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Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.26: Hanging Separately

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/06/26/17-26-hanging-separately/

Key Points: What can go wrong with an ensemble story? Waiting too long to bring them together. Breach of promise. No cohesion or lack of bond. Ensembles need both arguments with each other, and we are a found family. If you fail, make the arguments shallow, but make the family strong. There may be one character who needs to change or just be tossed out. Listen to your readers, then figure out what the real problem is.

[Season 17, Episode 26]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Hanging Separately.

[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.

[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we should be hanging together.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Howard] I'm Howard, and I'm stealing the thunder of our whole title.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sorry, Dan.

[Dan] Awww.

[Howard] Who was it who said that?

[Dan] That was Benjamin Franklin.

[Howard] If we don't hang together, we will...

[Dan] He said when they were plotting the revolution. If we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately. Or some variation of that.

[Dan] So we want to talk about this time the pitfalls of on ensemble. If the ensemble fails, if the characters don't mesh, there's lots of different ways this can go wrong. We are going to talk about it. So, let's start with that first. What are some ways that ensemble can go wrong?

[Howard] I want to clarify here that we're not talking about the pros and cons… The cons of an ensemble. We've already established that you're going to try and write an ensemble. What are the common mistakes? What are the disasters? What are the failure points? For me, the most common failure point is when we wait too long to bring them together or to bring them back together.

[Zoraida] Right.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Zoraida] I have some examples.

[Dan] Okay, let's hear them.

[Zoraida] One example to me which is… I guess this teeters on the success/failure rate for me. I think that The Defenders was a great show in the second half of the show. But as an ensemble… I… To me, it failed to ach… Like, the adhesion of the characters waited too long. If I hadn't gotten deep enough into episode four, which I think is too late, I would have turned it off.

[Dan] Yeah. I do think that there is room in the world for slow burn stories about teams coming together. Season one of Heroes did the same thing. But a lot of it comes down to promise. Heroes promised, look, people all over the world are suddenly developing powers for no reason. Over the course of the season, we're going to very slowly watch them begin to come together. The Defenders promised us, hey, all these other shows you love? This is the show where they team up. Then it didn't give us that for way too long, so it felt like a breach of promise.

[Howard] One of the things… This isn't necessarily an apologist approach to The Defenders…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But one of the things that made Daredevil so strong in its first season was that the four act format of TV with commercial breaks wasn't being adhered to. So, the flow of the show was much different. Conversations went on longer than they would have in broadcast TV had this been something that had commercials in it. So I feel like they leaned into that when they built The Defenders and shouldn't have. We needed to put people together sooner. But talking about the promise, the first Suicide Squad movie, the trailers promised me witty banter and antics. What I got was a depressing movie about criminals with bombs in their heads.

[Laughter]

[Dan] There's room in the world for depressing stories about…

[Talking about bombs]

[Dan] Criminals with bombs in their heads. But that's not what anybody wanted or thought they were getting from that particular story.

[Zoraida] Right.

[Dan] So what are some other ways…

[Zoraida] For me.

[Dan] What are some other examples of ensembles that… Ensemble stories that failed in some way?

[Zoraida] Kaela, you were starting to talk.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[I'm going into depression, sorry.]

[Argh…]

[Dan] You didn't want to go on public record bashing somebody's arc?

[Howard] Look, I went on the record saying that I loved the Hobbit movies.

[Laughter]

[Howard] So nobody's heating you more than they hate me.

[Zoraida] I love them too. I really dig them.

[Kaela] I like a lot about them, but at the same time…

[Zoraida] Look, honestly, I feel like I most creator's ideal target, because I really just watch to be entertained. Right. Like, I will have a good time almost anywhere. Right? I enjoy so much that I feel like my friends who have, in their opinions, more discriminating tastes…

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] But, so, like I… So when something like lets me down, I feel really like passionate about it. I actually watched Oceans 8, and I think that like as an ensemble cast, I wasn't invested in them at all. I think it's like a powerhouse [garbled actresses], then there was like… It's like there was… The tension that was there, there was no cohesion. I think that when you don't have that bond between all of your ensemble, it just feels like there's just somebody there doing a job as opposed to we are… As opposed to, like, we said in previous episodes, we're all in this together.

[Kaela] Yes. I was going to say, I think that the big draw of an ensemble story is the bond between the characters and how their bond affects the plot and how they have to come together in different ways in order to accomplish the thing that needs to be accomplished. So when you have characters who, like, don't care about each other, particularly, or don't get to a place where they care about each other, that's a big let down. If you have characters who you're like, "I literally don't even know why you're here." You know?

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] Like, they just showed up in your house and you're like, "Why are you here? Get out. Please." Except it's the movie or it's the book, like, I think [garbled]

[Howard] I'm a drummer and you had a couch.

[Kaela] Yeah. Exactly. You're like, "What? Why are you here, man?" Anything that does that, one, it throws you out of the story, of course, like most flaws will in a story. But, two, like those are the things like in an ensemble, everything gets compounded when you make mistakes in characterization or in the way that the characters affect plot. Because it will like keep pinging around all of the other characters in the ensemble. It would be a domino effect of, like, one character here doesn't have their motivation figured out, we don't know why they're here, and everyone interacting with them either has to address that is like an actual character point or it gets confusing why these other capable characters aren't addressing that, and why, like, all of their decision-making processes get affected by this person who we're like, "Why are you here, though?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm trying to create a dichotomy here. This is… This might just be the medication talking…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But you're familiar with the phrase surprising yet inevitable. When you write surprising yet inevitable, if you fail at inevitable, you've got deus ex machina and we hate you. If you fail at surprising, we might just feel smarter than you, and that's actually not a bad thing if I've bought the book. So I lean toward if I'm going to fail at surprising yet inevitable, I want to fail on the surprise, I don't want to fail on the inevitability. The dichotomy I'm reaching for is what are the poles… Surprising on one pole, inevitable on the other pole. What are the poles for an ensemble? Like, we hate each other, but we're a family. Or something. If you have to pick which one to fail at, which one do you pick? Which one is worse? I feel like if there's that thing where we argue with each other, but we are a family… Boy, howdy, let's err on the side of we're a family and make the arguments feel a little shallow, rather than make the arguments feel just unovercomeable. Oh, man, there's not enough medication…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In the world for me to parse all these thoughts at once. I don't want to fail on that, because, at the end, I don't have an ensemble, I have a group of angry people who all got to be in a book together.

[Zoraida] Like a structural Thanksgiving.

[Dan] We're going to pause here and talk about an ensemble that absolutely worked, and did not fail. The Expanse.

[Howard] Oh. My. Goodness. Which one of us was going to pitch that?

[Dan] Zoraida.

[Howard] I'm talking.

[Dan] Or you.

[Zoraida] You do it.

[Howard] I love the adaptation of the Expanse. It's its own master class in trans media, translation from book to show. But, just as a show, the building of the ensemble, the setting up of the promises, the characterization, it's… It is brilliant and beautiful and I love it. I've watched it end to end… End to end, all the seasons, probably three times. But, like the first four seasons, because they're older, I think I may have gone through those eight times. Just turning it on while I did other things. Because I love the way those characters interact. They are in such horrible trouble so much of the time. They have so many reasons to fight with one another, and yet, they are a found family and they love each other, even their sociopath Amos.

[Zoraida] Yes. Oh, my God. Amos forever. I… So I chose The Expanse too because it… I started reading the book, and the book has one of the best openings that I've read in a very long time. This is like… I'm 10 years late to this book. I started it a month ago. So, it's… For writers who are like worried that their work will never find a reader, like, I'm 10 years late to this series. Okay. One of the things that I found while watch… Switching over to watch the TV show, was that everybody has their own clear motivation and reasons to stay together. I think that when a book doesn't give me that… That's… It's all subjective, because I've read books that are ensemble cast that people love and I'm just like I don't get it. But it's… It really is so tightly woven that I feel like I'm going to have to go and watch it eight more times. Like Howard.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, that is The Expanse TV show, that's our thing of the week. It's also a book series, starting with Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey. So, go…

[Howard] Real quick, let me just say that the books… The series ended where the books took a big time jump forward. The ensemble would've had to change… For one thing, we'd have to age all the actors up. So, the fact that there isn't an Expanse season that takes us all the way through to the end of the whole proto-molecule galaxy spanning whatever story is nicely illustrative of the understanding that people are watching this, even if they don't know it, they're watching it for the ensemble, and if we break the ensemble in order to push through into the big Galactic story, people will be disappointed. The books can do it. It's really hard to keep that audience on TV though.

[Dan] Yeah. I will say as a closing note, if you are interested, Howard and I did an episode a few years ago with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who are the authors that make up James S. A. Corey. They wrote the books and they are the show runners for the TV show. So look back through the Writing Excuses archive and you can hear a lot more about how they did that.

[Zoraida] This is me discovering that they are two people.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah. James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

[Zoraida] Incredible.

[Dan] But let's talk about some more… While Kaela was talking earlier, a really cool example of a failed and then repaired ensemble came to mind, which is the TV show Parks and Recreation.

[Yeah!]

[Dan] In the first season, season and a half, they had Mark. Mark was kind of intended to be… When that show first started, it was basically The Office, but re-done with a government office instead of a corporate office. Mark was supposed to be the sardonic Everyman. He was the Jim of the cast. Then, over time, as they refined their show, as they changed the focus, it stopped being a show about look at all these losers and their terrible job, and it started to be, hey, look at these good people who are trying their best in a crazy system that they have to work within. Once that focus changed, then Mark, the sardonic Everyman, absolutely did not fit in the ensemble anymore. Because his job, his archetype so to speak, was to make fun of everybody else. But we liked everybody else. It was not the Office that was full of misfits and losers anymore. It was full of people we genuinely loved. So he did not fit. They wrote him out of the show completely because he was a failed part of that ensemble. They brought in instead two other characters, Adam Scott and Rob Lowe, whatever their characters are named, I don't remember. They fit better, because they were part of the we're kind of strange people, but we love our jobs which the ensemble had morphed into. So identifying why the ensemble doesn't work… Maybe it's just one character and you can tweak that character or change them completely. Then everything suddenly jells. So what are some other ways to fix on ensemble? If an ensemble is broken, what are some things people can look at to help identify the problem and then fix it?

[Howard] There's a principle here that I learned when I was drawing a Munchkin deck, and that is that the customer always knows when there's a problem, but never knows what the actual problem is.

[Yeah!]

[Howard] Learning to listen to your alpha readers or your beta readers… When they say, "Oh, the story's not working for me. I hate this one character." Does that mean that the character needs to be cut? Does that mean that the character needs to be made likable? Or does that mean that they need someone in the story to agree with them that this character is being a jerk so they can feel vindicated in not liking this character and be okay to move on? It is really tricky to understand that. But, for me, the key piece of the toolbox is having a beta reader or an alpha reader who has been well enough trained to be able to say rather than I think you should get rid of this character to say I don't like what this character is doing. I don't like… I don't feel like these two people would be friends. I don't think that their plan is the smart one, and I don't like reading about stupid people. Whatever. You get them to say what it is that they are feeling so that I can step back and troubleshoot it and find the core of the problem.

[I think that…]

[Howard] Yes, this may be extremely difficult to troubleshoot books that you're writing just on your own. I am exceedingly fortunate in that I have a couple of alpha readers, Sandra Tayler and Bob Defendi, who I know how their opinions work. I know… They know how writing works, and that's awesome. They know how to tell me things in a way that I know what to fix.

[Dan] All right. Let's jump to our homework now. Zoraida, you have our homework.

[Zoraida] We have our homework. I would like you to pick an ensemble story that you think fails, and explain how you would have fixed it.

[Dan] There you go. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

[Mary Robinette] Oy. Have you checked out the Writing Excuses 2022 cruise yet? We've got all the details about guests, dates, and destinations at writingexcusesretreat.com. This will be the 10th workshop we've done. We'd love to have you join us.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.6: Building Your Brand

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/07/16-6-building-your-brand/

Key points: Branding for your audience, staking a claim in the writing industry. What do you do really well that makes you stand out? How can you avoid being locked into a series? Make the fans follow your writing, not the series. What makes your writing unique? See what people are responding to. Your brand isn't necessarily the whole soul of your writing. The articulation of your brand isn't necessarily the message you want the fans to internalize. Take the highlights of your work, and turn them into pitches. Expand your brand into different genres.

[Season 16, Episode 6]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Building Your Brand.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. We are back here in our intensive course on publishing business, and we're going to talk about branding and what kinds of things we need to think about. What do we mean by that, Brandon?

[Brandon] So, this is something that I have come to realize I think about a lot more than most of my writing friends. Which is, when I was breaking into the business, and even still, a major idea in my head was how to brand myself to my audience. How to stake a claim on a part of the writing industry or part of the continuing dialogue or great discussion that is the publishing… A genre. Right? I very deliberately wrote a bunch of books and decided what it was that I did really well that made me stand out. I made that a major feature of my career. What this allowed me to do… My goal from the get go, I looked at the careers of a bunch of different authors and I identified some that… Whose career path I didn't want to follow because they would often talk about being locked into a series, a certain series, and being only… People only wanting to read that one series from them. Then there are other authors, Neil Gaiman is a great example of this, that whatever that author wrote, the fan base went and read. I realized Neil Gaiman had done a really good job of branding Neil Gaiman as a writer, rather than branding Sandman or branding any other thing, it was whatever Neil writes, people are going to go read. Nora, N. K. Jemisin, has done a really good job of this recently in saying this is what she writes and the feel of her writing and whatever she puts out, we're going to go read. Because we are into her writing, rather than branding to a series. Whereas some places that this happens the other way, a lot of YA writers I noticed accidentally fall into the series becoming the brand. So it becomes very hard, for instance, for Suzanne Collins to get another series or get people interested in something else. I have some other YA friends whose names I'm not going to mention because I don't know if they want me talking about this with them, but have released other books, not in a series that they are well-known for, and they just vanish. Even though these authors can demand huge advances and lots of attention when they write in their series, anything else they try just fails. I think this is partially a branding failure rather than their other books not being good, because I've read some of these other books, and indeed, they're very good.

