Writing Excuses Transcripts

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-25-writing-confrontation-live-aboard-the-wx-cruise

 

Key Points: Why are your fight scenes boring? Just blocking is boring! Four parts of a reaction, focus, what the character notices, physicality, thoughts, and actions. Is the problem using all four tools at the same time, or is it using all four tools every time? What's new and different for the character, that's what they notice? Fight scenes that work well contrast the character's history with their anticipation. The idea that confrontation will reveal aspects of character is a good reason to have a confrontation. Confrontations and fights should have emotions, character reveals,  something that matters, changes. Think about ways that strengths can become weaknesses. That's not a nail!

 

[Season 20, Episode 25]

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 20, Episode 25]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Writing Confrontation Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise.

[Dan] Fif… I don't know what to say now.

[Mary Robinette] Just your name.

[Howard] Your name.

[Dan] Ah! I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm cueing Dan.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I'm also Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we are aboard the Writing Excuses cruise in front of a live audience.

[Applause]

[Mary Robinette] And the first thing that happened on the cruise, one of the first things, was that Dan taught a class called why your fight scene is boring. I went to the class because I would also like to know why my fight scenes are boring and realized, as he was talking, that it actually applied for every form of confrontation that your readers… Your characters go through. It's not just the physical confrontation, it's also the verbal altercations, it's facing off against a dragon. It's… Well, I guess that is a fight scene. But, point being, it applied to a lot of other things. And we thought that it might be fun for you all to listen to how we come up with lesson plans and what… How we react to new material by coming up with something on the fly for you.

[Howard] And in the interest of explaining a little bit of the overall Writing Excuses meta, this happens all the time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] We start… Yes. We are podcasters with radio voice. We sound like experts.

[Mary Robinette] Ha ha!

[Howard] Which we're not. We learned so much from each other every day. We come on these cruises, we learn things from our students, we learn things from each other's lectures. It's such a wonderful place to be, being just smart enough to figure out that you don't know enough and you have to learn something new.

[Dan] I gotta say, I do love it when we start episodes with how smart Dan was that one time…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I was going to say, we should do that more often, but that requires me to be smart more often, and I don't know if I can do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. 15 minutes long, you know.

[Dan] Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] That's the length of smartness we need. Okay. So. There were a lot of things that you talked about, but one of the things that I was struck with… One of the students asked a question that then made my brain go, oh! The student said something along the lines of, so you're talking about how if a fight scene is only blocking, it's really boring. Which is, like, correct. So how do you get the reactions on the page without stopping the fight scene, without slowing things down. And you gave a whole series of answers. But my brain then started unpacking things into thinking about what reactions were. So here's what I've got, and I wanted to toss it around to see if there's something there. That there are four parts of a reaction. There's the focus, the what the character is noticing. There's the physicality of it. There are thoughts. And then there are actions. So, let's say you want to slow down a moment, you would use all four of those. So there's the I see the sword. There's the description of the sword, the sword is long and with a basket hilt handle. And then there's the physicality, the way the sword feels in the character's hands. That there is a weight to it. Then there's the thoughts. Yes, this is the sword that belonged to my father that he made for the six fingered man. And then there's the actions, which would be the slashing and the cutting. And that often, what happens when we are s… When we are… When things bog down is that we are using all four of those at the same time, but we don't need all four of those at the same time. That they can… That we… Sometimes we're only using one aspect, that the only thing the reader gets is the focus. And that's another way that things can go bad, we're just describing the way things look without hitting any of the other pieces of interiority or the character's looking at the wrong things and noticing the wrong things. Like, let me describe in loving details this sword while vamps are coming at me.

[Howard] It can also… I mean, yeah, you bog it down when you're trying to do all four of those things in sequence in turn. Compressing is super useful. You can use the same words or one phrase to cover two or more of those things. The familiar weight of the sword… Well, now I know how I feel about it and I've described that it is an object with mass. Okay, so I haven't said very much, but it's…

[Laughter]

[Howard] But you see where I'm heading with that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And that's the sort of trick that we've been using forever, which is you put a line on the page, make that line do as much lifting for you as you can.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, the thing that I'm excited about is that this is a… When you say this is the sort of thing we've been doing forever… The thing that I love about doing these episodes, and to refer back to an episode that just happened on the stage, but for our listeners, was several weeks ago, teaching, it forces me to line my toolbox up. Like, podcasting forces me to figure out what are the tools that are actually in there, and how do I use them? So, this is why I was like are these tools here? Have I found a set of tools that I can articulate that…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Makes something that I do unconsciously easier to do on purpose?

