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Writing Excuses 20.23: The Lens of the Senses
 
 
Key points: Sensory details. What do you use automatically? Sound, sight... What do you remind yourself to include? Cues to memory or emotion. Use analogy to describe. Tie it to an emotional moment. The unexpected squirt in the dark. Leave space for the reader. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 23]
 
[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 23]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] The Lens of the Senses
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm stinky.
[DongWon] And we all have a regret.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] So we've been talking about the various lenses you can use to approach how you're doing worldbuilding, how you're building your fiction, how you're just constructing your story in general. Right? We've been talking about context and time. But I wanted to bring us back down into the body a little bit today. And what is the most rooting thing you can do in a scene often is to remind your readers of the sensory details of the scene. What do they see, what do they hear, what do they taste, what do they smell? What do they feel? Those are the five senses. I believe I hit all of them. And so... 
[Mary Robinette] What do they taste?
[DongWon] What do they taste? Did I miss that one? Anyways. As we're going through these, or as we're talking about how to make your world feel really lived-in, what are the sensory details that you guys reach for in a scene automatically, or what are the ones that you find otherwise you have to remind yourself to include?
[Howard] I reach for acoustics. Very, very quickly. Because, as an audio engineer, one of the first things that I would do walking into a space is stop, close my eyes, and listen to the room. Not just listening for things that are making noise in the room, but then I also snapped my fingers or clicked my tongue and listen for the T 60, the time in which an echo will drop by 60 decibels. How long does it take for the echo to die away completely? And I realized fairly early on that with my eyes closed, I could tell, without making any noise, if I was in a little room or a big room or a giant room or outdoors. And it's such a fun exercise to do.
[Mary Robinette] I… It's interesting that you say this, because my husband is also an audio engineer. Film and television, he did location sounds. In college, I was an art major. I am very visually oriented, and tactile orientation. So we walk into the same space, and he will be absolutely driven bonkers by a buzzing sound that I don't even know exists until he points it out. And I will talk about the pattern in a carpet that's just, like, why would anyone do this, it gives people vertigo, and he is like, there's carpet in the room?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And this is… I think one of the reasons that it is such a powerful tool, because it's telling you not only about the world, but also about the character. So I tend to default to visual. And I think a lot of writers do. As a result of that, I will sometimes make a conscious decision that one of my character's other… It's primary sense is something other than sight. So… To differentiate them. I try to link it to… Usually something about the career that they've wound up in. Not because the career shapes it so much, but because I think that you get drawn to a career based on what is important to you. But I can reverse engineer that to create some character distinction.
[Erin] What's interesting hearing that is that I… I have aphantasia, so I cannot make mental images at all, and I have a horrible sense of smell. And those are my two favorite senses to use when I'm writing.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Actually…
[Mary Robinette] Interesting.
[Erin] I don't know if it's because I am try… Like with visual, I actually am trying to make it happen. So, something that I will do is I will actually pull up images of the place or something like the place I'm writing about so that I can actually look for what are the visual things that, like, would be happening. And I just love smell because I feel like it's so visceral, even though I don't experience it as much as other people maybe. I just love what it says about the way you experience something. I feel like it's the thing that's the hardest to get away from. Like, if something smells bad…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It also will have, like, a taste effect on you. And so I think it's an interesting one because it kind of has, like, an interesting secondary effect. But I think part of the reason is because they aren't things that I'm experiencing as much, I'm able to think about the way that the character experiences them in a completely different way, and it doesn't… I'm not distracted by my own senses in coming up with the character's sensory experiences.
 
