Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-11-a-close-reading-on-voice-an-overview-and-why-time-war

 

Key Points: Voice in fiction. Voice, mechanical, aesthetic, and personal. Tools for voice on the page: pacing, accent, attitude, and experience. Pacing is cadence or rhythm, pauses, punctuation. Accent is word choice and sentence structure. Attitude is attitude. Experience is how the character views the world. Aiming to give you tools so that you say, "Oh, I can do that." 

 

[Season 19, Episode 11]

 

[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 11]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice -- An Overview and Why We Chose Time War

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, this episode is the first of our close reading series. I'm very excited to dig into this one. We've chosen for our first module here to focus on the aspect of voice in fiction. We thought what better book for that than Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar's This Is How You Lose The Time War. This was a novella that was published in 2015 that features two alternative voices from two different POVs and [garbled] as letters written between them. It won a bunch of awards. It's been very popular. I think the voice in this book is very distinct and very powerful and much of the charm of the book is in how these two different writers are approaching these characters and how the voice is carrying through.

[Howard] There's also the elephant in the room which is when I got this book out to reread it and showed it to my 22-year-old and told them, "I think you might like this book a lot," they said, "Yes. Bigolas Dickolas said the same thing."

[Ha]

[Howard] "I will get to it eventually." They will get to it eventually because I'm going to bring this copy back and shove it in front of them. Yes, this book got huge props… Was it 21, 22?

[DongWon] It was the… Oh my gosh… What, 23?

[Howard] I do not remember.

[DongWon] Summer 23.

[Mary Robinette] 23. Summer of 23.

[Howard] This is… I mean, we're recording this in fall of… Or in December of 23. So…

[DongWon] It was this summer.

[Howard] It was this year.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It won all of the awards when it came out, and then it was rediscovered by Bigolas Dickolas, and now is a phenomenon sweeping the globe.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Howard] Part of the reason it's doing that is that the voice is so strong and so… It speaks to a lot of people. I think voice is the reason it does that.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I want to just put something out, that is we're talking about voice, that the voice of this is one of the things that is so important. But voice is also one of those wiggly words that we use a lot. I find that it tends to mean 3 different things. There is the mechanical voice, which is, like, the style. First person, 3rd person, the mechanics of it. There is the aesthetic voice, what it sounds like. Then there's the personal voice, which is what the author brings to it. We are primarily going to be focusing on the aesthetic and mechanical voices when we're talking about this. In part because we don't know which parts which author wrote, so it's harder to pin down and say this is because of their life experience.

[DongWon] They have said who wrote which part.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, they have now?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] For a long time, they refused to.

[DongWon] Yeah. Oh, I'm pretty sure that's public. So I have the other elephant in the room is that I have a particularly inside perspective on this book, because the first 2 books we've chosen, I swear to God, I did not do this on purpose, I did not suggest these, are both books that I have worked on is a literary agent. So, Max and Amal are both my clients and I have worked on Time War since its inception. So I have a little bit of inside perspective and sometimes filtering out what is public and what is not is a trick for me.

[Howard] Drop the knowledge, DongWon.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] But I will very gladly give a few peeks behind the curtain when I can.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Double check them on that one.

[DongWon] I will.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, the… For me, one of the things that struck me immediately the first time I started reading this was that there was a poetic denseness to the language that you see less often in science fiction. It's… I can think of other examples, but the poetic denseness was one of the things that pulled me in, and also, slowed me down. Because I felt like I needed to savor the book as I was going through, that the language, the voice itself was as important as the plot. That it was inextricably tied together.

[Erin] Yeah. I think some of that is the form of the book itself. Because so much of it is epistolary, it's in letters, I think that there's a certain indulgence in some ways that, as readers, we give to a letter. We sort of assume that it will be like… That you're going to lean into maybe the poetry of things when you're writing a letter to another person and what… I think it was such a smart idea, because while in like non-letter prose, you might be like, oh, this is a lot, in a letter you're like, oh, no, this completely makes sense, because it's such an expression, such a personal expression, and therefore a way in which a voice can come out so cleanly and clearly.

[Mary Robinette] Interesting, because I actually have the opposite experience when reading, which is that the letters are the more straightforward prose than the 3rd person passages.

[Erin] Interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it interesting?

 

[Howard] An example. The piece… There are 2 pieces that hooked me on the first page. The first piece, 2nd line and beginning of the 3rd paragraph, "Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world. This was fun, she thinks."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. I'm on board.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm on board. Then, paragraph 4, this is where the prose gets dense and does a whole bunch of worldbuilding for us. "She holds a corpse that was once a man. Her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She let's go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronzed depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red." Okay. You've thrown a bunch of cool technical terms at me, and I'm like, "Oh, wow, future battlefield… Wait. Crude technology. Wait. What?"

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Now I have… That's the 2nd hook.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The first hook is, "[gasp] That was fun." The 2nd hook is how advanced is this? Please world build some more for me.

[Mary Robinette] Right. I think that that was part of what I'm thinking about… And we're going to dive into this way more in the next episode, when we're talking about… Like, we're going to do really close reading about Red's perspective, looking at these first pages. But, in general, one of the things that Amal and Max are trying to do in this book is describe this time war which is technology that we don't have and an understanding of time that we don't have. So they are using this metaphor poetic language to attempt to communicate something to us because we don't have the language for it. So that juxtaposition of those 2 things, of, like, this is a very highly technical thing I'm going to attempt to explain to you people who are locked into this single timeline… It makes things really juicy and lovely.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's one of the main reasons I wanted to pick this. I wanted to pick it both because I deeply love the voice of this book, I find it very affecting and very sort of pleasurable to engage with. But then, there are really almost 4 different voices in this book. Because you have the Red sections, you have the Blue sections, you have Red letters and Blue letters. Each of them has a distinctly different voice that is communicating different information and different worldbuilding as we go. So one of the reasons I wanted to examine this one is we get to sort of do that contrast between, okay, what's happening here versus what's happening here versus what's happening here. So it felt very useful as a teaching tool in addition to one that is just, oh, they are executing this at a very high level and is delightful to engage with.