 

[Dan] Yeah. I think that's interesting, and I'm wondering if the issue is, are you using all those four tools at the same time, is that what bogs it down? Or is it using all four tools every time and that's what makes it so slow and ponderous? It could be that you need one moment that really gets attention… Like you said, magnify that, and draw it out, and then the others could just focus on one? To seem much quicker?

 

[Erin] I also think… I was wondering, do we use… I was thinking about fighting with swords. So we were in Scotland a while ago, and we got to actually do some sword fighting. Which was quite fun for me. And it turns out that I'm very aggressive with a fake sword, which was a fun thing to learn about myself. What's interesting is, like, I'm thinking back to the moment that I was sparring, and I'm thinking, even though I was reacting a lot in that moment, I actually did not have… Like, I could not have thought in that moment…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it was so new to me that thought was, like, beyond me. Like, I mean, maybe I'm sure on some subconscious level, like, I had to think, to, like, move my arm forward. But I wasn't having a deep thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I was just like, Go. Ra. Kill that man. But the guy who I was fighting against, a trained swords person, might have had time. He was, like, oh, I thought about the technique that you… He would slow down and say, like, oh, your technique is a little off here. Because for him, the physicality was so ingrained that he didn't have any time to spend on that and could spend more time on the thought. So, I think, what's interesting is thinking about, like, in a reaction moment, what is coming so naturally to your character that it's not worth putting all that space on the page, because it's just a familiar weight. And there's not much more you need to say about it. And what's the thing that's new, that's different about this situation? That is the thing that your character can lean into.

[Mary Robinette] I love that. You have just… And this is the thing that I love about talking to you all is that you just… What you said just combined with two other thoughts. One was the memory of doing that. One of the things that we asked them to do was to teach our writers what it feels like to have a sword. It's not… We weren't trying to learn how to fight. We were trying to learn enough to be able to write about it. And so we asked them to disarm us. And the thing that I remember was that I had about enough time to go, oh! Our swords hit each other, and I was like, oh, I could… And then the sword was out of my hand. And he had me in a headlock.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It was so fast that all I was left with were sensations that I could not register until after the moment, that my hands were stinging, and that there had been a poof of air as he went past. And that was all the time I had. And that just combined with the puppetry memory, which was, we did this show called Pied Piper and it was the hardest show I've ever done. When we started doing this show, we could not get through the entire show in rehearsal, because we were so winded. And, by the end of the show, it's like, I would come off the stage and I put the puppet down, I'd stretch a little bit, have a glass of water, and then I'd picked the puppet up and go back in. And that's my experience of it. But a friend of mine was watching it, and was like, you never stop moving. I'm like, what are you talking about? I took this whole little stretch break. And he showed me video that he'd taken from backstage. My movements are so fast and so economical and I'm not thinking about them at all. That's all I'm thinking about is the newness, the, Ah, I can have a stretch here, I can have a little sip of water. And I think that that happens… That must happen in fights.

[Dan] It probably does.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I was so excited about this. I'm like…

[Dan] No. This is cool, I'm trying to think of how this newness applies to non-physical confrontations, like, you were saying in the beginning. To a conversation or to an argument. And it certainly happens that we get into arguments. Often, with my children, that I have had this argument with you so many times before, and you already know that you have to go to bed at night. Why do I have to convince you every single time? And so, yeah, there are certainly ruts that we fall into. But I'm not sure…

[Mary Robinette] I think… Maybe the… That moment where you're like, that was a strange facial expression. What's going on there? Like, where they have a reaction that you weren't expecting.

[Howard] Yeah. Years and… Many years ago, I was commuting to work one morning and there was black ice on the road. And I can relate the story in a very… Very descriptive, blow-by-blow of everything that happened. But I've driven past that point several times and realized that I can no longer imagine how there was enough time for me to think about what I was doing and what I did… What I ended up doing was driving on the wrong side of the road in order to avoid a pileup of cars at the bottom of the hill. And I looked at this, and I thought, where did I even find the time or the room to do this? I don't understand it. Did time compress for me? Did it expand for me? Or was I just reflexively aware enough as a driver to automatically put my vehicle where things weren't going to kill me? I don't know. But I fall back on that experience a lot when I'm writing action, because it's fun.

[Erin] Speaking of finding the time, I believe it is time for us to take a break for our thing of the week.