[DongWon] Interesting. It lets you put yourself in the fictional space more because they're things that aren't [garbled] connected to you… A you experienced world. But it's also really interesting about this is each of the senses are tied to memory and experience in different ways. What we see versus what we smell versus what we hear, I think, are all different cues for different people into memory. I… There's a lot of research that scent is the most strongly connected to memory for a lot of people. Maybe less so for you, Erin. But that the scent memory of something… I know, for myself, that sometimes I'll smell a particular smell and I'll suddenly just be back in when I was 13 years old in this particular space, in this particular summer, or whatever it was. And so I think… Are there things that you guys not only are connecting in terms of what's interesting for the character, but if you're trying to evoke certain emotions, do you lean towards different sensory details or do you find that it's more just what tool fits what character?
[Mary Robinette] I often, when I'm trying to evoke a specific emotion, the one that I lean towards is touch. Because I lean into what the body is feeling, where the character is feeling their tension. If they're too hot, if they're too cold. Those are the things for me, when I'm trying to create emotion, that I tend to lean towards. Which is linked to, but somewhat different than trying to create a sense of place.
[DongWon] Right.
[Howard] I do feel like scent, the sense of smell… It's almost like when we remember things, smell ends up as the index tabs. Whereas other things, sounds and colors, don't. And… But I don't do that to try and… I don't include smell to try and make the reader smell something or… I'm not trying to flip through their index tabs. What I'm trying to do is let them look into the character's brain by giving a scent and have the character immediately smell…Ah. It smells like grandma's place. What? Oh, mothballs. I'm smelling mothballs. And if anybody's had that experience, and I think most of us have, where you smell the thing and immediately been in a place or had a thought, that is normalizing, that is… That draws us into the character and gives us, the reader, a sense that we experienced the same thing the character's experiencing.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I will hear people talk about sometimes is that they… Yes, they agree with that, but that they don't use smell as much as they would use sight because there's not as much language for it. However, after my husband went through the audio engineering, he went and became a winemaker. Which, sometimes I have to help him with his research, and that's very difficult.
[Erin] Oh, no.
[DongWon] What a struggle.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] sadness. But it means that I wind up going to these winemaking events, and they have so many ways to talk about scent. One of the things that I was struck by was that actually it's the same toolbox that we have for talking about sight, we're just not used to using it. When you talk about a color being creamy, that's an… That's analogy. Right?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And that's the same thing that happens when you're talking about scent. It smells chocolatey. It doesn't smell like chocolate, but there's that richness of flavor. And this… You can build a sense of something that is not a flavor or scent that occurs in the real world by linking it to things. Like, I just wrote a story where there was something called a basil willie, because people are actually really crap at naming things. We just name it by what we… But then I was sitting there, trying to describe basil. I just had a recent experience where I have a friend who has the unfortunate gene where cilantro tastes like soap, and she's like, what does it taste like to you? And attempting to link it to things that I know that she has smelled and tasted. It's like, oh, yeah, this is all analogy. One of the things that my husband says when people are learning to approach wine is if it smells like that to you, you're correct. If the way you need to describe it is it reminds me of grandma, then someone else can be turned and say, oh, knowing me, oh, your grandmother's southern and you're picking up these bacon notes and these vegetable tones. Grandma's baked green beans are amazing. Now I'm hungry.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Now I want bacon wine.
[Mary Robinette] I can introduce you.
[DongWon] I really want to talk more about the language that we used to describe sensory details. But before that, let's take a quick break.
 
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[Mary Robinette] The thing of the week is an experience that I think is actually going to be hard for you to find. It's called Darkfield. It is a train show and you go… They have containers that they have turned into a theater, and you go into a container and are in a completely dark space. This is actually something that is not commonly experienced, because most of the time, there's a little bit of an LED, there's the exit light. Completely dark space, and they tell you a story through sound and motion. It is wild. There's… They have a couple of different experiences. Flight, séance, and comma. As a storyteller, thinking about how you can tell a story with only a few senses and removing others highlights exactly where we get our information. It's very compelling. It's a little disturbing, and it is a touring show so it may be hard for you to find. But if you can, I recommend seeing Darkfield.
 
