] I think there's this tendency to want to start in media res, is advice you always hear. Because you want to start with stakes. Right? You want to start with something exciting, you want to start with something that's going to engage people. The problem is survival is not good stakes. Right? Even deep into our story, often, like, if the character lives or not, I don't care about that as much as I care about what happens if the character dies. Right? If the character dies, then all these relationships fall apart, all these people will be incredibly sad, but, like, all of those things have so much more chewiness than my connection to the character continuing to exist on the page or not. Right? And so that is compounded by us not knowing the character yet. Right? Part of why the James Bond thing works is we have a serialized relationship with this character. We know who James Bond is, we want him to do these things, we want him to succeed in his mission. Because we like him, and we know him. Right? Or we have a relationship to him, whether we like it or not. And so I think when you are starting a book with a cold open, the biggest mistake I see... Or an action scene as a cold open, the biggest mistake I see over and over again is thinking that, oh, this is a cool gun fight, that's all I need it to be. Right? And instead, what you need to do is give me a reason to care about these characters that goes beyond just the fact of they might die in this scene.

[Erin] I recently started reading a romance novel called Love Hate Relationship, I believe. And it's...

[DongWon] I love, like, a simple descriptive title. Just, like, tell me what we're engaging with. I was thinking of K-pop Demon Hunters too, which is just like here's the thing...

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's what it is.

[Erin] This is what it is. But it is a story sort of a... It was described to me as a Cutting Edge, if you know that old romantic comedy, which also actually begins in an action scene. In the beginning of the Cutting Edge, the movie, you begin with the two leads, one who is a figure skater, a pairs figure skater, and the other who's a hockey player, both doing their score at top levels, and it cuts back and forth between them. And part of what they play with is the contrast between the two sports, which will then come into play when they become a pair together. But in the beginning of this, it really opened with them, with one of the main characters, in the middle of playing hockey. And what was great about it is you get the small, like, things that you need to think about in a sport. So you're getting a lot of micro tension, like, will I get passed the puck? Will I get the thing? But there was a part where the main character looks up into the stands and, like, one of their parents isn't there. Even though they promised to be there.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And though it was only a moment, it gives... It really humanized the person. You're like, this is why it's so important. And they look up again, and they see the scouts that might send them to the college that they really want to go to.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And putting those moments of humanity in allowed me to then really care whether or not they actually made the shot in the end or they didn't. Because I'm already starting to care about them as a character within this action context.

[DongWon] I would argue that there's three things a cold open really needs to do. Right? One is establish voice. Second is establish worldbuilding. And the third is establish character stakes, not just character bolts. What matters about this character? Right? And so kind of what you're describing with Cutting Edge and then with this book is you get a sense of the worldbuilding. Right? This is about skating, here are the values, it's being good at this thing, all of that. There is the voice of it, which hopefully is coming through in the prose in a way that's really exciting. And then there is, why do we care about this character? Them looking up in the stands and seeing that their parent is missing. One of my favorite examples of an action cold open, pulling from film, is the Matrix. Right? The Matrix starts with this thing that is the most vibe-y, the most voice-y thing in the world. Right? Especially in 1999, we had not seen anything like this. And it was just like mind-blowingly, like, cool and interesting, it was such a strong aesthetic. It was such a strong worldbuilding component, because it starts with this idea of like searching for this thing and then you're getting this cool technology, both in terms of how they were filming it and then also the cyberpunky hackery story that's embedded within it. Right? So we're getting that worldbuilding and that voice. The thing that movies can do that books can't do is show you a picture, though. Right? So we actually don't have a lot of character stakes in that scene. And a lot of film examples will have this problem, where you won't have a lot of stakes, because you can replace that with the audience looking at the scene and enjoying the physicality of the scene and building a relationship with the character based on how they look. Right? We like Trinity because she's hot and cool. Right? Like, that is basically what they're relying on, and it works. Right? We like James Bond because he's suave and doing slick stuff. Right? Like, he's jumping out of an airplane, he's, like, shooting guys in an alleyway. Right? These kinds of things work as a cold open. Being able to see the character builds that stake in a different way. When you're doing a book cold open, you need to give us things to care about that character with. Right? Like, I think of Six of Crows as an example where you kind of start... It's not necessarily an action scene, you're kind of, like, going through this, like, weird prison, but you're following this guard, and then it devolves into action over the course of it. But because you learned so much about him and his interiority as we move through this space, by the time things are popping off at the end, and... Spoiler for the prologue... By the time he dies at the end of that, it feels sad because he's encountered things that are way out of his scope of reality, his ability to manage these challenges, and we know enough about him that it hurts, because we care about this guy and his relationship to the world.

[Erin] This explains a lot to me about... What you just said, in that I think when people are writing, sometimes when you're writing your action scene cold open, you're seeing, like, the James Bond gunfight, but your reader may not be seeing it in the exact same way. And as somebody who can't see things in my head a lot of times, those action scenes can leave me a little cold, because I cannot envision...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Everything that's happening, so the details of how cool the gunfight are, I... Like, a lot of times, they just kind of run past me...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And any emotional moment, any character moment, I will seize on. But if there's none of that, and it's just pow, pow, pow... In a movie, it works because I can see it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But in a book, I find it sometimes hard to track, or to know why I should.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, why should I be tracking it, actually?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And why should I be caring about it?

[Howard] This comes back to a tool that we should all have ready access to in our toolboxes, and that is point of view.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] If you are doing your action cold open in strict first person POV, then you don't have the ability to give us someone else's perspective on the awesome thing that the main character just did. We only get their opinion of what it is that they're doing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] But we get very quickly embedded in their voice. Which is awesome. By the same token, when we talk about movies, that's... And comics, that's cinematic POV or cinematic third person, where we tend to follow as if it is a third person limited POV, but we're following via a camera that is looking over their shoulder. And so we will be looking at other people. Knowing that that is what movies do can help you understand how to do it with prose.

[DongWon] Yeah. That's what I would say for the action cold open in prose. Think of it as a vehicle for voice and worldbuilding. The thing that you're doing to pull us in is be so voice-y and so interesting and introduce elements of your world in nuanced and complex ways. And then the last thing you're doing is giving us stakes. Stakes are the failure point, but the hook is the voice and the world. Right? When you're doing that. That's why, when we see an action cold open, it's most frequently in isolation from your main story. And that is either by a different perspective or a different place and time. I would love to dig into that more when we come back from our break, though.

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[DongWon] Okay. Before the break, I was talking about one of the things about a cold open that makes it a cold open, I think, is really important is actually kind of isolating it a little bit from the rest of your story. Right? Either through perspective or through time as a flash forward or a flashback. Erin, before we started recording, you raised an interesting question, which is, what's the difference between a prologue and a cold open? Do you have thoughts on that?

[Erin] No, that's why I asked.

[DongWon] The question...

[Erin] That's why I asked you.

[laughter]

[Erin] But I feel like, like, a lot of prologue... Like, some of the things that you're talking about, I often see in prologues.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which is that they are a worldbuilding delivery mechanism, and what they do is they... They're like, I need everyone to understand that, like, the great shebang is what got this entire thing started. And so I want to put you in the mindset of a person who was there when the great shebang happened, and then it kills them at the end, so we know we're not following them anymore.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Erin] I feel like I see a lot of that sort of setup of world through action...

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] And it's difficult... It's interesting. I wonder if you feel like it... How well it works. Because I wonder if the danger is, number one, that people might not be excited about it, they might not be interested in the action.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But, number two, if they get really interested in the action, and then you pull them to somewhere else in the story, are they going to be like, I wish I were further back or further forward in the actual time period that the story is that I'm now having to read.

[DongWon] You really got to... The challenge of it is, you're almost doing two starts to your book. Right? And that's the challenge of a prologue, in general, is you kind of got to start the book twice. Right? And starting a book once is really hard. Now, that said, you can give us two different tonal openings, and that can be part of it. Right? So your prologue can operate as a here's the one vibe, and then your next open, that's the opening to, like, your actual plot is a different vibe. But it has to be interesting on its own terms. So I'm thinking of Fonda Lee's Jade City as an example of this. It's one of my favorite sort of action cold opens, which is, you get these two idiots who are going into a restaurant to try and rob a guy of his Jade. Right? And that scene gives us the worldbuilding and the stakes. We see what kind of world Janloon is. We see the perspective of why Jade matters so much to these people. We get to see what is capable... What people are capable of doing with Jade, because it... Surprise, the robbery doesn't go smoothly. And, we get all this voice of the world and the characters and the vibes and the stakes of these two idiots trying to accomplish this thing, even though we know they're idiots. Right? And so we start with that specific image and that specific element of we're like, oh, this world is so cool. These criminals are so fun. I want to spend more time here. We're getting this very like Guy Ritchie kind of opening in terms of, like, a crime story. And then when we jump to chapter 1, we're getting the perspective of the daughter, whose name I'm blanking on right now. We're getting her perspective as somebody returning to this city. We get this perspective of, like, oh, this prodigal child coming home. And we get a sense of a different kind of story that we're entering into. So, you can lose momentum by doing that. But because we also have a clear entry point to the story, both these two openings kind of work. One is a cheat, in a certain way, to get all the worldbuilding on the page without having to explain it through your main character's perspective, and then you can just enjoy spending time with the main character.

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that the example that I led with, GoldenEye, technically I would say that's a prologue. Because at the end of that scene, when he flies away in a plane, we end that scene, and we do the James Bond music, and then it's 10 years later.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That feels very prologue-y to me. But it establishes what kind of world we're living in, and it establishes who our final villain will be. Spoiler alert, Sean Bean.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Well, that's that movie ruined.

[laughter... Also... We've ruined a movie... From 20 years ago... He dies...]

[Howard] I want to bounce back to the Matrix really quick.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And draw a metaphor here. The Wachowski's invented the bullet time photography rig...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] Which was essentially looping a set of 100 cameras or something...

[DongWon] Something crazy like that.

[Howard] Around the action so that you could fire them all off at once and create a 3D rotation on film in the pre-digital, pre-CG days. They leveraged that technology in their opening scene. They didn't save it for something later. What is this? Well, it is an establishment of voice. This is a coolness. This is a visual, but it is a cool thing that's going to happen again. And so, when you are writing your action cold open, if there is some cool technique, whether it is using brackets to describe the way aliens yell...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Or whatever, don't be afraid to use it in that opening...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Action scene. Because you are communicating to the reader that this is a thing that can happen again later, and if you do it well enough, like the Matrix did it well enough with the Trinity fight, we're hungry for it to happen again, and you get what is, to my mind, a big win, which is I keep turning pages because I want to read something like that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] From you again.

[Erin] I will say it's interesting, because it creates... I'm always interested in... When stories are creating a different Journey for the reader than they are the characters. And so if you're telling the reader, wow, there's this really cool thing that could happen in the world. A lot of times in fantasy prologues, or cold opens, you'll see, like, the use of a really extreme version of magic or a technology, often a mistake...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Ruins everything. And then you'll go forward and it's like people rediscovering that magic or trying to figure it out. But in the... But they don't know. They're like, oh, I'm just trying this new thing. But in the mind of the reader, they're like, I know what this could do, both positively and negatively. And so it's like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop the entire time. Which is a really fun way of creating tension in a reader, even in a low stakes time for the character when they're just playing around, because you know that, like, Hiroshima happens in 3 days, so this lovely, like, meal that everybody is happen... Is happening around their table isn't just a meal, it's one of the last meals. Or it's leading to something like [garbled]

[DongWon] Well, The Matrix, again, is a great example of this. We see Trinity do the cool bullet time Jump, and then the rest of the movie is when does Neo get to do that? How is he going to go on his hero's journey, to call back to an episode a while back, but how is he going to get to the point where he is able to do the thing that she does. So we get sort of this magic system moment early on of, like, here's how she can break the reality while inside the Matrix. And then he's going to build his way up to doing that. Right? So we get that tease of a possibility. But, also, it is so... Howard, you're absolutely right. Where the Matrix is a primarily voice forward opening. Right? And if you think about all of the Cinematic tools being put on display there, from the technology to the costume design to that horrible green palette that everything has, is this idea of like... They're using voice to pull us in. Right? And so, I'm going to disrupt the idea of this episode a little bit at the end here, which is think less about whether or not you're starting with an action scene, and think more about what tool you're deploying to pull readers in. Right? So, I think action openings are often voice openings, and I think that the Matrix opening has more in common with, for example, the start of the movie Alien, which again is establishing a voice, establishing an aesthetic, and a technology, and pulls you into this incredibly slow pan through the ship, as it shows you the soundscape, it shows you the slowness of things, it shows you the way the technology looks and feels in this movie, which is going to matter a lot more than where the story ends up in the craziness at certain points.

[Howard] I want to enumerate some things, kind of summarize a little bit. DongWon, early on, you ticked off three elements you wanted an opening to do. You wanted...

[DongWon] It was voice, worldbuilding...

[Howard] Voice, worldbuilding...

[DongWon] And stakes.

[Howard] And stakes. And, Erin, you mentioned tension as something you want the reader to feel. And I've said I want the reader to like the character.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] I see these as parallel categories. There's the informational category, I'm giving you information about voice, about world, about character stakes. And there is the reader reaction emotional category of I like the character, you are making me tense, you are... And I'm going to add one just because I want to have three... You are making me interested enough to keep turning the pages. As you are crafting your openings, you need to be thinking about doing all of those jobs...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] With your words. And that's the part that's so tricky.

[DongWon] Yeah. And just to explain a thing, for me, stakes is tension. They're the same thing in my mind. Character stakes is what introduces and maintains tension, and that is also tied up with how you feel about the character in terms of liking them. So I think we're all agreed and kind of saying something very similar. I just wanted to be clear about that.

[Erin] Yeah. And I just wanted to say that something that I've found is that in working with students who are really used to visual media...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] They're used to playing games or used to watching things, is that a lot of that work is happening in ways that are not explicit. So a thing that's explicit on the screen is the action. Like, this guy shot that guy in the face. That is a thing that we know happened. But the, like, I like this guy because, like, after his first three attempts to, like, shoot the guy didn't work, he found another way to do it with, like, a stapler, and, wow, that was really ingenious. Made him seem really competent, made me like him. I understand the stakes because all these different things that we're talking about. And so something that I would challenge people to do is when you're looking at action scenes, if you're patterning a written one after something that's visual, actually go through and look at an action scene and write down all the things that are happening in you. The things that you are thinking, the things that you are doing to fill in the gaps between the actions. Because those are the things that you're going to have to put on the page that the cinematographer and the actors and the music do when you're in a visual form.

[Howard] And I would just like to lean in and say, damn it, Erin, that's the homework I was going to give. Like. literally...

[DongWon] You just gave the homework.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Word for word. Very nearly word for word. Okay. And so, fair listener, I'm sorry. I'm just going to repeat what Erin said in my own words. It's homework time. Okay?

[Howard] Take an action cold open from a movie, and sit down and write the things that are happening in it, in terms of worldbuilding, in terms of setting stakes, in terms of defining characters, in terms of how it makes you feel, with regard to tension, with regard to liking the characters. Make notes about all of those things that happened and how they were done. And then, attempt to write a version of that scene that does the same things using words.

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

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Writing Excuses 21.10: The Cold Open - Voice

2026-03-13T03:05:21Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.10: The Cold Open - Voice

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-10-the-cold-open-voice

Key Points: Voice? Sound, cadence, rhythm... Voice-driven openings. Someone ruminating about something. Aesthetic voice: cadence, rhythm, tone. Story questions. Reason to care. Genre. Failure? Writer trying to figure out what the story is, so the ruminations have no significance or bearing on the story. An interesting person thinking about an interesting thing for an interesting reason. Authority and control. Make it interesting, dynamic, engaging. Don't be too flowery. Beware purple prose. Feels like poetry, like a song. Beware lack of focus, so much ornamentation that the reader doesn't know where to focus. Songs! Voice-driven openings filter readers. It also gives the reader a lens or filter to use. Usually both things at once, voice and action. Interesting characters need to deal with something. Some transition. Do it for a reason. Listen to people. Use movement, songs, other prose to get the rhythm. Read your prose out loud! Use voice sparingly. Balance action and voice.

[Season 21, Episode 10]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Cold Open - Voice.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Erin] And I'm super excited today about voice as a way to open a novel, a story, a whatever you're writing. We've been talking a little bit about the idea that there is a difference between an action-focused opening and a voice-focused opening. And, of course, those are a spectrum, but if it is a spectrum, I prefer to be on the far voice side of things. So, I'm interested to find out why am I doing that, and what am I gaining from it? Mary Robinette, you're the one who sort of introduced this, like, interesting balance that we're standing on. So what would you say a voice-driven opening has in it?

[Mary Robinette] Well, I have to give credit that I became aware of the distinction from Donald Moss. I took one of his classes on opening, and he talked about this as the thing that is kind of one of the pieces that is hooking the reader and bringing them in. In an action-driven opening, it is... Which we'll talk about in depth next week... It is... There's a character who is doing a thing, and that pulls you into the story, an interest in what they're doing. With a voice-driven opening, the thing that pulls you in initially is the sound, the cadence, the rhythm, all of those things for the voice. And these are like... Most stories have both of these things happening. There is a voice and there is action. But there are some that are... That there's nothing happening. So I'm going to give you an example of a voice-driven opening, which I think most people will recognize. But in a voice-driven opening, it's a character who's ruminating about something. There's a thing that they are pondering, or... And it's not always... The character can sometimes be the narrator.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And not someone who's going to appear in the story. But, here's an example:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 98 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] This is [garbled] by your voice, when you read those words.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think, like... I have tried to read this... I can read this in my normal voice, but it calls out for that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Among other things.

[DongWon] Well, I mean, that's part of the specificity of voice is that you're hearing a voice with it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But there's nothing happening in this. There's absolutely no action. There's not even a character in this. So John had a list of things that he thinks are the tools. I have modified it for myself. There's the aesthetic voice. Like, cadence, rhythm, tone, that kind of thing. And there's the story questions, like what do we want the readers to wonder about? And then a reason to care, like, why is this important? And it's not that the reader has to understand... The reader doesn't need to understand why it's important. Yet. But it's important for the author to know. And then you usually want to try to get across genre during that section. And so when you look at that opening, again, there's the story question of, like, who is looking at us that thinks that we are primitive, and that digital watches are not a pretty neat idea? I mean, like, who is this person?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It definitely sets up genre. Because this is... We're clearly being viewed by someone who is not human. There's a definite aesthetic voice. And then the reason to care, why is this important, as we move into the story, we find out that it's really important because a Vogon construction fleet is about to come through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So even though we don't necessarily know yet, when I see voice-driven openings fail, it's a lot of times less that it's voice-driven and more that the writer is trying to figure out what the story is. And so the thing that the character is ruminating about is something that will have no significance or bearing on the rest of the story. So there is no reason for us to invest in it at all.

[Erin] Yeah. Sort of the... As you were saying that, the way I was thinking about it is an interesting person thinking about an interesting thing for an interesting reason.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great way to say it.

[Erin] And it sounds like if any of those three is not interesting, like, their voice is very, like, monotonous for whatever reason, it doesn't have a lot of rhythm and cadence, they're... The story question is, like, should I eat peanut butter and jelly today? And the reason they're thinking about it is, it's Tuesday. Like, unless they're about to get hit by a meteor two seconds after this happens...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's not really... I mean, you can have a... Like, an aggressively boring voice, boring reason, like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I think. Isn't that the one that's about a guy who's like... He's living a really, really boring life.

[DongWon] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Erin] And just wishes his life was better.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so some of the opening is like forcing you to live his really, like, boring life. But I think as long as one of those three is interesting, or all three of those things are interesting, then it really works.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think when we talk about voice-driven openings, it is that thing that I was talking about in an earlier episode about authority and control. Right? This is a place for you to really exert control over your reader, in a certain way, and you're going to be like, no no no no no no. Slow down. We're going to look at this really simple quiet thing. We're going to talk about why pocket... Or digital watches are a neat idea, and how silly that is. Right? We're going to be in a particular perspective and experience something in a very controlled way at the pace that I want you to. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So if that is eating a peanut butter sandwich for some reason, then you have to make that interesting. Right? You have to make that dynamic. And this really relies on a lot of the prose tools that we've learned, around rhythm, musicality, word choice, sentence structure, all those things you have to be interesting and engaging. And I think where a voice-driven opening can fall flat is one, by being too flowery. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think the failure mode of a voice-driven opening is what we call purple prose. Right? Of something that just goes so out of pocket, so deep off the one end of it that you're like, okay, this is just word salad. I don't know what's happening here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] The good version of that uses all of the tools available to you, and the one that I think about the most is rhythm and musicality. I think what drives a voice-driven opening is that thing. of it almost feels like a poem, it almost feels like a song. And that cadence is bringing you deeper into the story, even though no action is happening yet. And so I think that's one thing I want you to think about, is think about epic poetry, think about how Homeric verse grabs you and pulls you in. Think about how Seamus Heaney grabs you and pulls you in, in his translation of Beowulf. Right? Those kinds of things are the things I think to really think about when you're like, How do I set up a long story using just the tools I have at my disposal for description?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The... I'm really glad you said all of that, particularly mentioning purple prose, because I think the problem... It's the same problem on two different scales. The problem with purple prose is that people put in so much ornamentation into the language that you don't know where to focus. And when you have a voice-driven opening that is not about a specific thing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Let that reader doesn't know where to focus or why they should be paying attention.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so, like the thing with The Hitchhiker's Guide is this is about Earth, like that's... We start far out, and we zoom in, but it is just about Earth. It's not about anything else. It's not about the Vogon's coming in, it's not about any of those other things. It's just one thing that it's about. So I think that's one of the things that you can also think about is where do I want to put my readers attention and why?

[Erin] Yeah. I also think, like, you're talking about epic poetry. But I also think just songs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, songs have to catch you really fast. They all... A song is very hooky, in the sense that, like, you don't have, like, a thousand pages to get into that song. And so thinking about songs that you like... Why is it that... If you have a song that you're like, I really feel emotional whenever I listen to this particular song, what is it that it's doing? Now there's certain tools we can't use because they're musical, but a lot of times you can see, if the cadence speeds up, that's something that you can emulate. If they're using a particular rhythm, and I like to talk about sort of, like, the technical, like, poetic terms. So, like you have your iambs, which is like, if I remember, like the da dum da dum da dum da dum. And then you have, like, your trochee, which is the other way, dat dum dat dum dat dum dat dum. In fact, when I was looking at examples of trochee, somebody was saying that Taylor Swift uses them a lot. Nice to... Meet you... Where you... Been... It's very, like, rhythmic, and then it changes. So it establishes a rhythm, and then it changes. When music swells, that could be you using more interesting words or having a story question that comes to the front, because you can't swell the music, but you can swell the meaning.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah...

[Erin] And so thinking about what is a song doing to capture that rhythm, and why... Not to say that your story can't be let the bodies hit the floor, but I think sometimes like, with purple prose, it's like a really... Like a screamo...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Like [screaming]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, that's a lot. For 3 minutes, it's great. For an entire book, it's maybe a lot.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And maybe not everyone is your audience for that. So thinking about what can grab you and therefore how you can grab other people. And with that, we are going to take a short break.

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[Erin] I think right before we went to break, DongWon, you looked like you had something to say.

