wetranscripts | Entries tagged with antagonist

Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-41-deep-dive-erins-short-fiction-extravaganza

Key points: I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story. Genre can be bookseller's version, where do we shelve it, the critic's version, what is the cultural lineage of this, and the reader/writer's version, what's useful, important, what does it feel like? Is it horror if the writer didn't intend to scare you, they just wanted the character to do a horrible thing? What drives speculative fiction in short form is the power of clear and simple metaphors. There are horror stories where the protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens. In these stories, our protagonist is the horror, doing things that we are horrified by. The antagonist is trying to prevent bad things from happening, and fails. Short fiction packs a lot in a small space. In a Myers-Briggs of writers, there are long and short writers.

[Season 18, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] 'Cause you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I have managed to put off my deep dive until the very very very last, but the time is here.

[Dongwon] You were very very determined to go last.

[Erin] Right.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Very determined to go last. I have no idea why, but I'm really excited to talk about my work, I guess…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But also to just give a… To shine some light on short fiction as a whole.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I am merely a conduit for the love of short fiction. But I want to talk a little bit first about why I picked the 3 stories that I asked you all to read, and then see if you have any questions for me, otherwise I'll just ramble about them at length. So, the 3 that I picked are Wolfy Things, is the first story that I ever had published, so I felt it really represented the beginning of the extravaganza when I was really just kind of getting things off the ground. I was just saying before we started recording that I can tell it's my first published story because I just can. Something about the way that it's constructed, I'm like, "Oh, it's early on." But I still love it. I picked Sour Milk Girls because it is my buzzy-ist story, I would say. It's the story that ended up in year's best collections and like almost made the Hugo ballot. So it's the story that sort of people know me the most for and were most excited about. Then, I picked Snake Season because I think it is the closest to where I'm going as a writer. I think it's like sort of the truest to…

[Howard] Oh, no…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, "It's the truest to my voice of murder."

[Dongwon] Let's go.

[Erin] Weirdly, it's also the one that's been translated into the most languages. It's been translated into, I think, Spanish and Portuguese and… Anyway. So, people can be horrified, I guess, in many different languages.

[Mary Robinette] Ha. You said horrified. You… I was saying earlier, we were having this conversation about whether or not Erin writes horror. I was like, "I think you do." She does not think she does. But, ha ha…

[Erin] It's you all. You brainwashed me into thinking it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] I think so much when I write, I think about what I'm writing as, just like one individual person's like troubled story, that I don't see like… What they're doing may not be… I would not use my protagonist as like life lessons. I wouldn't follow in their footsteps.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] If they told you to do something, I would say, "No." I often think of my protagonist as the antagonist of somebody else's short story.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That I just decided not to write.

[Howard] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But I…

[Mary Robinette] Accurate.

[Erin] I just… Even though that's the case, for me, it's really, I think I get so much in their head and have to understand them in order to make them somewhat sympathetic on the page, that I can't think of what they're doing or what I'm doing as horror. Because I get why they did it, and I decided to make them do it, even though it may be something that is beyond the pale in the normal, like… In the normal life of things.

[Dongwon] I love this as a way of thinking about genre. I think one thing with conversation about genre get so muddy in a certain way, because there's almost 3 different ways in which we use the term. One is how I use it, which is very much the book selling side. Where do we put this in the store, what bisac code do we put on this, what gets… What comp titles do we use? Right? Like, how do we sell this? Then there's like the way critics use it, which is… I'm not even going to dive too deep into that, but it tends to be more about what's the cultural lineage of this. Then there's like how readers and writers use it, which is much more like what's useful to you, what's important to you, what does it feel like? So I love this idea that you separated out so much of your process from necessarily what the bookstore genre of it is because you need to access a space where you can look at it in a way that these are just people doing things. Yes, the things that they are doing are very upsetting, but they are doing things for relatable reasons. Right? So, I mean, even Sour Milk Girls where she does one of the worst things I've ever seen a character do in a story to another character. It's so upsetting the thing that she does to Princess, but it's so understandable and relatable, even if I wouldn't make that choice, I can understand why she does it in a way that I think, for you, I can see how internally, that's not horror, that's just a person. Right? That's a flawed person who lives in a deeply flawed world trying to survive in whatever ways that she can. Her experience and trauma and psychology all lead her to this place of doing this upsetting thing.

[Howard] The context in which… Ghost does things to Princess. Ghost is not doing anything to Princess that society has not already done to Ghost.

[Dongwon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] In reading that story, there is horrific revelation after horrific revelation. At first it just looks like they live in an orphanage. No, this is worse than an orphanage, this is… Something's being done to these kids. As we learn more about it, it gets… You experience horror. So in talking about genre, I always go back to our Season 11, Elemental Genres. I keep turning the page because I keep looking for the next horrific reveal. I experienced dread, but I'm sort of thrilling, reveling in it. It grows so nicely out of that symmetry between what society is doing and what the character is doing that when we get to the end, it is the perfect horrific inevitability. So, yeah, circling back around, yes, Erin, you're writing horror. Are they going to shelve it as horror? I don't care, I just want to read it.

[Mary Robinette] Something that I just want to circle back to, you said that your antagonist… Your protagonist is the antagonist in someone else's story.

[Dongwon] Great line.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… When I think about all of these stories, I'm like, "Oh, yes." One of reasons that these work, I think, structurally so well is that you have a character who has set out to achieve a goal. They come up with a plan, they have obstacles, they have all of the markers. It's just as a reader, I do not want them to achieve that goal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, that is… I can see why actually you would make the argument that it's not horror, because in horror, generally speaking, bad things happen to the protagonist. In this case, you're like, "Oh, no, your protagonist is absolutely…" And I can see all of the stories that are written from the other character's point of view.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It is… I'm like, "Oh. Yes." Okay, I will grant your point about how these may not be horror.

[Erin]'s Thank you. I think it also comes back to, like, what… Intentionality…

[Mary Robinette, Dongwon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] So we were talking about, just before hand, in all the fascinating conversations we will reprise here, about that there's 3 different genres of the body. Humor, erotica, horror. They all try to make you feel something in a very visceral level. So, to me, to set out to write horror is to say I want to scare you. I want you to feel dread. I never intend… That's never a thought that goes through my head. I just want my characters to accomplish a horrible thing which might make you feel horror, but I'm not thinking. At the end, if you said, like, "I was totally fine with everything they did and I felt like I was like I'm cheering them on," I might have some questions about your moral compass…

[Laughter]

[Erin] But I wouldn't feel like I didn't accomplish my goal as a writer. Whereas, I feel like in a horror story, if you say like, "I wasn't scared at all," that you've missed something.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The same way that if you didn't laugh at humor…

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] Last night we joked during D&D, we joked about you being chaotic evil or what… This is more like chaotic IDGAF…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Chaotic WTF. I just… I am doing a thing and you're going to have experience, but that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about the thing.

[Dongwon] I will say… I will grant you what you're saying on Wolfy Thing and Sour Milk Girls. I will say I made the mistake of reading Snake Season…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Right before I went to bed.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yes. Bad choice.

[Dongwon] I was upset. The image of Sarah, the image of the donor, is just so upsetting to me. It's so emotional too, though. I mean, what drives speculative fiction in short form so well is the power of the metaphor. Right? One of the things I love in short fiction is it's so clear and simple about what the metaphor is. Right? In Sour Milk Girls, it's the state is robbing them of their identity and memories, because that's kind of what the foster system is invested in doing, is erasing who you were to be this person that can be entered into new situations. Right? So, just this mother's trauma over her dead daughter, over this monstrous thing that she's afraid of in herself and in… I don't know how to unpack all the things in that because it's so rich and textured and dense, like, that's the beauty of that image. But, yeah, I'm very scared of that little girl. She's definitely haunting me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, I think that one of the things that also happened for me as we got deeper into the story was wondering how much of Sarah's appearance was actually just Mary's view of her, like, was this just a normal little girl who just wasn't a baby anymore, and that that's something that she couldn't stand. Like, the fact that I don't know and there's just enough ambiguity in there? I mean, I feel like she's… It is… She is horrifying and also what if she's not?

[Dongwon] Yeah. Exactly. Because do you know something, maybe she's fine?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] On that disturbing note, we're going to take a slight break. When we come back, I have a question to ask you all.

