Writing Excuses 17.22: Establishing the Ensemble

Jun. 1st, 2022 03:20 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 17.22: Establishing the Ensemble
 
 
Key points: How can you make all of your character matter? Start by giving everybody an introduction tied to the big change at the core of your book, show us their reaction to it. Play up those changes as they meet each other for the first time. Show us why we should like these people. Use a task list, character name, introduce them, describe them, make us like them, aim them at the story. Help the readers know the characters, and then you can use them. You get more combinations and fusions then. Pair them up and explore the sandpaper interactions. Use another character to help readers know what to feel.
 
[Season 17, Episode 22]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Establishing the Ensemble.
[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.
[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.
[Kaela] I'm Kaela.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We… Last week, we talked about making sure that all your characters are different. What we want to talk about this time is making sure all of your characters matter. Giving them equal space, equal weight, equal time, whatever it is. So, Zoraida, we're going to throw this to you, like we always do. Why is this important, and how do we start?
[Zoraida] This is important because every character in your ensemble needs an equal amount of importance. Right? Like, they need to share in this goal that they're going to go forth and conquer. When I start, in my books, I give everybody an introduction that has to do with the big change. Right? So, I feel like in a book there's something that has changed in the world, and now these people are all reacting to it. This could be in contemporary, it could be in fantasy, sci-fi, whatever. But the inciting incident, the change, is now transforming every single person. But before that, we get to see a glimpse of who they are before they meet each other. Because sometimes you have ensemble casts where it's strangers coming together, or, like, The Fast and Furious movies, right? Huge ensemble. They already know each other, and then you have an outsider coming in, right? So, playing up with those changes is my starting point.
[Howard] There's a couple of cinematic examples that are super useful. One of these is the… Serenity, the movie. Where, in the first few minutes, we are introduced to everybody aboard the ship. It goes very, very quickly. Wash says, "Things are about to get interesting." Mal says, "What do you mean by interesting? Oh, God, oh, God, we're all going to die?" That's… In two lines, we've established a little bit of relationship between those two. This is an ensemble that's already come together, but they needed that opening romp there on that planet to introduce us to them as individuals and how they function as a team. The other good example itself, and I've mentioned this before as a master class sort of thing to study, is the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Where, as we are introduced to each of these characters, James Gunn is using every cinemagraphical tool in his toolbox to let us know that we're supposed to like these people. The example I always come back to is… Now I've forgotten her name. The green skinned one.
[Garbled. Gamora.]
[Howard] Gamora.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I know. How could I… It begins with a Z? No, it doesn't begin with a Z. No, that's not right. Gamora. When we are introduced to her, she is the only green thing in a room full of blue and black. So even though what she is saying is very aggressive and threatening, we have been told this is the person that we like. Anyway, between those two visual examples, I have a whole toolbox of things that I use when I am introducing characters via prose. I recognize… If I'm introducing you to someone not in their own POV, but I want you to like them and they're going to be part of my ensemble, what am I doing to set them apart from the people around them? What am I doing to make you like them? What am I doing to make you interested in them, so that when we come back to them, we're like, "Oh, yes. I'm so happy this person joined the team."
[Dan] Absolutely. You get a… The book that keeps coming to mind, and this is not an ensemble book, so it is not necessarily a good example. But, in Pride and Prejudice, early on, you get to meet all of the sisters. Actually, maybe Little Women is a better example, because that one is much closer to an ensemble cast. It still is primarily about Jo, but you get to know who all of the sisters are and how they interact with each other. You get introduced to them fairly quickly. Now, not all of them have equal space by any means. But they all, in their own way, are important to the story. You've got the sick one, and we have to really get to like her, because, spoiler warning for this 200-year-old book…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Things are not going to go well for her. That affects everybody else. One of the reasons…
[Howard] She doesn't die, does she?
[Dan] That I absolutely…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Howard!
[Garbled]
[Dan] One of the reasons that I love, love, love the Saoirse Ronan movie of Little Women is because it gives much more weight and a little more space to… And now I can't remember her name, but the sister who's in the book kind of the snotty one who gets all the stuff that Jo wants and can't have. Giving her that little bit of extra attention, so we get to see things from her perspective, absolutely rounds out her character. Suddenly, she's no longer kind of the villain of Jo's story, she's just part of this ensemble who helps make everyone who they are. So being able to give the right amount of weight and space to the characters really helps everyone come together as a unit.
 