[DongWon] Yeah. I... One thing I was thinking about, and I think one of the uses of a voice-driven opening, is a little bit filtering your reader. I think it... One thing to think about, with particularly a voice-driven opening, is that some readers will bounce off of it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] There are readers who will pick this up and be like, this isn't for me, this isn't my kind of thing. And I would argue that's a very good thing. What you want to do, in the early pages of your book, are communicate, this book isn't for everyone, this book is for you, Dear reader. And if that reader's like, no, no, no, no, not me, this is for somebody else. They close it and walk away, that's totally fine. You're trying to find your audience. And the way to find your audience is by being fully yourself in an engaging and interesting way. So a voice-driven thing is often communicating things about genre and tone and voice in a way that is specific enough that people will bounce off of it. So if you are out there taking your voice-driven opening to your crit group and half the group is being like, I don't get this, and half the group is like, I love this, then congratulations. I think you've done the thing. Right? You don't need everyone to love that opening, you need some people to love that opening. But the people who it's for better really love it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, and I think also the word filter is like one of the other things that a voice-driven opening does for you besides filtering out who your readers are, it also provides them a filter or a lens through which to view the book. It says, like, this is...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Some of the framework that you should take coming into it. Like, coming in with The Hitchhiker's Guide thing, some of the framework that you're getting is we are viewing this from the perspective of people who are more advanced technologically than we are, and everything that the character experiences is encountering people that are... That think he's primitive.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so that's the kind of lens, the filter that everything that happens in the story is. The other thing that... I want to switch tangents just a little bit and talk about the fact that most books actually have both things happening at the same time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so, Erin, you do a lot of this, where you do actually have a character who's doing a thing in the beginning, but it's also very voice-y. What are the kinds of things that you're thinking about when you're creating that?

[Erin] I think I just don't... It is, again, like the interesting person doing an interesting thing. Once you have created a voice of somebody that you find... That I find interesting, I'm less interested in the boring parts of their lives...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In some ways, and so I want them to be moving. I want them to be having to deal with something. Because it's like if you create a character and you like them, then you kind of want to throw things at them and see if they will catch them. And so their musings about life as a whole are less interesting to me. I'm also a big fan of starting a character in... Not in media res, but in transition. At a point in which they are leaving something behind, or something new is being introduced to them, so they have to... Which is... When we're in transition, we often reflect more on where we came from, and think about where we want to go at the same time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which allows us to use time a little bit. It gives you a reason to flash back to something, it gives you a reason to anticipate something. But it's all through this particular character's voice as they're thinking about it. So I sort of cheat and give myself like, what's a really cool situation that this person could be in? Okay, Now let me see, like, what their voice wants to do and how I can bring it into the story.

[Mary Robinette] I don't know that that's cheating, so much as...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Working smart.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think using time is one of the most important things you can do in the beginning of a book...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] In terms of foreshadowing what's going to happen and reflecting on what just happened, thinking about the distant past. All those things that you can do by rooting your character... Us in the perspective of a character that you can play with time in really useful ways. And voice is how you, like, paper over those cracks. That's how you kind of, like, move us smoothly from point to point as you're bouncing around in time, filling in those details. You can use the voice, you can use that to sort of move us through the action in a way that even if I don't entirely get in a physical blocking way what's exactly happening here, I'll roll with it if I'm enjoying the prose of it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it's like... You just were making me flashback to the metaphor that we've been using about decorating a house.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I've been using... We've been using the word voice, and I should say that I think of it in kind of three ways. There's the mechanical voice, like, first person, third person, that kind of thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] What we're talking about here is specifically the aesthetic voice, and you can have... A building can have rooms, and the rooms can be sterile, or if they have a strong aesthetic voice, it can be... They can totally transform, and so that's one of the things that you're doing when you're bringing in that aesthetic voice is you're saying, okay, well, here's the structural stuff of what's happening, but this is how I want you to feel when you're inhabiting this space.

[Erin] And you're like focus... Like I... In one of my very first studio apartments, I painted three of the walls a blood crimson red...

[DongWon] Wow.

[Erin] And we had one white...

[DongWon] Vibe.

[Erin] It was a vibe. I think like... But my like... All my, like, decor and things, like, reinforced that this was happening. So I think that when people came in, they were like, Murder Town? No, wait...

[laughter]

[Erin] It actually seems like this has a reason.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So I think you can do things that are striking in a voice, as long as it seems like you have control over them and you did them for a reason. And they're like... It seems like you're doing something on purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which is one thing that I like, is to think about, you control the voice, the voice doesn't control you. I think sometimes, and I do this too, like, you almost want to talk about the voice like it's just doing things, like it's run off with your story.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And it can feel like that. But, it's like you ultimately have control. You can change how the voice is, you can change how heavily you lean into it, and try to create levels. I think the purple prose happens when you're so exaggerated because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The entire time. Which is why I think it's always fun to go out and listen to people talk.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even people that you don't know who are, like, the most animated, the... Whatever. They have cadence. There are times they pull back in order to get you to lean in. And then they get excited again. Most people have a lot that they're doing with their personal voice.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you listen to the way we use our voices on the podcast and think about what is it that we're doing, what's the difference between the way that each of us speak, how would we each be different characters in a story?

[DongWon] That's funny. I thought when I was talking about the rhythm thing, that I started nodding my head in a specific rhythm and cadence, and then I started speaking along with that rhythm and cadence, and I'm doing it again right now.

[laughter]

[DongWon] And, like, it's unconscious. You know what I mean? And, like, I think we all... You're right, we all use voice in interesting, dynamic ways as we talk. I mean, we all know someone who's a great storyteller and someone who's a terrible storyteller. That person who is a terrible storyteller is not really using their voice in dynamic and interesting ways. They're not framing it in that perspective, they're not making interesting language choices, and there's prob... Their rhythm is probably all over the place when they're trying to talk.

[Mary Robinette] That also brings up a really great tool that people can use. When I'm learning how to do a new accent for audiobooks, one of the things that they'll often do is give you a movement to do with your body in order to remind you of how it should... What you should be doing. So, like, when you're doing French, you draw your hand along and then you go up.

[oh... Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And this is... So now I'm French, I'm so sorry to everybody that is listening to me...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is a thing you can do.

[DongWon] Yeah. That's a really cool trick. I love that.

[Mary Robinette] And so... And it's a way... Like, it's a way to get an exaggerated form of the accent...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Into your body. But I think that the writing version of that is the song, like putting music on that is the rhythms that you want to use. The other trick that I'll use to capture rhythm is sometimes I will look at a writer that has a very distinctive voice, like Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories has a really distinctive aesthetic voice. And so I'll actually just key in a page of that to get those rhythms into my fingers before I start writing.

[Erin] Yeah. I also like to listen... Watch, like, real people, and by that I mean, like, two people on, like, Judge Judy, or, like, a crime documentary. Just because it's an interesting way to hear how different people speak. When I was in college, I took a class by somebody who was, like, a mentee of Anna Deavere Smith, who is an actress who does these one woman shows where she embodies all these different characters, and he talked about, yeah, how do you change your physicality? How do you change how clipped your speech is, how fast it is? When you go up and when you go down? And I think all that stuff is really, really fun to think about when you're writing, because when you read it, which is also... Like reading out loud is great. Because when you read something out loud, a lot of times you can hear the rhythm and the cadence in a way that is sometimes difficult to hear it from in your own head.

[DongWon] Yeah. And I think the thing to really keep in mind when it comes to voice is that it's best used sparingly, like a seasoning. Right? You can really overdo it. And do I think it is... There are moments where you're going to want that dial turned all the way up. But don't sustain that for too long. Right? I think it's really important to hit it right in the opening. And then ease off of it, and then pick it up again at, like, heightened moments. And I think where, again, we get into purple prose territory is when, like Spinal Tap, you're at 11 and you stay at 11 the whole time.

[Mary Robinette] And it's also something that you can use to... For transitions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, again, using audiobook narration, when I'm doing character voices, I hit the character voice hardest when I come into that character to make a distinction between characters, and then I can drop off because the reader's like, oh, okay, and they will intuit the voice in the rest of it. And so you can use that... You can hit it a little bit harder when you come into a new chapter or a new scene in a short story or heightened places as you're saying. But it isn't something that you have to maintain all the time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's funny. I'm like I don't know that I agree with that. Hit that voice hard!

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Beat it like it... No.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think that like... I think the problem you can come into is when the voice, like, obfuscates... It hides what's happening...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] In the same way that worldbuilding can get in the way of the story, if, like, every animal has like... Is like a gleepglop instead of a cat. At a certain point, like, you need some sort of, like... You don't even know, is this four legs? Like, the gleepglop had four clickerclackers. At a certain point, you cannot understand what is happening... They're laughing over here... You can't understand what's happening.

[DongWon] Erin broke me.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I don't know why you're pretend... Trying to pretend that you can't... That you're not laughing...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] The gleepglop had four tickertockers?

[laughter]

[Erin] Clickerclackers.

[DongWon] Oh, clickerclackers. That's... I'm sorry. Tickertockers, gleepglop...

[laughter Peep Peep other strange noises]

[DongWong] All right.

[Erin] Anyway. So...[garbled] you hear what I'm saying, which is that voice can do that too, where you get so into the voice and the way somebody would say something that you lose the plot of what it is you're saying and so does your reader.

[DongWon] We just did, as we just lost the plot.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Which goes back to this being a spectrum. So it's about what is driving the moment, whether it's... What's driving it is the voice, and I think if you... It's... There's the, oh you can obscure the meaning, but there's also the you can forget to have any action happening.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so there are some moments where you're going to want action to be the driver, and there's some moments where you want the voice to be the driver, but it's not that when the action is driving, that the voice isn't there, it's just it's not the thing that's propelling the scene in that moment.

[Erin] Yeah. In fact, and I'll take this to the homework... I think one of the reasons to have action is the more action that's happening, I think even in our own lives, the less voice-y we become. Like, even your most poetic friend, like, if being attacked by, like, a pack of wolves, probably isn't going to be like, the fur glistened in the moonlight...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Probably more like, oh, crap, wolves, run. Like, and so I think it allows you to distill down to what is happening.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And gives you a break, and then once you reach safety, you can reflect on how beautiful the wolves looked as they tried to tear your throat out.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing.

[Erin] And with that, I will take us to the homework.

[Erin] And your homework is not to put the gleepglop... That is the bonus homework.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But the actual homework is to take three voices that you com... That you know well or can know well. One way to think about this is a celebrity that you do a good caricature of, that you think of, that has a really distinct voice. Someone you know well, like an interesting storyteller. Just anybody that you think, like, I really understand their voice and can get it in my head. And then write something very basic, like that person goes to the grocery store and buys eggs, in all three of those voices. And see what changes in the way in which you tell that story.

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

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Writing Excuses 21.09: Grounding The Reader

2026-03-05T12:15:37Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.09: Grounding The Reader

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-09-grounding-the-reader

Key Points: Grounding the reader? Make them feel fully engaged or immersed in the story. What are you grounding the reader in? Place, time, emotion? Emotion. Where, who, genre. Tale-telling style. Voice-driven versus action-driven spectrum. Grounding in the storyteller. How do you ground someone in the story? Sensory details. Context. Action and flashback. Details that catch the eye. Embodiment and emotion side by side. FAST reactions: Focus, Action, Sensation, Thought.

[Season 21, Episode 09]

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[Season 21, Episode 09]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Grounding the reader.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Erin] And today, we are going to be talking about how to ground the reader in the story from the very beginning. And what we mean by sort of grounding the reader in the story... At least what I mean, is making them feel like they are fully engaged in, fully immersed in the story. And I think that's true whether it's a short story or a novel. A lot of times we talk about novels as being more immersive. But even if you're only reading a 300 word flash piece, you want to feel like in some ways you are in it and you understand where the character is in it. But, I have two questions to start y'all off with. One is what are you actually trying to ground the reader in? Is it the place, is it the time, is it the emotion? What do you think is the most important?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Okay. Good. Love that.

[DongWon] Emotion. I think starting with how the character feels is the most important for me. I mean... But I'm always, like, very emotion forward in how I think about storytelling. And then, if I know how the character feels about the environment they're in, feels about the situation they're in, then starting to build out all of that around them... That comes secondarily to me. But, you had a different opinion.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I think that there's three basic things that you want to establish at the beginning. Where, who, and genre. And I think that you can do those in the first three sentences. And I think you do where with a link to sensory details about the location. I think you do who with their attitude or their emotion. But also what their role is and what action they're engaged in, if you're doing an action-driven opening. And then the genre, you do with the genre specific details. I'm going to use an example. And I'm using an example, this is an action-driven opening from one of my own stories. From Ghost Talkers.

"The Germans were flanking us at Delville wood when I died."

Ginger Stuyvesant had a dim awareness of her body repeating the soldier's words to the team's stenographer. She tried to hold that awareness at bay, along with the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army.

So, the first thing I start with is not actually character. Right? "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died." What that tells you is we're talking to a ghost. So we get our genre specific detail up right at the front. We get a sense of where, she's someplace that's large enough to hold dozens of other spirit circles, and it's some sort of military thing. And we have a sense of who she is, because she's the one who is repeating. You may not know the word medium yet, but that is the action she is engaged in. And you also know from the dim awareness of her body and trying to hold that awareness away, that for her, this is an everyday occurrence. This is her job. So I'm doing all of those things, and that's one sequence. But I could have tried to... I could have flipped that. I could have started with,

Ginger Stuyvesant tried to hold the awareness of her body at bay, along with the awareness of the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army. She repeated the soldier's words to the team stenographer. "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died."

So I'm hitting those same things. The sequence doesn't matter. What I'm doing with that, the choice to start with that opening line was I'm going to give you a question, and I'm going to answer it, coming from the previous thing, of building the reader trust. But I don't think that the order that it comes in matters.

[DongWon] I would agree with that. I also want to add a little bit of extra thought to the thing I was saying earlier about emotion. I think the emotion can also be trying to establish a reader emotion...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] In addition to... Or a character's emotion. Because I think what was interesting to me about both those examples was I had an emotional state in hearing both of those that was very evocative in both cases, but different. Right? The first was almost a sense of immediate panic, of, like, oh, the Germans have surrounded us and I died. Right? Then it's like, oh, that's so bad. The other is a professionalism, a person doing a job and trying to channel a thing under extreme stress and circumstance. And so I think the emotional state communicated about the character and then therefore my emotional state was both really different, but really grounding in both cases. Because I was immediately felt... Not necessarily embodied, because it's a spirit, but, like, I felt in the scene. In a very immediate way, because you were controlling my emotional state really, really effectively.

[Erin] Yes.

[laughter]

[Erin] I agree with that 100%. No, I was thinking... I was trying to, like, recall those in my head and I think one thing that is in there that you didn't mention in, like, the three things, or maybe it's a part of the who, is also, like, the culture and, I guess, tale telling style...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Of the piece. Like, is this a more... Like, what we learn in that section also is there is dialogue, even if it is dialogue of the dead. There's, like, reported dialogue and action. Like, we know that we're in... We know what POV we are in. We understand, like, whether we're going to be getting something that's distanced or close, some of the things that we talked about last season. So there is also kind of the grounding in the way the story is told.

[Mary Robinette] I completely agree with that. So, something we're going to talk about later is this idea of a voice-driven opening versus an action-driven opening, and I think of them as two ends of a spectrum. Most stories are a blend of them. So, in a voice-driven opening like the... At the far extreme of it, I think about, like, the aesthetic voice of it. And that's some of what you're talking about, which is encapsulating both the author's ideas, but also the... Sort of the voice of the character, their history... A lot of the things that we talked about last season about how to make a character feel live.

[Erin] Yeah. I often think of it as, like, for me, grounding in the storyteller, because I am more voice focused. It's kind of like is this an interesting person from whom you would like to hear a tale? Like, is this person... It's like the person coming up to you and being like, you'll never guess what happened to me at the grocery store yesterday, and you're like, well, okay, I wouldn't... Like, all right, let's hear about it, and something about the way in which they say that makes you feel like you're in good hands. Because even if you don't understand everything that's going on, you don't understand all the action, you understand who is taking you through it, and you feel confident that that person is going to do it in a really interesting way.

[DongWon] It's the difference between the Ancient Mariner stopping you versus, like, some guy at the bar. Right? Like, there's a difference in tone and vibe between those two things, and one of those is just really grounding you into different kinds of stories.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Although I would not go any place with either of those, just to be really clear.

[laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] Ancient Mariner at...[fubar]

[laughter]

[DongWon] The problem is you can't go anywhere with the Ancient Mariner. He's stuck with going into the wedding.

[Erin] Now that we have a sense of, like, what are we grounding in, how are you doing that? Like, what are the tools that you use in order to ground someone in the story?

[Mary Robinette] So, sensory details are a big one for me. I think that's one of the things that we're asking the reader to do is to sort of build pictures or words... Like images, sensations... We're asking them to carry part of that with them and to do some of that work. So, if I can tap into a sensory detail that is going to be something that the reader... We talked about this with All the Birds in the Sky. When we were talking about... There was a point where one of the characters sat down in the slushie ground... and we've all experienced that, where you sat down on a bench that you didn't know was wet. And so I think anytime you can use a sensory detail that is... That a reader can relate to, that's going to immediately make people feel more grounded, even if it's not something that they could have experienced. Dan talked about this in his... In a class that he taught on the cruise, about fighting, Jackie Chan will have a character thrown through a plate glass window, then stumble back and hit their head on a shelf, because everyone knows what hitting your head on a shelf...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Feels like. And so I think that if you can...

[DongWon] Hopefully we don't know what getting through...

[Mary Robinette] Most of us don't know...

[DongWon] A plate glass... Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think that if you can find a sensory detail that is... That we can link to, that that's one of the things you can do to help the reader feel grounded.

[dong wall] Yeah.

[Erin] That makes a lot of sense, but I have a devil's advocate question that I will advocate for the devil after the break.

[Erin] All right, we are back. My devil advocacy is ready. This is for you, DongWon. You talked about how difficult it is, in a previous episode, sometimes for action...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To really grab you. But when Mary Robinette was talking about sensory details, I mean, what's more sensory than the spaceship blowing up around you, and, like, all the sounds and the feelings and the noise. So if that has so many sensory details, is there a reason, like, does that help, or does that not help, in terms of getting grounded in the story?

[DongWon] Sensory can help, and I think sensory details are really, really important. I mean, to be really clear, I said start with emotion, but also, like, that emotion is often embodied and grounded in a specific way. What we smell, what we feel, what we hear. But sometimes I find starting in a quieter moment lets me learn more about how a person is experiencing sensory details in a really different way. So I think about Arkady Martine... I use this example all the time, but there's this moment in the novel where a bomb goes off, and the character experiences it. The way the character experiences it is by removing sensory detail first. Right? She has very little sense of what happened and is very disoriented, and then, one by one, the author adds back sensory detail, and that grounds me in that character's experience so much. Right? There's this description of, like, learning what the word for bomb was because that's what they were yelling that wasn't any of the other words that she knew. And so, like, that thing of, like, being able to lock into I can't process everything that's happening, so I'm going to focus on this one detail, feels really grounding and real to me, even though there's an overwhelming amount of sensory detail. I think part of the problem with starting with an action scene is there's too much information. I think oftentimes in an action scene, I need to know who my antagonists are, I need to know what kind of technology level's happening, I need to know what the physical space looks like. I need to know why I'm being shot at. I need to know what my goal is. Right? It's so much information to get across very, very quickly while also trying to heighten the stakes, in terms of, like, this fast paced action scene, that it's very overwhelming for me as a reader. Which is part of why I think it's hard to do well.

[Mary Robinette] I think what you're pointing at is context.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That often the reason that it's not working is because the reader lacks context. So, for instance, let's say that I'm at home and I have upstairs neighbors and I hear footsteps. Contextually, that's fine. Let's say I'm at home and I hear footsteps upstairs, but I know that my upstairs neighbors are out of town. Let's say I'm at home and I hear my cat, who uses buttons to talk, and I hear my cat say, hurry, stranger, and then I hear footsteps upstairs and I know my neighbors are out of town. Like, those are contextually several different things. That last one did happen by the way.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Very unsettling.

[Mary Robinette] Extremely unsettling.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, those are very, very different contexts. And I think what happens with an action... With the fight scenes is we do not have the context, we don't know what we're supposed to care about, what we're supposed to root for, what the objective is. And it doesn't take a lot to give context. Honestly.

[Erin] That's funny. It makes me think of how often you see in films and television, but sometimes books as well, the one big moment of action, and then the flashback. Like, 24 hours earlier, like, oh, I was just waking up and it felt great.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because in that case, it's like... It gives us the anticipation of context. The thing that just happened is going to have all this context that you're going to bring out, and this is a big promise. And you're making it and we will actually get to see it fulfilled on the page. Which I think is really exciting. But thinking about that bomb scene, the thing I remember is... I believe that's a scene that comes right after they're having a meal.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And the character's looking at the person drinking all the water, and is like... Or eating meat...

[DongWon] There's...

[Erin] There's something where they're like...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] They're eating meat, which is, like, insane to them because they grew up on a space station. They're just eating, like, a big slab of meat, and there's a fountain going behind her, and she's like, that is such an insane waste of water. And it was just like this complete moment of disorientation, followed by physical disorientation.

[Erin] Yeah, and I remember that moment.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, I remember the bomb, but I remember the like, oh, my gosh, the water is gross, and the meat, like, how could you be doing that, because it's such a different perspective...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Than I am used to, and therefore, that's a detail that catches the eye. I think one thing that's just interesting with action is we see a lot of action...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think there's just like a lot, like, in film and television, we see a lot of things blowing up. We see a lot of people, for better or worse, getting shot and dismembered. And so I think sometimes we tune those details out because they don't feel new or different. And so... But seeing somebody, like, freak out over a fountain is new and different.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So maybe part of the answer can be that when you're grounding, find a detail to ground in, a sensory detail that is going to catch the reader's awareness in a way that they might not be used to.

[DongWon] It's kind of like the thing you were saying about the Jackie Chan thing of you need to have him hitting his head on a shelf, too, because I know what that feels like. I don't know what getting shot feels like.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It seems bad, but I don't have experience with it, so I don't have a visceral reaction to it. Right? And so this is, again, returning to the idea of the microcosm, where I find the microcosm to be really, really useful. To jump media a little bit, as a GM, and it's sort of an actual play setting, one of the things is the players are my audience in addition to the people who are experiencing the story. Right? You have sort of two layers of audience. But one thing I need to do, one thing I've really learned to do, is when starting a campaign, starting a game, I need to put my players in a small relatable situation to ease them into the character. I need to give them a small stakes goal. And so when I'm introducing the characters, I'll do little vignettes that are actually like pretty quiet moments, but that sort of give them a way to figure out, okay, if I'm this person, how do I solve challenges? Right? How do I figure out who I am? So it's not just like a bombastic opening of, like, I'm so and so, and here's my thing in the tavern. It's like, okay, if you are trying to get across town to make it to a meeting on time, how are you doing that?

[Mary Robinette] And this goes back to the thing you were saying before, about grounding starts from emotion.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That, with that, and also the example that you brought up from A Memory Called Empire, that you could have described that scene in eating at the restaurant and made that food seem totally normal and ordinary. But the character's attitude, the lens through which the character's viewing the world, is one of the things that we're trying to introduce the reader to in most fiction, not all fiction. And so thinking about that lens, why are they doing that?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Why are they experiencing things this way? I also think about it as what is their attitude, their opinion about things. You mentioned a thing in a previous episode about sometimes... Last season, about how sometimes you'll write a character having a big emotion, that's a scene that won't actually appear in the story.

[Erin] Yeah. And it's funny, I was thinking though... I think earlier you were talking about embodiment. And so I think in some ways it's like you want the embodiment and the emotion side by side. So if you're leading with, like, something physical, you want enough emotion so that you understand, like, why is this physical... How do they feel about this physical thing happening to them? If six people get slapped, they will all feel it probably the same way, but they won't all, like, emotionally feel it the same way. It depends on who's doing the slapping, what's happening...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Where it's going?

[DongWon] Why did he get slapped mattered a lot for how you respond to that, and that's the emotion I want to be grounded in.

