wetranscripts | Entries tagged with caricature

Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/13/15-50-juggling-ensembles/

Key Points: How do you manage a large cast? In outlining, include the characters who are NOT going to be in the foreground, who are going to be left out. Start with a few, and then expand out. Don't try to treat all point of view and ensemble characters equally. How do you connect multiple different POV's in different places into a cohesive narrative. Common bits, e.g., dialogue. Groupings and teams! Don't exceed the reader's threshold for people and lines. Make sure every member of your ensemble serves a purpose in the story. I use multiple POV's for different places. Make sure your story is big enough to justify multiple POV's in different places. Switch to the POV who is in the most pain. Be careful of cliffhangers. Make sure the reader can follow your narrative, don't shift too many perspectives and timelines at the same time. How can one primary viewpoint character interact and build relationships with a large ensemble? How do you develop relationships without sending all the other characters out of the room? Don't treat all characters equally. Treat your ensemble cast like a group of real people. Use shorthand and cues to remind the readers who certain characters are. Sometimes caricatures work. Give the readers space for their imagination. One or two weird idiosyncrasies of character go a long way.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Juggling Ensembles.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We have questions from you guys about how to manage a large cast. This is tricky. I was not good at this early in my career. In fact, I have a story, I think I told you guys before, but when I first sat down to write the first Stormlight book, this was in 2002 before I sold any books, I failed because of the large cast. I wanted to do a big epic, like George RR Martin, like Robert Jordan, that had a large cast. I, even though this was my 13th novel, still crashed and burned trying to write this one. It didn't work until I had been handed the Wheel of Time and had to get up to speed on juggling a large cast very, very quickly. 2600 named characters in the Wheel of Time. That was like going to the gym and being like, "All right, personal trainer…"

[Howard] How many point of view characters were in the Wheel of Time?

[Brandon] 50, I think. Somewhere around there. How many main viewpoint characters? A dozen or so is what I would say. Maybe two dozen, depending on how you count main. So there were a lot.

[Howard] Using your gym metaphor,

[chuckles]

[Howard] There are people who go to the gym and overhead pressing 45 pounds, boy, that is a lot. Then there are the bodybuilders overhead pressing 450 pounds is also a lot. What you're talking about here really is the ultimate bit of heavy lifting. I don't… I haven't counted how many point of view characters there are in Schlock Mercenary, because the point of view is the camera instead of the character. But I think I realized around 2008, 2009, that my nascent outlining process needed to include which characters whose names I know, whose backstories I love, am I going to leave out of this book except for we get to see them in the background so that we know that they're not dead. Because unless I did that, my brain would latch on to the fact that oh, we haven't talked to so-and-so for a while, I should put them in a scene. That was a disaster. So, for me, large cast was about taking the huge cast, and then for an entire book, setting a different set of limits.

[Victoria] I mean, this is interesting. So, in the Shades of Magic series, I think I have four point of view characters in the first book, eight in the second, and 12 in the third. I like an expansion project. I like the idea that we can root in a few first, and then expand outward from there. I think it allows for focus. I also, though, and I think this will come up a few times, I'm a really big fan of not treating all point of view characters equally. They do not all get the same amount of pages. I have a primary cast, a secondary cast, and a tertiary cast. The primary cast always gets point of view time. But I'll throw in some secondary and some tertiary just to break it up. I don't think you have to treat all members of the ensemble equally from a perspective.

[Brandon] Do you get fan anger from that? Because I get a lot of it. From not treating my tertiary characters… People will read it and they'll write me notes and say, "I feel like I've been promised much more from this character, because my brief glimpses of them were so evocative. Why are you ignoring this character? Why do you hate this character?"

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] You know, that's one you can't win. Like, I love writing characters who are on page for maybe a page or two, and feel holistic enough, complete enough, that you can imagine that they're the protagonist of a different novel. I want all of the characters in a book to feel like they have legs in that way. But no… I mean, I get people who are like, "I want more of this person." I've been lucky in that I don't get the anger of it. Maybe when I… It's because in each subsequent book, I shift that a little bit and I give more space to the ones that I've established. I like having this almost ripple effect, where if a person is a secondary character in one book, they will have a primary status in the next book. So I'm almost seating them, letting you get accommodated to their presence in the room, so that then when I focus on them more, you already are like, "Oh, yeah, I know that dude. I'm really excited to learn more about them."

[Howard] That was the second season of Community, we're introduced… In one of the humanities classroom scenes, we're introduced to Fat Neil. Where John Oliver says, "Oh, Fat Neil." Neil says, "Neil is just fine." Then it's two or three episodes later, when we get Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where Neil's character arc is super important, and the fact that people are calling him Fat Neil is super important. But for that episode, he's… I thought… When I first saw that episode, I thought, "Who's cameo'ing? Why is that person important? He just now showed up, we called attention to him, I don't think I've ever seen him before."

[Brandon] So, one of the questions here is how do you connect multiple vastly different POV's into a cohesive narrative, especially when some characters might be in totally different places in the world.

[Howard] Common tone modulation. It's a cheat that I use all the time, where I will take words from somebody's dialogue at the end of a scene and I will work them into someone else's dialogue. They are literally an entire galaxy away doing something different, but I have picked this tiny thread that shows that there is a similarity between the two of them and away I go.

[Victoria] I like the groupings. I like physically grouping different teams. I like to think of them as my A Team, my B team, and my C team. Because we… Like as readers, we are trained that if you start showing different teams, we're waiting for the coalescing. We are expecting that at some point in the narrative, the teams are going to begin to physically cross, or they're going to begin to come together. I think that it is… There's a threshold for reader balance, where they can hold a certain number of people and lines in their mind at a time. You have to be very careful not to exceed the threshold for reader balance. That's why there are whole sections of George RR Martin books which focus on a narrowing slice of the cast. Because to ask them to hold all of the cast in their mind for a long time… One, you're diluting the impact of any one of your cast members. So I always encourage when people want to have a large cast to make sure that every member of your ensembles are serving a purpose in the story. But I love a good physical grouping.

[Dan] See, for me, the question about how can you handle multiple POV's when they're in very different places… That's when I use multiple POV's.

[Victoria] Exactly.

[Dan] Right? Because if they're all in the same place, then I'm just going to stick with my main character, and we're going to follow her. But in the Partials series, this is how I eventually started using multiple POV's. The first book is all Kira. The second book had to have a second one because we needed to know what was going on and she was in a different part of the world. Then, by the time we got to the third, I think I have five or six POV's because that is how I can show the different parts of the world. So, for me, this is less a question of POV than it is of is your story big enough to justify having people in all these different places at once.

[Howard] One of the most important things I learned recording Writing Excuses with Brandon and Dan during season one back in 2008, was the discussion of… I can't remember whose writing book it was, but the idea that the point of view character that you want to switch to is the one who is currently in the most pain. Because I'm writing comedy, and pain is funny. That is, it is a conflict from which I can always exact a punchline.

[Brandon] Another thing that's useful here is determining just how you use cliffhangers and not, particularly if there's going to be large spaces and large gaps. Different authors do it different ways. I'm not going to say there is a right and a wrong way, but I've found as a reader that having to keep track… Like if you… If the author doesn't tie it up somewhat neatly, before leaving this character for a long time, it's going to be much harder, because you're going to feel like this is dangling over you. Now sometimes you can be neat and still have a cliffhanger. Right? You can sometimes be like, "All right. This character, this thing's happened, you only have to remember they have fallen off a cliff." But if you have to remember they have fallen off a cliff while there in a political negotiation that has not finished and their loved one is over here with… And keep track of all that, and you're going to leave them for 100,000 words and come back, then you're setting yourself up for some failure.