[Howard] Yeah. Let me circle back on that teaching tool briefly. You can pick up to similar books by different authors…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And compare voices and ask yourself, why do these sound different? Why do these feel different? Why do these work differently? That's valuable. Having that experience in one book where the same narrative, a singular narrative is being run in multiple voices is utterly invaluable. There's… I cannot think of a better teaching tool for voice then reading and rereading and analyzing your own experience as you pick up the book again and again than this book.

[Erin] While this book is… Has a very sort of unique style, it's also something that you can do in books with multiple POVs. So if you wanted to take what we're doing in this close reading and apply it somewhere else, you could take a book that has a lot of different points of view and think about how is the voice being done differently by the author from one character to the next.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is just an extreme case, which I think is what makes it so useful. Right? Of having such distinctly different voices, and it's such a voice-y book. What I mean by that is there just leaning so much into that voice as a forward component of it. Which, in part, they get away with because it's a shorter book. Right? It doesn't overstay its welcome. This might be more difficult to do at great length. But, given the compactness of the book and how quick the experience of reading it is, you can really push pretty hard on the voice lever. Which they've done in this case.

[Howard] I have a question that I'm going to pose after our break.

 

[DongWon] I want to talk to y'all about Scavengers Reign. Which is one of the best things I saw in 2023. It's an animated series on Max that tells the story of a group of survivors crash landed on an alien planet after their colony ship malfunctions mid journey. What makes the show wonderful is its incredible art style, but also its approach to how they portray alien life and how humans interact with it. It's really deeply interested in systems and ecologies, and tells a really beautiful story about how humans interact with their environment and with each other. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

 

[Howard] The big question is if you are but one author, but one mortal author…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Trying to write multiple voices, as you said, a novel with multiple POVs. Can you do it this well?

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, one thing I want to point out as we go into this close reading series is we're picking these as examples we hope are instructive. We're not saying you have to do what these authors are doing or replicate these. We're picking examples that are really pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this particular severe. So, this is pushing the boundaries of voice. When we get to Memory Called Empire, that is pushing the boundaries of what you can do with worldbuilding. When we get to Fifth Season, that's going to be pushing the boundaries of what you can do with structure. I do not recommend trying to replicate these things. We're showing you big examples so you can take lessons from them and learn from them.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you a couple of words that we're going to be using as we're going through. As you probably know, I am an audiobook narrator, and when I'm trying to learn how to do character voice, when I'm teaching it, there's a couple of tools that we use that are very useful for doing voice on the page. So, pacing, accent, attitude, and what I call experience. So, pacing is kind of the cadence, the rhythm of the voice. Where they pause, whether they're doing long sentences or short sentences. Where they put the punctuation. That's something that you manipulate really by punctuation. It's replicating the way we pause in speech. Accent is all about word choice and sentence structure. It's not about pronunciation, which is what a lot of people focus on. So you'll hear us talking about the word choice and sentence structures that are specific to each character. Then, attitude is exactly what it sounds like. When you're talking to someone on the phone, and I know that a lot of people never do that anymore, but you can tell… Well, when you're listening to us, you can tell if we're smiling or not smiling. Mechanically, that's because the shape of our facial mask changes. But really it's that our attitude is driving the way that everything happens. On the page, you're manipulating that with word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation. Then, experience is about what… How the character views the world. So, specifically, when you're hearing us talk about Red and Blue, you're going to hear us talking about the use of botanical metaphors versus the use of mechanical metaphors, depending on which character we're talking about. That comes from their experience. So those are a couple of levers that you can push very consciously without having to, like, have this extensive acting career or, in Amal's case, Amal is a poet and is using a lot of additional tools. But these are 4 things that I find very useful.

 

[Howard] In… Oh, gosh, this would have been 40 years ago. I was reading the liner notes… Liner notes? Must have been, on a Billie Joel album. Billie Joel talked about getting his start. He said, "I listen to things on the radio and I told myself I can do that." That… I wanted to be a rock star for years. Then I got into cartooning and into writing because I looked at things and said I can do that. I look at Time War and think I can't do that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you are feeling the same thing, I just wanted to express some camaraderie, a little bit of commiseration, and a little bit of hopefulness, which is that as we go through these, we want to give you the tools so that on your 3rd or 4th reread of one of these close reads, you begin to tell yourself, "Oh. Oh, I can do that."

[Mary Robinette] It doesn't even have to be doing that entire… Like, you can't write Time War because that's where the personal voice comes in. Their own experience, the thing that drives them. But you can use the tools that they're using in Time War. That's the piece that we're hoping that you're going to get out of these really close readings, that here's this tool that you can use and apply to your own personal voice and your own experience, that that will come out on the page.