[Dan] Yeah. I suspect that some of that, with YA specifically, is just the nature of the YA audience that has a very specific kind of blockbuster mentality that we don't see often in others. But this branding issue is definitely there. I've done this myself. The first year that I was on twitter, my twitter handle was John Cleaver. It was Howard, I think, that finally convinced me to change that out and become Dan Wells instead and really work about building my own brand as me. It's especially… I feel kind of especially stupid for doing that, because in terms of my actual books, I did make a strong effort to make sure that my second book series was as wildly different from my first as possible. So even if you're thinking about this in some areas, it's still an easy mistake to make in others.

[Brandon] Indeed. One of the things that really helped me in this was deciding what made my writing unique. Another… Pointing back to N. K. Jemisin, this is something very easy to see in others. Sometimes it's hard to see in yourself. What does Nora write? Nora writes stories that are in the traditional fantasy tradition but that are using modern literary techniques borrowing from literary fiction. Kind of making a blend where you have the characterization and pacing of traditional genre fiction and the literary styling of literary fiction, and kind of marrying these two together. Each book or series she writes finds a different way to marry a different type of literary flourish with a different type of science fiction or fantasy. The series that won all the awards was, hey, she's going to do a really cool magic system and marry it to somehow second person voice, right? Which is just like so literary, and it worked. For me, my branding, the thing that I did, is I said, "I'm going to be the magic system guy." I was writing a new world with every book I was writing during my early years. I really fell in love with writing these kind of rule-based magic systems, kind of sometimes called hard fantasy. I don't know if that term actually really works. But the idea is that you're going to get a really interesting take on magic that's very rule-based in every book of mine you pick up. I was able to pick that because I had written a bunch of books and known whatever I end up writing, this is something that I just naturally put into every book that I try.

[Erin] I would say, if you don't know that about yourself, you might be like, "I don't know, I'm just trying to write the things. What is my brand?" As you start getting work out there, either publicly or even with your own critique groups, is to look at what people are responding to. Sometimes you can learn your brand by having sort of other people put a mirror up to you. I, for example, I write a lot of racy dark work. I don't know that I would describe myself that way naturally, but when people over and over again are like, "Oh, no. Erin, I'm so excited about your next racy, dark thing," I'm like, "Oh. Maybe that's…"

[Chuckles]

[Erin] "A thing that I can cut out for myself." If you're all saying this and it's not in opposition to what I write, why not embrace it? I would also say some parts of your brand, you can't control. As a black writer, there are going to be certain maybe assumptions or things that people might put on you based on who you are that affects the way they see your writing. So not everything that someone sees in you, you have to necessarily claim as your brand. But it's good to know how people see you and decide what of that you want to maybe lean into and what of that you want to push back against.

[Brandon] That's really smart. One of the things that I want to mention that that kind of jogged in my brain, Erin, is this idea that the brand doesn't have to represent the whole soul of your writing. Honestly, like when I branded myself as the magic system guy, I made some deliberate choices on that. But in reality, behind the scenes, I'm like, "I really don't want to be the magic system guy. I want to be the really great characters guy." Right? That's what I think every writer wants. I want to be known for writing great stories. I don't want to be known for this little niche. But the way that marketing works, the way that writing works, the way that the minds of fans work is they kind of notice things that make you stand out. Hopefully, we're all doing great characters. So the fact that you do great characters who… Like, one of the things that's really great about Mary Robinette's writing is she has mature relationships between adults who legitimately love each other. That's not going to be in every book she writes. But it's a hallmark of her career. She's like, "I'm going to show how relationships can actually function." Because a lot of writers write dysfunctional relationships, because that's a source of conflict. Where she has actively said, "You know what, good relationships are also a source of conflict. I'm going to deal with these things." It's a hallmark of her writing. Doesn't mean that great characters aren't, but that's something that stands out. So the thing that stands out about you doesn't necessarily always have to be the thing that you're thinking of as the soul of your writing.

[Howard] There's a marketing 101 concept here that I've talked about before, but I think I need to reiterate. That's the idea that the articulation of your brand… I'm the magic system guy… The articulation of your brand is not the message that you actually want to be received at the subconscious level by the market. The subconscious level that you as a writer who wants to make money want to deliver to the market is, and I'll use my own name because of course I'll use my own name, "Oh, Howard Tayler. That's the guy who I buy all of his books." Okay? That's the message. Now, I can't come out and say, "I'm Howard Tayler. I'm the guy you want to buy all your books from." Now, part of my articulated brand is humor, and self-deprecatory humor. So I can actually get away with saying that thing and people will laugh. But that's not the same as the message being internalized. So what you need to do when you are building your brand is understand that at one level there are the things that you are articulating about yourself. I write jokes, I write humor that's in dialogue rather than situational comedy type things. Science fiction. I'm kind to people online. I try not to be a jerk. These sorts of things that I articulate about myself are things that get distilled down to the reader, and as they absorbed them, some of those readers will be like, "Oh, my gosh, it's a Howard Tayler thing. I just want that because I love his stuff." Others will be, "Oh. It's all silly. I don't love it. I'm not buying his stuff." The value there is that… And again, this is marketing 101 stuff… You really don't want your brand being in the wrong place. I don't want people who hate funny books to pick up my stuff and then be mad. Because now someone has a super negative association with me, which is that I wish I hadn't spent money on Howard's book.

[Dan] We, much later than usual, are going to stop for a book of the week.

[Howard] Sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's okay. I'm actually throwing this back to you, Howard. Because you have our book this week.

[Howard] I do. I do. The book is called Blowout by Rachel Maddow. You're probably familiar with Rachel Maddow's brand as a commentator on MSNBC. Blowout is a nonfiction exploration of the petroleum industry written by Rachel Maddow, and she narrates it. I loved the book. I mean, as a… At a high level, the meta of we have a commentator who is doing a book and this is an extension of the brand, that's all well and good. Understanding the way the petroleum industry influenced current events, influenced historical events, is not something that I had in my head until I read that book. It was fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. The audiobook is narrated by Rachel Maddow, which, she's easy to listen to and that's part of her brand.

[Dan] Okay. So that is Blowout by Rachel Maddow.

[Dan] Now, we don't have much time left, but I do want to ask a question. I love the way this discussion has been going, I love what Erin said about having other people help you find your own kind of brand identity. One thing that was pointed out to me several years ago that I had never intentionally done and had not seen on my own is that all of my main characters in all of my books across the six or seven different genres that I write, the one thing they all have in common is that they are all obsessed with an expert in some very specific niche of knowledge. I had not done that on purpose, but it's absolutely true. Even in my historical fiction that came out earlier last year. So, what I have not yet figured out is how I can take that piece of knowledge and turn it into a useful marketing message like Howard was just saying. So, Brandon, what advice can you give us of how to turn your brand into a marketable thing?

[Brandon] So, one of the things to do is watch… Erin mentioned this… What are people saying about your work. What are they saying as the highlights of your work? You, as a writer, are going to have to come up with pitches to sell your work. When you are sitting on a panel, when you are even just writing a blog post, you're going to have to give a three sentence pitch on each new thing you do. One of the ways that you can start making this a brand for you is incorporating these things into your pitches. So that your fans know how to talk about your books. If you were provided these pitches, then they will kind of start picking up on them. It's kind of this feedback, back and forth.

[Erin] I would say panels… The mention of panels made me think that if you are somebody who goes to… Who's able to go to conventions, they're a great way to… If you're able to speak on panels, number one, see where people place you is a good way… Sometimes it's random, but if you're on like 10 panels in a row about like unreliable narrators, maybe that's a thing that people associate with you. Two, you can try to ask for panels or on a panel, like, talk about the things that are within your brand or that mesh up with your brand.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's also a great way to kind of try out some ways of talking about it. Because most people are just going to absorbed the panel and go about their merry way. So you can kind of hone your messaging a little bit while trying to convey information about writing as a whole.

[Brandon] You can also kind of expand your brand. If you want to put something like I am the magic system guy, right? Well, magic system guy really focuses on fantasy. I wanted to write science fiction, and even I wanted to write some detective stuff. I thought a lot about how do I expand this to match what I'm doing in these other genres. So I actually have a couple of brandings. One is the Cosmere. I have an interconnected universe. So when I started doing my science fiction, I'm like I'm going to be doing a little bit of that. But there's also this idea that more than magic system, it's like these rule-based speculative elements that I was able to apply to my detective fiction. Because it's a… There's a magic system, even though there's no magic in the world. The way that the person approaches solving crimes is very like one of my fantasy novels, even though there's no actual magic involved. So being able to expand that brand and know how you can talk about these things in different genres is also really handy. Mary Robinette's another good example of this. Instead of branding as historical fantasy, she's now branding as I take some sort of cool historical item and then I change one thing. She's doing like a larger alternate history sort of thing rather than just doing fantasy. Now she's got science fiction in that and things like that. So you can still have… You can expand these things and make them umbrellas and cover a lot of things. Dan, you're… You talk about you've got specialists in your stories. Well, I mean, specialists, a lot of different types of genres use specialists. If you could find a way to say, "I do deep dives into topics…" Michael Crichton made his whole career about a team of scientists get together and have a problem. That works in a medical thriller as well as a science fiction as well as… He did the great train robbery, which is a heist, all with a team of specialists get into shenanigans.

[Dan] That is a very good point. Lots of good things to think about here. We encourage you all to work on this.

[Dan] We're going to give you some homework to help you work on this for yourself. Brandon?

[Brandon] Yeah. So your homework is to do something Erin was talking about, actually, is to go to your friends. You may not have readers yet, you may be newer, you may not have readers you don't know, but you hopefully have a writing group or you have alpha readers and beta readers. You have been sharing your work with them. Have them make a list. Impose upon them, hopefully it's not too much of an imposition, but say, "What are…" Ask them to write down the things that stand out for you as a writer in their mind. Do this with a couple of people. Because it's so hard to see in yourself. See what different connections and themes are showing up time and time again in those lists that your friends are making.

[Dan] Fantastic. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/20/15-51-feedback-when-to-listen-and-when-to-ignore-with-special-guest-mahtab-narsimhan/

Key Points: Prescriptive advice, suggestions about how to do it, are going to come your way. But when do you look for it? Until you show me you can articulate your reactions in a way I understand, I may not accept your advice on how to rewrite a scene. Tell me how you feel, then tell me how to rewrite the scene. Arrange your readers by the type of advice you want. Subject matter experts, sensitivity readers, tell me what's wrong and how to fix it. Most readers, just tell me your reaction. Editors, suggest how to fix a problem. When you get feedback, you decide whether to accept it or not. Follow your vision. How do you find people you trust to tell you what to do? Professionals. Agent, editor, writing group. Organizations can help, but you have to pick and choose. Audition, or vetting, process. Start with media you both consume, and see what they think of that. Reactions, fresh perspectives, the feedback echo chamber... stay true to your vision. You know how to fix your story better than anybody else. But be open to brilliant ideas from someone.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 51.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with Mahtab Narsimhan.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Mahtab] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon. Which I keep telling you and I'd like you to take that feedback.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, we talk all the time about how to give feedback, how to construct a good writing group, how to train your alpha and beta readers, and one of the points we hit on a lot is that what you're looking for in that feedback stage is reactions rather than specific prescriptive advice. But, as one of our listeners pointed out in an email, asking this question, "Prescriptive advice is incredibly valuable and we all do it and we all get it." So, we're clearly not saying ignore every suggestion that comes to you. What we need to talk about now, then, is how do you decide which pieces of advice you're going to listen to and which ones you're going to discard. When should you actively seek out that kind of specifically prescriptive feedback? So, first ideas, like, when do you seek it out? At what point do you say, "Hey, I need you to answer this question for me?"

[Howard] Approaching it from a different angle, until I have gotten reader reactions from someone and they been able to articulate their reaction to me in a way that I understand, I'm not going to accept feedback from them. If someone hasn't yet told me that this scene made them feel a certain way, I'm not ready to accept their feedback on how to rewrite the scene. I want to know that you can tell me how you feel before you tell me how to rewrite the scene so that you feel what you're supposed to.

[Brandon] Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. Although one thing I do is I kind of arrange my readers by what type of advice I want them to give me. For example, when I use a subject matter expert… I recently wrote a story about someone who's paraplegic. I went and I hired several people to read this story. To them, I said… They were paraplegic and I said, "I want you to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it, specifically, how this differs from your life experience in the life experience that you know other disabled people have. I want you to tell me." For other readers, though, I say I just want to know your reaction. I want to know if my characters are working and my story's working. The way you help me with that is by telling me your just feedback emotionally. I'm looking for different things from different people. From my editor, I want them to tell me what they suggest I do to fix a problem when they've noticed it, because I might not take that, but there's a much better chance that I will take it when it comes from an editor who really knows what they're doing.

[Dan] Let me follow up on that subject matter expert thing. When you've got feedback from them, how much of that feedback was just kind of the mechanics of daily life of a para… Someone who is paraplegic and how much of that was the story or the characterization are broken, and here's how you can fix those? Because that seems like it kind of straddles that line between subject matter and storytelling.

[Brandon] It was actually weighted toward the latter. I would have thought it would be weighted toward the former. But those things are very easy to fix. When someone says, "I usually keep a pole next to me so I reach things and pull them across the desk to me," that's like, "Oh, that's really handy. I will do that. That's an easy fix." But when they say something along the lines of… A piece of feedback I got on this piece which was really helpful was all of them noticed… They say, "We work in a community. We talk to other people." A lot of people write… When they write a story like I had done, they talk about this person in isolation, which is not how we do it. It makes it seem like this person is the only person who is paraplegic in the whole world. That's very common. I hadn't realized that's what you do, but of course, you're part of a community. I'm part of a community of writers. I'm part of a community of people who share a faith with me. I'm part of a community of people who are parenting. We look for people who have a shared life experience so we can help each other. This is something that I had done flat-out wrong that required a really big revisitation of how I was viewing the character and the story because it was just… It was flat-out wrong. That sort of thing was a harder revision, but it was also more surprising to me, and it's the sort of thing that needed a subject matter expert to explain to me.