[Victoria] This is really interesting. I learned this lesson through timeline. I tell a lot of alinear narratives, and I also have multiple perspectives in them. So I have multiple perspectives, multiple timelines. I learned that basically my reader could tolerate shifts between perspectives or shifts between timeline. Could not tolerate a shift from perspective and timeline. So if I wanted to follow a character's present and then into the past, I needed to come back to the present for I switched to somebody else's present. It's a matter of sandwiching. It's a matter of understanding that threshold for pain that a reader has in terms of like being able to keep track of the narrative. It's the worst reason to lose your reader is that they can't actually follow your narrative. They're like, "There are too many threads here. Those quote

[Howard] That is a great exploration of the difference between prose and other mediums. Because in comics and TV, visual medium, we can make this sort of jump and take the reader with us because we have text and we have video and we have audio and all of those things can be used to cue the change.

[Victoria] And you have palletes and you have everything.

[Howard] Color palette… All of those things can be used to telegraph it. But, yeah, in books, I really like the idea that you've limited yourself. You need to switch between all of these things, you're just not going to throw all of the switches at once.

[Victoria] You have to be very careful which switches you throw in which order, or else you genuinely will end up with a very confused reader.

[Brandon] Let's talk about a book this week by one of our favorite people ever.

[Victoria] This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, is one of the strangest, most beautiful examinations of perspective. I think it fits perfectly into this theme. It is an epistolary love story between two characters, Red and Blue, two women on opposite sides of an alinear, intergalactic, inter-spatial, interdim… Inter-everything time war. They begin leaving letters for each other. It is almost impossible to describe, and that is all right, because it is only… It is novella length. I read it on a single plane ride. I would recommend to everybody just carve out an hour or two in their evening or in their morning or in their lunch, at some point, and just sit with it and just devour it. There is something so powerful about it.

[Howard] Structurally, it's fascinating because you have two third person limited points of view and you have two epistolary points of view. So there are four POV, and they alternate very… Mechanically is the wrong word. Formulaicly. There is a formula for the delivery of these POV's. On my second iteration through that formula, in that book, I realized, "Oh. That is letting me perfectly keep track of where I am. That is brilliant." They used the pacing structure of chapter breaks to tell me who was talking and when and why and how.

[Victoria] It's a master class on a lot of the things that we discuss.

[Howard] It is so awesome.

[Brandon] So…

[Howard] This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and…

[Victoria] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Brandon] So, another question we have on POV takes this a slightly different way with these ensemble casts. One of our listeners has a character who is going to be the main viewpoint character. This character needs to interact with a lot of different people and build relationships with all of them. How do you give time to a large ensemble when you're using one primary viewpoint character and you need to characterize all these different people? One of the things this listener says is, "How can I isolate certain relationships for development without always having to send the other characters out of the room?" Which actually is a thing I think about a lot. Because I find that personally, I don't know if it's the same with you guys, if I have too many characters in the scene, I will naturally start to forget about some of them, and they just won't participate. If I get beyond about four or five people, characters start slipping, and I've realized I have to create scenes where if I have more than that, I have to use other tricks to tell the story.

[Victoria] Two things for me. Hierarchy. I don't treat all those characters in that ensemble equally, and I don't think in a relationship or any group of five or six or 10, that we all would have equal relationships and equal time. Two, one of my own personal favorites. I write characters who hate each other. The nice thing about writing characters who hate each other is that they're not terribly enthusiastic, even if they're on a spaceship or on a boat, they're not really great at being in the same room as each other at all the same times. So, remembering that in any group of 10, most of those people probably don't like each other equally and are going to gravitate into their own almost small subgroups. You have to remember to treat your ensemble cast like a group of actual people.

[Howard] I would ask our listeners to think about a time when you've been super happy that a friend of yours has fallen into a wonderful relationship. You are now the POV character for their love story. How do you write that? Because that's… If you have a single POV in your novel, and other people are falling in love, that is exactly what you're describing.

[Brandon] One of the other things here is the larger your cast gets… This isn't always the case. But the more often you're going to have to use shorthand to give readers reminders on who certain characters are. Some of these characters who don't get equal time with all the others, you're going to have to be okay the fact to just aren't going to have a lot of time to develop them. A great writer can take a short amount of time and characterize someone in a really interesting way. But then one note of that is going to stick in the reader's mind, and you have to remind them who that character is when they come back, and not violate what that note is.

[Dan] So, the novella that I wrote for Magic, the Gathering, has a fairly large cast of… By the end of it, six or seven main characters. They're… I did this trip with them. I gave them… Here's one or two identifying traits that will just be shorthand, because they're not main characters, they're there because they need to be there and they're flavor. It was really fascinating to me to read the editor's notes, because one of those, who's just a very thinly drawn character with one or two traits, that was the editor's favorite character. He's like, "I love every scene that this guy's in. His characterization is so strong." I'm like, "That's because he's a caricature." But that works. Don't feel like it doesn't work.

[Victoria] I'm going to say as well, I think that we don't always give readers enough credit or space for their imagination in these things. We feel the need to dictate all the details of characters, when the truth is, like, sometimes you really just do need a few cues and shorthand, and allow the reader to fill in, and kind of fill-in like smoke, spread out into that space. I am somebody who I'm not great with spaces, personally, and so I love the visual cues shorthand. I will use an article of clothing, I will use a color, I will use a piece of jewelry, and that will be the thing that tethers an entire primary cast in my readers minds to each of those characters. Yet, when I look at the fan art that comes in for the series, they're all identical. There's just enough there that they get the main pieces of it.

[Howard] Back in September when we talked about writing under deadlines, I mentioned the importance of falling back on craft. Dan, what you've described, that is absolutely a craft trick. You know you've done it right when your editor can't see the trick.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You know this is a very well painted cardboard cutout. But a trick of the eye, from the reader's perspective, ah, it's fully fleshed out.

[Victoria] Also, to that, beyond the physical details, giving one or two like kind of weird like idiosyncrasies of character can go such a long way with characters that don't spend a huge amount of time on the page.

[Brandon] It really can. It can be really, really handy. Sometimes I feel bad about doing it, because I'm like, "This character deserves their own book." But these are the things you have to do, if you want to have a large cast.

[Howard] This character deserves their own book, but I deserve to be able to write The End and turn this in for money.

[Victoria] Yep.

[Brandon] So, we're out of time, and this is our last podcast with Victoria.

[What? Oh!]

[Victoria] I've had so much fun, though.

[Brandon] But we're going to give you a last homework.

[Victoria] Yeah. So. This is a good old favorite of mine. I want you to take something that you've written, preferably something with an ensemble cast. Let's say a cast of at least three. We're not… It doesn't have to be a whole gathering, a whole gaggle. Take a cast of at least three, if you have a viewpoint character, or even in your mind a main character in this group, I want you to pick one of the other two or four or six or however many you're choosing from. I want you to think of how you would tell the exact same story, and, by shifting the leadership role, shifting the primary and secondary and tertiary roles around, so that this new character, hopefully a minor character you've chosen, is now at the center of the narrative.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Victoria, thank you so much.

[Victoria] Thank you.

[Brandon] You're all out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/24/15-21-writing-about-children-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

Key Points: Writing about children can be difficult, and you may stray into caricature. How do you avoid making fun of them? First, don't just transcribe what kids actually say. Try to give the sense of being children without hitting the reader over the head, especially in dialogue. Children focus on different things than adults. If you add grammatical issues, be sparing. Kids are sometimes overly precise, applying a rule everywhere. Why are you writing about a child, focus on the bits that enrich the story. Looking at the world as a child does can let you portray the fresh wonder of the world. The life experience, and stakes, are very different for children. When the protagonist is a child, or a teen, the stakes rise, and the tension, too. Consider kids as foreign visitors, trying to avoid faux pas. Teenagers are spies in adult country! Teens are not little adults, they are trying to figure out the transition from child to adult. Don't minimize their feelings. To write about kids or teens, you need to respect them. Pay attention to what is important for the story, and the relationships, how other characters react to what the children say and do.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 21.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing about Children.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guests, Shannon and Dean Hale.