[DongWon] I started this episode by talking about how sensory details can be the most grounding. But, Mary Robinette, before the break, you were talking about ways in which actually that sensory experience is so subjective. What I experience is very different from what you experience, very different from what Erin experiences, and Howard experiences. Right? What tastes one way to us, even if we all like the same thing. My experience in eating cilantro is different from yours, because I'm a different person. I mean, my physics, biology, all these things. So when you're trying to use language to make an experience feel universal, make someone feel in the body of this character, you don't know what kind of body your reader has. What are the tricks that we can use to make sensory experience feel universal or feel connected or feel specific in different ways?
[Erin] So, it's funny, because hearing y'all talk earlier about, like, scent being the core of memory, I think, because of a lack of both sent and visuals, like, I actually have a quite poor memory. And I… The only way that I remember things is by feeling like there's a story about it, almost as if somebody was singing a song and suddenly you remember the chorus. And so, like, that's how my whole… My whole life is stories. But one of the things that I do, then, because I'm trying like to convey scents to… Or something to a reader that I don't have is I often make up what a scent is by trying to create an emotional moment and then telling you there's a scent to it. So I would say this smells like a combination of… And a lot of times I'll use a very sensory thing and a fake thing. Sort of. So I'll be like, this smells like rotten meat and sidewalk chalk the day after a rain.
[Howard] Yeah. And as a humorist, I am always, always playing with the words around smell. Because it's so much fun. This smells like something died and then went to gym class without taking a shower. That's a ridiculous metaphor. But… And what we know is that the character has passed judgment on… Maybe it's body odor, maybe it's putrescence, maybe it's both. But we are having, hopefully, a humorous emotional response to what the character is experiencing.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that Erin was saying, just taking that and tying back in, you make me think about the way perfumiers describe perfume, that they're trying to create an experience that takes you through something. So, even though you're saying an imaginary thing, it's like, yeah, it's imaginary, but there's a whole layer of scents that are associated with each of those things that builds this whole in a way that a list would not. It smells like petrichor, sidewalk chalk, and exhaust from streets… But, like, that's a very different thing than the smell of sidewalk chalk after a rain.
[Erin] And the thing is if you say, like… I can think of a lot of reasons why I think, like, that scent makes sense, like, things like rain do have their own scent, a sidewalk after the rain has a certain scent, and chalk has a scent. But I also think that it's very possible that if we had, like, smell-o-vision or, like, I could suddenly smell what you might think of when you thought of that, that we would all have different smells.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But I've rooted it to the same emotions.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So that if I reference it again, or if I'm using it to describe a character, it's sort of doesn't matter that the scents are different because the emotional thing…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That I'm trying to get you to realize through using that sensory detail is the same.
[DongWon] I think that's the thing that we were all talking about, is that really, when we get to these sensory details, so often it's about emotion. How is the character feeling? We're describing sensory details to give us a sense of what their experience is, not just in a physical way, but how that connects to the emotional truth of it. Right? So, in describing… The way you're combining positive and negative imagery when it comes to the scent of something, that gives us a more well-rounded experience of, like, oh, this smells bad, but also a little nostalgic. And what does that mean that this character associates writing me with something a little nostalgic?
[Howard] The mediums that we're using… We have to pay attention to these. Because if you are writing and someone is going to read it, then you are using principally the sense of vision to create a data stream that is giving us… But if the audiobook is read… If someone reads the book to you, you're listening to an audiobook, the information stream is now going through your ears. And there are audiobooks that are not just read, they're dramatized. And so some of the sounds you might put in the text end up performed as sounds. I remember being in a planetarium for a concert, and they said if you see something you like, that's us. If you hear something you like, that's us. If you feel something you like, don't look at us. And then, during the show, they were in the back with a squirt gun.
[Laughter]
[Howard] And it was hilarious, because we were getting information through a stream that we were told we wouldn't be getting.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] Anyway, I'm just fascinated by this.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I love about this is that we're in the module where we're talking about where and when, but we're talking about character, and this is, I think, an important thing is most of the time when your reader is experiencing the place, they are experiencing it through the lens of a character. When we're using these sensory details. How is the character experiencing it? And even if the character isn't there, the reader is interpreting it through their own lens of self and their own awareness of how their body would experience those things. Like, if I see someone who is describing stepping out into the humidity of a southern day, and they are describing the way I described it, which is, it's like stepping into a sauna and being hit in the face with a hot wet towel. I know that, and I have… I bring my own memory to it. This is part of a thing that we talk about a lot, that your reader is building the story with you. And so, invoking those sensory details, even if you're doing it in omniscient, even if you're doing it where there's not a character on the page, you are evoking them for the reader.