[Erin] Exactly. Is it a stranger slapping you, is it your mother? That's a very different thing that's going to be happening, even though the feel of the hand on the face is probably very similar. And then on the other side of things, like, if you start from emotion, how can you embody this emotion?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So that you're not, like, floating around just being like, I am sad, but like... Or I don't understand this culture around me, there's something in it that is an embodied sense, so that that emotion has somewhere to live. Because I think sometimes I don't feel grounded in a story when it's so emotional that I don't understand, like, what is even happening. Like it's gone to just, like, feeling the feelings, with no understanding of why they're happening, where they're happening, or, like, to whom they're happening.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've been using a... This acronym recently, FAST reactions. Focus, Action, Sensation, Thought. That these are the places that we feel reactions. The things that we notice, Focus. The actions that we take in response to the thing. The sensations, where we feel it in our body, and then the things we think about it. And it's not that a character has to have all of those all at the same time. But when they're having reactions, they're probably going to have at least one of those. When I want them to have a really big emotion, I'll like clump them. But for me, it is thinking about where does this character hold tension for the sensation? Where does this character hold tension, what things are comfortable for them, what things are uncomfortable? Using the slap again, if we add one more possible person, if this is someone who's into BDSM, they're going to have a different reaction, they're... The action that they take, the sensations that they have, are going to be different on that slap if it's a consensual slap then it would be if it was a non-consensual slap in a totally different... Even if it's the same character... Those reactions are going to be different.

[Erin] I love that. And we're going to now ground you in some homework. And I promise, it's not go slap people. That is not...

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Or be slapped. Don't be. No.

[Erin] Don't slap or be slapped. Or at least if you do it, don't do it because we told you to.

[Mary Robinette] Unless it's consensual, and we love you very much.

[Erin] But I think what I want you to do for the homework is to take something that you're opening and just write the actions. Just write, like, what is physically happening, where the person is, what they're doing, if they're being slapped, what is... What are the sensations that are happening? And then go through and actually figure out, like, write yourself little annotated notes. What is the emotion that you want to have associated with each of those actions? This is how they're going to feel, this is what getting into it. And finally, once you've done that, try writing the scene where it's integrated, where they have the emotions that you annotated mixed with the actions that you've already described, and see what happens.

[DongWon] I love that. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

comments

Writing Excuses 21.08: Setting Expectations

2026-02-27T04:43:03Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.08: Setting Expectations

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-08-setting-expectations

Key Points: Expectations? What is the shape of the story? What are we going to do? Genre, plot structure. What kind of ride will this be? Beginning? First couple of scenes. By the end of the first chapter. Short stories? Small proportion. Microcosm in the first half page or whole page. How do people engage with their world? Hacking the brain and checking the label. Hit the markers to identify the kind of story. MICE quotient. Understanding the character's perspective. The feel, what is going on. Build reader trust. Make a promise and fulfill it. Let readers feel clever. Let the reader figure it out just before you tell them. Raise a question and then answer it. Don't try to be mysterious. Sometimes the surprise can be how something happens. Control the tone, so the beginning matches the rest of the book. Use common human experiences.

[Season 21, Episode 08]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Setting expectations.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] And today we're going to talk about setting expectations. So, we have been looking at the things that you need at the beginning of the story. And, after taking a little break to go dive into my short story, we are back and we are talking about one of the specific things that you need to try to accomplish in the beginning, which is to set the expectations of a reader. So when we say expectations, like, what does that cover?

[DongWon] I mean, I think that covers everything from what is the shape of the story... I think that's the thing I say the most when talking about openings, is, this didn't communicate to me what the shape of the story is to come. What kind of things are we doing? Is this... And that includes genre, but that also includes sort of just like a hint of overall plot structure. And so those expectations for me are really like what kind of ride am I about to go on? I think of it as a roller coaster, and I look ahead and I can see, oh, there's a loop de loop, there's a drop, I don't know what that's going to feel like when I get there and there's stuff I can't see, but, like, okay, that's the kind of thing that says, versus one of those ones that just goes straight up and drops you right back down.

[Erin] I also have a couple of questions about that. Let's interrogate that.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I love roller coasters.

[Erin] No. I'm curious when you say beginning in this case, how large of a piece are you... Like, does it take for you to get that kind of... Is this a one-page thing, is this, like, a three chapter thing? How do they set that for you?

[DongWon] I think this is more of. like. a first couple scenes thing. So not necessarily first page. Like, first page is so much about setting a vibe and tone in a lot of ways as we were talking about in the last epi... Or a couple episodes ago. But I think in terms of setting expectations, I think really by the end of the first chapter, depending on how you've structured your book, I kind of need a sense of not necessarily who the protagonist is, but also, like, a feeling of, like, the kind of protagonist we're going to have. Right? So, if our opening is a cold opening with a character who's not going to recur, I think that's totally fine. But then the action of that should give me some indication of what kind of story I'm in. So I think of Six of Crows as a great example of this, which starts with the POV character who's... Spoiler... Is dead by the end of that prologue or first chapter or whatever it is. But I got the kind of sense... It introduced me to the magic system, to the setting, to the world, but also the like, oh, this is going to be a story of a certain kind of crime story, a certain kind of about resisting oppression, a certain kind of, like, violence will be present in this story. And I'm like, okay, I know what ride I'm on now, by the end of that. And so my expectations feel really thoroughly set by the end of that. And the rest of the book continues to deliver on that.

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to answer that from short stories. Because I think it's the same thing, but I think one of the places that people get into trouble when they're going from novels to short stories, or the other way around, is that it is about proportions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, the end of the first scene of a novel is like 1% of a novel-ish.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And this is a really... Like, I've pulled that number out of my ass. But it's a really small proportion of that novel. And when you look at the first 1% of a short story, you're looking at the first half page, sometimes the first full page. Where you've got something that tells the reader the same thing, but you're just having to do it a lot more economically. So I think of it like if you're making a layer cake, and you decide to cut the recipe down to make some cupcakes. Right? It's the same proportions, you just aren't using as much flour for that cupcake as you do for the layer cake.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, I'm thinking about the same things. Like... But I specifically try to get that microcosm in within the first half page, because I also know how editors read when they're reading slush. And that first half page is where they have to make the decision about whether to turn the page or move to the next manuscript.

[DongWon] I also think that's how readers read it, though. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] I do think readers make their judgment. I think they're actually even meaner than industry folks are, because we... We're in it with, like, a hope of, like, that we want the story to be good, that we want to be excited about this. And so when we're reading slush, I do think there is a little bit more generosity afforded than sometimes a reader, who's like, I'm not paying for that. You know what I mean? That's my general impression from talking to readers, of like, oh, you guys are brutal.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I mean I certainly... When I've been in a brick-and-mortar store and pulling something off the shelf...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To decide, sometimes it's like I decide within a paragraph whether or not I'm going to read it.

[Erin] Yeah. It's funny, I was thinking about, like, how do you set expectations, and thinking about like when I used to slush read, a lot of it was like how the characters... Like, not necessarily what they were doing, but, like, how they were moving through the story. If you think about a whole bunch of people confronted with, like, a clock... A clock table for whatever reason. Like, there are the people who would decide, like, how can I take this apart? What are its components? A technical approach for example. Where there are other people who would be like, this reminds me of time and what is the meaning of time? A more lyrical, poetic approach. And so that tells me as I'm moving through the story, okay, what can I expect in terms of the way that people engage with the world around them. It's almost like the way you think about people engaging with the way around them. If you think about the people you know, like, people carry their own stories with them, but if you have five friends and the same problem, they would all approach it a little bit differently and would probably give you a hint pretty early on as to how they would go through it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And that's... I think that how they would go through it is a lot of it. If you've ever had an experience where you encounter someone... And it turns out that they were just having an off day, that's not the way they carry themselves for the rest of their life. But if you're reading the story, and it's like, this is the experience that you're going to have, but then the rest of the story is not like that... It can be... It can have this real disconnect.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like that's not what I signed up for. I often talk about writing as a drug made out of words. Which is something that I got from, I think, Cory Doctorow, that writing is designed to hack the human brain. Because that is how he would phrase it. But... That with novels, what you're thinking about is a slow release, long acting drug. You're dealing with immersion, like, often a cocktail. And with short fiction, it's a fast-acting thing, it's designed for a very focused experience. You may go through different emotions while you're taking that to treat whatever symptom that you're trying to treat. But that you are picking it up for a reason. And that first page is kind of like checking the label to see is this going to address the symptoms I have?

[DongWon] Yeah. In terms of hacking the human brain, I think about it in terms of pattern recognition. Right? I... I talk about this a lot. Human brains are really wired for pattern recognition, it's like how our cognition works. And so storytelling is our way of communicating patterns that we've observed to other people and to Future Generations. Like, one of the things that makes humans special quote unquote is our ability to discover and communicate information and dangers across generational divides and communities. And so storytelling is kind of how we do that. Right? And so what you're trying to do in the opening is hack that process. You're trying to get me to match the patterns that exist in my brain of... So when I say the shape of the story, I want you just to like... I don't need you to tell me what's going to happen. I need you to hit certain markers that will activate my brain that goes, oh, I'm in a Law and Order episode, or, oh, I'm in a romance, or, oh, farm boy is going to find a sword in like three pages. You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] This is one of the places that I often reach for the MICE quotient. Because that means that in the beginning, I can have a small version of that problem happen. So if it's a milieu story, which is... it's about crossing thresholds and navigating, then I can begin with a little bit of a navigational problem at the beginning. If it's about a character story, I can begin with a little bit of angst. It's not the big angst yet. If it's an event story, something small goes wrong. It doesn't have to be the big thing. A lot of times when you're reading horror, there's just something that is out of place and unsettling. But it's not... like the haunted object has not yet hit the page. So often just saying, like, this is going to be a story about the status quo being disrupted, this is going to be a story about... Where we're going to have to be dealing with trying to be kinder to our self. Like, this is... These often help me make decisions about the kinds of information to give the reader in the beginning to set the expectations for what I want to have happen later on in the story.

[DongWon] I think it's really important that it comes down to perspective. Understanding the character's perspective, how they approach a problem, I think... One of my favorite openings is Lee Child, I be... Is it the first Jack Reacher novel? I think it's called The Killing Floor. And it starts with him getting arrested in a diner. And the main thing that strikes me in that is it's a very staccato opening, because you just feel Reacher tactically assessing everything in the diner. Of like, oh, this is, like, vulnerabilities, these are my entrances and exits, as these cops pull up and start coming towards the diner to arrest him. And you just... Moving through his perspective tells me everything I need to know about this character, everything I need to know about the story I'm about to get, which is going to be a very smart man dealing with very violent situations. And that is precisely what the book is going to deliver for the next however many pages, and it's a great thrill ride.

[Erin] I think sometimes it's about, like, the character, and sometimes it's about the feel, like maybe the milieu, the what is going on. I was thinking about Law and Order, because you mentioned it earlier. And in the, like, original Law and Order, openings are always two New Yorkers talking about something deeply New York-y.

[laughter]

[Erin] And so they stumble over a body.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that really sets, like, place is important, like, there's a New York atmosphere, especially to early season Law & Order that that captures. Like it doesn't start with the victim, it doesn't start with the body already there. It's them being like, oh, I can't believe I gotta be in this rent controlled apartment. Oh, no...

[DongWon] Fo'ged about it. Ah'm working here.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Exactly. And I think it's like, okay, that gives you a sense of what you are getting from the story. And it's like if you liked this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You can get more of it. This is the expectation and we will fulfill it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. It's the [garbled Brooklyn accents?]

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] So we're going to take a quick break. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about some more tools for building reader trust.

[Mary Robinette] Welcome back. And, as part of building our reader trust, I'm going to fulfill the promise that I made before our break and we are going to talk about how to do that. Because that's one of the important things that you're doing in the beginning, especially as a debut author, especially early career, or just... The honest thing is that if someone has never heard of you, even if you're five books in, you're a debut author to them. I had the joy of introducing someone to this author they had never heard of before, a little-known author called Ursula K. Le Guin...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And so for them, Ursula was a debut author and had to build reader trust. So, like, wherever you are, you have to build reader trust. What are some of the tools that we can use to do that?

[DongWon] I think part of it is... You kind of mentioned this in a previous episode, but you make a promise and then you fulfill it. Right? You make some... You set some small expectation and then you pay it off. And that can be as little as like... I wanted to have a sandwich, oh, I have a sandwich. You know what I mean? And just like having... Just showing this thing in a very small way... And it's almost like animal training in a certain way, of, like, I'm going to set an expectation, I'm going to give you your treat. Proving that I'm a reliable source of treats. Now, I'm going to make a big promise, and you're going to get that treat by the end of this book.

[Erin] I think it's also, like, letting readers feel clever...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is always a great way... Who doesn't like to feel clever? So in a book in which you start with a sandwich, even something as simple as having a character gather the ingredients for a sandwich, so a reader will be like, oh, they're making a sandwich, I can tell, like, they've got turkey there and lettuce and tomato. And then they're like, as I enjoyed the sandwich, just for one second you get to go, like, just like I knew they were going to do. Which makes you feel like I get the story. What I expected from what you gave. All the ingredients is what it was, and I'm smart. And everyone loves that.

[DongWon] Because that's part of the relationship, Trust, too. I'm trusting you to figure out that this is a sandwich one line before I say it's a sandwich. Right? And I think that's one thing that you should think about in reveals in general is let the reader figure it out right before you tell them. You know what I mean? Don't... If you're trying to completely surprise them, it feels bad. If you let them be like, um, this is a sandwich. Hah, I knew it was a sandwich. I think that is a really satisfying interaction, and builds that trust, because if the author is saying to the reader, hey, I know you're a smart reader and you know that I know how to build a reveal. I think once you start building that rapport, that relationship between creator and audience, that's going to create a really fun experience of reading this book.

[Mary Robinette] I think... Absolutely. I think with that, one of the other variations on that is specifically raising a question in their brain and then answering it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which I wound up doing... It's one of the tools that I use in With Her Serpent Locks, because there was a thing that I was trying to do with that particular story. Which I... Like, the surprise that, ooh, look, we are actually dealing with Greek mythology. But, to start with, to get to the place where I could reveal that, I had to build reader trust. And I do it by saying, hey, cuz, as my starting line, and that raises the question, who's talking?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then within the first paragraph, I'm like, her cousin wanted to visit, the asshole favorite grandson. So I immediately answer that question. And one of the things that I've found is that if you raise a question, and it's a small question, and you immediately provide the answer, you raise it and you provide the answer, and you raise it and you provide the answer, then you can raise a question and not provide the answer...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And at that point, the reader is like, ah, I understand now. They are going to give me the information I need at the point that I need it, so I don't need it right now.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] And that's when you can start playing. But what I see the failure mode of that is people raising up questions because they want to be mysterious. They want the reader to figure things out. But they aren't giving them the trust and... To know that they're going to get the tools to figure it out. And so it just makes the reader feel ungrounded and unsafe.

[DongWon] The thing I'm always telling... When I'm giving critiques on opening sections, I'm always like, just tell people stuff. Just tell people how your world works. You don't need to be mysterious about it. Just tell me, like, this is a mystery or this is what they're thinking about. Or let them solve problems early. And that lets you... Yeah. Have the big questions later. But I think there's such a feeling for... I see this a lot in TTRPGs, actually, too, of GM's being like, oh, I can't tell them this yet, because that has to be the big reveal. But sometimes I'm like, no, you can just be like, this is the big bad, this is the villain, he's bad. We're going to spend the rest of the time chasing this man. And that can be a really fun narrative thing. Right? Not everything has to be a surprise.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And sometimes the surprise can be how it happens...

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] Not that it happens.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I mean, the entire Final Destination series is basically like, you goin' die. But how?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And where? And, like, in what horrible way?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think about that with one of the... I think the very first story I ever published was a story in which I wanted there to be this, like, big surprise at the end, and it just was not working for people. And so I made it, like, much easier to figure out, like, that this kid is the son of the other character in the story that he hates. And then, as you see him want to, like, hurt this person who is his father, then, like... It's bad. Because, like, you can see it coming, he doesn't get it, but you get it, and it's this feeling of, like, I cannot stop this, like, Greek tragedy from happening between the father and son, versus, like, surprise, that's his dad. Which is fine, but, like, just didn't have the same emotional weight. Because it kind of, like... we'll get to this with endings, but it's like, when you punch somebody in the stomach, you want to, like, wait a second to, like, watch that unfold before you run away. Like, if you punch someone and run away, you don't know if the punch hurt them. If you punch someone and stand there and watch them go ulp, then you know it landed. And then you run away.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Before they can get you. And that's kind of what you want your story to do. But sometimes the surprise...

[DongWon] This is not tactical advice.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] When you punch someone, you should just run away. Don't wait.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In real life, don't do that.

[DongWon] Yeah. In real life, don't do that. Just to be clear.

[Erin] Comfortable. But...

[DongWon] Unless you got to. But, yeah.

[Erin] But, like... You punch people, you want to like... You're spending all this time, like, gearing up for the punch...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That you're not even going to watch happen. And I think that can be... It feels like... It can never hold the force that you want it to. Because, like, everything cannot come down to this one surprise.

[Mary Robinette] And a lot of times, giving someone an answer at the beginning and they are like, oh, how is that going to happen? The opening line of The Calculating Stars is do you remember where you were when the meteor hit?

[DongWon] Ooh, that's good.

[Mary Robinette] And then what is that first chapter? The meteor hitting.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have a piece of information that the protagonist does not have while she's experiencing that. And so you can... You understand contextually what is happening as she is piecing it together, and it's one of the ways that I built trust...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With the readers for the rest of the story. It's like, yeah, I'm going to give you every piece, you're going to get to be a little bit smarter than her, sometimes. And those are things you can do. The other thing that I think you can do to build reader trust is control your tone. Because this is another place that... A failure mode that I'll see that someone will have is a total opening that's like... Like, really in media res action-packed thing, and then the rest of the story is this contemplative thing. That they've been told that they have to have something that's very hook-y...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And interpreted hook-y to mean action...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And fast. Or having a very slow opening that then is for a story that's super fast paced. So I think sometimes that's a place that you can play with.

[Erin] Yeah. I was thinking about those action openings. Because I do like them, and I think... I tried to figure out what makes them work. And a lot of times, it's... I think we can also hook into things that are common human experiences. A great way to kind of figure out... Like, if you have somebody who's nervous about giving a speech in public, that is something that a lot of people can relate to. It makes the character... Oh, that's a thing I got, and then, like, as they're on the way to give the speech, the spaceship explodes. But, like, while they're running through, they're like, oh, I'm sad the spaceship exploded, but I'm glad I don't have to give that speech. I'm like, I get that. That feels very... It feels really real to me, even though I don't know the character much yet. So, I find a lot of times action pieces work really well for me when there's something in them where the character has one driver...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That is something that I understand as a driver that doesn't require me to understand the world. It's something that is very personal instead of like it is part of the World building.

[DongWon. Yeah. Giving a really simple relatable goal can be a way to carry somebody through an outlandish experience. But as part of why these action openings almost never work... They're really, really hard to do, actually. Because I don't care about this character yet, so I don't really care if they live or die or get hurt. I need to care about some aspect of it. I'm thinking of like the Harley Quinn movie where she has her breakfast sandwich. And the thing that matters is preserving this breakfast sandwich. And so... I mean, that's like a comedy beat way to do it, but giving a really small scale achievable goal to care about let you feel... Understand the character in a deep way, because the character cares about something, and then I can see how is she responding, how does she act? I learn who she is by her working through this scene of trying to save the sandwich, and failing.

[Mary Robinette] I think these are all really great ways to get people to trust you at the beginning. And, to continue building our reader trust with you, I think it is time for us to move to a little bit of homework.

[Mary Robinette] So, what I want you to do is I want you to review the first chapter of your work in progress. Make a list of all the story promises you've made. Keep this list somewhere you can easily refer back to as you progress through the story. So that you can make sure that you're staying on track. And if there's a promise that you set up, then maybe you should think about how you're going to fulfill it. But... Start with the list.

[Mary Robinette] And now, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

comments

Writing Excuses 21.07: Deep Dive -- "With Her Serpent Locks"

2026-02-19T07:30:59Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.07: Deep Dive -- "With Her Serpent Locks"

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-07-deep-dive-with-her-serpent-locks

Key Points: Birthdays are Leveling Up days! This story has teeth. Subtly diabolical. Use mythology to ground the story. Mix in science fiction technology. Barriers to writing? Angry snakes. When you have a big emotion, lean into it. Give it to a character and then help them pivot away from it. Intentions. Delaying information. Internalizing. What the hell?

[Season 21, Episode 07]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deep dive -- "With Her Serpent Locks"

[Marshall] Tools, not rules.

[Erin] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Marshall] I'm Marshall.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] And we are very happy that Marshall has joined us. He's usually on the other side of the microphone, being our engineer. But... Today is my birthday.

[Chuckles. Happy birthday. Yay.]

[Mary Robinette] So I often think about this as leveling up day. I'm now at 5th... Level 57 human.

[I love that]

[Mary Robinette] It makes me feel powerful...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In a way that I'm 57 years old does not. Because then I can think about the new gear that I get and the tools that I get. And for my birthday, one of the things that I often do is I do what I call a party favor. Which is that I host one of my stories, but then I also talk about some aspect of it. Sometimes I show you a first draft. And in this case, we're going to talk about the story through the things we've been talking about with beginnings, some of the things we're going to be talking about with beginnings, and I'm also going to talk about some ways in which this story shows me leveling up. So, this is on Uncanny. It's called With Her Serpent Locks. My friends have read this story. And before I tell you where it came from, I would love to just see what your first initial thoughts of it were.

[DongWon] I really loved it. It's really fun, even though it comes from a place of like... There's definitely, like, teeth to this story. Right? Like, these things have a bite. And I really enjoyed seeing that unfold. But it's... I like the way in which the emotions of it is kind of sublimated, like, there's irritation, but it's all filtered through this very, like, I'm going about my day, I'm keeping my cool, I'm just like doing the things that comfort me, and it sort of has all these sensory grounding things so you can feel the simmering rage underneath it that's going to end up where it ends up. So, yeah, I really liked that emotional tenor and it made it a very, like, pleasant story to read. Even though it is coming from a place of like... Fuck this.

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] I agree. When I got... Especially when I get to the end, it just felt like subtly diabolical. Like, by the... Like, she's just going about, like DongWon said, going about the day, but, like... There was some planning going on and there was some anger. And then the execution at the end was just... It was very satisfying by the time we got to the end.

[Erin] Yeah. I really was thinking about it in the context of, like, some of what we've been talking about recently of, like, beginnings and openings, so I really... The end is great. But, like, I was thinking about, like, how it works. And one thing I found interesting is, it's based in mythology. Mythology that I'm aware of. Which is something we didn't talk about, which is something you can ground a story in a broader context and, like, even the context that like... Which is not 100% required, but this is a fairly well-known myth, like, the Medusa turning people into stone. And so it was really cool to kind of uncover what was happening on both the personal level for the character who I was not familiar with, but, like where it fits into my broader understanding of the myth, which is a fun way to ground, and also makes me feel clever, which we talked about in previous episodes. Which is the... I'm like, oh, this is that, and it's a little more explicit right after that. So I'm like, I figured it out...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Before it was told to me, which is something really fun that I enjoyed.

[DongWon] Yeah. And even in the way where I was like, oh, wait, I don't really remember this part of the myth. Like, I remember Medusa was, like, one of the Gorgons, but I don't remember who the rest of them were, or what the setup was, or even exactly how she died. I remember the Harry Hausen...

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[DongWon] Version of it. But it didn't feel necessary. Right? I got the pieces I needed to get. I remember the vibe of the thing more. And so I think that's the thing where, like, you don't have to worry too much about referentiality, so long as you're not, like, expecting me to remember every subtle detail of a thing. But like, okay, I know what the Medusa is, I know what a Gorgon is.

[Marshall] Yeah. The title, and then getting to that first break, the stone back of a man held on the ground, it's like, oh. I see...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Marshall] What's happening here.

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] I was like, okay, that's sick. I like that. But we were talking about grounding the reader a bit, but what I thought was kind of a clue is grounding these gods with this kind of technology, too. Like, how does a god get from... How does a god trying to escape from her family, and then how are they communicating across time and space, and do they have to take a ship over... Like, I just thought that was a really cool touch, like, the wormhole, the relay station. I just thought that was a cool, like, way to kind of like ground gods into... Inside the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. And then, why make it science fiction? Like, what was behind that choice?