[Shannon] Hello!

[Dean] Hi. I'm Dean.

[Shannon] And I'm Shannon.

[Brandon] Thanks, you guys, for coming on the podcast with us.

[Shannon] Yeah, it's great.

[Dean] Thank you.

[Brandon] You're going to tell us how to write about children.

[Shannon] Okay, let's do it.

[Dean] Awesome.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, this has been surprisingly hard when I've done it. I'm never sure if I'm going too far and it's straying into caricature. Like, I can usually tell for an adult when I've gone too far in a vernacular or a voice or things like this. When you're approaching writing about children, how do you keep away from making it… It almost seems silly to me. Does that make sense? Like, I'm making fun of them rather than actually writing like them.

[Shannon] It's actually… I've written… Where I've taken direct transcrip… Directly transcribed what my children have said, and tried to put it into a story. Our editors are always like, "That's too extreme."

[Dean] Nobody would be like that.

[Shannon] "No one talks like that. Come on!"

[Dean] What are these, monsters?

[Shannon] So you can't actually… Actually, I did write what I thought was a humorous slice of life story about our four-year-old twins. The editor legitimately thought it was a horror story.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] I was very… The notes were very confused. I was like, "Why is she saying… Why is she reacting…" Then, finally, she referred to it as a house of hell. I was like, "Oh, she thought it was a horror story. That's just our everyday."

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] But it is… You can't do exactly what kids do. Just like… But it's true with any characters. Dialogue would be really boring if we just transcribed what people actually say. So you have to get the sense that they're a child without hitting the reader over the head. Particularly in dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] What are some of the markers in dialogue that you find for believable child language? Is it a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, con…

[Shannon] You know… First of all, I would say children are very observant about things that adults don't care about. So for… Just what they talk about is going to be different. That can be so much fun. What does this kid… What are they interested in, what would they notice? So there are these non sequiturs that just kind of pop up. It's a great thing for humor. I would say also, just as with any character, if you want to have like grammatical issues for the kid, pick like one or two and stick with those. Don't hit the reader over the head with, like, weird grammar things constantly. Just have that consistency be for that character. Just like you would for an adult character who might have a certain quirk with the way they speak. You don't… You wouldn't do it every single sentence because it gets to be too much.

[Mary Robinette] When I was doing the puppet theater, we were often… I mean, the protagonist was always a child. One of the things that I found was that… Also, going into schools a lot, was that kids tended to be overly precise sometimes. That they would have learned a rule and they wouldn't actually have any nuance about how the rule was applied.

[Brandon] I've noticed this in my children. This is absolutely true for almost all kids I've met. That they… You tell them something. They want that to be the way the world works. They now understand the world. Then, when you immediately violate it, because of the wiggle room we give ourselves, they call you on it. I remember when my… He was only like three or four. We had talked about certain words that we don't say. Then we went to a Disney movie and they said like one word that was like this. Then, later on, that kid was describing the movie to my father… His grandpa… And said, "Don't go see that movie, grandpa. It is filthy."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It's like a Pixar movie, right? I'm like, "Oh. Okay. Yeah."

[Shannon] I actually wrote a chapter book that was based on our twins, and really tried to be true to what it felt like to be that age. My… I sent it to someone who didn't know it was about these twins. My response was that the character was unlikable and nobody would be interested in this child.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Your children are unlikable and no one is interested in them.

[Mary Robinette] She's also living in a hell house.

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] But it can be too much. You don't… Like, too much reality, nobody wants. So what do… Why a child? Why are you writing about a child, first of all? What are they bringing to it? So you focus on those little quirks, those little bits that can just enrich a story.

[Dean] The best part for me about writing from… As a child, because that's kind of where I go, is get into that headspace, is just looking at the world in a different way. It makes the story somehow more interesting. It's like that quote from… Was it GK Chesterton? That's about the dragon and the… I can't remember how it goes, but the idea that…

[Shannon] That… The quote you're talking about is GK Chesterton says that fantasy doesn't tell you if dragons exist. Fantasy shows you that dragons can be defeated. I think you're thinking of a different quote.

[Dean] No, I am… I'm thinking of the door one. That there's a…

[Shannon] Oh… Yes. So… Like a kid of 10…

[Dean] Go, quote.

[Shannon] Is interested in reading a story that says, "Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon." A kid of four is interested to read a story that says, "Tommy opened a door."

[Dean] It's finding…

[Shannon] Everything is still so new.

[Dean] Finding the wonder in those things that are sort of rote and old is… For… As a writer, is awesome. I mean, you can be able to kind of get that reinvigorated look at something from the other side.

[Dan] Yeah, that's what I did with Zero G, which was the middle grade that I put out. The plot is… I always pitch it as Home Alone in Space, but really, it's Die Hard in space with a 12-year-old. It's Die Hard if John McClane were super interested in how fun it was to jump around in antigravity, right? Like, that's his focus. He's always either trying to have fun or he's hiding from bad guys. Because those are the cool things that a kid is going to care about in that situation.

[Shannon] Yes.

[Brandon] So, when we were talking about this ahead of time, you mentioned the stakes are really different for children in life, which really struck me. Can you expand upon that? How are stakes different for children? How does that influence writing about them?

[Shannon] Children don't have the same… Well, life experience. But, just, they don't have as much in their toolbox. They don't understand how things work, they don't have the confidence, they don't have experience, they don't have a credit card, you know, they don't have… So when they're put in a situation, it's going to be totally different than if an adult were in it. You can get so much tension by having the protagonist be a kid. And a teen as well. Also, even if the main character isn't a child, if you insert a child into a situation, the stakes go through the roof. Immediately. Oh, we've got to save these people. Yeah, let's do that. Oh, and there's a three-year-old about to fall off the bridge. [OOOOH!] I mean, it just…

[Dean] We did that with Squirrel Girl. Like, we were like, "We need more tension here."

[Shannon] Let's add a baby.

[Dean] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dean] That's exactly what we did.

[Shannon] She's not just saving the day, she's saving a specific baby. Suddenly, it's like, "Yes, we need to do this immediately." I was… We were just watching Adventures in Babysitting last night with our kids. I was trying to explain to them, because I'm a nerdy writer mom that's explaining story to my children in the middle of a movie…

[Dean] Mom, we're watching.

[Shannon] I know. But, I'm like, "Do you understand why…"

[Dean] Pause.

[Shannon] If this was about adults, it wouldn't matter, because…

[Dean] Can we watch it now, Mom?

[Shannon] They've got a credit card, they can just get a new tire. But, added to the fact that all these things are happening, is the fact that they can't let their parents know. They can't make the most logical easiest way… Choice to get out of this situation because they can't let their parents know. An adult wouldn't have that same situation. So, the stakes are higher, the tension's higher, and then [you opt] for fun.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry, it just occurred to me… One of the things that I often say, like, when I'm talking about kids is that… What you said, that they just lack experience. But I think of them as foreign visitors. Like, when you come… When you go to a foreign country, what you want is someone to explain what the rules are so that you don't make any social faux pas. So, like, when I go into… When we would go into schools doing school visits with the puppets, the mob mentality was the thing you kind of had to fight. Because they would… Like, if one kid did it, everyone would assume that that was the thing you should do. But it occurs to me that teenagers are actually like spies who have come into adult country and don't want anyone to know…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That they're from the outside or child land. So they're desperately trying to not get caught is still being children.

[Shannon] Yes. Oh, teens are… I love writing about teens. I think a mistake a lot of writers make is they don't want… First of all, they don't want to be annoying. They don't want their character to be annoying. So they just make them into adults. They say they're 16, but they really just behave like adults. They're missing so much great story matter there. What matters to a teenager? What are they going through in their lives? But in addition to the science fiction adventure or whatever you're writing, you've also got that element of this is a person trying to figure out… Navigate that transition from child to adult. That's really interesting.