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[Dongwon] My thing of the week this week is Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap. In my personal opinion, I think Isabel Yap is one of the greatest science fiction short story writers we have in the game right now. She's an incredible talent and this is her debut collection of stories. It came out a couple of years ago in 2021 from Small Beer Press. The work that she does in here is so wide-ranging and delightful and engaging. She pulls from her Filipino ancestry in bringing in some traditional myths and monsters in the story, and the way she blends fabulism and horror and supernatural elements with grounded relatable concerns of contemporary characters is incredibly powerful and wonderful. I think this is a phenomenal collection and I would love for all of you to go check it out.

[Erin] We are back, and my question is ready, which is, who do you see as the antagonist of these stories? Because I've been thinking about it, and I actually think there's a slight shift in the antagonist… In who I see as the antagonist of all 3 stories that I think makes Snake Season feel the most horrific. But I'm curious…

[Howard] Wolfy, the antagonist is Erin. Sour Milk Girls, it's Erin.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Snake Season, it's Erin like 3 times.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm upset at you in particular…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah [garbled] statements.

[Dongwon] No, I mean I'm not sure who the antagonist in Wolfy Things is, actually. That's kind of an interesting one. It feels much more like portraiture than really like a strong… Like this intense metaphor about society in a certain way. Sour Milk Girls is definitely the state. Then, for Snake Season, it's almost just like the world. Like there's a… She just exists in a world that is stacked against everyone in the story in a certain way.

[Mary Robinette] Like, she's… She has decided that the conjureman is the antagonist. Like… I think from her point of view, from Marie's point of view…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The conjureman is the antagonist.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] But I don't think that he actually… He…

[Dongwon] I don't think he's a good dude, though.

[Mary Robinette] I don't think he's a good dude. But structurally speaking, like, he does serve the function of an antagonist.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] She has…

[Howard] There are horror stories in which our protagonist is up against an antagonist and loses and horror happens.

[Dongwon] Yep.

[Howard] Just in general. In these stories, I think… In all 3 of them, our protagonist is the horror. The protagonist is the one who is ultimately doing the things that we are the most horrified with. So the antagonist is the one who's trying to prevent bad things from happening. I'm just… In broad structural strokes.

[Dongwon] Totally.

[Howard] There is… That is a flavor of horror in which we are sympathetic with, we are following a character who is on a path, their goals are going to lead them into the horrible place, and the antagonist is the one who is putting obstacles in front of them, and the antagonist is going to fail.

[Dongwon] There's no Freddie, there's no Candyman, there's no [garbled]

[Howard] You stop thinking of antagonist is villain, and start thinking of them as the person who's in between the protagonist and their ultimate goal.

[Dongwon] Well, this is why I think it's so useful in certain cases to really let go of genre expectations and not think of it as a genre piece in certain ways and just follow the story where it goes. Right? Tonally, and voice wise, I may look at this and say horror. I think Howard's right, and you're right, when I break it down to the core elements of the story, horrific things are happening. I think you're right, though, that is not a horror story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Aha!

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] You convinced me.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I also want to say that I don't think that every story has to have an antagonist. In, I think Wolfy Things… I've forgotten the main character's name. I remember Lee's name, but I don't remember the POV character's name.

[Erin] Nikki.

[Mary Robinette] Nikki. I think Nikki is the protagonist, and the antagonist. I think he is both.

[Erin] I think… What I would say is that for me, or what I think I was trying to do, and it's interesting to go back and see whether or not that work. For me, I think, society, culture, the world, as it is is the antagonist. I think that a lot… I think that all 3 of these stories, to a degree, are my kind of thinking about, ruminating on the idea that the master's tools can never dismantle the master's [garbled]

[Dongwon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] And that ultimately the reason the society is the antagonist is that the protagonist is monstrous, but they are only monstrous because they are in a world that creates monsters. Therefore, in them trying to figure out the world and where they fit into it, they start with good intentions, but they ultimately are kind of in like the classic tragedy sense, unable to escape who they are and how they've been made…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And what has created them. I think that Snake Season is the place where that is the least clear.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I love that.

[Erin] Like, the culture is like much more, like, hopefully like the culture of the town and their hatred of wolves is pretty clear, and the state's direct like manipulation of these poor girls is pretty clear. But in Snake Season, it's a lot less like it's just kind of the world in less of a directly antagonistic way and more just like how do you fit into the world as it is.

[Mary Robinette] But it's also like in Snake Season, at least to me, it was about how she only felt like she was supported after her child had died.

[Dongwon] Yeah. The only time people came out in a sympathetic way for her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Instead, she had the conjureman who's like bossing her around, and her husband who's not there. And she's alone. She's alone with a child that she's trying to raise by herself while her husband goes off and works. The only way she gets people to come out is if a child dies. She's not conscious of that, I don't think. Not like… Or she's… That is the lie she is telling herself.

[Erin] She's not, like, waking up and journaling…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] No one has visited me for months…

[Dongwon] Time to kill a baby.

[Mary Robinette] Kill a baby.

[Erin] That would be horrible.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Erin] But you can't say that to yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So you create a world in which that is what's happening for you, so you can get the emotional joy… Or not… The emotional comfort that you want.

[Howard] As we explore these structural interpretations... I love doing this. I could do this all day. It's important to recognize that a large part of this comes from us, within, what we bring to the table, what are reading experience was. When I read Wolfy, I at first thought the wolf was the antagonist. After reading it, I feel like Lee is the antagonist. Because there's a moment when I was reading, when I felt like, "Oh. Nikki's objective has changed." Nikki wants to talk to the wolf, meet the wolf, learn who the wolf is, and Lee prevents that from happening, by falling on his own knife. Lee, you klutz. Nikki's goals change and he follows through with the original plan. But that is an interpretation which… Okay, in critical senses, maybe it's wildly invalid, but based on what I brought into the book, that's the experience that I had. That's one of the things that I love about short fiction in general is that it's so tight that we have all of these experiences so close together within 30 to 45 minutes of starting the story. It's easier to unpack, easier to talk about, and I talk about it for way longer than I would on a 300,000 page…

[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to touch on this actually. Each of these stories implies a massive world. Right? World building, technology, magic, societal stuff… The amount that you get into 6000 words in terms of gesturing at a bigger world is truly extraordinary and breathtaking. But also, I think, especially Sour Milk Girls could sustain a novel length work, right, with what you have there. I could see something bigger possible in that space if you want it, but that's not what you wanted. You love short fiction. You like writing short fiction. You believe in it, as do I. I adore it. But I'm curious to hear more about your thought process, about why short fiction, why is that how you wanted these stories to unfold. Why do you like working in that space?

[Erin] So this is a great question, specifically for Sour Milk Girls, because of its origin story. So I actually wanted to, and maybe still do, want to write a novel about 5 different women whose lives have been screwed up by this memory, the memory as a commodity system. Ghost was going to be like sort of the protagonist, through which this larger thing happened much later in her life. Not much later, but like in her 20s. I was trying to get her voice. So, for me, as a writer, if I cannot hook into the voice of the character, I cannot write the story. Which is one of the reasons I'm extraordinarily slow writer. Because I will rewrite the first paragraph and the first page over and over and over until the character sounds right to me in my head and I have some sort of instinctive sense of how they see the world and then I can move forward. Then it gets much easier. But that process can take a long time. So I could not hook into the voice of Ghost. I kept trying and I kept writing these horrible things I didn't like. So I was like maybe I need to go back and do a writing exercise for myself of some pivotal moment in her life early on that turns her into the person that she was at the time that the novel that I was writing, which is kind of a compulsive kleptomaniac, a compulsive memory kleptomaniac. Why become a compulsive memory kleptomaniac?

[Howard] I forget.

[Erin] I was trying to figure out what is the thing? Like, why… Where did she start going down this path? So I wrote… Started writing this writing exercise. I was like, oh, this writing exercise feels a bit like a story actually. Let me finish it. Then I did. I was like I think I could publish this. So it's sort of an accidental story that comes out of me...

[Dongwon] I love that.

[Erin] Trying to understand the novel form. Because I don't get it. I have this theory that I've told people before that there should be a… Like a Myers-Briggs of writers…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Where, first, like introvert/extrovert, I think some people tend long…

[Dongwon] Yup.

[Erin] And some people tend short.

[Dongwon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] As writers. I tend short. I think I tend to just… The way that my sentences are constructed, a lot of times, I try to jam a lot in there in a way that won't… Wouldn't work. It would be a lot for like a longer work. You need to kind of stretch things out and dole them out differently. So I… When I try to write longer works, I often end up coming up with ideas that I then break off into shorter things. Because I'm trying to understand and trying to get to a place where I could write a novel. I also… Yeah, I think like it is a lot of it's about natural tendencies and my own speed because I'm slow, writing a short story is a much easier…

[Dongwon] Totally.