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So [garbled] yes. Now we talk [garbled] about evolution of the story. So, I run this thing called a short story cohort, and one of the things we do at the beginning of the cohort is I check in with people on, like, barriers to writing, victories. And one of the people, as a barrier to writing, said she had a lot of stuff going on with her family, and she just felt like her brain was full of angry snakes. And one of the things that I always say is when you're having a big emotion, try to lean into it. Whether it's giving the character that emotion and then helping them pivot away from it, or lean even farther into it. And so that day, for the writing project, I said our writing prompt is angry snakes. And so what I wrote down... I saved this. What I wrote down was angry snakes. And then the next thing I told them to do was to set some intentions. That they should set a couple of things that if they accomplished those, they would feel satisfied by the end of the day. And the lowest bar is possible. So the things I set were start a new story, decide where, who, and what the problem was. That was it. And so I was like decide where? I'm like, backyard on a planet with rings. That was like the sum total of what I wrote down. Who? Medusa's sister. Problem? Zeus wants to visit. Like, that was what I wrote. And then... This is one of those stories where I got lucky. I talk about this, sometimes, when you get lucky and you kind of cough a story out. I got most of this story during that 2-hour block of writing. Not all of it. There were pieces that I was like, oh, have to fix that. But the opening line of the story was not originally the message from Zeus. It was originally the message hung in the air. It was the second line, was where I started.

[Marshall] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] And my very first take was it was actually going to be Medusa. And then I went over and I was like, can we just check on Medusa? Like, what are some things? I remember, again, she has some...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sisters. She's dead. So who else is around? And that was when I learned that the Gorgons, some of them were immortal and some were not. And also, I was like, there's gotta be a star named after... Like, all of the other things. And indeed, there is... Like, I didn't make up the name of that... I made up the idea that there's a planet that's habitable there. But I'm like, okay, so you've got immortal gods. That means if we go into science fiction, they should still be around. Theoretically. Unless someone has killed them. And that was kind of where I started. But I didn't know the ending when I started. I knew that I wanted a confrontation between the two of them. I knew that she was dealing with grief. I knew that she hated this asshole. Because, I mean, really, Zeus is, like, rotten. And the other thing that I knew as I was going was that I wanted to play with form. Because I tend to do this fairly immersive kind of... I don't tend to be flashy. And so the idea of doing this thing where Euryale is just doing the why, the where, the question words as my transitions was really appealing to me. And trying to do these very condensed scenes that were doing a lot of lift. But actually, not a lot happens in. Also, very appealing to me that it's this correspondence between the two of them. But at the end... By the time I got to the end, that final scene, I knew what was going to happen to Zeus. I knew that she had taken steps. But I had to go back and plant the... I don't know, basil [garbled layer] whatever it is, at the... I had to go back and plant some of that stuff so that it was there. I think she was originally cutting a lemon instead of a pomegranate. I'm like, it's a Greek myth, what are you doing?

[laughter]

[DongWon] Well, and cutting a pomegranate is such a good sensory detail.

[yeah]

[DongWon] It's such an involved task, it takes these different steps, and there's all this technique involved. I don't know. And it's just this beautiful red luscious image.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the other things that I was trying to do to level up is something that I will talk to you about after the break. Because it's about delaying information.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, before the break, I said that one of the leveling up things that I played with was delaying information. And one of the pieces of information that I was very deliberately delaying was the word Zeus. And also that, yes, this really is a Gorgon and all of the commentary about her hair is not metaphor, it's like I'm... I've got Greek myth mashed with... But that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. It's not something that I would have been able to do when I was a beginning writer. And it's one of the things that I felt like I had more control over. So I wanted... So I am curious about how that played for you, and what you see as the tricks I was using to be able to do that? Or anything else you want to talk about.

[laughter]

[Marshall] Well, you mentioned the hair not being a metaphor. Or not being... You know what I mean? It was something that was actually happening. And I think I started to kind of figure that out when she sat down and one of them was like...

[Mary Robinette] Bit the chair behind her?

[Marshall] Yeah. That was it. Bit the chair behind her, and she just was kind of doing something with it. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. These are actually, like, responding as she's feeling things. And I was like, okay, that's really cool. And then that, when... I was trying to remember the other spot. Oh. She just didn't want any more statues haunting her house. That line. I love that line. Because now I'm imagining all of these people coming there and her just being like, okay, now you're stone.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Marshall] Sorry, bro. And I just thought that was cool. So that connection of the hair and that image, and then Zeus shows up... I just thought that was really well done.

[DongWon] I love the pattern also you set up of the who what when where why. You know what I mean? Just the single word questions which you, like, hang a lantern on, because she's like I'm being deliberately annoying by just saying one word. But then it leads to the who. Right? And so I think it's just like fun to set up a pattern that is going to resolve, in that way. And resolve in the other thing of, like... I was like it's probably Zeus. You know what I mean? I, like, had a sense of, like... But there's plenty of gods in the Greek pantheon that are complete assholes. But there was something about it that I was like, I wonder if it's going to be Zeus? And then it was, which was very satisfying.

[Erin] I think one thing I found very interesting was at the end of the first paragraph after the spoken line, or the hanging in the air message, was about the asshole favorite grandson who got away with rape and murder and incest. Which is interesting, because her reaction to that is very blase, which to me speaks like something is going on beyond what you're expecting. Because like... It's not like she's like, and I will alert the authorities to this, or like... It's just sort of like, oh, this is like a known thing. It's happened. This again. Which is something that is very... I was like, well, what's going on with that guy? Like, that seems messed up. Like...

[Marshall] Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?

[Erin] Yeah. Like, why is nobody doing [garbled] feels like somebody should be handling this...

[Marshall] Tell somebody.

[DongWon] It's... I mean, weirdly, it's very outsized. Right? Because like... I don't think any of us know someone who's that terrible.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] But I do think a lot of us have someone in our family that's a little bit like, ugh, like that person [garbled] like... You don't... It's also like... I'm not clear on how bad of a person they are, but maybe they're not, like, perfect.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know what I mean? Or just, like, maybe it's just like a little bit. But that exasperation and discomfort with somebody you're connected to in your circle that you can't quite get away from is, I think, a really, really relatable feeling. Right? And so I think setting that up as, like, the grounding emotion is really helpful there.

[Mary Robinette] Awesome. I'm going to point back to a thing that you said when you were talking about setting up the pattern, the who, where, what. That I had to switch... I remember having to switch something, one of the wheres of one of them in order to get the beats to hit right. But the... At the very, very end, I also deliberately, the where, where would you like to be, I also deliberately gave her more words when she was talking to her sister's head.

[Chuckles] [yes]

[Mary Robinette] I also, in terms of... And this is what we... We'll be talking about endings much later in the season. But the last line was originally, considered the best spot for a hero. And then I was like, that's not her relationship with her.

[DongWon] Yeah. Beloved sister feels so much more the core emotion of the story. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Such a tenderness to her, too. And I think you do a good job of showing that early, both in terms of we think of that as somebody doing these nurturing tasks, preparing food, gardening, but also just like her relationship with her like awful little cilia covered...

[Marshall] Yeah.

[DongWon] Pet. It's like so adorable, but also, when I think about it...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I'm like I don't want a million leg making biscuits on me. It felt so bad to think about. But also you made it very sweet and very cute and very tender. Right? Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I love Butterscotch.

[Marshall] Yeah. I agree. That was a... That was an insanely good character moment, too. And, like, although it was a little off-putting, like... She loves this awful little creature...

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] And I love that last line of that section. They liked frolicking in the moss. And I'm like thinking of this thing with all these legs, like, doing something...

[laughter]

[Marshall] Okay, he likes that. That sounds awful, but... Okay...

[DongWon] Listeners, I'm sorry you missed the pantomime.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, is that a thousand little legs, or is that a marionette moment?

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm not sure what's happening over there. Cool.

[Erin] I have a question for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I know we don't have endless amounts of time, but you talked about feeling like you were leveling up, and I'm curious, like, what that felt like to you, and, like, how did you feel that? Like, what specifically did you feel that you were able to do that you weren't before?

[Mary Robinette] So I know that... Like, I've had control over delay of information for a while, but this kind of slow reveal in such a compressed space? That felt like something that... Like, I know I couldn't... I know I couldn't have done that when I started writing. And so I'm not even sure that I would have been... Like, 5 years ago, doing that. I'm not certain. But I felt like this... The feeling that I had really was, oh, I know how to do this. And one of the things that I... It wasn't actually that I know how to do this. Oh, I've internalized this. That was the thing. When I've done this before, it has been a very, very conscious thing. Like, I've had to think about it and I've had to tweak and adjust it. And this time it was, I've internalized how to handle it. And that's, I think, part of why I described this story as like I just coughed and the story happened. That I was chasing the feelings and the emotions that I had in that moment. It's very short. For people who have not read it, it's only 1,700 words. So it was something that I could write... Mostly write in one sitting. Which meant that I was kind of in the same headspace for the entire time. So it really did feel like that thing I always talk about with puppetry, where, like, I've internalized it, the figure's just moving. And often, when I was performing, I would remember the show from the point of view of the character. Even though that's not... Like, my body is not in that memory, even though I know that I was there. But I had internalized what I was supposed to be doing so much that I was just acting within the moment. And that was very much that feeling with this. It's like I've internalized this, I'm just acting, I'm just feeling the moment. Which was a really good feeling.

[DongWon] There's a real ease to this story that comes through. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] It doesn't feel effortful or forced in any way. Not that your fiction normally does, but, like, there's a breeziness to it that I think makes it so appealing and easy to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It was... Like, I think that that can happen with my other stuff, but often it's something that I had to really work for. And, like, polish off the rough edges.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And this time it was like, no, I know exactly what I'm doing with this one. Which was a nice feeling.

[Erin] Awesome.

[Marshall] And I know we're not talking about revision right now, but, like, that's something good, I think, for, like, in my writing community, where a lot of new writers or aspiring writers or whatever you want to call it are trying to figure out, is this ready? You know what I mean? And so I guess I like hearing the fact that you were able to do this, but this isn't something that happens all the time. But it's also something that will happen, the more you do it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Marshall. I don't know if there's a question there, but like... Do you see what I'm saying?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. No, I think it absolutely is a thing to know. And that... Because you're right. It is so frustrating when you are working for it, and I see that also with a lot of people who've taken a writing Workshop. That they come out of it, and everything is so conscious that writing feels incredibly hard, because you're trying to do everything, trying to use all of these new tools.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] And so knowing that, oh, yeah, once you do that work, there is this payoff on the other end.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It just may take... May take years before you get there.

[DongWon] It's all practice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like I started... I sold my first book, I think, in 2005. I think that's right.

[DongWon] [garbled] a couple years ago.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So I'm about 20 years into doing this as a career... Up to... Whoof.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I have not actually said that out loud before.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that I was going to say is that when I was writing this, we also took a couple of breaks. So, even though it's a 2-hour span that I wrote this in, I know that I took a couple of breaks during that, in which I walked around. And the break's only 2 minutes long. Which is long enough to go get a cup of water, long enough for things to kind of kick over in my head, and then come back. So, like, one of the things that I've got in here is, in the original, is a prompt that I used when we came back, which is, after, she took a face mask out of another drawer and hooked it around her ears. And I've got... I preserved the prompt which was, what the hell? And originally, like in my... And again, like, this is a 2-hour span, I know that I was planning on... Like, I was thinking about how many iterations, how much back and forth... And then I was like, what the hell? Have him just show up.

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, he just shows up.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it's just like, what the hell.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, forget all of this. And that was also one of those things that, again, the internalization ... Internalizing of, oh, sometimes you can actually just make a decision to stop a try-fail cycle and just move to the next beat.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, you don't have to, like, build... Sometimes you can just be like what the hell...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This is happening there? And just move.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. Any other questions before I give them their homework?

[Mary Robinette] Well, first of all, thank you all so much for coming to celebrate my birthday.

[Erin] Happy birthday again. Thank you for sharing it with us. Yeah. I love getting presents on somebody else's birthday.

[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework. This story started with a description of emotion. Angry snakes. I want you to take a strong emotion that you've experienced recently, and describe it as a metaphor. Then, I want you to use that metaphor as your writing prompt.

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

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Writing Excuses 21.06: Begin and the Beginning

2026-02-12T08:01:04Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.06: Begin and the Beginning

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-06-begin-and-the-beginning

Key Points: Begin at the beginning. Ground the reader. Set expectations for the ride. Pace, tone. Action-driven openings or voice-driven openings. How will you pull the reader through the story (aka hook or frame). Interesting, unique details. DIY slushpiles. Going into a house for a party. Start at the interesting. Where are we, who should we care about, and what's happening? Taste and an offering. A microcosm of the greater story. Make a promise and keep it, or ask a question and answer it. Welcome snacks! You don't need to get it right at first! Party planning with time travel.

[Season 21, Episode 06]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Begin at the beginning.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'mErin.

[DongWon] And, this week we're going to talk about beginnings. This is one of my very favorite topics... I think I've said that like three episodes in a row.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But I do love talking about beginnings. I overindex on them. I think in part it's because of my job as an agent, when I'm looking at queries and I'm looking at samples, I'm always looking at beginnings of stories and trying to make a judgment call on them. So, I have read thousands upon thousands of beginnings of books and had to make judgment calls about is this working or not. Right? And I think they're really, really important. I think readers are also reading beginnings of stories and making a decision of do I buy this book, do I keep reading this book? Right? And so many times that's where you lose somebody. Right? Because... Now sometimes for good reasons, which is, oh, this book isn't for me, I'm not the reader for this, I thought it was going to be something else and it's not. The cover... I made an assumption from the cover that isn't true. Right? But a lot of times, it's people who would enjoy the rest of your book, but bounced off of it because it didn't quite do what it... The beginning needs to be doing. It's a very difficult section because your reader's coming in cold, they know nothing about what's happening, they don't know your characters, your stakes, your world, and you need to communicate an enormous amount of information to them very quickly without losing them because of a lack of action or too complex prose or whatever it is.

[Mary Robinette] So this episode is kind of going to give you an overview. And then we're going to have some follow-up episodes where we're going to kind of dive into a lot of these things. But generally, when I'm thinking about beginnings, I think about grounding the reader. I think about setting their expectations for the kind of ride they're going to be on. I think about the pace and the tone of the overall thing. So, sometimes, I'm going to do something that's called an action driven opening, and sometimes I'm going to do something that's called a voice driven opening. And I think about sort of what questions I want to set up that are going to... Like, how am I going to pull the reader through the story? Sometimes we call this a hook, sometimes we call this a frame. There's a bunch of different words for it. But, like, what is it that makes the reader say, do I care about this?

[Erin] I recently did an event in which we read the beginnings of people's works. And so what happened is there was a panel and we read the first few pages. I was one of the readers. We actually couldn't see the panel. And when three of them raised their hands, saying I would stop reading here, we stopped. And so it was really an interesting way... Like, and we read them completely, like, no prep at all.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And it was an interesting way to see what was catching people's attention. And to me, it was, like, something that felt unique, something that people hadn't necessarily heard of before, with interesting details. I found that pieces that had really interesting details, especially if it was like one key detail that felt unique and felt like something that you could really understand, grabbed people's interest and kept them going through the whole beginning. Whereas other ones did not have that same sort of grab.

[Mary Robinette] I've been the reader for this kind of event. And I've also learned that there's a way you can set up this experience at home with friends, which is you can create kind of a slush pile experience. We do something with my short story cohort where we do... The... We get... We take the first 13 lines, which is the first page in standard manuscript format, and we chunk all of the first 13 lines that we have written in a period of time into a single document. And then we go through and read it as if we're reading through a slush pile. And mark which ones kept us and why. We don't mark which ones we hate... We don't do any of that. It's just a I love this, I love that. And one of the things that will happen for the writer is that often everyone will gravitate towards one, and the writer is like that's really fascinating because I know that this other one that no one has picked is way more interesting deeper into the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so then they can look at it and compare, like, what am I doing in this one that everyone is gravitating towards? And so that's the thing that you can do with your writing friends. You can create your own slush pile. You can even create a slush pile by just grabbing the first 13 lines out of existing material that's not even yours to create this experience of what is it that consistently catches me? And it's... You'll find that it is different with each of them, but that a lot of it is that there is something in it that makes you... And this is so amorphous... But there is something in it that makes you lean in.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think that thing is control. The thing I think about the most when I'm looking at the opening pages of a book is: is the author in control of this story? Are they in control of their prose? And I think about this in terms of... We've turned to the metaphor a few times this season, but Amal el Mohtar's idea of a book as an act of hospitality. Right? And I think in terms of when you walk into someone's house, you can feel if this was a space designed with intention. If it's clean and orderly and set up for a good experience for you. Right? When you walk into someone's house and it's chaotic, there's stuff all over the place, there's no clear place for you to sit, there's no... If you don't know how to get water or you don't know how to be comfortable here, it puts you in a more... It puts you on your back foot. Right? And so when you walk into a story, you want to feel that this is a roller coaster ride, and that roller coaster is well built and I'm not going to fall off of it. Right? And so I think finding ways to communicate that in the opening pages of you're in good hands, I got you, is incredibly important. And I think a lot of people think it's important to start with action, you have to start in media res, it has to be thrilling and exciting. But sometimes, for me, the strongest openings are ones that are very, very quiet. The ones that are just describing something for a long time, but they're doing it in a way that is demonstrating in micro you're going to like my prose, I have control over the pacing, I'm going to build tension, and you're going to be interested in it even though nothing is happening yet.

[Erin] Yeah. It is kind of like going into a house, like, for a party...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, you can come in the middle of a party and it... Definitely things will be going on, it'll be interesting, but if you don't know anyone there, you can sometimes feel like very like, I don't understand, I just want to stand in the corner of the wall, I don't know why this person is dancing with that person, or what's happening. But if you come to a house before the party has begun, you get a chance to, like, take in, like, oh, this is the place, here's the person, here's the host, now I have, like, a little bit of a sense...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Of it. And I think that's why details, to me, like, stuck out as one of the things that worked really well in the openings that I was reading. Because, like in a house, if you have too many knick knacks, like, it's just like... It's hard to focus. Same way, if you have, like, too many details... If you're trying to describe a scene, and it's like this amazing detail, that amazing detail... It's like, wow, I can't focus. But if you're controlled and you're like, let me take your eye to this one really important thing that, like, resonates with the story and is really going to catch your attention, like having that one really great art wall in your house, that is something that says I understand how to move you through this space, move you through this story, and give you something that's going to be worth seeing. worth reading.

[DongWon] Because, even if you show up in the middle of a party, if there's a clear idea, oh, snacks are here, drink station is here, music is there, and that's clearly legible. Or the host comes over and says, hey, let me take you around, then you can have a great time in the middle of the party. You can show up in media res if you're being well taken care of.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. By the same token, if you arrive too early, there's that incredibly awkward thing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Where you just stand around while the host is getting things ready. That's when... Those are the books that you read where the... They've just started it too soon.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like they are still doing the [grope] which often you need to do while you are writing, and there is nothing wrong with doing that in draft. Like, do not think that your first draft has to have the perfect opening, like, the first time around. Very few of mine do, I have to tell you that.

[laughter]

[DongWon] It's funny, I almost suggested changing the title of the episode, but my proposal would have made no sense, which is the beginning is a terrible place to start.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Because sometimes... I run this... This is a very, very common mistake is that the writer is starting the story for where the character's story starts. Which is, like, waking up, going to school, before the inciting incident happened. So a lot of times, what I'll say is, hey, jump forward, start where something interesting is happening... Don't start at the beginning, start at the interesting. But the challenge of that is exactly what we're talking about, of you don't have any context and it's all pretty chaotic. And I think there's like a lot of techniques to help ease the reader in. Like we've talked about high level, of like how you want the reader to feel, and when we come back from the break, I want to start talking about some of the techniques that we use to make sure that that feels good to them.

[DongWon] Okay. DongWon here. I wanted to remind you that in September, our last annual cruise will set sail for Alaska. And on February 15th, ticket prices will increase. The hosts are teaching classes on the business of publishing, world building, conversational storytelling, and game writing. You can sign up and learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats. Hope to see you there.

[DongWon] Okay. Welcome back. In the first half of this, we've been talking about how do you make the reader feel comfortable in the story, How do you communicate authority and control as they're reading the opening lines of your work. Let's start talking about the techniques that are useful here. How do you play with getting enough information into those opening pages that they accomplish all the goals that you set out, Mary Robinette, and the reader feels well grounded in the story and has a sense of the shape of what's to come?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And we will get into this, like, a lot more when we get to the grounding...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The reader episode. But... High level, I think about... That the reader wants to know kind of where they are, and where can include a when. They want to know what they're supposed to care about, whether that's a person or an idea. And they want to know sort of what is happening. Which can sometimes, in an action-driven story, be like literally what is the character doing? But in a voice driven opening, that can... Like Hitchhiker's Guide is an example of this. They want to know, like, what is the deal with the watches? And the digital watches and why they're a pretty neat idea? Going back to the... I jotted something down while Erin was talking before the break about arriving at a party and how you know that someone is in control. Because I'm like, yeah, I want a sense of control, that the author is in control, but, like, what is that? And I think the things that we're looking at are intention, the order, that it isn't just a chaotic thing. Sometimes, if you have everything everywhere all at once, but that doesn't start chaotically. Chaos comes in that. Taste, a sense of the author's taste. And then a good host comes with an offering.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so I think if you kind of think about those things... It's like, what is your intention with this opening? What order are you going to present the information in so that they build a picture in their head? What is the tone, the taste that you're trying to demonstrate? And what is the thing that you're offering that entices them to come further in?

[DongWon] The thing I think about a lot is a really useful thing to do is to create a microcosm of the greater story. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] You build a tiny little micro taster of... The Douglas Adams thing that you're talking about, in terms of that opening, the reason it works is it's him being like, hey, you like this? Get ready for a lot more of it. Right? And sometimes just giving a little taste sample of what's going to come is the most useful thing you can do. My favorite opening of all time is The Haunting of Hill House. And it starts with this, like, abstract idea, goes into a long description of a house, just very normal description of a house, and then ends on an incredibly creepy line. Right? And so what that is, is an absolute outline of the book we're about to read. Of kind of abstract, gets into talking about a house for a long time, and then gets really weird. Right? And so I think sometimes setting the reader up and putting them through the paces of your story in a filtered way, in a microcosm way, is a great way to be like do you like this? You're going to like this book.

[Erin] I also think like... I agree with that. I also think that making a promise and then keeping it...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Really quickly is a great way to show that you understand what's going on, or asking a question and then answering it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because, like, early on, the reader's like, I don't know if I can trust you to keep your promises or answer the questions. And as the story goes on, you can actually space out a promise from it being fulfilled or a question from it being answered because you've already established that you're doing that. It's like you're showing that, like, I said this was what was going to be, and this is what it's going to be.

[DongWon] I have a friend who calls that welcome snacks. Like when somebody comes to a party, they're immediately like, here's a little thing, here's just a bite you can have. Here's, like a little, like... I don't know, like a sweet popcorn dish or like a chip and a dip. You know what I mean? Just like immediately you walk in, you just get a little mouthful of something. You're like, mmm, that was nice. Okay, let's go.

[Erin] And part of what that does in a party setting... We're also party planners here...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Is that it says, I thought of you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When someone has a snack for you when you enter, they say, like, I actually before you arrived thought of something that would make you more comfortable and happy in this moment. I made a promise, I'm going to be your host, and I have immediately fulfilled it by doing something that I wouldn't do if this wasn't a party.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so that is the quick thing that you can put in the story.

[Mary Robinette] Which reminds me of a thing I was talking with a friend who had just gone over to someone's home and it was the first time this person had hosted anyone. And the friend arrived and she's there for an awkward amount of time, and then the person is like, oh, I probably should have had snacks. I should have had snacks. Do we have snacks? I might have snacks. And that is often my first... My experience of reading early career manuscripts.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Where you arrive and there's like nothing really happening, and then at some point, the author is like, oh, something's supposed to happen. And then there's like an explosion out of nowhere, and you don't understand...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Why it's happening or anything. Like, What. Is. Going. On? And you feel a little unsafe and uncomfortable.