[Mahtab] Okay. I would call those instead sensitivity readers. I mean, that's what happens when you're writing a piece, middle grade YA fiction, and your writing someone with whom you don't share the identity or a marginalized status or what have you. I mean, you just… You do not have a similar background. That's when you get someone who we call like a sensitivity reader, who's going to look at your story and tell you, "Okay. This is what it is," or "This is what you need to think about as you write." You said, Brandon, they're not in isolation, but sometimes when we're writing from an outsider's perspective, we almost make that kind of an issue story or the issue with that character is their disability or whatever. Sometimes having someone with that background read it often gives you a whole different perspective because they do not see it as an issue, because they're part of a community where this is not the center stage. You can get other feedback from it, but just coming back to your point, Dan, as to when do you seek feedback. When I've taken a story to a certain level and I do no more with it, is when I would actually send it out to my critique group. One of the good things is I have a group that has different strengths. Someone is really good with the big picture perspective. So they would like really look at the forest. There are some who actually look at the trees, and they go down to the bush level, and they will absolutely look at the pacing and the plot and the characterization. So that's when you take the feedback from these people which is… Each one gives you a different idea or a different facet of what your story is. Then once it comes back to you, I think the onus is on you, and it goes with your gut feel of should I accept this feedback or shouldn't I. If it does not fit with your vision, no matter who's given it to me, I would probably not follow it.

[Dan] Okay. I want to pause now for the book of the week, which we get from Howard.

[Howard] Yes. It's not really related to the topic, but I really, really enjoyed Dan Rather's book What Unites Us. Dan Rather has been a fixture in American and, let's be honest, world news broadcasts for… I want to say 50 years, at least 40 years. His experiences… It's kind of a retrospective of the way he sees the American nation and the people who are in it. I really loved it. I needed it when I listened to it. I don't know if you do, but the audiobook was quite good, and that was the way I experienced it. So I can't speak to reading the words on the paper with my own eyeballs and brain.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's for other people to discover. But the book is called What Unites Us by Dan Rather.

[Dan] Thank you.

[Dan] Now, the common thread between all of your comments in the first half of the episode were heavily kind of focused around this idea that you have curated your groups of people that you get feedback from and that you… When you look for specific feedback, you are trying to get it from specific people and for specific reasons. So let's talk just really quick about that. How do you find these people that you trust… Not talking about specifically subject matter experts or sensitivity readers, but just, in general, how do you find those people and how do you decide, yes, I trust what this person is going to tell me to do?

[Brandon] Well, with beta readers in particular, them, it doesn't matter, right? Because I'm not asking them to tell me what to do. So, people who tell me what to do, that I let… That I'm looking for, are professionals. Right? Which is a different sort of thing. I find my beta readers, generally, they are people who have been long-term friends, people who are active in fandom, or people that other beta readers have recommended. We do that a lot. We try to add a few new people every book that I do and not have everyone do every book, right? So we shake it up. It's just a process of watching who makes astute comments on forum posts about the books, who are active on our Facebook posts, those are the people I look for. But for alpha readers, they're giving me direct, fix this, I'm generally only looking at like my agent, my editor, or my writing group for that.

[Mahtab] I think, for me, I join a lot of organizations, and again, we've got forums, so you can connect with people on the forums and say, "Okay, I'm looking for… I'm looking for a critique partner," and everyone kind of just exchanges emails and then goes for it. In case… That's how I started with, but then, over the years, I kind of got closer to a group of people because they write similar stuff that I do, and I like their work and they like my work. So we kind of broke off and formed our own groups. But if you're looking at the children's section, SCBWI, CANSCAIP, these are the… I guess for the US, it's SCBWI, you join those groups, there are areas where you can exchange information and find critique partners. I would say, start out with maybe a chapter or two, see what the feedback is like, see if they're on the same wavelength as you are, before you go deeper down the rabbit hole, and then become good critique partners, because sometimes… What if you're not at a similar level or if the level of feedback that you're getting is not what you're looking for? Then that relationship or that critique is not really helping you. So you also have to pick and choose. Don't just say yes to anyone who says they're going to give you feedback.

[Dan] That kind of audition process, so to speak, I think is really important. Because, we've talked before about how to find fellow writers and form your little groups and things, but going through that kind of vetting process, of saying, "Okay. You know what, I really like your feedback," or "You're giving me feedback that I don't think is valuable," that's a big step. It can be difficult to say, "You know what, this relationship isn't working. I think we should break up."

[Howard] There is… To my mind, there is an easier and much lower pressure way to get to that point. That is to socialize… And I guess Zoom may be the way that we're doing this for the foreseeable future… Socialize with people right and who consume media that you consume, and talk about the things that you're consuming. If Dan and I both sit down and talk about The Mandalorian, and I say, "Oh, my gosh, it's my favorite Star Wars ever, because it's like a cowboy movie Star Wars," and I don't know what Dan's going to say about it. But if Dan's feedback about Mandalorian makes me feel like the two of us watched a completely different show, he's out of my group.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because… Not because he's wrong, but because connecting might be so very, very difficult. Initially, for seeking feedback, I want to get feedback from people whose critiques I'm able to understand. We both watched a movie and we both agreed, "Wow. The protagonist fails to protag for the entire first act, and by the time the second showed up, we were… We didn't like him anymore," and we both get that. Oh, yes, this is someone I… Because when they critique my work, I'll be like, "Oh. Oh, yes. You're right." And when you prescribe something to me, I'm more likely to get it. Now that, that initially is going to create kind of a bubble, and you want to branch out from that. But start friendly first, I think.

[Mahtab] Yes.

[Dan] Yeah. It is a very tricky line to walk, because you don't want to get into that feedback echo chamber. I always really value opinions that are different from my own. Because that, I think, is going to help me look for new solutions and new answers. But on the other hand, someone who is constantly suggesting ideas that don't fit with my style at all, that's not going to be valuable to me. So, it all comes back to this idea of just very carefully deciding who you're going to talk to. Well, I guess, who you're going to get that prescriptive feedback from. The person whose ideas are super different from mine, yes, give me all your reactions. Please. But when it comes to how am I actually going to change this, that's when I do tend rely on people who have similar sensibilities to mine.

[Brandon] Or, I would add, the further someone gets in the professional field of writing and storytelling, the more it seems they are able to help a story become a better version of itself, rather than trying to push it one direction or another. That's not to say that all agents and editors are perfect at this, or even all writing group members, but I've noticed that people who write a lot… For instance, Dan tends to be better at looking at one of my books and saying, "Here's what I think you're trying to do. Here's how to make it better." Where there are other people who are longtime writing group members of mine who like my books, who often give good feedback. But if you give them a book that's outside their normal reading comfort level, they'll give bad feedback on it. Where I've never gotten bad feedback from Dan, because as an industry professional, he reads a lot of things and even things he doesn't like, he can say, "Here's how I think you can make a better version of this thing that I don't necessarily like." Which is a really great skill for a storyteller to learn, I think. But it is not something you can expect from your average even writing group member, I think.

[Dan] I want to print up business cards that say, "Dan Wells. I will help you make a better version of a thing that you're doing that I don't like, even though you're doing a thing that I don't like."

[Mahtab] Where do I sign up?

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] But just very quickly to say something about what you said, Dan, was sometimes you can get that same feedback from the same group that you're with. So getting a totally fresh perspective, even if it does not gel with your own thinking, I think is very valuable. But at the end of the day, you have to decide am I taking it or leaving it, and that decision rests entirely with you. So you just stay true to your vision. No matter who gives you feedback.

[Dan] Yeah, well and…

[Howard] One of… Sorry. One of the things that Brandon said, the ability to say… As a critiquer, the ability to say, for instance, it feels like in this scene you are presenting me with a red herring and you want me to feel doubt about this and you want me to become convinced of this. If that's the case, you need to punch this bit up more and punch that bit down a little bit in order to adjust the balance. But if this isn't meant for a red herring, whatever, then ignore everything that I said. I will give feedback like that to Bob all the time, because I don't know where Bob's book is going. But I will tell him this is my response and this is where I think maybe your levels need to be set. Bob will smile and nod, and I have no idea if he's going to take my advice or not. But he knows what to do with it.

[Dan] So, as a final word, I suppose more than anything else, I just want to give you as a writer permission to get prescriptive feedback, to take suggestions from other people. Don't feel like we have told you you're not allowed to. I do believe that at the end of the day, you know how to fix your story better than anybody else. But that doesn't mean that someone is not going to come along with a brilliant idea that will solve your problems for you. That does happen, and absolutely be open to those experiences.

[Dan] So, let's end with some homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. Bear with me.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You're going to want to do this with a friend. Okay? Step one. Each of you prepare a quick written critique of a movie. Maybe one… I mean, they can be different movies, but something that you've watched and has problems that you're willing to critique. Now. Share your critiques with each other, swap them. Now you take the critique that your friend gave of this movie… Oh, and when you wrote the critiques, you anonymized it, you didn't say like character name, you just say like protagonist or antagonist. Anyway. So you get this feedback from this movie. Now. File as many of the serial numbers off as you can. Set it down next to your manuscript and treat this bit of random, utterly random, feedback as if it was aimed at your manuscript. Why are you doing this? So that you can see what absolute nonsense looks like with regard to your manuscript AND so that you can have the broken watch is right twice a day experience of "Oh, my gosh. That thing that you said about the phantom menace applies to my book."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, no. It may seem really weird, but by doing this, what you're going to do is refine your filters for the sort of feedback you receive and it's going to knock you out of the box and maybe make some of your writing better.

[Dan] I really like this homework. I think it is a cool idea to teach you how to sort through the value of a bunch of feedback. So, cool. Anyway, that's our show for today. Thank you so much for listening. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.34: Writing Deliberate Discomfort

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/23/15-34-writing-deliberate-discomfort/

Key Points: How do you write when parts of what you are writing make you uncomfortable? Cursing, sex, violence, racism, misogyny? Where is the discomfort coming from, and is it desirable? Do it on purpose. Signpost what you are doing. Let other characters balance. Don't kick the puppies! Consequences! Be aware that for marketing, this may be hard to place. You may be uncomfortable, but you may also be hurting specific readers. Listen to your beta readers. Make sure you have thought through the discomfort, and you are doing it for a reason.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 34.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Deliberate Discomfort.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Lari] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm definitely not that smart. My name's Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Lari] I'm Lari.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] We are very excited to have Erin Roberts back with us. I won't make you introduce yourself this time. But she's amazing.

[Dan] We want to talk about deliberate discomfort. This was a really fascinating question that came in from a listener, and I'm going to read it to you. It says, "What do you do when your writing includes elements that make you uncomfortable, but you're writing the story you want to write?" Someone asked this a while ago in the comments section in relation to a character cursing, but I'd like to ask this question in a broader sense. What if my mom reads this? This is uncomfortable to write. Thank you for submitting that question. I think this applies to so many things. Whether it is you are not a person who uses curse words, but your characters do. Maybe you are uncomfortable writing the sex scenes, or the violence. Maybe you're writing about racism or misogyny or something like that that makes you very uncomfortable. How do you deal with this as authors, as editors? Deliberate discomfort. For yourself, or for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] I think all of us are uncomfortable about jumping on this one.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, I've done this a couple of times. What I find is that there are… There are different degrees of discomfort, and you have to understand where that discomfort comes from, and also think about whether or not it's desirable. So there's the what will people think aspect of it. So, like, I have a story Cerbo en Vitro Ujo, which I've told my parents, "Do not read this." Like, I just… I don't want to have that conversation. That's a different kind of discomfort then when I am writing sexism in a novel, because that is stuff that I have experienced directly and I am putting things in that made me uncomfortable when they happened to me, and I know that they're going to make my readers uncomfortable in the same ways, hopefully, that I was uncomfortable, and that for some people, it's going to be even more painful than that. So… And with those, I am like, that discomfort, I know that I'm doing it on purpose because I want to invoke that sense of "Oh, this is really… Oh, God." But other times, it is about making sure that I am reflecting the shape of the world. So, for me, it's really about interrogating why am I putting that discomfort in there.

[Dan] Yeah. I had to have this conversation with my editor with my historical novel, Ghost Station. There are two major plot points that kind of turn on sexism. The fact that the women in the main character's life, he doesn't necessarily respect them as much as he should or consider them as equals. Which sounds horrible, and it is horrible. What that meant was that for the first two thirds of the novel, there's a lot of kind of gendered language that I worked for 15 years to edit out of my own writing. Making sure to include more inclusive environments and cast of characters and so on. For this book, I was deliberately pulling back from that, so that we would be building this character towards the moment… Two different ones, like I said, where he realizes, "Oh. I screwed up because I have this massive blind spot in my life." I had my beta readers, I had my editor, I had the copy editors, all of them for those first two thirds of the book were like, "You did this wrong. This is a wildly sexist book." I had to say, "Yes. But it's on purpose. I know that it's painful to read. But that's what we're going for at the end, and it does pay off."

[Erin] One thing that I love to do and stories in general is write horrible people that are… I like to call them sympathetic monsters. One of the things that you have to do, or at least that I have to do, when I'm writing a like really not the greatest person, is to remember that there is a difference between the story the character is telling and the story that I am telling about them. Even in a first-person perspective. There, you can signpost out there that what they're like… I'm stuck in my horrible evil world, but you can still indicate by how other people see them and react to them, by what else you put in the descriptions of what they're doing, to show people that it's not necessarily… That you are not your character, and that they're something that you're trying to do, and that the discomfort is there for a reason.

[Dan] Relying on other characters is a good way of doing that. Because then you can still have that character, whether it's the viewpoint or a side character, expressing an opinion that you as an author disagree with, but then you still get to have the balance in there through the other characters.