[Erin] Kind of thing for me to set out to do. But I think even… I'm the opposite. We're going to talk later in this deep dive about what happens when all your short stories, people are like, "That should be a novel." Which happens a lot to my students. Like, they'll be like writing this short story, and I'm like, "This is not a short story, this is a prologue."

[Dongwon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I have the opposite, where even when I come up with novel ideas they sort of come out in short story form. Because I think I'm so focused on one character. Part of it is that I get so into the idea of the single character that you need a broader cast a lot of times in order to make a novel work, and I want to be so much in this one person's head that it's hard to think about taking them on such a long journey.

[Dongwon] It's funny, you and I were chatting before recording, and you… Just talking about an idea that you had. I was like, "Oh. That actually sounds like a short story…"

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Not a novel." I think you would need to do something to make it more novel size. So it was really funny to hear you say that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like, I want to sidebar with you and talk to you about how to fix that, because…

[Erin] Oh, cool.

[Mary Robinette] Because I've…

[Dongwon] Would you, because she needs to write the novel [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I know, I would like it too. Yeah. It's… You're right. You are so… Because I also went from short story to novel. So I know the thing that happens. But I'm pretty sure we can talk about that at some point later in the deep dive. Right now, we should probably pause for homework.

[Erin] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The homework assignment is take a line that you've written a while ago that you absolutely love and try rewriting it is the writer that you are now, because your style changes, your understanding of how language changes, your interaction with it changes, your taste changes. Take that original line, read it once, put it to the side, and then rewrite it as you are now.

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

[Erin] Would you like to help other writers be out of excuses? Review us on Apple Podcast or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-38-how-do-you-write-a-series-with-books-that-stand-alone

Key Points: Deep Dive into A Function of Firepower. The title comes from a maxim, "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." AI, Oafans, Petey, all these guns versus "The pen is mightier than the sword." I.e., an academic conference. Mutual assured destruction. Fermi's Paradox. Comedy depends a lot on subversion. Petey is an antagonist, but not villainous. Being a villain and being sympathetic are not necessarily separate. Sympathetic and monstrous at the same time. Sometimes you need a new tool.

[Season 18, Episode 38]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, A Function of Firepower.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm in charge for this episode, and I have been for some of the other ones. Kind of in charge. Mostly, the questions from my friends here are going to steer what happens…

[Laughter]

[Howard] The title of this book, A Function of Firepower, title comes from one of the 70 maxims. The maxim is "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." Which obviously means sometimes who is in charge is not a question of who was elected to be in charge, who is most qualified to be in charge, it is who is the best armed. Which is, as I think we can all agree, a terrible way to decide who gets to run things. The story here begins with a crazy AI who has lots and lots of big guns and who is bound and determined to blow up anything that could cause the sort of mess that she's upset about. Then we have the return of the Oafan race, who own a whole bunch of spaceships that our heroes took because they didn't think the Oafans were still alive. But, hey, surprise, they are. Now we want our stuff back. Now, instantly, they are the largest armed force in the galaxy. Then, of course, throughout Schlock Mercenary, there's been Petey, where I always imagined as the sci-fi equivalent of an enlightened desperate. A benign god-king. Who is not as powerful as he used to be. Then I balanced those questions, all of those guns against the old saw… I say the old saw. It's Shakespeare, isn't it? The pen is mightier than the sword? That's Shakespeare?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say yes. I don't actually know.

[Howard] It's probably Shakespeare.

[DongWon] Odds are high, let's say.

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled ballad] is Shakespeare. So, yeah. The pen is mightier than the sword. I wanted to drive some of the actual solutions from an academic conference where people are trying to answer the question, where did all of the civilizations go that came before this galactic civilization? Are we doomed to wipe ourselves out? Is there a great filter? What is it that's going on? I really enjoyed writing it, but it was a challenge, because I knew it had to be more than just a thing that keeps the conclusion from sitting right next to the beginning. It needed to be more than a spacer.

[DongWon] You managed to create in the way that middle volumes are kind of a really dark chapter of this story. Right? I mean, the thematics as you just laid them out, tapping into Cold War era of mutual assured destruction. There's, like, overtones of almost, like, indigenous reparations. Then, answering this big question about like Fermi's Paradox in certain ways. Right? I'm… I know you grew up sort of child of the Cold War in some ways. How much was that weapons of mass destruction, mutual assured destruction, finding other answers to that and asking that question in a slightly different way… How much was that [garbled driving]

[Howard] That's been… I mean… Sigh. People use the word DNA wrong in this way all the time. That's been part of my DNA my whole life. I grew up… Yes, child of the Cold War. Parents telling me how incredibly scary the Cuban missile crisis was. And I think it was Korean Airlines flight something or other… Seven… KLA… I want to say 007, but it couldn't have been that because nobody would name their plane, their flight, 007. Korean Airlines flight shot down by the Russians in the early 80's.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I remember that.

[Howard] I remember everybody at school thinking this is it. This is the thing that sets it all off. So, yeah, there… That's in my blood, that's the thing that my brain grew up with and grew out of… Not in the same way that you grow out of a pair of clothes, but in the way that a tree grows out of a given patch of dirt. So, yeah, I had to explore those themes. Also, those themes are… When you look at the various solution sets for Fermi's Paradox, one of them is the set that says intelligence always gets greedy and destroys itself in a way that leaves no traces. Which is a horribly negative thought to have, but it's fun to ask the question.

[DongWon] I think, because you've kind of created inverted war games here in certain ways. Right? Like, Chinook has decided that the long guns are bad, we need to get rid of the long guns, and she's going to do everything in her power to make that happen. Unfortunately, that also means the Cold War is now a shooting war.

[Howard] Yep.

[DongWon] And a lot of people are going to die as a result. Also, the actual problem is completely external to whatever is happening here. This is a misinterpretation of the data. But I guess I'm kind of curious, like, how did you get to that iteration of this? It seems like you took the basis… The base narrative that we see a lot, of the AI goes amok, decides humanity is the problem, but pushed it one step further in this way that she really is trying to save civilization in a certain way. Right? She believes she's doing the right thing. In a way that I found to be very relatable and kind of fascinating, watching her kind of go off the rails, even as she's editing herself and coming to some erroneous conclusions. But what was… I don't exactly know what I'm asking, but there's something very interesting in how your thinking about mutually assured destruction that I don't feel like I've ever quite seen in this way before.

[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because at some level, everything Schlock Mercenary is, is derivative of things that I've consumed. I named a book Big Dumb Objects because there's this whole sci-fi trope about big dumb objects. Better authors than I have gotten to many of these questions long before I did. So when I addressed them, I wanted to subvert or distort… Because comedy depends a lot on subversion, and maybe that's just… Maybe that accidentally resulted in something that from a philosophical standpoint is interesting rather than comedic. I'm so glad you noticed.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, like… Circling back to Chinook when we're talking about the goals. Like, there's the authorial goal of these are the things, the questions that I need her to take. Then there's the character goals of this is why she's doing that. When you were mapping it out, when you were doing that outline, how aware of her internal motivations were you, and how much of that did you discover in the process of writing it?

[Howard] Ah. I knew pretty much all of what was driving her from the word go. There were the overt motives which is that her creator, her jailer, and her savior were all killed at the same time. It was very emotional for her. She suddenly had no way to process it. But also, the event triggered or set off a trigger like a timebomb in the system that she was now inhabiting, because the intelligence that had all of the Oafans trapped was so unhappy with themselves for what they'd done that they built this thing that would let them rewrite themselves so they could forget having committed the crime so that they could continue to keep the Oafans trapped. Well, now Chinook was there, the AI that used to live there moved out because they were ready for a new life, and she has this horrible emotional event and trips a system that begins rewriting her psyche in ways that she doesn't know she's doing. I got… I mean, when I first described that to myself in the outline, I got chills. I was like, "Oh, my goodness. Oh, what a landmine you've created for this character."

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] "This is going to be fun." Then, everything after that…

[DongWon] Well, the core metaphor…

[Howard] Everything after that was just exploring the outgrowths of it.

[DongWon] I love the core metaphor of for these cycles of violence to perpetuate, for us to continue these wars, to continue these oppressions and genocides, we have to erase our own memory of what happened and rewrite our memory so we don't remember what we did a generation ago.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And then we will repeat the same error, which keeps people oppressed, which keeps people in these positions, which perpetuates this long Cold War and all of that.