[DongWon] Well, one thing to keep in mind is also that this is 2 people. Right? This is a collaborative process. They're bringing double the firepower to this project, and anybody who's read Amal and Max's work individually knows that those are already some pretty heavy guns that they've got. So, there's something special that can happen in a collaboration where the sum is even greater than the individual parts. It's very hard to get to. I don't love a collaboration project, actually. It's one of the grand ironies of this book, is I tend to be fairly opposed to them because they're so difficult to do well. But in this case, those 2 came together in a way that their voices really braided together in this really powerful way that leads to the reading experience that we have in front of you.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, Erin, you tend to do fairly voice-y fiction also when you're writing. What are the things that you think about when you're looking at Time War in kind of relation to the way you approach your own work?

[Erin] I think, I like the way that you broke down sort of the different stuff, pacing… I'm going to forget them all now.

[Mary Robinette] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience.

[Erin] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience. I really wanted that to be like something I could say, like PAAE. That's not really…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

[Erin] It's okay. But I think that pacing, especially… Like, I love to look at the way in which other folks use punctuation. Because, like, really as writers, I find us to be a controlling lot.

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? We don't just want you to read it, we want you to read it how we would read it in our own homes. So thinking about, I wonder if this… If the way I'm reading this is the experience that they intended me to have. Why is… In the thing that Howard read earlier, okay, there are some shorter bits in there. There are things that are 2 word sentences. Why is this. Here, why not a dash? Why was this not a semicolon? Oh, it's because I need to stop all the way here. I like to really think about that because when I'm doing it, I know the effect that I'm going for. What I like to try to do is listen to somebody else and wonder about the effect that they are going for. It's sort of like the listening to the song on the radio and going I think this song is meant to make me sad. Why and how? Because if I'm writing a song that wants to make somebody sad, I should think about if I understand how they did it, then I can understand the way that maybe I could do it better.

 

[Mary Robinette] My… One of the arguments that I will occasionally have with copy editors who will never see the argument back, like, the book is never returned to the copy editor with my No!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But I'll have things that are phrased like a question, but I do not have a question mark, because they are not said with a rising tone. Like, "What did you say." Like, what did you say… Like, there's a falling tone there. If you put a question mark, it's a very different, "What did you say?" That kind of thing. I see early career writers, and I know I did it myself, get hung up on the grammar and having something grammatically correct is not what you're trying to do when you write. Grammar is there for when you need to express clarity in some way. But most of the time, what you're looking for is just do these rhythms flow?

[Howard] I look at grammar as the rule set that we play by when things are complicated and we need to make sure that everything is working well. Breaking those rules is what we do when we need a new rule in order to communicate something different. So we will deliberately throw down a word like mis-underestimate which isn't a word, but which we can kind of tell what it means and away we go. The copy editor will say, "Hey, this isn't a word," and you say, "But it's my word for this book."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] One way to think about voice is that voice is about clarity for the reader. It's about clarifying the reader's experience of all the information you're trying to give them. Right? Because it is the vessel with which that's handed over. So, sometimes, the way you achieve that clarity is by breaking grammatical rules, by using a very complicated language, or inventing your own word sometimes. Because what you're trying to do is communicate what the emotional experience that you want the reader to have is. Right? So voice is your first interface with them. It's the first… It's why we're doing this as our first module, is voice is the first and the last thing that you will encounter while reading a book.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I also think… Something else that just occurred to me, a bit of a side note, is that the other thing that I really like to look at is that… Is… Once you create voice and people understand what that voice is, you have to keep doing the work, but in some ways, you've already established who this person is. The way that they talk, the way that they think, and it actually helps to put their voice in the mind of your reader.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, one of my favorite English sentences is, "I didn't say you got to keep the money." Because you can put the emphasis on every single word in that, like, I didn't say you got to keep the money. I didn't… Like, it's a different… It's a slightly different meaning. If you have the voice of the character established, they will emphasize, hopefully, the word that you would emphasize when you were writing it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is very similar to what happens in audio fiction. There are character voices that I cannot sustain for an entire thing. Like the [low shack] Luidaeg in the October Daye books. I'm talking like this. I can't do that for an entire page. So I hid it really hard at the beginning, and then I back off and use it for emphasis where I want to drive home this is the [low shack] Luidaeg speaking. I find the same with… When I'm writing, that I will use those embellishments, the… Sometimes it's just as simple as italics, but sometimes it's like the flourishing words at places where I want to remove ambiguity about who's speaking or what they mean or places where I want to add emphasis. It's like, no, this is seriously this person.

 

[DongWon] Well, one last thing I wanted to point out here is another reason I think this is a great book to use is so much of the character development and plot development is communicated through alterations in voice. The voice evolves over the course of the book, and as it does, we grow with the writer. Or the characters, and our understanding of the world that they live in also evolves. Right? So we get to sort of see how you can use voice as an active tool in your fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think people think about it as kind of a passive set thing. Right? In the first paragraph, you set your voice, and then it's the same throughout. That, ideally, is not true. It grows and changes with you. I think this again is a pretty radical example of how you do that.

[Howard] Before we jump to our homework… Isn't that what we're getting ready to do next? Before… I would like to send us home with a passage that I think fits beautifully. "I am glad to know you love reading. Perhaps you should next write from a library. There's so much I want to recommend."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's perfect.

 

[DongWon] That is perfect. On that note, I have our homework for you this week. So. What I would like you to do is to take a sentence from a work you love that has a strong and clear voice. So think about what are some voice-y pieces that you've read that you really enjoy. Take that sentence and write a scene based on that as a prompt in the same tone and voice as the original. So, I'm not trying to get you to replicate the original scene, but take that… Take what you love about why it sounds the way it does, and try and extend that into your own fiction and make that voice a little bit your own.