[DongWon] I mean, that's what I like so much about this topic is, whether we like it or not, we all have bodies. Right? Whether we like it or not, we all have… We're all in our Gundams made of ham. Right? We're experiencing the world filtered through the sensory organs that we have. And so are your characters. Right? So when you get this opportunity to remind your reader that your character has a body… They don't. They're fictional. You made them up. They literally don't have a body. But the reader does. Right? And so if you can connect those two dots, you will increase the verisimilitude of the reading experience exponentially.
[Erin] And what I like about that in setting is that you can use things that are very visceral and sensory to connect things that are very speculative, very out there…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] To something that we can feel. I was at an immersive theater show at the Edinborough Fringe Festival where we were in the dark. Full black dark, in front of, like, an arcade machine, and you could, like, choose things, and it was all audio. We're just standing there. But at one point, there is… Like, somebody is killed by some really weird out there gun of some sort, and the arcade machine squirted a tiny bit of water. It was the most disturbing thing ever…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because, like, I don't know what that machine does, I don't know what happened to the person exactly, but death plus liquid in your face…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is making you feel like so many things. And I connected really strongly. I don't remember much about that experience other than that moment, because it was so visceral and because it was so sensory and I didn't need to know the specifics of how the thing works because I understand how the thing feels.
[DongWon] I mean… I think this is why… I talked about genres of the body. Right? Because horror is such a classic one, because you can take the most outlandish thing in the world and you bring it down to blood and bone and the smell of somebody dying and now it's so real for your reader no matter how bonkers made up the monster was or the situation was with a haunting was. You made it felt in the body, and then your reader's with you in that moment.
[Howard] I… I love the senses, and I love the idea that when you feel a thing… Feel, smell, hear, see… That seems out of place, it can be absolutely horrifying. A little bit of wetness when there's been a splotchy death noise. A little bit of open fresh air when you've opened a door you expect to lead to another room, and you realize that this door opened into… Don't take a step or you're going to fall to your death. There's all kinds of ways to play with this, where the unexpected sense is part of a reveal that can be humorous or horrific or intellectually stimulating or whatever it is you want to evoke in the reader. You do it with more than one sense, and it's harder.
[DongWon] And it's a place where sometimes doing less can be more. Right? I think if you're really trying to overwhelm your audience with the sensory aspect, it can be hard to parse what's happening. One of the… Going back to horror, I'm thinking about the famous rain room scene in Alien, part of why that is one of the most iconic effective scenes in all of horror history is because it's very quiet. He's there, you can hear the drips of water, you can feel how cool it is on his face, you're so grounded in his body, in that moment of, like, this moment of relief of, like, oh, there's water on my face, the chains are clinking, there's a little bit of a breeze, and there's all these tiny little sensory details that are making that scene pop, right before awful things happen. Right? And it's the quietness in that moment that lets you absorb the sensory reality of it, which then heightens your dread, because you know what's coming.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think along those lines, sometimes, the thing that you can do is to leave space for the reader.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that has stuck with me for a long time from Steven King where he says, you can describe the pain in great detail, going into all of the… The nerve endings lighting up and all of this stuff, or you can say, they ripped his fingernail off. And, like… For our listeners, DongWon, sitting beside me, just winced and turned away.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Mary Robinette] And that's an example of leaving space for the reader. That sometimes you describe the thing that is happening to someone and you don't deliver the sensory details, you let the reader experience them. It's something that you use sparingly. But it's also the thing that relies on the reader having a common experience.
[Erin] I'm just thinking… It makes me think that part of the way that we experience sense is also distance. Like, how far away is the sound, how close is the smell? You know what I mean? And I think that there's like… That is something to think about. And that actually I like to play with more, which is, like, what happens when a sense… Something that you sensed as far away is suddenly closer. Or something that you sense as close… If you're smelling your grandmother's baking bread and then that becomes further away through time or further away through distance. Like, that actually can convey emotion in the exact same scent, but a different context for it.
[DongWon] Absolutely. I really love that. And that's combining the differences that we have in terms of context, in terms of time and distance, and all these things, and how you experience that in your body. So, while we think about how to make space for the audience, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us?
 