[Howard] Yeah, that when I did do on purpose. But… And I can't remember when, but I recall at one point deciding, "Oo. You know what? I don't want to say that part out loud. I want to just leave that at that level as a discovery exercise for the reader." Speaking of discovery exercises, we're going to go discover something and come right back after the break.

[Howard] Hey, everybody. It's Howard. If you go to kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler spelled T.A.Y.L.E.R. all one word, you will find that we are getting ready to put Mandatory Failure, Schlock Mercenary book 18 into print, and you can get a copy for your very own self. We are super excited about this. I've done a bonus story for it that [Ethan Kozak] is illustrating. The book is glorious and wonderful. It's one of my very favorites. It's one of Sandra's very favorites. I'm sure that the moment we're able to put it into your hands, it will be one of your very favorites. Kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler all one word except not with the all one word part, I didn't need to tell you that, you knew that. Just spell it with the ER and you'll be fine. Thanks.

[Howard] And we're back. What are we going to discover next?

[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk a little bit about Petey and what Petey is going through here.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Again, like, by this point, we really like these characters. You're doing stuff to them that I have feelings about. Why? Why?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For a long time, when I created the character of Petey, the trope that everyone expected and they been waiting for this shoe to drop for a decade or more, was, "Oh, yeah, he runs a galaxy. He's going to turn out to be awful. We're going to have to kill him, we're going to have to fight him. He's going to be a bad guy." I needed to set things up so that that didn't happen. The easiest way to do that was to put pressure on him where he has to do violent and unpleasant things, and he always manages to do it in as nonintrusive a way as possible, and actually to back away from the options that a true tyrant would have taken.

[DongWon] Do you consider Petey a villain?

[Howard] I don't, but I consider him frightening.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, he definitely serves an antagonist purpose, but…

[DongWon] Yeah, he fits the antagonist role, especially in volume 3, which will talk about in [garbled episode]

[Howard] He's an antagonist, but I don't see him as villainous. Does that make sense?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Which is, I think, why I'm like these are characters that I wind up caring about because it's not just the… It's like all of them.

[DongWon] I mean, Chinook is like the primary villain of this book. Right? I also find her probably to be the most sympathetic character in this book as well. Right? Those things aren't necessarily separate. There are ways in which I really like Petey. Also, I find Petey to be the scariest thing in these books. I consider the arc of all of this is… Or the fundamental arc really is as much what do we do about Petey as it is what do we do about these dark matter intelligences that are determined to destroy the universe.

[Howard] Well, the fact that… There's that… The UNS, they're having some High Admirality meeting and somebody mentions Petey and somebody else says, "What are you doing? You might as well just invite him in." Then he shows up and says, "I don't actually need to be invited."

[DongWon] I was already here.

[Howard] "I've been here the whole time." One, that's a fun joke to tell. Two, that's yet another cementing of, guys, when something is super intelligent and superpowerful whether or not it is super benign, it's scary.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Howard] That's actually echoed by something that happened very early in Schlock Mercenary, which is my discovery that from any perspective other than Schlock's, Schlock is a monster. So, placing a character we like in a way that you don't have to turn the book very much to one side or the other to realize, "Oh. You're really scary." That was very fun for me.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Well, I mean, you do such a good job of that, of so many of your heroes are also quite monstrous in certain ways and capable of truly mind-boggling acts of violence. Right? Like, even your human scale protagonists are often capable of truly astonishing acts of violence. Right? Whether that's pulling the arms off the enemy ship's captain or…

[Mary Robinette] I was thinking that that…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] When you were talking, it was like…

[DongWon] Or one person in power armor just destroying an armada.

[Erin] It seems like it's really on cue with the theme… Like, getting back to that kind of mutual assured destruction, like, I think there's something really… Wholesome is not the right word, but in realizing that monster… Like, everyone is… People are both sympathetic and monstrous at the same time, and that's what makes the whole situation so terrifying.

[Howard] Yeah. The… Again, coming back to the question of Fermi's Paradox, the idea that as civilizations developed technologically, their ability to destroy themselves permanently… Not just a portion of themselves, but to just wipe themselves out of existence, increases. That's an important theme here, and I wanted to illustrate it in a way that lets us explore a possible alternative. Which is what that whole scholarly convention was, and is… Elizabeth, who ends up running the scholarly convention, she was roped into traveling with the Toughs because her boyfriend was one of the mercenaries and she just followed him onto the ship and suddenly realized she was cooking for a group of professional sociopaths and wasn't sure she fit in. In this book, I wanted to put her in a position to steer things, to guide things away from all of the violence and disaster.

[DongWon] Well, she's really the antidote to the title. Right? Like, rank is a function of firepower, but also, we see her get promoted out of being a cook, just for being smart and competent and willing to say the thing that no one else is willing to say. Right? It's almost like your… In creating this hero organization of these mercenaries, the antidote to just taking power at the end of a long gun really is recognizing and rewarding competence and forthrightness. It's in a world where not only rank is a function of power, firepower, but ethics is a function of firepower, to have an antidote to that, I think, really essential to making this book work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, along the lines of making this book work, it also had to function as setting up in the launchpad for the final book. So when you were… So let's talk about, since this is a deep dive and we're full of spoilers, let's talk about the ending.

[Howard] In the end of the previous book, the end of Mandatory Failure, the Pa'anuri, the bad guys, blow up one of Petey's cities. It was during this book that someone figures out, "Oh, I think I know how the Pa'anuri long gun works. They don't have a targeting mechanism… Their targeting mechanism… They can see certain kinds of power sources, and they are walking their shots. What are they aiming at? They're aiming at Petey. They're trying to destroy his core power generator, which, by the time we get to the end of the book, we realize that's the tool that he needs in order to fight back. They blow a piece of it up. I knew that was… That was part of the original outline, is that we blow up something that creates a puzzle in book 18, we blow up something that creates a disaster in book 19. Cueing that up was a lot of fun. Honestly, one of the things that was the most fun about it was… And this is going to sound silly, I'm sure. Using brush pens and circle templates to create some of the energy effect shapes that I wanted to create, and then sending them to the colorist and saying, "Look. There is no actual astronomical or physics analog for the colors that these things should be. Just make it look scary and dangerous and loud and hot and big and whatever." Travis ran with it.

[DongWon] Yeah. I was going to say, we… We're a writing podcast, so obviously we're talking about the narrative structure and the writing, but on the art front, you really pushed yourself to a different level it feels like here. You got on… I don't know, you kind of got on your Jack Kirby bull shit in the best way.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It was really fun to see some of these bigger scope, bigger scale intergalactic war things happening. You really start pulling out these big guns, no pun intended, by the end of this one.

[Howard] I leveled up the writing earlier in my career than I leveled up the art. That might be because I joined the Writing Excuses podcast…

[Laughter]

[Howard] In 08, and have never been part of an art podcast. Never. But I remember, it was a convention, it was at GenCon, I was talking to Lar deSouza and complaining about how much my hand hurt using this one pan trying to create lines. He looked at what I was doing and said, "Here. Take this." A [fidona suke] polymer nib short brush pen. I grabbed it and was like, "Oh, my gosh. A light touch makes a skinny line, and a hard touch makes a fat line, but it doesn't splay like a brush. Oh, this is amazing. This is so cool." Took it back to my booth. He gave it to me because he's a hero. Took it back to my booth, and drew a book cover with it. I think that was 2015. Just started to learn to use those tools and that piece of the toolbox was critically important for the finale, because now I could render some of these pictures that I just didn't have the skill set for earlier. Weird to talk about that on a writing podcast.

[Mary Robinette] But it's I think it's very much to the point, that there are… There is a tool that you don't know that you need to add to your toolbox. Like, that's… We talk about it as a metaphor all the time, and you're talking about it is a very literal real thing.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, here's a new tool. Physical tool." I think that that's something that everyone can take away. It's like you… Just getting the tool is not enough, it's learning how to use the tool that's really where the magic is.

[Howard] I think one of the things that Lar said was "When the student is ready, the master will appear." I had tried to use brush pens before and just couldn't. I tried several. Simply could not make them work. Then I sat down with him, and in 30 seconds, the lines were coming off my hand the way they needed to. I was like, "This pen is magical. I never…" Then he said, "When the student is ready, the master will appear. You are now ready for this tool. Congratulations." We are just about out of time. The conclusion of this book needed to set up the final story. That involved what I call like character arc blocking. Where I had to put chunks of the cast in different places. I had to scatter them because I knew that the final act, the next book, was going to come together with them in the very end coming together. I know that sounds shallow and silly and obvious, but shallow and silly and obvious… I've made the Schlock Mercenary joke already. Which of those words suggested that I would not do this? But sometimes those simple tools are the best. We work with those forms, and then, as you drill down on them and make them your own, they actually work. Hey, work. Homework. Who's got that?