[Dean] I think one of the things that we do as adults, or at least that I do, is tend to believe or to minimize the feelings of the kids, or minimize the experience.

[Right]

[Dean] To believe here they are going through this thing that… [Adolescence?] Oh, that's ridiculous. How is that difficult? But if I go into writing it that way, it rings weird. But the kids are feeling with the same intensity or more than we would if we were put in… If we were plucked out of our familiar environment and put into an environment where we don't know what the rules are.

[Mary Robinette] It's stressful.

[Shannon] That's a good point, that you have to absolute… When you're writing about kids or teens, you absolutely have to respect children and teenagers. You can't…

[Dean] It can be hard.

[Shannon] It will come off as false if you go in thinking and judging them and being like annoyed with them and wanting to just make them older. Come in respecting their point of view or it will be false.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dean, you're going to tell us about The Princess In Black.

[Dean] The Princess In Black is a phenomenal…

[Shannon] Phenomenal.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Yes, it's a… Let me see if I think of another word that you can say. No, it… What's the type of book that we are calling it? It's like transitional chapter book about a g… Princess Magnolia who is a princess and loves being a princess and walks around in pretty dresses. But when the monster alarm rings, she becomes the princess in black, and puts on a black costume and goes out and fights evil. As a superhero would. There are many books in the series, some of them…

[Shannon] There are seven so far. Yes.

[Dean] Oh, and if… Wait…

[Shannon] [Gorgeously?] illustrated by LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] How close are we to Easter? We're past Easter. Because I was going to recommend, there's a hungry bunny horde book if you're celebrating Lagomorph Liberation or some other kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Day.

[Shannon] [A bunny horde book] belongs in every Easter basket.

[Dean] That's true. That's true. So, The Princess In Black by Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by…

[Shannon and Dean] LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] Something…

[Brandon] We love these books in our household. My sons just went straight through the whole series eagerly, so… They're fantastic.

[Shannon] Yay. Thank you.

[Dean] More coming.

[Dan] I purposely did not tell my children that I was hanging out with you guys today because they would have just blown a gasket. So.

[Shannon] I have to tell a quick story. One time I… My son borrowed a bunch of books from a friend. Several of them were Sanderson books. We were going out to dinner with the Sanderson's, so I brought my son's friend's books with us and he signed them to this guy. When I returned them, I was like, "Hey, just FYI, I saw Brandon Sanderson, so we just had him sign your books to you." He said, "Hold on a second." He ran upstairs, he ran back down, with all seven Harry Potter books and said, "Would you like to borrow these?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'll sign them.

[Shannon] That's not going to happen. But only because… Also, talking about Princess in Black in terms of writing about children, these kinds of books… There's lots of different ways to write about children. In some of them, we like get inside a kid's head and show the world how they're seeing it. In other ones, like Princess in Black, it's purely wish fulfillment fun. There are no adults in this world. So we're not showing children by comparison to what they're not. We are just having kids in adventures. So the way they talk and the way they experience things is a very different style than in some of our other books.

[Brandon] I want to circle back to this what you said before about respecting children as you're writing about them. Because I find this is a hard line to walk sometimes, because some of the things my children do, as we've talked about, you just can't put on the page. Like my children, I think all children, are basically sociopaths for a large part of their…

[Narcissistic sociopaths. Yup.]

[Brandon] Getting that across, getting across… Like, I love my 10-year-old. He's awesome. But he will not accept that the world is not the way he wants it to be. If we say, "You have to do this." He says, "No." We say, "But if you don't, your teacher said this." "No, she didn't."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? I'm like, "No, we have a piece of paper here." He's like, "She didn't say that. It doesn't say that." He won't accept it, it's right there. Like, evidence means nothing to my 10-year-old, right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because he says it's not. So, how do you do things like this in a story about children, but also respect them and not act like they're… There's this fine line between talking down or treating down and also presenting how they are. That line can be really tough for me sometimes.

[Shannon] Yeah. It is a really fine line. Honestly, if we really wrote children exactly as they are in movies and books, nobody would like those characters at all.

[Dean] They just really aren't likable.

[Shannon] But we love them in real life.

[Dean] Yes.

[Shannon] But you just can't show that.

[Dean] [garbled… The paranoids aren't there… The paranoia…]

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] It's insane. So you have to show the bits… We're always asking ourselves, what's most important for this story? So, what matters about this story? Then characters in service of this story. Also, I mean, I think the… I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times. The heart, the foundation of every single story, no matter the genre, is relationships.

[Dean] Relationships. Oh, yeah.

[Shannon] Relationships between characters is all that matters, ultimately. Everything else is set dressing. So how the other characters react to the children is equally important to what the children say and do.

[Brandon] That's a really good point, thinking about it. Like, that's another dynamic that changes your perspective. Asking what the stakes are, asking what are the relationships, how does the child view the relationships with those around them? Which is going to be very different, but still very intense and important than the way I view the relationships.

[Dan] Well, those relationships… I love what you said about that being the most important thing. To talk about my own middle grade series again, the second one, Dragon Planet, I had this fantastic plot built, of how he was going to go out and explore this brand-new planet and there were dragons on it and all this stuff. I'm like, "This is still so boring."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "Why is this Dragon book so boring?" Then just added in the little character arc was that the little boy is trying to get his dad to think of him as a scientist. All of a sudden, all of the stakes were there because that relationship was in place.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I think of examples of stories where… That do not have relationships. But all of the ones that I get really excited about, like, the ones that I read for… Certainly, I think if you have characters on the page, that if they are not having relationships, there is a problem.

[Shannon] I mean any relationship, not just romantic, but any kind of connection…

[Mary Robinette] No no.

[Shannon] Between other characters.

[Mary Robinette] I just… There's… This is a total digression, but there's a story that I love that has no characters on the page at all. So…

[Brandon] Once in a while.

[Mary Robinette] Once in a while. Once in a while, you can do it.

[Shannon] Any rule can be broken.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the honoring of the children is that… What I've found is that when I try to remember like specific incidents from my own childhood, rather than looking at the outside of the children… From an outside observer point of view, that it is often a lot easier for me to have them move through the world in a way that makes emotional sense.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There was something that someone said when they were… It was at an assembly. Like an art exhibit opening, and someone had brought their infant, and the infant cried. You could hear a couple people in the audience make a dismissive sound. But the speaker said, "I am so glad that you brought your child, because we've all been that child. We have all cried." It was just like, "Yes, yes. We have all cried." It's a good reminder that everyone can enjoy art.

[Shannon] Some of us have been the mom who desperately needs to get out of the house. But I can't leave without the baby.

[Brandon] Didn't you take the twins on tour with you?

[Shannon] I took my kids everywhere. Yeah. The twins, specifically, came when we shot the movie Austenland in England. So they were there for seven weeks with me.

[Brandon] On set?

[Shannon] Well, you know.

[Dean] When they let you on the set.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] All right. We're out of time on this episode. It's been awesome. Shannon, you're going to give us some homework.

[Shannon] Yes. So we talked about how the stakes change when you've got a young protagonist. So find a storybook or a movie that is about adults, and conceive of it as instead to be about a teenager or a child. Just write a paragraph about how that plot would change. What would… How would the heart of the story change if everything that happened in the book still happens, but it happens with and to a child?

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.50: What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/16/13-50-what-writers-get-wrong-with-zoraida-cordova/

Key points: We don't need just one of something, we need multitudes. Seeing yourself as a caricature all the time hurts at a very basic level. Don't just throw in random Spanish words, like Abuela. Different Latin countries, different families, have different nicknames for things. Subvert stereotypes, think about how you are going to make your character different. Read 100 books about a culture. Be aware that Hispanic and Latino has a lot of variations and range. The Dominican Republic and Ecuador are very different. Representation in what we create is important, both for the people who have stories about them, and the rest of us to have empathy with them. "Good representation is good craft."

