Writing Excuses 20.25: Writing Confrontation (LIVE Aboard the WX Cruise)

Jun. 26th, 2025 05:54 pm
mbarker: (MantisYes)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.25: Writing Confrontation (LIVE Aboard the WX Cruise) 
 
 
Key Points: Why are your fight scenes boring? Just blocking is boring! Four parts of a reaction, focus, what the character notices, physicality, thoughts, and actions. Is the problem using all four tools at the same time, or is it using all four tools every time? What's new and different for the character, that's what they notice? Fight scenes that work well contrast the character's history with their anticipation. The idea that confrontation will reveal aspects of character is a good reason to have a confrontation. Confrontations and fights should have emotions, character reveals,  something that matters, changes. Think about ways that strengths can become weaknesses. That's not a nail!
 
[Season 20, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 25]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] Writing Confrontation Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise.
[Dan] Fif… I don't know what to say now.
[Mary Robinette] Just your name.
[Howard] Your name.
[Dan] Ah! I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm cueing Dan.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I'm also Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, we are aboard the Writing Excuses cruise in front of a live audience.
[Applause]
[Mary Robinette] And the first thing that happened on the cruise, one of the first things, was that Dan taught a class called why your fight scene is boring. I went to the class because I would also like to know why my fight scenes are boring and realized, as he was talking, that it actually applied for every form of confrontation that your readers… Your characters go through. It's not just the physical confrontation, it's also the verbal altercations, it's facing off against a dragon. It's… Well, I guess that is a fight scene. But, point being, it applied to a lot of other things. And we thought that it might be fun for you all to listen to how we come up with lesson plans and what… How we react to new material by coming up with something on the fly for you.
[Howard] And in the interest of explaining a little bit of the overall Writing Excuses meta, this happens all the time.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] We start… Yes. We are podcasters with radio voice. We sound like experts.
[Mary Robinette] Ha ha!
[Howard] Which we're not. We learned so much from each other every day. We come on these cruises, we learn things from our students, we learn things from each other's lectures. It's such a wonderful place to be, being just smart enough to figure out that you don't know enough and you have to learn something new.
[Dan] I gotta say, I do love it when we start episodes with how smart Dan was that one time…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] I was going to say, we should do that more often, but that requires me to be smart more often, and I don't know if I can do that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. 15 minutes long, you know.
[Dan] Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] That's the length of smartness we need. Okay. So. There were a lot of things that you talked about, but one of the things that I was struck with… One of the students asked a question that then made my brain go, oh! The student said something along the lines of, so you're talking about how if a fight scene is only blocking, it's really boring. Which is, like, correct. So how do you get the reactions on the page without stopping the fight scene, without slowing things down. And you gave a whole series of answers. But my brain then started unpacking things into thinking about what reactions were. So here's what I've got, and I wanted to toss it around to see if there's something there. That there are four parts of a reaction. There's the focus, the what the character is noticing. There's the physicality of it. There are thoughts. And then there are actions. So, let's say you want to slow down a moment, you would use all four of those. So there's the I see the sword. There's the description of the sword, the sword is long and with a basket hilt handle. And then there's the physicality, the way the sword feels in the character's hands. That there is a weight to it. Then there's the thoughts. Yes, this is the sword that belonged to my father that he made for the six fingered man. And then there's the actions, which would be the slashing and the cutting. And that often, what happens when we are s… When we are… When things bog down is that we are using all four of those at the same time, but we don't need all four of those at the same time. That they can… That we… Sometimes we're only using one aspect, that the only thing the reader gets is the focus. And that's another way that things can go bad, we're just describing the way things look without hitting any of the other pieces of interiority or the character's looking at the wrong things and noticing the wrong things. Like, let me describe in loving details this sword while vamps are coming at me.
[Howard] It can also… I mean, yeah, you bog it down when you're trying to do all four of those things in sequence in turn. Compressing is super useful. You can use the same words or one phrase to cover two or more of those things. The familiar weight of the sword… Well, now I know how I feel about it and I've described that it is an object with mass. Okay, so I haven't said very much, but it's…
[Laughter]
[Howard] But you see where I'm heading with that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] And that's the sort of trick that we've been using forever, which is you put a line on the page, make that line do as much lifting for you as you can.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, the thing that I'm excited about is that this is a… When you say this is the sort of thing we've been doing forever… The thing that I love about doing these episodes, and to refer back to an episode that just happened on the stage, but for our listeners, was several weeks ago, teaching, it forces me to line my toolbox up. Like, podcasting forces me to figure out what are the tools that are actually in there, and how do I use them? So, this is why I was like are these tools here? Have I found a set of tools that I can articulate that…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Makes something that I do unconsciously easier to do on purpose?
 
[Dan] Yeah. I think that's interesting, and I'm wondering if the issue is, are you using all those four tools at the same time, is that what bogs it down? Or is it using all four tools every time and that's what makes it so slow and ponderous? It could be that you need one moment that really gets attention… Like you said, magnify that, and draw it out, and then the others could just focus on one? To seem much quicker?
 
[Erin] I also think… I was wondering, do we use… I was thinking about fighting with swords. So we were in Scotland a while ago, and we got to actually do some sword fighting. Which was quite fun for me. And it turns out that I'm very aggressive with a fake sword, which was a fun thing to learn about myself. What's interesting is, like, I'm thinking back to the moment that I was sparring, and I'm thinking, even though I was reacting a lot in that moment, I actually did not have… Like, I could not have thought in that moment…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Because it was so new to me that thought was, like, beyond me. Like, I mean, maybe I'm sure on some subconscious level, like, I had to think, to, like, move my arm forward. But I wasn't having a deep thought.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I was just like, Go. Ra. Kill that man. But the guy who I was fighting against, a trained swords person, might have had time. He was, like, oh, I thought about the technique that you… He would slow down and say, like, oh, your technique is a little off here. Because for him, the physicality was so ingrained that he didn't have any time to spend on that and could spend more time on the thought. So, I think, what's interesting is thinking about, like, in a reaction moment, what is coming so naturally to your character that it's not worth putting all that space on the page, because it's just a familiar weight. And there's not much more you need to say about it. And what's the thing that's new, that's different about this situation? That is the thing that your character can lean into.
[Mary Robinette] I love that. You have just… And this is the thing that I love about talking to you all is that you just… What you said just combined with two other thoughts. One was the memory of doing that. One of the things that we asked them to do was to teach our writers what it feels like to have a sword. It's not… We weren't trying to learn how to fight. We were trying to learn enough to be able to write about it. And so we asked them to disarm us. And the thing that I remember was that I had about enough time to go, oh! Our swords hit each other, and I was like, oh, I could… And then the sword was out of my hand. And he had me in a headlock.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It was so fast that all I was left with were sensations that I could not register until after the moment, that my hands were stinging, and that there had been a poof of air as he went past. And that was all the time I had. And that just combined with the puppetry memory, which was, we did this show called Pied Piper and it was the hardest show I've ever done. When we started doing this show, we could not get through the entire show in rehearsal, because we were so winded. And, by the end of the show, it's like, I would come off the stage and I put the puppet down, I'd stretch a little bit, have a glass of water, and then I'd picked the puppet up and go back in. And that's my experience of it. But a friend of mine was watching it, and was like, you never stop moving. I'm like, what are you talking about? I took this whole little stretch break. And he showed me video that he'd taken from backstage. My movements are so fast and so economical and I'm not thinking about them at all. That's all I'm thinking about is the newness, the, Ah, I can have a stretch here, I can have a little sip of water. And I think that that happens… That must happen in fights.
[Dan] It probably does.
[Mary Robinette] Sorry…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I was so excited about this. I'm like…
[Dan] No. This is cool, I'm trying to think of how this newness applies to non-physical confrontations, like, you were saying in the beginning. To a conversation or to an argument. And it certainly happens that we get into arguments. Often, with my children, that I have had this argument with you so many times before, and you already know that you have to go to bed at night. Why do I have to convince you every single time? And so, yeah, there are certainly ruts that we fall into. But I'm not sure…
[Mary Robinette] I think… Maybe the… That moment where you're like, that was a strange facial expression. What's going on there? Like, where they have a reaction that you weren't expecting.
[Howard] Yeah. Years and… Many years ago, I was commuting to work one morning and there was black ice on the road. And I can relate the story in a very… Very descriptive, blow-by-blow of everything that happened. But I've driven past that point several times and realized that I can no longer imagine how there was enough time for me to think about what I was doing and what I did… What I ended up doing was driving on the wrong side of the road in order to avoid a pileup of cars at the bottom of the hill. And I looked at this, and I thought, where did I even find the time or the room to do this? I don't understand it. Did time compress for me? Did it expand for me? Or was I just reflexively aware enough as a driver to automatically put my vehicle where things weren't going to kill me? I don't know. But I fall back on that experience a lot when I'm writing action, because it's fun.
[Erin] Speaking of finding the time, I believe it is time for us to take a break for our thing of the week.
 
[Mary Robinette] Our thing of the week is a TV show. It's on Hulu. It's called Death and Other Details. Mandy Patinkin solving murder on a cruise ship. It is so good and it is so twisty. It's 10 episodes, and one of the things that I love about it, it's… I just… I want all of my writer friends to watch it. It is nonlinear in the way it tells the story, because they will tell the story and then they will jump back in time. It is talking about the malleability of memory and how that affects crime and your… How it affects the difficulty in solving crime. There's this scene where he's trying to get someone to remember a scene, but he's also trying to point out to them that their memory is not entirely reliable. And so what you see is the character reliving the scene. She's like, okay, so there was this… The room. And then there was spilled ketchup on the floor, and something else. And then… And then it cuts back to him, and he is waving a French fry with ketchup under her nose. And that has caused her to imagine ketchup on the floor. It is so good. And I want everyone to watch it, because it also… And it also to… I'm going to keep talking about this. It's also talking about the narrative, the stories that we tell each other, and the stories that we tell ourselves. It is so good. Please go watch Death and Other Details, so that I have someone to talk about it with. I see two people in our live audience who have watched it. I will meet you in the bar.
[Chuckles]
 
[DongWon] Between drafting your new novel, building your lore bible, or meeting with your critique group, who has time to stress about website security? As a writer, your website is your digital face to the world that lets people know about your work and where they can find it. Securing your website means less stress about anyone disrupting that important outlet. Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress with lightning fast load times, enterprise grade security, and 24/7 human only customer support. They're available in multiple languages and ready to assist regardless of site complexity. It's complete peace of mind knowing your WordPress site is always secure, online, and performing at its best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security and is one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200 percent faster sites by simply moving their WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called MyKinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. And if you're moving from another host, they offer unlimited expert led migrations to ensure a smooth transition, so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's a perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new customers on selected plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today.
 
[Erin] I wonder, actually, if I have an answer or a thought about something that Dan was asking before the break, which is, how do we take these same sort of reaction tools and use them at a time when we're not hitting people with swords, lifting heavy objects or… I'm glad that you avoided it, Howard, going into many trees and other cars. And I think the newness there is… Can sometimes be that in argument, we sometimes reveal things that we might not reveal in another way.
[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something else that Dan said that… He was talking about, and I wrote it down, that it is a lot of what we're dealing with in those fight scenes is the character… The fight scenes that work well is the character's history contrasted with their anticipation. So one of the examples in the class was out of Dune where Paul Atriedes is fighting Jamis and there's a lot of, like, little flashbacks, very very small ones. But I think when you're having that fight, that the verbal altercation… It's like, I know how these things go, and I'm anticipating the way… I'm anticipating the thing that you're going to say. You know how you… You have an entire fight with someone in your head before you actually start talking to them.
[Erin] And yet, the fight never goes that way.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And the fight never goes that way.
[Erin] Because, I think, like, also your emotions become heightened in confrontation. And, sometimes, like, you can become the, like, a worse version of yourself. Like, you become more strident, you become… You see is on some little detail and decide to use that to pick the person apart. And everyone argues a little bit differently. And so, I think, thinking about, like, how do we bring that to the page. Like, it's not just, yes to no. It's this person brings in lots and lots of facts, and figures. This person appeals to emotion. This person breaks down physically. Thinking about what those things are, whether it's, like, a thing you've seen a thousand times, where you're like, not you again with these facts and figures. Like, Ah, that's what always happens. I should have been prepared. Or if it's something new that you're experiencing. It really, I think, is a great way to get to a heart of character, because sometimes we forget to shield parts of ourselves that we might otherwise, when we are angry, and we are trying to like get a point across.
 
[Howard] This idea that the confrontation will reveal aspects of the character is a beautiful reason to have the confrontation to begin with. A bad reason to put a confrontation or a fight in a book is to say, well, I've reached the point in the scene where something needs to happen, so now they fight.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] And we can tell, as readers, as moviegoers, as TV watchers, as whatever, we can tell when that was the reason for the scene. And we don't love it. Even if it's really, really well done, we don't love it. We want there to be emotion, we want there to be character reveals, we want something to matter, and we want something to change. And if those elements aren't the underpinning of the action scene of the fight, of the argument, of the car chase, the whatever… Then it's just a thing you put in because you felt like this kind of story has to have that in it.
[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things Dan talked about in his class.
[Dan] I know. This is great. I don't have to participate in this episode…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Because we're all just quoting me the whole time anyway.
[Howard] For those of you…
[Laughter]
[Howard] For those of you who have not benefited…
[Dan] It's wonderful.
[Howard] From the video feed… There is no video feed… The smug smile on Dan's face…
[Dan] Oh, yeah. I just ate a canary, and there's nothing you can do about it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Something else that I was thinking about as we were talking… But I'm now interested to see if it can play into verbal confrontations. That… The idea that the character's strengths become their weaknesses because we over rely on them and they shape the choices that we make, even when it's not appropriate. In the example in the physical conflict was, again, the Paul Atriedes and his shield training, that he had been trained so carefully to compensate for the shield and slow down, that he kept missing the other person. And I think that that may also work in stories. Like, if there's someone who's, like, I am always very articulate and forceful, and what they actually need to be… That has served them extremely well in negotiations. But now they are talking to a loved one and it's like, no, actually you don't need to be extremely articulate and forceful, that is a weakness right now. You need to be quiet and listen.
[Howard] There are plenty of stories to be told around when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And you've made a mess, because that's not a nail.
[Erin] That's not a nail is going to be the name of either my next…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Band or my autobiography.
[Howard] It's the label on the box of screws in my toolbox.
[Erin] Nice.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you all for letting me explore this new set of tools with you. I was extremely excited by Dan's class. There's a couple of more classes that are happening on the cruise that I'm also excited about.
[Dan] You should all come on the cruise.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Because the cruise that we've got coming up has a whole different set of classes that I'm also excited for. But, I think it's time for our homework.
 