[Erin] Yeah. I do. Speaking of tools you can make your own,what we're going to ask you to do for the homework this time is to work three words into your work in progress. They are expeditious, sock, and dragonfly. The best words. So, enjoy those and set them right into your work.

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

[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any questions that are on your mind.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.28: Small Evils

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/12/15-28-small-evils/

Key points: Small evils are easy to relate to, we all have felt them. Small antagonisms turn into small evils, which make nuanced villains. Motivation separates the antagonist and protagonist. Contrasting philosophies. Villains are interesting because they can move upward, while heroes can only fall from grace. Redemptive villains can become heroes. Team sports stories often have small evils villains. We like villains with small evils because they let us see someone who feels things we have felt, and acts out on them. We see ourselves in the negatives of a character, rarely in the positives. We like to watch people be bad. We, the writer, chooses who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist. Consider what would happen if you flip the narrative, shift the perspective. It's important to know why the villain, the antagonist, feels the way they do about the protagonist. When you shrug off external costs, you become a evil. Use escalation, and remember the process that takes a person from human to villain or vice-versa.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 28.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Small Evils.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm trying to be bigger.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Victoria, you pitched this idea to us. Will you explain what you mean by small evils?

[Victoria] I do. I will, I will. I am fascinated by villainy and antagonism. It's one of the guiding principles in all of my stories. The thing that I'm really interested in is the idea of, as I said, small evils as compared to big ones. The way… The example I always give is it's Voldemort compared to Umbridge. Dolores Umbridge, one of the prime villains in chapter 5 of the Harry Potter series. The reason is that world domination is not a very grounded concept. It's not something that the vast majority of people can relate to. But almost all of us, I'm pretty sure, have felt a small evil inside of us. We've either been jealous or covetous, we've felt slighted, we've felt as though somebody hasn't given us the attention or the spotlight. I am fascinated by the way in which these small antagonisms can become small evils, that can make very grounded nuanced villains.

[Dan] I love the way that you told us about this earlier, that none of us have met a Voldemort, but we've all met an Umbridge. Right? Some domineering or tyrannical person that we've had to deal with at school or at work or in our own home. So we can relate to that, instinctively.

[Victoria] Yeah. I love it. I was writing a series I called the villain series, Vicious and Vengeful, which genuinely explored this on the most grounded level possible. I wanted to see if I could write a book without heroes and still make you root for one of them. So it became an exploration of small evils, it became an exploration not of the things that people do, but of the things that motivate them to do those things. It becomes about the relatability of the motive. I have a character who basically had a God complex. That was not relatable. So people had a very easy time casting him in the role of the villain. I had another character do the exact same evils in terms of the what, but his why was very different. The why was simply that he wanted revenge on this other character because of the massive falling out that they had. What I found was that people could absolutely relate to the sociopathic character who was bitter about his falling out, and nobody could relate to the sociopathic character who had a God complex. So it became an exploration of motive, and of really cre… Motive turning antagonists into protagonists.

[Brandon] We've often talked about how a lot of times the stories with the strongest villains tend to be the best stories. Strength of the protagonist is directly related to how difficult it is to overcome the villain and how interesting that villain is. It's not all one-to-one, but…

[Victoria] It's not, but… So I'm very anti the concept, like, when you're talking about love stories, that two halves make a whole. When we're talking about hero and villain, or protagonist and antagonist, I absolutely believe that two halves make a whole. That our hero and our villain, our protagonist and our antagonist, for a less dramatic turn of phrase, are in constant conversation. Really. One of the examples I always give of this is Batman and the Joker. Because if you look at what kind of character Joker is, he is formed directly to fit all of Batman's fears. Like, Batman is a complete control freak who wants to have power over his environment, control over his city, who wants to set things right. Joker is an avatar of anarchy. An avatar of chaos, and of everything that Batman fears and can't control. I absolutely believe in writing your heroes and villains not only with the same amount of thought in the same amount of humanity, but also of thinking about them as things which are foils, in constant conversation with each other.

[Brandon] Right. The best hero villain pairs are the ones that espouse contrasting philosophies about life, or have the same goal but very different philosophies getting there. Magneto tends to be my favorite…

[Victoria] Yeah. Mine too.

[Brandon] Villain from comic books. Because they have, over the years, built this contrasting philosophies between him and Prof. X that you can see they both are aligned on trying to achieve the same thing and approach it in very different methods.

[Victoria] Yeah. Talk about a philosophical divide. But one of my favorite things that I heard recently from another writer was that the thing that makes villains so much more interesting is that they don't have a fall from grace that can happen, they can move upward. So they tend to actually protect certain people, or have caveats to their villainy. Whereas the hero can justify almost anything they do for the right cause. So there's a fascinating space between the hero and the villain where one has the ability to rise and the other one has the constant tension of falling.

[Brandon] So, some of my best… My favorite moments in books are when the villain has a chance to… You see, and you bring it, and you're like, "Wow." They could, at this point, make the decision to go… Good… Good is kind of difficult to talk… They could make the decision we want them to make and they don't and we totally see why they don't, and it breaks your heart. Right?

[Victoria] Exactly.

[Brandon] Like, a villain breaking my heart is one of the things that I just… I love when a story is able to do that.

[Dan] Well, connected to that, I love redemptive villains. I love that moment where you get there and then they do the thing and you're like, "Wait. You've been the antagonist for two whole books. Now in the third one…" Zuko does this in the Avatar series. He becomes one of the heroes by the end. It's handled so well.

[Howard] In terms of genre, in terms of story type, I think that the small evils villain sees a lot of play in the team sports stories. Because ultimately the triumph of these stories is team comes together and wins. It's not team comes together and overthrows the Dark Lord. That story can work just fine if there is no villain at all. But they really become grounded for us when we have minor antagonists who may be on the same team. People were not getting along with who are preventing us from coming together, or a rival on the other team who is doing things they shouldn't be doing in order to undermine us. But that's still not super villainy. It's small and we can relate.

[Victoria] I'm going to make an argument for why we love villains with small evils as compared to large evils. It is the slight, almost like virtual, sadism of the reader, a little bit, but basically they allow us to look at avatars of people who feel the things that we have felt in our lives, and who act out on those things in ways that we cannot. I think there's an immense satisfaction in reading like a villain lowercase V or a villain with small evils because we do see ourselves in them. We always see ourselves in the negatives of a character, very rarely in the positives. Very rarely do we go in the adventure, and be like, "I can relate to that hero, I feel just as brave." Usually, it's like, "I can relate to that antagonist, I have felt this way before." So I think… I don't know, when I write my villain series, I get a lot of messages from people who are like, "This woman got to act out in a way that I obviously can't because society dictates that I don't go burn my ex-husband into ash, but it was very satisfying to read."

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I think we get some satisfaction from getting to watch people be bad. It's sometimes why we enjoy watching a hero have a fall and descend. I remember growing up on Smallville and loving when Clark Kent got his hands on red kryptonite, because we got to see that let loose. That letting loose, which is the thing that villains do so much more readily than heroes, is a very enjoyable reading process.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is a book called King of Liars by the author Nick Martel. This is an arc that I was given by my agent for a new epic fantasy. I honestly don't know if it will be out yet, by the time this episode goes live. It should be around this time. I really enjoyed this. Debut authors are always fun to read. I like to see what the new writers are doing. Often, they make me try to level up my own writing, because I'm like, "Man, if the kids are doing stuff like this these days, I gotta get better." This story is very fun, because it's about a family, they're called the Kingmen, not the King's Men…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] The Kingmen. This family, whose job was to kind of help protect the throne. The protagonist's father, instead betrayed the throne. He lives under the shadow of his father having been the Kingmen who went against the rules they have. They have a very stratified society. It's got all sorts of interesting politics and things to it. It's got a very cool worldbuilding, with a shattered moon that is constantly dropping debris on the planet, which is a very science-fiction concept taken into fantasy, which is the sort of stuff I like. It's kind of about his story of deciding is he a villain, is his father… Was his father a villain, what is… Where is the evil? And there are small evils all over this story. It's less about superpowered characters fighting other superpowered characters and more about the sticky messiness that comes from family expectations and societal expectations, in an epic fantasy package. So. Kingdom of Liars by Nick Martel.