[DongWon] One thing I want to point out is I think you can be forgiving of your friend, when it's your friend.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] When that happens. When you go over to your buddy's house, he's like, oh, man, Chuck is always like this. You know what I mean?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] He doesn't know how to plan a party. But when you are asking someone to pay $20 and give up time away from their family, away from TV and video games and going to the gym or whatever it is, then that is saying come to my professional [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] You don't want the Fire Festival of books.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] You don't want to be serving someone white bread with a slice of ham on it, and being like, welcome to my luxury festival. Right? You need to be giving them...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sorry.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Sorry. We are just losing it. [garbled] But y'all wanted to be part festival, y'all want to be at the White Lotus. Right? You want to be, like, here's the beautiful experience, also someone's getting murdered.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But I think thinking about... I mean, we really went all around this hospitality metaphor, but I think it's really, really, really useful in thinking about opening of how do you take care of readers as they're coming into your story?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And there's this thing that I want to say about this is that from a writing perspective, from a craft perspective, you 100% don't need to get this right on the first try. And...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] You almost certainly won't. Every now and then you'll get lucky. Like, I've had times where I'm lucky and the opening is, like, lasts through the whole thing. More often than not, I will get into the middle of the book, and then reach the end of the book and realize, oh, this is what that book is actually about, and have to go back and write a new first chapter. Or with a short story, have to reframe the first couple of... Sometimes, the first couple of pages, sometimes it's just a paragraph. Sometimes I have to pull a whole scene at the beginning of it. But it is... It changes. In fact, coming up in... Later, in two episodes, two episodes from now, we're going to be looking at one of my stories, With Her Serpent Locks, and that opening line is not the opening line that I started with. It's an opening line that did not happen until my editor read it, and said, we need this here. And I was like... And I resisted it really... It was like very... Very annoyed. But...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Very correct.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So a lot of... So when you're writing from a craft perspective, think about this as party planning with time travel.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You get to plan the party, and then you get to have the party, and then you get to time travel back and say, okay, these are the snacks we actually need, these are the things that we... This is who's coming, it turns out this allergy exists and we need to take that snack away and make sure that the AC is running because someone is coming with a fire thing that they're going to do outside...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And then everyone's going to come back inside and be really hot. So, like, you can do all of that, and then throw the party again.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And everyone is comfortable... Same people coming, but they just have a different experience because of the way you framed it at the beginning.

[Erin] And I think you can also learn that you wrote a beginning to the story that you're not actually trying to write.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, you could be like, oh, I'm going to... In The party planning analogy... I'm going to throw a rager. A rager to end all ragers. with a string quartet, and wine, and cheese. And it's like, is that a rager? Like, if what you want in your party is, like, I actually want people to have really quiet, intimate conversations with each other the entire party. Like, even though in your head, you may want to think, I'm the kind of person who throws epic frat rager... No. You're actually interested in this, like, gentle, like, cocktail party. And that's okay.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I think sometimes we get ideas in our head of what we want to be as writers and we start writing a beginning using that. And then in the middle, we realize this is not the story that I really want to tell. And it's okay to abandon that and leave that beginning for some other time or some other version of you.

[Mary Robinette] And with that idea, it's also important to note that sometimes we got ideas from seeing other people's parties.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But those parties don't necessarily fit into our house, into our taste or into our budget. Like, when I see people go from novels to short stories, they're trying to write an opening with a novel budget which is a lot more words and they just don't have that big of a budget, and their apartment is also a studio apartment,...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's not a mansion.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have to make different choices.

[DongWon] And I think another reason to not write your beginning first, or not worry about your beginning being exactly right when you start, is that openings of novels are heightened. Right? They're written in a slightly different way than the rest of the book, because your language is going to be a little bit more dense, you're going to be doing more than you can ease out of this, like, really high octane, High information density. And like often in your opening lines, you're going to be a little more showy then you will be later in the book in terms of prose style. Because you're trying to like really hit people with, like, here's a bang opening line. Here's like... I can write. You know what I mean? Is one thing you're trying to communicate in that early section. And so trying to sustain that over the course of the novel is... Would be a huge mistake, because it would be exhausting for your reader and for you. So I think finding a way to, like, have... To come back and be like, okay, how do I craft something that feels heightened and that's like a special entry to the story, but doesn't have to be sustained throughout? And that kind of gives you the space to do that little microcosm thing that we were talking about.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that's going to bring us to our homework.

[Mary Robinette] And for the homework, what I'd like to ask you to do is to make an artificial slush pile. This is a great exercise that you can do. We're going to be talking about tools, and we're going to give you an opportunity for the rest of this beginning to play with those tools in the homework. But for right now, just take a look, just analyze existing tools and see what works for you and what makes you lean in, what makes you feel welcome at the party.

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

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Writing Excuses 21.05: The Same, But Different

2026-02-05T12:55:09Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.05: The Same, But Different

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-05-the-same-but-different

Key Points: How do you write something that feels original, but still meets readers' expectations? Genre or sequel? Sequels, structure or cast? Change one. Don't change too many things, one difference can be enough. Grounding questions may carry over. Window dressing genre or elemental genre? Keep the window dressing the same, but play with the elemental genre elements. Aesthetic driven or structure driven genres? What are the questions underlying your stories? Writing as hospitality. How do you avoid repeating your tropes? Do it consciously. Honor the fact that you are not the same person. Ask what if about your writing!

[Season 21, Episode 05]

[Mary Robinette] This episode...

[unknown] Kimi no game system... [advertisement in Japanese] [Singing Lenovo, Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] ... of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 05]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The same, but different.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] And this week we're going to talk about one of... A topic that I'm deeply fascinated by, and, I think, one of the trickier things to figure out when you're talking about genre writing, when you're talking about series writing in particular. But I think it's really true of the entire publishing process. Right? And that is how do you write something that feels original, but still accomplishes meeting the reader's expectations? And that can be down to meeting the same genre expectations, that can be down to writing a sequel, that feels in conversation with the original but is its own thing and is unique. Right? I mean, again, we are creatures of pattern recognition. Right? We want certain beats, we want a certain feeling from our romance or fantasy or science fiction or mystery or thrillers. Right? Like, there's this idea of fiction being trope-y or formulaic. But those tropes and formulas are the building blocks of genre storytelling. So, how do you look at differentiating the story that you're writing from the things that came before it?

[Mary Robinette] So, I think that there's two ways to think about this. One is with sequels and one is with genre. I'm going to start with sequels first.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, when I wrote Shades of Milk and Honey, it's basically Jane Austen with magic, it is more or less a straight up Regency romance. In romance, the structure is that you write the first book, and there's a very specific romantic structure. And then when you write the second book, the structure is the same, but the difference comes from a different cast. So it's the sister of the heroine and the boyfriend's BFF. Now follow form. I didn't want to do that. So what I did for my same but different was I changed my structure, but I kept my cast. And what I see when I see people moving into sequels is that a lot of times they are keeping the same ca... The sequels that feel flat is that a lot of times it's the same cast and they are facing the same kind of problem. So it's the same and the same. And they aren't bringing anything new to it. So I think one of the things that you can think about when you are moving into a sequel is keeping the same as this is the heart and the core of this story. Those are the things that you keep the same. Because I also see that the other problem which is that someone moves into a sequel and then go the different and the different.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] And it's so far away from the original that people... People go back to that sequel because they want a specific thing. And so if you remove that piece of the same, and you then... Then there's no reason for them to go back to it. So I think looking at kind of what is your intention, keep those things the same. And then, what are the places you want to kind of surprise or bring something new?

[Erin] I was thinking about, because I haven't written novel sequels, like, where I've encountered this. And I kept thinking about my time when I was writing for Zombies Run. It's interesting, because it's the same cast of people, and it's the same action. There are zombies and you are running from them. Every single time.

[DongWon] You've got one verb.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It is a game with one action. Run. And so, something that we would find is early on the instinct would be to throw a lot of new things, to try to make each thing different. Like, there's more zombies, and they're on fire. And you're in space. No, not really. But, like, and they're all happening. And it turns out that a lot of times one difference makes a huge difference because people are like, oh, I understood how they got through everything, like, they really figured out how to run from the zombies. But now the zombies are on fire. Which is bad. And so, like, this one difference accelerates the tension, in part because you're like, they can't repeat what has already happened, so how are they going to get out of this situation this time? And so, you don't have to change everything, and, like, throw all the toys into the bin, you can just have this one thing that they can focus on, and that actually adds a lot.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, going to sort of MICE quotient, right, you have all these different components that make up a story, from milieu to the characters. And I think choosing one or two of these, I mean, you can do a thing where you're keeping most of these the same, and if you're doing, like, romance, you're really keeping a lot of things very similar. Or if you're doing, like, procedural mystery, then a lot of it is staying using the very popular phrase these days, standalone mysteries with series potential, you're going to want to be able to carry things through. But if you wrote the first book as a true standalone, now it's like, okay, how do I do book two? Right? And so figuring out what you want to carry over from book one, whether that is purely the setting, have new characters or pick up side characters, or you have the same cast and you're putting them in a different situation. I think those are the things that you need to start thinking about, of, like, wait, what are the things that I want to be fixed points as I'm looking forward to telling this new story?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like with the Lady Astronaut books, I've got Elma has anxiety, and so... But we go into space and all of that. And so in book one, we don't fix her anxiety, but she has come to a place where she accepts the choices that she's making and... But in the second book, the thing that I change isn't, oh, now she has a new problem. It's, she still has anxiety, but it's a different trigger this time. Which is often the way that things happen in real life. You're like, ah, now I have a handle on this. Oh, wait, circumstances are different. So a lot of times, just changing the context, whether it's setting your zombies on fire or sending someone to Mars, is enough to shake things for the character.

[Erin] And if you think about... Like, a lot of science fiction that, like, at least I grew up on Star Trek, it's very procedural. Like, it is...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The same but different, like, episode after episode after after episode in the series, where it is the same cast and theoretically the same... Like, they're still part of the Federation, they're still trying to, like, seek out new worlds, but it's what's on this world? What does this alien do that we didn't expect? How are our expectations of how we can handle this shifted? And I think we, like, see a lot of that and have experienced a lot of that as watchers, as people who are engaged in science fiction. But then sometimes when it's written, it like freaks people out. It's like, nah, you cannot have... If people really love your characters, like, fanfiction will tell you, if people love your characters, they will watch them open an alternate universe coffee shop together...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because they just really want to be in a place with these people.

[DongWon] Well, and sometimes it's important to realize that you can wander pretty far afield.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? I mean, I'm thinking about two classic examples of 80's science fiction movies, which is Terminator and Terminator 2. Right? Which is just a complete inversion of the first story. Right? They're the same structure, in a lot of ways. Same beats in a lot of ways. But instead of the Terminator being the villain in one, now he's the hero in two. Right? Instead of Linda Hamilton's character being the victim in the first movie, she becomes this incredible badass action hero in two. So it's like, oh, what if we just flipped everything on its head, but told the same story, How does that change? Right? Which makes it a really fun, easy to grasp thought experiment as you're looking at it and being like, oh, I get what this is right away. Also, this feels like a Terminator movie, has the same tone, and it has the same body. And another example is the jump from Alien to Aliens, which is a complete genre shift. It goes from horror science fiction to action science fiction. Right? The second movie, wildly different tone, wildly different vibe, same aesthetics though. Right? It's using the same visual elements and it's still quite scary. There are still, like, horror elements to it. But the difference between there is one alien and it is picking us off one by one to oh, hey, God, there are thousands of them and... But we have a whole military unit with us. Completely different tone, but, again, same but different.

[Mary Robinette] I think... Talking about the tone also brings up a thing that you can do when you're looking at a sequel, and I'm thinking of the Gideon the 9th and...

[DongWon] Harrow...

[Mary Robinette] Harrow. That there's a big tone shift when you go from one book to the other. Because we shift POV characters...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because of a bunch of other things. But there are also so many grounding questions that are carried over...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] From the first book that you are still engaged with it, even though there's a lot of difference...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In that one. But the big kind of question of sort of who am I and how do I define myself...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And pushing against systems that want to keep me in a specific place, like, that's very consistent from book to book.

[DongWon] Or, again, A Memory Called Empire jumping to A Desolation Called Peace. Right? We read A Memory Called Empire a little while ago on this podcast, but the second book takes the same characters or many of the same characters, the ones who make it through the first book, and then they put them on the bridge of a starship trying to figure out how to communicate with some very different aliens. It's a really different problem and setting. I mean, one... In the first one, we are in an epic fantasy succession sort of story, and then in the second one, we're in this Star Trek how to meet the aliens story. But, because of the same characters and the tone and the questions are the same, they are still questions about connection and communication and language in a way that the first one is, it feels of a piece, even though they are radically different from each other. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to talk about some... Zooming out a little bit in sort of a more macro scale, How do I keep this feeling the same, while not just doing a direct sequel.

[DongWon] Okay. DongWon here. I wanted to remind you that in September, our last annual cruise will set sail from Alaska. And on February 15th, ticket prices will increase. The hosts are teaching classes on the business of publishing, world building, conversational storytelling, and game writing. You can sign up and learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats. Hope to see you there.

[DongWon] Okay. Welcome back. We're going to keep talking about the same but slightly different now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Do we get to talk about genre now?

[DongWon] We get to talk about genre now.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[DongWon] I want to talk about genre now, but I also want to talk about your career planning. How to still feel like you as a writer. But let's talk about genre first. So, in terms of genre, I think a lot... Many, many years ago, Writing Excuses, before I joined the podcast, did a season that I think about all the time, that I find so useful, which is the idea of elemental genres. You sort of have your window dressing genre, which is sort of are there ray guns and spaceships or are there dragons and swords in this? And then you have your elemental genres, which is is this fundamentally a mystery? Is this fundamentally romance? Is this a story about wonder and discovery? Right? And so when I think about the same but different, I think the things that need to feel the same are the window dressing things, kind of carry through, but then the things that you get to play with more are the elemental genre things. Right? You can set a mystery inside your cyberpunk setting. But the cyberpunk setting needs to hit certain aesthetic beats and hit certain elements to feel of the same.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I talk about a lot and think about is that there's, I think, aesthetically driven genres and structure driven genres. So aesthetic ones are things like science fiction, fantasy, historical, Western, that there's a look and a feel and a vibe. Set dressing.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Costumes. Ray guns. And then structure driven ones are things like romance, mystery, heist, thriller... That there's certain beats that you have to hit in order to do that. And the nice thing is that you can often get your same but different by layering those things.

[Erin] I'm curious though. That all makes sense to me, but how do you know what readers, or should you care what readers are responding to? Let's say you have a cyberpunk mystery that everyone's like, wow, cyberpunks cool, but I was really into this cyberpunk detective and, like, the actual unraveling of the mystery. And therefore if you make your next book cyberpunk romance, this... People might be like, oh, yeah, that was fine, but, like, I was really hoping for more on the mystery side, less on the cyberpunk side.

[DongWon] Well, I think one thing that's really important is we're talking about aesthetic versus structural genres. I do want to flag, though, that even though it is aesthetic and we're talking about it as set dressing, the aesthetic often has a question embedded in it that's really important. Right? So talking about cyberpunk specifically, it is about a certain set of questions and issues, and I think when cyberpunk doesn't feel like cyberpunk, it is just like hackers and flashy stuff. But there's no question about like what is individual... How do we operate within an oppressively capitalistic society? Right? I think, like, one of the primary elements of cyberpunk is the punk part of it. Right? How do we DIY ourselves under corporate oligarchy? Right? I think that's a really important thing. So I think if you carry through that question from one to the other, it'll feel connected. Right? I mean, this is Blade Runner versus Blade Runner 2049. are interested in really different or have incredibly different story structures. One is sort of like... The first one being more of a detective mystery and the second one being more of this, like, more sprawling story about tevolution and inheritance. Right? But they both feel like Blade Runner stories because, not just the aesthetics carry through, the question carries through of what makes a person a person.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that that is absolutely true. And also, I think that in... You're thinking about the question, but then there's also the thing you're asking is that that may be the thing that the creator is interested in is this question. But the readers may come for something else. And so for me, this goes to a metaphor that I've talked about before, which is the idea of decorating the house. Amal el Mohtar talks about writing is an act of hospitality. So I think that when you're thinking about this same but different, which pieces do you keep, you're thinking about when you move from one house to another, there's some things you keep and there's some things you don't keep. but it's ultimately still your house. So when I did Shades of Milk and Honey, and did the next book, which was secretly a military war novel disguised as a Regency romance, I did lose readers. Because there were readers who wanted... The same that they wanted was the structure. And I lost readers. But that was a ch... And I knew I would. It was a choice I made on purpose because I... As much as I love romance, I didn't want to be trapped in writing Regency romances. So I think that you can do that, but you just have to be conscious of it and decide why you're making the change and who you want to invite into the house. And what house do you want to live in?

[DongWon] Yeah. And I think this goes into sort of the second half of the question I had, which is, as a writer, when you're thinking about your career, when you're planning out what book is next, if you're not writing a series or even necessarily writing in the same genre, how do you make sure your next book still feels like a project from you? Right? What is an Erin Roberts story, and then what also feels like one, when you're thinking about what your next story is? Right? Like, is that something you two think about actively in planning that out?

[Mary Robinette] I think about it with novels.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I do not think about it with short fiction. With short fiction, that is the place where I am deliberately and joyfully playing all over the map.

[Erin] I think... Yes and no. Like, I think it's just like part of the story is a reflection of who you are. And so, when you think about the same but different, we are ourselves are often...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The same...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And always different. And I think one of the struggles when the world is moving at a pace, we'll say, and things are happening is you're changing a lot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And you're trying to figure out who you are and what's going on. That also changes your writing. And I think, for me, feeling beholden to a past version of myself feels like trapping myself in a relationship...

[DongWon] 100%.

[Erin] I didn't want to or locking myself in a house and refusing to move.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even though the neighborhood's on fire. and so I think it is... Even though who knows what the consequences of that may be.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's better to do something that I feel is a reflection of the thing I'm trying to say and maybe I'm the only one who likes it than writing something that I think other people will want, but I'm not happy with and I feel uncomfortable in the space. I'm not being hospitable to myself.

[DongWon] One thing I look at when considering taking on a client is what is their project. Right? Is the way I think about it. And when I say project, I mean not just what is this book, but what is the big question they're tackling. Right? Are they writing about liberty and authority? Are they writing about family inheritance? Right? Are they writing about morality? There's all... Or are they interrogating capitalism? Right? Like... And I say that in a way that sounds very highfalutin, but sometimes, like, I have this question about Chuck Tingle, too. Right? Chuck Tingle is writing about how to be queer in a world, how to find joy in a world, where things are really difficult. And these are big thematic questions told in a way that is often very light-hearted and accessible. But everyone I think is interrogating a question in their fiction in one way or another. Right? Whether they know it or not, and whether they're aware of it or not. And it's not a question I ask them and that I need them to answer, but this is a question for me of can I see it and can I figure out how to support that question. Right? And... So I think to some extent that connectivity is really important from one book to the next book of being able to feel like they're still talking about the same stuff.

[DongWon] But I've also noticed something, and I'm new to doing creative works on my own. Right? I've worked a long time supporting writers, but I've been doing a thing recently in preparation for an upcoming project where I've iterated on a bunch of games really quickly. Original settings, different groups, different themes. But I keep finding myself tripping over... Like, oh, crap, I did the same thing again. Right? Oh, I put doppelgangers in this story again. I put twins in the story again. Or whatever it is. Right? Like, there's a few repeated tropes I have. How do you spot the things and resist the things that are too same-y, same-y from story to story, and keep it feeling fresh? Or do you not worry about it at all?

[Mary Robinette] I don't worry about it often when I'm drafting. And there's some things like... There's some things I do on purpose. Like, with my books, one of the things that you know is that you're going to get committed family people. Whether it's a couple or friends, that there's a strong relationship that's not threatened. You will usually know that you're going to get some pretty costumes. The thing that I notice is that I have a... And I think this is a... I have a really strong tendency to injure my characters' hands and arms.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And I suspect that that is because as a puppeteer, that is the thing I'm most afraid of. And so that's the part of the body that I'm most likely to damage. And so I will catch myself doing that sometimes and pull it back. And other times, I'm just like, no, that's actually the appropriate part of their body to injure...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And we're just going to...

[DongWon] We're just going to do that.

[Mary Robinette] We're just going to do it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, like, it's when I look at it, I think, okay, why do I need to change this, and do I need to change it? Like, the number of times that someone actually is going to binge all of my material back to back and then write a thesis going, ah, she has broken five arms... It's unlikely to happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of times, the patterns that we see in our own work are because we are living with our own work, not because other people see it. And then other people will see patterns that we have no idea are there.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Like, someone just pointed out that I've got three different books, one of which isn't out yet, that are essentially about... That have this through line of the cost of celebrity.

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, oh, yeah. Elma doesn't want it, has it forced on her. Tesla in Spare Man, that was a conscious theme of that book. And then the new one, I'm like, oh, yeah. No, look, I've done that again accidentally. Huh.

[Erin] Something that I think is really exciting to do is to use the way you write as a way to push yourself. So, something that I find in... At some point, I actually did have two stories where I was like, wow, these stories are very different, different settings, but I was like seems like I'm writing a lot of stories about a person who realizes their place in the world is worse than they thought it was and lashes out as a result. Against something or someone or in some way, and so I was like, well, that's cool. But what happens after you lash out? Like, what happens, like... It's a short story, so, like it ends there, and there's, like, a lot of implication about what that might mean. But I'm like what happens after an act of, like, violence or anger? Like, what does the community... What are we left with and how do we deal with the aftermath? And a lot of the work that I'm working on now is about what do we give to each other and what do we do as... In the aftermath of, like, an act that is not a good one, but is still one that you have to live with? And I'm like, who knows? Maybe at some point I'll get sick of those and be like then what happens, like, when you want to do restorative justice?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] Like and so it actually becomes, like, this larger story of, like, how do we deal with life? As I have different things that I am interested in. And part of the reason that I push myself was, I was like, oh, I'm sick of writing the same story, but also, it was partly like maybe I do need to interrogate a little bit a harder thing for me to write. But it's something that I'm still interested in writing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's exactly the key to writing the same but different, is to honor the fact that you are not the same person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And to always be like, well, what is it... I mean, science fiction and fantasy in particular is really the story about, like, what if.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the main things that drives us. So I think doing that with your own work... It's like, well, what if I try something different? What if I push this? Even if it's not a theme or a question... What if I push this area of craft? Like, all of these things are ways to have the same but different. Because you are the same person writing it.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. Okay. I think we're going to leave it there. Thank you guys so much for talking this through with me. I have a little bit of homework for the audience. This one is less of a writing exercise and more of a critical one.

[DongWon] What I would love you to do is to take two works from the same franchise, either a direct sequel or just two things in a series. Could be a TV show, could be a movie, could be a book. And then I want you to take note of did you like the ways in which they handled the sequelness? Did it feel the same but different? And then I want you to do a detailed analysis of that. Really write down, component by component, what carried over, what didn't carry over? Did it feel good to you that this thing changed, did it feel good to you that this thing stayed? Did it feel really static, did it feel dynamic, did it ask new questions? And take note of that and think about it as you plan out your next work.

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.04: Deconstructing The Hero's Journey

2026-01-29T07:33:35Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.04: Deconstructing The Hero's Journey

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-04-deconstructing-the-heros-journey

Key Points: Departure from the real world, trials and apotheosis in the magical realm, and return to the real world. Arm bar, propelling the protagonist across the threshold. Hero: Here I am, explosions, run... The unwilling hero. Mentor! Removed before the final battle. Patterns need to be completed for satisfaction. The return!

[Season 21, Episode 04]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing the Hero's Journey.