[Dan] Yeah. So, for the homework, I want you to do one of the things that I did in my class. Which is, go and watch an action scene in a movie, something that you really like, whether this is a Jackie Chan scene or whatever. And then, to kind of underline how different books are as a medium, transcribe it. Blow-for-blow and step-for-step, and see how long you can get into that before you want to tear your own hair out. Because it becomes extremely boring. Then, after you've proven that the blocking and the blow-by-blow doesn't work, rewrite that scene in a way that does. In a way that translates to and uses the medium of prose.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go fight.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.22: The Lens of Time

Jun. 3rd, 2025 04:05 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.22: The Lens of Time 
 
 
Key Points: Time! Setting? Day versus night? The when of the character? Anticipation and flashbacks, expectations and disappointments. Magnified moments. What is the character noticing? Order or sequence of time. Time as an extension of setting. Associations with time of day. Personal physical cycles! Conveying passage of time. Children, other changes. Sensory details, obligations. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 22]
 
[DongWon] Between drafting your new novel, building your lore bible, or meeting with your critique group, who has time to stress about website security? As a writer, your website is your digital face to the world that lets people know about your work and where they can find it. Securing your website means less stress about anyone disrupting that important outlet. Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress with lightning fast load times, enterprise grade security, and 24/7 human only customer support. They're available in multiple languages and ready to assist regardless of site complexity. It's complete peace of mind knowing your WordPress site is always secure, online, and performing at its best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security and is one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200 percent faster sites by simply moving their WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called MyKinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. And if you're moving from another host, they offer unlimited expert led migrations to ensure a smooth transition, so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's a perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new customers on selected plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 22]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] The Lens of Time.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And this is Dr. Who.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about these different lenses that you can look at a story through. We're looking at the idea of where and when, and time is one of the big lenses. You don't have to be working on a historical piece of fiction to be thinking about time. All stories move through time, even if it's only for a moment. So we're going to be talking about time as your setting. The differences between a story that's set during the day versus at night, or even a scene or a moment. We're going to be talking about how you can use time to your advantage. Not so much in a structural way, but more in that sense of controlling the reader's experience of the story and the character and the setting.
[Erin] We are going to be doing that.
[Dan] Love it.
[Erin] And we're starting now.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When you are sitting down to think about a story, I know, Erin, that you often start with a voice and that you are very much thinking about the character. How much is the character... At that stage, are you thinking about the when of the character?
[Erin] I think a lot... So. I saw a very interesting tweet a long time ago that said that one of the ways you can upgrade your craft is to move time in the story. To actually use anticipation and flashbacks… Not necessarily, like, an entire flashback, but just what is your character coming from? What are they looking back to? What are they looking forward to? And, like, playing with that in the story. That in truth, and in our own lives, we rarely just move forward in time. We're often thinking about, like, our expectations, which is our vision of the future, and our disappointments, which is our reckoning with the past. And so, a lot of times, I really think about how my characters are reckoning with the time they are in in their own times. And, like, also the time that the world around them is in. Are they in sync? Like, are they moving forward in a world that's moving forward with them? Do they want to hold back in a world that they're like they love tradition, but the world wants progress? And then, looking at that as a source of tension in the story, between the way that they're dealing with time and the way the story and the world is.
[Mary Robinette] I love this idea of looking at where they are in time and using that anticipation as a source of tension. That… You're making me think of something that I just did a brief reread of which is in Dune, which is the fight between Paul Atriedes and Jamis, when he has to, like, "Hello! No, here I am! The Chosen One." And what's interesting in that scene is the way Frank Herbert plays with time. It's happening at a particular point in Paul's life and… Where he's a young man, he's approaching a point where he is going to kill for the first time. That is a threshold, that is a time threshold. That's going to be a marker. Before he killed, and after he killed. That's how his world is going to divide. But the other thing that he does in that is that he does these very small flashbacks to before he is in this thing, where he's thinking about my training taught me this. And all of that is setting up this anticipation of the ways the scene can go wrong, the ways that it can potentially go right, but mostly the ways it can go wrong. It's looking at the… That he's been trained in this one particular way, to go very slow against the shield, and that he keeps making the same mistake over and over again because of his training. And so you've got this contrast of this… His knowledge… His history compared with the future that he's aiming for and this anticipation of all the possible paths for which it can go wrong, which is, I think, one of the great things that you can play with with time, is the… Is letting the reader know, oh, there's more than one path for this. There's more than one path, there's more than one way that this can go wrong. You don't know which of those possible futures you're going to land in.
 
[Dan] Yeah. One of the other things going on in that scene is… That also plays with time is what my seventh grade English teacher always used to call a magnified moment. Where it's really an exchange of blows that takes probably ultimately maybe 30 seconds. I think in the movie, it was drawn out to 40 or 45 seconds. But it's still very short. Whereas the actual excerpt is two or three pages worth of material. Because every single second, every single step, every single move of the blade is given this momentous weight. And so it is expanding things out and magnifying every little moment that takes place into this huge, kind of glorious, thing.
[Erin] I love that… I was thinking about, like, fight scenes and love scenes are two of the ones in which the time in which it's taking on the page and the time it was probably taking in the life of the characters are so different. I'm curious, like, how like… Like, how do you make that moment… Like, how do you make it slow down and not fade as it feels momentous? But not slow down so much that people are, like, wow, I've been on three chapters of the same, like, sword cut, and, like, I wish they would do it already…
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] is it just, like, let… Like, how do you, like, actually make time slow and speed within something?
[Mary Robinette] I think that there's two pieces that you're playing with. One is the character's awareness of time, and the other is the actual amount of time that it takes the reader to experience it. So, one of the things that happens in the example that we were just using is 2 to 3 pages takes several minutes to read. And… Unless they are listening to some [garbled] to speed.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it is that reader experience of it will slow it down. Sometimes when something is slow down in ways you don't want it to be… Fight scenes that are slow in ways that are not helping the story… It is because you're taking too long to get us through it. Likewise, you can speed things up by compressing it so that the reader's actual experience of reading it is shorter. Like, physically shorter. But then there's also what the character is noticing. Sometimes you can create a sense of, oh, this took forever, by lingering on the character's experience, feeling all of the things that they feel. The kinds of things that I've been thinking about lately are what they're noticing, where they feel it in their body. It's not that you have to hit all of these beats, but that each time, you hit one of those, you are having the character live that moment again. So if I have my character picking up a sword, and the first thing that happens is that we describe what the sword looks like, and then the next thing is the character experiences the physicality of picking it up. The weight of it, the heft, the balance. We've now experienced that sword twice. If we think about, this was the sword my father gave me, that's a third time that we're experiencing it. If we think… If we cut through the air, if we try some simple bl… Strikes with it, that's a fourth time that we're experiencing it. But all of those are things that probably happen almost immediately for the character. So, those are ways to slow it down, but also to be conscious that sometimes you don't want to slow it down, and you want to just pick one of those, the one that is most distinct to the character, the one that is most demonstrative of this specific moment in time.
 
[Erin] I think that's interesting, because that's making me think about ordering a lot. Which, like, ordering is a function of time… Or whatever. Sure, I'm going to say it is. Ordering is a function of time because I said so.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I think it is.
[Erin] Yeah. But I'm thinking, like, let's say that the character ends by slicing somebody in half. I don't know if this is what happens, but… This is what happens. Then I'm wondering, that, if it's like, if you pick up the sword, sliced the person in half, then notice the weight of it, then think about that it's the fact that it's the sword that your father gave you, it's a completely different emotional experience…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Than if you do all of that before you hit. So, thinking about, like, what order things happen in is really interesting. I also just really love that there are certain things you can do in prose that are difficult to do in other forms. Which is that… Like, I always think people in the world of my character probably find them very annoying because every time they say a line of dialogue, they then think for, like, a long period.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Half a paragraph of deep thought. Return line. Which is, like, an interesting… And we can talk at some other time about dialogue and how not to lose the reader when you, like, have long periods of, like, epic thought in between dialogue. But in real life, that would be quite irritating, unless you think very quickly. But in a story, the reader does want to know what's going on in the character's mind. And so they're willing to, like, pause with you for a moment. Because what they're gaining in that moment of time as a reader is worth the pause in the reality timeline of the story itself.
[Mary Robinette] I think, on that, why don't we pause for a moment?
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I am really enjoying about this conversation is that we're talking about using time in so many different ways. We're talking about the sequencing of a story and how that can change… Just when a character has a reaction. We're talking about using time as a way of… As an extension of setting. And I'd love to actually dig into that part of it just a little more, the idea of time as an extension of setting. I think I've talked about this more on a previous episode, but one of my favorite scenes that taught me so much was from Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey where we get a character going into a room and describing it… First, her experience of it, her interactions with it, when she arrives in the middle of the night and it is fulfilling all of her Gothic fantasy dreams. And then, the next morning, when she gets up, and discovers that the terrifying scratching sound is actually a rosebush that's beautiful outside the window. And that the secret locked cabinet that had a role of enciphered paper in it is actually not actually locked. It was open, she had accidentally locked it, and the enciphered paper is actually a literal laundry list. She just couldn't read it because it was dark. But the… How the literal time can cause the character to experience a place and the reader to experience a place in a different way, which gives you essentially two settings for the price of one.
[Erin] Absolutely. Because we associate certain times of day, I think, with certain things. Like, night and danger often go together. Which is interesting, too, because if you with… If there's a character who's like, not feeling steady in their bones, until the sun goes down, then that's an interesting… That's something different, and what does that mean about the character? What does that say about them? But I often think about, like, I experience my own body differently walking around based a little bit on time of day.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You know what I mean? It's like I am more… Because it feels like you don't have the 360 view in the same way at night. And so I am more conscious of who's around me in the distance. And those are all thoughts that I'm having, and that a character can be having as a way… So then what do they notice? Because we all… The dangers that we view are reflections of our own mentality. And so, the dangers that you view in the night are going to be different than the dangers I view in the night. And so thinking about that, then, that's a great opportunity to maybe get to what are your character's fears? Or what is your character's fearlessness? Where do they feel comfortable? When do they not? When do they feel ill-at-ease? And I think all of those are, like, great moments, I think especially… I think that's especially great when you're trying to get something done clockwise. Like, I need to have the character go to the grocery store…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because it's like, really important later on that they've been there. But it's not interesting at all, so, like… But, if it's all of a sudden, they're going and, it's, like, they've got to go in the middle of the night… Or they need to go out in the day, but they hate their appearance. Then, how does that time actually make something mundane more interesting so that you can hide the plot work that you're doing that will then become more interesting later.
 
[Dan] Yeah. And I think a lot of kind of personal physical cycles can go into this as well. Healthwise is what I'm thinking of, since developing depression and on the particular meds that I'm on right now, I am so much better in the mornings and in the afternoons than I am in the evening. And by the time we get to dinner time, there's just not much of me left. And so I will experience the world and people will experience me in very different ways based on what time of day it is as well.
 
[Mary Robinette] It is interesting how much we are shaped by time. And yet it is also one of those things that I think is hard to convey to readers. Like, the passage of time. The way in which someone is different in the morning then in the evening. One of the questions that I'll hear people ask is, like, how do I let people know that time has passed? If…
[Dan] Yeah. I asked Fonda Lee this question a while ago, because I think she does such a brilliant job of it in the Greenbones saga. With the first book takes about a year, the second about five years, and the third book covers 20, 25 years of time. And how do you convey that so well? One of the little tricks she pointed out was that she made sure to always talk about the children as soon as possible after a time jump, because if the kid that was toddling around and barely verbal last time is suddenly doing his school homework, well, then you know that a certain amount of time has passed. And it became a really interesting shorthand for me to go back and look through the books and go, oh, yeah. She does do that every time there's a time jump.
[Laughter]
[Dan] She starts talking about the kids early on. Because they will change more than the adults will, and so it makes it more obvious that time has gone by.
[Mary Robinette] I think that actually interestingly ties back into what we were talking about for where… How much can you change a place and still have it be recognizable. And, like, how much can you change a time… When you're changing time, what are the pieces? If you don't have the option to have children, if it is just moving day to night, what are the pieces that change, and those are the things that you flag. Like, kids change a lot, but buildings don't change that much. If you're going day to night, the light through the window changes a lot even if nothing else in the room does.
[Dan] Yeah. The temperature could change, the sounds that your hearing outside, whether there's suddenly crickets or something else, that you could… There's a lot of sensory details that you can mention that will immediately clue you in to the passage of time.
[Erin] I also think obligations change over time. Like, from day to night, if you're in a sort of traditional, like, work during the day is the, like… One of the reasons a lot of times writers write late at night and early in the morning is because those are times that people feel that the obligations of life had yet to like come tug on them. And so it's, like, is it quiet in some ways, not just the quiet of the actual room, but the quiet of, like, no one demanding things from you and nobody is needing things from you in this moment.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but… Interestingly, that has been one of the things that has been disruptive for me at this… And I've recognized the symptoms before I say it… That's one of the things that's been disruptive for me about teaching my cat to talk…
[Laughter]
[Erin] There are many, but that's…
[Mary Robinette] Is that her diurnal cycle is not the same as a human's. So she sleeps during the middle of the day, and then, at night, when I am starting to wind down, when, normally, before this, I would have been able to have quiet, because the rest of the world has quieted, that's when she's like, let's play! Let's have zoomies together! Let's use this button board thing and let me mash on it and talk to you. So I have… Like, I'm finding that now I'm starting to write during the middle of the day, which has never been a writing time for me. Because then those obligations, which is this, are quiet.
[Dan] I need to write when my cat shuts up.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God. I love her so much, but choices were made.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] What I love about that is, like, you're not going to get your cat to not be dire… Like, you can have some stern talks, but I don't think it's going to work. And so, also thinking about, like, what are the things… Like, children's growth, like a school day, like, what are the things that keep… That are unchangeable by your character, no matter what they do in the world?
[Mary Robinette] The inevitabilities.
[Erin] These are the inevitabilities of time. At the beginning of the day, they'll have to do this. At the end of the day, they'll have to do that. I was reading Babel…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] By R. F. Kuang and it's all about school. Like, it's a schoolbook, for at least the portion then I'm in. And so there's a lot about the school year, and, like, the passage of time in a school year, which the characters are going through so much internally, but there's still, like, they have to hit the external, go to this class, be in this place, do this thing by this time. And, I think, we sometimes forget or ignore or get used to the strictures of time in our lives. But maybe we should not do that for our character's lives, and think about how we can use that as an opportunity for tension or fun.
[Mary Robinette] That is a fantastic example of great time passage and using time as setting and time to manipulate character. Speaking of time, it is time for us to give you some homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] And it's a really simple one this time. It's similar to the one that we gave you at the beginning of this, looking at the lens of when and where. And this is just I want you to change the time at which a scene takes place. If you've got a scene that's set during the day, what happens when you move it to the night? What changes? If it's set in the spring, what happens if you move it to the fall? You don't have to make all of the changes, but, what happens if you change the time in which that scene takes place?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.39: A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together

Oct. 4th, 2024 03:41 pm
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Writing Excuses 19.39: A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together
 