 

[Mary Robinette] Our thing of the week is a TV show. It's on Hulu. It's called Death and Other Details. Mandy Patinkin solving murder on a cruise ship. It is so good and it is so twisty. It's 10 episodes, and one of the things that I love about it, it's… I just… I want all of my writer friends to watch it. It is nonlinear in the way it tells the story, because they will tell the story and then they will jump back in time. It is talking about the malleability of memory and how that affects crime and your… How it affects the difficulty in solving crime. There's this scene where he's trying to get someone to remember a scene, but he's also trying to point out to them that their memory is not entirely reliable. And so what you see is the character reliving the scene. She's like, okay, so there was this… The room. And then there was spilled ketchup on the floor, and something else. And then… And then it cuts back to him, and he is waving a French fry with ketchup under her nose. And that has caused her to imagine ketchup on the floor. It is so good. And I want everyone to watch it, because it also… And it also to… I'm going to keep talking about this. It's also talking about the narrative, the stories that we tell each other, and the stories that we tell ourselves. It is so good. Please go watch Death and Other Details, so that I have someone to talk about it with. I see two people in our live audience who have watched it. I will meet you in the bar.

[Chuckles]

 

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[Erin] I wonder, actually, if I have an answer or a thought about something that Dan was asking before the break, which is, how do we take these same sort of reaction tools and use them at a time when we're not hitting people with swords, lifting heavy objects or… I'm glad that you avoided it, Howard, going into many trees and other cars. And I think the newness there is… Can sometimes be that in argument, we sometimes reveal things that we might not reveal in another way.

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something else that Dan said that… He was talking about, and I wrote it down, that it is a lot of what we're dealing with in those fight scenes is the character… The fight scenes that work well is the character's history contrasted with their anticipation. So one of the examples in the class was out of Dune where Paul Atriedes is fighting Jamis and there's a lot of, like, little flashbacks, very very small ones. But I think when you're having that fight, that the verbal altercation… It's like, I know how these things go, and I'm anticipating the way… I'm anticipating the thing that you're going to say. You know how you… You have an entire fight with someone in your head before you actually start talking to them.

[Erin] And yet, the fight never goes that way.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And the fight never goes that way.

[Erin] Because, I think, like, also your emotions become heightened in confrontation. And, sometimes, like, you can become the, like, a worse version of yourself. Like, you become more strident, you become… You see is on some little detail and decide to use that to pick the person apart. And everyone argues a little bit differently. And so, I think, thinking about, like, how do we bring that to the page. Like, it's not just, yes to no. It's this person brings in lots and lots of facts, and figures. This person appeals to emotion. This person breaks down physically. Thinking about what those things are, whether it's, like, a thing you've seen a thousand times, where you're like, not you again with these facts and figures. Like, Ah, that's what always happens. I should have been prepared. Or if it's something new that you're experiencing. It really, I think, is a great way to get to a heart of character, because sometimes we forget to shield parts of ourselves that we might otherwise, when we are angry, and we are trying to like get a point across.

 

[Howard] This idea that the confrontation will reveal aspects of the character is a beautiful reason to have the confrontation to begin with. A bad reason to put a confrontation or a fight in a book is to say, well, I've reached the point in the scene where something needs to happen, so now they fight.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And we can tell, as readers, as moviegoers, as TV watchers, as whatever, we can tell when that was the reason for the scene. And we don't love it. Even if it's really, really well done, we don't love it. We want there to be emotion, we want there to be character reveals, we want something to matter, and we want something to change. And if those elements aren't the underpinning of the action scene of the fight, of the argument, of the car chase, the whatever… Then it's just a thing you put in because you felt like this kind of story has to have that in it.

[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things Dan talked about in his class.

[Dan] I know. This is great. I don't have to participate in this episode…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because we're all just quoting me the whole time anyway.

[Howard] For those of you…

[Laughter]

[Howard] For those of you who have not benefited…

[Dan] It's wonderful.

[Howard] From the video feed… There is no video feed… The smug smile on Dan's face…

[Dan] Oh, yeah. I just ate a canary, and there's nothing you can do about it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Something else that I was thinking about as we were talking… But I'm now interested to see if it can play into verbal confrontations. That… The idea that the character's strengths become their weaknesses because we over rely on them and they shape the choices that we make, even when it's not appropriate. In the example in the physical conflict was, again, the Paul Atriedes and his shield training, that he had been trained so carefully to compensate for the shield and slow down, that he kept missing the other person. And I think that that may also work in stories. Like, if there's someone who's, like, I am always very articulate and forceful, and what they actually need to be… That has served them extremely well in negotiations. But now they are talking to a loved one and it's like, no, actually you don't need to be extremely articulate and forceful, that is a weakness right now. You need to be quiet and listen.

