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mbarkerWriting Excuses 20.36: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of When
From https://writingexcuses.com/20-36-deep-dive-into-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-using-the-lens-of-when
Key points: When? Flashbacks and foreshadowing. Chronoplotologically! Foreshadowing for tension and stakes. Beware of flashbacks in the middle of action scenes! Don't use flashbacks to relieve tension! Visible foreshadowing and covert foreshadowing. Foresahdowing as revision.
[Season 20, Episode 36]
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[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 20, Episode 36]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" through the lens of When.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Erin] And we are going to be looking today at the lens of when. Which is a little bit of a cheat, because when we did our lenses, we put where and when together. And we did, I think, a single episode about time. And I am also going to cheat in that this story takes place… This book takes place in multiple time periods, but I'm completely uninterested in that.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I'm not going to talk about it at all. Instead, what interests me is the use of foreshadowing. When I think about time, I think a lot about flashbacks and foreshadow. Where you are in the time of the story, the when of the story moment.
[Dan] Well, and it's interesting, because this book takes place in four different times, but they are not presented chronologically. There are a lot of flashbacks in it. And so she is using time very intentionally and very specifically. And just because something took place, like, in school for Patricia, doesn't mean that we're not going to hear about it at the end of the book, because that's when, emotionally, it needs to be there.
[Howard] So it's chronoplotologically… We start in grade school, and we end with them as adults. But when the plot requires it, we flashback chronoplotologically.
[Erin] That is not a word.
[Dan] I like how so many of our jokes are Howard saying a weird thing, and then we all stare at him, and then he explains it, and we go, oh, okay, actually, that makes sense.
[Laughter]
[Howard] That's not actually the definition of a joke. If it was a joke, we'd be laughing with me instead of at me.
[Mary Robinette] That's not the function of you in the pod… No…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And we're back to the lens of who.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled]
[Howard] Let's go back to when.
[Erin] Yeah, let's go back to when. One of the things that I found really striking in this story is Theodolphus. I assume that is how you pronounce…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] His name. When Theodolphus is introduced to show us the horrible future that will happen to these kids. I'm sure Theodolphus does other things, and he does, but this is, I feel like, a huge thing. Because it is a big flashforward. It is a big jump forward to show us this future, and to really, I think, set up how we view these two kids. And I'm wondering, like, how did that affect do you think your reading of the story to know that there was a future when that we are theoretically, like, hurtling towards for the rest of the story?
[DongWon] I mean, the foreshadowing felt really essential, because it creates tension throughout the book. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It gives us stakes in the relationship beyond just the general interest in the characters. Right? And I think a couple episodes ago, we were talking a little bit about the tension between a literary impulse and the genre impulse a little bit. And this is, I think, the connective tissue is in here. Right? In terms of what she wants us to do is pay attention to the nuances of a relationship, and she's going to give us this genre framing device around prophecy, around doom and the end of the world and apocalyptic kind of visions. But the thing that's also so interesting about what she does with Theodolphus is she goes through a great deal of work to humanize him. Right? He is an assassin, who knows all these different ways to kill people, but (a) he can't kill these kids, which makes him, like, a Sunday morning cartoon sort of villain in a funny way. But also, the way in which he genuinely enjoys being a guidance counselor…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Added so much dimension to him, and adds so much pathos to when we see him again in the future as sort of this sad broken man on the street. Right? And sort of reiterating the doomed prophecy that he was given initially. Right? And so there's this thing of… He's a character who is there as an antagonist out to kill these children who we've grown very fond of, or hopefully have grown fond of, and… But because he's shown to be a creature of empathy and understanding, it add so much texture and context to the doom that he projects. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, and also it's interesting, as you were talking about it, I was reflecting, this prophecy that he was given at the beginning. It's, like, actually, no, that is not when he was given it in terms of when we experience the book.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So his scene is… Contains both a flashback and foreshadowing. Because we meet him after the kids have played their game about what are these people. And then the narration does a quick flashback. As it happens, she was correct. And then we meet him, and then he is another flashback to the going to look into the seeing hole or something like that…
[DongWon] Something like that, yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It… Like… How he gets the prophecy and then… But the prophecy is about the future. So it is this interesting back-and-forth. I think one of the things that I see Charlie Jane doing with this is choosing the moment when to flashback and flashforward. Choosing a moment where it's going to add to tension and help keep the story moving. Where I see the failure mode of this with a lot of early career writers, when I've done my own stuff, is the flashback happens, like, in the middle of a high impact action scene, and everything stops, because the story is now no longer moving towards a goal, it is looking at the foundation work.