[Erin] Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And today, we are putting paid on tools, not rules. Because we're going to talk about the Hero's Journey. And I just need to preface this with... With a whole preamble about anxiety of influence and Hero With a Thousand Faces, and the fact that many of us look at this and think, man, I don't want to read that Joseph Campbell book, because then everything I write will end up conforming to this colonizing, culturally appropriating whatever. And you know what? You're not wrong about what the Hero's Journey might be. But we're not here to present it to you as a set of rules. We're here to present it to you as a useful toolbox. And for me, I've found that anxiety of influence always... Always, always, always... Manifests less the more I know, and the better I understand the thing that I'm afraid of.

[DongWon] And just to underscore this point about tools, not rules, I have made it this far into my publishing career, I've been doing this for 20 years professionally, I've edited hundreds of books at this point. I don't really know what the Hero's Journey is. Or at least like... I know it's, like, role in conversation, I know sort of the meta-structure of it. But in terms of what the actual steps of the Hero's Journey are, in terms of that strict application, I don't really know what all those pieces are. And so, I can see its utility as a tool. But if you just need some reassurance of, like... If you're hearing this conversation and you're like, oh, God, I don't know what the Hero's Journey is, I'm not a writer... Please, rest assured, many people don't know what it is and that's 100% fine.

[Howard] The... I mean, by way of definition, Joseph Campbell wrote Hero With a Thousand Faces, first edition, in 1949, and he was a student of comparative mythology, and he studied a lot of mythologies. Did he study all of them? No. Because that's way too big. But he studied enough to make a convincing case, backed by Jungian psychology and Freudian psychology and a whole bunch of other cultural elements that were prevalent in his culture at the time... Made a very good case for, boy, all of these mythologies seem to be tapping into some subconscious structure. And that structure looks like this. And then he describes what this is.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And it is basically departure from the real world, a... Trials and apotheosis in the magical realm, and a return to the real world in which gifts are or are not bestowed upon fellow people. And that is such a super, ultra-condensed summary. What's funny about the Hero's Journey, the book... Or Hero With a Thousand Faces, the book, is that the... After 1977, they started changing the covers to include Luke Skywalker on the cover of the book.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because George Lucas was a big fan of this and incorporated these structures into Star Wars.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And so it's very easy to look at the Hero's Journey, to look at the monomyth, and to say, oh, well, it's successful because it resonates with all of us, and that's why Star Wars works. And that's why Lord of the Rings works.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And that's why whatever works. And the fact of the matter is those things work because they were stories that were well told. There are plenty of things that adhere to the monomyth that are not well told and that don't work.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, part of the reason I use Star Wars so much as a writing example is because of this. I mean, not just because I love it and know it very well. But it is just a useful shorthand in terms of this very iconic, sort of simplistic idea of what the journey for a hero is, or what this character arc can be. And I push back pretty strongly on the idea of the monomyth. I think there are lots of different story structures that we encounter in story, from different cultures, from different perspectives. I think there are lots of different types of stories that we tell even within Western culture. But I also have this strong belief that pattern recognition is central to storytelling. Right? A lot of how human cognition is wired is to recognize patterns in the world. We then see those and communicate those to other people, and that's storytelling in a very fundamental way. And so, of course, there will be sort of nodes that appear, strange attractors, within storytelling that will be dominant in one way or another, and we can see that in the Hero's Journey. We can also see that in something like Save the Cat. We can also see that in sort of these... What's the Japanese structure that I always forget the name of?

[Howard] Kishotenketsu.

[DongWon] Yeah. Thank you. And so, I think it is useful to think about and talk about, even though what I would really urge you to not do is feel like you have to use this as a formula, when writing your story in particular.

[Erin] Yeah, because I think it has... I think the Hero's Journey has a few, like, underlying assumptions. And I'm interested to find out more about sort of what it is, because I have also sort of bounced off of it. Even without knowing it, I just bounced away from it. And as somebody who also is not a big Star Wars fan, like, I... People often use that as, like, it's the great Hero's Journey, and I'm like, I hate it. And so I don't know as much about it. But I think part of the reason is that I get really interested in stories that are about people embedded within community. And to me, the Hero's Journey is a journey, and so it is a great... Seems like a great tool for the... Like, a departure is part of it. Right? There's... Part of it is you leave the world you know and you go out. And while you could leave that world philosophically or, like, emotionally, I think a lot of times in its traditional form, it is about physically leaving behind what you know, and going somewhere else. And so I think, for me, one way to wrap my head about it is when I want to write a story of journey, this is something to consider. If I want to write a story of being under siege or of remaining, maybe it's not the thing that I want to use. But it's a great way to think about where do you leave, where do you go, and what do you come back with.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One of the commonalities in the departure, and it's not, again, it's not always this way, but it's very commonly this way, is a technique that screenwriters often called the arm bar. Which is that you are propelled into... You're propelled across the threshold, you are propelled into the adventure because all of the other choices were bad. To use Star Wars as an example, it's not until Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru have been...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Killed by the Stormtroopers...

[DongWon] Skeletonized.

[Howard] Yeah. That Luke decides to leave. It is not until... And when... The Hobbit... When Bilbo leaves. He has this whole dinner with the dwarves, and he decides not to go. And then changes his mind in the morning. And, again, using Tolkien, Frodo...

[DongWon] Yep. I've been rereading Lord of the Rings, actually, recently I was working on a narrative project early this year with a group of friends, and I had a long drive heading to do that recording and so I started listening to the audiobook of Lord of the Rings as preparation for that, because it was going to be a journey story, it was going to be a sort of classic walk into the wilderness as so much fantasy is. And the thing that struck me was how long it takes Frodo to leave the Shire. And how long that period is of him delaying and delaying and procrastinating and putting off this thing he's been told to do until the riders show up, until it is almost too late, and he's literally being chased and hounded out of this place of safety to go on this adventure.

[Erin] Yeah, it's funny. Earlier today, I was joking about a hero from Hero's Journey being an acronym...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because I love acronyms. And I only got as far as the first three letters, but they were: here I am, explosions, run.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so... Because I think a lot of times the explosions do not necessarily have to be literal explosions, but it is the loss of family...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The sudden danger, the thing that... That is the thing that propels you across a threshold and then you go running, and I think...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] You run away, and then you run towards something else. First you're running away from the danger, and then...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You're running towards some new goal.

[DongWon] I cracked it!

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] It's, oh, no, apotheosis.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And we should talk about that, maybe?

[Howard] What I was going to say is, oh, no, hero only has four letters, and there's way more pieces here.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] We are going to...

[DongWon] [garbled] That's it. We're done.

[Howard] We're going to talk about some of those pieces after a break.

[Howard] I said we were going to talk about more of the pieces. I lied a little bit, because I want to finish talking about this arm bar. The part about the Hero's Journey that I think resonates with a lot of us is that unwilling hero. Because most of us, yeah, you'd have to twist my arm to send me on that kind of thing, that kind of an adventure. I don't want to go do that, I'm very Hobbit-like. In many many ways. And so that resonates with us. Does it resonate with us because that is a grand pattern in the Jungian psyche? Or does it resonate with us because most of us like to sit at home and read books?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that it's possible to tell really good stories that begin with the hero saying, I'm picking up my sword and I'm going to go do something dangerous. And that's fine too.

[DongWon] And there's something I think about a lot, and this comes up from TT RPGs, is you run into a lot of things where, like, someone makes a character who's like, I'm a lone wolf. I don't participate in friendship and doing stuff. Right? And it's sort of like you end up in this problem where the forward momentum of the story stops before it starts, because one player will just say, I'm not going to do that thing. And so the way I like to invert it is to think about this question of why, not if. Right? If starting from this idea of if your protagonist participates in this, the answer is they're probably not, they'd rather stay home, they're scared. They're whatever. They're not paying attention to the world around them. If you instead say, okay, they are going to do this thing. Frodo is going to leave the Shire. Why does he do that? Not will he do that. Starting with the why will lead you to much more interesting narrative places and sort of unlock all the things that cascade from that moment in a way that I think is much more useful.

[Erin] Makes sense.

[Howard] One of the key pieces that, for me, identifies a thing as having been influenced by the Hero's Journey is the presence of a mentor character.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And... O, my goodness, we see this in... We see this everywhere.

[DongWon] This is Obi-Wan, this is Gandalf, this is... Yeah.

[Howard] This is Obi-Wan, this is Gandalf, this is... Yeah. Why do I try to look at that and say, oh, that's obviously Hero's Journey? Because if I take a step back, you know what? All of us, hopefully, at some point, have had mentors. This is a role that exists outside of this framework. The thing that makes the mentor character, the archetype, the meme for lack of a better word, so memorably identifiable in the Hero's Journey is that they have to get removed from the picture before we have our final battle. Gandalf has to stay... Has to fight a balrog and say, fly, you fools.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Obi-Wan has to be struck down and say, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. And that is... On the one hand, I mean, it's useful to know that tool, but on the other hand, it kind of becomes a metapredictor.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Howard] If the reader sees the mentor like, oh, that guy's doomed in Act 2...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is that an effect we want in what we're writing?

[DongWon] Well, one thing I want to flag here is... You called this a meme. Right? And I think that's accurate. There's a memetic quality to...

[Howard] Yes.

[DongWon] These kinds of structures. Right? This is the pattern recognition thing I always talk about. And it is this idea of, like, you can see this mentor figure and there's so many times I'm watching a movie and I'm like, hmm... He's dead in the next scene. Or like... It's like the old cop being like, I'm going to retire in 2 days, and you're like, you are not making it out of this movie, bud.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And I think...

[Howard] A soldier looking at the photograph of his girlfriend...

[DongWon] Totally.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] And the thing that I want to flag here is those scenes can be kind of corny. Right? Sometimes if it's too obvious, it'll feel cheesy. It'll feel what people call quote unquote trope-y. Right? And trope-y doesn't mean that you're doing the thing, it means that you're doing the thing badly, in an uncomplicated or a way that feels rote and not rooted in the story, in an emotional reality of the characters. Right? So I think that's really important, but it's also important to do the thing. Part of the satisfaction of being in a pattern is seeing the thing complete. Right? This is the thing of, like, when you're telling a mystery story, if the Poirot figure doesn't stand in a room and put all the clues together for the reader, you're missing a satisfying part of the story. If you're telling a romance, and there isn't a happily ever after, you're going to get yelled at by every romance reader in the world, because that is part of the pattern, and they're looking for that completion. What you want actually is that feeling of figuring the thing out one page before the author tells you. Right? The satisfaction... The ideal mystery conclusion or thriller conclusion is the reader figures it out just before they figure it out. Right? Because then they feel smart and they feel like, ooh, I can see all the pieces, and then you get the satisfaction of the thing resolving. Right? So you can sort of think of it as a musical scale or musical note. You want the thing to resolve in a satisfying way that feels inevitable but surprising.

[Erin] Yeah. And speaking of that kind of resolution, like, to really deconstruct the Hero's Journey, I was thinking that why does the mentor exist? And in some ways, like, the mentor exists because, as an author, as somebody telling a story, they are a vehicle to explain things, to give information about the world that someone who has been shielded from that world would never know. So there's some way... It doesn't have to be the mentor, but to me what that role is... How does the world make itself known in a way that is clear cut so that the person who is going through the journey understands what they're up against, how to do the thing that they don't know how to do, is given enough tools to put things together. And the mentor's sad demise or... I don't know, like, leaves for another planet or whatever they do to make them unavailable is really about balance. If you start a story with reluctance, then you need to end with acceptance. I do not want to go on this journey. I am now the only person who can finish this journey. And so the men... In order for that balance to happen, the mentor can't be there because they would be like, well, why don't you do it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You've had 25 years of experience. Seems like you would be the better choice...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Than me, a person who just started doing this 3 weeks ago.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So they must be, like, taken out of the story.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] And so one of the things that maybe I'm taking from this is how can I, even if I'm not telling the exact Hero's Journey, look for ways to balance the way that a story begins with the way that it concludes, so you have that resolution, and how do I think about... How do I bring the world into the story? If I don't want to do it with the mentor, because it feels too trope-y, do they... In a video game, they just find, like, really detailed journal entries where people...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Going through the dystopian end of the world...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is so nicely lettered out, like, day three, the zombies attacked again. Turns out they're allergic to water.

[DongWon] Day four...

[Erin] You know what I mean? So that you know what it is.

[DongWon] I'm being bitten by a zombie and writing it down for some reason. Why...

[Erin] Oh, no.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Castle Argh.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But each time... Those are still... It's doing the same thing. It's just doing it in a different way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One of my favorite examples of this, of using the Hero's Journey, but using it in a way that surprises the reader, is the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Because the Hero's Journey, the pattern of the Hero's Journey, we discover on about, I think, halfway through book two. I forget, it's been a while, we discover that that thing happened and the hero failed, and that's why ash falls from the sky. We had a Hero's Journey, and we had this whole archtypical thing that fits on so many points...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And what we have now is a heist crew that is trying to make a living, and in the course of doing that, they are finding ways to maybe fix things. And so... I mean, taking a step back from any sort of deconstruction of Brandon's work, using the Hero's Journey as worldbuilding, using it as something that underlies a mythos, a religion, a magic system, whatever that your characters are aware of, but they are not following the pattern... That's a great way to very quickly ground your world and make it seem real without having to do a whole lot of heavy lifting.

[DongWon] Well, one thing I wanted to point out, I was talking earlier about with patterns what we want to see is the resolution. We want to see the chord resolve. There is a second way you can resolve an ascending scale, which is to break the pattern. Right? You don't have to go to the obvious resolution, you can invert it. Right? And so when we have a pattern in story, it's often... I have this thing when I watch movies where it's not that I know what's going to happen next, it's that I can see the range of possibilities. I'm like, oh, either the monster's going to appear now or we're going to get a fake out and this is a whole nother thing. Right? And I think those inversions can be just as satisfying as giving us the thing. There's a moment in the Candyland remake directed by Nia Da Costa where... One of the main characters, like, near the end of the movie, she opens the door to a cellar and you see this descending staircase into darkness that is like below this creepy building. You know that the villain is down there. And she just looks down the hallway and says, nope, and closes the door. And it is one of those, like, perfect inversion moments of here's the pattern. We're showing you the pattern of your horror movie protagonist is going to enter a scary situation full of tension. And then we see her say, I ain't doing that. And it's so satisfying and so funny, in that moment, because you can invert the trope in a really useful way. So when you're thinking about these tools, remember you can choose to deliberately use them or not use them. But if you don't have an awareness of what pattern you're playing into, it can misfire, because I will expect you to either do it or not do it. And then if you show instead that I didn't know I was setting that up, then I'm like, oh, you're not good at this. You don't know what you're doing.

[Erin] Speaking of knowing the pattern, I am curious. We made it through the beginning, and then, oh, no, apotheosis. But is there anything we missed, like, on the back end.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] We kind of missed...

[Erin] Also, Dong...

[DongWon] Yeah, I think we made it through the first quarter.

[laughter]

[Erin] We did not actually take up the call, nor did we resolve the situation. But I'm wondering if like... If there's a quick, like, for people who number one maybe don't know apotheosis or, like, don't know the rest, we need to do that now, or...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I will go ahead and provide a graphic for our producer to post on the web. We built monomyth light for Extreme Dungeon Mastery, which is super useful for storytellers. One of the things that gets left out of a lot of applications of Hero's Journey in story is the... It's described as a circle. And apotheosis is at six o'clock, is at the bottom of the circle. There's this whole return, which has trials, try-fail cycle often, a re-crossing of the threshold, and a delivery of the boon, whatever... The magical macguffin to the real world, and the acceptance or rejection of that by the real world. That is something that gets left off, because at least per Western storytelling, we like a narrative curve that climbs slowly and steeply to a climax, and then falls off very quickly...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] To a resolution and denouement. When you look at the print editions, the written version of Lord of the Rings, the scouring of the Shire functions really well as the last half of the Hero's Journey. It's compressed, but it functions really well as the last half. In the Peter Jackson movies, they missed that all together and still gave us five endings. But that's a separate discussion. But it felt like the right decision, because going back to the Shire would have been...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Way too much movie.

[DongWon] Well, it's one of the great sins of modern storytelling is there's no space for denouement. Right?

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] There's no space for us seeing the characters in their apotheosis after they've done the thing. One of my favorite books of all time is Robin McKinley's The Robin and The Crown, which... Kind of a spoiler, but, like, the whole back half of the book is after she does the thing. Right? The Hero's Journey part of it is only the first part, and then you realize that the Hero's Journey is actually the thing that happens after you do the thing. And it makes it one of the most interesting examinations of what it is to be a hero, what it is to do hard things, what it is to engage with the world that makes that truly one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time.

[Howard] Well, we are far enough in that we need to cross the threshold into homework.

[DongWon] Have we apotheosized?

[Howard] I don't think we get to apotheosis.

[laughter]

[Howard] If that ever shows up in an episode, everybody will know.

[DongWon] No, we've gone super sane here. This is it.

[Howard] Homework for you. I want you to take an outline of the Hero's Journey. And we'll go ahead and provide one in the liner notes. And just on an index card, on a Post-It note, or something, from memory, write down as many stories, movies, TV shows, operas, whatever you can think of that adheres to this pattern. Just as a mental exercise to see if the pattern... If you understand the way the pattern is being applied.

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

comments

Writing Excuses 21.03: Deconstructing Plots

2026-01-23T02:43:00Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.03: Deconstructing Plots

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-03-deconstructing-plots

Key Points: [Fair warning! They do NOT deconstruct plots in this episode, they talk about what that means and how they are going to do it during this season.] What does deconstructing plots mean? What's the essence, or the components of plots? What principles do these plot recipes have in common? The action plot and the emotion plot. Borrow a plot structure, then improvise and add your own details and flourishes. Arcs and through lines.Rules like the story must have a character with a problem or must have conflict are made to be broken. What draws us in? What pulls us through a story? Hooks! Beginnings, middles, and ends. Breaking rules! Signalling. Understanding the ripple effects. Rule of 3. Looking at specific plot structure, take them apart, and look at why and how they work.

[Season 21, Episode 03]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing plots.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] And, we are going to be talking about the other big thread that we're going to be running through the whole year. So, deconstructing plots. What does that even mean?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that you'll see with food where they're like, this is a deconstructed peanut butter sandwich, where they get into, like, what the essence of things are. So, I've been thinking a lot about what the salt, fat, acid, heat of plot structure is. And what we're going to be doing this year is we are going to be digging into a bunch of different plot structures, looking at why they work, and then looking at the individual components of things that go into story. So, because, I mean, there are so many plot structures out there. But you... Flashing back to all of our metaphors, they're just recipes. So what are the underlying principles that they all have in common that lead us to things like the inciting incident, or the dark night of the soul? Like, what are those things?

[DongWon] I'm really excited for this season. And as soon as you pitched it, I was like very in on it. And I'm in on it for a contrary reason. Because I don't really believe in plot structures.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So, I think there's a thing about doing this podcast and about teaching, which is, whenever I ask... Am asked to teach a class or we're talking about the season, I love doing it about something I don't really understand. Which is contrary, because, like, if I'm going to teach, I should probably know about it. But sometimes the act of digging into teaching it gets my head around it in a way that I hadn't before. So, when you were talking about let's deconstruct plots, I was like, hell, yes. Let's go. Because it's a thing that I don't feel like I have a really great handle on. Right? Like, obviously, I can tell when a story is slow, I can tell when the story structure isn't hitting in all these different ways. But, for me, I always round it up to, oh, plot distance from character. That's like my one rule about plot is that plot distant from character. It's not helpful in 90% of situations where we need to talk about plot. So, anyways, this is just me saying (A) I'm going to be the audience surrogate here, being like, what do we mean? What does that mean?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And then (B) I'm just excited, really excited to dig into this. Yeah.

[Erin] I think I'm really similar, actually.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So we can fight over who can be the audience surrogate. Like, I like plot, I gue... I mean, it's there. It's in a story.

[DongWon] It's obviously important.

[Erin] But I think it is interesting in that I really, I think, overindex away from plot.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Thinking back to my sort of soap opera roots, like, soap operas are such like... They're on every day. And so there are days in which, like, nothing really happens. Except a few... Maybe there's a conversation, and somebody looks good in a dress...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And then there are days in which everyone gets slapped. Which are fun. But knowing how to link from one of those events to the next... Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And I sort of feel like, to go back to a different metaphor, not mine, fashion. I sometimes feel this way about clothing. Like, I can say this thing looks good at the Met Gala, and this one does not, to me. But if you ask me why, and then you ask someone who actually understands clothes why, like, they would be like, oh, it's this cut, it's this line, it's the whatever. It's that long speech from...

[DongWon] The Devil Wears Prada.

[Erin] The Devil Wears Prada. Where the character like... Who is it, Meryl Streep?

[DongWon] Cerulean.

[Erin] Yeah, she explains like all the things that go into...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You deciding to wear this blue top. And I don't understand a lot of that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And instead, I'm working on instinct. Which is great when you just wanted to say which one looks better. But if you're home, trying to figure out how to dress yourself, and you don't understand the underlying principles, you might be like, oh, this looked good on this person but not on me, and I don't understand why, I just have to keep trying.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And especially if you are early in your career and you don't trust your own taste, and then you are second-guessing yourself all the time before you go out the door to a party.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so I started off when I was writing, I know people have heard me say this before, that I understood character. Like, that was a thing from theater that I understood. But I would write really good... Like, stories that had a really good beginning, a really good middle, and a really good ending to three completely different stories...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That just happened to have the same set of characters. So structure and plot was the thing that I really focused on. And one of the mistakes that I made, I think early on, was that I thought plot was just about the action, the things that happened. And plot isn't. When you say plot distance from character, Rebecca Roanhorse describes this as there's an action plot and there's an emotion plot. Yeah. Which is really interesting. So she thinks that when... That the failure mode of an action plot is... Some of this, sometimes you'll see in science fiction early career stuff, where there's so many things happening, but you don't understand why any of it's important.

[DongWon] Totally. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, they focused on the action too much, and they've forgotten the emotion.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And the failure mode of the emotion plot you'll see in some literary fiction where they focused so much on the emotion that, like, nothing happens. So, both of those things are important. But you're right. How do we do these things? The thing for me is something I always go back to, which is that I do just want to write on instinct. I do just want to do the art of it. But the idea that technique exists for when the art isn't there. And so I don't think that people need to be thinking about these things all the time. The reason we keep saying tools, not rules, is that it's nice to have a toolbox. And you can... Like, I can improvise a meal in the kitchen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But I didn't start off improvising a meal. I started off following recipes. When I started writing, I didn't start off improvising a plot structure. Like, some of my early structures, if you look at it, like, my first sale is Rapunzel. It is... It's like hitting those beats. Like, there's a lot of things where I borrowed someone else's plot structure. And I think that we do that when it's like, oh, I love this thing that's so-and-so wrote, and I want to write a book like that. It's like, yeah, you want to copy their recipe, which is... There is nothing wrong with that. You can improvise around that, you can add your own details and flourishes. This isn't, hey, everybody, everything should be original and new. It's like... I think there are actually things.

[Erin] What I love about the way you're talking about plot is it's like... maybe I like plot more than I think because I often think about arcs and through lines in a piece. Which... Like, if that is also... When you talk about an emotion plot, I'm like, oh, I'm often thinking about what's the emotional through line, or what's like the knowledge through line. Like, what's... Who knows what when and why, and how does it affect them? But I never think of that as plot, I think, because I often associate plot as being rules, not tools. Like, I often think of plot as like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You must do these six things in this exact order, or else you have broken everything. And I hate that.