[Mary Robinette] I think that one of the…

[Erin] I was going to say, you could also use objectives… So I do a lot of unreliable narrators as well. I think there's a similar craft there. If you take something objectively wrong, and the character is agreeing with it, it helps to show people that they're… Something is off in the way that they see the world and that there's… And that you realize the difference. They talk about it sometimes as like the kicking… Kicking puppies is always a good example people use in film. Like, if you have a character kick a puppy, and be like, "That's the greatest moment of my life," then you're showing… Everyone objectively agrees that kicking puppies is wrong. So you're showing that there's… That the discomfort of living in that character is something you know about, and that you know the reader is experiencing and you're saying that's on purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think also giving consequences to some of the horrible action that… Even if it's your protagonist doing it, like, not letting them get away with it is something that you can do to kind of mitigate that and indicate that it… This is not acceptable behavior, there are consequences. Lari, I'm curious. How do you handle this as an editor?

[Lari] Also… I wanted to point out from a market perspective, just how what Dan did with 1/3 of the novel being a misogynist character is not something that everyone can do at any point. I do think that there should be… There is discomfort for yourself, like we were saying, there is discomfort for… In terms of who's reading this. Then, I do think that when you're trying to break through, there are a few things that I would consider inadvisable. That is one of the things, if you just spend a lot of time in it. As incredible as the second and third part would be, if that's your breakthrough, that might be really hard to place.

[Mary Robinette] There was something that I recently saw someone say about Calculating Stars. I was like, "Oh, yeah. That's a really good point." It was on Twitter. It was a Black reader saying that she wondered when Elma's friends would get tired of her continually making the same basic nice White lady mistakes. And that she found it exhausting to read because she had to deal with it so much in her own life. I think that that's an important thing to understand, that when you put in something that's deliberately discomforting… Uncomfortable, that it is often going to be significantly worse for… Like the misogyny that Dan was putting in. That's uncomfortable for him. For me, reading that, that's going to be worse for me reading it because it is an environment that I live in all the time. So you do have to think about the cost that you're putting in there is that you are… You're not just making yourself uncomfortable, you're also potentially hurting specific readers. That… It's like is that… You probably need less of the deliberate discomfort than you think you do.

[Dan] I definitely want to dig really deep into this. Everyone's raising their hand, they have something they want to say.

[Dan] Let's pause first for our book of the week, which is actually a short story, and then we'll get back into it. Erin, you've got the story of the week.

[Erin] So the story of the week is The Lamentation of Their Women by Kai Ashante Wilson. It can be found, I believe, on Tor.com originally, and then it was republished at PodCastle as an audio. What I love about this story is it wants to make you uncomfortable because it has a point to make. So it is a story that has curse words in it, it has violence in it, it has a really stark look at policing in America in it. It is something that… Where discomfort is used as a tool to try to be part of the story that it is telling.

[Dan] Excellent. That is The Lamentation of Their Women by…

[Erin] Kai Ashante Wilson.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you.

[Dan] So, yeah, let's dig into this. Being deliberately uncomfortable in your work is going to affect your readers. It is going to cause discomfort in them, and, like Mary Robinette was saying, it's going to be a lot more painful for some readers than for others. So why do we put it in? What is the purpose of this? What value does it have? I know Lari and Erin both have comments they wanted to make. Lari, let's start with you. What were you going to say?

[Lari] I was going to talk about the importance of beta readers. I think it's really important when you're writing uncomfortable scenes to have people who are in that group make some comments. They might be something that you want to incorporate or not. But sometimes it's a little hard to know where you are in that line. If… How far you've gone, how hurtful it might be. So I do think it's really important to have people make comments.

[Erin] What I would say, to build on all that, is that you need to do the discomfort work first. If it's something that you're not comfortable enough with to write well, and to really do the work and make yourself feel horrible and all that stuff, don't do it. Because… If you're not doing that work, you're putting it on your readers. It is unfair to ask readers to do work that you are not comfortable doing yourself. So make sure you're in a place where you can use that discomfort as a tool, because there's a specific thing you're trying to get out of it. I would also say don't do it as a thought exercise, like, "Can I write horrible people just for funsies?" When I do it, it's usually because I'm trying to make a point about the way that culture… Oppressive culture can warp the people within them. So for me it's important to show how a monstrous culture turns a person into a monster. But there's a point that I'm trying to make. I'm not just doing it like to see if I can.

[Dan] That might be valuable as a writing exercise. But if it's something that you are going to put in front of readers, then, yeah, I think you're right. It is important to have a purpose, and have a purpose in mind. Why am I including, for example, racial oppression in my fantasy world? It doesn't have to be there. I'm making this world up. So if it is there, why is it there?

[Mary Robinette] Within that, also, the… Like, again, that… It was just a single tweet. I don't want to make it sound like I'm spending my entire life… But it did make me sit back and go, "Oh, yeah." I knew that I was writing this book for an audience… For me. But this is a really good reminder that that also meant that specifically I was… As much as I want those books to be inclusive, that I was writing this book for a White audience. The realizations about race that are in there, that I… Like, I see a lot of people who are like, "Ah. I realize that I was doing the things that Elma was doing." I'm like, "Yeah. Yeah. That's… I mean, that is the realization that I want you to have." But Elma's realizations are all in there because I had friends who did the emotional labor to teach me. But that means that I have to recognize that any Black readers are also having to do emotional labor to like my character. That wasn't something… That was not a deliberate choice. Like, that part of it was not a deliberate choice. That's… That is the piece that I'm like… That was a thing that I missed when I wrote it. And that I'm trying to think about when I'm writing other things. Which doesn't mean that I'm going to leave out the discomfort, but I'm also… It does mean that I'm going to think about… I'm going to think more carefully about how much is necessary to have that character arc and growth. It's usually less than you think it is.

[Dan] All right. Well, let's have some homework. Lari, you have homework for us.

[Lari] I'm calling this an exercise in confession. It is a short story in first person about a character whose point of view you completely disagree with.

[Dan] Excellent. A short story or a paragraph, write something with a character you disagree with. Excellent. This has been… I've been looking forward to this episode because I was hoping for a great discussion, and we got one. So, thank you, to all of you. This was awesome. Wonderful listeners, thank you. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/23/15-08-qa-on-a-ship/

Q&A Points:

Q: What have any of you learned in the past year that has improved your craft?

A: Talk to your editor early in the process. Use an outboard brain. Do the hard thing. Take a chance, make mistakes, and do something because it might be fun. Go watch Lindsay Ellis Three Act Structure. (Maybe this one? https://youtu.be/o0QO7YuKKdI)

Q: My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?

A: Look at the problem, what is the barrier to moving the story forward? Make yourself a checklist, an inventory of things that can go wrong. Trust your instincts.

Q: As published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?

A: Committed idiot. Plan ahead, but publishing is volatile. Strategy, planning, but be ready to drop it. Be ready to jump in a different direction. Have a roadmap, and build a new one if you need to. Diversified income. Make plans for multiple scenarios, for whatever happens at cost points.

Q: How do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?

A: When you wonder if it's gone on too long.

Q: How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?

A: Learn by teaching. Externalize and explain, talk through the process.

Q: When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?

A: Identify different phases, and avoid doubling up on phases.

Q: If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?

A: Try it. See how it reads.

Q: What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?

A: The end is a frame, matching your beginning. Show who the character is now, how things have changed, and give the reader the emotional punch you've been aiming at.

Q: What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?

A: Rhythms that are linked to the character's personality, idioms, metaphors. Make the character feel specific and vivid.

Q: How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?

A: Experience and personal preference. What are you looking for in readers, how are you using them?

Q: My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?

A: Does it connect to your story? If a horse is just a horse, call it a horse.

Q: How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?

A: Agents work with people, not projects. If they believe in the person, they get lots of leeway.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Eight.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on a Ship.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] I've been on this ship for several days now.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Which is a lot longer than 15 minutes. We are here at the 2019 Writing Excuses Retreat on a cruise ship in the Caribbean Sea. Actually, right now we're in the Gulf of Mexico. We have a live audience in front of us. Say hello, live audience.

[Whoo!]

[Dan] Awesome. We have asked them to ask us some questions. Our theme this whole year is the questions of the audience. We've been trying to answer them, we'll continue doing that throughout. Now, we have some live ones. So, our first question. Tell us your name and your question.

[Caleb] This is Caleb. I'm wondering what any of you have learned in the past year that has improved your craft?

[Mary Robinette] What any of us have learned in the past year that has improved our craft? I actually learned the value of talking to my editor really early in the process. One of the things that happened to me this year was that I had a number of events that derailed me from writing. I was working on a novel, and my usual process did not work. So… When I say editor, what I guess I mean is using an outboard brain. My usual process was not working, because I kept having life things go wrong. There were some family members at hospitals, then we were moving, and it was just a lot of things. Going to someone else and saying, "I cannot hold this story in my head. Please help me focus." was immensely valuable and actually got me back on track.

[Dongwon] That's convenient, because the lesson I learned this year was to talk to my clients early in the process.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] To make sure that everything's on track. I think one of the things that I learned that kind of lined up with that is to not be afraid to push people to do the thing that is hard. Right? In that sometimes when you're giving editorial feedback, because you're working with somebody who puts their heart and soul into a manuscript, into a book, you want to be… You want to be nice, right? You want to go easy on them in certain ways because you like this person, you work with this person. For me, one of the things I had to really learn in this past year is to get involved early and don't be afraid of saying, "Is this really the right choice? Is this the best way to get where you're going?" Sometimes, breaking it down and doing the hard work is the most important thing. Whether or not that's going to make someone upset.

[Howard] For me, it was when I joined the TypeCastRPG role-playing game and decided that, you know what, for fun, I think I'm going to try to live sketch things that happen during the game. The pressure there being I need to turn out a… What is ultimately a single panel comic strip that depends on the context of the game in a minute and a half. Then we did a live show at [FanEx] and they set up an Elmo and I… To borrow the metaphor, screwed the courage to the wall and said, "I'm going to make terrible, terrible mistakes and I'm going to do it when my arms are 10 feet long on this screen behind me…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "But I'm going to do it anyway because it might be fun." It unlocked a piece of my brain that allowed me to visualize more quickly and draw faster and draw things I've never drawn before.

[Dan] Fantastic. Just, really quick for me, I talked about this in one of the classes that I taught here on the retreat, the Lindsay Ellis's episode about three act structure and the way that she explained it made three act structure work for me in a way that it never has before. So everyone go watch that. It's brilliant.

[Dan] All right. We have another question.

[Allison] Hi. My name is Allison. My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?

[Mary Robinette] I wish I knew the answer to that one.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's a really super common problem. The way I evaluate it is whether or not… Is to interrogate the quest… The problem that I'm having. I look at the problem and I'm like, "Okay. What is the barrier between me and moving this story forward?" If it's… If I can't identify a barrier, that means that it's probably me, it is not actually the story. If it is… Sometimes it is… There is actually a problem with the story that is really difficult to diagnose. That's when handing it to someone else to look at becomes useful. But most of the time, if I ask just what is the barrier that is between me and moving forward, or the character and moving forward, that will unlock what the problem is.

[Howard] I've found that, for a lot of people, by the time you reach a point in your writing career where you're comfortable answering this question, you may have moved beyond actually writing down the equivalent of a preflight checklist. But having a preflight checklist, having a way to take inventory of the things that can be wrong… They might be diagnostic tools like pacing, three act structure, character arc, conflict, seven point whatever… The sorts of things that we talk about here on Writing Excuses all the time. When I'm writing jokes, I have this sort of checklist. I've internalized it. But what I found is that when I'm stuck, I have to take inventory. A lot of the times, it's me. I haven't had enough sleep. I haven't eaten correctly. I'm exhausted because of an emotional thing. The temperature in the room is wrong and it's making me grouchy. This character is at the wrong point in their character arc for me to write the scene that I want to write, therefore, I don't feel justified in writing it. By the time I'm able to articulate these things, the unlocking starts moving really quickly. I can see where the problems are, and where the problems aren't.

[Dongwon] I think it's probably the most frustrating advice I give, and also the most important advice that I like to give, is that you need to learn to trust your instincts. Right? But this is a case where it's very hard to tell where the line between your conscious thought and your instinct is. So, the thing I think about a lot is what Howard was just talking about is the ways in which your conscious and subconscious mind are connected to your embodiment, right? So, a lot of things that can help you are really core mental health and mindfulness techniques, right? Meditation, yoga, go for a run, go take a shower, go take a break. Find something that uses up part of your brain so that your subconscious can chew on it. Then come back to it when you're feeling calm and relaxed and centered, and try and get in touch with what is your core emotion here? What is your instinct telling you, versus what is your fear telling you? Right? If that instinct is saying, "Actually, it's a structural problem here," then focus on that, and do that hard work. On average, if you're having that question, you're probably right, that the problem is bigger than I don't feel like writing right now. On average.

[Mary Robinette] I forgot that I have an entire blog post on this that we'll put in the liner notes. Which is… For those people who never go to look at the liner notes, you can search for it. It's called Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. I talk about how to diagnose the kind of delays that you are having and the kind of… Like, if your drowsy, it's probably that your story is boring. If you are restless, it's probably that you don't actually know the next thing that's going to happen or you don't believe it actually, I think. But, anyway, Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. It includes how to diagnose it, and then a long list of tools for when it is… The problem is not with the manuscript, but external to the manuscript, to your own life. Some things to help you move forward.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Next question.

[Matt] Hello, my name is Matt Chambers. My question is as published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?

[Howard] 10 years ago…

[Dan] Now I'm just depressed.

[Laughter]

[Howard] 10 years ago, I could have told you that 10 years from now, I would definitely still be doing Schlock Mercenary. Five years ago, I could have told you when the major Schlock Mercenary mega arc was going to end. Two years ago, I could have, but wouldn't have, told you how it was going to end and what all the book plans and plot plans were around that. This year, I am re-thinking all of that, because I was probably an idiot, but I'm committed, so I'm sticking to it in a blind panic.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Committed idiot is actually a great thing to put on my business cards. Six years ago, I had the very best year of my career up to that point, and since.