[Brandon] Hey, guys. Just breaking in here before we start the podcast. This is Brandon, and I have a new story out that I think you might like. Little while ago, Wizards of the Coast came to me and said, "Will you write us something? You can write anything you want in any world that we've ever designed." So I was excited. I sat down and wrote a story called Children of the Nameless which is kind of a horror story-esque thing. It starts off with a blind young woman in a town listening as everyone in her town is murdered by something she can't see. So, you can find links to that on my website. It's called Children of the Nameless. Or you can go to Wizards of the Coast.com, wizards.com.

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm usually getting it wrong.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We are live at ComicCon Salt Lake City.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Brandon] We have special guest star, Zoraida Córdova.

[Zoraida] Hi, guys.

[laughter]

[Brandon] Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[Zoraida] Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited.

[Mary] So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Because one of the things were trying to do is make sure that people know that culture is not a monolith. So what's your background?

[Zoraida] So I am originally from Ecuador. I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I came here, I came to the United… Not here. We moved to New York when I was five. So I'm… I consider myself a… New York made. I am a writer, I write urban fantasy. I love painting, I love Star Wars, I love food. I do speak Spanish, but I don't… I no longer think in Spanish. That's a little bit about me.

[Mary] So, out of that stuff, are we gonna talk about Star Wars, are we going to talk about writing? What are we going to talk about?

[Zoraida] A little bit of everything, I guess. Whatever you want.

[Laughter]

[Mary] We're going to talk about being Latina in America?

[Zoraida] Yeah, let's talk about being Latina in America. I think that, especially right now, it's a little complicated because I grew up in a very, very diverse neighborhood in Queens, New York. I'm from Hollis. You recognize the song, It's Christmas Time in Hollis, Queens. I never felt like an outsider really. Because I… Everyone around me was a person of color or… Even if we had like white kids in school, they were like neighborhood kids, right? So I didn't… I was never aware of my otherness until I got into publishing. Because publishing liked to segregate books and genres for a little while. Like, my first novel went out on submission when I was 18…

[Mary] Oh, wow.

[Zoraida] Actually, 19. It was a quinceañera story, which… quinceañera are 16s, but with more pink and more cake and more family…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] And heels. But we got… It was the same time that Jennifer Lopez was published, like, had published a quinceañera collection, and there were a couple of other quinceañera novels. So our rejections were, "This is really funny, but we already have a Latina book for the season." I feel like… Nobody says that anymore. They say it… They use more coded language, but it's almost like… It's like the Highlander, right? There can only be one of something. Because I as the Latina, in publishing, represent all other Latinos in publishing. That's wrong. It shouldn't be that way. We should have multitudes. So that's… Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I never… I mean, I get some rejections, and they're never, "We've already taken books from bald dudes."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] Never comes up.

[Dan] We filled our white guy quota for the season.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] Yes. Yeah. So I don't… I think that things are changing a little bit, and I think that that has to do a lot with We Need Diverse Books, the organization that came out in 2014, I believe, May 2014. It started out as a hashtag. I feel like it's not to say let's replace white authors with people of color. It's just let's make the table bigger so that we can all have a seat. I think that that inclusive… Like that inclusive mentality is what's desperately missing from publishing. My book, Labyrinth Lost, is about a girl who is… She doesn't want power, so she casts a curse to get rid of it. Instead, she gets rid of her family, and sends them to another dimension. Oops.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] Now she has to go in get them back. But, above that, it's also about a Latina family, and how witchcraft is different from this culture. Right? Because they're brujas, which is the Spanish word for witch. At the end of the day, it's still a universal story, it's about family and sisters and having something bigger than yourself. But, it's still one Latina character.

[Dan] So, one of the things that… One of the side effects of this is that often when you see Latino characters being presented in media, they're not being written by people who actually are Latino. I'm guilty of this. I don't know if guilty is the right word. I've got an entire series where the main character is Latina. But. What do you see when you watch TV or you read books, and you're like, "Oh. That guy's never met a Mexican in his whole life." Like… What do people get wrong?

[Zoraida] People get the accents… In TV, people get the accents wrong, right? Like what is an accent… Ecuadorian speaking Spanish sound like? You've probably never heard it. But you've heard like Mexican accents or Colombian accents. If you watch Narcos, some Colombian people are upset because all the accents are wrong. But then again, you have a show, like Narcos, where like… They're drug dealers. Yay.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So that portrayal, the drug dealer, the… A book recently came out where a girl goes to Ecuador, and I'm like, "Yes! Ecuador's in a book. Finally. That I didn't write." She gets kidnapped, right? By these drug lords. I was like… It makes me… Like, it hurts. Right? On a very basic level. Because, like, seeing yourself as a caricature all the time… Latinos… Like, every time you watch a TV show, here comes the maid, and her name is Maria, and she gives you some wisdom. So it's the same problem with African-American people who have like the magical Negro who all of a sudden gives you a bunch of wisdom. Now you know, like, "Oh, I can finish my quest." That goes for all different cultures, right? We have these stereotypes. For me, and YA, it's always like the sassy best friend, or the super like curvaceous Sophia Vergara look-alike. Like, I'm sorry, I don't look like Sophia Vergara, like… If anyone's disappointed, like when you meet a Latina author. So, those are some stereotypes. I think that other ones that really bother me are when you can't establish a character… Your character's ethnicity, so you just throw in random Spanish words, right?

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] I recently read this sci-fi book, and the only way that you know that this character is Latina is because she randomly says the word Abuela. I have never used the word Abuela in my book. Because I don't call my grandmother that. I call her mommy. Because she's like my second mother. So that just shows like not doing research. Because different Latin countries use different nicknames for things. Like, different families use different nicknames for things. So that's really frustrating.

[Dan] My Latina character totally calls her grandma Abuela.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's the one she was talking about.

[Howard] That's a Puerto Rican or a Cubano…

[Zoraida] It just means grandmother.

[Dan] It's different in every culture.

[Howard] I know, but if there's a cultural thing… I saw this in a comic book recently. I wish I could reference it directly. Where a Latino writer put a very, very Latino Abuela in the book, and it is a beautiful, beautiful moment. I think it might actually be in a Hulk comic.

[Zoraida] Really? Well, the new Groot… Groot's grandmother is Puerto Rican. He comes from like the Ceiba trees, and… You know…

[Howard] I think that might be it.

[Zoraida] Are you thinking that?

[Howard] I think Hulk was in the book.

[Zoraida] Oh, okay.

[Dan] Oh, that's super cool.

[Zoraida] Yeah. I think that's really beautiful. There are ways to do it. But that's just craft, right? Like, as writers, we want to subvert stereotypes and we want to be like, "yes, maybe I do want to write about a sexy Latina and… But how am I gonna make her different?" One of my favorite stories is Selma Hayek, when she was in Dogma, she almost didn't get cast because Kevin Smith just saw her as like, "Oh, she's just like a pretty body and face." Then he actually talked to her and was like, "Oh, maybe there's more to you than this outer shell of what you're supposed to be in Hollywood."

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, although you've already kind of pitched it to us. Do it again. Labyrinth Lost.