[Mary Robinette] I do. This is an exercise that I learned from C. L. Polk. We're going to link in the liner notes to the original essay. And it is an exercise that they use to create an immediate sense of place, that they got from an anxiety stopping exercise. Five, four, three, two, one. You list five things your character can see, for things your character can hear, three things your character can touch, two things your character can smell, and one thing your character can taste. So that your exercise, is to do the five, four, three, two, one. I'm going to put in a slight twist for you, which is, if your character's primary sense is something other than sight, make that the one that's the five.,
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss
 
 
Key points: Delicious, tasty writing with flavorful words? Good word do! How do you write beautiful prose? Go over it again and again, tweak and tweak and tweak, like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. Watch for repetitions and ambiguities. Beware lazy writing. Focus on the sound of language. Listen to good word doers. Read good word do! Read your own work before writing more. How do you add density to your sentences without going purple? Don't add things to it, take out the unnecessary parts. Trim, and trim, and trim again. Ask yourself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be, and what order of information is most effective in getting there? Words go through the brain, but sounds can strike you in the heart. Lyricism can put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Six.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Pat] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Pat] And I'm Pat.
 
[Dan] We have Patrick Rothfuss with us again. We're going to talk about prose. This is specifically about writing itself. Word for word, how do you make your prose delicious? How do you make your writing as wonderful as it can be?
[Howard] Tasty, tasty sentences with flavorful words and syllables and… And…
[Mary Robinette] Things.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You know, it's a lot easier to do when I write it.
[Pat] We all good word do. We make you do word good too.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Now I'm super excited to have Pat on for this episode. This is… You have such a reputation for fantastic word-for-word writing in your work.
[Pat] Do I actually?
[Mary Robinette] Yes, you do.
[Pat] Really?
[Dan] You absolutely do. That's always…
[Mary Robinette] You didn't know that?
[Pat] I mean, I know I work on it, but… Usually, that's not what people s… I mean, it's rarely what people say when they come up to me.
[Mary Robinette] Huh. That's what people talk about all the… I'm…
[Howard] It's what we say behind your back.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah.
 
[Dan] But I know that people do ask you how do you get… How do you write beautiful prose? What do you say when people ask you that?
[Pat] What I said just today was, "Boy, I don't know how I would teach that." Because it comes very intuitively to me. So for it to get better and better, I just sort of go over it again and again. Each time, I tweak and I tweak and I tweak. It's like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. It gets smoother and smoother and smoother until it's done. But that's not advice that can be followed.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I have found, because it's… I come at it from theater, and similarly, I run into this issue when people ask me about dialogue.
[Pat] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Like, how do you do dialogue, which is… Dialogue is one of those places where the words are… Like, the words… You're telling a story, so the words are always important, but dialogue specifically, because it's often carrying even more, you have to be very concise with it. But similarly, it came super easy to me. It took me forever to figure out how to teach it. I wound up having to reverse engineer what I do as a narrator. Because my job as a narrator is to take the words that are on the page and make them into sounds. Writing developed to convey the spoken language. Right? So what I'm looking for with that, what it taught me, are the things that sound good, the things that play smoothly, the… It's a lot about repetitions. What I find is that if you use repetition with intention, it will draw attention to something and it will point it at the thing you want people to look at. But when you don't use it with intention, when it's an accidental repetition, the repetition is always going to catch the reader's attention, and it will drag them in the wrong direction. That's the thing where you… It's not quite having a piece of déjà vu with the thing, but it'll pop you out of the story just a little bit. Sometimes that repetition is a word, and those are easy to spot. Sometimes it's a collection of sounds. Sometimes it's a concept. But often that's the thing that I'm looking for. Making sure that those repetitions are where I want them to be. One of the other things that I look for our ambiguities. Words or phrases or concepts that could go either way and aren't doing so on purpose. Like, one of the examples that I use sometimes when I'm talking to people about it is this thing… There's a compilation video of… In movies, people saying, "You just don't get it, do you?"
[Pat] [snort] Oh, that.
[Mary Robinette] I know. There's a compilation video of person after person after person in completely different films saying, "You just don't get it, do you?" That's lazy writing. It's ambiguous, because what don't you get? Why don't you get it? But then you look at Blade Runner and Rutger Hauer's famous speech, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe." That is "You just don't get it, do you?" But it's getting… It's making it specific, it's removing the ambiguity, and the repetitions there are all very deliberate. This beautiful rhythmic flow.
 
[Pat] That's really interesting, because you're coming at this from a conceptual… As soon this topic got brought up, I immediately thought of the sound of language. Because I focus that way a lot. But what you're talking about is something that I also do. I love the term lazy writing. That's something that I find increasingly galling as I watch more TV. I actually hear it reflected in my son's speech, now that he gets to watch more TV, is he is emulating the lazy writing that he has heard.
[Dan] That is depressing.
[Pat] Oh, it's super depressing, which is one of the reasons I've tried to keep him away from bad media, is it homogenizes his beautifully original speech. That's what it does to everyone. So, I first off say, if you want to do good word do, then listen to good word doers. Like, absorb it in a meaningful way that like it sticks to you. Sometimes, that's just like… For me, I read Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Like… Or I read Shakespeare. Like, ooh, some Shakespeare. The problem is, I am so sticky, I'm such a mimic, that if I read a Shakespeare play, I will have to fight to not write and speak in iambic pentameter. Especially if I get a couple of drinks in me.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] So good word do sticks to you.
[Laughter]
[Pat] Sometimes, yes. So, like, that is a trick that I would recommend, is, like, if you read enough of something, it kind of gets in you.
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the way I wrote The Glamorous Histories is that I would read a chapter of Jane Austen, and then I would write a chapter.
[Pat] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] Because that… Because I was using it as a conscious upload of her language.
 