 

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

 

[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk with your fellow writers.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/24/17-30-know-your-characters/

 

Key points: How do you know your characters? Exterior, physical characteristics, versus interior, how do they think or feel, what internal forces guide them. Dialogue is an outward expression of attitudes and thoughts. Watch for the collision between character and authorial intent. What questions do you ask your characters to help you separate their speaking? Quirks, speech patterns, ways of seeing the world. Background and attitude or emotional state. Be aware of the context that you need to provide to make prose dialogue clear.

 

[Season 17, Episode 30]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Two, Know Your Characters.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're dumb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

[Dan] Okay, this is about knowing your characters, not your tagline.

[Maurice] Correct.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] And you are both busy and in a hurry, so let's get right into this. We want to talk about knowing your characters. If you want to write good dialogue, you gotta know who's speaking. So, how do we get to know our characters, Maurice?

[Maurice] Well, I tend to think of it in terms of sort of mining out the exterior versus mining out their interior. So, it's like when I think of exterior, I think of like physical things about them, in terms of like their age, or… Let's see. Oh, yeah. Just age and physical characteristics, things like that. The [garbled]… And, in fact, like nationality, origins, culture, those I consider sort of external elements to the character. As opposed to their interiority, which is how do they think, how do they feel, what are their philosophies, what are the internal forces that guide them. I'm fascinated with this whole idea of what Howard talked about earlier about the DTR. [Define The Relationship, Episode 28] So I was hoping he'd jump right in right about now.

[Howard] Well, let me say this. If you were going to define… If you were going to try to write dialogue that sounds like Howard, a couple of the character attributes that I consciously try to apply to myself are I am more inclined to make fun of myself than to make fun of other people and I never make fun of other people unless I know them and know that they can tell that I am joking. So if you were to write Howard dialogue where Howard says something really mean-spirited to someone he just met, that would sound out of character. So that's the sort of thing… It doesn't matter that I'm 54 years old or way 230 pounds and I'm happy with weighing… None of that matters with the dialogue. What matters is how am I going to speak to other people in a way that sounds true to who I am.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing in the Regency which longtime listeners will have heard me say before that manners are an outward expression of your opinion of others. One of the things about dialogue is that it is an outward expression. So when you are having two characters speaking to each other, when your character is speaking, what they are revealing is their own attitudes and thoughts. It's not just… It's a way of exposing how they are perceiving those around them. Not just by what they're saying but by the way they are saying it.

[Pause]

[Mary Robinette] And I've stopped the conversation completely. Perfect.

[Laughter]

 

[Maurice] I was just thinking… I'm processing all that. So it's one of those things where it's like all right, so. I'm trying… Start off with the Howard thing, because I'm like, "What would it be like to write Maurice as a character?" So that's been like a weird mental exercise, because it's like, all right. So I am black. Spoilers for anyone who didn't know that, by the way. So that is going to affect how I operate in certain contexts. It shouldn't, but it does in a lot of ways. Because I'm going to… I mean, even right now, there's a light version of that going on right now, even though I'm friends with all of you. I'm also in podcast performance mode, as opposed to oh, I'm hanging out with my boys mode. Right? So there's that aspect, which is feeding into how I'm coming across in terms of what I'm saying. But then there's the internal stuff that's going on too, the stuff that informs me in terms of what are my aspirations, what are my insecurities. That's going to weigh in how I frame certain things, in how I want to come across versus how I do come across. Right? So that's that balance of the interior and exterior that I was talking about.

 

[Howard] There's the collision between that information and what Mary Robinette has described as authorial intent. In the Shafter's Shifters cozy mysteries I'm writing, I have five mean characters. It's an ensemble. Often, all five of them are in the room with someone else. I have to remember that authorial intent, I want to move the story forward here, intersects the fact that each one of these characters may have a question that… There's information that they need or there's an objective that they're after, and they will interrupt. They will participate in the conversation, they will turn it from a dialogue into a trialogue or a quadalogue or whatever. I'm breaking the word dialogue, I'm sorry. I shouldn't do that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But it gets very confusing because when you have that many voices, if they're not distinct, you have to start using dialogue tags. Now the page gets cluttered. Now it starts to slow down. And now I flip back to authorial intent and ask myself, "Do I get to override what I know those characters want in order to make this scene function the way I want it to function?" It's challenging.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Maurice] So I think… Oh, go ahead, Mary.

[Mary Robinette] No, no, no, you go ahead.

[Maurice] Well, so one of the things I… So along those lines then, so I think there's one part where we're figuring out… Each individual character, what they want, in terms of what they want to accomplish in the story, what they're trying to figure out, that sort of thing. But there's also that… That kind… You have to sort of like figure out what is their relationship to each other character, also. It's almost like a separate column. 

[Meow]

[Maurice] Right?

[Mary Robinette] There's a kitty.

[Maurice] There is one. She can always sense when I'm on a podcast.

[Meow]

[Mary Robinette] It's purrfect. So, this is another great example of dialogue, and how when you're trying to get to know a character, sometimes having them interrupted by something unexpected is a way to expose stuff about a character. Dialogue is rarely totally linear. So sometimes having something happen like a random cat walking through, having a waiter interrupt a conversation, can help shift the conversation. It can also help you understand more about that character. The… Going back to something that…

[Howard] Maurice?

[Beep… Beep… Beep]

[Mary Robinette] So, for instance, Maurice, when confronted by a cat, reaches down and pets the cat. Howard, when confronted with a beeping alarm, has walked away from his microphone and into another room. Both of these things expose different things not only about the interruption, but about the way the character reacts to that. So…

[Dan] Now I am going to interrupt all of you.