[Zoraida] Labyrinth Lost is about a girl who sends her family to another dimension and then has to go and get them back.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Excellent. And… Um…

[Mary] So I had a question that I wanted to ask. As you were talking about some of these things that… They hurt and… I was wondering if you wouldn't mind… And the Selma Hayek story made me think of this. Can we dig into some of your own personal pain there a little bit? So you've… I'm going to extrapolate from a friend of mine who had grown up in San Francisco… Actually, no. She had grown up in Texas, as a Japanese-American in Texas. She had friends from San Francisco who were Japanese-Americans. They all went to Seattle to this very small island. The San Francisco women were going, "Why do these people keep staring at us?" She's like, "What? Are they staring?" Because she was so used to being stared at that she had just stopped noticing. So, growing up in a very diverse community, when you leave New York, what are the things that you experience that you think are probably media-based? That the… Experiences where it's like, "Oh. Oh, you've just explored…"

[Zoraida] So, I think… I haven't… I've been traveling for… I haven't been home in two months. I went home for a day last week, and then I came here. So traveling in different cities has been strange. I was in Atlanta, and I think that… Like, I don't know the Latino communities in Atlanta, but it's… People do look at you. Most of the time, I'm on my phone talking to… On my headset, so maybe that's one of the reasons. This girl's talking to herself.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] But sometimes it's just like maybe somebody has never seen somebody that looks like me walking in their neighborhood. I won't really go to Arizona, because I'm afraid of like somebody asking… Racially profiling me or something like that. Like, I just won't go there. So when I leave New York, I… I don't always feel unsafe, I don't… It's not that I'm afraid of being around other people. Like, I'm literally surrounded by you guys right now…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] But you're great. So I think that the problem is the language in our media right now about Latinos and about Mexicans and about like Puerto Rico and things like that. I think that has caused me to feel more guarded than I would have two years ago, right? Like, I'm always on the edge, and sort of like standing near somebody, like, "Are they going to say something inappropriate? Are they going to like…" If I'm on the phone with my mom, should I talk to her in English or should I talk to her in Spanish? Because like, if I'm talking in Spanish… You see these videos that go viral where somebody's like, "It's America. Speak English." I'm like, "Well, go back to England and speak English."

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] So like, it's just being afraid to do things that were normal to me two years ago.

[Mary] Right.

[Zoraida] That are a little frightening. If you look at the things from the earthquake right now in Mexico, there are these people… There's a photo of a 90-year-old man carrying boxes to help his neighbors. So, like, these are the people that our leader calls like rapists and murderers? Meanwhile, there are some of the most helpful people like coming together for a tragedy. Where do I fit in that? Because I'm not Mexican, but if you… I don't know what people see when they look at me. Because I only know what I see when I look at me. Hopefully, it's like good things right now.

[Mary] Your hair is fantastic.

[Zoraida] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Sorry we had to put the bandanna on it.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Zoraida] I like it. I feel like I'm at Woodstock.

[Brandon] So, say we've got a listener who says, "I really wanted to add some Latino/Latina characters to my book." Where would you say they begin? How do they go about that, doing it the right way?

[Zoraida] So… Just with writing, there is no one right way to do things. Right? I think that Cynthia Leitich Smith, who… She's a native American author. She says if you want to write about somebody, read 100 books about that person, about that person's culture. If you can't find 100 books, then are you the person to add to this? Right? That's one way. I think that with Latinos, you have to figure out… Don't say… Like, I'm not telling you how to write, how to say Latino, how to say Hispanic, but there are very, very different connotations. Like, I am Hispanic and Latina, because part of me is from Spain. But there are some Latinos who have no Spanish blood, they're still indigenous, or they're Afro-Latino. So, like, figure out what those things mean. Figure out what country they're from. Because even though we speak a similar language, although our accents are completely different, we have completely different histories. The history of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean is going to be different than the history of Ecuador in South America. So figuring out that there is no way to look Latino… That's one of the things that really bothers me, because when people think Latino, they think light skin or tan or… They don't think Afro-Latino. They don't think of somebody like Rosario Dawson or Zoe Saldana. They think of Sophia Vergara. I'm sorry for using her over and over again, but I'm blanking out.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] On my Latina actresses. So, I think it's doing a research that doesn't feel like anthropology, because anthropology also is about studying a culture to then destroy it, right?

[Mary] Yeah, we can… If you're not clear on that, go back and listen to our colonialism episode, and that'll help clear that up a little bit.

[Zoraida] Colonization, yay!

[Howard] One of the things that is… Doesn't get said enough is the importance of representation in the things that we create. My oldest son is autistic. We were watching an episode of Elementary in which Sherlock Holmes is talking to the woman who becomes his girlfriend, who is portrayed as autistic. It's different from how my son's autism manifests. He stood behind the couch watching the episode for about 15 minutes. For the first time ever… Ever! Watching TV, he said, "They're kind of like me." That moment! There are kids who are Latino, who are black, who are female, who are all kinds of ways, who never get to say that. We need to hear… We need to hear your voice. We need to hear diverse voices so that these people have stories about them.

[Mary] Well, it… Just to use a… Not… A non-loaded example, the… Oh, shoot. I've just forgotten her name. Astronaut. Um. She just did…

[Howard] Mae Jemi…

[Mary] No. No, no, no. She's white. Which is why it's a non-loaded example, because white is the American default. Sorry. But she just got the record for the most number of days in space. And said that being an astronaut had never been on her radar at all, until NASA picked… When she was in late high school, NASA picked the first class of female astronauts. She was like, "Oh, I want to do that." If she had not seen that role model, she wouldn't have pursued that. For a lot of people, the role model comes from fiction. Learning through fiction that, "Oh, that could be me," or "I could do that." Or just "I am not alone. This experience that I'm having is not alone." There's… While you were surrounded, there are also… When I was going to elementary schools, I would go into elementary schools in Idaho and it would be a sea of white kids and one little brown kid. One child. So that child was getting everything through books.

[Zoraida] Right. I think it's a… It's not just important for us, for like diverse people to see themselves in books, it's also important for like white kids to see other people in books.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Zoraida] Because that creates empathy. Like, as writers, our biggest thing is to create empathy through our works. When I lived in Montana for a brief period of time when I was in college, I'd never seen so many blonde people in my life.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So, I would… But the people who would come up to me were native people who were like, "What tribe are you from?" Because I was confusing to them. I'm like, "I'm from the Ecuadorian tribe."

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So…

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] So, it's… We confound each other as people, but I think that as long as we create inclusive stories… You don't have to make it a point to say like… You don't have to make a checklist of I have a disabled character and I have a character who's queer and Latino. You… It has to be organic to your story, too, right? You don't want to create two-dimensional characters. But that's just craft. So good representation is good craft.

[Mary] Can you give some examples of some good craft? Some books or media where you've been like, "Ah, yes. Thank you. Thank you for using your craft to do this well?"

[Zoraida] I'm a really big fan of Leigh Bardugo and Six of Crows. I think that that is an example of a really diverse cast of con artists…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] I'm trying to think of lately… Benjamin Alire Saenz, who writes queer Latino boys. And Adam Silvera, who also writes queer Latino boys. But they're completely different from each other. Part of that has to do with one is in the Southwest and one is from the Bronx.

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at ComicCon.

[Whoo! Whistles!]

[Brandon] And I want to thank Zoraida for coming on the podcast with us. Thank you very much.

[Zoraida] Thank you.

[Brandon] Mary? You've got a writing prompt for us.

[Mary] Yeah. What I want you to do is I want you to go and… This echoes something that you've done previously, which is reading outside of the box. I want you to go and find books written by authors in, let's say… See if you can find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Read them. Then… You've got a suggestion?

[Zoraida] No, I was going to say, challenge accepted.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Try and find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Then, make one of your secondary characters… Not your main character. Make one of your secondary characters from Ecuador.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.34: Q&A on Character Arcs

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/26/13-34-qa-on-character-arcs/

Q&A Summary:

Q: How do you fulfill your promises about a character arc without being cliché?

Q: How do you subvert a common character arc without it feeling like betraying a promise to a reader?

A: How do you give them what they want without just being obvious about it? Use the predictability test: If at the beginning of the story you can predict the resolution, there's something wrong. BUT some stories, readers, genres or subgenres, fulfilling expectations is the right thing to do. Name that tune, or sing along? Make sure the promise can be fulfilled in multiple ways, then pick a surprising one that is more fulfilling. Have the character wanting at least two things, and then give them at least one. Make the character original, unique, and their reaction will also be original and unique.