[Howard] I think it's useful when you're outlining, and even if you're not outlining, even if you're discovery writing your way into this, have a task list that's like character name, and introduce them, describe them, make us like them, aim them. Just four little things where you just have this in front of you so that you know I'm not meandering through their dialogue and their scene. I have four goals here. Especially, early in a book, when I'm trying to establish an ensemble. I have to name the character, I have to make them distinctive, I have to give them a… I have to give them personality. And I have to aim them at the story, so that as the story unfolds through other points of view or other scenes, when that character shows up again, they show up on the vector that we expected. Or, if they're not on the vector that we expected, that's interesting. We thought they were going to show up wearing the top hat. But, no, they've turned the top hat into a gun, or something.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I'm making dumb stuff up, because I didn't think this out well enough before hand.
[I want to see that character]
[Howard] Do better than I'm doing, please.
[Zoraida] No, but I understand what you're saying, because we're tasked with making… Yes, okay, we have protagonist and supporting protagonists, and they're all working together for a common goal. They all have their own voice. We've done all of that work. So, now, how do we introduce them in a way that becomes memorable, in a way that says, like, I want to see more of this person. I want to see their point of view, or I want to see them in a scene. The really rich part to me when I have multiple groups of people is getting them alone together, like, so, breaking them into smaller groups and seeing how those dynamics play around. I just finished binging The Expanse TV show. The way that they introduce every single character, they… I immediately wanted them all to be friends. As the seasons progressed, I wanted them… Like, if they were not in a… There was, like, one season where they weren't together all the time. I was like, "Where are they? Why aren't they together?"
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] "Please get them back on [the route to Dante?] as soon as possible." That's the feeling that I want readers to have when they walk into a story. Like, get my people back here.
[Howard] Yeah, I think… The second season of Stranger Things, I think, had the same sort of problem. Where our ensemble had been broken up and they were in different places. Yeah, sure, they come back together at the end… Maybe it was season… I don't know what season it was. But the point is, it was… I was enjoying the season, but I was angry that I didn't have my ensemble for so much of it.
 
[Dan] So, our book of the week this week is actually mine. It is Ghost Station. This is my Cold War spy novel. It's about cryptographers in Berlin in 1961. Very paranoid and… Anyway.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] But… When I submitted this, the editor who bought it, their very first comment was we need to fill out this ensemble better. A lot of it is workplace. He works in a listening station in West Berlin. There are several other spies there, whether they're cryptographers or surveillance people or whatever they are. His main note for me was we need to get to know all of these people better. He was absolutely right. It made the book much, much better to spend more time with that group and get to know them, because it gave more chances for friendly banter. It gave more chances for suspicious things to be dropped. It gave more chances for the main character to feel nervous and self-conscious, because of the things he didn't want people to discover. All of that came together so well because we got to know all of those characters. So it… I didn't plan it as an ensemble book, but the editor helped make it into one, and that made it much better. So, Ghost Station by Dan Wells. We just got a printed edition of this out, you can get it on Amazon. So, hooray.
[Yay!]
[Dan] Hurry and go buy that.
[Excellent. Buy the book.]
 
[Dan] So. How does that work for the rest of you? Knowing who the characters are, and helping the reader to know who the characters are, really improves everything about the ensemble. How do we do that? How does that… First of all, let's ask the question why. Why does getting to know the characters really, really well affect the story and affect the interactions?
[Zoraida] I think it's because once everybody has established personalities, you have sort of… You have an endless opportunity for different character dynamics and interactions. You have somebody who can make a mistake, you have somebody who can keep everybody on task, you have somebody who, like, they might have nefarious things, they might be playing both sides… It's very vague, because I'm not picking a genre to go with it, but the more you know about a character, the more you can utilize them. Like Howard said, right, it's like aiming a gun, aiming something, and entering them to do the thing that they are there for on the page.
[Kaela] Yeah, like…
[Howard] The very… Oh, go ahead, Kaela.
[Kaela] I was going to say that the more familiar you are with anything, the more you… It's like being a chef. When you know how everything works, you're able to start combining things and seeing them and seeing all the different possibilities for new combinations, for fusions, etc. I actually think that's something that the MCU does super well, like, Guardians of the Galaxy Two, I was really curious how they were going to set that up and how they were going to explore new character dynamics. Like, I never expected Yondu and Rocket Raccoon to have, like, one of the most emotionally moving story lines in film to me. I was like I did not expect a blue man and a raccoon to make me cry, but they did.
[Chuckles]
[Kaela] But that's because they knew those characters so well that they knew that they were really similar, and they wanted to explore that. There was an opportunity there. I loved how they did that. It's one of the things that, like, I'm most interested in in ensembles is how, like… I call it sandpaper. Is how you know them well, you can pair them together and you know exactly how to get the right angle on it so that they're scraping in a way that's interesting, that's sanding them both down into something new, but is also getting a lot of interesting friction, a lot of interesting conflict for the reader. That's something I love to do in my books even.
[Howard] The very… I was just reading this last night. The very first Superman comic book, and in fact, I think it's the very first line of dialogue we get from Superman, he is a jerk. He's carrying this woman who is tied up, and he leaps to safety, and sets her down and says, "I don't have time to untie you. Attend to it yourself." Then he jumps away to go do other stuff. Okay?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That's our first introduction to Superman. Now, this was, depending on how you feel about the creators of Superman, and they were young guys who learned a lot about writing, whatever. None of it matters. This was sloppy because she's actually the bad guy. But Superman doesn't know it yet. So him dissing, sort of… Discomforting the person who the writers knew was actually a bad guy is fine, but we don't know it. My point here is that when somebody says something, if it's something that's going to rub the reader the wrong way, if is they're insulting someone or being mean or whatever, if you give us another character who has an opinion about that, you can tell us how to feel. If she'd had a thought bubble… This would be dumb, but if she'd had a thought bubble, like, "He's being so mean to me. Does he know that I'm really the murderer?"
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay. Don't do that. But that would totally make the line okay from Superman, because maybe Superman does know. So that's one of the things that I think about, is that any time I'm introducing these characters, any time I'm trying to define them, I make sure that they say a thing and that somebody else has an opinion about it that helps inform how I want the reader to feel about it.
[Yeah]
 