[Mary Robinette] Fine. Fine. I mean… Oh, of course, Dan. Please do what you must.

 

[Dan] Maurice, what's our book of the week?

[Maurice] Our book of the week is… What is it? Oh, shoot. The Ballad of…uhm... Let me think. I'm sorry.

[Dan] The Ballad of Perilous Graves.

[Maurice] Thank you. This cat is all over the place right now.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] It's by Alex Jennings, and I just started this book, but I'm falling in love with this book. It's New Orleans, it's music, it's magic. Alex really put his foot in it. Which… Oh, yeah, which is a good thing. Trust me on that. But it's just… You have this world of magic that's going on and… Uh. I'm sorry, this cat is killing me right now. But I've just started this book. I'm falling in love with what Alex has done in terms of creating the magic and tying it in with music in this world.

[Howard] That's The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings.

[Maurice] Yes.

[Dan] Fantastic.

[Howard] And what's the name of the cat?

[Maurice] Ferb.

[Mary Robinette] Ferb. Oh, that's great.

[Maurice] As in Phineas and Ferb.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Yes. At some point during this, we will be visited by Elsie as well.

 

[Mary Robinette] So I want to tie us back into some concrete tools based on something that Maurice talked about in the first episode, which is thinking about questions to ask about your character. I talked about the interiority of the character, the… What the… Their manner exposing what they think about other people. But the way they express themselves is not just that attitude. It is also about their culture, their nationality, their class, their age, what their home language is… Language or languages. So if you think about these things when you are sitting down to approach that dialogue… Patrick Stewart is going to say things in a very, very different way than Woody Harrelson. Well, did I just get the actor's name right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, good. Good job, me.

[Dan] You did, assuming you were talking about Woody Harrelson.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, I was.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] But they have enormously different approaches to the way they would say something. Dan, one of the things that I love about the way you handle dialogue and characterization in the John Cleaver books is with Marcy and the way we can tell who is kind of present at any given moment. Do you want to talk about some of the tools you use for doing that?

[Dan] Oh, boy. First of all, thank you. Yeah, so I assume you're referring most specifically to books four and five?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] In which Brooke is essentially possessed not by an actual spirit or person, but by a vast backlog of memories that have been downloaded and different ones will take over her personality at different times. I gave her, first of all, a set number of people who would be in charge. Typically we will get Brooke, we will get Nobody who is a demon, we will get… I can't remember the name, but there was a medieval woman who appears a few times, and then eventually Marcy shows up. So, knowing first of all, knowing your characters, knowing who the main personalities were going to be, me to give them specific quirks. Different speech patterns. We have the two modern girls, Brooke and Marcy, who I had already written several books about and I knew them well and they were very different people. Then we had the medieval one, who of course spoke in a different way. She had a child, she had very different life experiences than the others, that allowed her to speak in… Use different words, notice different things about the world, ask questions about the world because she came from a different time, things like that. Then, of course, the demon, Nobody, who is again someone that I had known fairly well. She is very acerbic, very biting, very aggressive, but also incredibly and deeply broken, and kind of flawed as a person. She hates yourself, and that's kind of the root of the whole problem that drives the book for about… Or drives the whole series for about three books in a row. So making sure that they all had these very distinctly different ways of viewing the world meant that as soon as one of them popped up, they had a different relationship with John, so that they would refer to him by different names or they would use different tags, different vocabulary, when they were talking to him, when they were talking about him. They would ask different kinds of questions. That made it relatively easy, after the giant amount of work that you've put in.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then it's relatively easy to use those tools once you've built them and put them on the wall. To say, "Oh, well, this is clearly Marcy who's talking right now."

 

[Mary Robinette] So, just to recap, what we're talking about there is knowing the background of your character and also generally speaking their attitude or I guess emotional state at any given moment.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Which is why when I'm building characters, I'm always trying to focus in on… Well, not always, but there's like a series of questions I tend ask each of my characters. Like, what is your dream, what's a traumatic experience, what is… What's your greatest fear. These sort of questions. So I can just get a feel for who they are. Then, in essence, writing dialogue boils down to knowing your characters so well that you can drop them into any situation and you're just going to know how they're going to respond. You know how they're going to speak in that given situation.

[Dan] Yeah. I have found lately, and there's actually… We could talk about this for an hour, so I will give you the truncated version. Most of what I have written over the past several years, and everything that I have published over the last several years, has been audio drama scripts rather than prose novels. That has caused me to think about dialogue differently. Not that I have learned new things that are… That make my novels different or better. In fact, it often is more difficult. When you're writing an audio drama, there are no dialogue tags. You are relying on different voice actors to convey the idea that this is a different person. So there's no tags, there's no narrative… No editorializing, he said, suspiciously. Things like that. Some of the little tricks that we use when we're writing prose I absolutely can't do when I'm writing scripts. So, being forced to strip the dialogue down, removing all context from it, removing all commentary from it, so it is just words and voices and nothing else actually made it hard to come back to novels because I'd forgotten how to do some of that stuff. But also really forced me to get into their heads and make sure that when you heard somebody speak, it was different words. I had to find other identifiers aside from dialogue tags and adverbs and so on and so on.