[Howard] Oh, dear.

[Dan] I thought at the time that I knew I would be doing six years later, and had no idea that one of my publishers was going to dry up completely, that one of my series was going to tank abysmally. So, kind of my answer to this is that it is very smart to plan ahead, but that this industry is very volatile. A lesson I did not learn early enough is how to plan around that volatility. The good news is we're going to have one, and possibly two, episodes on this exact topic later in the year with Dongwon about how to plan out your career and how that career can change and how to reboot it when it falls apart.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I love talking to my clients about strategy. A lot of times, what most of them are planning three, four… Not even books, like 3 to 4 contracts out, right? And a contract can be 2 to 3 books. So it's what are we doing here, what's coming after that, what's coming after that? The important thing, as Dan kind of touched on, is that you have to be sort of ready to throw all of that out at the drop of a hat, right? Publishing is extremely volatile, you have no idea what's going to happen when that book hits the market. So you have to be kind of ready to jump in a different direction. Sometimes you have backup plans, and sometimes you don't. But always have something… Some roadmap of where you want to go. Then be ready to build a new one when you need to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I… Much like everyone else, my plans change. The things that… For me, the metrics that have been working is that I have… I have kept my income stream diversified, so that's why I have three different careers running simultaneously. So that when one of them is not doing well, I can fill in the gaps with one of the others. I also think about the shape that I want my career to take. That, generally, is that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. Which means that if a really lucrative contract comes in, and I'm like, "That looks… I mean, the money looks really great, but I don't want to be pigeonholed into doing that kind of work," that's not… That is something that I can think about turning down, and that I can decide in the moment. I have a giant list of novels that I want to write. I won't get to write them all, probably. But I keep them. Then, I think, the last piece of advice that I was just given this past year… I was in an enviable position, which is that I had just won the Nebula and the Locus, and we were looking at the Hugo. I was like… People kept saying, "Well, you're going to win it." I'm like, "You can't think that. That's not healthy. Certainly not healthy for me." Then my agent, Seth Fishman, said I should think about it like applying to college. That you don't know whether or not you're going to get into college, but you make plans for both scenarios. You make plans for well, if I get into college, I'm going to need to be able to put these things into place. If I don't get into college, then these are the backup plans that I have and this is how I'm going to occupy my life. So I think that that's one of the things that is very useful, is to think about the possible cusp points in your career, and to think about positive outcomes for either cusp point. So that's… That has been very helpful for me. Fortunately, I did get into college, in this particular scenario.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it was also… Even the positive things can rock you if you are not prepared for them.

[Dan] Awesome. I want to pause right now for our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about a book called Jade War, which is the sequel to Fonda Lee's… Wait. Yes. The sequel to Fonda Lee's Jade City. I just had this moment of thinking that I had them backwards. So, I blurbed the first book, and the second book is every bit as fantastic. It is the Godfather meets like a Kung Fu wire film. It's secondary world fantasy, but it feels like 1960s or 70s Earth. But there are people who can use jade and they can do magic, except they don't think of it as magic, it's just part of an… It's just completely woven into the world. It feels so real that I am surprised that it is not. The relationships are compelling. If you are someone who likes a well-written sex scene, it is not the entirety of the book, but there are a couple in there that are some of the hottest and… Like, really beautifully drawn consensual sex scenes. The consensual parts is the part that I find appealing. But the…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Just the entire thing, it's great. It's Jade War by Fonda Lee.

[Dan] Cool. Thank you very much.

[Dan] Now, we still have several questions to get… Left. We want to try to get to them all. We're going to let this episode run a little long. But we're going to call this the lightning round, okay? So ask your question, and then one of us will answer it instead of all four. So, go.

[Cameron] Okay. Hey, guys, my name is Cameron. I was wondering how do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?

[Dongwon] When you wonder if it's gone on too long.

[Laughter]

[Dan] [Haha!] Excellent answer. Next?

[Chuckles]

[Caitlin] Hi, I'm Caitlin. How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?

[Mary Robinette] I learn by teaching. When I was a pup… Getting trained in puppetry, what my instructor had me do is he would have me learn everything with my right hand, he would teach me with my right hand, then he would have me teach my left hand how to do it. What he said was any time you have to externalize and explain what you're doing, even if it's to yourself, that it causes you to hone your craft and to get rid of the parts that aren't important. I find that when I am teaching students, even if it's someone that is a peer and just saying, "Hey, this is the thing that I've learned today." Even if they don't necessarily need to know it, but I'm talking through the process, that it makes me better at my craft.

[Jessica] Hi, I'm Jessica. When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?

[Dan] My answer to that has always been that I will identify the different phases that each project has to go through, and then make sure that I'm not doubling them up. So I'm never writing two things at a time, but I could be writing one while revising another or outlining another or editing or proofing or whatever it is. That way, it makes it much easier for me to keep them in my brain, because they're all in different parts of my brain.

[Kevin] Hi. I'm Kevin. If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?

[Howard] I love the way POV use changes in our culture over time. I think that that could work. I don't know that I've seen it done, but I've thought about doing it myself. I think that 20 years from now, that could end up being the rule rather than an exception, because these sorts of things are cultural. If it's what you want to do, go for it.

[Dongwon] I just want to jump in with one little note, is the thing I run into a lot from writers and in the writing community, is people think about POV really, really rigidly. So, like, if I start in third person limited, I have to stay that way all throughout. Whereas, I think, we're seeing a lot of things that are really pushing back against that. N. K. Jemisin's Fifth Season is a really great example. Even Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside, you'll see POV jump around from first person to third person, you'll see tense shifts, things like that. So feel free to really sort of experiment with the different perspectives and the different POV's that you have. You can drop into one just for a chapter or a scene, and then they can never reappear again. So, feel free to try different things and experiment and see how it reads. I think writers and crit groups are very focused on consistent POV. I don't think readers even notice.

[Emma] Hi. I'm Emma. What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?

[Oooo]

[Howard] Your Patreon.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, what I think about when I get to the end is it is a frame. I am framing something that I set up at the beginning. At the beginning, I made promises to the reader. One of the things that I promised them is that they would feel a certain way when they get to the end. So when I look at that last paragraph, I think about it as the beginning in reverse, the inverse of that. I try to make sure that I'm showing who my character is now, where they are now, and the ways in which things have shifted. Doing that in a way that makes the reader have that emotional punch that I had been going for through the whole thing. Like, if I had been wanting them to have a sense of dread all the way through, and then the catharsis of relief, then that last thing needs to contain relief. If I want them to still feel dread, then that last thing still needs to have dread in it. So it's a… For me, it's the frame, it's the button, and that's what I look for at the end.

[Jess] Hi. I'm Jess. What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?

[Mary Robinette] I can take that one.

[Dan] Do it.

[Mary Robinette] So. Coming from theater and audiobook, the thing about third person and the way… Is that it is actually still very much first-person in this real simple way. The narrator is telling a story to the audience. The narrator is sometimes very closely linked to a third person character, but even so, there is a storyteller who is speaking to the audience. What you're looking for with the voice are rhythms that are linked to the character's personality. If it is a tight limited third person, you want to use everything… You want to make sure that the idioms that you're using, the metaphors that they're using, that these are all linked to how they self define themselves. All of that is going to make the character feel specific and vivid in ways that aiming for the so-called transparent prose will not.

[Morgan] Hi, I'm Morgan. How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?

[Howard] Sad, sorry experience.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. I mean, that really is the answer. I know Mary Robinette and I, for example, have very different criteria as to who we count as an alpha and who we count as a beta reader. That… It all comes down to experience and personal preference, I think.

[Howard] For my own part, an alpha reader… When I've handed it to an alpha reader and gotten it back, I want to feel energized about doing the things that need to be done to fix it. I want my offer readers to energize me. My beta readers I want to be a little more critical and help me fine-tune things. But I'm fragile that way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm… Just to demonstrate that we are sometimes counter. The thing that I'm looking for in a beta… In an alpha reader is someone who is asking me the right questions to help me unpack it a little bit further so that the beta readers are getting something that is closer to the story that I'm trying to tell. The beta readers, I am using them as a general, but the alpha reader… For me, the alpha reader in this case is Alessandra Meechum [sp?], most of the time, and she is… She's what is sometimes called the ideal reader, which is that she represents the core audience that I am writing for. So when I'm writing, I am specifically writing to see whether or not I make her go, "Oh, I love this," or "I hate this so much."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That often pleases me a great deal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So it depends how you're using them. I'm using her to shape the story. I've spotted… Sometimes I'll spot someone in beta and go, "Oh. You also sit in that ideal reader category." There are some stories that I'm going to write at some point that she will not be the ideal reader for, and I'll switch out alphas for that story. But that's what I look for.

[Dan] It's worth pointing out that Alessandra is in the room, and beaming like the sun to be referred to as an ideal reader. So.

[Nick] Hello. I'm Nick. My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?

[Oooo]

[Dongwon] I would say only rename things if there's a big sort of… If it connects to the core of your story, right? If the question you're asking is about, I don't know, national identity, for example, then it can be very complicated to use an existing country or an existing sort of language structure. So… If… Unless you're asking the question of what is the meaning of horse, then I wouldn't rename it, right? But if you're trying to disrupt ideas of like what do we consider animals, what do we consider our relationship to them, what are beasts of burden, then that's a case where maybe playing with it would give you an opportunity to really do a lot more there. But, in general, if it's a horse, call it a horse.

[Matthew] Hello, my name is Matthew. How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?

[Dongwon] I wonder who's going to answer this one?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I don't know. Well, I'll take… No.

[Dongwon] The thing that I talk about a lot is that I work with people, not projects. Right? I sign a client, I don't sign a single book. So, the answer is if I believe in the person, then all the leeway in the world, right? That's something that we'll work together to make it right. What goes into that decision is hard to articulate in a lot of ways. But I have to be excited about this person's potential to do something really interesting… Even if they're not quite there yet. So there are clients I've worked with for years and years and years, and we haven't gotten out with anything. But we're still working together, we're still honing in on what the right project is… Or how to do X, Y, or Z. So, the answer is, it depends a lot on the person. The right circumstances, it's okay if that book isn't quite there, so long as I can see you're doing something interesting and I can see that you are someone who has all the chops, all the drive, all the ambition to get to where you need to get to.

[Dan] Great. So, that is all our questions that we have. I'm sure that there are many more burning in your hearts right now, but… Thank you for listening. We have a piece of homework for you. So, once again, we're throwing this to Dongwon.

[Dongwon] So, I think that the openings of novels are really, really important. It's a great opportunity to hook your reader. More than that, it's an opportunity to get someone to say, "Yes, I'm going to spend $20 or whatever it is to buy this book." So what I would like each of you to do is take the first line of your work in progress or something that you've finished and rewrite it three separate times. Make sure that when you write each one, it's not three variations on the same sentence. Try and shake those up as much as possible, right? Try a different voice. Try a different style. Try different… Even like points to start the scene and see what jumps out at you. What is the most exciting, what grabs you, what are you excited about to keep going with. I think that will tell you a lot about how your opening scenes should work so that your pulling the reader into your story as forcefully as possible.

[Dan] Perfect. Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.28: Warfare and Weaponry

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/21/14-28-warfare-and-weaponry/

Key points: Combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? How do you write it when you aren't the expert that some of your readers are? First, if you think it may be wrong, let it be a character who can make a mistake. Super soldier takes more homework to get it right. Second, pay attention (reading or listening) to people who "have seen the elephant." Talk to somebody who has been there. Search the online community, including YouTube historicals and recreations. Make it personal. Why is the reader going to be invested in this? The more you know about human beings doing human things, when you write about them in a situation not too far different from things you have seen before, you will get a lot of it right. Use extrapolation, add elements of technology, magic, or combat that change the way the game is played. Add wildcards to make it your story. Keep the lens tight, and focus on a few characters, even if the landscape is very wide. Give us someone to care about.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 28.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Warfare and Weaponry.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] We are going to talk about weapons!

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] This is actually one of my favorite topics, because it lets me talk about a hobby horse of mine.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] One of the big dangers with dealing with fantasy and science fiction, particularly when it comes to warfare, I find, is that, well, I don't have the time to become as much an expert as some of my readers in how to go about conducting war. I've never been in a war. This was actually kind of a bit of an issue when I was working on the Wheel of Time books because Robert Jordan had been in a war. He was in Vietnam. So the way he wrote warfare was very different from the way I write warfare. So my first kind of question for you guys is how do you approach, specifically, with this sort of thing, combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? Doing this right when you know that many of the readers out there are going to be better at this than you are?

[Howard] Um… The crutch that I fall back on forgetting things wrong is… I try and make sure that when tactically something might not be a good idea, might not be the best way to do a thing, I'm okay with that character having gotten it wrong. If I'm trying to write somebody as a super soldier who tactically gets everything right, I have to do a whole lot more homework, because that's the character that the actual soldiers in my readership will take issue with first. The… The second thing is there's an aspect to soldiering that no one who has not soldiered can really understand. The… It's a blend of adrenaline and esprit de corps and fright and thrill and… Often they talk about it as seeing the elephant. But compensating for that, you have to make sure that you have read extensively and listened extensively to people who have had those experiences. So that when you describe things, you don't describe… Especially describing feelings, describing things from a point of view character, you're not doing so in a way that an actual soldier will say, "Nobody feels that. Why would they feel that? You wrote that wrong."

[Dan] We give this answer so much, but that's because it is incredibly true. Talk to someone who knows what they're talking about. I've got a handful of police and soldiers that I will send something to, to alpha or beta read for me, if I suspect that I've gotten it wrong, which is most of the time. It's the emotions in battle. It's, for me, where I often fall down, is the tactics. I'll have a scene and they'll come back and say, "These are the dumbest soldiers ever. Why didn't they do X, Y, and Z?" I realize, "Oh. There's a procedure that's already in place for this common combat situation that I didn't know anything about." So having good reference points and readers who can help out is really valuable.