 
Key points: anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. How do you decide what to use when? Think about one thing and do that the best you can. Then go back and fix the others. Do little bits of lots of things. Ask yourself questions at the end of a try-fail cycle.  Use an inverted pyramid, to do the least rewriting. A mille-feuille of elements! Multiple threads of tension. Bake your structure as you go! Add tension in rewriting. Tension is not just conflict. Don't just add more explosions. Tension comes from caring, stakes too. That needs relationships. Relatable moments. Focus! Variation and change. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 39]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 39]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] I'm excited that... Well, I'm sad that we're winding up our whole piece on Ring Shout. But I'm excited to talk about all the things that we've been talking about over the last few weeks and figuring out how do you put it all together. We've been talking about anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. If you're writing, trying to write something as tense as Ring Shout, how do you decide which tools you're going to be using at which moment to make it work?
[choking sound]
[Howard] I'm laughing because there are so many disciplines… That as a web cartoonist I had to learn so many different disciplines and in every last one of them, I found that I knew more things than I could track at once when I was trying to do a thing. So, for me, the answer is think about one thing. Do it as best you can. Then come back and figure out where you made the mistakes in all of the other things and now try to do them.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is been such a fun module because we were able to cover some many different techniques, so many different types of things. I think P. Djèlí Clark is really virtuoso-ly demonstrating a lot of these techniques at once. So one of the things to kind of take away from it is what you want to be doing is doing little bits of lots of different things. Right? I think this kind of goes back to what we were talking about last episode in terms of how to keep something from feeling super trope-y is having that variation. You want to subvert a little bit here, you want to like deny someone a resolution here, and then you want to complete the pattern here so that we're in the rhythm of the story and your drawing us forward. Right? This really ties to a lot of the stuff we've said before, we're just framing it slightly differently in terms of try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, like all of these kind of things that help move someone through the story which we usually talk about in terms of plot, really are tension techniques. Because tension is the thing that makes a reader excited to continue reading. That's when you get that page turning effect. That's how you get the more like quote unquote transparent prose effect where it makes something more quote unquote commercial. Right? I'm going to just keep saying quote unquote around…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] All these publishing terms. But tension is so much of what like drives the story, because you can get to the emotional core of the characters, you can get to the core of the relationships, and you can set stakes in really efficient ways.
[Erin] I love what you said about try-fail cycles, because one thing I've been thinking about for myself is, like, how to incorporate all of this. Because it's one thing to read it in somebody else's work, like you were saying, Howard. It's another thing to try to put it all in yours. I was thinking if I broke my work down… A work I was still doing, into a try-fail cycle, maybe these are all questions I could be asking myself at the end of that cycle. So it's like, okay, I'm trying, like… What am I… What are the characters anticipating in this try-fail cycle? What have I resolved at the last try-fail cycle? Where am I moving towards? Instead of look for some of these moments of tension, because, sort of as you were saying, though the try and fail is a lot about the… Like, the action. But not necessarily the tension. So, thinking about what's the tension that moves that action forward, or that makes that action important, might be a cool thing for me to think about, like, when I'm trying to figure out an outline or if I've written something and I'm like, "That doesn't seem very tense. How can I add more to it?"
[Howard] I love the try-fail cycle aspect of it, because try-fail cycles are one of those things structurally that you kind of want to know early on. Because if you get them wrong, you have to do a whole lot of rewriting. I think about… Tying it all together, all of the techniques, I think about which do I need to do first in order to do the least amount of rewriting. It's kind of an inverted pyramid. Worldbuilding. For me, is the very first, especially with a historical alt history piece like this. You get something wrong, oh my goodness, the amount of rewriting that has to go on. But the amount of history that your readers are actually seeing on the page is very small compared to things like dialect, dialogue, all of those other tension techniques we've been talking about. So, for me, tying it all together is an inverted pyramid. Start with the structural things that will make the biggest mass if I get them wrong, and finish with the structural things that are like the fine grit sandpaper.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. One way to think about how to apply what you're talking about and sort of what we were talking about earlier in terms of all these techniques is I often think of a novel as a layer cake is the metaphor I use a lot. Right? Not like a three layer birthday cake, but like of mille-feuille with all these different elements. One thing I want people to think about in terms of how to keep tension rolling forward, how to keep that momentum up, is if you're resolving one thread of tension, if you're coming to the end of a pattern, make sure you have another one set up that's going to carry them forward. Right? So as you're resolving one, so… Say it's resolving her arc of understanding what happened in the barn, then underneath that you have the second arc of the broken sword. So that's going to carry you forward. As one ends, there's already rolling forward tension and momentum on another plot line. Ideally, like two or three others. Right? This is partially why what we were talking about in one of our earlier episodes about contextual tension can be so useful. Because the contextual tension is this ambient tension that pulls us through the whole book as were trying to understand how does this tie into the real world history, how does this tie into the actual plan, into the history of quote unquote the nation and all of those things.
[Erin] I also think I will say, like, as a very messy writer, I am not a great structural like planner. So I think it's also maybe, maybe not, a way to like bake your structure as you go. So I'm thinking about that opening scene where they're fighting… Let's say I was just like I want to write a scene where the clan are monsters and somebody is fighting them, and I'm going to figure out the rest once I get there. So it's like the scene has ended. Okay. They fought them. Then it's like what is left unresolved on the stage. Like, what is left? What's actually left is the next thing they do, which is the pieces. So I'm thinking, like, okay, now they've killed these things, they've got to, I assume, get out of wherever they are. Okay. That needs to be resolved. They need to, like, take the bits of monster somewhere and do something with them.
[Howard] Oh, and they gotta steal some whiskey.
[Erin] And they gotta steal some… There's always time to steal some whiskey. One of my life mottos. Not really. But then, like, by thinking about that, then it's like, okay, maybe that gets me to the next scene. Then I can figure out, okay, now I've figured out where they take the pieces. Oh, I thought up a new character, maybe that character provide some new tension. Will it be a lot jankier, and you're going to have to go… It's like a cake… You ever make those cakes where it didn't quite work out?
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I mean, not frosting the heck out of it?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] You're like, no, no.
[DongWon] [garbled] Flat and round. Right?
[Erin] Exactly. That's all you need. So you may have to fix it in post. But I think sometimes, for me, like, I will often get stuck when I'm writing at transitions. I think a lot of times it's because I haven't figured out where the tension is going.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So it feels like you just ended a sentence with a really, like, heavy period. That sounds very odd. You just ended a sentence with a very definite ending.
[DongWon] You want to keep the flow going.
[Howard] You know what, let's keep that. And speaking of flow, should we take a break for things of the week?
[Erin] Sure, while I get myself together.
 
[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It's not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it's easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. What to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]
 
[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about a novella that I translated from Icelandic. Yeah, I know. Icelandic. It's a whole other story. The thing I want to talk to you about is this novella. The author, Hildur Knutsdottir, is an award-winning writer in her home country, and we met at Ice Con in 2021. I fell in love with her writing, but it wasn't available in English. The Night Guest is a creepy horror novella which starts out with a totally relatable situation. The main character goes to the doctor because she keeps waking up tired and with mystery bruises. That's not the relatable part. The relatable part is that her concerns are dismissed because she's being quote hysterical. But each night, the injuries get worse. Hildur has this beautiful spare language that manages to create dread in the seemingly most innocuous moment. I loved this book enough to translate it. Check out The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir.
 
[DongWon] Howard, I love what you're saying about thinking about how to write efficiently. How to figure out how to do the least rewriting. The one thing I do want to say on that, though, is I think tension is the thing that needs rewriting the most often. You know what, as an editor, the thing that I see the most, the feedback I give the most is, characters are great, worldbuilding is great, the plot is great, it just doesn't have enough momentum. It needs somebody to… The line I always say is it didn't pull me through the story in the way I need it to. Right? So that's always a tension critique when I give that. So what you're saying, Erin, makes a lot of sense to me too, in terms of like when you do it, you have these individual scenes, is getting the momentum and sliding from one scene to the next. Tension is how you create that elision, moving from one beat to the next beat. So figuring out how to layer that in sometimes will not be too obvious for you in the planning stages, and maybe something you find as you go. So if you're struggling with that, I don't want you to, like, worry too much about things in the outlining and planning stages. Obviously, have an eye on it, think about it. I think it can be really helpful. But it's okay if you feel like this needs a lot of rewriting to get the kind of tension in there that you want.
[Howard] You know what, I want to be clear here. When I say the least amount of work, I'm not talking about no work.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] There is so much rewriting that needs to be done. But I don't want to have to take this magnificent set of layers and instead of doing some trimming, I turn a dobos torte into a dobos tortilla. There's... Okay, I only have one layer I can use. Now I gotta rebuild the whole thing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] For a tension rewrite, what I prefer is to be able to say, "Oh, this chapter isn't working the way it needs to work. I will rewrite this chapter." Rather than, "Oh, this chapter doesn't even fit in this book. I have to restructure it and everything that comes after it." That's the work that I want to avoid.
 
[Erin] I think that one of the reasons… I agree with everything. But I think that one of the reasons that tension often happens in the rewriting is because tension is different than conflict. I think sometimes when we get stuck in writing, or maybe it's just me, like, the instinct might be to, like, Michael Bay it and…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Just be like more explosions! More things! More enemies! Like, and just like build it out bigger and bigger and bigger. But that doesn't necessarily make it any more tense.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because it's like if you're up against 50 people trying to kill you or 60 people trying to kill you, it's pretty bad either way. It's not more tense, you're pretty dead. So you have to think about a lot of times, it's small things…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] That create tension. It's emotional things, it's personal things. I think that's what I love about Ring Shout is that things that we talked about in tension, the girl, the sword, they're important, but they're not the big set pieces.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] They're not the huge battles in a lot of ways. They're the smaller moments that pull you from one big set piece to the next. I think they can be harder to find until the rewrite, because you don't know what small details you put in chapter 3 until you write it out. Then you go, oh, I mentioned a cloak. Maybe that's a source of tension that I can bring through…
 
[DongWon] I think the lesser version of the opening of this book is one that starts with the trap blowing up. Right? But he doesn't do that. He starts with a conversation. Starts with a long conversation between the key characters of the story. I think that leads to the kind of tension that's interesting. Because now we have a sense of who these people are, we're starting to care about them. Then, for me, the fight scene in the warehouse is fine until she draws the sword. Then it's like, oh, damn. This is interesting now. Right? Because that, for me… I… We talk about this a lot, but death isn't very interesting stakes. Right? Like, if the character dies, I'm sort of like, okay, characters dead, let's move on. It's how the other characters feel about the character's death that makes it hit hard. It's the sense of, like, oh, they had something to accomplish that they didn't accomplish. Because we, as people, care about other people. Right? We don't necessarily care about one thing in isolation, we care about communities and relationships. So when I say that this needs stakes, I almost always mean that this needs a relationship of some sort. To another person, to a group, even to like themselves in a certain way. An aspiration for themselves. That's the thing we're going to feel emotions about. So, that's why starting in an action scene is something that, like, I always recommend against. When you think about action scenes in general, as Erin was saying, it's not about the explosions, it's not about the cool fight scenes, it's about the intensity of emotion, it's about caring about the relationship, it's about what's the consequence of losing this fight. That consequence is in the regard of their community and their family, whatever it is.
 
[Howard] The community and family. There's a scene about… I want to say a third of the way into the book, where the community is coming together for shared meals, and we talk about the food and we talk about the music and what's happening. When a scene like that is done well, I want to eat. I am now connected. If you do something that like removes their ability to get crayfish anymore, I'm tense. Because I… Food. That's important.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] So these sorts of celebratory moments a third of the way into the book… Granted, my meta-reader is saying, "Oh, Howard, don't learn to love this food or these people or whatever else. P. Djèlí Clark is just setting you up to care about things that could be taken away." Yeah, set my meta-reader aside and just enjoy it. Because it's a lovely scene that connects me and allows the author to create stakes that matter.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Rather than, oh, no, somebody's gonna die. Oh, no, this community might fracture.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It's so grounding. Like… You said food, it made me think, many of us may have been in life or death situations against multiples of people, but many have not. But we've all eaten. I would assume. Oh, boy…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So I think that a lot of times in… It makes me think about one of the challenges of fantasy and science fiction, which is that sometimes you're talking about things that we have no frame of reference for. Like, I have never been tense about a ship exploding, because I'm not on a spaceship. But I am tense about letting the people on my crew down. Or, like, disappointment is something that we understand. So I think a lot of times where I can sometimes get lost in fiction is when so much of the tension is focused on the thing that I can't ground myself into, and not enough, like you're talking about, in the relationships.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But I think when people hear "add more stakes," sometimes they think…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Add bigger things blowing up.
 
[DongWon] One other thing I want to add to my layer cake metaphor here…
[Erin] Yes.
[DongWon] And sort of what we're talking about in general is I think one of the problems with adding more explosions is you lose focus. Right? So I'm saying have lots of layers, but have one of those tensions be the focus of your scene. Right? Then as you resolve that, you shift the focus to something else. When you're just adding more noise, you lose sight of the tension, so the tension drops, actually. Right? So thing to remember is that, like, if you think about the juke joint fight scene, right, she's running around looking for her lover through all that, and the tension is coming from that, primarily. There's other elements there. Right? There's the relationship with Sadie, there's whatever's going on outside with the butcher, there's… Again, the stuff with the sword, her memories, those are all present in the scene, but the dominant note, going back to our music metaphor, the dominant theme in that is her relationship with this guy as she's coming to terms with how much she cares about him.
[Howard] You mentioned don't raise stakes like Michael Bay by blowing more things up. Funny story. I think it's the third Transformers film where they were shooting in 3D, and it was the most enjoyable and comprehensible for me. It turns out it's because the 3D tech people went to Michael Bay and said, "That thing you keep doing with the cameras? Stop it. We can't do 3D if you jiggle around a lot." So they, for technical reasons, they forced him to, as you were saying, focus our attention on something.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Which let me care about it. Which made things comprehensible.
[DongWon] Yeah. I saw an interview with George Miller the other day where he was talking about the most important thing that he learned to do, and he learned it from making Happy Feet 2…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Which he made immediately before Mad Max Fury Road, which is very funny to me. But once you spot it, you can see why it makes Mad Max so good, is he learned that you communicate who the protagonist is by what the camera is looking at. Right? So all throughout Fury Road, you will notice these scenes… You talk about, like, Michael Bay level action, a million things are happening at once, but you're always focused on a character, what that character's experiencing, thinking, and you can tell what that character feels about the other characters in the scene. Right? You can see the growing trust and affection between Max and Furiosa simply by watching how they move, how they respond to each other. Then when they start fighting in tandem, it's this beautiful moment of two people coming together for survival. So, I know we've wandered off of Ring Shout…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But think about that focus when you're thinking about how to create and maintain tension.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I also want to, just before we wrap up this episode, you were talking about music earlier also made me think about something that I've seen that happens a lot at karaoke. Which is that if you have somebody who has the most beautiful voice in the world and they start singing at the same volume and, no matter how beautiful it is, after about 30 seconds, people will stop. The thing they do where they start listening, they're like, "Wow, you can really sing," and then go back to their conversations. Because it is the change that actually makes…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] People pay attention. Our human brains are really good at taking things that there use to and screening them out. It's actually… Whole nother podcast on why that actually is unfortunate, because if you're happy, sometimes you could get really accustomed to it and start thinking you're not happy anymore, because that's what the human brain does. But it does the same thing when you're reading. So when you were talking about the one scene in her looking for her lover, that's the note of that scene. But it's not the note of the entire book.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] Because if you hit the same note over and over and over again, nothing wrong with explosions, I think the reason Michael Bay gets a lot of heat is because when you go to the same well over and over, it's like that singer holding the same note, same pitch, same timber, for 10 minutes. Eventually, you're just like, oh, got that. Now I need something new.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
[Erin] Speaking of something new, we have new homework for you.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I've got your homework for you this week. What I want you to do to tie this all together is to take a look at your own outline. Move one of the major conflict points in that outline into a different act. Move it forward. So, say you have the resolution of Act I. See if you can stretch that into what happens if you move that to the end of Act II. If you have something in Act IV, what happens if you move that to Act III? See how that changes the pacing, see how it changes the tension, see if moving things forward or back increases or decreases the speed of reading the book and the momentum of your story.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion

Sep. 24th, 2024 04:10 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion
 
 
Key points: Anticipation and subversion. Set something up for the reader, then send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. You don't have to go the exact opposite. Lateral! Lean into it! Support your subversion with something else in the text. First show you know what you're doing, then start subverting. Mini-subversions and Chekhov's whiskey bottle. Humor and horror. Mix it up, sometimes follow the trope, sometimes subvert it. Widening the lens can be a subversion. Use in text subversion. Use the POV character's attitude. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, 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] I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite forms of tension is the thing where you set something up for the reader, and then you send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. It's something that P. Djèlí Clark does again and again in Ring Shout. An example from a different property... It's one that DongWon mentioned earlier in this series when they were talking about the... in The Candyman... 
[DongWon] The Candyman.
[Mary Robinette] The Candyman remake with the opening the door, the long set of stairs, looking down it, and going, "Nope!"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, we are anticipating that, and that just subverts it. It's like, nope. We're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to go in a completely different way than you expected. So, when we're playing with anticipation and subversion, is it necessary to always go in the exact opposite direction when you're subverting or are there other options?
[DongWon] Yeah. I think there's so many ways to subvert. Right? There's the complete inversion. Right? But then you can also just sort of sometimes make a lateral move. Right? Like, the nope example is the complete subversion, but to stay on the Jordan Peel tip for a second, the movie Nope make sort of a right turn instead of a complete inversion. What originally feels like an alien invasion story is still about aliens, but it has morphed into a monster movie instead. So he is very carefully subverting our expectations over and over and over again throughout that movie. In general, he's a complete master at this. But the turn into the more adventure and monster tone that that movie goes into, I think is such a great example of how to be very playful with your audience while still honoring the core experience that people showed up to your movie for.
[Howard] Another really great example of that is the hotel desk scenes in the original Beverly Hills Cop and in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F where Eddie Murphy pretends to be someone he's not in order to get a free hotel room. In the second movie, he starts into it, and then stops, and says, "Oh, I'm too tired. Do you have any open rooms?" The woman says, "I do." "I would like a room, please." Yeah, complete subversion. Then she quotes the price, and he gives us the same deadpan I'm going to accept this price that he gave us in the first movie. So it's a… It's almost like it's a double subversion.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I think is fun is that you can subvert something by moving away from it, but you can also subvert something by leaning into it more. I'm going to go back to that butcher shop scene. Because we get… We get this… She has this really horrific nightmare, where she sees this butcher and he's this redheaded man and he's got mouths all over him, and then she wakes up and it's horrifying. You're like, "Well, that's a really bad dream." Then she goes to the butcher shop and what I'm expecting to happen is for that dream to have been a metaphor for something else. It turns out, no. In fact, he is a redheaded butcher who is covered in mouths, and then we lean into it even further because each of those mouths is a separate individual creature. That is all composing this one horrific person. So it is… It's not the thing that I thought it was going to be. It is setting it up and then it's going I'm just going to take it further than you thought it could go. That's another way that I think you can subvert something.
[DongWon] Well, the subversion can lean into the thematic core…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Of the things as well. Right? Because thematically, it's not one evil person. It's not one dude doing this. It is the host, it is the collection of all the different perspectives, all the different people that that represents, all the different intelligences that make up the butcher. Just the sheer horror of realizing you're not dealing with one guy, you're dealing with a system of people, a way of being.
 