[Mary Robinette] This is a really great thing to underline here. Prose dialogue and scripted dialogue, anything with an actor, are not the same thing. It's two different toolsets. It's not just that you can't use the things in prose to go into scripts, it's that when you are writing for an actor, they're going to do some of the lifting for you. You can give them a line that is… Would be ambiguous on the page and trust that they will have done their character homework and come to it and give it a spin. Like, you can just say, "What?" And they can find five different ways to say it, one of which is going to be completely appropriate for the character. But if you just put the word what on the page, there's so much ambiguity there that it's not… It's the kind of thing that you maybe due deeper into a novel when the reader is doing that lifting for you. But it's not something that you can get away with in a short story or the beginning of a book where the reader doesn't yet know that character. So learning… I've seen a number of things that I've gotten from an early career writer where it's clear that they have learned their dialogue from watching media. Because of all of the ambiguity that's inherent in it. Because it doesn't… Because it's dialogue that would work great for an actor because you left space for the actor to do their job, but it doesn't work on the page. Because there's no one there to provide that context for you.

 

[Dan] With that, we're going to go into our homework. Our homework is me today. This is something that I have talked about before, but it is something that I still do all the time. When you're trying to figure out who a character is, write a monologue. Pick one of the characters that you're working on in a work in progress or something like that, and write something. I have done job interviews, I have done just straight let me tell you who I am. Let that character talk for a page or two and just tell you about themselves. This doesn't have to be part of the story. It can just be the character speaking, breaking the fourth wall, telling you what kind of character they are. Whatever it is, write a monologue in which a character talks about themselves. Let that kind of… Use that to discover the character and get to know them better. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/05/15-27-alternate-history-with-eric-flint/

 

Key points: Alternate history makes a change to real history, and explores the ramifications. One kind involves a time travel element, while another just makes a change. It takes research, and people will complain about details. One trick, use locations that were later destroyed. Use historical characters where possible. Also, crowd source your expertise! Think about how to use thoughts and actions of historical people rather than modern thinking and behavior. You may want to use old attitudes to tell a story. But, be aware that your audience may not like those attitudes. Time travelers may help you here. Also, pick the right historical period, and characters.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History, with Eric Flint.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Eric Flint. Thank you for coming on the podcast with us.

[Eric] You're welcome.

[Brandon] We're also recording live at SpikeCon.

[Applause]

 

[Brandon] So, Eric, you are one of the established masters of alternate history. We're really excited to have you on the podcast about it with us. Just in case there is someone listening who doesn't know what alternate history is, how would you define the sub genre of alternate history?

[Eric] Basically, the author makes some kind of change in real history, and then follows what the ramifications of it might be. You can broadly break it into two parts. There's a lot of alternate history also involves a time travel element.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Eric] Where you take somebody in the modern world and put them back in older times. But then there's a different kind of alternate history, what you might consider pure alternate history, where there's no time travel element at all, where the author just makes a change in something. It can be something very minor. But something that's going to have a cascading effect. I've written both types.

[Brandon] So, that sounds to me really hard.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because I write epic fantasy. No one can tell me I got my history wrong, that I… But it feels like if you pick a time that people have studied a lot, say World War II or something like that, and you say, "Well, this battle changed and I'm going to explore the ramifications of what happens all the way into the future if that one battle was fought differently." It sounds like you have to do a lot of research and listen to a lot of people grumble that you got it wrong.

[Eric] I make it a point… I have not, and have no intention of ever writing an alternate history set in World War II, the Civil War, the Napoleonic era, where there are a jillion reenactors and fanatics who will go berserk over every little goddamned jot and tittle [garbled]

[laughter]

[Eric] "No, those uniforms only had three buttons…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, your problem is that historians, they will let you know when you're wrong, but the reenactors…

[Eric] No, no, no.

[Howard] They'll come to your house.

[Eric] Well, what really drives you nuts is that the issues they're going to give you a hard time about, who in the hell cares? I mean, they really don't have hardly anything to do with the story. My biggest series, Ring of Fire series, is set in the middle of the 30 Years War in central Europe in the 17th century. There are, in the United States, exactly one group of reenactors of the 30 Years War. I made it a point to get on good terms with them a long time ago.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Yeah, it is a lot of work. Whenever I'm… At least when I'm starting an alternate history series. It gets easier if you go along, as you go along. But whenever I'm early on in an alternate history book, I have to budget about twice as much time as I do for pretty much any other kind of novel. The only other kind of novel I've ever done that requires that kind of research is hard SF. Yeah, there are plenty of times when I envy dirty rotten fantasy writers like you…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Because you can just wing it.

[Laughter]

[Eric] I mean, you do have to be consistent and care… I mean, there's actually quite a bit of work goes into it, but it's not the kind of…

[Brandon] No. I've… Most of my career, I wrote just in secondary world fantasies that I'd made up. The first time I even touched our world, I made sure to make it post apocalyptic. Cities that had suffered in Norma's disasters that had changed the landscape, the physical landscape. I still got things wrong and got complaints about… I took Chicago and I changed it to steel and blew up most of it and I created an underground and most of it takes place in the underground. Still, people were like, "You know what, that street actually doesn't intersect there."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm like, "Uh. Man. You'd think that I could change the world enough that I could…" But it is… It's difficult. How do you… What's your go-to method for research?

 

[Eric] Well, all right. There are some tricks I use. When Andrew Dennis and I wrote 1634: The Galileo Affair which is part of the Ring of Fire series, and takes place mostly in Venice. Every single important location except the Piazza de San Marco and the Doge's Palace, which are quite well-known and you can visit them. But every other location that figure in the novel, we situated somewhere in Venice that got destroyed later. So, Mussolini razed it and put up a railroad station in one case, and I've forgotten everything else. So there's nothing left for anybody to go and prove that we're wrong. It's far enough back, there's not enough of a historical record.