[Brandon] One of the advantages that we have right now that writers didn't have even just 10 years ago is a large online community that talks about historical warfare and battlefields. For someone writing fantasy, like me, I can go to YouTube and there's a whole ring of them. Some of the ones I watch are… There's one called BazBattles which is just historical battles, kind of showing the tactics that each general is using and why they were using them. There are people like [Lindy Mage? Lindybeige] and Scholar Gladiatorius [Schola Gladitoria]… I'm very bad at saying his YouTube channel, but they talk about historical battles. There's people like Shadiversity that just will talk about here is how a weapon was used in these sorts of things. They can be really handy. I will sometimes just go to some of these…HEMA, historical martial arts things and say, "All right. Let me see some people fighting sword against knife." They will have 20 bouts of people…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Doing a recreation for you, where they are fighting…

[Dan] That's fantastic.

[Brandon] You can see directly 20 times in a row how that battle might play out. It lets you write it.

[Dan] There was a BBC series… I can't remember the name, and I'll try to get it for the liner notes… Where there was a historian and his father who was also a historian. They were British. They would just go around to famous sites of battles in… That had taken place somewhere in England and say, "Okay. This is the hill. That's where this guy's army was. That's where this one was." So you got a really great sense of the tactics and how the terrain affected them.

[Mahtab] Writing for young readers, you don't have to get that technical, you don't have to get all your facts so correct, because you're writing for younger readers, and they are not as experienced as the adult readers. But what I like to do is make it very, very personal. One of the stories that was set in World War I was War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. That is actually told from the perspective of the horse, but of course, you have the young protagonist who really loves this horse. It's recruited by the Army, and the entire journey is about the horse getting back. It's… The thing is, you could have something as big as war, but you can make it very, very personal to the character. The interaction with how it feels to lose something and want it back and then kind of work that in. So, you're more looking at how it is personal… How that warfare is personally affecting your main character, as opposed to just focusing on the tactics or the weaponry. At least for us, I think it's a little bit easier than writing…

[Brandon] It tends to actually work really well, right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Like, one of the questions I wanted to ask is how you might have a large-scale war happening, but keep it personal. But I think you just got to it. Making sure that you're keeping your eye on why is someone really going to get invested in this. Often times, the reader's investment is directly tied to how invested they are in one character, or a set of characters, life through this battle and how they are surviving and what their goals are other than just staying alive, or does their goal just become I want to live through this.

[Dan] My grandfather fought in World War II, and he was specifically a supply sergeant. So all the stories he would tell us were about… They were not about battles, they were not about who won and who lost and who got killed. There were about we didn't have enough socks so here's how I found some socks so that our unit could have some and things like that. Which really gave me a different sense of how personal it can be, and the kinds of concerns that soldiers actually have. It's like two minutes of fighting and then three weeks of waiting around wishing you had clean socks.

[Howard] My grandfather fought in the first World War. He was born in 18…

[How old are you?]

[Howard] He was born in 1899.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He died in 1968. I never met the man. But he wrote, when he was… I think when he was in his 30s. One of his kids said, "Dad, you are always harping on these old guys who talk about their Civil War experiences, because obviously they've inflated them and whatever. Why don't you write a book about yours?" So he did. He wrote… In my family, we just call it PFC 1918. Because it is his journals from the year 1918 when he enlisted through his experiences in Europe. He did not see the horrors of World War I that we so often talk about. But he got there afterwards. His descriptions… Some of them are very emotional, and some of them are very clinical. Having never met the man, I… He doesn't write much in the way of emotion. But it's been an incredible resource for me because it's a point of view that I don't get from any of the history books.

[Brandon] Mahtab, you have a book of the week for us.

[Mahtab] Yes, I do. It's one that I really, really love, I read it quite recently, although the book is, I think, maybe three or four years old. It's called The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey. It's a dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. What I love about this is, it's basically a fungus has destroyed most of humanity. What it does, in terms of changing humans, is once it kind of infects the humans, they turn into cannibals and they just want to devour the other humans. This has basically destroyed most of civilization. But, just outside London, there is a small little place called Beacon. There is a lab that has been set up by a scientist who's rounded up these kids. They're called Hungries because the moment they smell humans, they just want to devour them. They're studying them to find out a cure to it. But, what I loved about it is this book needs a lot of expo. But it is… It gives you the bits and pieces just as needed. So it's a very, very close focus lens. It starts out with Melanie who is a Hungry. She is in this lab being tested. She just makes a joke, like. She's put in this wheelchair, strapped up, and then under the like a military watch with guns trained on her, this child who's probably about 11 years old is taken into the classroom. That just poses so many questions. It sets up the narrative, and you know you're in good hands. So the story is about finding the cure, being attacked by the remaining humans, and the conclusion is just so fabulous. I mean, it's unexpected yet satisfying, which is something you guys always talk about. This one really demonstrates it. So, The Girl with All the Gifts, M. R. Carey.

[Brandon] Excellent. Howard, I wanted to put you on the spot again. I know I've done this a couple times already in this episode, but you write military science fiction and you write about what it is like to live as part of a military group. But as far as I know, you've never been in the military.

[Howard] I never have.

[Brandon] So what… Are there things you know you've gotten wrong that our listeners might get wrong? That you have been corrected on, or that you've learned to do right? Or are there certain things, specifics, they have really helped you to get this right other than, of course, get some friends…

[Howard] The things that I got wrong… The things that I got wrongest, I got wrong early on, which was me poking fun at my ignorance by having ranks and forms of battle and whatever where it… I deliberately made it so it did not make sense. I stopped doing that. Because you can really only tell that joke once. It's a joke that I'm telling on myself. Those aren't funny for very long. Research, and a large part of what I get right, I got right because I spent 11 years in a dysfunctional corporate environment, and a top-down management structure that is dysfunctional is not unlike a military command structure under fire. Because a lot of those same hotheaded, emotional decisions, lieutenants that are kissing up, people who have more authority than they should and less knowledge than they should, all of those things existed in that environment. I got lucky when I extrapolated them out to the military setting that I had built. But ultimately, I come back to this idea that at least if we're writing about human beings, the more you know about human beings, the more you've seen human beings do human being things, when you write about them in a situation that is not entirely unlike something you've seen before, the odds are you're going to get a lot of it right.

[Brandon] One of the things I wanted to bring up in this podcast was talking about fantasy and Science Fiction extrapolation. Something you were talking about there reminded me of it. You mentioned you don't make a joke out of getting things wrong. One of the things I do intentionally is kind of along those lines, in that when I am building a situation in my fantasy books that… Even my science fiction book that just came out, Skyward, I am looking to have some elements of science fiction or fantasy technology or combat that will change the way the game plays out dramatically. To the point that it removes it far enough from the experience of a lot of the really historical readers, so that they can suspend their disbelief and say, "Well, maybe this sort of situation could never exist in our world, but we didn't have shard blades and shard plate and we were crossing these impossible chasms to try and reach this one goal." In that situation, taking what I know of warfare, applying it, and then adding some wildcards that make it completely into my control, really has been helpful for me. I know with Skyward, which is kind of based on starship fighter pilot stuff, that taking it a few steps away from the way that we fight by letting the starships have technology that we don't have allowed some of the fighter pilots that I gave it to to read to say, "You know what, this works for me, even though you're doing things we could never do. The fact that I haven't done this thing lets me just have fun with the story." Then, of course, they gave me the things that they had done that I was doing that I was doing wrong, so I could get those details right. But that mix is really handy for science fiction and fantasy in specific. Anything…

[Mahtab] There's just one thing I'd like to say, and I'm going to refer to a movie right here, which is the recent one, Crimes of Grindelwald, which there was a battle between good and evil, but when there is just too much happening, when there is no focus on a character, the readers or the audience do not know who to identify with, who to empathize with. I think that is a mistake, especially in war, because it's huge, there are many people in there. You may take the lens so far back that the audience is not left with anyone to care about. That makes it… For me, this did not work. So I would say that some of the things that you have to remember is although the landscape may be extremely wide, try and focus on at least a couple of characters. Make it personal so that readers can feel that, "Okay, this is something that I want, I care about this character, and hence, I want to go forward." Just coming back to the book that I had recommended, which is The Girl with All the Gifts. Melanie is a Hungry. At first, she's viewed with suspicion. You don't empathize with her. But, as the story goes on and the lens pulls back, you're still… It's very much still focused on Melanie and a person who was viewed with suspicion all of a sudden has to be viewed with trust. That little tip makes the story works so much better. So I would say even if you have a wide landscape, give us someone to care about.

[Dan] Another author that does this really well, particularly with warfare, is Django Wexler. He writes historical fantasy, very Napoleonic era, with cavalry and infantry forming a square and all these things. I remember one battle in particular where we were in one infantry person's head. When they all started firing, that kind of weapon reproduces so much smoke that all of a sudden, they couldn't see what was going on in the rest of the battle. He didn't change perspective, he didn't give us the Broadview, he stayed in the middle of that infantry square that was fully blind, just trying to listen. Are the horses getting close? It was really effective. Because it had that one single focus that we could stay with and empathize with.

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to call it here and give you guys some homework. I would like you to invent a powerful weapon that is not based on technology. I want you to take this to the side of technology. In fact, make it more powerful than technology in your setting could exist… The technology people understand, this is something completely un-understand… Non-understandable. I want you to invent this weapon, and see how society adapts to it. Try to build a battlefield around the idea of a weapon that no one even really knows what it can do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.04: Writing the Other – Bisexual Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/01/27/wx14-03-writing-the-other-bisexual-characters/

Key points: Writing the Other is aimed at encouraging writers to write characters who aren't like you, and giving you the tools and examples to do it right. Starting with bisexual representation. First, bisexual is someone who has an attraction to two or more genders. Beware bisexual erasure! Bisexuality is not a phase, nor is it a transition on the way to gay. Bisexual, pansexual, queer... the language is evolving. The power of the default often reinforces bi invisibility. Think about how to resist the default. Watch for treating one kind of relationship as a joke, while the other is serious. Remember that people are not just one thing, make them intersectional and real. Make sure you emphasize the positive! Remember that bisexual people are normal people. Be wary of making one kind of relationship real and meaningful, while the other kind are just sad pale smears on a bagel. Use sensitivity readers, too.

[Mary] Season 14, Episode Four.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Bisexual Characters.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Tempest] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[T. J.] And I'm T. J.

[Dan] Yeah. We have our wonderful guest with us today, T. J. Berry. What are we going to talk about today, T. J.? Actually, before we do that, why don't you introduce yourself?

[T. J.] Hi. I'm T. J. Berry. I'm an author of science fiction/fantasy mash ups. I… This is my second time joining Writing Excuses on the Writing Excuses Cruise, and I'm a long time listener.

[Dan] Well, that's awesome. We are excited to have you here with us. This is the first of a series that we are going to be doing. In previous years, you've heard a lot of the what writers get wrong podcasts. Those are awesome and informative. We wanted to do another series that was a little more constructive, where we give you great advice about how you can write these other things. This is the brainchild of Tempest Bradford. What can you tell us about the Writing the Other series, Tempest?

[Tempest] Well, basically, it's all about getting writers to understand that it is okay to write characters who aren't like you, and, yes, there are many ways to get it wrong, and to fall into the fail hole, but there are also a lot of ways to get it right. It's actually much better if you learn how to get it right from constructive examples. So that's what were going to be talking about in this series. We're going to be giving you tools to learn how to write these characters well, so that everyone is happy.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. So what are we talking about today?

[Tempest] We're going to talk about bisexual representation. I wanted T. J. to come on because I know that T. J. is a bisexual person, and T. J. writes fiction that has bisexual people in it. And especially since T. J. is in a relationship with a person who is not her gender. So, from the outside, it may look a lot like T. J.'s in a heterosexual relationship. That's one of the many sort of nuances of writing bisexual characters that I thought you would be a great person to talk about that.

[T. J.] Awesome. So, yeah, backing up just a little bit, and making sure that people understand what the definition of bisexual is. A person who is bisexual is someone who has an attraction to two or more genders. You can also use the language that it is yours and another gender. Outdated language uses binaries like attracted to the two genders. We don't really use that much anymore, because we've recognized that gender is a spectrum, so we don't use that. We don't use that binary language much anymore. Tempest, as you said, I am married to a cisgender man, and I have been for 21 years. But that doesn't make me any less bi. So one of… That segues really neatly into, one of the things that if you are writing a bisexual character you need to keep in mind is that there is a phenomenon called bi-erasure, by which, if specifically a person is in a relationship with somebody who is not of their gender, it can read as a straight relationship. Just because you're in a relationship with somebody who is not of your gender, does not make you necessarily straight. I am no less bi, because I am married to a man. So, as a writer, when you are creating bi characters, you should be aware of bi-erasure as a concept, and how to avoid it. Some of the things… Like the tropes that have been used in the past that contribute to bi-erasure that you should avoid. Treating bisexuality like a phase. Like, oh, this is just something you're exploring and then you're actually a straight person. Also, the reverse of that is… I've heard the phrase, and this was on Sex In The City, which I quite enjoy. They call bisexuality a layover to Gay Town.

[Wow]

[laughter]

[Dongwon] That show has not aged well.

[T. J.] No, it has not. Bisexuality is not a layover to Gay Town. Nor is it a stop on the cruise to Gay Town.

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] Bisexual people are queer people. So, for an example of the layover to Gay Town in television and film, think of Buffy's Willow. Buffy's Willow, for four seasons, dated guys. Then, all of a sudden, in season four, she declares, "I'm gay now." Which can be a thing that happens. But it also can lead to bisexual erasure. She dated men, and was clearly happy dating men, and then all of a sudden was like, "Click. I'm gay." So, yes, those things can happen, but because bisexual people are so infrequently represented, when that changeover occurs, it erases her bisexuality. So be aware of that when you're writing, and have bisexual characters who are visible and who are seen and who are treated as bisexual and queer people. Now, I kind of use those terms a little interchangeably. A lot of that is personal preference. Somebody may use the term bisexual, someone may use the term pansexual, which is similar, but not exactly the same. Pansexual, generally, is someone who's attracted to all genders. But some bisexual people are also attracted to all genders. The language on this is evolving constantly.