[Pat] Actually, that's a trick that I use in my own stuff if I've been away a while, or even just to maintain consistency, is I read the previous chapter before I start writing or drafting a new chapter.
[Mary Robinette] You do that, don't you, Dan?
[Dan] Yes. I will always start each day's work by reading what I wrote yesterday to kind of get myself up to speed before I step out of the moving car, so I can…
[Chuckles]
[Pat] By the time you get to the end, I'm usually already tweaking and fiddling, so I'm already writing by the time I hit the end.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Pat] Then I've got momentum.
[Dan] That also makes the first draft a little cleaner, because it's kind of been cleaned up as you go.
[Pat] Exactly. And the tone is easier to match, because you've kind of… Or at least I tend to have my head in it.
 
[Dan] I would like to pause here if we can for our thing of the week. It is not a book this time. It is a podcast. What are you going to recommend for us?
[Pat] I would really love to recommend to you the One-Shot Podcast Network. Now, it's a group of podcasts, and they all deal with gaming in some way. But what I have really come to love over the last year is listening to a lot of comedians and actors and game players get together. Effectively, what they're doing is collaborative improvisational storytelling. They have an ongoing series called Campaign. There was 100 episodes of like a Star Trek theme podcast. The current one that they're doing, where I think they're about 30 episodes in, is unoriginal world called Sky Jacks that is inspired by the Decemberists' music. Oh, it's so good, guys, it's so good. But also, the One-Shop Podcast Network itself, they do a bunch of one-shot games. Like, I came in and I played a game called Kids on Bikes.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's…
[Dan] That's a good game.
[Pat] Oh, it's amazing. It's based off like the 80s, like ET and Goonies and The System. James D'Amato runs it, and he runs a lot of these games. You can go in and see like what they're doing. This year is especially interesting, because they… James has decided to feature only games designed by not-white dudes. He is an amazing guy, an incredible storyteller. I've learned a lot about gaming and narrative just by listening to the podcast.
[Dan] Cool. That is called One-Shot?
[Pat] The One-Shot Podcast Network. Which contains many shows, including Neo-Scum, One-Shot, Campaign, and some others that I'm embarrassed that I can't remember off the top of my head.
[Dan] Awesome. So go listen to that. We will link to it in the liner notes as well.
 
[Dan] Now, I've got a great listener question that I'm going to throw out, and then immediately provide my own answer for.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Because I've got a really good answer to this one. Someone asks, "How do you add density to your sentences without going purple?" Purple prose is something that we want to avoid that… If you've ever read an AP English essay, you've se… They're just trying to cram so much brilliance into their… My solution to this is actually you add density to something not by adding things to it, but by taking out the unnecessary things. Think of this as you are cooking your writing on low heat so that it reduces down, and what you're left with has just as much flavor as possible. Earlier, Pat was telling a story about how he revises by trimming something and then leaving it and coming back and then trimming it down until… What was it you said, that one day you'll be left with just 12 words that are so intense they can kill a person.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] What I loved about that story is that that's exactly what the poet, Ezra Pound, did. He had an experience where he was… He went into the Metro in Paris, and, just for whatever reason, had this profound experience looking at faces in there. He wrote this giant thing, it was this multipage essay, trying to re-create that emotion that he had. He was like, "No, this is too much." He kept cutting it down. He ended up with a poem called Faces in the Metro, which I'm going to tell you right now.
 
"The apparition of these faces in a crowd,
Petals on a wet, black bough."
 
[Pat] I remember that. [You said that before]
[Dan] Cutting out the extraneous stuff until he's left with just this one powerful emotion adds so much density to it because you don't have any filler.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that… I have a similar kind of a relationship with Ray Bradbury's writing. Because it's… What I love are his short stories, and the way he plays with language. There's a piece that I use when I'm teaching narration, which was again one of those things where I'm like, "I know this works. Why does this work?" So I'm just going to read a little bit to you. This is from The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.
 