[Erin] I think when subversion works really well, it's when it is supported by something else in the text.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] So it doesn't feel like you've just gone out completely on a limb. But it's a limb to a tree that is being supported by your story. In this case, it is that her sword is also a multitude of voices.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So you've got the multitude of voices that are good, or not good, but that are in support and the multitude of voices that are apart. That becomes more and more apparent over the course of the story until it eventually, like, in the climax, that becomes, like, the song versus anti-song, becomes like a huge part of the climax. So, leaning into it and subverting it also is the story that's being told here on purpose.
 
[DongWon] Also, it's very important to think about patterns here, too, because when you want to subvert, you kind of have to show that you know what you're doing first. If the first move you make is a subversion, then it sometimes will just feel like you don't know what you're doing. Right? But if you look at Ring Shout, that opening fight is a sequence of promises that are delivered on. Maybe not delivered exactly how you expected. Like, he knows how to draw the beat out, draw the tension out. Right? It's not the bomb that kills them. Because the way that scene unfolds, where the explosion is the start of the fight, which then resolves inside the warehouse. Right? So, what he's doing, over the course of that scene, is setting up all these beats, all these reveals, by making us promises, and delivering on them. Right? Setting up the anticipation, and then saying, here's the thing. So that when later he wants to start messing with us and providing that subversion, which is adding extra layers to it, which is pushing the book in different thematic directions, where it's like, "Oh, this isn't just a we're going to have sword fights with monsters book, there's more going on here," we're open to it because we have the competence, he's proven to us that he knows what he's doing.
 
[Erin] I also think there's some interesting mini-subversions in that scene. Like, for example, there is a whole, like, we're in a cotton warehouse, like, in a story about the South…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But it's not important. Like, it's just that's just what's there. And they find the whiskey, and I was like, "Ah, this will be key to everything, this whiskey." It's not. It is just…
[DongWon] No, they're just mad because they're competitors.
[Laughter]
[Erin] They're just like, "No." It does actually matter in the course of the story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But it isn't like, oh, this is going to be the key to figuring it all out. What I like about that is it says, "Oh, like I need to pay attention. I can't just check out and be like, oh, this is going to check these boxes…"
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] It's going to follow the steps. I don't need to worry about it, and I can kind of half pay attention. It's like, no, the things that you think may be key are not. The things you're maybe not paying attention… As much attention to are in fact important. I love that because it makes you lean into the text.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It looks like it's going to be Chekhov's whiskey bottle, but… Like that is a thing that you expect. It's like you set it up in Act I, it's going to go off in Act III. And Chekhov's whiskey bottle does not, in fact, have to be consumed.
[DongWon] Sometimes a whiskey is just a whiskey.
[Chuckles] [laughter]
 
[Howard] Okay. So we're laughing… We're laughing at this. I want to point out that the whole principle of anticipation and subversion is one that horror and humor rely on incredibly. I'm going to put a stake in the ground here and say if you want to write good humor, become a student of horror. If you want to write good horror, become a student of humor. Because learning how people use these tools for things other than what you plan to use them for is how you'll get better at using them.
[DongWon] Horror writers are some of the funniest people I know. Like, their ability to dig into on the one hand, very dark material, but also that gives them so much of the toolset to deliver a great punchline, tell a great story, and things like that. So…
[Mary Robinette] Which reminds me of this really important point. But we're going to take a break right now.
[Laughter]
[Erin] No…
 
[DongWon] No one writes a story like Kelly Link. There's such an odd pacing to them, and I find in that to be endlessly enchanting. Her worldbuilding, character work, and deep interest in what makes people people keeps her at the top of my list of writers of short fiction. She has a new collection called White Cat, Black Dog. This shows that she remains at the peak of her abilities. Rife with creepy encounters, fairytale retellings, and even just strange creatures, this is a unique and rewarding read that I cannot recommend highly enough.
 
[Mary Robinette] Now, the pattern from Writing Excuses over the years is that coming back from the break, I'm going to tell you what that important point is. But I have another question for you. When we are looking at Ring Shout… I'm certain that someone out there is like, "No, she's making this up." No. When we're looking at Ring Shout, and one of the other things that we had talked about with that, that anticipation and subversion is the thing with the girl. That we keep anticipating that this is going to be important, and where it finally is revealed, it is in a different way than we expect, and also exactly the same way. Do you think that there are ways that he could have subverted that more than he did, or do you think it's important that he follows the pattern there?
[Erin] We're stumped.
[Howard] That's a difficult question, because I was so enamored of the beauty of the resolution of that scene that I'm reluctant to suggest any possible change.
[Mary Robinette] So, this is one of the things that I wanted us to be thinking about for our listeners is that when we're talking about this anticipation and subversion, that a lot of times someone can see a tool and be like I want to use that all the time, and that actually the reason it works is because there are patterns that are set up and followed through.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So you don't know which ones are going to be subverted and which ones are going to be like oh, that's kind of the payoff I was expecting. Which means that everything then becomes tenuous and tense.
[DongWon] Exactly. It's how you keep it from feeling quote unquote trope-y. Right? Like, I get a little frustrated when people say that a book is trope-y as a criticism. In part, because, again, returning to my whole patterns thing, books are made up of tropes we've seen before. They're all just combined and recombined in different ways. But those little subversions, having the little subversion of, like, the girl isn't the age that she was when that event happened reveals itself to mean something else in that moment. But those little moments helped disrupt the sense of oh, I've seen this pattern before, even though we absolutely have. Right? I think including small moments like that, not fulfilling every single pattern you set up, having some make a right turn, having some of them invert, I think adds the kind of texture and nuance that people are looking for from a book that make it feel like it's not just paint by numbers.
 
[Erin] I think in that particular example, like, the subversion is in the widening of the lens. So, sometimes the way that you subvert things is that you create a pattern, and then you're like it's a much broader, a wider pattern then you even realize. One of the things that I love is that I had the same thought twice during that sequence of the girl. There's the one where she is a little girl, like, I think, like hiding under the floorboards. And she feels guilty, and I think, "Of course she couldn't do anything." Then you realize she's 18 and I thought, "Of course she couldn't do anything."
[Mary Robinette] Ooo...
[Erin] Like, that difference in context, nothing has changed in my understanding, really, but the broader context just made it like hit me so much more.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I think having that…
[Mary Robinette] Yah...
[Erin] Earlier moment of sympathy made that sympathy carry through, and made it so much more tragic when I understood.
[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That is a really good example of that kind of widening of the lens, of different ways of subverting. What are some other ways that we can… That we saw this being subverted?
 
[Erin] I have one other one which is I love that there is an in text subversion. So I like when subversion is happening, it's happening in our minds, it's happening in context, but the belief that what she would be offered was to have her family live again…
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is a belief that I also considered as one that the story would do. But I love that she considers it on page and is told her beliefs and her anticipation is subverted in the text. Because it is an interesting way, like, it's subverted for me as well, but then I also get to see the emotions play out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] How do I feel about that? How does she feel about that, is an even better question may be to be asking. By subverting it on the page, I get a chance to experience it, both from my reader perspective, and also from, like, the parts of me that is identifying with her as a POV character.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, the fact that as we go into that scene, we are not told what her decision would be. For that… That she thinks she's already made the decision. I'm like, "Oh. Are you going to turn that down?" Then, when she gets the actual decision, and is… Like, the actual offer, and the temptation that she has… I'm also, like, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the temptation that you're having right now.
[Erin] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think the core inversion of the question of what does it mean to be a hero in that circumstance. Right? The question of is the sword good or is it a curse? Right?
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[DongWon] Is really core to it. And her relationship to the haints and things like that… Like, we are so conditioned as the reader to be like, "Oh. You're the chosen one. You're getting all these cool magical powers. You have the magic sword. You're the hero of this." But we can see how corrupting that is on her. Then, when the offer itself is subverted, that leads to us recontextualizing and questioning all of her choices about the story and what future she represents for this community, for herself, for all of these… All of the people that she holds and represents in a very literal way.
[Howard] There's also a subversion of the overall meta-, which is… This looks like a story about good versus evil, and when we get to our resolution, it's… Well, there's good and there's evil, and there's something else. All of these things are on the table and in play. That was the point where I got chills…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Like, oh, this is neat.
[Erin] Yeah. I think it's also, just like the subversion of good versus evil. One thing that I… Not my favorite thing is that you will have like forces that like all evil forces line up together and they all agree on…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I guess the evil of it all. But what I like here is that each set of folks, like each group here, has their own perspective on each other.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Like, the haints are like, "I don't know about this, like, lady."
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] And the woman is like, "I don't know about going to the night doctors." They're all sort of, and in some ways, she needs them all. I think in a story that's ultimately about communities…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Communities for good, communities for ill. The fact that there is a community of people working together, none of whom are quite good or evil, but each have their own perspectives and needs that can align for this moment is something that's really power subversion of the overarching trope.
[DongWon] Like her going to the night doctors is such a hero's journey in a certain way. Where we're expecting her to, like, go on this quest, rebuild the sword, like, she's literally like reforging whatever Aragorn's sword's name was, I forgot it all of a sudden. But, like, whatever. She's off to the quest of re-forge the magic sword, all of these things we're expecting in this regard. That just takes such a hard right turn into something completely different. The night doctors scene was probably my favorite in the book, just because it is… It just feels almost like it's from a different story. But still is so in conversation with the thematic's, with the characters, with the world, that it felt like it's from a different story, but in a good way. Not, I mean, parentheses complementary. Right? Being able to subvert expectations that way, of just like making the hard 90 degree turn into something else for a second, I think made the world feel so much more expansive and rich and nuanced than if we just stayed with the haints and the butcher.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As you were saying that, it made me realize that there are two places, two different worlds that she portals into.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The contrast between those two is really interesting and fun to play with. Something else that I was also thinking about in terms of subversion is that one of the ways you can subvert something is with the hero's attitude towards what they get. So that sometimes your hero achieves the goal that they were going for and they're unhappy about it. That's a way to subvert a victory. Sometimes they lose something, and they're like, "Oh, thank heavens I lost that thing," and they're happy about it. That's… The attitude of your POV character is one of the ways that you can subvert things.
[Howard] That sounds like it might be homework.
[Mary Robinette] Ah, it's pretty close to homework. So, this is a time in Writing Excuses when we normally offer you homework. This has been Writing Excuses…
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] The homework that I have for you is I want you to take a trope and I want you to write for different outcomes for it. One of it doesn't deliver the trope outcome. Just like the nope. Just doesn't deliver it. One of it inverts the trope. It goes in the opposite direction of what you're expecting. One of them has an unexpected kindness. And one of them has an unexpected cruelty. And now…
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go subvert something.
 
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. Private instructions here includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout

Sep. 5th, 2024 04:10 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
 
 
Key points: Tension: how do you create, build, and release it? Various forms, contextual, in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution. Lizard brain or primal tension, intellectual tension, emotional tension. Discordance. Historical fantasy pits what the audience knows about history against the tension of the story and how you have changed the world. Tension as potential energy, the rock on the top of the hill. It's going to roll! Tension can be horror or suspense, released by the jump scare or awful revelation, but it can also be released through a joke or comedic drop. Sometimes we braid physical, emotional, and intellectual tension. Tension: someone walking towards an open manhole. Tension plays with pattern recognition, tapping into narrative inevitability, patterns and expected resolutions.
 
[Season 19, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
[Erin] 15 minutes long, 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 Howard.
 
[DongWon] So, this week, we are continuing our close reading series by looking at Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark. We wanted to talk about this book in particular because as we're looking into the segment on tension, and how do we talk about how you create, sort of build, and then release tension over the course of a story, we realized that shorter works can be really useful in examining how these techniques work in the best ways to go about doing that. So we wanted to pick a novella, and this is a very tense, very dark novella that we want to talk about in a little more detail.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I particularly found compelling about it is that it uses tension in more than one way. We'll be talking about a bunch of these throughout the next couple of episodes, contextual versus in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution, but you're also seeing it in terms of the speed with which the tension is deployed, and many of the tools that he's using from the character to the situation. It's got a lot of good examples for us to use.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I also think it's just really cool as a… To compare with our other novella from earlier in the year. Because This Is How You Lose the Time War is about fantastical, imaginative landscapes and this is a very grounded, very sort of feels like it's got a foot in the real world, but still fantastical story. So I think it's really important to think about how do our tools work, both when you're creating something completely new and when we're drawing from something that we know maybe a lot better.
[Howard] I loved reading this so much that I read it all in one afternoon. Maybe that's because the tools were just used so well to keep me tense that I couldn't put it down until I was done with it.
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say, for those of you who are a little bit jumpy, I was listening to this audiobook, and I had to stop because I needed to be able to skim over the parts that were too much for me. I can't do horror. While this book is not actually horror, it's a straight up monster book. It's monster hunting, and it's basically an adventure novel. There are parts of it that are using tools from horror to create tension, and I couldn't listen to it in audiobook.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It was really good, and I was like, I have to stop. This is not okay.
[DongWon] As the cover might indicate, it is also dealing with a lot of real-world trauma and tension. A lot of this is pulled from actual history or begins in actual historical events, and then adds a fantasy layer on top of it. So, just a heads up to all of our audience, that we're going to be getting into some pretty heavy topical topics and conversation here.
[Erin] Be ready for it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Or as ready as you can be. So, but it is good to note, especially if you're just starting to read the book now, so that you're not… So that you have some preparation for what is to come. But who can really prepare for tension in truth?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] No. No. That was… That's actually one of the things… We'll talk about this deeper into the episodes, but one of the things that I particularly appreciated and why it was so hard is that I would see the tension and I would brace myself for one kind of problem, and then it would be something else that was sig… I was not prepared for.
[DongWon] The bait and switch is such a useful technique.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] One place I'd love to start, actually, as we're diving into this conversation, is actually to not start with the writing itself, but to start from a publishing angle, because I just touched on it briefly, but I think the cover of this book is absolutely brilliant, and does such a fantastic job of signaling the kind of story that we're going to be engaging in, and already increasing the tension there. It really hits on the thing that you were just saying, Mary Robinette, of you have this figure of the white hood, which is very iconic and symbolic and menacing. But then when you look closer, Erin, you and I were talking about this right before we started, you can see the teeth eyes… The teeth in the eyeholes, which again, I think is for you, like, expecting one thing and then realizing, oh, there's another layer here that's upsetting and difficult.
[Howard] Okay. I didn't even look at the cover. I was… Admission, I read this on assignment. I had not picked it up before I knew we were going to record it. But then I picked it up and immediately just opened it up and started reading. Sat down and started reading. The first time I stopped and set it down and looked at the cover, I looked at it and went, "Ewww."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because they… Because now I knew what might be there and, whew, boy, it was fun. It's very stylized. It's not like…
[DongWon] The cover. Yeah.
[Howard] You're looking at something graphic. It's just… That's just cool.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have to admit that I was reading it in the airport and I had the thought of this book does not look like the book that I'm reading to someone who does not know what this book is.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That creates another additional tension. That I think is very intentional tension.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's a book designed to make you uncomfortable in a number of ways. Some of that is the contextual elements in terms of the packaging and the design and how it was published and some of that is the content itself.
[Erin] Yeah. I just keep thinking about the teeth eyes.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] Sorry, I'm like…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The teeth eyes… I have a… Uhn Uh.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] I love that. I always think… This is a slight tangent, but I think there's something about putting things together that just don't feel like they could ever belong together that creates like a visceral lizard brain tension.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I think that we can have tension, like, in the front of our brains, where it's like this is an intellectual tension. Why is it like this? But then there's like the part of us that's like, "No. Eyeholes with teeth? Bad!"
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] Like the parts of you that would have been afraid of, like, a wolf back in the day is activated. I love when stories are working both on that primal tension level…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And the intellectual. And the emotional tension level. I think this one does all three, which is so cool.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. For me, one of the big things for me is like a kind of discordance. Right? So if I'm watching supernatural horror, I could ride with lots of gore, lots of violence, doesn't throw me at all. But you put me in a real-world context, like a home invasion story, or somebody using something that's not meant to be a weapon as a weapon, I'm deeply unsettled and very uncomfortable, and often have to bail. There's a memorable scene in a movie called [Taten?] Involving a knitting needle that if anybody's seen it, I was like, I'm done. I gotta bail on this movie. I very rarely bail on movies. But sometimes that discordance, being able to lean into a kind of tension where you're making people uncomfortable by creating things that shouldn't go together can be so powerful and disruptive.
[Mary Robinette] It is one of the best tools to use when you're writing anything that's set like any sort of historical fantasy. Because there is the tension of what the audience knows about the history that is in conversation with the tension of the story that is also in conversation with the tension of the way you have changed the world. These three things can cause the story to become wildly unpredictable to the audience, and for them to also bring their own… Like, the places where they're putting their own pressure on the story from the outside, from a… Which this does great things with.
 