Q: Do you need to complete each character arc in the story? For a character in a series, should each book contain a complete character arc, or should the entire series cover one large arc? How do you tie multiple character arcs together when you're writing the first book of a trilogy? With lots of character arcs, how do you interweave them?

A: If all the character arcs follow the same shape, that can feel artificial. However, if the arcs are staggered so that one person has a completely unresolved crisis at the end of the story, that may feel unsatisfying. Look for plateaus, stopping points along the arc, for individual characters.

Q: What separates an iconic character from a caricature? Or a stereotype?

A: Make the character unique. Caricatures are exaggerated and one-sided, while iconic characters don't change from episode to episode. Separate iconic, not changing, from archetype. If a similar iconic character from another series can replace your iconic character, you may have a caricature.

Q: Have you ever had an iconic character, upon further exploration, become a character in need of an arc? How would you make that transition?

A: Comics are often forced to reboot because they are trying to do this. However, books often take iconic characters from one book and put them in a second book where they have an arc.

Q: How do you continue a character's story after they've completed their original arc?

A: Think about your parents' roles in your story. Put the character and what they've learned in a new situation. Make sure your character has enough depth and layers.

Q: How much does a character need to change in their arc? Does it always have to be a major, permanent, life-redefining change?

A: It needs to be enough to see a difference. Satisfy the reader that a change has occurred. Set up the right conflict and make the right promise. Some change, some growth, even if they're not perfect at the end.

( A bunch of questions and answers! )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on Character Arcs.

[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 Howard.

[Brandon] We have your questions. Ian asks, "How do you fulfill your promises about a character arc without being cliché?" Good question.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I don't know.

[Brandon] Oh, come on.

[Dan] I'm a very cliché author.

[Brandon] Get on it, get on it.

[Dan] Okay. Fulfilling problems without being cliché. I don't know if there's a direct tracking line between those.

[Brandon] Okay, here's another…

[Howard] Let me approach it a different way.

[Brandon] There's actually another question… The next question is by Connor and… I think it's the same sort of thing.

[Dan] Okay.

[Brandon] How do you subvert a common character arc without it feeling like a… Betraying a promise to a reader? That's what they're all getting at. How do you…

[Dan] Okay. How do you give them what they want without just being obvious about it?

[Brandon] Yes. That is the question.

[Dan] Subvert that without feeling like you've deceived them.

[Howard] There are so very, very many movies, stories out there, whatever, where the character arc for our main character is discovering the importance of their friends. We see that all the time. If, at the beginning of your story, you know that's where you're headed and you can predict it… If that is predictably the resolution, you may have cliché problems. You can still fulfill a promise along those lines, you just need to not… I use the predictability test all the time. If I can predict a line of dialogue in a movie, then something's probably wrong. If I can predict, "Oh, this next scene, this is where they kiss. He's going to drop something. They're going to…"

[Brandon] Now, let me say, there are certain stories and readers where fulfilling the expectation in the way that you anticipate and want is the right thing to do. It depends on the story you're telling, the way you… The promises you make. Some books will promise to subvert expectations. Some books will promise not to. In fact, I remember reading through several romance novel entries on Amazon where the description of the book says, in big bolded letters, this is a book with a happily ever after and no cheating. That was repeated on most of the pages I went to in this sub genre. Big, bold letters. That is a promise that that trope is not going to get subverted because the reader's looking for it. So you really have to decide, am I trying to subvert things or not?

[Dan] I remember when we had Mike Stackpole on the show, and he talked about writing plots as playing name that tune with your readers, and you want to be just ahead. If they guess the tune too early, then you've lost them. But I do think there is another kind of reader that just wants to sing along with the song, because they know it so well.

[Brandon] Right. There's nothing wrong with that. I would say this is something that I really enjoy doing, is playing name the tune with the reader. The way that you make it not feel like a betrayal, but not like a cliché either, is you make sure that this promise can get fulfilled in multiple ways, and that the one you pick is not necessarily the first one they'd pick, but is in some way more fulfilling. So you kind of have to identify what is the need and how do you fill it, and you promise you're going to fill it in a certain way in the middle of the book, but then you give a better promise… You always have to do a better job.

[Dan] One of the things that I do a lot… We talk about the Hollywood Formula a lot on this show, and how you need to set out knowing what a character wants. I have found that if I can make sure my character really wants at least two things, then I can totally screw one of those up on purpose, and you will still be happy when he or she gets the other one. That's a way of making sure that the character arcs are still driving this plot.

[Valynne] Well, I think if you've invested enough time in making sure that your character is original and unique, then the way that they're going to solve that problem or get to… Or what we want fulfilled, will also be original and unique. You need to write a character that he's not like anyone else, and so it makes sense that character would solve the problem this way.

[Brandon] So, we've got multiple questions on a similar topic, so I'm going to kind of meld them altogether. This is from Ben, and from Jessica, and from Anthony, and they're asking about multiple character arcs in the same story. Do you need to complete each character arc in the story? Like, Jessica asks, "For a character in a series, should each book contain a complete character arc, or should the entire series cover one large arc?" Then Ben's question… Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, Ben's question is, "How do you tie multiple character arcs together when you're writing the first book of a trilogy?" A lot of questions about lots of character arcs, how do you interweave them? What do you do?

[Howard] If they all form… And when I think of a character arc, I think of the narrative curve, that bump shape that drops off kind of sharply at the end. If all of the character arcs in the book follow that same shape, it's going to feel kind of artificial and kind of weird. If, however, all of the arcs are staggered to the point that one person is in crisis at the end of the story and you can tell it's completely unresolved, that may feel unsatisfying. So what I try and do is find plateaus, stopping points along the arc, along a character's arc, where, for this story, I can park them there… Maybe for the whole story. Their arc is not complete, their arc is six books long, but I can park them there, and we'll be happy. So thinking of it as tiers along this arc, and within a given story, which steps are they moving between? That model works really well for me.

[Dan] As an example, the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke and Han each have an arc in each movie. It goes and it's complete. Whereas Leia has one larger arc that takes all three movies to fulfill.

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week is Fat Angie.

[Valynne] Fat Angie, by e. E. Charlton-Trujillo. One of the things that I love about this book is that it's both funny, but just really has some tender moments. It's about a girl who is overweight in high school. Her older sister is in the military and missing. She's the only one who thinks that her sister is still alive out there somewhere. So I think that for a lot of military families, this is… Might have a lot of meaning for them. She, in the beginning of the book, has tried to kill herself, commits suicide in front of the entire school, and is working through a lot of those issues of just learning to figure out the kind of person she is, the kind of person that she wants to be, what she wants to be known for, and that is not this act that she is currently known for. It's a wonderful romance, in terms of the fact that she's trying to figure out her sexual identity. I think that the way that the author handles this book is just perfect. The mix of just being so realistic, and having the teenage angst of dealing with these really important issues, but handling them very realistically.

[Brandon] Excellent. So it's called Fat Angie?

[Valynne] Umhum.

[Howard] By e. E. Charlton-Trujillo?

[Valynne] Umhum.

[Brandon] All right. Questions. Back to questions from the audience. There are several questions about iconic characters. John asks, "What separates an iconic character from a caricature? Or a stereotype?"

[Dan] Oooo... Interesting.

[Valynne] Well, I think that you're still going to make that character unique in some ways. I mean, not everyone is Superman and has the powers that he does and can… Run as fast as he can and has the superstrength. He's an iconic hero, and so is James Bond. They have completely different attributes. So, I think what defines an iconic character is, and we've discussed this in a previous episode, is just the situations that they're thrown into, and the way they react.