"William Acton rose to his feet. The clock on the mantel ticked midnight. He looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with the same ten whorled fingers."
 
It's like… It's just… It's so beautiful. But the thing about it, and we'll put this in the liner notes so you can look at it, there's… That repetition that I'm talking about. He uses "He looked at his fingers, he looked at the large room around him, and he looked at the man lying on the floor." It's like this is a normal thing, this is a normal thing, this is not a normal thing. One of the things that he's doing there, when you look at it, is he's adding modifiers, but he's adding modifiers just to the things he wants you to pay attention to. The… First, it's "he looks at his fingers," and he doesn't give you any modifiers, he doesn't give you any modifiers to feet, to the mantel, none of that. "He looked at his fingers, then he looked at the large room." Gives you a little bit more emphasis. "Then he looked at the man lying on the floor." Like, lying on the floor, it's not purple prose. It's just… Just adding that little bit and it's making it more specific and it's pointing you at it, just by lingering on it. Then he comes back to the fingers again. Because those actually… It's like these… This, I… These are the things that did that. Everything in that sentence, about stroking the typewriter keys and the ham… It's all about these were normal, and I've done this other thing with them. I think it's just beautiful, but it is… It's that layering and that deliberate choice about what things am I going to emphasize. It's not about let me add more adjectives, but it's about pointing.
[Pat] It's also… Bradbury is so good about this. He's extraordinarily lean.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Pat] It's just so clean. Robert Bly once said, he's an American poet, he was on stage, I saw a recording of it, and he said, "I think a person could be an amazing poet, even if they…" He goes, "You don't need more words. You don't need fancy words." He goes, "If you knew 25 words perfectly, you could be a poet." That was really interesting to me. It's the sort of… In some ways, this is kind of a wankery statement. But, I think, he's pointing towards a truth. That is, like, you don't need to get fancy. Now, I think there's a space for fancy. Sometimes a perfect word is perfect. But a lot of times, the perfect word is the less perfect word that everyone knows.
[Howard] My approach to this is… The Bradbury piece. What is the reader to be left with? Well, the reader is supposed to be left with the horror of having committed a murder and staring down at one's own hands and realizing that you are the murder weapon. Or at least that's what I got out of it. Other readers may get other things, but that's what I got. You can get that, sort of, by telling the reader exactly what they are supposed to feel. "He stared down at his hands, and was horrified that these were now murder weapons." Okay? That is really, really lean. But I've been very literal and told you exactly what to feel. Purple prose is when you have words in there that are not working towards giving us that emotion. They are working towards demonstrating to us that you…
[Dan] Own a thesaurus.
[Howard] Have memorized the thesaurus.
[Chuckles]
 
[Howard] So, a great many times, I will sit back and look at a paragraph and ask myself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be? How do I get there? How do I get there fastest? Well, I get there fastest by being very literal, and that's actually not the most effective. How do I get there in an order in which it's the most effective? What are the pieces of information that I want to give? That's where I think the Bradbury piece becomes a tutorial.
[Pat] Yeah.
[Howard] Where we're looking at… We're identifying the murder weapons, but not yet. We're just looking at them. Then we're describing that there has been a murder. Then we are con… We are recontextualizing the hands. By describing it in that way, it suddenly sounds very non-poetic and very mechanical and very soup can. But when you sit down to do this, when you sit down with this recipe if you will. I'm headed for this emotion, and these are the beats I want to hit, that's the point at which, at least for me, I can no longer teach it, I can no longer describe it, because I have to have done it 200 times in order to have any sense of how this is going to work.
[Pat] It's a muscle memory thing, and I think… For some people, it's easier, for some people, it's harder. The same with plot and character and dialogue. I always come back to sound, as… Because, like, I love the plain… Rather, the simplicity of the concepts that Bradbury's talking about there are great. Because, like, who knows ham? Everybody knows ham. I can… It's good. Like, this isn't fancy, it's not elaborate. These are simple, solid, real things. He could get florid, he could get fancy, but… Honestly, I see that in a lot of like first-time books. Where they're describing the breakfast somebody sits down to. But authors like Bradbury, it's almost like everything he puts on the page is an icon with roots down to the heart of the world. Like, there's just nobody like Bradbury. Nobody did what he does, or does what he did. But, like Robert Frost, not to bring up another white guy, but Frost, like… Seuss doesn't get credit for his mastery of language. Because what most people know about Seuss is his kind of thumpy, heavy-handed, singsong-y kids' books. Which, by the way, are extremely hard to pull off, and you could not do it even though you feel like you could. But he wrote a book called The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough. Which, it's hard to understand how brilliant that title is, until you look at it in print, because all the words look the same, and they're all pronounced differently. Dude was like deep in the paint in his understanding of how words do. But, like, same thing with Frost. Frost wrote consistent beautiful iambic language and you would never know. He would do it in dialogue. Some of his longer unknown… Like, never cited, never read poems are pages and pages long of people having a conversation. You don't realize your reading iambic anything. It's because it's perfectly natural and perfectly flawless. Which means he sweat blood into it. I think Frost also wrote
 