[Howard] I sometimes think of tension in terms of potential energy, the rock at the top of the hill. I know that there isn't much keeping this from rolling, from heading down the hill, and I think I know which way it's going to roll. It doesn't have to be frightening. It doesn't even necessarily have to be uncomfortable. It just has to be this awareness that this state of things cannot hold. Something is going to move. I don't know what's going to move, but it has to move, because this can't keep up. That's every other page for me on the way through Ring Shout.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Love it!
[DongWon] Well, this is something you talk about a lot, Howard, is that tension can be multiple things. Right? We're talking about tension in a horror context, or, like, a suspense context, because of this particular book. But tension also can be released through a joke. Right? You can use a comedic drop instead of the jump scare, or the reveal of something awful. That's still tension building the same way. I think about the movie director Jordan Peel, being such a brilliant horror filmmaker, because he's a brilliant comedian, too. Right? So many of the skills that go into one can go into the other. There's a moment in the Candyman reboot that they did a few years ago where a woman opens the door down the basement stairs, and it's like these long stairs descending into darkness. This is like this incredibly tense moment. It just feels awful. Then she just goes, "Nope," and closes the door.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] The theater I was in just burst out laughing completely. It was like a perfect use of tension and release in that moment, although, even though in a horror movie, not for a horrific purpose. In a way that, as we're talking about this, I want you to think about all the different ways in which tension can be deployed as a narrative tool, even though, because of this, we're going to be focused on the dark side of it.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think we often like braid the different types of tension, and just… Like you're saying, call them all tension. But, thinking back to kind of the, like, physical, emotional, and intellectual tension, I was thinking about it again when you are talking about the rock at the top of the hill, because I'm thinking, if you're watching a snowball go down a mountain and you're at the bottom, like, intellectually, you know it will gather speed and eventually crush you. Eventually, it will come close enough that you will really know that it's about to crush you…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Also… I don't know, your mom's standing there. So you have to save her from the avalanche that is about to come up on you. But, different people will react in different ways. Like, some people can see the most terrific physical, like a slasher movie, forever…
[DongWon Yep.
[Erin] And it will have no impact. They will not feel any tension. They're like, I don't care about physical danger, but emotional danger gets me.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Like, somebody being embarrassed to me is harder to watch than somebody being hacked into bits.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] So, if you're thinking about all the time where are you deploying each of those types of tension, then you'll get the widest audience possible feeling tense.
[DongWon] Yep. Speaking of keeping balls rolling and moving things along, we're going to take a break for a moment and we will be right back.
 
[DongWon] Late last fall, Netflix released a new animated show called Blue Eye Samurai. I was initially skeptical, but was completely won over by the stunning animation style and impeccable action choreography. Frankly, I expected a simplistic good time, kind of like a John Wick thing, but was surprised by how thoughtful the show is about race and Empire and violence. It's one of those hyper kinetic action shows, but one that knows when to slow down and ask questions about its hero and the world she inhabits.
 
[Howard] Mel Brooks famously said that comedy is you falling into a manhole and dying. Tragedy is me with a hangnail.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] When I think of tension in terms of this, you see someone walking and you see an open manhole and there is tension, but you don't yet know if the resolution is going to be comedy or tragedy, because you don't know what's in that hole. That's part of… That unexpected aspect of it. I mean, there's the tension of the potential energy of something is going to fall, but there's the unexpected, the darkness of that manhole. It might have a very silly octopus in it. It might have a very ferocious octopus in it. I don't know.
[DongWon] I talk a lot about pattern recognition when it comes to fiction. Right? I think tension is a thing that is very consciously playing on pattern recognition. It taps into something I think of as narrative inevitability. Once you start setting up a certain pattern, people will expect that to conclude in a certain way. They'll expect a resolution of that. Right? The example I was talking about earlier of heroine opens the door to a dark basement, you're like, "Oh, she's going to go down there and something bad's going to happen." You expect that resolution. That's where the tension, that's where the dread, that's where the energy in that scene is coming from. As you're talking about, Howard, it was a release in comedy instead of in horror by her closing the door in a very funny way. But it was the refusal to resolve that tension as opposed to giving into it, I think, is a thing to think about as you're building it. So, how do you actively use the patterns of storytelling to manipulate your audience's emotional state?
[Mary Robinette]. It's something that we talked about in a previous episode… Previous season, when we did a dive into tension. We talked about anticipation and the patterns that the listener… Or the reader, recognizes. As we're talking about Ring Shout, one of the things that I want to point out is that you'll hear us using different terms than we used previously. That's because the terms of art for tension, there are so many different ways to apply it, that all of the things that we're talking about are basically us attempting to apply a lens or some sort of words to "this makes me feel some feels."
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah. Tension's about emotion is the main thing to think about here.
[Erin] I'm feeling some kind of way [garbled]
[chuckles]
[Erin] Expressions. I also think it just occurred to me that, like, thinking about the manhole. There was a recent question put out in the writing world, of whether or not twists make sense. Because the theory is if the twist is actually completely unexpected, it actually feels like a trick. Like, if you could not anticipate it at all, it feels like the author being clever at your expense. But I think one way you can actually get around that, if you want to have the truly surprising twist, is by making the emotions carry through even if the facts don't. So if you're walking down the street and there's a manhole cover, the, like, open hole in front of you. But you step on it, it turns out it's an optical illusion. It was just a sidewalk artist doing it. So the audience is, like, "Aha. You fooled me." Then the person takes another step and gets hit by a truck.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The hitting by a truck makes no sense, maybe, but you were still in that moment of tension, right at the moment that something happened. So it feels more earned.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Even though the truck came out of nowhere.
[DongWon] Yeah. The example I always think of is the red writing from the Game of Thrones. Right? It's like this moment that is such a famously twist moment, of, like, "Oh, my God, nobody anticipated that," but it made so much logical sense and emotional sense where the characters were at, that you could see how it was inevitable in retrospect. Right? So tension can also be… I'm talking about narrative patterns, and you know something is going to happen, but it's fun to hold that back, of understanding exactly what the event will be that will release the tension. Right? So it's another way to think about that.
[Howard] One of the things that I want to point out before we wrap up is that as part of the close reading series, we want you to read the book before you listen to the episodes. When you are doing this… Read the book. Do a close reading of the book. Think about why the book is making you tense. Think about choice of language, the choice of point of view, what decisions are being made. By all means, enjoy the book. But read it closely and try to learn from it. That's… At the beginning of the episode, why did we pick Ring Shout. Because we can learn from it. We can learn a lot from it.
 
[DongWon] That dovetails very beautifully with my homework. Which is, I basically want you to do what Howard described to a book that you love or a movie that you love. Take a suspenseful story that you really enjoyed, that you feel the kind of feelings that were talking about. Either anticipation or dread or that kind of emotional tension. What I want you to do is write an outline for that work. Create that outline. Note where that tension was coming in for you and how it was resolved. Right? From that, you'll have a little bit of a map and a little bit of a key to begin to understand some of the stuff we're going to talk about in the coming episodes.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.15: Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools

Apr. 12th, 2023 06:36 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 18.15: Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools
 
 
Key points: Using a toolbox of ways to build tension in mysteries? Anticipation! Unanswered questions. A foundation of character tension, relationships and stakes. Handles or business ends of the tools? It's not just information, there's also emotion, revelation, and consequences.
 
[Season 18, Episode 15]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] 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.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We're going to talk about mysteries again, but now you have this whole toolbox of different ways to build tension, and you see why we were so excited about it. So. Let's start  talking about mysteries. So we've been talking about mysteries and anticipation. Okay. So how do you apply anticipation to mysteries? What are some of the classic ways we've seen it done or ways that you're like, "This! This is a really meaty juicy way to do it?" I can talk about... I was like, "I'm just going to riff until one of you has an answer…"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I was anticipating something and then it fell through for me. Seriously, though, one of the things that I did a lot in the Spare Man was that I was using anticipation. I was using the anticipation of waiting for that body drop is one of the things in the first scene… Or second scene. In the second scene, I set up a fight. So that is building for the reader the anticipation that something is going to happen with one of these three characters. That then allows me to have… To keep you moving along. Then we get into the second scene… Or I guess it's the third scene, actually. The next scene where we have a scream. That builds an anticipation of oh, something has gone wrong. Which I then ramp up further by giving you an unanswered question of who is the screamer? So what I find a lot of times you can do with these is that you can take one of the tools that we've used and then use it as a… One of the tools we've mentioned and then use it as a handoff or a funnel point…
[Howard] A page turner.
[Mary Robinette] Page turner. Use it as a way to keep you going, and then give you another. Another piece of tension.
 
[DongWon] I'll say that those are the mechanics of a plot structure that you have there. Those are the beats that you used to move us along. What works really well, and the reason all all that engine goes, is you've established underneath that the character tension. Right? You've established the relationship and the stakes for these individuals of like her trying to figure out how do I relate to this other person, what is marriage going to be like for me, and also like dealing with her own trauma, her own history. Like those are all questions you've introduced fairly quickly. I cannot remember exactly when each piece of that comes in, but by the end of the first few chapters, I have a lot of questions about the future of this character, the future of her relationship, the future of her sense of self, that are pulling me through all of this as your giving me the plot details and the unanswered questions that layer on top of that.
 
[Howard] Coming back to the toolbox metaphor for a moment, as we talked about these as tools, we're kind of talking about the business end of the tool. The way the blade of the screwdriver fits into the head of the screw. The way the hammer slams the head of the nail. We haven't talked a lot about the handles of the tools. For my own part, I don't start with anticipation or juxtaposition or conflict. I start with what is the answer to the original unanswered question of who committed the murder. Then I start making notes about where I want readers to feel the different things. This is where I want them to be excited. This is where I want some sense of wonder. This is where I don't know what's going on or what's going to happen, but I've got to get them to turn the page, so here's a question mark. Then as I sit down with the manuscript, that's when I open up the toolbox and start looking at, "Oh. Oh. This is where I'll throw in micro tension, because the characters are talking about things that don't really matter, but I need to explore them. I need to explore the characters so I need them to be passionate about what they're talking about and to be perhaps a little bit in conflict during the discussion." So my approach to the use of the tools is… Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, I will say that with Spare Man, I actually started with not who committed the murder, but how the murder was committed. Because for me, the thing that is interesting in a mystery is the puzzle. That puzzle is around the murder. So I figured out what is a really interesting way to murder someone. Then who do I have that can commit that murder. That was actually the way that I built that particular thing. Which… What I'm hoping that you're noticing, dear listeners, a thing that we keep talking about is that there is no one right way to do things. Each of these is a correct way, it's just whatever is feeding you as a writer.
[DongWon] Yeah. I don't want people to come away from this feeling like with all of these different tools, you have to have some kind of master plan. Right? That you need to know, "oh, I'm going to deploy a red herring here, I'm going to deploy tension here, I'm going to deploy this that and the other there." Because I think a lot about the apocryphal thing about Agatha Christie, about her not knowing who the murderer was until Poirot said it on the page or something along those lines. Right? You can approach it from… I mean, yes, you do need to know which end of the tool's the business end, and which is the handle, but you can deploy these tools as you go and sort of see where that leads you and sort of build up to something that feels really consistent. A lot of making a mystery feel right is a thing that happens in editing process as you go back through it and say, "Hum. I was giving a little too much information here. I need to withhold that there." Or, "This is really confusing because I knew what was going on, but I didn't set that up properly two scenes ago." Right? So, mysteries. Think of them more as magic tricks rather than like perfectly executed plans. Right? You get to go back through it and adjust and tweak and make sure everything's set up right for your audience to get there when they get there.
[Dan] So, as we've been going through these last few episodes, which really stood out to me talking about all these different forms of tension and how to use them are overlaps between them and ways to solve multiple problems with a single tool. So, for example, we've talked a lot about how we need to care about the characters in order to be invested in them. That is a perfect match with the concept of micro tension, because if you give your character enough texture that they have a hobby or a job or something that they love outside of the plot, then suddenly you've given them something that they can be working on in the background of a scene or these other kinds of little micro tension problems they can be dealing with while trying to solve or trying to ignore the much larger mystery and problem that they are faced with. That solves a lot of things all at once.
[Mary Robinette] That's a great example… Sorry, I'm going to use… A great point, and I'm going to use the character of Fantine in Spare Man as an example of that. So, there's two things, two micro… Two points of micro tension for her. One, she's doing crochet for much of the thing. At one point, she is so distracted she makes a mistake, and in yelling, she's mad, not just about all of the other things that are happening, but about the fact that she had to rip out 20 rows. It's like having to rip out 20 rows has no bearing on the overall mystery at all. But it is… It's a piece of character detail and it adds just a little bit of micro tension. Then the other piece for her is her weird pattern of cursing. Because she had made a deal with her priest that she wouldn't use swearwords. So she curses by a combination of Shakespeare and Catholic martyrs. Again, she hits a point where she's so upset that she accidentally does swear. Again, it's just this tiny bit… Little bit more tension that I'm applying to that seen, and texture to the character, which is a lot of fun.
[Dan] Fantine ends up as a lot of people's favorite character, or one of their favorite characters. Because of all these things that you've done.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. Hashtag team fantine or team gimlet, apparently.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Why don't we take a moment and pause? We'll come back and talk about some of our other tools and how to apply them to mysteries.
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Mark Oshiro's new young adult novel Into the Light. It is a very twisty thriller that's told in a nonlinear way. It focuses on a young teen named Manny who was first pulled into a cult called Reconciliation and then subsequently kicked out of said cult. We sort of meet up with him while he's on the road after all of that. His sister stayed behind, and so he's trying to reconnect with her. Then sees on the news that a dead body has been found in the hills near where Reconciliation is based. There's multiple timelines, there's different POVs, as we try to get to the heart of what exactly happened at Reconciliation. What is his trauma around his experience with this cult, and what is it like to navigate the world as a queer adoptee who's been sort of neglected by the system. It's a really fantastic pointed sharp funny weird novel. I think people are going to be very excited to find the spoiler at the core of what makes this novel tick. It's a real thrill.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, when we're talking about mysteries and tension, there are a number of other tools that we have not even gotten to yet. One of them which… One of my favorites and one of the core things is the unanswered question. So we talked about that a little bit in the first one. We've got a whole episode on unanswered questions. But when we're applying them specifically to mysteries, one of the things I want to look at is not just the ways to do it, like misunderstanding the question, but also some of the dangers in that. Like, what are some of the pros and cons of delaying an answer in a mystery?
[Dan] Okay, so I've got a pretty good example of this one. One of the things of the week that we promoted earlier was my new book, Dark One Forgotten. Which is a mystery and it is a prequel to a Brandon Sanderson fantasy novel. What that means is that even though it is structured as if you are listening to a true crime podcast, you go into it knowing that there will be a supernatural angle. You know that eventually… It's got Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson on the cover, there's going to be magic or some kind of speculative element to it. Especially if you've read the novel it's based on, you know exactly how the mystery gets solved. So the problem that I ran into in writing it, and that I had to send multiple drafts over and over through my writing group to figure out is, it is obvious to the reader what's going on. We know that the reason no one can remember the killer or the victims is because there is some kind of magic effect. So, how long can I drag out that anticipation for the reader for the characters to finally catch on without making them seem stupid or without frustrating the audience? It's difficult. It was very hard to write a story that kind of fundamentally ignores one of its core premises for the first half or so of the story. So there is that unanswered question like who's the mystery, but the fact that it's… Or who's the killer. The fact that it's a prequel means that I needed to start… And here's the solution. Here's why I'm saying all this. What I eventually had to do was to just give you as much information as possible. It was essentially a story about tying off every possible loose end before they finally conceded that maybe magic was real. Because it takes place in our world. They aren't predisposed to believe it, even though the audience is predisposed to expect it. So, three episodes of them exhausting every possible other explanation made it interesting enough to get through that. So the anticipation and the unanswered question was very difficult to deal with.
[Erin] I think this gets to something that we've talked about before. Which is that sometimes you can give the answer to the reader or to the listener. I think it's what's really cool about that example is the question, it seems like to me, becomes less is there magic involved with this, because everyone knows the answer is yes, but more how will people deal with the revelation that magic exists in the world? So that's a different unanswered question. So sometimes shifting from the informational question… I think one of the dangers sometimes in mystery is you think everything has to be about information and plot. But, sometimes some of the most interesting unanswered questions are the ones about emotion, revelation, and consequence, as opposed to the ones about who did what to whom at what point.
[Howard] Touching on something that Dan said toward the beginning of this episode, and something that Erin just said, we've talked about how it's like setting up a magic trick. In the second edition of Xtreme Dungeon Mastery, Tracy and Curtis Hickman point out that magicians entertain purely by deception. When they explain how the trick is done, it just kind of makes us feel dumb for not having seen it. Which is why they typically don't do it. Storytellers entertain by setting up deception, and then with revelation. Erin, you use that word twice. So when I think of unanswered questions as a tool, I'm always thinking of the revelation that is going to come at the end. The reveal of this is the answer to the question, this is how it was done. The magician typically won't show us that they were using a trick knife with a collapsible blade, but in Knives Out, famously, we are told about a trick knife in the first act, and we are shown the trick knife at the very end of the show.
[Mary Robinette] Interesting that you say that, because I have some friends who are magicians and we talk about the overlap between magic and story all the time. Because one of the things that a magician must do is that they must tell the rea… Tell the viewer what they're about to do is impossible. Because you go into a magic trick knowing that they're going to do something. I think that that is also one of the things that you have to do, in different ways, but it's still a narrative thing, that you using a lot of these tension tools in a mystery to signal to the reader that this is actually hard to solve. A lot of the conflict things that you're using are ways to say this is… There are reasons that this is hard to solve. Much like what Dan was talking about with, well, why don't they just think it's magic. There have to be… It has… You have to present the impossibility to them in order to get the payoff of, "Ah, here's the solution and the answer." So a lot of the tools that we've been talking about are tools that you can use for that.
[DongWon] I think one thing that's important to remember in all of this is that there's a way in which mysteries and the structure of a mystery is a fantasy. You are selling people on the idea that there are easy answers to complex problems. That there is a trick behind the whole thing. I think when we think about unanswered questions, sometimes it is almost more interesting to not answer every single unanswered question you put out there. Right? Like, sometimes you have a Darrell who's still wandering around the island and nobody knows why he's there. That adds this extra layer to what you're doing and you can sell the fantasy of, "Wait. We do know who the killer is. We do know what happened. We do know what exactly was done to pull this magic trick off." But things are hidden from the audience in that. Right? There are answers that we won't see, and that's okay. I think that can add a really interesting layer to how your presenting your mystery, how your presenting your answers, and what questions are you really asking in the story that you're telling.
[Mary Robinette] I think these are all great points. I'm hoping that our listeners have some new tools for when they're going back into their mystery and can apply all these different forms of tension to the mystery.
 