[Dan] We are going to end with that, and have some homework. What we want you to do this week is to pick an ensemble work that you like. This could be a book, this could be a movie, this could be a TV show. Maybe you want to do Community or Star Trek or Little Women or whatever it is. Identify each member of the ensemble, and why they are important, and why the story could not be told without them. Not just it's fun to have Drax in this movie because of X, Y, and Z. But specifically, why would this movie not work without Drax? Do that for every character of the ensemble. See what you can learn about it. Anyway, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Brandon, Howard, Dan, me, Mary Robinette, and a few special guests are going to go write this September on the big group Writing Excuses cruise. We'd love for you to join us. See writingexcusesretreat.com for details and for information on other upcoming in person events.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles

Dec. 16th, 2020 02:03 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.49: Elemental Ensemble, with Michael Damian Thomas

Dec. 15th, 2016 04:46 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.49: Elemental Ensemble, with Michael Damian Thomas

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/12/04/11-49-elemental-ensemble-with-michael-damien-thomas/

Key points: Ensembles are more than just heist stories. Ensemble stories have a team of specialists, each with a different role and part to play, who get together to accomplish some important goal working together. Get people together, let them bounce off each other, and together solve a problem. Why do we like them? We get to see lots of different people, see them interact, and make friends with them. Multiple character arcs intersecting in unique ways. A team of interdependent specialists, hyper competent in individual ways, but holes as a team. How do you make one? Start with a cast of characters, but give each one similar emotional weight. Make sure your characters are specialized enough. They don't all need a POV, plot arcs can happen offstage. One of the keys is introducing the members of your ensemble quickly, usually in action. Make the scene do multiple things. Don't infodump! Think about your competency porn scenes, where you show us how good the characters are at what they do, usually while doing something else at the same time.

( It takes a village to... )

[Brandon] Well, we have to stop here. We've gone like 25 minutes almost…
[Whoops! Laughter]
[Brandon] Yes, but you can tell we love this topic. We will be back to talk about it again in a few weeks. I'm going to give you some homework, though. When we were talking earlier, one of the things we realized is we love ensemble stories that aren't always just the obvious heists. But we do love the heists, obviously, as well. We want you to go look at some different professions, particularly ones that have some sort of front person leading the charge, and, like a chef, maybe on a show like that. We want you to identify all the rules that happen behind the scenes to make that person succeed. We want you to try to design a story that doesn't use the front person at all, and uses all of these different roles supporting them behind the scenes. Do that for a couple different jobs. See what you come up with. We want to give a special thank you to Michael Damian Thomas.
[Michael] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] We want to thank the Writing Excuses cruise members.
[Yay! Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.37: Casting Your Book, with Gama Martinez

Sep. 13th, 2016 09:09 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.37: Casting Your Book, with Gama Martinez

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/09/11/11-37-casting-your-book-with-gama-martinez/

Key points: If you don't think about casting before writing, you become subject to your unconscious biases, making lazy casting choices and using things that you have already seen or done before. Make a list of the roles you think will be in your book, and where they lie on various axes. Then flip some of the axes and see how that affects your plot. Cast all your people, then switch their roles. See what this does to your story. Who will be in the most pain? Who will experience this in a way that let's you tell a new story? Once you know what the story will be about, write job interviews with different kinds of characters. Go through magazines and cut out pictures of people. Think about your characters existing on multiple axes!
( What's my motivation? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience at Phoenix ComicCon.
[Whoo!]
[Brandon] Long-suffering audience, who at this point has done a lot of episodes with us. Mary, you have some… homework?
[Mary] I have homework. So in the liner notes, we're going to be giving you a link to a casting sheet. This is a grid that I said that I used. What I want you to do is I want you to go through… It'll come with instructions, I promise. I want you to go through and I want you to cast the next thing that you're working on or the thing that you have previously… That you already have in progress. Go through and fill it out. Look at the axes that your character exists on. Then flip it so that you make sure that your character has at least two axes in which they are not dominant. Then flip them so that they have two different things that they are not dominant in. When you look at this sheet, I'm also going to say that if you're doing secondary world fantasy, that this is a really good spot to start thinking about how your culture handles prejudice and which gender is dominant, and if it is in fact a binary culture, that you want to make sure… Feel free to tweak that worksheet. But this is the place that you need to start thinking about that, is before you start writing. So, that'll be… That's your homework. I want you to do that.
[Brandon] Gama, thank you so much for coming in and podcasting with us.
[Gama] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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