[Victoria] Also, you hit on something in that pitch that I want to talk about.

[Brandon] Yeah, let's go for it.

[Victoria] [It's about] perspective. It's about… We obviously… It's a very trite phrase, like, that the villain tends to be the hero of their own journey. But we really didn't think about the fact that we choose when we're writing who is our protagonist and who is our antagonist. It's fascinating to analyze a little bit why we choose these things, understanding that if we flip the narrative or we shifted the narrative, one scene to the left, or one person over, we could end up with a completely different dynamic here. So I often challenge myself when I'm writing protagonist and antagonist to make sure that I write the antagonist as someone who doesn't necessarily feel like they're right, but could, through a different lens… I would say it's the… Like the Gryffindors and the Slytherins. There's like the Gryffindors are written as the heroes in that story from a perspectival sense. So they get centered in the narrative. But I'm always interested in what happens when you shift the narrative one over. There's a book for younger readers out right now called Nevermore that essentially follows like a girl who is kind of set up to become like a super-villain, like a Voldemort, magic villain, and it's about like what happens if she didn't choose this, but the world is so afraid of the kind of power that she has that they have essentially vilified her in advance. I'm fascinated by the idea that we choose the perspective, and in so choosing, we do choose who our heroes are.

[Dan] One of the… One of my favorite villain kind of series to look at is actually the Oceans series, Oceans 11 through 13. Partly because they do what you're talking about. Like, there is this small evil. The first movie is this big heist and it's all very stylized and all very cute. But, at the core of it, is you ruined my life and you stole my wife. So now I'm going to steal her back. Which, not only is it that very relatable thing and a very small evil, but you could totally flip the story around, like you're talking. If the casino owner was the protagonist, here's this old ex-con who's coming to wreck my home and steal my wife from me. I think that that's amazing.

[Victoria] Yeah, it's the comprehension of both sides. You don't have to root for both sides equally, but it's really important that you understand why the villain or the antagonist feels the way they do about the protagonist.

[Dan] To follow that on, you look at Oceans 12, which is the least loved and least successful of the series. It does not have a strong villain at all. The villain that it has, has no personal connection to the characters. So that's why when they got to the third in the series, they're like, "Nope. We have to bring this back to basics. We have to have a villain that there's a reason to dislike them." Because the hole that not having a strong villain leaves ruins every other part of the movie.

[Brandon] That movie in particular, that series… Like, there are series you can get away with your villain being a little bit weak. It works for certain situations. But in that series, you have to root for the bad guys.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] To do that, that series puts you against someone worse. That's the whole framing device of why you can root for these people doing pretty terrible things. Those movies absolutely need a strong villain for that reason.

[Victoria] I… Oh.

[Howard] I want to bring up a principle here. The principle of external costs. The idea that you profit on something because there is a cost that you didn't need to pay, but that someone else did. For me, one of the easiest definitions of evil is once you know about the external costs, you shrug it off and say, "Eh. Somebody else will pay it." A horrifying example of this which doesn't actually end in horror, this morning as we were picking grapes to bring to the craft services table, Sandra found actual ripe deadly nightshade in and among the grape plants. Okay? A handful of these berries will kill a child. The neighbor child, the toddler, loves wandering over to our yard and eating grapes off the vine. Deciding not to weed when we don't know about the deadly nightshade is just deciding not to weed and there's a tragedy. But once you've seen that plant, deciding not to immediately drop everything and rip them all up and tell the neighbor… Well, now I've become evil. It's just a little thing. Maybe nothing will happen. But that's evil.

[Dan] You should get to that at some point, Howard.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Yeah. This has to be the last point that I want to…

[Howard] I made my son do it. By which I mean, I asked Sandra to make my son do it. Then I checked before I left.

[Victoria] This has to be the last point that I want to make, which is one of escalation. One of my favorite examples to give from recent pop-culture is Vulture, in Spiderman Homecoming. Michael Keaton's character. What's so amazing about that character is it starts from such a grounded place. It is an escalation of minute choices. It is an escalation of a man trying to care for his family, who ends up having his job taken away from him, who then decides he'll just have to sell the products that he has on the black market. Who then escalates into a much larger business, who then escalates into obviously a villain and murderer and terrifying human. I think that is probably my favorite thing is to remember whether you're rewinding from villain back into human or fast forwarding from human, like your standard human character, into villain, that there is a process that happens there. Nobody just starts out and is like, "I'm going to take over the world." There is something that happens to displace them or set them at odds with the norms of society or with the good guys, whoever's on the other side, that makes them feel not only self-othering but as though they belong in the place that they're in.

[Brandon] So, we're out of time for this episode. Let's go to our homework, which you are very excited about.

[Victoria] I am, because it's a direct extrapolation of the thing that I was just talking about. So, often you'll be told, if you were the hero of the story, what would it look like? But I essentially want the listener to become the villains of the story. I want them to take their own petty grievances, I want them to take their own perceived weaknesses, their own cracks in their armor of life, the things that they know get to them. I want you to start asking yourself what steps stand between you as you are now and you as a villain in a narrative. What would it take, and what would it look like? I think this is important, because it is that reminder that all villains started normal at some point. So, like, just start extrapolating it out and see what kind of villain you would be.

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

[Howard] And do the weeding. Please.

[Chuckles]

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/07/14-27-natural-setting-as-conflict/

Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.

[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.

[Brandon] Yeah, we are.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?

[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.

[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."

[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.

[Brandon] That's a very good point.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.

[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."

[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?

[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.

[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?

[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.

[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…

[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.

[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.

[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.

[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In a science fiction setting…

[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!

[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?

[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]

[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.

[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Coconut glass.

[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?

[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…

[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.

[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.

[Howard] Boy versus nature.

[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.

[Mary Robinette] Whoo!

[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.

[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.

[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.

[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.

[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.

[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?

[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…

[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.

[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.

[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.

[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?

[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…

[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.

[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.47: Q&A on Fixing Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/11/25/13-47-qa-on-fixing-characters/

Q&A Summary:

Q: How do you approach changing/refining character voices when you realize that two are too similar?

A: Redefine in your head who they are. Give them a different background and personality. Do you need the extra character? If not, combine them. Try a vocabulary fix.

Q: How can you tell if a character is the problem? How do you go about defining this?

A: Watch for the reactions in writing group. Is writing them keeping you engaged, or are they boring? Try looking at them from somebody else's viewpoint. An honest critique partner.

Q: How do you maintain interest in a character who is largely inactive?

A: A reluctant hero, or a protagonist who has not yet protagged, may mean it's time to focus on somebody else, or that the story hasn't started yet. What is the character excited or interested in? Protagging is good, but fascinations can also work.

Q: How do you write interesting bad guys when your POV characters are just the good guys?

A: Why are the people around you interesting? Use second-hand sources, clues, and the POV characters thinking or talking about it.

Q: How do you give a powerful character meaningful challenges and relatability?

A: Identify things they are not good at, and put the challenges there. A really big bad guy. Delve into their emotional side, what they care about.

Q: How can I make alien characters charming and mysterious?

A: Listen to the podcast on writing alien characters. [Season 13, Episode 44]

Q: How can I make a normal everyday person an interesting character without giving them some sort of Mary Sue trait? I.e., child of prophecy or magically superior?

A: Consider what you find interesting in the normal people around you. Listen to people -- the knowledge, background, even the way they talk. Passions and interests are strengths.

Q: How do I give my characters interests that mesh with the plot after writing half a draft and realizing they have no interests?

A: Use a spreadsheet. What are the plot points, and the interests or abilities that you need? Now add the characters, and see who needs what.

Q: Who is Cheeto McFlair, and why are they writing on our spreadsheet?

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 47.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on Fixing Characters.

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Valynne] I'm Valynne.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Broken.

[Brandon] Well, hopefully we can fix you, Howard.

[Brandon] Jonathan asks, "How do you approach changing/refining character voices when you realize that two are too similar?"

[Dan] Oh, man. Okay. So I did this. I talked earlier in the year about how all of my boy best friend characters tended to be very similar. So the most recent one, since it's not out yet, I have the chance to go through and fix it. Really had to kind of fundamentally redefine in my head who he was. He couldn't just be the snarky guy who cracks the jokes I would make if I were in the scene. He had to have something else. So, I made sure that I gave him a very different background and a very different personality than the other character, and his language started coming out differently.