[Mary Robinette] We also need to set you up for success for the next episode. We are going to be doing a deep dive on The Dark One. Dan, do you want to tell us a little bit about what people should do?
[Dan] Okay. So, as we explained several episodes ago, our next little series that were going to do, we'll start with a deep dive on Dark One Forgotten, an audiobook by Brandon Sanderson and me. Then we'll have some other episodes spinning off of that. So, in preparation for that, you've had several weeks, you have one more week left to listen to Dark One Forgotten. This is audio only because it is a fake podcast. You can get it pretty much anywhere that has audiobooks. Audible and LibroFM and Google Playbooks and Barnes & Noble and all these other places. So it's about six hours long, a little more. Listen to that. Then get ready for next week, when we are going to dive deep into everything about its structure and its… The process of creating it and why I love it so much.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the reasons that we're doing these deep dives, and then building episodes off of them, is so that you can see the tools that we use and hopefully start to build a toolbox of your own. Which brings us to our homework assignment.
[Howard] Okay. So. Yeah, part of your homework is if you haven't listened to Dark Ones yet, go listen to Dark Ones. But the other part of your homework is make a list of the tools which you regularly return to when you're writing. That might be MICE Quotient, three act structure, Hero's Journey, whatever. Just make a list of the tools that you already use regularly. Then make a separate list of the tools you know about, perhaps tools like tension via micro tension, conflict, anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions. Make a list of the tools you know about but don't think you're using yet. Then, try to move one tools from the second list to the first one.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go build a toolbox.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

Mar. 8th, 2023 02:10 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait
 
 
Key Points: Forms of anticipation? Surprise, introducing an unexpected element. Suspense, delaying the action or answer. Humor, the joke is coming. Unfulfilled promises, waiting for the promised action. For anticipation, you need to know or think you know what is coming. Be careful about trying to build tension with unearned interruptions, withholding information. Inevitability, and genre tropes, can build anticipation. Subverted tropes, using the reader's expectations against them. Mix up the kinds and places of anticipation, and play them against each other. Horror and humor use the same anticipatory expectation, but horror fulfills it, while humor subverts it. Use your beta readers to check your anticipation. The twist in mystery depends on the reader anticipating something, and then you take them someplace else.
 
[Season 18, Episode 10]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] 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.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] So now that you've been anticipating something, let's talk about actually how this works. There's a number of different forms of anticipation that we can think about playing with. I'm going to mention four of them, but there are more. This can be anything from surprise, where you're introducing an unexpected element, suspense, where you're delaying an action or an answer, humor is often a form of anticipation where you know that a joke is coming, and then unfulfilled promises, where you… The reader is waiting for the thing that you've promised is going to happen. Like, in a previous episode, we mentioned going down the dark stairs, and you know that someone is going to jump out. You've just made that promise.
[Howard] Yeah. The title of this episode comes from the 1976 Heinz ketchup commercial where they're singing anticipation while the very slow ketchup comes out of the bottle. The whole idea being I really want to just eat the sandwich, but I have to wait for the ketchup first. Anticipation is inherently… There is an inherent tension there, and you can be anticipating something wonderful. Even the ordinary kind of wonderful like ketchup.
[Mary Robinette] That actually…
[Dan] I just want to say, an important part of anticipation is that you have to know or think you know what's coming. A very, very short version of a story I know I've told before. I was trying to teach this to a group of teen writers several years ago. I showed them the beach scene, the first beach scene in Jaws, where there's a bunch of kids out playing in the water. It is full of jump scares and all these things. It is just delicious mounting tension of which one of these kids is going to get eaten by a shark. But I, in my foolishness, forgot to tell this group of 12-year-olds that there was a shark. They didn't… They had no context for this movie whatsoever. So instead of a very tense scene, it was a really boring scene in which nobody got eaten by a shark. Without knowing that something bad was going to happen, there's no anticipation at all.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about that example is the… Is that you have to have that conversation with the reader. One of the things that I will see people do badly with anticipation is that they will hold onto a key piece of information trying to build tension by creating a mystery around it that is unnecessary. Where the reasons for interruptions are unearned. This is a… Like, this is, again, a thing that I played with a lot with Spare Man was that I would attempt to have… To create tension by having someone say, "Oh, well, the answer to your question…" Then I would use Gimlet, who is an adorable small dog, to interrupt the process. So, "The answer to your question… Is this dog allowed to have fries?" The reason that that worked was… Usually… Was that it was an earned interruption. It was an interruption that wasn't under anyone's direct control. There was also a different payoff, like that interruption was serving another function. Often, the interruption is just like someone comes by to drop a check, and they decide not to answer the question after all. That dropping the check? That is not serving any other purpose in the scene. It's not… It's an unearned, in my mind, interruption.
[DongWon] In a different way, you also used anticipation in one of the most clever ways that I've seen. Which is with the intimacy between your two leads. Right? There's this recurring sort of very funny thing where they're just trying to get a moment alone to sort of have an intimate moment, because it's their honeymoon. You're using those scenes to give us an enormous amount of exposition and information. You're having them talk through the mystery, and you're using them is what could, in other circumstances, be a very dry and boring dump, but by including this anticipatory element of like are they finally going to get to do the thing, it creates this very funny loop where you using the anticipation in this very like subtle background way that draws us into the scene and gives us a reason to care about what they're saying, while we're just like, "Can they please just make out now?" It's great.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you for noticing that.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Or not. Maybe I don't want you to notice it. But, yes. But it is that thing which I think gets back to something that Dan said earlier, that anticipation, that there is an element of hope… That there is a thing that you're hoping is going to happen. I think that was Dan. It may have been Erin.
[Howard] It was Dan, and it was two episodes ago.
[Mary Robinette] Two episodes ago. Previously.
[Howard] Or, no. One episode ago. But, yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Before. Someone said. I thought it was clever. But that element of hope, whether it's that there is an outcome that you're wishing for with anticipation…
 
[Dan] Now, one form of anticipation that I don't see on your list, though it arguably can be a part of suspense, is the idea of inevitability. If we have seen a character do a certain thing in a certain situation every previous time that that situation has arrived, then, all of a sudden, you can present us with that situation again, and we know what's going to happen. We know they're going to make the wrong choice or we know that they're going to kill the person. You can see this a lot in No Country for Old Men, for example. Where we suddenly find ourselves in this situation and we know what's going to happen because we've seen it happen before. That inevitability just adds so much tension into it.
[Howard] Genre also programs a measure of that inevitability into us. If you're watching a… Watching or reading a thing, and you realize, "Oh, this is sort of following Hero's Journey, and this character is the mentor… Oh, crap. I like this character and they're the mentor. Something is going to happen to them to prevent them from being useful. Oh, no." That's real. That's a thing that your readers bring to your book, even if you're not writing Hero's Journey. If you've dropped enough things that might telegraphed to the reader that it's Hero's Journey, the character they think is the mentor is the character they're expecting you to kill off. It's something that we need to be aware of any time we're writing in a genre.
[DongWon] Sometimes you can be really explicit about it. Star Wars has spent 20 years now milking anticipation as a narrative engine in all these prequel series. Right? I'm a huge fan of the cartoon Clone Wars, also known as the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. Right? We know what happens to Anakin. We spent five seasons with all these characters that we know aren't surviving this series. They are not in the movies. We know what is going to happen when Anakin becomes Darth Vader. So the tension of that series is so much in wait, there are all these characters we care about. Are they going to make it out of this? How do they make it out of this? And those questions. Andor recently was such a fascinating series because we know where Cassian Andor ends up. We know… And the entire question of the series that we're watching is, how does he become the character that we meet in Rogue One? So they're sort of using this as a loop, over and over again, to answer interesting questions that the audience has, using our anticipation, using our sense of inevitability, to give us like these little Greek tragedy structured stories. Because we have certainty about where this ends up.
 
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of inevitability and anticipation, why don't we take a pause for our thing of the week?
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Max Gladstone's Dead Country. This book is out March 7th, which should be a couple days from when you're hearing this, if you're listening to it when the episode drops. Max is returning to his most well-known and original series, the Craft sequence, with a new series of books that is telling the story of a war that is coming to the world of the Crafts. The first book starts with Dead Country. We meet Tara Abernethy, who's the hero of the first book, Three Parts Dead, returning to her home for the first time since she was chased out because she's heard the news that her father has died. So, we get to see this character that we've seen before returning home. It's this really wonderful examination of what we give up when we go out into the world, what ambition costs us, and how do we pass on the learning that we've had over the course of our lives. Dead Country kicks off a new arc in the Craft that is a much closer, tighter knit arc then we've seen Max do before. I cannot tell you how excited I am for everyone to see where he takes this universe over the next four books.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, as we're continuing this conversation about anticipation, there's… One of the other things that I particularly enjoy are subverted tropes. Where you are using the reader's expectations against them. Sometimes this is a… I will spoil a little bit… This is a thing that I used in Spare Man, when… You'll see this used a lot… Where you're like, "Aha. I think that it is this person." Then they become the act two corpse or something else happens that causes you to decide, "Oh, I guess I was wrong." Then, either they have fake their own death or they have… There's something where you subvert the reader's expectations. You use their anticipation of the ways they think it's going to go to toy with them.
[Howard] One of the best examples I can think of, just off the top of my head, is Samuel L. Jackson's St. Crispin's Day speech in 1999's Deep Blue Sea, where he is riling everybody up and saying, "Yeah, these sharks might be smart, but we're human beings, and we're…" He is ramping up to awesome, full-blown Samuel L. Jackson. Then a shark comes out of the water from behind him and eats him. Now that… I mean, it's 20 years later, we kind of expect that kind of thing. Now that it's been done a few times. But at the time, it was both hilarious and horrifying and was brilliant. So, I look for ways in which I can do something that looks like it's delivering what people are anticipating, and then twists and delivers something else that makes them laugh and makes them scream at the same time.
 
[Erin] One of the things that I love about that is that it plays with the different types of anticipation. Not in the way that Mary Robinette has set this up, but just the different strands. You can have physical… Like, the anticipation of physical pain, the anticipation of emotional change. Like, I'm going to have a breakthrough, or a relational change, we're finally going to make out. What I think is cool about that example is it's an emotional… The anticipation is of this emotional release, and then a physical thing comes in and interrupts it. So one thing that's really fun is to play around with the different types of anticipation or the different kinds of places in which anticipation can happen, then layer those in among each other.
[DongWon] Mary Robinette kind of mentioned this earlier, but I think horror and humor really rely on the same overlapping anticipatory impulse. Right? This kind of goes to what Erin was saying as well, in… There's one type of anticipation that sort of drives that flip. There's a moment in the recent reboot of Candyman. It's a tiny little moment, where one of the characters opens a cellar door and looks down a dark stairwell. We have this horror anticipation of she's going to go down there, something bad's down there, it's not going to go great. She just says, "Nope." and closes the door.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It becomes this comedy beat. It's a delightful beat. I was in a theater. We all just lost our minds at this. But it is the thing of humor can be that subverting the expectation, and horror can be about fulfilling of the expectation. The horror version is she goes down there and something bad happens to her. The humor version is she's like, "I ain't doing this. I'm out." and closes the door and walks away. So, I think how you resolve the anticipation can sort of determine what genre space you're in. But the same impulse is there in terms of the feeling we have going into that.
[Mary Robinette] The… One of the examples of how you can really use anticipation along these lines is in the Expanse, in the first episode, we meet… I think it's the first episode… But we meet a ship's captain and he has this wall of collectible cat figurines.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The main character is like, "So what's with the cat figures?" He's like, "What?" He clearly refuses to answer, there's something there. What you're anticipating is that later he's going to be… There's going to be a telling moment, a compelling moment where they… He shares why he collects the cat figures, or you're anticipating that one of them is going to be broken, and he's going to feel… The main characters going to feel really bad about having broken it. Instead… Full on spoiler… What happens is we just blow the entire ship up, and we will never get the answer to what is going on with all of those cats. But it creates this little bit of tension there that it's like here's… We're anticipating something… That these are going to be important for some reason. We're anticipating that they're Chekhov's gun, and then they are not.
[Noise]
[Mary Robinette] The other… Go on.
[Dan] If I can interrupt really quick, that's also an example of that combination of anticipation and hope. Just giving those little cat figurines humanizes that character in such a tiny but vital way that suddenly we care about this person. We care about getting the answer to that question. We find them to be more interesting than just standard captain on a doomed ship. So, when the ship blows up, we care in a way we wouldn't have without that little element.
 