[Howard] So, you're like time travelers trying to hide your tracks…

[Eric] Yeah.

[Howard] By putting your activities where something's going to wipe it out.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] It's not just [garbled]. Another thing I will do, I like to use historical characters if at all possible. But what I try to do is… One of the major characters in the Ring of Fire series is a Danish prince, Prince Ulrich. He existed. I mean, he was a real Prince of Denmark. But in real history, he was murdered at the age of 22. Very mysterious episode. So he died at the age of 22. Well, prove me wrong as to how he…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Evolved afterwards. So I try to find people that were young. In one way or another. It's hard for somebody to… They can second-guess me, but, it's like, "Prove it."

[Brandon] Right.

[Eric] There's a lot of that. No matter how you slice it, though, you're still a lot… Actually, in terms of writing excuses, the two things I tell people there's the biggest and most dangerous forms of procrastination are research and worldbuilding. Because you can do that forever. At a certain point, you just have to say, "Enough!" And start writing a book. Then, yeah, a lot of times, you'll have to go back into more research and do stuff. There's no way around it, there's a lot of work. It gets easier if it's a big long series, the farther you go. Because the farther you get from the breakpoint, as we call it, the more possibilities open up.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and talk about our book of the week, which is the first book in the Ring of Fire series.

[Eric] All right.

[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about it?

[Eric] Yeah. The premise of the whole Ring of Fire series… The first novel is called 1632… It's a very simple premise. There's a cosmic accident that's caused by basically irresponsible behavior on the part of a very powerful alien species, who enjoy manipulating space-time, and what amounts to a fragment of their art hits the earth and causes a transposition in time and place of a whole town in northern West Virginia in modern times. Modern times being the year 2000, which is when I wrote the book. A town… About a 6 mile diameter… I mean, the whole physical area is transposed, not just the people. So that this town materializes in the middle of Germany, in an area of Germany called Thuringia, which used to be southern East Germany, in the middle of the 30 Years War. They just boom, they show up, and there they are. That's the MacGuffin, I mean, that's the premise. That's the only premise. I… It's a three-page premise. I don't spend… It's really let's get on with the story. Take my word for it that this happened. Yeah, I know it's crazy, but who cares.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] We'll go from there. What the whole series is about is how this town of 3500 modern Americans… The impact that this has on the world in general, particularly Europe in the middle of what was probably the most destructive war in European history, at least since the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire. It's also a very fascinating period in history. From there, the series has sprawled out all over the place. There are seven novels that I call the mainline, that sort of run in the center of this series, followed… They depict the main characters and the main actions that happen. But then there are all kinds of side stories that branch off from there. Some become pretty major storylines in their own right. I believe we're up to about 24 novels published by Baen Books. Then, in addition, starting about two years ago, we launched our own publishing house, which we call Ring of Fire Press, which… We have a booth in the dealers' room if you want to drop by. We're publishing our own stuff set in the series. It also has a magazine called the Grantville Gazette that's been in operation professionally for about 12 years now.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Eric] [garbled] done really well.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] If you guys don't know about this whole thing, go research it. Because it is one of the most fascinating like emergent storytelling cultures in science fiction fantasy that these novel started. The people loved reading them, started talking about them, and creating forums. Out of that grew a magazine which has fiction that is kind of members of the community are writing that is all canon about this town, and they know all the people who are in it because it's a somewhat small town and just what they're doing. They'll be like, "We need to get rubber? How do we get rubber? Well, we need to write a story about somebody going…" All of these things… It is really… The network around the 1632 books is just fascinating to me.

 

[Howard] Well, that's the thing that I would like to ask, with regard to alternate history and the research that needs to be done, how much of that in the last 10 years have you been able to crowd source? Have you been able to go out to members of the community and…

[Eric] I was crowdsourcing it right from… When I wrote the first book, I talked to Jim Baen and we set up a special conference in Baen Bar's discussion area devoted to that book. I said to people, "I'm going to need help writing this, because all kinds of… The kind of research I have to do is impossible for one people to do." It's like, "What can you do with modern engines?" So a lot of it was technical. The basic rule I followed, with one exception, was that I used the real town of Mannington, West Virginia, as the model for the town of Grantville. The only big exception is I moved the power plant, which, in the real world, exists in another town called Grant town about 15 miles away. I moved it because I really needed a power plant.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] But that's the only thing I cheated on. So the basic rule, that's been true ever since, is if it's in Mannington, you can put it in Grantville, if it's not in Mannington, you can't. That's the rule. People spend a ton of time, believe me, researching what is and isn't in Mannington.

[Brandon] Do people in the actual town know about this?

[Eric] Yeah.

[Brandon] Do they get tired of…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] We haven't been out there in quite a while. The first… Four years now, going back, I don't know, close to 20 years, the fans of the series hold an annual convention. It's being held here this year. WesterCon is hosting it. The first five years we held it in West Virginia. We couldn't hold it in Mannington, because Mannington doesn't have a motel. That's how small a town it is. So we held it in a larger town of Fairmont, population about 30,000. We did that for five years in a row. But at that point… There would always be new people coming every year, but about at least two thirds of the people had gotten to be regulars. They came up to me and said, "You know, Eric, there's only so many times you can visit a town of 3500 people." I mean…

[Laughter]

[Eric] So… Which is fair enough. So what we started doing after that, Conestoga in Tulsa was the first one that did it. We'll go to a convention and ask them if they're willing to host us. What they get is maybe 50 people showing up who wouldn't otherwise show up. We do all the organizing and tracks and everything else. But basically, it means we don't have to organize a convention because somebody else is already done it.