[DongWon] Yeah. And I think one thing that comes... I think about a lot of times when those... The rules of plot... Those are very culturally defined, too. Right? Like... I'm someone who... Certainly when it comes to my taste in movies, I'm notorious for liking the slowest, most glacially paced things imaginable. Like, when you were talking about the... Like, it's a failure of... The action plot, if they focus too much on the emotional, I just thought immediately of three of my favorite films...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That I would describe as literally nothing happens in this movie. A man cleans bathrooms for 2 hours, and then I'm crying, and I'm like, this is a perfect movie. But also, that movie is made by a western director, but is about a Japanese man, takes place in Japan, and he's using non-western plot structures. Right? And so to say that it is plotless is only from a perspective of a western audience member who's expecting Hero's Journey. Who's expecting certain kinds of beats and structures. And instead, what I'm being fed is really different structures. So when I watch [long Kong?], when I watch Korean cinema, these kinds of things are pulling from very different rhythms and expectations.

[Mary Robinette] Like, there's this rule that a story must have a character with a problem...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And I... And there's con... A story must have conflict. And I push against that so hard...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because, like, one of my favorite stories that I think is one of... Like, the perfect story out there is Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rain.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And there's like... Show me the character with a problem and the action? Like, there's not. You can make an argument for the house, but really, no. And so...

[DongWon] At the beginning of the story, the house is sad and lonely. At the end of the story, the house is sad and lonely. Nothing changes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. A character does not have to undergo change. Sherlock Holmes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Doesn't undergo change...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But the stories are so engaging. And I think that there are reasons that they're so engaging. Like, what draws us in? And so, the thing for me is when you were talking, Erin, about through lines and arcs, the thing that I've been thinking about is, well, what pulls us through a story? And we talk about a hook. And you have different hooks to attract... I'm going to actually use the fishing metaphor instead of sheep...

[laughter]

[Erin] Not the sheep.

[Mary Robinette] For readers... Or for listeners, I previously confessed that I had for years thought that it was talking about a shepherd's hook instead of a fishing hook. To move the sheep around. But it... When you're fishing, you've got a hook, you've got different lures on that. To... And different lures depending on what you're trying to catch, depending on what your intentions are. So I think with, when we're looking at fiction, it's a lot of the same thing. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the kinds of areas we're going to be poking at for the rest of the season.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. Welcome back. So, what are some things that you can look forward to? Are we going to be talking about beginnings? [pause] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I look at the other two and they're like, I haven't looked at the outline for this season.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Wait, wait. You wanted us to know the structure of the season?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] We just said we're not structure people.

[Mary Robinette] But we...

[Erin] Through lines...

[Mary Robinette] But I think the... Like, one of the few things that stories have in common...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Is beginning, middle, end.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] If for no other reason than you start reading it and then you stop reading it [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So I think...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, looking at what are some things that are consistent when you're looking at all of these different structures? We're going to be looking at middles. Like, people talk about the saggy middle. What are all the things... Like, most of the story actually happens in the middle.

[DongWon] It is most of the book. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So...

[DongWon] It's not the part that everyone remembers the most, usually. Right? So what's actually happening there? What makes it effective? And how do you keep people moving through it? These are all really, really important questions.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And, I assume the ending, at some point, we will definitely talk about. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] We will talk... We will definitely talk...

[Erin] And how does it land? It's funny, like, how much an ending can, like, taint or make a story. I think about, weirdly, two endings that I love that other people did not like. Which are the ending of Lost and the ending of Mass Effect 3.

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Erin] It's like I'm the only one in history...

[DongWon] Both of these are like heretical tastes.

[laughter]

[Erin] Don't add me.

[DongWon] But my canonic one is I really like the ending of Sunshine, the Stanley Boyle movie that everyone loves the first half and hates the second half. But I'm like, I don't know, I think the whole thing works.

[Erin] Yeah. But it's interesting...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Thinking about, like, why do these things work?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, for me, Lost works because the ending is an emotional ending, and I cared more about the emotional content than the solving puzzles content of that particular piece. So it hit me in the heart, it didn't need to hit me in the head.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? And for... I can't remember why I liked Mass Effect 3, but I remember being like, people are very mad, but I like these pretty colors.

[DongWon] People are too mad, but it is still insane to say that you like that ending.[garbled] to calm down.

[Erin] But I do think it's really interesting to think about, like, how do we do that, because what's unfortunate...

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I think about... The reason I picked those examples are they're two things where people never talk about the rest of it anymore.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] They only talk about the ending. And so if people are going to over index on the ending, what does that mean...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That you have to do as a writer in order to not have them only be talking about [garbled]

[DongWon] Totally.

[Mary Robinette] Right. And also the fact that they... I think one of the reasons that people are mad about both of those is that they broke a rule.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And so deciding when you're going to break it. We do talk about tools, not rules, but the fact is that people have expectations, and a lot of these rules arose because someone reverse engineered something that they did by accident.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Other people were like, oh, that's the way it should always be. And then an audience will overindex on, well, that's the way it must be. But the other reason is that when you do that reverse engineering, when you figure out, well, what did I do, how did I get to this point, that a lot of times it is because it created a specific effect.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so if your audience... If you've used all the tools at the beginning to set up one effect...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like this is the effect I'm going to give you, and then they are disappointed in that, that's where the disconnect happens.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I think... We've talked last season a little bit when Erin was talking about the chapter that's going in our craft book, Now Go Write, about breaking rules. It's like if you... I think it's like if you understand the effect of this thing, then you can decide how you're going to use it.

[DongWon] It's signaling that you meant to break that rule that's important. I think about another famous like, quote unquote, bad ending that I adore, which is Neon Genesis Evangelion. That ending is completely bonkers. I love it because it closes an emotional arc, like Lost for you. But it also is that way because they ran out of money and time. Right? And so they weren't able to signal we're doing this on purpose...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Because, quite frankly, they weren't doing it on purpose. I think they did something incredible that works. But it is the hand holding component, it is the hey, we know we're breaking a rule. We know you expected X, but we're going to give you Y. Trust us and go with it. And when that doesn't happen, I think that's when it feels like a mistake.

[Erin] And I actually think that's why it's so important to actually learn more.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, I'm really excited to learn more about...

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] These plot structures, because what you don't want to have happen is everyone is aware, whether intentionally or unintentionally, of a particular plot thing that you are doing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then you don't know that that's what you're doing, so you break away from it without signaling. Like somebody who cuts across eight lanes of highway without signaling. And you're like, oh my gosh, now you've caused an accident, what is happening? And I want to know what those rules are so that I...

[DongWon] Totally.

[Erin] Can break them intentionally.

[Mary Robinette] And I think it's actually in some cases less about signaling than understanding the ripple effects of the decision you've made.

[DongWon] Yeah. And sort of building on that, it's... When we say rules, it... There's not a committee sitting that's being like, here are the rules of fiction. If you follow them, you'll be fine. Humans are creatures of pattern recognition. Right? All storytelling is, is pattern recognition. We're seeing the same rhythms, we have the same expectations of like, oh, here's what happens in a story, because of all the other ones we've experienced, all the other ones that we've observed. Right? And so when we talk about different story structures, when we talk about different expectations, whether that's three act structure, seven point plot structure, non-western structures, all these different things. That is because over time people have developed certain expectations by observing certain patterns over and over again. So when you are breaking with that expectation, when you're breaking that pattern, knowing what other patterns there are, and moving from pattern A to pattern B, or just even inverting the pattern on purpose, becomes really important. So that you're not just chaotically wandering off the path, and then it doesn't match to anything we know.

[Mary Robinette] Let me give a really concrete example of this kind of thing, which is the rule of three.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, you hear it all the time. Three times is funny. Third time... Three times is... Bad things come in threes. Good things come in three. Three things is... Three times is funny. All of these are this expectation in Western culture that it's going to be one, two, three got it. And some other cultures, it's rule of five, rule of seven... I think there's one that's rule of 11. I'm like, whew, those are long evenings.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But, once you know that, that the audience is expecting this dun, dun, dun, got it, if you've been watching media and it's like, this is very predictable, it's probably because they've been doing rule of three every time. And so you can manipulate that. If you want something to feel harder for a character, then you can go to a rule of four or five. They have to put in four or five efforts. If you want it to be easier, you can do a rule of one or two. You can even have the character go into it expecting it to be hard, get it on the first try, and have them be like, oh my goodness. That there's this big cathartic release that they were not expecting, the reader wasn't expecting it, because they're expecting this buildup to it. So if you know that, then you go in and you consciously break the rule of three for the effect, because you know what the audience expectations are.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's the kind of thing where I'm like, you don't have to signal it, but you just have to know what the ripple effects are.

[DongWon] Exactly. So you can set up the pattern, and then break it.

[Erin] Yeah. And what I love about when you mentioned them all is that while there are maybe some that don't fit into this, it's a very odd number. So I actually think the desire for things to be in odd numbers is like a human brain thing that goes across cultures. But some go five, some go seven, some go nine, but it's rare to have like six, for some reason. Like, I don't know why our brains are like this. What I think is interesting is just knowing that, like, there's a discomfort in things ending in an even way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's like if the fourth one was the one you ended up with. Like, maybe something is wrong about this. Can make you... If in fact you wanted it to secretly be the fifth, the fourth seems right, but in fact, something is wrong there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You can actually, like, when you understand these patterns, it's like you can subconsciously create things going on...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That even the reader will understand why it feels off, but it just does.

[DongWon] You can be deliberately unsettled, you can make things feel unfinished, like the chord doesn't resolve. And then, if you're telling a horror story, if you're telling something psychologically upsetting... Yeah. Make it four. Four feels bad. I don't know why, but it does.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's death. So this is the kind of thing that we're going to be talking about this season. And, in addition to that, what we are also going to be doing is we are going to be taking plot structures, like the three act structure, the Hero's Journey, the Heroine's Journey, the four act structure... like, we're going to be looking at a bunch of different very specific plot structures and taking them apart and going, well, why does this work? Why do we have to have that thing here? So those are the things that we're going to be doing this season.

[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, what I want you to do is I want you to grab something that you like. And I want you to kind of look at it and do... We've talked about doing reverse engineering of outlines before. I want you to do that with this, but in a kind of very gentle way. I just want you to go through and say, scene good? Scene bad? Like, good thing happen, bad thing happen? As the overall takeaway from the scene. And look to see if there's a pattern that you did not realize was in that work.

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

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Writing Excuses 21.02: My Process is Not Your Process

2026-01-13T07:50:17Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.02: My Process is Not Your Process

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-02-my-process-is-not-your-process

Key Points: Barriers? Where do you start? Why am I not doing a thing? Stimulus! Patterns. Notice what you are doing, look for intersections, and figure out the ties. Observation and self-examination. What works for you? Lower the threshold, the friction. Give yourself permission to not do something, too. Then what? Link things together, make chains. Look for what you are eager to do. Pavlov dogging. Pay attention to physical, simple things. Be your own nice assistant! Give yourself good advice. Listen to yourself more than to other people.

[Season 21, Episode 02]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] My process is not your process.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] This week, we wanted to start digging into one of our season 21 topics here. Which is, we're going to be talking about the barriers to writing. Things that get in your way, things that block you from accomplishing the goals that you set for yourself. Last week, we talked about intention setting and goals, and now we're going to start talking about ways in which you can start breaking down the things that stand between you and those intentions. To do that, we want to talk about processes. Last year, we spent a bunch of time talking about each of our individual processes for getting work done. For accomplishing your goals. And in this episode, we wanted to start shifting away from here's what we do to start talking about okay, if they do X, Y, and Z, how do I figure out what works for me? So when it comes to each of you in terms of building out what your process looks like, where do you start with that? Where do you start with the I need to figure something else out, I need to change something, or figuring it out in the first place?

[Mary Robinette] So I spend a lot of time, just in my own personal life, not just with writing, trying to figure out why am I not doing the thing?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Trying to figure out what my barrier is. Because the thing that I have found is that there's usually a reason that I'm not doing a thing. I've talked before about humans are mammals. And one of the things my dog trainer said about our dog was that when you have a dog that's reacting to something, that the first thing you should do is remove the thing that they're reacting to. It's not that they're misbehaving, they are having a response to a stimulus. And so that... What I... Like, when I am... When I'm doing avoidance reaction, when I'm doing things like that, I am having a response to a stimulus, and I need to figure out what that stimulus is and how to either remove it or to reshape my reaction to it. And so that's one of the things that I do when I'm sitting down and, like, trying to figure out, okay, the process is broken, how do I find a new process?

[Erin] I think, for me, I look a lot for patterns in my own life and figure out like, why is something happening? A pattern... I think I told you about this on the podcast years ago is that I discovered once that I would start buying lottery scratch off tickets when I was unhappy at work. And I didn't realize for a long time... I'd be like, I just feel like there's periods of my life where I appear to be buying all these lottery scratch offs, and then I lose interest. Like, what is that about? And so I started paying attention, like, when am I doing this? Is it certain days of the week? Is it when I pass a specific store? And eventually, I was like, no, it's every time I'm having, like, a really bad day, and so I'm in my mind envisioning that I will win the lottery and never have to go back to work.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] This is like what's happening beneath the surface. But it required me to notice that I was doing something a bunch, think about where else intersected with things in my life, even things I would not have expected, and then try to figure out what's the tie between them. And so I think anytime there's something that feels like a barrier, I try to figure out what is that barrier tied to, where's the pattern? Because once you know the pattern, you can then... At least being aware of it, I think, sometimes does a lot of the work, and then you can also try to break it down.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah. I think it really has to start with observation. Right? And self-examination. I'm in a moment right now where I'm, like, rebuilding a bunch of different work processes in my life for a variety of reasons. One of which is, I just moved again. And so I'm sort of figuring, okay, now that I'm in this new physical space, also in this different place in my career, also in this different sort of situation with various projects, what do I need right now and how do I assemble a process that works for me? Right? So I think starting with what are those barriers, like, or what are those patterns, at least, before we even get to the barriers? Or, like, what am I currently doing? Are these things serving me? I think is the first thing to start with. Right? In terms of, like, my day looks like this. What... My goals for this week were this, here's what I actually accomplished, here's the stuff that's a problem, here's the stuff that's not. And, like, at least starting with that self-assessment I think can be really, really helpful in terms of, like, figuring out do I need to change anything, what needs to change, and what even is my process right now?

[Erin] I think that can work both ways, which is that you can also observe the patterns that are serving you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In one of the process episodes, I can't remember which one, we talked about learning how you got yourself to do things, like, what gets you past barriers in other aspects of your life.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, if there's something that's like a trick that you figured out that, like, get you to work when you don't want to work or get you to the gym when you're like, ugh, I'm not sure about this, then is there something there that you can mine and figure out, well, I'm not going to do it the exact same way, but there's something at the heart of what I'm doing here that works for me, and I can use it to push down the barriers once I figure out what they are.

[Mary Robinette] There's an essay, and I can't remember what the exact title of the essay is, but it's something along the lines of The Cab Is The Ritual. And the person who's writing it says that they go to the gym everyday. But going to the gym, that's not the thing, it's the ritual, the thing that gets them to the gym is getting the taxi. And so, if they think about all of the things that they need to go to do to get the taxi, and they've got all of that stacked up, once they get in the taxi, the ritual is complete, and now they know that anything that follows from that is something that they have previously done before that makes them feel good. But the... But recognizing, oh, okay, if I... If I set... If I set the once I do this, then that follows, and you set the once I do this at a lower threshold, then a lot of times... Obviously this is someone in New York who...

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But I... That's the kind of thing that I think about when I'm hearing you talk, Erin, about, like, what are the patterns, How can I... How can I find a thing?

[DongWon] Right. Right.

[Erin] And I really relate to that, because when I was actually trying to go to the gym or in New York, one thing I would do is always change into my gym clothes before I left the office.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I would tell myself, you do not have to go to the gym. All you have to do is be in gym clothes and walk past the gym. You can walk past the gym and go home. But you have to walk past it. And like nine times out of 10, it's like, well, I'm here, I'm in gym clothes, here's my gym. But sometimes I would walk past it. And having the permission to sometimes, like, not be at... Just because you figured out a pattern doesn't mean it works 100% of the time, or that sometimes the barrier is there for a reason. Sometimes you're exhausted, and you're like, my pattern is to write every day, but, like, I can't even keep my eyes open. Maybe this one time, like, I can let the pattern go and it won't destroy everything that I've built is something that I think is really nice, which is permission to yourself...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To be human. Because I think sometimes when we think about barriers, it's like if I'm not slaying it every single time, then, like, I am a failure at breaking down barriers, and I might as well not try at all.

[DongWon] Yeah. This is where the idea of a practice comes back in for me. The difference between an intention and a goal, a practice versus a pattern. You know what I mean? And it's like having the permission to not do the things sometimes, at least for me, is very, very useful for helping me (A) not beat myself up the one time I do slip and I don't do the thing, but also to lower that initiation cost into getting... If I don't have to... If, for me, sometimes I feel oppositional to being told to do something. Right? A shocking surprise to everyone in my life.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But I think lowering that friction can be really helpful.

[Mary Robinette] And, on the other hand, if you are someone for whom a streak really works...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And breaking the streak can cause that entire process to collapse, then... Then what I would say is find the smallest version of that streak, because if you say I always write 2,000 words, then... And you hit a day when you can't because you have the flu, then that process is going to collapse on you. But if you... If you're like I always open my document. That's like the lowest threshold you can possibly set it at.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Then that's something that you can maintain. But, again, like, not everybody's brain works the same way. Some people, if it breaks, it doesn't... So looking at the patterns outside of writing...

[DongWon] It's funny. I have this physical object that is a calendar made by the maker Simone Yurts or Simone Yetts. Yeah. And it's a board that has every day of the year on it. And when you press it, it lights up. Right? So all you do... It's called the Every Day Calendar, you just, like, tap it and it, like, marks that you did a thing that day.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, neat.

[DongWon] And it can be used for a variety of things. And when I've tried to use it for, like, I'm gonna like meditate for 10 minutes every day, or I'm gonna like go for a 5 mile run, or I'm gonna do XYZ. Those are the times when I found myself skipping often. I've started using it again recently, and all it is, is I open my notebook to look at my task list. It's not I did anything on that task list, it is not I rewrote, it's nothing more than I took my notebook, I opened it up, and looked at it. That's all I have to do to mark it. And so it... Having something that's very low friction, it is letting me mark the thing on the thing so that it all lights up and it looks pretty and I'm like, oh, there are the weekends I didn't do it, then... You know what I mean? That is really, really helpful, and sometimes, like, being that generous with yourself in terms of, like, what are the things I need to get me into the mindset? I think this is like my work version of, yeah, I put on my workout clothes before I leave the office. And so I want to talk a little bit more about what we actually do once we've, like, lowered that friction a little bit. But first, let's take a quick break.

[DongWon] Okay. Welcome back. Before the break, we were talking about sort of, like, how we manage to reduce the friction when we're building out our processes, when we're starting to figure out what are the things that we can do that make it a little bit easier to activate when whenever we need to do the thing.

[Mary Robinette] So then I think the next question is, though, okay, so we figured out how to lower the friction, what do I do next?

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. So once you've, like, lowered that friction, how do you start taking that next step? How do you identify here's the next thing I need to be doing in the chain? For me, it's often like, okay, I've opened that notebook, I looked at the thing, what are the useful steps I can take from this point? Right? And sometimes that is as simple as, okay, rewrite the list. Remake that list. Sometimes it is, oh, this has reminded me of this email that I forgot to send last night that I've got to send right now.

[Mary Robinette] I find that I have similar things where it's if I use my checklist, if I use my notebook, I'm much better. But what I also find when I'm trying to, like, figure out a process, a routine, a ritual, whatever that is, is that if I can link things together so that there's kind of a natural flow, that it is, again... It's part of reducing the friction.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And that sometimes the way I figure that out is by doing what Erin talked about, just looking at patterns for ah, here's something that I'm eager to do, and look at the things that I'm eager to do, think about why I'm eager to do those, and then how I can either attach the thing that I... The next thing to something that I'm eager to do, or how I can re-engineer the thing that I don't want to do into something that has similar properties to the thing I'm eager to do. So...

[Erin] Yeah. I'm a big fan of, like, the what you're eager... Like, attaching things together that wouldn't otherwise be attached. Something that I will sometimes do is, not to make everything about working out, but when I get hungry, I think, like, the best time to have food, in my opinion, is right after you work out.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Your body is like, this is delish. And so when I get hungry, I think, I'm hungry, this is a sign that I should go work out so that I can have the most delicious food. Ever. So I think I've turned, like, this one body signal into a signal to do another thing, as opposed to thinking, like, oh, when am I gonna work out today, it's like, oh, my gosh, like, beginning signs of hunger? Oh, yeah, baby, like let's go. And so that is something. And I also will cook food while... I have an air fryer... While I'm working out. And so, like, as I'm working out, the food, I can smell it and it's like, I'm Pavlov dogging myself...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Into associating exercise with getting delicious food.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so therefore I'm, like, creating a way not just to, like, lower friction but to create some sort of, like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] This tie between things...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That may not be tied except I forced them to be.

[Mary Robinette] That's really interesting because you actually just reminded me of a thing that I was, like, I... That works for me, but I'd kind of forgotten that I did. Because it's been working for so long. Which is I realized at some point that when I'm writing or avoiding writing as the case may be, but when I reach for my phone, that it's because the task in front of me is hard and I'm fleeing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so I can't... Like, that impulse is hard to break, so what I've retrained myself is that when I reach for my phone, instead of opening social media, I have an app called Sweepy, which will present you with one task which you should do around the house. And they're like 5 minute tasks. And so I go and I do the 5-minute task, and that gives me a little bit of time away from the computer. I've accomplished a thing, so I feel better. Something about my house is a little bit tidier. And also, because it's a non-narrative thing that I'm doing, it gives me time to kind of think about the thing. And then I can go back. And if I nope that again, that I will do sometimes two or three household chores, and then I'm... But usually that is enough for me to kind of get away. Whereas when I pick up my phone and I go into social media, I'm in there... Like, the rest of the day is lost.

[DongWon] Yeah. What I really like about both of your examples is when I think about getting stuck in process. Right? When I'm thinking about, like, oh, my process isn't serving me in some way, I think the physicality of it, the embodiment of myself in that process becomes really important for me to think about, too. And those are simple things, like, do I need water? Am I hungry? Right? Have I been outside today? Am I just like in my dark office staring at my screen, or do I need to get up and walk around? Should I go stretch or go outside? Like... Or even, like, do I need to change the setup of my office? Right? If... Is the problem that I'm not getting a natural light? Maybe I should actually open my curtains for once. You know what I mean? And I think those things and observing and thinking about those processes not just, like, as abstract work, but also remembering that you are a person who unfortunately has a body and has to be in the world.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Well, I think also I like to treat myself like I am my own, like, nicest assistant. Which, like, sometimes you're doing something and it's a small stress. So, like, I like to drink cans of soda water when writing. And for a long time, I would just, like, put them on the side of the desk. And then it's like they're messy and they're there and I thought, like, if I was a really nice, like, person for me, I would buy myself, like, a tiny trash can. So that, like, I could put all my cans in the recycling and they would be behind me. I wouldn't have to see them. And then when I took them downstairs, I would feel like, great, now it's not bothering me.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think a lot of times, like, my instinctive response to a small bother will be like I should not be bothered by that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Whereas my lovely assistant version of me, like my, like, good partner version of me, would be like, well, how can we actually just not have that bother you at all?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to you becoming unbothered by it. And so now I... A lot of times, if something is like a very small thing in my space, it doesn't feel like it affects the writing, but it's like... Sometimes I'll be like, oh, there's all these cans here, like, oh, I should go... I should go do this, I should go do that, I'm such a messy person, and it like gets me out of the... Out of the flow.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In a way that putting something in the trash can never does.

[Mary Robinette] You said something that I'm like, what kind of gift can I...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, some... And that, I think, is one of the biggest things you can do. Because we give really good advice to our friends.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like, all of us do.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You, listener, give really good advice to your friend. So one of the things that I was doing for a little while when I was at a point where I was... This was right after mom had died when I was trying to rebuild my process. I started writing... At the end of the day, I would write, Dear Past Self, here are all the things you did really well today. And when I got up in the morning, I would write, Dear Future Self, here are the challenges that you're facing, here are some strategies to help you get past those things. And that helped so much.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I think you can do that. That's a thing that you can do for yourself about your writing process, about anything else. Dear past self, here's the stuff. And the first time I did it, my instinct was, wow, you really messed up today. And I'm like, no, that's not how I would say this to a friend. How would I say this to a friend? Like, there were a lot of challenges, and you worked really hard to get past them, and here are the things you did anyway.