[Tempest] It's very just layered and nuanced, right? Like there's…

[T. J.] Absolutely.

[Tempest] There are a lot of people who like adamantly, are like, "I'm pansexual because bi means this." Bi doesn't actually mean that, but like, for them, bi meant that, and they're like very much like "No! I want to be sure that I am inclusive of everything."

[T. J.] Exactly. A lot of this is what word feels right to you. Some people will just simply use the word queer as an umbrella term. That's fine too. Yeah. Some people have started reclaiming bi even though it has that bi in it. People get really thrown by the two prefix, by it. People are really reclaiming it to mean two or more genders.

[Dongwon] If I can jump in for a second.

[T. J.] Sure.

[Dongwon] One thing I want to talk about a little bit is sort of the mechanics of how bi invisibility gets reinforced in fiction. It's a thing that we see happening a lot when dealing with any kind of marginalization is there is the power of the default, right? Whenever you're not explicitly stating somebody's sexual orientation, their gender identity, their racial identity, there's going to be a lot of pressure for your reader to automatically assume that they are whatever the default is for the culture that they come from. Here in the US and in the West generally, it's often cisgendered white heterosexuality. So when you have a bi character dating someone of the… A different gender or of the opposite gender of them, then there's going to be that default assumption that they're hetero. So, what are some of the ways that we can flag that in an explicit way to sort of resist the default being assigned to those characters?

[T. J.] Absolutely. An example of something that happens… I know we all love The Good Place…

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] But along your line of tagging, Eleanor often makes jokes about how attractive she finds Tahini in The Good Place, and that is great, but the creators have explicitly said that she is not bisexual. So it is treated as a joke, and she's not tagged as bisexual. So that's a way that bi-erasure can be enacted in our popular culture. Because it's played… Sometimes relationships between two people of the same gender are played as a joke, whereas the opposite gender relationship or the different gender relationship is played as serious. That's a way to erase it. So if you are having a bisexual character in a work that you're creating, make sure that you're treating with the same seriousness the relationships of all genders.

[Dan] Right. This is actually a whole that is very easy to fall into. The third Pitch Perfect movie did exactly the same thing. Or, no, it was the second Pitch Perfect movie. Where there was, similar to Tahini, a female character who was very tall, very attractive, and very dominant in personality, and the main character was constantly making these kind of joking references to attraction, that were never actually taken seriously. So it does show up a lot, that people do that thing.

[T. J.] Sure.

[Dongwon] We see it between male characters as well. I was thinking of anytime we see The Rock and Kevin Hart on-screen together…

[Oh, my goodness.]

[Dongwon] There's always that sort of like little bit of attraction tension. That's part of what makes their comedy duo work. But it always is played for sort of this queer panic laughs. That's very frustrating.

[T. J.] The laugh is, exactly as you say, it's just a nervous laugh. Like, "Oh, we wouldn't really want that to happen." But yes, we kind of do.

[Dan] All right. Let's pause for our book of the week which is Space Unicorn Blues by T. J. Berry.

[T. J.] Yeah. So, Space Unicorn Blues came out July from Angry Robot Books. The pitch is a disaster gay in space cooperates with a talking unicorn in order to deliver a time-sensitive magical cargo to save humanity from a coming apocalypse.

[Tempest] I love it.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Every single piece of that sounds amazing.

[Laughter]

[T. J.] I'm not sure when we'll actually air this, but if by then the sequel is coming out in May of 2019. It is called Five Unicorn Flush. Our disaster gay is back with all of her friends. Now she has to protect a planet full of magical fairytale beings from humans who want to colonize and exploit them.

[Dan] Fantastic.

[Tempest] [inaudible] go wow!

[Laughter]

[Dan] That is Space Unicorn Blues by T. J. Berry. Where can people find that?

[T. J.] People can find it online, Amazon, bookstores. It's really delightful to go into bookstores and find your own book.

[Tempest] Isn't it, though?

[Dan] It's a great experience.

[T. J.] As a new author, that is my greatest joy.

[Dan] It's wonderful.

[Dan] All right. Well, let's get back into this. One of the things we really want to focus on is that what we're here to do is to give you, as an author, you can use to port… If you choose to use bisexual characters, here's some great ways that you can do it well. So what are some things that they can keep in mind or include in their fiction or in their descriptions so that they can do this right, and do it well?

[T. J.] Sure. So one of the things that I highly recommend is that you make your characters intersectional so that… People are never just one thing. So you may have a bisexual character, but keep in mind this character may also be disabled. They also may be Latino. They may come from a marginalized… A background that hasn't been explored fully. Make sure your characters are intersectional and real. One of the things I'd like to talk about is there's a book by C. B. Lee called Not Your Sidekick, which is a YA book. Really fantastic. The heroine is Asian, she is Vietnamese Chinese-American, and she's a bisexual teenage girl. So you've got a lot of different things going on. That is what happens in people's lives. People are never just one thing. She is the daughter of superheroes, but she has no superpowers. So she gets an internship with a local super-villain. So we're basically looking at sky high but queer, which is amazing. One of the things that's done really well in this book is not just the inclusivity, but the intersectionality. So you have someone who is Vietnamese Chinese-American and is dealing with be… The cultural implications of being second-generation and her bisexuality. So intersectionality is something that writers should definitely take a look at. Another thing is positivity. Make sure that if you have bisexual characters, that they are not just… This goes for marginalized characters in general. Make sure they're not just receiving the brunt of homophobia, racism. Make sure you are showing the positive sides of their lives. A book that really does this quite well is Passing Strange by Ellen Klages. It's a novella from Tor.com. It is of 1940s San Francisco and it has magic in it. So it's really delightful. The LGBTQIA representation is fantastic. The characters are very well-rounded, and they… She is able to touch on the realities of queer life without making it a tragic gay story. This is a positive, uplifting love story where we see some of the discrimination and hardships that come with this life, but also things go well in the end. So, make sure that you're not doing the usual trope of burying your gays, which means that your gay characters are disproportionately killed off in your narrative. Make sure that queer people have happy endings, and that they also find love. Those are some things that you can definitely look at to make sure you're doing the right thing. Also, make sure your bisexual people are just normal people. There is a stereotype that bisexual people… This was more in the past, but still it kind of pops its ugly head up now and then is that bisexual people are promiscuous. This is… Just because bisexual people have a larger dating pool doesn't necessarily mean that is true. Bisexual people are soccer moms, you know?

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] Just write that into your narrative as daily life. People are married, they have domestic lives. Not everything is necessarily clubs all the time.

[Tempest] Right. It isn't always about like their sexuality.

[T. J.] Right. Exactly.

[Tempest] Another thing I want to mention is if you are going to have a bisexual character that is going to have relationships with people from multiple genders, it's really important to not privilege some relationships over others. This is a mistake that I found in Torchwood, which was supposed to be a very bisexual program. I wrote a whole essay about this, so I won't go into like all the things about Torchwood that made me mad. But, like, one of the core things was how even though Capt. Jack Harkness was bisexual, omnisexual, or whatever they were calling it at the time, it was very clear that the relationships that he had with men were like real impactful relationships on him as a character, and the relationships he had with women were like sad pale like smears on a bagel in comparison.

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] Exactly.

[Tempest] It was… That's like a problem that Russell T Davies has in general when he's writing bisexual characters. That may be in part because he, as a gay man, is like pulling more from his… Like his relationships that are deep and whatever are with men, because he is gay. So like he sort of transferred that to his character that was supposed to be omnisexual. So, I would say, like… You don't have to have your bisexual character having relationships with multiple people to prove that they're bisexual in your work. But, if you do decide to have that, if you do decide to have multiple relationships, make sure that like it's clear that all those relationships are meaningful. Not just some of them.

[T. J.] Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the last things… I cannot enough stress the importance of sensitivity readers. On this last book, Space Unicorn Blues, I had the services of five sensitivity readers because it is a fairly diverse book with a lot of intersecting marginalizations that are not mine. I'm going to quote [me sea schall?] here, who I love very much, who says, "There is a difference between writing a diverse set of characters and telling someone else's story." So what is helpful is if you can get a sensitivity reader who can come in and say, "No, you are telling someone else's story that maybe you should not be telling." I know Mary Robinette has told the story many times about she had a book where she was telling someone else's story and decided to pull back on it. I cannot stress enough how important it is, because even certain turns of phrase that you will not recognize as problematic, someone who is own voices will look at this and say, "No, you should not use this particular word." It may not be a very problematic word, but the phrase itself may be something that indicates something that you would not know as a member… As not a member of that community. So hire sensitivity readers, and pay them.

[Dan] Absolutely. We want to stress the whole purpose of this series of episodes is to tell you that you can write these kinds of characters. We want you to write these kinds of characters. It benefits the entire industry, the more of this that we have. But there are those lines that are easy to cross and hard to notice if you're not part of that community.

[Exactly]

[Dan] That's why sensitivity readers are so valuable.

[Definitely. Definitely.]

[Dan] I wish that we had more time. We really need to end, though. T. J., you've got some homework to give us.

[T. J.] Yeah, this is an easy homework. You don't have to write, but what I would love for people to do is find the 100th episode of Brooklyn 99. They have a canonically bisexual character, Rosa Diaz. On the 100th episode… Which, by the way, a 100th episode of a show is a big deal. So to dedicate the hundredth episode to the coming out of your bisexual character is a really fantastic thing. This is her coming out episode, and she talks to her family members. Not only is it difficult, and she has a really tough time getting through it, it has to happen multiple times. This is something that people who are not queer may not understand is that coming out is not a one time thing. It's multiple conversations in multiple spaces, and sometimes with the same people over time. So Brooklyn 99 handles this beautifully, and I would love for people to take a look at how they did it.

[Dan] Well, that's awesome. Thank you very much. This is been a fantastic episode. Thank you very much to T. J. for being here.

[T. J.] Thank you.

[Dan] And, of course, Dongwon and Tempest for joining me here. This is Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.38: How to Find and Use Alpha Readers

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/09/23/13-38-how-to-find-and-use-alpha-readers/

Key points: Alpha and beta readers? Alpha readers, you trust to read a rough draft, to be honest and give you helpful feedback. Beta readers read a more polished version and you get their feedback. Or, alpha readers are industry professionals, while beta readers are test audience. Alpha readers are agents and writing groups. "You'll have your own definitions." Alpha readers understand the form. Where do you get them? Writing conferences. Book clubs. Face-to-face or online critiques? For alpha readers, back-and-forth, face-to-face is better. Beta readers, online feedback is okay. Don't forget targeted experts! Be aware that bad critiquing can ruin books! To get the right feedback? Make sure you and the other person can argue and articulate different opinions and understand what the other person is saying. Send it to the right people. Ask your readers to just give you their reaction, you will diagnose the problem. Look for people whose strengths complement your weaknesses. Use tiered questions, get their reaction, then drill down for specifics. Put pins in the good parts! Use targeted beta readers, who are as close to the character's experience as possible.

( Who wants to read this? )

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Valynne] I'm Valynne.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm… Um… I haven't actually finished today's chapter yet.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Valynne, you were going to define for us alpha, beta readers, that sort of thing.

[Valynne] I think sometimes people call them… Use that… Use alpha beta interchangeably. To me, on alpha reader is generally maybe one person whom you trust to read what you're writing. It's not polished, it's just rough draft. You throw it at them, they tell you what they like. You trust them to be honest and trust that they will give you feedback that is helpful. Beta readers, I would say, I like… I consider a beta reader someone… It's at the… Your manuscript is at the stage where you've gone through, you've done some edits, you've polished it a little bit more, and then you're sending it to beta readers to get their feedback. These people can be other writers in a critique group, it can be family members, it can be friends. I think it's good to have someone who is going to give you honest feedback and good feedback such as other writers in a critique group.

[Brandon] We'll talk about how to get that out of them.

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] Then, also, have a cheerleader. Someone who just loves everything you write. I think writing can be hard, so it's nice just to have someone who tells you what things they absolutely love about your writing.

[Brandon] So, today we'll talk about kind of alpha and beta readers. Because you'll have your own definitions, listeners. I have a starker line between them than Valynne. Alpha readers are industry professionals. Beta readers are test audience. For me. So, for me, if you are my agent, you're an alpha reader. You are reading a book before it's done to give me feedback. A beta reader is, you probably aren't an industry professional, you're a fan, you read the book to just give a reader response when it's in a close to finished form.

[Dan] That's kind of how I split them up as well. Because the two groups give very different kinds of feedback. There are people that I use as beta readers that I know if I send them my first draft, all the advice and all the feedback they give me is going to be weird, and often going to be wrong. Because they don't know how to read a first draft. They will identify big problems that I know are big problems and they will start suggesting solutions. That's not what I want. Instead, I send it to my writing group and to my agent.

[Brandon] So, let me ask you guys this. Where do you get your alpha and beta readers?

[Valynne] I think that one of the best ways to find critique groups, for example, is to go to writing conferences. Any… You're already among people who write and a lot of times are people looking for critique groups. You can do critique groups online. You don't necessarily have to live close to each other. So, I think that's one of the nice places to find someone to…

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. Do you usually use… Do you do in face critiques and Internet critiques, or do you do only Internet critiques? How's it for you?

[Valynne] When I first started writing, I used to do a critique group once a month. We would bring pages, we would sit… Everyone would come to the critique group with those pages read, and we would talk about… Give… Go person by person, give the feedback. These days, it's really hard to find the time to do those kinds of critiques, so we are still critiquing each other's work, but sometimes it's more a full draft of something that's about to go to print or something like that. So a lot of it is more online now.

[Brandon] Dan, where do you find them, and is it in person, online for you?