[Howard] I want to call out one of my favorite go to tools for anticipation. That is the beta reader. I will ask my beta readers at the end of each chapter to tell me what is it that you are anticipating? What is it that you are dreading? What is… Tell me what you think is going on. Not so I can second-guess you and write the story so that you're wrong. I want to know if the anticipation is working. Because it's very difficult to know if it's working when the only person who's reading it is you.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's very true. Which actually brings me to how you can use anticipation with a mystery. We mentioned that one of the main beats in a mystery is the twist. The twist does not work unless you have the reader anticipate something else. That's one of the things that you have to do when you're setting up the mystery is you have to build in anticipation. Then, at the twist point, you take them somewhere else. Speaking of taking us someplace else, think let's take us to our homework assignment.
 
[Howard] I can do that. Have a look at your current work in progress, and ask yourself, are there genre tropes that you can subvert? Can you payoff reader anticipation by delivering something other than what the genre you're writing in has led the reader to expect?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.09: Unpacking the Tension

Mar. 1st, 2023 07:29 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.09: Unpacking the Tension
 
 
Key Points: What drives a story? Tension! So what kinds of tension are there? Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Tension is emotional, it requires engagement. Narrative tension is what the characters feel, contextual tension is what the readers feel, and they don't have to be the same. Anticipation, expectations about how we think things are going to go. Juxtaposition, contrasting expectations and actually how things go. Unanswered questions, mystery, but also other levels. Cold start horrible situation, then back off to earlier, making us wonder what happened. Mystery box storytelling, what's in the box, what's the solution to the puzzle. Do a question and answer quickly to build trust with the audience. Anticipation is expecting an outcome, while unanswered questions, where you, the reader, don't know the answer. Micro-tension is smaller tensions, often lower stakes. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 9]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Unpacking the Tension.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] 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.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We are going to be spending the next several weeks talking about tension. I'm going to go ahead and frame this a little bit, because as we were trying to set the season, we each brought something that we have been struggling with a little bit or a new toolbox that we've been noodling with. Erin and I happen to have simultaneously just taught a class on tension. So she's going to be chiming in here in a moment. But I want to start explaining what's going through my head with this. So, we are often taught that a story must have conflict. I think that actually what drives a story is tension, but that conflict is the easiest form of tension to teach. I started thinking about this while I was reading Japanese literature, which often does not have any visible conflict, but there's a ton of tension. It really solidified for me while I was watching Ted Lasso. Slight spoilers here, but when you look at… Watch the Christmas episode of Ted Lasso, there's no villain. Everyone is being kind. There's no conflict. All of the conflict comes from this anticipation of something that you think is going to go wrong. For instance, at the beginning of the Christmas episode, he's watching It's a Wonderful Life and he's drinking, so, obviously, the next thing that's going to happen is he's going to go on a bender, and he's going to have a dream sequence. None of that is what happens. But they so clearly signpost it that it builds this tension, and then you get this release… So, what I want to talk about is looking at some different types of tension. So we're going to kind of give you an overview, and then for the rest of the episodes, we'll be digging into each type of tension. So. I'm going to break them down, and then let other people talk. The types of tension that I am identifying as I am attempting to build this toolbox are anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and then micro-tension. Erin, on the other hand, is building… Is constructing a tension toolbox in a different way.
[Erin] Yeah. I will say that one of the things I love about tension, just to start, is that tension is emotional. Just the word tension feels more emotional than conflict. I think it's an amazing reminder that you need some sort of engagement with the thing in order to be tense. If you don't care, you won't be tense. I think sometimes because we think a lot about conflict, people will open a story or a novel or a movie with a conflict that we haven't bought into. So we're not feeling the tension. We just see the conflict. Like when you have a little… Your two dinosaurs, as a kid, and you have them fight. The two dinosaurs are fighting with each other, but why? Does anyone care? So, to me, tension is a lot about building in and thinking about the emotion. The other thing that I really love about just tension versus conflict is that conflict is something that is felt on the page. Your characters are in conflict with each other. Perhaps. Or with nature, or what have you. But your reader is not in conflict. They are observing the conflict. The tension is the thing that both the readers and the characters can share.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Dan] I love this description of tension as requiring an emotional investment. For me, the way I have always thought about it, tension is a combination of anticipation and hope. You anticipate something bad is going to happen, you hope it doesn't. But without that hope, without that one outcome I like and one outcome I don't like, there isn't really any tension. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.
[Mary Robinette] I think the outcome of tension and hope is where a lot of romance comes from. It's like, oh, you know that they're going to get together. So that's the thing that you're hoping for the entire time, but you keep seeing all of the reasons that they aren't going to get together, which is what builds that tension. That's a… I really like that framing, Dan.
[Howard] Yeah. I've… Without going into detail, one of the things that for me makes a good action scene is if I care about what's happening. If the action scene… Fight scenes are often inherently conflict, because they're fighting, but if I'm not feeling tension, if I'm not emotionally invested, all the great fight choreography is just eye candy. I don't care. So tension is key. It's critical.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think that brings up a really interesting point, because for me, tension is almost always about relationships, because stakes aren't necessarily about survival, stakes are about consequence and how you see yourself or how you see other people in connection to other characters. Because that's how we think about it, and that's how we feel it, so just for a quick example going to what you're saying, Howard, like the lobby scene out of the Matrix is them fighting a bunch of goons. The tension in that scene doesn't come from are they going to shoot these security guards. It comes from is Neo starting to realize who he is? Is he in tension with himself? What matters to him? So we're excited by that scene because we see, as Morpheus says, "He's starting to believe." We see that relationship starting to change. So the tension comes from an internal journey that the character is on, not the conflict of there are 10 random goons that need to get out of their way at this point.
 
[Erin] I think you can also, like, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm just starting my story. Nobody yet cares about my characters. How am I going to create this tension?"
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] One way to do that, also, is to tap into kind of primal tensions I think that we feel. So if you're on a spaceship and the spaceship is breaking, that's bad. But it's also this person's first day on the job, like, there's a certain primal, "oh, crap, I just got this job, and now everything is breaking." Or I have to give a speech. The things that people freak out about in their dreams. Like, that kind of thing, if you put it on the page, it's a way to tap into tensions that people might be feeling in their own lives. Then use that to kind of move the action forward while you build up the character engagement.
[DongWon] Yeah. The thing that you said about conflict being something the character sees, but tension is something the audience sees. Conflict for the character is am I going to survive this. I, as a reader, at the beginning of a book, I don't really care yet. I don't know you. Sure, if you fall out into space and die, that's not particularly interesting to me. But what is interesting to me is are you going to feel bad about it being your fault that you fall out into space and die. Right? I think that's the difference between tension and that conflict in that way of stakes matter… Survival matters to the character, but you have to give me a reason to care. That's where tension comes in.
[Howard] Circling back to Mary Robinette's five things here, can I talk about juxtaposition for just a moment?
[Mary Robinette] I think you can, after the break. That is going to create tension for our readers, our listeners…
[Gasp]
[Mary Robinette] As they wait to find out what Howard is going to say about juxtaposition.
 
[Dan] All right. So our thing of the week this week is Dark One: Forgotten. The first official collaboration between Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson. This is the prequel to a story that has been out in graphic novel form for a while, called Dark One. It's a portal fantasy. This is presented… The prequel is presented as a… As if it were a six episode podcast. Someone is making an amateur true crime podcast about a mysterious murder that has remained unsolved for 30 years. Over the course of the series, discovers many more mysteries and a much larger thing going on. This is a lot of fun, because of that nature of a… As a faux podcast, it is only in audio. It's available pretty much everywhere audiobooks are available. Take special note of this thing of the week, because several episodes from now, we're going to do a deep dive on this one. When we finish our whole tension class that we're doing, we are going to do a deep dive into Dark One: Forgotten and talk about the process of writing it and producing it and everything at length. So, it's a little over six hours, and it's a lot of fun. They did an amazing job on the recording, the cast is wonderful. So, Dark One: Forgotten by Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard.
[Howard] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard. Tell me. Tell me about juxtaposition. [Garbled]
[Howard] Okay. Return of the King, the Peter Jackson, we have the scene where the Steward of Gondor has sent troops into Osgiliath to try and take it back. While those troops are in Osgiliath, the Steward is eating and making… I can't remember if it's Merry or Pippin… Making them sing…
[Dan] It's Pippin.
[Howard] It's Pippin. We are watching… Is it John Noble? Is that the name of the actor?
[Dan] Yes.
[Howard] I think it's John Noble. We are watching him crush food in his mouth and dribble on his face and tear meat from bone as we watch these soldiers drive into Osgiliath. It is brilliant and beautiful as juxtaposition and also serves as a way to give us X-rated levels of gory horrible violence without actually doing that. Our… Your brain does all the work because of the juxtaposition. It makes you terribly tense because the soldiers on the horses have not yet been turned into grapes in John Noble's mouth yet and you don't know if they will be.
[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Something that it makes me think of that I've been thinking about a lot is how much of storytelling is a collaboration between the author and the reader. We talk about this in puppetry that the difference between playing with dolls and a puppet show is that one of them has an audience, and that the puppet exists in this liminal space between us. It is also true for writing, that I can write something, but the moment you start consuming it, you're going to bring your own lens to it, your own experience, and you're going to combined things in your own head in ways that I can't anticipate.
 
[Erin] That makes me think a lot of something that I find really fascinating about tension. It is that difference between what readers are doing and what the characters are doing is narrative tension versus what I call contextual tension. So, narrative tension is the tension that characters feel, and contextual tension is the tension that readers feel. They don't actually have to be the same. If the characters are blithely walking into an ambush, but you signal to the reader that there's an ambush coming, there's a difference there. Versus where both folks, both are feeling tense. So there's a lot of really, really fun things that you can do there, in separating those two, and playing with where your character's feeling tension, and where do you want your reader to be.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think of this really as genre expectations. Right? So if you're in romance, you're in horror, you're in mystery, in the ways that we've talked about it in the past, the audience has certain expectations. This is why, when I talk about storytelling, I always talk about pattern recognition. Right? We have read and absorbed thousands upon thousands of stories over the course of our life. So, we have ideas about how these things are supposed to go. You can use those expectations for a lot of these techniques which [we mention?] here, in particular, anticipation and juxtaposition. Anticipation being sort of like we think we know how it's going to go. Then, juxtaposition is the contrast of we thought it was going to go this way, but now it's going that way. I think you can use that tension between the audience expectation and what's happening in the text to kind of create a discordant note that automatically creates a sense of tension that the audience is so hungry for it to be resolved. Waiting for that resolution, waiting for that next cord to progress, so that we know where we're going, is one of the most effective ways to create tension between the book and the audience.
 
[Dan] So one of the elements on Mary Robinette's list that we haven't talked much about yet is unanswered questions. Which, at one level, that's just what a mystery is, right? Somebody is dead, we want to know who killed them and how. So we have that question. But there's a lot of other ways to use this type of tension. The example that comes to mind is the old TV show Alias, which kind of leaned a little too heavily on this particular trope, but many, many… I would go so far as to say, most of those episodes started with the main character in a horrible situation, and then we would cut away and say, "72 hours earlier…" Then, that leaves us with this unanswered question of "Oh, no. I know she's going to be in a horrible peril at some point. How does that happen? How is that situation created? What is going to go massively wrong?" That creates the tension that draws us through the episode to get the answer to that question.
[DongWon] This is also what's commonly referred to as mystery box storytelling. This is this J. J. Abrams idea of asking what's in the box, what's in the puzzle, can be a driving force for your entire narrative. So, Lost is probably the most famous example of this. Sometimes they can be unsatisfying if it's clear they never knew what's in the box in the first place, but you can really connect with an audience who also wants to know what is the core of this mystery, what is the core thing that's happening. A more recent example is Severance. It's a good example of like, "What the hell is he actually doing down there?" It's something that really drives the story forward.
[Erin] Speaking of boxes, literally, since we've done Glass Onion as thing of the week, maybe you've all seen this, but it starts with a box being opened. I think that why this is so important is because in order to have your audience trust that you will answer the unanswered questions, it helps to pose a question and answer it early on. So that you're like, "I am capable of answering questions." How will they open this box? They do. You saw it. So then you're actually willing to give them more space. Each time you answer a question for an audience member or for a reader, I think what happens is you lengthen the amount of time that you can put between question and answer as they trust you that much more.
[Howard] Dan's example, from Alias, 72 hours earlier, is the in media res, and we're familiar with that structure. One of my favorite reversals of that can be found in the first paintball episode of Community. I think it's episode 23 of season one, where Jeff leaves the room. We've been told, "Oh, there's going to be a game of Paintball Assassin," whatever. Jeff leaves the room and says, "I'll see you losers later. I'm going to go take a nap in my car." Then we see, kaching, one hour later. Jeff wakes up in his car, steps out of the car, and the campus is a wasteland, with sort of zombie wasteland music playing. For a couple of minutes there, you're wondering, "Okay. What happened?" I now have a lot of questions about what could have gone this wrong in an hour. Now, obviously, it's a community… It's a community? It's Community, so it's a comedy. So there is exaggeration. But the tool is still there for you. Running the clock forward a little bit and things have changed, and how did it get this bad this quickly?
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to briefly cut into say that one of the reasons that we separated unanswered questions from anticipation is that… We went back and forth on whether or not they should be lumped together… Is that with anticipation is something that you know is going to happen. Like, you know that when they walked down the basement steps, that a bad thing is going to happen, and tension comes from that. It's anticipating an outcome. Versus unanswered questions, where you don't know the answer. So in one… You can be… With anticipation, you can be wrong about the answer. Like, often you build tension by having them go down the stairs, and then something jumps out at them. But it's just the cat. So you can build anticipation and tension and let the reader be wrong about what they're anticipating, but that is different than the reader does not know what is going to happen.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, so, like in Severance, I'm actually expecting not to get answers to many of the questions I have. It's sort of a genre expectation, that I would almost be unsatisfied if they did answer all those questions, but finding out more so I can start piecing together the puzzle is one of the narrative things that's pulling me through this story that I'm loving.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The last piece of it that we need to define, and then we'll go to our homework, is micro-tension. I'll try to keep this short. Micro-tension are smaller tensions that happen within a larger scene. So if your character is attempting to deal with a murder, but then they also have to make spaghetti dinner and the water boils over. That's a micro-tension. They're small tensions that pop up often from mundane sources, but not always.
[Howard] They can be related to the plot. I need to get the autopsy report, and in order to get the autopsy report, I have to apologize to the coroner. Now, macro-tension would be I'm going to steal the report.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
 
[Howard] Hey, should I do the homework?
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a great idea, Howard.
[Howard] I should do homework. Okay. In this episode, we covered five types of tension. Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Look at your current work in progress or something that you're reading… Last week, we invited you to read a mystery… And try to identify examples of each of these. That's it.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Imagine working with horses as a way to explore and enhance your creative process, all while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of Bear Lake, Utah. Led by me and Dan, this four-day workshop is suitable for writers and riders of all levels and experience. Come make new connections, receive valuable feedback, and set your writing goals in motion. Visit writingexcuses.com for more information about Riding Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go ride.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.3: Chekov's Surprising Yet Inevitable Inverted Gun

Jan. 19th, 2022 09:44 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.3: Chekov's Surprising Yet Inevitable Inverted Gun
 
 
Key points: Chekhov said if there's a gun on the mantle in Act I, it must be fired in Act III. Which means if you want something surprising yet inevitable later in the book, you need to set it up, make the promise, earlier! Structure, genre, audience, medium all shape the way you put the gun on the mantle. Look at your story holistically, especially during revisions. Do critical analysis of the media you consume, especially when the big reveal fails. Use expectations to create good anticipation and tension.  
 
[Season 17, Episode 3]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Chekov's Surprising Yet Inevitable Inverted Gun.
[Kaela] 15 minutes long.
[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.
[Megan] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Kaela] I'm Kaela.
[Sandra] I'm Sandra.
[Megan] And I'm Meg.
 
[Transcriptionist's note: According to the sources I checked in Google, Chekhov is spelled with an h. So... I'll spell it that way in the remainder of the transcript.]
 