[DongWon] It's like a thing I say about relationships sometimes. It's like your partner should treat you at least as well as they would treat a stranger. You know what I mean? In terms of like politeness...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Consideration, and things like that. And you completely derailed me by being like you should treat yourself at least as good as you treat a stranger.

[laughter]

[DongWon] It's like, well, damn.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah.

[DongWon] I'm going to have to think about that one for a second.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] A little uncomfortable there. So those are things... I think what we keep saying here is ask yourself questions, pay attention to patterns, like, trust your reactions. So if you're having a bad reaction to something, that's from a stimulus.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have to reshape that, or remove it in some way.

[Erin] Yeah. I was just thinking that, which is that sometimes, like, a process like we may have said something during this podcast or previously where you're like, no, do not want.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Hate it for me, and I think, like, pay attention to that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] Just because somebody is not you doesn't mean that they know better than you. In fact, they probably don't. But I think sometimes we are willing to, like, listen to other people tell us how we should be, as opposed to listening to what...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] We know about ourselves.

[DongWon] I love that. And I think that's a perfect segue into our homework...

[DongWon] Which is, I want you to start taking these first steps towards listening to yourself. So, my homework for you is to make a list of all the steps that go into your writing process. Start small. Start with the little things and work outwards towards the big macro things that you need to keep moving forward in your writing. Right? Start with I like to write at this time... I like to use this keyboard at this computer, and use this program, and I need to write for this amount of time. Whatever it is. Just make a list. Free associate it, don't put too much stress on it, and then work backwards to the I need to feel a certain way, I need my environment to be a certain way. And once you've made that list, just go through and consider if each of those items is serving you in this process or not, and are they something you want to change? You don't need to know how yet. All I'm asking you to do at this point is observe and feel and see what your process actually is.

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

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Writing Excuses 21.01: Welcome to the New Year!

2026-01-09T11:01:29Z

Posted by: mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.01: Welcome to the New Year!

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-01-welcome-to-the-new-year

Key Points: New tagline: Tools, not rules! For writers, by writers. You are a writer. What's coming: Deconstructing structure and barriers to writing. And some wildcards. Thinking critically about structure and what are the pieces. Unpack it, break open the toolkit. Why and how does it work? Intentions and barriers.

[Season 21, Episode 21]

[Season 21, Episode 01]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Welcome to the New Year!

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Welcome, everybody, to 2026 and our season 21. The podcast is officially old enough to drink, depending on where you live.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] As a result, we decided to make some changes. Small ones. Like, we have a new tagline, you'll have noticed. We're going to talk about why we made that change. And then we're going to tell you about the curriculum that we've got planned for you for this season, and we'll talk about some intentions as well. So, why did we change the tagline?

[Howard] We changed the tagline because Dan said we should, and he gave us this, for writers, by writers, tools, not rules, which kind of sums up who and why we are and have been since 2008. Writers, talking about writing, and we're talking about the tools we use, rather than trying to prescribe, proscribe, inscribe any...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sort of laws for you to live by, and I like that.

[DongWon] Yeah, it's a really nice way to think about what we're trying to do here. Right? I think so much of writing advice you see on the Internet or in person or whatever it is can be very, very prescriptive. It can be this is the only way to do this, this is the only way to write, like, you must do XYZ to be a successful writer. And I think a lot of that comes from a very understandable place. People want to have a simple way of doing things, people are used to doing things their way, and think that can apply very broadly. But from our perspective, each of us has a different background, each of us has a different approach to our various practices. I see a lot of different techniques across a lot of different writers, and so I think trying to avoid this space where we end up being very prescriptive, but still can give useful, actionable advice. I think tools, not rules, is really where we landed as a podcast. We've had a lot of conversation among the group of us of who are we, what is our identity as a podcast, what are our goals, what are we trying to accomplish with all this. And I think just making sure people do have the tools to succeed is so much of our mission.

[Howard] The aha! moment for me was when... I tried to come up with... Certainly there's some hard and fast rule. A writer has to write. You gotta sit down in front of the keyboard. And then I realized, no, wait, I know at least one New York Times best-selling author who dictates his novels into a machine, and I know people who write longhand. And so, nope. That's not a rule, that's just the way...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I happen to do it. And if at that most basic level, how I make the words appear on whatever I'm calling a page at the time, if that can't be held in common across all writers, then there are no rules at all.

[DongWon] There's just personal practice.

[Erin] I also just want to talk a little bit about the for writers, by writers. And I think part of it is about I think it can be really easy for people to say, oh, I'm not a writer yet. I'm not a writer, I didn't write yesterday. I'm not a writer, my writing hasn't been published. I'm not a writer, a thousand thousand different reasons. but I think, like, looking at all of us, like, listening to all of us, we all come to writing from different places. We all write in different ways, in different formats. And if we can all call ourselves writers, then I want to offer that as a way to say call yourself a writer as well. By listening to this podcast, you are now a writer. I have said it, I am the arbiter of all things bizarre...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so I think that every time you hear the tagline, I want you to think of it as I am a writer and I am part of this.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, all you need to do to be a writer is have the intention to write, and hopefully put some words on a page. Right? I think being a published author is a really different thing, and being a writer is a prerequisite, but it's not required. And I think publishing your work and finding that career path is a separate step from being able to call yourself a writer. And I want all of you to really feel empowered to create the stories you want to create, to put words on the page in the way that you want to, and to celebrate that as real, beautiful, difficult creative work.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that we say all the time when we're doing the Writing Excuses cruises, their workshops, that we are all writers. It is just that we are at different points in the path. But we're just peers. And so this podcast is a group of your peers talking to you about the things that we have learned. And hopefully, giving you some of the benefit of our advanced hindsight.

[Howard] One of the most motivating things that a writer ever told me, Ken Rand, who passed away, gosh, 15 years ago, and he said, lots of people will tell you you can't write. Don't let them be able to say that you don't write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And I just love that. Yeah. Yeah. If I write, I am a writer.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] And so what we're going to be talking about today and for the rest of the season are hopefully a bunch of tools, not rules, that will help you. We're specifically, we're talking about this season, a couple of different streams. So we're going to lay out for you what those streams are. And in the second half of this podcast, or of this particular episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about intentions and what it means to set intentions. So, we've got a couple of different streams. We've been thinking about this as deconstructing structure. So we started talking about that last season, and this season really looking at the plot aspects of structure. And how, what all of these mean, and how they work. We're going to talk about that a little bit today. We're also going to be talking about barriers. There's going to be a whole stream of podcast episodes that are coming to you this season that are about barriers to writing, the things that get between you and writing that are not necessarily the story. And then, we're also going to be doing some deep dives on specific structures. We're going to be doing deep dives on a couple of specific topics... Wildcards. And we're going to be looking at all of these this season. We wanted to kind of give you an overview of what to expect. Does anyone want to explain what we mean by deconstructing structure?

[DongWon] I think the thing that we're really trying to do with this season is think very critically about structure. I think structure's one of the most common things where people get super prescriptive of you have to do it this way. Right? You have to use Save the Cat, you have to use a 3 act structure, a 5 act structure. I think it's the one that people most reflexively go to, well, stories work like this. All stories do X. Right? And I think I at least, and I think many of us, feel a reflective sort of opposition to that, of this idea of, like, no. Stories can be lots of different things, and can exist in different ways, and are very sensitive to cultural context, to genre, to style of storytelling, medium even, all of these things. And so when we... We're like, okay, let's do a season about structure. Let's talk about structure, it really sort of came down to how do we unpack this? How do we make this feel like something we're comfortable and excited to talk about? And that means deconstructing a little bit. Not in like a postmodernist way. But in a let's break open the tool kit. Let's show what is in the toolbox, what you can use, what you can reach for.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I... Made me start thinking about this was there's a cookbook called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is looking at kind of, like, what are some of the core principles. And then I was also thinking about it because with puppetry, I talk about here are the principles, if you have these four principles, you can make any puppet look alive, any inanimate object. And the techniques, the specific mechanics that you use, are going to change depending on what kind of puppet you've picked up. But the core principles, the underlying pieces of it, the underlying structure, if you will, is the same. And I started thinking, does writing have this? And I've been noodling on it a little bit, but I remember this moment... I don't know if you remember this, Erin, but we were all sitting around at one of the recording retreats with these note cards and you said something about writing is a form of jazz. And, like, that jazz has this structure, that music has this structure, but that you can start to play with it. And I thought that that was such an interesting way to think about it.

[Erin] And I think, like, it's funny... I sometimes, like, dislike classical plot structures because I think they can get really shoved down your throat. And, like anything that somebody tells you a thousand times, you're like, Ah hate it. Ah don't like it. But just the way that really great jazz musicians understand classical music, because part of understanding music in general and how it's used in different ways allows you to have the base that you can then use to accept or reject parts of the music that have already come into your life, I think that deconstructing these structures, it's like maybe I still hate the Hero's Journey, but maybe there's one thing in there that I find really helpful that I can put in my own toolbox, and I don't have to take the rest of it. But without breaking it down, there's no way to know, like, what is that kernel of really cool wisdom that I can actually take from something that maybe I don't like the rest of the corn cob.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple topics in here we duck into which are structures that I've historically been opposed to, or not a big fan of. And it was really interesting to be forced to sort of sit down and go through them, and be like, oh, okay, I get why this exists. I get why people use it. It may still not be for me, it may not be what I go to or what I'm interested in seeing more of, but it was... It's useful still to understand why it exists, even if what you then want to do is act in opposition, or break from it, because, again, understanding the tools helps you choose what fits your project and your style and your particular voice.

[Mary Robinette] And I think one of the things that we found as we were talking about this and digging into it was that there were... There were common pieces. That you would see something, it's like, oh, Dark Night of the Soul happened here, but in this other place, what you got is a contrast moment. And you start to realize, oh, Dark Night of the Soul serves as a contrast moment. Like, I started thinking about it, again, going back to food, at one point, chocolate chip cookies didn't exist. And then someone was like, what happens if I put chocolate chips in? And they became kind of ubiquitous. And then someone else was like, but what happens if I put sea salt on it? And the first time you encountered it, it was amazing. And then someone thought, what happens if I put bacon on it? And it was like, oh, okay, well, that's different. And we're excited for a little bit, and then you're like, okay, but actually, that's just different, it's not improving things. And so I think the thing about looking at these structures and looking at the pieces of them is that you can think about doing a recipe or an ingredient swap in something that you're writing, if it doesn't play well for you. You can think about, let me try this weird, out there, avantgard thing. And maybe it's going to be something that's like, yay, novelty! and it will be fun for a moment. But maybe it'll be something that's like oh, no, this really has no bones. This does a thing. And understanding why it does it is exciting because then you can do things with intentionality.

[Howard] One of the things that I've discovered as we've done a lot of interior home improvements is that there is a specificity of tools beyond just, for example, the Phillips head screwdriver. Okay. Yeah, I've got a Phillips head screwdriver that I just grab when I need to use a Phillips head screwdriver. But in many cases, that screwdriver fits into the screw head and wobbles just a little bit. Which means I'm more likely to...

[DongWon] [garbled] is a terrible design and we shouldn't be using them.

[Howard] Which means I'm more likely to strip the screw if I use...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] That screwdriver on that screw. And so I'll open up the box of bits and find a screw head that exactly fits... A bit that exactly fits the screw head. Nice and snug. And I can plug it into the drill and I can go to town. And...

[Mary Robinette] Whereas, what I am more likely to do is be like, ugh, it's so much trouble. Is there a kitchen knife I can use?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yes. And... The point here, though, is that with writing, there are a lot of tools that I know the name of and I kind of think I understand it, but once we start picking these things apart, I realize, oh, wait, if I try to use this tool as described here in this other circumstance, I'm going to strip all of the screws and make a mess. I need a refined version of this. I need a slightly different version of this in order to fit. And I didn't learn that until we began deconstructing things and really looking at what they were made of.

[Mary Robinette] And to your point, there are also times when you don't have access to that finely perfect like... And you're like, what do I actually need to happen here? What is it that I need to have happen here? I need something that will allow me to turn this screw.

[Howard] With a big enough hammer, I can get that screw into the wall, and that's all I've got right now. So, away we go, and I'll fix it in editing.

[Mary Robinette] I once... Sorry, you just made me flashback to this time in theater... I actually am pretty tool savvy, but the kitchen knife thing is when I'm desperate and don't have handy tools. But I remember this time where someone had offered to help me with a thing. And I'm like, great, can you help me with putting this shelf up? And they attempted to drill a hole with the driver bit.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] No screw, no... They just... All they knew was that they were supposed to put a bit into the drill and then put it against the wall and then it would do a thing. And it profoundly does not do that thing. And so this is, I think, sometimes what happens to writers who are early in their career and someone is like, this is the tool you should use.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And doesn't explain why or how it works. And so that's what we're going to be looking at is the why and the how it works.

[Erin] Yeah. I agree, because what you just said, I have no idea why that is wrong, why that wouldn't work, or even what you just said. I heard driver bit, and that was the end of it for me. And I'm...

[DongWon] All drill bits are pointy. Not all pointy things are drill bits.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] See. And that broke it down for me in a way that I will now [garbled] for the future. Much like the rest of our year is going to do. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] By the way, a thousand drill bits is about the size of a cat.

[DongWon] I think on that note, we need to take a quick break here. And when we come back, we can talk about the other aspect that we're talking about this season, which is personal processes.

[DongWon] Welcome back. So, we're really excited to talk about all these different tools that are applicable to sort of how you think about structure and what you're bringing to your project. Last season, we talked a lot about personal processes. Right? How we each work. And I think you can see that a lot of the tools that we'll be talking about are applied in different ways there. But the other thing that we wanted to address this season is what are the barriers to writing. What are the things that keep you from getting into a place where you're producing work and producing work you're excited about? So we're really breaking down at least a handful of the things that commonly get in the way of writers, and talking about what are some tools that you can use to address those issues, and how can you apply them to create a process that works for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And those are things, everything ranging from some time management stuff to brain stuff to how do you retrain your family to believe that you're a writer. All of these things. It... I'll go ahead and do a spoiler. It's hard.

[DongWon] It's all hard.

[Mary Robinette] It's all hard. So we're going to be talking about all of those things. But at the core of it, the core of... The barriers and the structure, all of it comes down to this underlying thing which is why. Why is the barrier happening? What are you try... Why are you trying to make this decision? Like, which tool is going to work for you depends on what you're trying to do. So, why are you trying to do a thing? So, since we're in the beginning of the year, and the beginning of this season, we also wanted you to think about what your intentions are. What is your intention with your story, what is your intention with your draft? How do you want to fit...

[Howard][garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Into your life? So we want you to think about those intentions as part of thinking about what structure you need, what pieces you need for writing.

[Erin] In some ways, I think about the barrier breaking thing as deconstructing the structure of your own life.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, plots have structure, but so does, like, our lives have... Even the unstructured life has some structure to it. You wake up, you sleep at some point, we hope. And so, I think thinking about what are the structures around us, and how do we think about those as well? It can be so easy to just move through life with so much going on, and never kind of, like, look up and think about what are the habits you're building for yourself, what are the things that you want to change, and how can they be changed? And I think the intention setting is great because it's sort of like what do I wish this was at the end? Like, what is the thing that I want to get to? And then, once you know what your intentions are, sometimes it helps you see what are the barriers between the intention I have in my mind and the actuality of me being able to do it.

[DongWon] And last episode, you heard us talk about us setting some pretty concrete goals for ourselves. And then sort of how did that go, what was that experience like, and things like that. Right? And this is really sort of like what energy do we want to bring to the new year. Right? We are on the cusp of a new year. What are the things that we're hoping to accomplish, at least how we approach, and some of that may be very specific goals, of, like, I want to do XYZ, and some of that may be more general in terms of what brought... What barriers are in front of me and how do I want to address them?

[Erin] It sounds like you want to go first, DongWon?

[DongWon] Yeah. Okay. I can go first. I think the watch word for me this year, as it often is in my life, is balance. Right? I think the thing I'm trying to find is how to balance the number of things that I am trying to do in my time, and without sacrificing quality or efficiency on all those fronts. right? If I have any sin, it is that I am always trying to do too much, I'm trying to do too many things at once. Right? I have many different interests, I have many different things that draw my attention and my enthusiasm, and things like that. Right? So, the first is, I'm trying to bring on some new clients, I'm trying to stay on top of my queries. Right? I'm trying to find a way to make sure that I am getting back to people in a timely way on that front. At the same time that I'm meeting the goals and expectations of my existing clients. Right? And so, the first challenge I have is balancing the bringing in new work and then still executing on the work that I have in front of me. This is a very familiar challenge to any freelancer out there. Right? It's both you need to be doing the rain making side, and also the making sure your crops are harvested properly side. Right? Like, it's both aspects. And a lot of being an agent is managing that rhythm of things. Which has historically been a challenge for me, and I'm sure will continue to be a challenge. So, especially in the first half of this coming year, that's really one thing I have my eye on. I'm also working on a big creative project which I've alluded to a couple times. And so getting... Keeping that on track and working on that in my spare time is important, while meeting all the other goals of my life. Which is maintaining a healthy social life, making sure my home life is good and well ordered, that I'm getting regular exercise and meeting my own fitness goals, [garbled] So all of that is requiring balance, it's requiring perspective. How do I make sure that I'm keeping an eye on all these different things? I have issues with object permanence. Right? If it's not in front of me... sometimes it's like if it's not in front of me, it doesn't exist. Right? And so how do I keep things in my field of vision so that I'm tracking all the things I need to be doing and staying on top of it? And living a well-rounded life that feels satisfying and enriching in all the ways that I want my life to be. So it's kind of a broad answer, but that's what I'm bringing.

[Howard] I mentioned some interior home improvements. One of the things that we put in this last year was a pot rack that hung the pots so that when I am facing the cooking area, all of the available pots are in my peripheral vision. I bring that up because I didn't expect that to be a big deal, but knowing which pots and pans are not in the dishwasher or not in the sink was huge. Suddenly this whole business of helping object permanence, having things visible as I'm working so that I know what to reach for next... I did not know how big a deal that was until we redesigned the kitchen space, and now I'm never going back. Now, for my own part, for the writing intentions that... The creative intentionality. There are 20 Schlock Mercenary books. And we are getting ready to put number 19 into print. We're finalizing the stuff that goes... The bonus materials that go into that. I would really like to have all 20 done by the end of this year. But at the same time, I'm terrified because once that's done, there are zero excuses... You're out of excuses, Howard, now go write.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are no excuses for me not to devote 100% of my energy to something new, to whatever comes next. I feel like I've been putting that off for 5 years now, and I need to stop putting that off. But also, we gotta get book 20 out. and so, I like what you said about balance, because I'm going to be balancing the very mechanical, very flowcharty, spreadsheety process of putting book 20 into print, balancing that against the pure summons of the muse in order to find the thing that I love, the thing that I am going to passionately pour creative energy into in order to pay the bills in 2027. And that's it, that's...

[DongWon][garbled]

[Howard] It's a very small nutshell with a very, very big thing in it.

[DongWon] That's exciting, though.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm much like DongWon, in that I tend to pick a word. I have used stable, and we moved that year suddenly without expecting it. So that worked out very well. It was 2024, which was [garbled stable garbled]

[DongWon] Intentions are important, but they encounter reality sometimes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But... It is so true. But one of the things that I find when I'm sitting down to write, that often if I write at the top of the page, just kind of the shape of my intention, the feeling that I want a reader to have. Sometimes it's a single word, like cozy. But it can serve as a check for me when I'm making decisions. I can come back and I can look at it and go, is this going to be more... Is this going to be cozier? Or is this going to be not cozy? And the same thing was true when I picked stable. It was like when I was making decisions this year, the word that I'm picking is play.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] I have been working very hard for a very long time. And the world keeps being on fire. And looking for moments when I can play and celebrating those tiny moments is what I'm interested in doing the next year, both with my personal life but also with my writing. I have been playing... As we've been recording episodes, I've been like, I've never actually used the Save the Cat structure. Let me try it. Let me see what it does. And not thinking of it as I have to get this right, but let me play with this. This is a toy, let me just see what it does. And that I'm finding... I'm... I'm looking forward to some joy with that. I will also say that the reason I picked that word was because the speech that I heard the writer/ puppeteer Liz Hara give several years ago at the... Which was about playing and... as an act of joy and defiance. And the idea that in... She writes, she works with the Muppets. The idea that playing and having failure happen as a result of play is a joyful act and that that's where a lot of the best discoveries come from. So that's what I'm planning, is playing for this year. That's my goal, my intention.

[DongWon] I love that. It's so important to make space for that and make space for that joyful exploration and creative practice.

[Erin] Agreed. I think we're out of other people, so...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] [garbled] Now it's your turn.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You don't get to escape.

[Erin] What are you talking about? There is... I think there's two things. So I have both... I think... I like also having, like, intentions. I will often, like, sum up the previous year with, like, a word. Like, now that it's done, what was that the year of? And then I'll go like, okay, what do I want this to be the year of in response? Which sometimes means, like, picking the same word twice, because it didn't work last time. But what I will say for this upcoming year is I really want to build. I think that is the thing I want to do. I want to build structures, I want to build a life. I'm in a new place. Like, I really want to kind of, like, build things that I care about and figure them out. And some of that is... sounds like work, but I actually think building is fun. I'm trying to take building the way that, like, little kids think about, like, Lego sets or, like, blocks. Where it's like there's so much imagination in building. You're trying to figure out what it is, you're trying different things. You start building this structure, that didn't work, you start over. And so, like, building and iteration is something that I want to do the next year. But also, I have a mantra that I'm using every time I'm trying to make a decision about what to do. And it is to live más. Más is the Spanish word for more. And so if I'm deciding...

[DongWon] Is this living the Taco Bell life? What's happening over there?

[Erin] Sometimes advertising really knows our souls. Have you had your break today? JK. But... Also a good question to ask yourself. But no, a lot of times, I'm like, look, I just want to... Like if I'm deciding between should I buckle down and do this project or, like, go see a friend, I'm like, live más. Go see the friend. Come back. Then do the work. And so I think the two work well together, because live más is, like, me giving my chaotic impulse-having self freedom to reign and run around, and build is the structure that keeps me coming back, so that when I've finished living más...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And I'm back to living minos... No, that's not good. When I'm back to sort of...

[DongWon] You've lived más and now you need to just live.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Now I need to just live regular. Then I know what I need to do because I built some structures into my life...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That are like, okay, here's what I need to be doing now that I've had my fun. And so it's my way of trying to be basically... Have my cake and eat it too.

[DongWon] I think that what this tells me is that for 2027, our intention episode is only in fast food slogans.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Everyone needs to pick a different fast food slogan, and that's going to be your intention for the year.

[Mary Robinette] Did you know that Taco Bell has an entire magazine, and they take fiction? A friend... I know a writer who has been trying to crack it for like 2 years now. And has not successfully gotten them to buy a story yet.

[DongWon] I want to... I need to know more. I'm Googling this immediately after we're finished recording.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And apparently they pay good money. But anyway...

[Howard] [garbled] the deep ones.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, that brings us to the end of this episode. And you see the other reason that we decided to move away from our tagline 15 minutes long, because we were increasingly not 15 minutes long. Which is not to say that we're always going to do long episodes. But we decided that the structure of 15 minutes was not serving us. And that we needed to get back into the tools, not rules, and the rule about being 15 minutes didn't serve us. So what we're going to be looking at... Here's your homework. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Your homework is to think about what serves you. What piece of last year do you need to let go of? And what intention do you want moving into the new year? So you're going to just write down, I am letting go of... And then whatever comes after that in that sentence. And, this year I am embracing... And then whatever goes into that blank.

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

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