[DongWon] One of the things I love about this book in general, and this comes… And I see this in how she uses time. So, flashforwards and flashbacks too, foreshadowing and things like that, and how she uses POV in terms of getting close to the character and out… Zooming in and out and all these things, is she does a lot of this in ways that break conventional rules.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] It's like, oh, you're not supposed to shift POV like this. You're not supposed to have just a character… Like, Theodolphus kind of comes out of nowhere as this POV character, and I was like, who's this guy?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] What's he doing here? And yet it's like it just works. There's so many things that she does because it works in the moment more than it works in the meta-structure of the book. And… Without disrupting the meta-structure of the book. I don't think she does that. But there is a priority that she has in terms of impact in the moment that makes this such effective storytelling for me.
[Erin] And, so I'm wondering, if you're trying to do this, and you're like, okay, I understand the chronology of the story, I understand the plot of the story. Now I'm going to try chronoplotology, which is [garbled] as we know, the practice…
[Howard] I love you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Of doing that. Like, how do you actually figure out when is the time to flashback, when is the time to project forward in order to create or release that tension?
[Howard] I have found an almost ironclad rule for when not to flashback. And that is don't flashback as a tool to relieve tension by stepping away from the tension and telling another story because that's just going to upset people. Find a different tool to relieve the tension. If I have to explain something in order to move this other scene forward, I need to explain it somewhere else, rather than breaking tension in order to do it. So all I've got for you right now is my personal ironclad don't. Which is not going to be ironclad for anybody else.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I often refer to one of my favorite tools, which is the MICE quotient. That if… A lot of times, the flashback is because I need to start the story… This thread moving. But if I put that thread in where it belongs chronologically, it does not work chronoplotologically. Howard, I hate you.
[DongWon] Why have we done this to ourselves?
[Mary Robinette] It's a useful…
[DongWon] Actually, it is.
[Mary Robinette] Unfortunately, it is a very useful construction, I just wish it was easier to say. But, like, if we had done all of these things strictly chronologically, we would have been starting with Theodolphus and his vision about these kids. And that's not useful. So the way I think about it when I'm talking about the MICE quotient is it's about the sequence in which you are telling the story to the reader. So I look at which things are the things that I want to keep tension on, and then when do I need to introduce something in order to activate either existing tension or introduce tension that is moving forward. And a lot of that, then, has to do with additional decisions. The problem with giving a lot of advice on this is that we can kind of say here are the metrics to look at, but it is very much a season to taste.
[DongWon] Well, what's also really important about the way the foreshadowing in Theodolphus works in this first section is that it's not about… The stakes aren't the end of the world. The thing we're concerned about is that the world's going to end. The thing that hits us emotionally is that Patricia and Lawrence are going to be at war with each other.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] It's the fracture of the relationship that is the stakes. And what Theodolphus does to these kids, because he can't kill them, is to try to turn them against each other. Which is a thing that he's actually successful at doing, in large part, and is the thing that's most hurtful to these kids and to us, the reader, who's experiencing this journey. Right? So the foreshadowing works and is introduced at a point where we already care about their connection and now you can have stakes, because there's something at risk.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? And the risk is how these characters see each other and how they feel about each other.
[Erin] Not to, like, over index on the idea that we're talking about lenses, but this actually makes me think of going to the eye doctor, and I promise this will connect. It's like when the eye doctor is, like, doing the is it better if you look through the left eye or the right eye.
[DongWon] One, two.
[Erin] What they do first is the big things, like, the big, like, how… Basically, like, how nearsighted or farsighted are you?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And that's the main lens. And then they'll do small adjustments to, like, astigmatism that are like… This is when they're like, is it one or two, and you're like, you're making this up. They're all the same.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But I think one of the things that I'm thinking about with this is figuring out what is the major lens through which you want your reader to experience the story? Here, as we talked about in talking about who, the major lens is who. And what the when does, it's those smaller things that actually make the who clearer or less clear as it needs to be for the story, but it doesn't take over as of when focused story would be, which would be to take us from the beginning into the end. And, speaking of taking us from the beginning into the end, we are going to take a break, and when we come back, birds.
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[Erin] Pickle!
[DongWon] See, reader, this is what we call foreshadowing…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] [garbled Erin] called the shots before the break, and we all just cocked our heads and looked at Erin, seeing how this was going to result.
[Mary Robinette] Cannot wait to see the bird die.
[Erin] So, the birds. In this story, there is a thing about time on the page, which is that the birds show up throughout the latter half to say, "Too late! Too late! Caw!"
[Mary Robinette] Too late.
[Dan] Yes.
[Erin] Too late! And so that's interesting, because it is… What is that? Would you consider that to be foreshadowing, is it… I mean, it doesn't end up completely coming to pass. What is the purpose of having the birds remind us of where we are in the world and the story as an in-story element.