[Dan] Well, I think that a caricature is arguably much more exaggerated and one-sided than an iconic character. You look at… If I say Capt. Kirk, most people are going to imagine a hotshot who just sleeps with weird alien women and disregards the rules. You look at the original series, he is definitely an iconic character. He doesn't change from episode to episode. But he is much more layered and nuanced and interesting than what we tend to think. He is an iconic character. Our vision of him now, looking back, is very caricatured.

[Brandon] Right. I think it's good to separate iconic, meaning not changing, from an archetype, which iconic character can totally be. But Mr. Spock is also iconic. He's not changing through that series. But also very layered, very interesting, very in conflict with himself. So separate those two things in your mind. If you're worried about clichés and stereotypes, you can build a character who is not one who still doesn't change, if that's what you're interested in doing.

[Howard] If your iconic character can be, in your book, replaced by an iconic character of similar skill set from someone else's series, it might be a caricature.

[Dan] That's… Yeah.

[Brandon] So, next question on iconic characters is, "Have you ever had an iconic character, upon further exploration, become a character in need of an arc? How would you make that transition?" Now, this is dangerous, because we've talked about how comics basically keep trying to do this, and then get forced to reboot and things like this. I totally think it's possible. In fact, I see a lot of books, what you will see people doing is there will be a series where there's a main character and kind of several iconic individuals around them. The main character has an arc. Then they write a second book that takes one of these characters that is maybe… Was a little bit… Didn't have an arc in the first book, didn't change, and then they get an arc, and then they get an arc.

[Dan] You can see this in a ton of webcomics in particular. Sluggy Freelance, that was just a joke a week, and then turned into a long story. Same with Sam and Fuzzy, same with Dr. McNinja. Same with, I think, Schlock.

[Howard] Yup. I gave him a character arc. He's an iconic hero, and then I gave him a character arc and established a new baseline for him. Because it's not a brand like Frosted Flakes or DC Comics, I am allowed to keep those changes. I don't have to reboot. I think better examples than comics are Death in the Terry Pratchett books. For most of those books, he is always the same character, and he's delightful when he shows up. Then we have a book in which Death decides to retire for a while, and becomes, I think, Bill Door. It's beautiful. He gets his own little arc. Hogfather kind of gives him his own little arc. So, yeah, this… Totally, you can do it.

[Brandon] All right. How do you continue a character's story after they've completed their original arc? I love this question.

[Valynne] So are we talking about sequels or… Okay.

[Brandon] Yes. I think a sequel. You've written a story. This one didn't have a name on it. Whoever asked this question, good question. You've written a story. The character's had a big, complete arc. And then you're going to put them in the next book. What do you do?

[Howard] What are your parents' roles in your story? Because when they were teenagers, they were very distraught individuals who were the heroes of their own story. Probably every bit as self-absorbed as the average teenager. But now that you're growing up, or that you're an adult, what are your parents' roles in your story? Because fundamentally, I think that's the question that's being asked here. When you… When we emerge from our period of change and stabilize, what do we become to the next generation of heroes?

[Valynne] Or, even if you look at it in terms of a shorter timeframe, for like a young adult book, you're looking at maybe just like a few months sometimes from beginning to end, but the arc suggests that their character starts in one place and grows and becomes something else, so I think that you just look at what are the nat… Like, this person is now not exactly the same person they were before. They are… You take that character and what they've learned and then throw them in a new situation and see how what they learned can affect whatever they're going into next.

[Dan] A lot of the time when this is a problem, it's because the character was originally designed around one specific conflict, and there's not enough depth to keep going. You look at what happened with Data in the Next Generation movies. Once he finally got emotions, the writers had no idea what to do with him. Compare that to say Oz in the Buffy series who went through tons of different phases of his life and completed long character arcs, but he was an interesting enough and layered enough character that the writers were able to say, "Well, what can we do with him next?"

[Howard] That's why I used the parent example. Parents are not… It doesn't have to be that kind of a timeframe. It can be a fairly short timeframe. They are, for many people, sources of stability, sources of rescue, sources of advice. They are, for other people, sources of continual conflict because they disagree with them. When you have a character who has completed their arc, if you want to tell a story about a character arc, you're telling somebody else's story, and the character who has completed their arc features into that in some way that's critically important.

[Brandon] Last question comes from Kalika. They ask, "How much does a character need to change in their arc? Does it always have to be a major, permanent, life-redefining change?"

[Valynne] I don't know if that's always realistic, but I think it needs to be enough that you can see a difference.

[Howard] Satisfy me. If you promised me that this person is going to be changed by the experience in this book, I have to be satisfied that a change has occurred. It can be a tiny thing, it can be a big thing. I guess it depends on the conflict, it depends on the character, it depends on the length of the story.

[Dan] I think figuring out what you want to do, so that you can present the right conflict and make the right promise… If you set us up where this person's conflict is that they are a terrible person who can't connect with everyone else because they're mean all the time, and then they end the story still a terrible person and mean all the time, you haven't resolved the conflict or kept the promise you made in the beginning. If you present that same character, but give us a different conflict that is smaller and less life-changing, then, okay, I'm willing to go along with them still being a jerk at the end. Because you've still resolved the thing you told me you were going to resolve.

[Valynne] I don't think you… I don't think everything has to be magically perfect in the end, I just want to see some change. Some growth.

[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Thank you guys so much for sending in your questions. These have been great questions. Dan has a writing prompt.

[Dan] Yes, I do.

[Brandon] Did you forget?

[Dan] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I warned you ahead of time.

[Dan] I know, I know. I don't have a writing prompt.

[Brandon] Howard? Do you have a writing prompt?

[Howard] I did at the beginning of the episode, but then Dan assured us that he…

[Dan] I assured no one. I merely said okay.

[Howard] You said, "I'll have this by the end. I'm on this."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I felt very reassured.

[Dan] Dear listener. We actually before recording this talked about how we use to blindside our guests with writing prompts. So, Brandon is taking great delight in now doing it to us.

[Brandon] [inaudible]

[Dan] Even though it's not even technically blindsiding, because he told me. I want you to write, dear listener, a story in which Brandon asks someone for a writing prompt, and that person is unprepared, and Brandon receives great karmic justice.

[Laughter]

[Valynne] Ouch. Pretty savage there.

[Brandon] All right. I guess I'll…

[Howard] Alternatively…

[Dan] I didn't say which side of karma Brandon was on.

[Howard] Alternatively, do an image search on mountains. Trace a mountain onto a piece of paper. Now make that outline the arc for your character.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. I hope we didn't give you any excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.2: Internal Motivations

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/06/12/writing-excuses-6-2-internal-motivations/

Key points: Character motivation has two aspects: what does the character want? How is that expressed on the page? What the character wants includes their big overall goal, what they need to do to reach that goal, and what do they want to do it immediately right now. Beware caricature and wild shifting. Play immediate needs against overarching goals. Let motivations shift in response to what's happening. One way to express motivation: throw in a thought. Let the reader see what is happening filtered through the character. Be sparing, and establish character well before you need it. "When a character makes a significant action or decision, the reader wants to have all the pieces already so that they can know exactly why the character did that." [Dan] Brandon's advice: use the thought, young writer. But don't overdo it. The descriptive words a character uses can help. Also, consider all five senses. Let another character point out changes. Just make sure you set it up well before you need it.
( lots of motivation )
[Brandon] All right. Mary. I'm going to make you give us a writing prompt.
[Mary] So, writing prompt. Come up with a character motivation. Then, with an action that they need to take that is counter to the motivation.
[Brandon] Excellent. All right...
[probably cut due to time constraints... This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.]

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.50: What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.34: Q&A on Character Arcs
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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles

Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

Writing Excuses 13.50: What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova

Writing Excuses 13.34: Q&A on Character Arcs

Writing Excuses 6.2: Internal Motivations

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