[Howard] There are plenty of stories to be told around when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And you've made a mess, because that's not a nail.

[Erin] That's not a nail is going to be the name of either my next…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Band or my autobiography.

[Howard] It's the label on the box of screws in my toolbox.

[Erin] Nice.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you all for letting me explore this new set of tools with you. I was extremely excited by Dan's class. There's a couple of more classes that are happening on the cruise that I'm also excited about.

[Dan] You should all come on the cruise.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Because the cruise that we've got coming up has a whole different set of classes that I'm also excited for. But, I think it's time for our homework.

 

[Dan] Yeah. So, for the homework, I want you to do one of the things that I did in my class. Which is, go and watch an action scene in a movie, something that you really like, whether this is a Jackie Chan scene or whatever. And then, to kind of underline how different books are as a medium, transcribe it. Blow-for-blow and step-for-step, and see how long you can get into that before you want to tear your own hair out. Because it becomes extremely boring. Then, after you've proven that the blocking and the blow-by-blow doesn't work, rewrite that scene in a way that does. In a way that translates to and uses the medium of prose.

 

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go fight.

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-51-and-that-was-that 

 

Key points: Endings! Climax, plus wrap up (aka denouement). Compare end to the beginning. Not just a return to home, but something that reminds us of the beginning, but shows the change. Who, where, what, why do I care? Surprising, yet inevitable, with a lean towards inevitable. Don't just stop, let us see the characters settling into their new status quo. Give the reader a little dessert, some candy! Beware the new question or problem ending! Sometimes cliffhangers are okay. Just make sure the ending is satisfying to the reader. Watch out for shoving the unanswered stuff in the closet! Cliffhangers... how do you give a sense of conclusion while the plot is still open, and there are still big questions hanging? Different kinds of questions: character/relationship questions versus plot/world questions. Use the M.I.C.E. quotient! Lingering effect. Resolving shots. Where will the reader's head canon take them? Think about things you have read that you liked the way they made you feel. Emotional beats, body beats. Playlists! 

 

[Season 19, Episode 51]

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 19, Episode 51]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] And That Was That.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] So, we're going to talk a little bit about endings and how you have your big moment of climactic excitement and then how you wrap it all up for your reader. When I started thinking about this, I was really thinking about fantasy fiction. Because I feel like in fantasy, the world , like, often changes in these very big, dramatic, like, big ways, and then has... You have to make sense of all that and still bring it back to something that hits home for the reader.So I'm worndering how you all do that?

[Dan] Well, earlier this month we talked about Toy Story, and Toy Story does this wonderfully. That birthday scene at the beginning where they're all freaking out, oh, no, we're going to get a new toy, how is it going to disrupt our status quo? We get that exact scene at the very end, but we get it instead of we need to see if Buzz Lightyear is the new toy, and instead it is Buzz Lightyear is my best friend and we're working together to see what the next toy is going to be. What this is doing, and what I try to do in my writing, is compare the end to the beginning. It doesn't have to be a let's go back to the Shire and see how we've changed. That mythological return to home kind of idea. It can just be something that reminds us of the beginning but shows that it has changed. Recontextualizes it, sees it from a different perspective, so that we can go, oh, okay. Things have changed. A doesn't exactly equal A anymore, because we've added B to it.

[Mary Robinette] I found that I… I do a very similar thing, that I try to look for those resonance moments. I often think about it as doing like the beginning and inverse. And at the beginning of a story, a novel you're attempting to do, to ground the reader with who, where, what, why do I care. At the end, I find that I actually also need to hit those beats again. That I need to let people know who we are with, like, how my character change… Has changed, who they are now. Where we are. Sometimes it's a literal different place, but also, like, what the environment is. And then, the reason to care. It's like why is this important to my character and in giving some aspect of interiority to the character, really helps, for me, like to bring that sense of oh, we're home. This is the return. Even in stories where it's not, oh, and happily ever after. But this is moment.