[Howard] This comes back to the timing of introducing Theodolphus. We had to earn… Theodolphus had to earn the right to be prophetic. And he earned it by us believing that Patricia saw the tree and had magic and Lawrence created an AI in his closet. And so now we can believe that this guy had a prophetic experience. If we had heard it first, we wouldn't have believed it. Okay. Well, so now we've got unreliability of narrators set aside for a moment. We come to the birds, and we have earned, or Charlie Jane has earned, the story has earned the ability to convince me that when a bird says a thing, it's important and it's true and the bird might not fully understand what it's saying, but I'm supposed to feel something. And what I feel is an increase in tension, a little bit of dread. It's too late? How far too late is it? But if we had led with the birds, which obviously we couldn't, but if we'd lead with it, the story hadn't earned it yet, because it hadn't told us that the birds could do this.
[Dan] I don't remember if this works exactly, but I'm pretty sure it does. As the birds kind of replace Theodolphus. He disappears from the story, fairly abruptly. And it's after that that the birds start saying too late, too late. And I think a big part of that is we don't need the prophet anymore, because it's already happened. The thing he was prophesying is here. And so that's what the birds are, is, okay, this thing is happening now.
[Mary Robinette] The balls are falling. One of the things, as we're talking about foreshadowing, that I kind of want to draw attention to is that there's kind of two modes of foreshadowing that are happening. One mode is stuff that Charlie Jane is doing deliberately, thematically, and very visibly. Those are the things like the there's a prophecy, that kind of thing, that are very clearly on the page and they're addressed at the reader. And then there's also invisible or covert foreshadowing, which you don't notice until you read it a second time, like some of the things that I was calling out in earlier episodes where she's saying this is a thing that she had learned about Lawrence, that you couldn't count on him, that those… There's reasons that that comes back later, and it's not necessarily something that you would notice on the first time as, oh, this is a big thematic thing. When… Like, I've talked to early career writers who are trying to figure out, well, how do I put the foreshadowing in? And what I want you to know is that mechanically, the way you do that is that most of the time, the foreshadowing is you get to the end of the book and saying, what have I put on the table already and what ingredients can I use? And grabbing those and writing… So that a lot of the invisible foreshadows or the foreshadowing that the reader doesn't necessarily notice the first time around is what I think of as hindsight foreshadowing, which is usually the reader mechanically reaching back. I have found that when I have attempted to put the foreshadowing in, unless it is this very conscious, very visible… If I want the subtle foreshadowing that the reader… That every single time, I am telegraphing things in ways that are unpleasant for the reader. And that Charlie Jane is managing to do these two different types of foreshadowing without falling into this annoying, well, I could see that coming.
[Howard] One thing that may not be obvious to readers is that you are not reading books in the order, word for word, page for page, in the order in which they were written. With rare, exceedingly rare, exception, you are reading something where it's been written, and then the smarter version of the author has gone back and retroactively foreshadowed or whatever.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'd be very interested to learn if Theodolphus was in the first draft of the novel.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I… My suspicion is not. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] But I think what's so interesting about the way foreshadowing works here, and this… Really going back to over indexing on the metaphor of lens here. Right? Is the way the foreshadowing and the way prophecy works in this is a lens into character. Over and over and over again. How the characters interpret the information they are given influences how they behave in the future, which reinforces their trauma, their rifts, their disagreements. Right? And so Theodolphus, a creature of violence, sees the violence coming at the end and cannot imagine a resolution other than the end of the world. Right? And then Patricia, being told that Lawrence is going to do this thing and that she must kill him, can only see that she must distance herself from this person who has distanced himself from her. Right? And so it's just like this repeats over and over again, and then, where the bird prophecy comes in at the end of the too late, too late, is simply Patricia interpreting that of oh, it is too late, it's too late to save the world, it's too late to do the things I needed to do. Lawrence is gone, I screwed all this up, and that is her own negativity, her own depression, her own cycle of trauma sort of repeating itself in that. When actually, the birds are talking about something completely irrelevant. I mean, to spoil the ending here, it's like the riddle from the birds… It don't matter at all. It's just her getting back to the tree. That's the important part. She was too late to come back and answer the riddle, but the parliament of birds are kind of just a bunch of idiots…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] As far as we can tell. You know what I mean? Delightful idiots, I love birds, but that seems accurate. I mean… And so it is this thing that because it is so closely filtered through the unreliable perspective of the character, we can see the way in which foreshadowing becomes yet another tool in her toolkit (A) to create tension between these characters and create that forward momentum of the plot, but to let us understand the perspective of these individuals and the flaws in that that drive them to make decisions that are quote unquote nonoptimal, in that way of, like, well, what if… Why didn't they just do X, Y, and Z, and that would have saved everything? It's like, because that's not how people work. People make flawed decisions on imperfect information for good reasons all the time.