 

[Brandon] So, kind of getting back to how to write alternate history. I'm actually going to pitch this at Dan first. I know you haven't done true alternate history, but you've done cousin genres.

[Dan] I've done secret history.

[Brandon] You've done secret history, you've also done historical fantasy. So, my big question is, how much do you worry about getting the thoughts, mannerisms, and actions of the historical people right when you're writing a story like this? I preface this by saying when I write epic fantasy, I generally am not trying to write… This is my mode… People who acted and thought like people did in the Middle Ages. I get away from this because I'm writing secondary world fantasies, generally with magical technology that would really place people more post-Renaissance and things like that. But really, they're thinking more along… If not contemporary, modern lines for thought processes. How much do you worry about this?

[Eric] Oh, a lot.

[Dan] I actually…

[Eric] Oh, I'm sorry, Dan. Go ahead.

[Brandon] We'll go to Dan first, and then we'll…

[Dan] I love this question, because I actually got into kind of a big ongoing argument with my editor and copy editor on my Cold War book, which, by the time this airs, will already be out. It's called Ghost Station. Straight historical, not alternate or anything. Set in 1961. Part of the plot hinges on the inherent sexism of the era. That there are two different places where people miss obvious clues because they assume that the bad guy is a man. Which is not to say that the bad guy is not a man, but… I'm trying to do this without spoilers. Anyway, that sexism was important. The editor and the copy editor were both trying to impose more modern sensibilities on this. Changing just kind of some of the minor language. In a place where I would say man, they would want to change it to person. Just in a couple of places, saying, "You know, we kind of want to be more sensitive about this." If it was in narrative, I let it slide. If it was ever in dialogue, I'm like, "No. The fact that this person has this attitude, the plot hinges on it. We have to keep that attitude there." So, it does matter. I think if you're using it on purpose to tell a particular story, you want to have those old attitudes and you want to have those older kind of more antiquated personalities. If you're not, then sure, go ahead, because obviously it's a hot button issue, if everyone who worked on the book kept trying to change it.

[Brandon] I know that when I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, like, the way that she made people feel, I don't know, I'm not an expert in that period, but they felt like they were from the period. It really was a big selling point for the book for me. Eric, do you… How much do you worry about this?

 

[Eric] It's… Oh, you worry about it a lot. I mean, it's kind of at the center of what you do. Because if the book isn't historically plausible, it's not going to work as a story. You have to realize that people in the past do not necessarily think the same way, or behave the same way, they do today. There are various ways that I have found to deal… By the way, the issue may involve, at a purely practical level, is that if your audience is so repelled by your heroes, it's awfully hard to sell a book. To give an ill… Unless it was written 2500 years ago. Then, people will give it a pass. But, to give an instance, the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, the very first thing he does after Troy, they're sailing down and he says, "Oh, there's a village there." And they stop, rob and plunder it. These are the good guys. Okay? There're two… There are several things you can do. One of them is that if you introduce a time travel element and people from the… Our time, then at least you've got a binocular view of what's happening. So you can be depicting the attitudes of people of the time, but you're also depicting how modern people are looking at it. The other is to pick an historical period… One of the reasons I picked the 30 Years War is that that world was not that different from ours. It was different, but it wasn't like ancient Greece, or Ming China. It wasn't that different. The same was true, even more so, with the series I'm doing set in Jacksonian America. Then what I did was went looking for the right character. I needed a Southern character, an effective political leader, whose attitudes would be at least okay for the modern audience. I was lucky, because such a person actually existed. That was Sam Houston. Sam Houston's attitudes on race were not the same as modern people, but awfully close. He was partly raised by Cherokees, so he's very friendly to Indians. He was asked once by Alexis de Tocqueville what he thought about the capabilities of the different races of North America. He said, "Well, there's no question the Indians are equal to Whites." He said, "Blacks are considered to be childish… Childlike and inferior, but nobody ever gives them a chance to do anything, so how can you really know what they're capable of or not?" That's an attitude that a modern audience, okay, they can go with that. Then, I think the other major character is a Northern Irish radical of the time. He's not exactly got modern attitudes, but they're a lot closer. It's a real issue, though. I mean, because you have to do it in a way that's going to be plausible all the way around. So far, I've been able to put off. But there are some areas of history I would just stay away from.

[Brandon] Right. Probably good advice there.

[Eric] Well, unless I could put a time travel thing in it, but other than that, I'd just stay away from it.

 

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon.

[Yay. Applause.]

[Brandon] I want to thank Eric. Do you have, by chance, a writing prompt you can give to our audience?

[Eric] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[Eric] When you're… Writing takes a lot of intellectual and emotional energy. It really does. It's hard to get started at the beginning of the day. Wherever that day may be for you. I found two things help. I plot ahead of time. Which I strongly recommend, because one advantage to having a well-developed plot is I don't have to sit down in the morning and say, "Gee, what am I going to write about today?" I can look at the damn plot and say, "Okay. Here's where I am." But the second thing is just write. Write a sentence. Just get a sentence down on paper and keep writing. If it turns out that sentence didn't work out right, you can always scrap it later. But start writing, because once you do that, you've kind of gotten into the story. The story itself will kind of pull you into it. But it really is kind of hard to do it. It's kind of like jumping into a pool of ice cold water. It's like the only way to do it is just do it. That's about… That's what I do every day.

[Brandon] Thanks for the advice. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.