[Howard] This episode is about creating the thread which makes surprise inevitable. The title of the episode is an acknowledgement of the fact that most people use Chekhov's gun backwards. Chekhov was saying if there's a gun on the mantle in Act I, it must be fired in Act III. I suspect that Chekhov, who was a playwright, was basically conserving budget for the props master. It's like, "No, we're not going to spend any money putting a gun on the mantle unless the script calls for a gun to be fired in Act III." The way we use Chekhov's gun is the inversion. If a gun must be fired in Act III, it has to be on the mantle in Act I. We want it to be surprising, yet inevitable. That gun on the mantle makes a promise, but the only promise is that the gun matters. Maybe it's a distraction, maybe it's not loaded, maybe it'll misfire, maybe it'll get used as a club, maybe it's in front of a secret safe on the wall. What do we do, as writers, to put a gun on the mantle in order to correctly foreshadow, in order to correctly make a promise of something really cool that's going to happen later in the book?
[Sandra] This is one of the places where… This is like where the rubber hits the road. This is where you have to look at the expectations you're setting up with the very structure you picked, and the genre that you've picked, and the audience that you're aiming for, and the medium that you've chosen… All of those things play into the decision on how do I put a gun on the mantle. Because the answer is very different for an animated show versus a cozy mystery novel versus a picture book. To hail back to the example of a picture book, The Monster at the End of This Book, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago, you have Grover and you have the title… The title, right there, that's the thing on the mantle. The title promises you at the end of this book, there will be a monster. That has to be delivered upon. That is the perfect way to deliver the promise for a picture book, because your audience is 3 to 5. You really just have to put it right there in front of them and say, "Hey, look. I've promised you this." Then we're all going to spend the whole book talking about it. Whereas a much more subtle thing, for example, Dan's I Am Not a Serial Killer series, had a huge telegraphing problem because in I Am Not a Serial Killer, the first book, he had supernatural elements that don't really come into play in the story until a third or halfway through the book. So he had to figure out how to hang supernatural elements on the mantle right there at the front of the book so that when they showed up later, no one felt betrayed about it.
[Howard] There were places where the bookstores had shelved it with thrillers…
[Yes]
[Howard] Instead of with something that's in context, "Oh, this is probably supernatural as well." Yeah, there were folks disappointed at that. What are some other good examples of foreshadowing? Kaela, and then Meg.
[Kaela] So, I love knight books. Knight books for this does such a good job, like, there's an amazing twist… Spoilers, I'm warning you there's about to be spoilers. Plug your ears if you're really invested. But knight books, they have this whole tension and it's weaved into tension and satisfaction overall. That's what this is about, satisfaction. But the… You find out, you find these bits and pieces, these clues about the last girl who tried to escape this witch's house or apartment in this case. The boy is piecing it together, he finds out that she had a plan and he finds what her plan was and then he doesn't find any more information about it. So he's like, "Oh, she must have escaped." There's like all these little unicorn emblems about it, right? My favorite part is realizing that it seems like a logical solution, she must have escaped because she didn't write more. But when he runs away, when he does the plan, he runs out and he sees a wild unicorn where he thought… What he thought was the exit, a wild unicorn, and he's like, "Oh, my goodness." Then he finds out the witch that has captured him was the girl and that she took the place of the old witch. You're like, "Oh, my goodness." It doesn't… It's surprising, yet it completely makes sense with the way they had framed things. You're like, "Oh, my goodness. That was satisfying payoff without feeling like you had tricked me." I had… It was totally a possibility, I just hadn't considered it because in the way it was framed by the characters. Very logical reasoning where they're like, "Oh, it must be that. She escaped." You're like, "Oh, yeah, I buy that. That made sense to me."
[Howard] Meg.
[Megan] One of my favorite examples is the comedy film Hot Fuzz. Because I think it has the greatest number of setups and payoffs in any movie that I've ever seen.
[Howard] It is so tight.
[Megan] Yeah. Pretty much any line of dialogue or any prop that you see in the first half plays into the big final fight of the movie. It's about this big cop from London with all of these skills who has to move to a tiny town where really no crime ever happens. It's this fish out of water story, and just the writing and the editing of the film itself, like how the shots are used and cut together, is so fresh and intriguing that it's one of my all-time favorites.
[Howard] It is a masterpiece. My own high bar for foreshadowing is the BBC America 2016 Dirk Gently. In the first episode, we get touchstones for… There's a missing girl, there's a dog wandering around, there was a terrible murder in this apartment… In fact, we open on this murder scene that just doesn't make sense, and then a kitten walks across and traces little red footprints in the carpet and then a hand reaches down and scoops up the kitten. For the first half of the episode, we cut and intercut and nothing connects. Except Dirk Gently keeps saying, "I am a holistic detective, I function on this way in which everything is connected." At the end of that episode, Dirk Gently unzips his bag and pulls out the kitten, and we see in the bag a gorilla mask that we saw on a monitor, and we realize, "Oh, wait. Oh, wait. What's going on?" Then we roll credits on episode one and we head into episode two. It does this so well. I watched it numerous times and it's like Hot Fuzz, there is nothing wasted. Everything that is thrown down shows up later and it is connected to other things. For me, it functions kind of like a master class. Because I want to be able to do that. I want to be able to foreshadow by writing things that… Where every word matters and every word is telegraphing or foreshadowing something that is coming. Kaela.
 
[Kaela] Yes. I would agree with that. I think that one of the keys to getting this done is looking at your story holistically. Which, of course, the time for that is really revisions. I know I've mentioned that already, but it's because it's so important, like revisions is the time when you are tracing threads throughout your story, and making sure that they're evident, that they're there, and they have their payoff. If they're not there, how do you add them there, how do you build to this kind of full moment where it feels satisfying? Because if you don't have it running consistently through, it is not satisfying. It's just like, "Oh. Okay. Deus ex machina."
[Howard] Yup. Meg.
[Megan] I have a YouTube video to recommend from a YouTuber called Folding Ideas. He did, back in 2016, he did a half-hour dive into the film editing of the 2016 Suicide Squad film. Talking about how their visuals didn't set up what the story was actually trying to tell. There is one very specific instance that he brings up. There's one of the characters who has a pink unicorn stuffed animal. That's just something he has. In his opening title card, where you learn about this character, he has a thing for unicorns. Then, later on, you see him get… This is maybe 20, 30 minutes into the movie, you see him get thrown down in a scene, and the unicorn falls out of his jacket. He picks it up and he puts it back in his jacket. Then, in the final fight, there's a moment where I think someone throws a knife at him, and he catches it, right in the chest. But then he reaches and he pulls the knife out of his jacket, and it's in a wad of cash. The unicorn never shows up again. So they did a set up for it, they did a reminder with it, and then the unicorn vanished for the rest of the movie. So…
[Howard] Was the cash supposed to be like stuffed in the unicorn, and the stuffing came out and… We have no way to know that.
[Megan] No. It's just a big stack of dollar bills in the exact place where he tucked the unicorn in his jacket. This was a film that underwent a lot of re-shoots and a lot of re-editing. So it's possible it's a through line that either ended up on the cutting room floor or maybe the cash was supposed to be a joke. It's just… It's not quite clear. So this is an example of something that would be done in revisions, where you have your alpha or your beta reader being like, "What? What happened to the unicorn?" You can be like, "Oh, right. Right." Because [garbled] thousands of words and hundreds of pages, you may not remember everything you've already put in your story.
 
[Howard] Right. Let's pause for the book of the week. I've got this one. It is Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. This is the seventh of the Dresden Files novels. It's… It is a novel that puts necromancy out in front. The title is three layers of pun. I won't explain it. But the premise of necromancy as a power in which the older something is, the harder it is to bring back but the more powerful it is when it arrives. The way these things are foreshadowed delivers in a final sequence that is just so delightful. So very, very delightful. Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. I don't think you need to read the other six Dresden Files novels in order to pick this one up and enjoy it. So you should pick it up and enjoy it.
 
[Howard] Let's dive back in now. What are some tools for us for foreshadowing well, for correctly creating the thread that makes the surprise inevitable. How do we create that inevitability?
[Sandra] I think that one of the best tools that a writer could use is critical analysis of the media that you consume. Look at the ways that the show you're watching or the book you're reading, how it fails. If you are frustrated by the big reveal, then dig into why that is. Kaela and I were having a little conversation about Frozen. I want her to tell us…
[Howard] Oh, oh, oh. Let's talk about Frozen. Yup.
[Sandra] Frozen. Yes.
[Kaela] Okay. So, Frozen. What I… Now, Frozen does a lot of good things, so I'm not ragging on the movie here. But my least favorite part of it, and yet also my favorite part too, at that, is the Hans twist subplot, where he is like, "Oh, Anna, if only someone loved you." Then tries to kill her and take over her country all of a sudden. Now, the reason that gave me whiplash, other than the fact that I had, at the beginning, when I was going to watch the movie, joked, "\Huh. What if he was the bad guy?" Because I always joke about what things that would be bad twists.
[Chuckles]
[Kaela] And I was right about my joke bad twist. But one of the things that… Like, this is not necessarily a bad idea, it could have leaned into the scenes really well, it could have been a satisfying through line, except that it was almost intentionally deceptive. Which does not create a satisfying, a surprising yet inevitable. It is, "I cheated. Ha ha." in a story structure. So I think the big moment that I can pin it down to in that movie is when, after Hans and Anna meet, and she walks away, and he looks after her. It's just the audience watching Hans, Hans by himself in the water. He has no reason to be deceptive. He has no reason to be trying to put on a face. He goes, "Ahh," all dreamily and smiles after her. We know… We're supposed to believe that that means, "She's the perfect person for me to murder later. Ahh." It's not at all tonally consistent. It doesn't match. All those things later… Yup. Megan, yeah.
[Megan] I was just going to hundred percent agree with you on that. Not only that, but there's a music cue that also indicates this moment is romantic. Because in books, we can be in our character's head, but in movies, it's the lighting, music, and sound design that indicate what our character is thinking beyond just what the actor is doing with their face. Every single element of that scene is stacking up to tell us that this is a romantic man with good intentions.
[Kaela] Yeah. He's a gooey boy. Like a… It shows that evidence. Then… Now, everything in the middle of Frozen could be interpreted that he could be secretly plotting things. But his whole set up, there is no evidence to give us any belief that he is a plotter.
[Howard] So, categorization of this. The apologist might argue that what's been done here is like a red herring, but what I'm getting from you and what I personally believe is that it wasn't a red herring, this was the animators, this was the studio, deciding that we need to help Hans keep his secret by lying to the audience. That is not how you make a surprise inevitable, that is how you make a surprise annoying.
[Yeah. Chuckles.]
[Megan] Because you feel cheated.
[Howard] Yeah. Meg.
[Megan] We have very intelligent audiences, as well, that… Especially if you have someone who really likes to consume everything in their genre. It can be very hard to hide your gun on the mantle. I went to a theater production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame at the Hale Center Theatre Orem with my family a while ago. There's a bit where Quasimodo is showing Esmeralda around the bell tower. This is a small theater with a circular stage and people sitting around it. There's not a lot of space for set. But there's a point where he points up into the rafters and was like, "And that's where I keep the hot lead where I repair the bells." I just leaned over to my sister and I'm like, "So that's Chekhov's cauldron of hot lead, right?"
[Laughter]
[Megan] We had a little bit of a giggle in the theater waiting for it to come back in Act II.
[Kaela] Yeah, but the interesting thing is like I think that people try to subvert… Like, you see people try to subvert expectations because they know that these tricks are in quotation marks tricks of the trade. But in fact that can create… You can use them to create good anticipation instead. Like, when you're like, "That's where I keep the hot lead," and I'm like, "Ooo, I hope the bad guy gets melted with lead." It actually makes you invested if you're doing it right. When you're like, "Hey, I'm not telegraphing the fact that oh, maybe it almost fell on the guy this one time before it officially becomes a thing." But that it can be… You can use it for tension, you can use it for anticipation. If you're looking at it right.
[Howard] That's why I describe the possibility that the gun on the wall has a safe behind it. So that we have this inevitable moment, somebody goes to lift the gun off the mantelpiece. But instead of lifting it, they pull down on it and the panel slides to one side and they open a safe.
[Megan] I think one thing… We want surprise and inevitable. But if you can only hit one, hit inevitable rather than surprising.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Megan] Because that is going to deliver a more satisfying experience for your reader, even if they guessed this once.
[Howard] We'll talk about red herrings in our next episode. Predictability is better than abject disappointment.
[Chuckles. Right.]
[Howard] To my mind. I could be wrong. I could be wrong. We've got…
[It's time for homework]
[Howard] I just love talking about this stuff, and we could just keep going, but we're almost 20 minutes in again.
 
[Howard] Homework. I think this is…[Megan] Meg.
[Megan] I got this. In your current work in progress, pin down a person, a place, or a thing you threw in for flavor at the beginning of your story, but didn't plan to use again. Write a scene for them to come back in the final act of your story in an unexpected way.
[Yes. Satisfaction.]
[Howard] I love it. I love it. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.20: Horror As a Subgenre

May. 19th, 2016 01:46 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.20: Horror As a Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/15/11-20-horror-as-a-subgenre/

Key Points: Why does horror make people turn the pages? Horror is universal. We recognize it, we connect to the characters in it, and we get a moment of catharsis at the end of it. We like to think that perhaps what we imagined is worse that what the author came up with. We want to know how it turns out and hope it will be a little better than we expect, but we're wrong. So in adventure, we want to see how they overcome, while in horror, we want to see how big the train wreck is at the end? Rubbernecking for horror? Yes, although some people want to be afraid, they want to be anxious. But still safe! You get people to keep reading by focusing on how the horrific element changes the story, the characters, the plot, the setting. Horror exerts profound change on characters, it illuminates and motivates the character. How to you transition to a horror segment? How do you get into the cave? Anticipation, dread, being afraid of the moment and what is coming. A horror segment can expose important points about the character. Don't forget uncertainty. And development. And loss of control. Oh, and visceral sensory details. Open the door to the basement, and it breathes on you. How do you hybridize horror? Loss of control. Beat, beat, stab. A moment of horror may be seeing the one thing that's out of place, realizing that this is a clue to something terribly wrong about to happen, and the emotional reaction to that. Look at the contrast -- horror in normalcy. Use the inescapable certainty that the character you love is going to do the wrong thing, because they have to. Horror can make the humor funnier, the action actionier, and the love lovier. Horror as a spice can set the reader up to really enjoy the good stuff.
( All the gory details... )

[Brandon] All right. It's been great. I have to actually cut us now, so that we can…
[Sigh]
[Brandon] I know.
[Dan] You have to cut us now?
[Steve] Wait a minute.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Wait! [Scream]
[Brandon] Mary, you have some homework for us?
[Mary] Yes. So we've been talking about using this as a spice, and the contrast that you can get. So I'm going to ask you to write two things. It's basically the same scene, but the first time, I want you to write it so that there's a funny element and then tragedy or horror happens. Then, I want you to take that and reverse it so that the second time you write it, the horror comes first and then the comedy.
[Brandon] The exact same things?
[Mary] The exact same things, but just reverse that so that those elements are in different relationships to each other. So that you can see what happens when you start flipping these pieces around.
[Brandon] Excellent. Once again, thank you Steve.
[Steve] Thank you.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 7.1: When Good Characters Go Bad

Jan. 3rd, 2012 10:08 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.1: When Good Characters Go Bad

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/01/01/writing-excuses-7-1-when-good-characters-go-bad/

Key Points: Why? Character change -- redemption or falling -- interests us! Also, fall and realization is cathartic. Plus, this can set up concern for the other characters. To start, show us their starting state, normal and good, and the choice that starts them down the path. Motivation and slippery slope. Dividing line or shades of gray? Don't tell the reader where the line is, let them decide. Does the character think they have crossed the line? Have they slowly eased over it, or been pushed to the edge and snapped? Does the gradual slip have a moment of realization? What about realizing that the rules, the code, itself is wrong? Consider the tragic flaw, and the archetype of the hero who falls from grace. Is this an Everyman falling? Remember that even villains are heroes of their own story. Make sure your character is motivated, and that the fall is foreshadowed. Use that anticipation.
( Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? )
[Howard] Perfect. You know what, I'm just going to build this off of the last comment I made. Come up with a list of three things that are very, very important to your main character that are all in alignment. Now, outline yourself some circumstances where one of those things is now out of alignment and can drive your character from the protagonist's side into darkness and eventual oblivion.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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