[Erin] Yeah, it's like… It's interesting to me that both of the… Both the magic and the tech people are sort of… They feel like they are in a foreshadowing, like, they both project forward…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] What they believe the future will be, and then attempt to do something heinous to control it or change it or flee from it. And so a lot of the entire book is, in some ways, like what happens if you see the future and you don't feel like… You see it coming, and it feels like there's nothing you can do to change it. Which is where I'm going to reveal that I, an unreliable narrator, lied and do want to talk a tiny bit about the time in which…
[Laughter]
[Erin] This story is set. Which is that, like, it is set in a world that is not ours, but is very technologically similar to our own. And so I'm wondering, like, how does that… Do you think that changes the way you read the story, or, like, the disasters of the story, in that it feels like it could… It's not an impossibility to the when of our own times or was that just me?
[DongWon] The whole book is so heightened. Right? Everything about it is heightened from the way the kids experience their adventure, the emotions around the rifts between them, and then the disasters that are happening at the end. And yet, I mean, in the years since this book was published, we've all experienced natural disasters, we've experienced conflict, and we've experienced a lot of things that are hinted at or explicitly described in this book. Not in a literal one-for-one way, but a lot of what she's talking about here feels very familiar. And it's why my reading of it is so grounded in a specific place and time of, like, this is about this city's conflicts. This is about this particular thing that she was working through in her own mind of what do we do about the problem of this city? What do we do about this conflict between these communities?
[Mary Robinette] I think it's inevitable that you will read the book through the lens of whichever time that you're in.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And having an overlap of when the book was written makes a lot of the parallels, I think, a little more clear. But also, as we move farther away from it, the billionaires destroying the world kind of situation, like, that again, that is something… This specific incarnation of it is something that happened years after Charlie Jane wrote the book, but it is still something that resonates, that connects. But when you read much older books, I think we still have those resonances and connections where we can draw parallels to where we are now or when we are now. So I think it's inevitable, and I think it's something that we can kind of overthink as writers too much.
[Erin] I was going to ask, do you think that's something we should… I know there's something people will worry about, especially people writing science fiction, near future, current versions of us is do you worry that what you're writing becomes dated? Do you worry that you're out of time, and then people will not relate to your story anymore?
[DongWon] I mean, that's the thing, is that science fiction is never about the future. Science fiction's always about the present moment it's written in. Right? William Gibson's Neuromancer feels futuristic even to us now, even though the technology is wildly outdated compared to what we have now. Right? You watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. None of our technology looks like that…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] At this point, but that movie still feels futuristic to us. And that's okay. You need to hit the feeling of futuristicness, but you don't need to be predictive about technology. And, I mean, frankly Charlie Jane did a pretty good… There's some called shots in here in terms of, like,…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] Generative AI, billionaires who are willing to destroy the planet just so they can go to Mars. Right? Like, there's a number of things that are just called shots here, because I think communities that she was in, being a tech journalist for so many years, all those kinds of things, like, I think, gave her a certain perspective that let her call these shots. But also those things that are coming true in this moment, 10 years from now, who knows what they will be. But because the thematic resonances are so rich, I think even if those technological things don't work out, because this book is about a moment in time, as all books necessarily are, and letting that be felt, I think, it works in a way that I don't need it to… In the way that Neuromancer doesn't need cell phones to feel like crazy, cool, future tech. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] To address the question very, very specifically, when I am writing, I'm writing for an audience who comes from the same chronological context that I do. I'm not trying to write for a future audience. If I were trying to write for a future audience, I would write something very, very different. And I recognize that the audience who reads whatever I write today… Ah, you know what, about 80 percent of what they get out of what I write is something that they brought with them into what I wrote. In 100 years from now, in the unlikely circumstance that anybody's reading anything I wrote 100 years from now, the number will be closer to like 95 percent.
[DongWon] I think the thing that keeps it from feeling dated is when you lean into concepts and trends.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Like big ideas, rather than like lingo and details. Right? Like if somebody was like [scibidee?] toilet in this, it would be like, whoa, that was a very specific moment. Actually, that would be a wild called shot from… If she wrote this back then. But…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] If there were things that are just like so of a particular moment in slang, unless you're writing a thing that is intended to be a period piece. That's where you need to find the fine line between what's the idea of the thing versus, like, putting a specific version of the thing in your book. Right? So everything being a slightly abstracted form and, like, shifted one step of these tech companies and these like billionaires rather than being this is this person doing this thing for this company, I think that helps to keep it feel from… Keeping it from being too dated.
[Erin] Agreed. And now we have come to the time for the homework.
[Erin] So, pick a scene in your current work. And I want you to think about two moments. One moment in the past of that that is resonant still with that scene, and one moment that will happen in the future that is also resonant with that scene. And write two different versions of the scene. One in which the past weighs heavily on it. And one in which the foreshadowing of the future weighs heavily on it. And then see what the difference is.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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