[Dan] My group right now is… My alpha readers are my agent, who I found by querying an agent. Then 2 other authors that I have just met at writing conventions over the years. Wendy Tolliver and Matt Kirby, who are both fantastic YA authors. We got together and formed a writing group. So that was just kind of networking interactions at conventions. A lot of… Like what Valynne's talking about. That's all in-person stuff. My beta readers, I've got a group of about 6 to 8 people that I will send every draft to once I think it's ready for public consumption. That's all online, and they will give me feedback online. I will also, for every book, have a group of kind of targeted experts that I feel like I need specific advice from. That changes book to book, but I think I can talk about that later.

[Brandon] We'll talk about that after the break.

[Howard] For me, alpha is in person, and beta can be in person but functions fine online, asynchronously. Alpha… And that, for me, that's the distinction. It's got to be completely synchronous communication with alpha because there's so much back and forth. When I'm critiquing Bob Defendi's work, often what I am telling him is I think this is what you are trying to accomplish with this chapter. I get the sense that that is what this chapter is for. I feel like it didn't do that job because of this section right here, it's kind of confused me. Bob can then respond and say, "Oh. Well, wow, it's really weird that you got that idea."

[Laughter]

[Howard] And off he goes. That kind of feedback we have to go back and forth, because when Bob brings it, he knows there are things in here that are broken and I need my alpha readers to identify them, and the alpha reader… Brandon, as you said, industry professional alpha reader needs to be somebody who understands the form well enough to be able to say, "I know what this chapter should be trying to do because of the form that I know that we're working within."

[Dan] Now, this, I think is dangerous. All of us use industry professionals for alpha readers because we are industry professionals at this point, and it is invaluable. Over the years, I have come to appreciate how important it is to have that back and forth conversation, when I can say, "Okay, this character doesn't work at all and I think it's for these reasons. What do you think?" And then the person, the author, will say, "Well, actually, this is what I intended." Those are very important. But I remember when we, Brandon and I, had our writing group in college. We were trying to do that and we didn't know what we were talking about, and we ended up ruining some books.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] Which I think is maybe just inevitable and part of the learning process, but it is something to watch out for.

[Brandon] It's way more dangerous for discovery writers, I've found, than for outliners. My books didn't get ruined, but I ruined books. Because I said, "Try this." Then they did, and it was the wrong thing entirely. Let me say where I've got mine, and then I want to dig into this question. My alpha readers are still my writing group, the same group that I started with Dan in college, but then he moved away.

[Dan] Ha Ha! I became too big for you. [Chuckles]

[Brandon] We approached Eric James Stone, and they still meet in my house every week in person. In person's really important for me. I have about 70 beta readers. We'll use a group of between 20 and 50 for each book. We do an online Google spreadsheet that goes… That is chapter by chapter with questions for them to fill in. The beta read for Oathbringer ended up being 600,000 words of comments.

[Howard] Comments? Ha ha. Yep.

[Brandon] Fortunately I didn't have to sort through them. I have people that sorted through and pulled out the important ones.

[Dan] I don't have people, so my process is a lot simpler.

[Brandon] Let me ask, this one's really important. That gets us into, and you guys are going to appreciate this. How do you get the right feedback from a critique group or from alpha beta readers? How do you get them to give you what you need and not ruin your book?

[Howard] One of the things that I've learned through experience just in talking with people is that I can tell if somebody's going to be a worthwhile critique if that person and I can argue about a book that we have both read and articulate different opinions on the book and understand where each other is coming from, even though we had different responses to it. It's one thing, "Oh, yeah, I loved this book," and then it's just how much we loved this book. But if we are each picking at a different aspect of the book… You know, if you sit down with your friends and have a book club with them where you are reading books together and allowing yourselves to critique the books, you will find alpha and beta readers in that crowd, I think, pretty quickly.

[Dan] When I… One of the things that I try to do is make sure that I am sending it to the right people. So, for example, when I write a horror novel, I will make sure one of my beta readers is Steve Diamond, because he knows that genre inside and out. So I know that the comments I'm getting from him are going to be the kind of comments I'm looking for. Where is when I write like my cyberpunk stuff, I don't usually send it to him, I'll send it to somebody else. So that's kind of an early level just filtering system. Beyond that, I always tell my beta readers, not my alpha readers, just to give me their reaction. Don't try to fix this problem, just point it out to me. Tell me what you liked, what you didn't like, and why. Then let me… You tell me the symptoms and I will diagnose.

[Valynne] The other thing that I like to do is that I am very aware of my weaknesses as a writer. So I like to give it to people whose strengths are opposite of what mine are. I think that is really helpful for me because I know there are things I just miss. If it were up to me, I would write a book that was straight dialogue all the way through. I love writing dialogue, and half the time, my editor is saying, "Where are these people standing? What are they doing?"

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] "What are they wearing?"

[Laughter]

[Valynne] I'm just not good with details like that. So I think it's good to… You know, other people have other strengths. Ultimately, we want to be strong in all the areas, but we still have our own strengths, and so I have someone who is really good at pacing, I have someone who is really good with character development, and that's… If I'm struggling with a particular thing in a book, that's how I send it out to a beta reader.

[Dan] Now, with… Very quickly, when we have those face-to-face conversations with alpha readers, I use Wendy and Matt, and I will sit down and I will ask them tiered questions. "I'm not very happy with this scene. Do you like it?" I won't tell them why I'm not happy. Get their reaction first. Then they'll say, "Oh, yeah. There's something wrong with that." I'll say, "Well, I think it's this. What do you think?" Just kind of get deeper with every question. So that I'm not leading them on, but I can drill in specifically.

[Brandon] We've found… It's very useful to get general reactions from a group, and then ask specific questions. That's a big difference between alpha and beta readers, to me, is alpha readers I can go and say, "All right. This is obviously broken. Why do you think it's broken?" Beta readers, I would never do that.

[Brandon] We have to stop for our book of the week. Howard, you're going to tell us about Death by Cliché.

[Howard] Yes. Actually, Death by Cliché 2, Wrath of Con. That's spelled c-o-n. Our hero is trapped in a role-playing game. Like in the game universe, not stuck at the table on Thanksgiving. Trapped in the game universe, and the players, he discovers, are at a convention. But that's… What convention they're at is actually irrelevant, what's relevant is the adventure that's happening in the story, and the horrors of what happens when someone has an artifact that lets them control the weather.

[Brandon] Can I pick up book 2 and read it?

[Howard] Yeah, you can pick up book 2 and read it now. It's… I'm currently offer reading, I think, book 5 for Bob.

[Dan] Do you need to have read book 1?

[Howard] You don't need… Oh, sorry, that's the question. You don't need to read book 1. You don't need to read book 1. It reads very nicely as a comedic fantasy novel.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Somewhere, Bob is shouting, "Yes, you have to read book 1!"

[Howard] But you should buy book 1.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because supporting living authors.

[Howard] One of the things that I wanted to bring up about that whole series from Bob is that our writing group has changed over time as he's written these. What we found is that Sandra is the one he's going to for character motivation and often sensitivity reader issues, and I'm the one he's going to for wordsmithing, joke-smithing, the setups of the funny bits. The most critical piece that we've discovered as we've critiqued is that when there are things that we love, we put smiley faces in the manuscript because… Not just because Bob needs to be told, "Yay. You're a good writer. See, this part didn't suck."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But because when you are editing, it's easy to lose track of the things that made a chapter wonderful. We want to put pins in those so that they don't get broken during the edit process. That was long, sorry.

[Brandon] That's all right. Bob's a good friend of a lot of us here. We like him. He's funny and his books are funny. So you should all go read them.

[Brandon] You mentioned the term sensitivity reader, which Dan mentioned to me has been… kind of people have been shifting away from that.

[Dan] So, sensitivity reader is a phrase that became popular because as we started focusing more and more on diversity, and I know that Valynne wants to talk about this, so let me just say very quickly. We started… The idea is, if you're going to write about say a black person and you are not black, you are going to want to have someone who is read it so they can make sure that you are presenting their culture and their background correctly. However, we're not… Kind of the nomenclature is moving away from sensitivity to targeted beta reader, because really, it's just the same thing as I suck at writing cops, so whenever I write about police, I have two friends who are police officers or family of police officers that I give it to them and say, "Make sure that I got this right." It's the same thing in dealing with another culture or another ethnicity or another religion or whatever. So, just using one blanket term for all of them is a little more common now.

[Valynne] I think that the word targeted is very important because I think especially when were talking about writing diverse characters, we often tend to approach it like it's a paint-by-numbers, which it's not. It's not I know a Japanese person, I'm writing a Japanese character, so this Japanese person I know can represent the entire Japanese culture and everyone in it. For example, I was talking to Brendan's sister-in-law this morning and explaining that I am fourth-generation Japanese. What that means is that I do not speak Japanese. I am pure Japanese, but I do not speak Japanese. My experience is vastly different than someone who is first-generation Japanese whose second language is English. So, targeted means that when you're writing a character, try to find beta readers that are as close to that character's experience as you can get. Because you need to understand like the generation of the character, the geographical location of the character, and how that affects the character. There are so many things that make a huge difference. So the more accurately you can target that to beta readers, the better chance you have of not offending anyone and just presenting it accurately and with respect.

[Howard] At this point, fair listener, you probably recall several episodes we've done this year under the general heading of What Writers Get Wrong About, with that whole idea that as a writer, unless you have a subject matter expert, whether that's an astronaut or a police officer or a third-generation Taiwanese person, you are likely to get things wrong unless you have offer readers in that demographic who can help you get things right.

[Dan] Now I want… What Valynne said about being very specific is very important. I recently had a really interesting experience. I went down to Guadalajara for the book fair there, because I've got, among other things, one of my book series is about a Mexican-American hacker. The Bluescreen series. I used to live in Mexico. I have a lot of friends in Mexico, and importantly to this story, I used my Mexican friends as might targeted beta readers. They are not Mexican-American, they are Mexican. So the character ended up feeling very authentically Mexican, and the books have been huge in Mexico. The Mexican-Americans, like the Latino population here in the US, haven't really picked them up because it doesn't ring true to them. It rings true to Mexico, because that's who I used to make sure I got it right. So specificity is important.

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and do our homework which Valynne is going to give us. You wanted someone to do this. Right?

[Valynne] Homework is to take something that you have already written. Identify something within your manuscript that you can send to a targeted beta reader for.

[Brandon] And then do it.

[Howard] And then send it to them.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.48: Q&A on Novels and Series, with Brian McClellan

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/11/26/12-48-qa-on-novels-and-series-with-brian-mcclellan/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you write an ending that gives a sense of closure, but still leaves it open for more stories?
A: Make sure the ending is satisfying. Try introducing a cast in the first book of strong supporting characters, then have your satisfying HEA ending, and future books star other supporting characters. Wrap up most of the plot lines, large and small, but leave tantalizing bits. Finish this villian, but expand the scope for the future.
Q: If I write one book and it takes me a long time, should I put it out as a serial? I understand people put out serials or make their first book free to get people interested in sequels, but what if I don't plan on having a sequel? Is a serial a bad idea?
A: The serial is in a renaissance. Make sure the chunks are satisfying, with a climax, hook, and lead-in to the next part. Make sure you finish the story before you start releasing pieces, because you want to be able to revise early parts.
Q: For an unpublished writer, is it a waste of time to pitch a multi-book series, or should I focus on standalone works until I've gained some traction?
A: Best, to go in with a standalone that has series potential. Every editor wants a book to be standalone when they start reading, and a series when they end.
Q: How do you keep readers engaged, and coming back for more, between novels in a series?
A: Teasers! Short stories, novellas, anthology stories, even outtakes.
Q: For a first-time author, should a series be completed before looking for an agent, or is the first book enough?
A: First book.
Q: Do you ever find that you have this great outline for a trilogy, but when you go to write it, you find you've written the story for all three books in a short period of time? How do I fix this? Am I cutting too much? Am I missing more subplot?
A: Give it to test readers and see what they think. If it is moving too fast, add subplots, add character plots, add viewpoints. Check your try-fail cycles, and make it hard on your characters. Consider expanding on why your characters made the choices they made. Add set pieces.
Q: Is it possible to write a series as a discovery writer?
A: Yes. Make sure your ideas are big enough, and then go!
Q: What are some specific examples you can give of foreshadowing and how it works on a longer piece of writing?
A: Fix it in post! Make sure you foreshadow three times. But don't be heavy-handed. Don't forget the red herrings to go with your foreshadowing.
( One more question, and then... )

[Brandon] All right. So let's do the homework, which again, I have written down Dan does something weird.
[Dan] Yes. Okay.
[Piper] Wacky.
[Dan] So, this is Dan gets to be weird again. This is actually a game that you will hear on a lot of comedy podcasts. So, in honor of this being our series, closing out our series idea, I want you to take two books or two movies. Get suggestions from friends, make sure that they are whatever weird things. Then, that is going to be part one and part three of a series, and you have to figure out what part two is, in the middle.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Piper] That's fun.
[Dan] It's a lot of fun.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 6.28: Interstitial Art

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/11/writing-excuses-6-28-interstitial-art/

Key Points: Interstitial art falls in the interstices between recognized genres. Beware beta readers and others pushing you towards the genre of their choice. Write what is important to you. Dialogue with your readers can help separate "this isn't what I expected" from "I don't understand." Don't put yourself in a box unless you want to. Consider a local salon.
( between the cracks of the keyboard... )
[Mary] I thought you were going to do that. Oh! So, for your writing prompt today, try to write something that doesn't fit neatly into the boxes. Maybe pick a genre and look at it and go, "Okay. Well, these are the tropes," and defy them.
[Dan] All right. Well, excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with beta readers

Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

Writing Excuses 17.26: Hanging Separately

Writing Excuses 16.6: Building Your Brand

Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Nar

Writing Excuses 15.34: Writing Deliberate Discomfort

Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship

Writing Excuses 14.28: Warfare and Weaponry

Writing Excuses 14.04: Writing the Other – Bisexual Characters

Writing Excuses 13.38: How to Find and Use Alpha Readers

Writing Excuses 12.48: Q&A on Novels and Series, with Brian McClellan

Writing Excuses 6.28: Interstitial Art

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