[Valynne] One of the things that I've done is when I have two characters in the same book who are sounding very similar, I've just had to decide, "Do I really need this extra character?" A lot of times, I can just combine them into one. So I kill them off.

[Howard] It's a good thing that that doesn't happen in real life.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Howard, you sound just like Dan. Die now.

[Dan] We don't need both of you!

[Laughter]

[Howard] My solution for this is often a vocabulary fix, where I'll pick words that are unique to each side. One character is willing to use metaphors in their speech, and the other won't use metaphors, they'll use something else. That often is enough to differentiate it.

[Brandon] All right. Darcy Cole, longtime friend of the podcast…

[Dan] Friend of ours in real life.

[Brandon] And friend in real life, asks us, "How can you tell if a character is the problem? How do you go about defining this?" I've had a moment to look at this, so I'll start us off. You guys can think about it. I've had a couple of times where the character was the problem. It took a little while to notice it. What would happen is in writing group, people were not wanting to get back to that character when their scene came up. This happens in all stories where you've got a large cast and you're switching between them. Sometimes people are going to be like, "I'm not excited to get back to this character." But what was happening with this one was habitually, people were like, "Oh, that one was a downer, too." Like it wasn't just like they were sad to get back to it. They were not excited when they were done with it, and they were happy to get off of it and back to other characters. Usually…

[Howard] Reading these chapters is like homework.

[Brandon] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was running into that. So that was one way I identified, "Okay. This character's a problem."

[Howard] If writing them isn't keeping you engaged, there's probably a problem. If it's boring, if it's…

[Dan] I find… I rarely write things from multiple viewpoints, but when I do, it's very easy in those cases to pop out, "Oh, this character doesn't work," when they're in somebody else's viewpoint. Because suddenly they become very boring. I realize that I haven't built enough of a personality for them. So when I'm seeing them from the outside, they're incredibly flat.

[Brandon] Sometimes it's just helpful to have someone like Dan read your book who will tell you…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because he told me before, "This character's boring." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, they are."

[Valynne] I think a lot of times I just have to have a beta reader or someone point it out to me. Because I'm too close to the project and can't see what's not working. So get an honest critique partner.

[Dan] Don't be afraid of honest critique, because you're going to get those critiques inevitably. In Partials, I got a character… The character Marcus. He… Everyone hated him. That's the kind of thing that a good writing group could have caught. Our writing group didn't. So then all the reviews and all the feedback from readers is, "Hey, this is great, but this guy's awful."

[Brandon] How do you maintain interest in a character who is largely inactive? For example, being afraid to leave the house. It's a classic first act problem, right? That sometimes you have a character who's reacting to stimulus instead of being the proactive one themselves. How do you solve this in your stories? Valynne, we've all talked about this thing a lot. Have you ever run into this, where you wanted to start a character who was reactive and then had to deal with making the story interesting? If you've never done it, it's okay.

[Valynne] I don't know if I have. I'm trying to think of… There's a movie that I'm thinking of that deals with… It's Ryan Reynolds, and he's inside a box, like the whole movie.

[Transcriptionist's note: the movie is Buried]

[Brandon] Okay. [Garbled] thing.

[Valynne] Or Sandra Bullock in the spaceship, like the whole time, and it's like only her. That's kind of what we're talking about, right? Just, you have someone who…

[Howard] Well, I think in this case, what they may be talking about is the reluctant hero. A protagonist who is… Who has not yet protagged. Often, for me, if I'm in a situation like that, it's because it's time for the story to focus on somebody else, where something is happening, or the story hasn't started yet. This person hasn't been moved out of their comfort zone yet. In late, out early. I can come in later.

[Dan] Well, all of these examples that Valynne is pointing out are people who are confined to one location but still very interesting. That's because… Your reluctant hero doesn't want to go on this journey yet, presumably, that's because they've got something else there really interested in doing. So as long as they are excited about something or interested in something or doing something, even if it's not the plot of your book, it still makes the characters seem active, even if they're not doing anything.

[Brandon] We are interested in lots of different things. Conflict… Protagging, as we say… Proactiveness is one of them. But we're also interested in people's fascination. Someone being really interested in something alone can be sometimes enough. But the example was a character that didn't leave the house. That's a conflict. That's a really interesting conflict. How do they work around not leaving the house? You've got a story there, right away.

[Valynne] I think you end up just going deep into that character's head and understanding the thought processes behind, "What if I left?" If… I think there are a lot of things that go on in the head of someone who doesn't feel like he or she can leave the house. So you're going… You have to really analyze those thoughts carefully.

[Brandon] So, also longtime listener, Cheeto McFlair…

[Dan] Good friend, Cheeto McFlair.

[Brandon] Yes. As… There's a lot of Cheeto McFlair in all of us. How do you write interesting bad guys when your POV characters are just the good guys? [Pause] Oh, Cheeto stumped you.

[Dan] I'm trying to think. Because I do this in all the John Cleaver books. We never get a viewpoint from any of the bad guys. But we do see a lot of them.

[Howard] This is… That's just the story of life. You are the POV character in your story. Are there people who are not you who are interesting? Why are they interesting? What did you observe about them that was interesting?

[Valynne] I don't think you write them any differently for the most part. I mean, you still give them strengths and flaws and…

[Dan] It can be hard, though, and I see where the question is coming from, to… How can you get into the head of someone that you're not actually writing them from their point of view? I've run into this problem in some of my books. I really want to explore, for example, this person who is… It's a chase book, and we're trying to chase this person down. Why are they running? I can't say that without getting into their head, and so I had to find other ways of making them interesting and of revealing their story. Sometimes the way to do that is through research, through… Let your characters learn what they can from second-hand sources and let them extemporize on it, talk to each other. Well, maybe it's because of this, or maybe it's because of this. Which increases the mystery while answering questions at the same time.

[Brandon] I had this problem in the Steelheart books. The first one, in particular. Because it's a first-person narrative from a guy's viewpoint, and… If you haven't read the books, he basi… His father's killed by evil Superman, basically. Evil… The Emperor of Chicago, and he… His life's goal is to take this guy down. So I had to have this Emperor of Chicago who was a very powerful individual that my main character could never really interact with, because if he did, he'd be squished. So my response to this, in building the outline, I knew this, and I needed to… Like, I had broadcasts from Steelheart, the Emperor of Chicago… The kind of 1984 style, you have to watch this broadcast, sort of thing, so I could show him. I showed the effects of his rule. Had people talking about him. I built him with some immediate conflict. Not inside of him. But to the reader. Like, when I present him in the opening scene, he's presented as a savior figure, floating down from the ceiling. Then he goes ballistic and it's bad. That kind of self-contradiction of I'm expecting Superman and I got this instead allowed me to make him very memorable in the reader's mind. At least that's my hope. Thank you for the question, Cheeto.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead to our book of the week. Which is actually a TV show Howard's been watching.

[Howard] Not a book at all. Myths and Monsters, which is narrated by Nicholas Day. As of January of 2018, it's available on Netflix. The first episode is a wonderful pop-culture overview on the Campbellian monomyth. The whole series is about mythology… The heroes, the monsters, the settings of legend, and what are the historical and cultural underpinnings of those. Why are so many of them similar? Where are the standouts? It's quite fascinating. One of the things that I love about it is that where no direct footages available, say of Triston and Isolde in real life, they will often use penciled illustrations with halftone shading that are really striking. Really pretty illustrations in the show. Very interesting, and I'm four episodes in and have loved it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] Myths and Monsters, narrated by Nicholas Day.

[Brandon] All right. So we get this question a lot. Both in the last Q&A, and we did this one. I'm just going to pitch it at you guys. If you think we've just covered this, we can move on. But the question is how do you give a powerful character meaningful challenges and relatability? This kind of comes into the iconic character thing sometimes, but I think they're talking about someone like Superman. How do you do this? We get this question a lot.

[Howard] Fundamentally, you identify the things that they are not good at, and you put the challenges there.

[Dan] Which works most of the time, but I do think there is something to be said for watching them use their… The things that they're really good at. We like that wish fulfillment of watching Superman just punch something so hard it compresses into diamond or whatever. So sometimes you just… You do just need a really big bad guy.

[Valynne] I think you need to delve into the emotional side of the character as well. What do they care about? Focus on what they care about.

[Brandon] All right. Victoria, you asked, "How can I make alien characters charming and mysterious?" We did an entire podcast on writing alien characters. So hopefully, you've listened to that by now.