"The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup."
 
It's amazing because what he's doing is playing with metrical feet. "The old dog barks backwards" is a series of words that you must say in stochee, in single metrical feet, because of just how… You can't make those flip trippingly off your tongue. Then, I think, the second line are all dactyls. They go dada dah, dada dah. One two three, one two three. "And I can remember when he was a pup." They're frolicking. They sound like a ferret running. It's things like that that I think of, and that I have a particular fondness for, because the words always have to go through the brain, but sounds will start… Will strike you straight in the heart. I get… I can get… If I can get past your brain to your heart, then I've won as a writer. It's like way easier to short cut around the brain because our brains are really messy and complicated.
[Mary Robinette] And often not very bright.
[Pat] Right! So, like, poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who would write things so beautiful that I could not understand them. Like
 
"I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." [The Windhover https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover]
 
You're like, "What are you even doing? What are you talking…" That is beautiful. I don't know what you just said.
[Laughter]
[Pat] See, that's… I don't know if that's purple? It's close to purple, but, like, if you can figure out how he did that and do a piece of it… You get 15% of that in your prose, and you can have a lyricism that will put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.
 
[Dan] This is… Has been a wonderful discussion. I'm glad we ended on poetry, because that is our homework for you, is just to go out and read poetry. We've been reciting some of our favorites. We will put some of our recommendations in the liner notes, but go out and fi… Not just one poem, but multiples by several different people, and people of different backgrounds. Just read a lot of poetry, and see what they're doing, and how you can put that kind of fluidity and grace…
[Howard] Read it until your mouth starts trying to poet…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Actually, no, one of the things I'm going to suggest is that if you are having difficulty getting poetry, because it is a different language, it's a different form, if you've been reading prose your entire life and you're trying poetry. One of the things to try with it is to try to read it out loud as part of your homework assignment. Also, to listen to people. So I'm going to add a… We're going to put some poems in the liner notes that we have mentioned or that we're fond of. I'm going to give you one to start with. That is Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool.
[Pat] Oh, man.
[Mary Robinette] It's so good.
[Pat] Read her off the page, but then… I'm sorry, go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Because there is audio of her reading it. So, read it on the page, and then you can find the audio to listen to it. Then, also, if you're still like this is difficult for me, there is a video by Manual Cinema which is, strangely, is a public company that I am very fond of.
[Dan] Imagine.
[Mary Robinette] But they were commissioned by the Poetry Foundation to create a poem… A visual poem to go with and support the recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading We Real Cool. It's a great way to kind of get a sense of oh, this is what it can do, if it is new to you as a form.
[Pat] I heard her do it live.
[Mary Robinette] [gasp] I'm a little bit jealous of you.
[Pat] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm a lot jealous of you.
[Dan] All right. So, go read some poetry. Read it to yourself, read it out loud. Just kind of see what you can do with it. That's your homework. You are out of excuses, now go write.
 
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.4: Brevity

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/01/22/writing-excuses-7-4-brevity/

Key Points: In late, out early. Start where things are happening, close to the change point, at the inciting incident. Minimize backstory. Remove extra characters and locations. Cut filler language, combine wording and ideas. Remove repetition. Use the right nouns and the right details. Use analogies for richness. Combine scenes -- have characters do something while they're talking. Don't proliferate viewpoints. Brevity doesn't just mean shorter, it also means packing more interesting material into what you keep. Trim the fat.
20% lean meat? )
[Brandon] Let's do a writing prompt. Howard?
[Howard] Okay. You have a group of characters in a spaceship...
[Brandon] 10 seconds.
[Howard] On a very, very long trip. Tell us why it's important. Tell us what the problem is, and solve the problem. In 150 words.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excus...

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