[Brandon] I'm going to go to Andrew's question here. "How can I make a normal everyday person an interesting character without giving them some sort of Mary Sue trait? I.e., child of prophecy or magically superior?"

[Howard] I feel very bad that you perhaps don't know any normal people who you find interesting.

[Brandon] See, I understand what you're saying. But I want to be in defense of Andrew here. Sometimes it's very hard to do in writing, right? What are your strategies for doing this?

[Howard] I have spent a long time listening to people. When I was doing my drawing at the comic book shop, I would often ask people, "What do you do? Tell me about it. Describe your job." I always learned… Learning that the smell of pineapple and the smell of cheddar cheese are differentiated by like one chemical from a guy who was studying food science. People know things that I don't. I love learning that. If you recognize that, and begin exploring those aspects of the people on your page, they will become interesting.

[Dan] That applies not just to the knowledge that they have and the background they come from, but also just the ways that they talk. One of my favorite scenes that I wrote in John Cleaver six is he kind of goes on a date at one point, and he's in a taco shop with five other guys, people his age. They're just kind of local kids, about 19 years old, talking. They're all very different, and some of them are obnoxious, and some of them are based on people that I know, and some of them are based on conversations I've had. That kind of stuff is great. Just getting into the gritty details of why does she talk very differently from her? I love that kind of stuff.

[Howard] Now, if we come back to the question and rephrase it, how do you instill a sense of wonder when the character is a normal character without giving them something wondrous? That becomes truly challenging. I… Sense of wonder's tricky.

[Brandon] Well, your books do not have any superpowers or anything. How do you… Do you differentiate your characters? I wouldn't even say that they all were necessarily skilled in anything specific. At least not in a kind of traditional this one has this ability. Like, it was just about a bunch of kids, and they were all really interesting. How did you do that?

[Valynne] I think that you just have to highlight what things characters are passionate about. It's a combination of passion and interest and… Those naturally become strengths for someone. If it's a passion, or interest, you have a lot of knowledge about that area, and not everything is going to be interesting to everyone. But you just have to figure out what you need for your story, and how those characters can contribute based on their knowledge and passions and hobbies. I think that that's the best way to… In most ways, that is sort of their superstrength is what they love.

[Brandon] So, last question comes from Sarah. She says, "I am writing a story. How do I give my characters interests that mesh with the plot after writing half a draft and realizing they have no interests?" So she wants our help fixing her story.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Presumably without throwing away that half a draft.

[Howard] Begin with a spreadsheet. I'm serious. Make notes along one column that are here are the plot points, and here are the interests, abilities, whatever's that would be helpful in making that plot point. Then have your characters be aligned in a different way, and determine who lines up where and what needs to be given to. Then things will start to emerge organically. I start with a spreadsheet, not because I'm going to fix things with a spreadsheet, but because a spreadsheet's going to show me the shape of the problem. Then I can stand back and look at it and say, "Oh. The whole is all right here in Act Two, and it all comes down to three things. I've got three characters, and this is probably a pretty easy fix."

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to give you guys a writing prompt. It's actually a very simple one. Cheeto McFlair. Who is Cheeto McFlair in your mind, and why are they writing on our spreadsheet? We actually know who this person is.

[Laughter]

[Dan] We're not just making fun of a random person.

[Brandon] We're not just making fun of a random person. But I want you to make up who they are. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.5: Villain, Antagonist, Obstacle

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/04/13-5-villain-antagonist-obstacle/

Key points: Holding up a mirror to hero, protagonist, main character, we have villain, antagonist, obstacle. Something or someone in the way is an obstacle. Someone intentionally working against the protagonist achieving goals is an antagonist. Evil makes a villain! Villains, antagonists and obstructions are key to good stories. Conflicts make the story change, while obstacles are just in the way. You may decide which one to use based on where you want the story to focus -- obstacles make protagonists more proactive, while antagonists and villains often make them more reactive. Consider scale. Superpowers and minor issues don't play well together. Antagonists can allow you to explore different viewpoints around an issue, topic, or theme.

( Thesis, antithesis... )

[Brandon] Mary, you had some homework for us.
[Mary] Yes. So. Last month, when we were talking about hero, protagonist, main character, we had you tell a story where you broke the hero, the protagonist and the main character apart and told it from different viewpoints. What we want you to do this time is to only have one main character, but they're facing three different types of problems. Same scene. One time, you're going to write it where they're just facing an obstacle or an obstruction. The next time you write it, reset everything to zero, and now they're facing an antagonist. Then you do it again, and they're facing a villain.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13-4: Protagonists Who Aren't Sympathetic

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/01/28/13-4-protagonists-who-arent-sympathetic/

Key points: Non-sympathetic protagonists, aka antiheroes, come in two flavors, classic and pop! Classic or literary antiheroes don't protag. They don't move the story along, even though they are where a protagonist should be. Pop is an evil person who still does good. Why write an unlikable character? Well, one reason is a reverse character arc, where the character goes down, then redeems himself and comes back up. It does make readers uncomfortable! Sometimes it's a signal that the character is becoming an antagonist. Sometimes we do it to mimic reality -- some people aren't very likable! To make it work, hang a lantern on it, give the reader subtle hints that it is okay to dislike this character. Modern antiheroes? The Punisher, or other bad guys with a heart of gold. We like them because we wish we could forget the limits and just do it. Hulk smash! Also, the pop culture antihero has dramatic tension -- they aren't likable, but they are proactive and competent. Built-in tension! Or maybe they are likable and proactive, but not competent. Again, built-in tension. You may not like them, but when the aliens show up, they are the hero you need.
( Motorcycle jackets and long hair... )

[Brandon] All right. Let's wrap this one up. I have some homework for you. I want you to take a slightly different spin on this. I want you to write a protagonist or a hero that the reader is supposed to like and does like. Right? You're going to make them likable. But you're going to try to create dramatic tension by having them… By having the reader not want this protagonist to succeed. So, generally, the reader's going to have information that the protagonist doesn't, or they're going to see things more clearly than the protagonist does. So you want the hero to fail. He or she is trying something, and you like them, but you still want them to not succeed. See if you can do that. It's very difficult. It's an interesting thought experiment. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.21: Brainstorming Random Ideas

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/10/23/writing-excuses-6-21-brainstorming-from-story-seeds/

Key points: Who took Dan's dollar? Look for conflict, character, and premise. Find or make distinctive characters with quirks. Is there an antagonist? What can you do distinctive? Insert technobabble. Beware the Lizards of Leipzig! If you go last, someone may steal your pun.
( Four amazing tales! )
[Brandon] I'll send mine to Howard so he can post them in the liner notes. Just... Mine are bullet points. You can see kind of how I outline a book by looking at my bullet points. Any of the others, if they want to send them along, will do it too. Hopefully, this was useful to you. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: punished

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.18: The Hollywood Formula

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/10/02/writing-excuses-6-18-hollywood-formula/

Key points: The Hollywood formula starts with three characters: the protagonist, antagonist, and relationship or dynamic character. Protagonist must want something concrete, a definite achievable goal. Antagonist places obstacles in the path of the protagonist and is diametrically opposed to the protagonist. The antagonist is not necessarily a bad guy. Relationship character accompanies the protagonist on the journey, articulates the theme, and in the end reconciles the protagonist and antagonist. First act (30 pages) introduces the characters and what they want, poses the fateful decision, and closes. Second act (60 pages): transition from asking questions to answering questions, and ends with the low point. Third act (30 pages) is the final battle. End with the protagonist achieves his goal, defeats the antagonist, and reconciles with the relationship character. The closer all three events are to each other, the stronger the emotional impact.
( now showing on the silver screen )
[Howard] Very cool. All right, well, we are pretty much all the way out of time. Who wants to throw a writing prompt?
[Mary] So, for your writing prompt, come up with a protagonist, an antagonist, and a relationship character. Then see what happens if you start spinning a story.
[Howard] Excellent. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

[Edited 10/30/2013 to give the right name: Paolo Bacigalupi]

Current Mood: tenacious

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with antagonist

Writing Excuses 18.41: Deep Dive: Erin's Short Fiction Extravaganza

Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?

Writing Excuses 15.28: Small Evils

Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

Writing Excuses 13.47: Q&A on Fixing Characters

Writing Excuses 13.5: Villain, Antagonist, Obstacle

Writing Excuses 13-4: Protagonists Who Aren't Sympathetic

Writing Excuses 6.21: Brainstorming Random Ideas

Writing Excuses 6.18: The Hollywood Formula

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