[Howard] I'm a big fan of the surprising yet inevitable. And if I have to choose between surprising and inevitable, I will choose inevitable. Because that lets the reader feel smart. If I choose surprising, but non sequitur, then I often just make the reader angry. And so… Am I always clever enough to surprise the reader? No. Frankly, I'm not. So I look at surprising, yet inevitable, as the high bar, and reach for inevitability first.

[DongWon] When I think about authors who are famously bad at endings, or at least people complain about their endings a lot…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] So… The safest one to mention is Steven King, for example. Right? People hate Steven King's endings. Especially in his earlier novels. The thing that I notice about these is that they end abruptly. They don't give space for the dénouement, to use the fancy term for it. Right? That beat past the declining action where we get to see the characters entering their new status quo. The reason… I think that that is so unsatisfying. Right? And I think you guys are talking about really excellent points in terms of closing these parentheses, referring back to the initial moments, but also, as the reader, I want my candy now. Right? Like, I've eaten the full meal, but I do want dessert at this point. I want that last bite to leave with that gives me a sense of this was all worth it. Right? And sometimes that bite is a reward of, like, seeing the happy ending for them. Right? To go to Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee getting married, having a good time. That is a candy for Sam. For me, also, the candy is Frodo having to leave the Shire, because he's too traumatized. Right? Because that's something that tells me this journey meant something. It was so weighty and so difficult that poor sweet Frodo is shattered at the end of it. Right? To me, that makes so much of the arc of the whole story feel so heavy and rich and bountiful to me. Because I had that emotional moment at the end. People complain all the time that Lord of the Rings has four endings. I think it's important that it has each of those endings. It tells us that this… I spent the last however many months of my life reading these massive books or however many hours watching these movies that I did something worthwhile. Because the writers took me seriously enough to make sure that I felt good at the end of it.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is something that I had a hard time with when I transitioned from writing short stories to novels, is that I would hit the landing and I'd get out, and I wouldn't give the audience time to breathe and to have that candy. I love that metaphor of the way to describe it. One of the things that I see people do who are historically bad at endings, in addition to the and now we just stop, is that they will introduce a new question, a new problem. And this is very tempting to do all the time, especially, I think, with fantasy. It's like, and what about the other dragon?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And it's like, uhuh. Because that's… You're gearing up for a sequel. Not every book has to have a sequel. Often, if you do that, it doesn't feel like the book's ended. So try not to introduce a new story question at the end, trying not to like wrap… Ramp the tension up as you're heading towards the end. So the trick that I've found for myself is that I write that last chapter, my dénouement, my epilogue, I kind of write it as a standalone short story with the same characters and on the same theme.

[Howard] For… [Sigh] Okay. There are a bazillion different structures that we could be working within. And, primarily, when I talk about satisfying readers, I'm talking about satisfying myself and my own familiarity with structures that are primarily Western. And so within those structures, I try to make sure that for the first two thirds… After I hit two thirds of the book, I'm not allowed to introduce new characters, new technologies, new settings, new anything, because I don't want to do that exact thing, Mary Robinette. I don't want to drop a big fat question at the end, and I don't want to drop something that feels like a deus ex machina. The last third of the book, I have to use the toys that I put on the table in the first two thirds. And for me, for the structures and genres that I work within, that's pretty effective for forcing me to narrow my options for an ending.

[Dan] Well, I think it's important to remember that there is a difference between an open-ended ending and a cliffhanger ending. Look at the first Star Wars movie. We know when the Death Star goes down that the Empire's much bigger than this. We know that Darth Vader is still alive. But because of the order in which they present that information to us, we end on an incredibly final satisfying note. It doesn't feel like a stretch to keep telling this story in more movies. But also, we're not left with lingering questions. There's no last minute stinger scene of Darth Vader tumbling in his tie fighter and we go, dumdum-dum, he's still alive. We already know that because that was given to us during the climax. So you can have these kinds of things. You just need to end us on that moment that helps us feel resolved and satisfied.

[Erin] That's sort of reminds me of something we said all the way back when we were talking about beginnings, which is about building reader trust by asking questions and then answering them. I think there's a little bit of that at the end, too. Like, you want to make sure you've answered enough questions in this book that if you raise, like, one additional… Not raise, but if there is an additional piece of information out there, there's more to the world, it feels as if the reader's still got the questions that they had for this book answered, and that they trust that you will answer those questions, like, in the future. I will say that, like, as a… I am… People who are horrible at endings, it me.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I… Like, one of the things that I do that's a, like, an in between mistake, is the shove everything in a closet. So, this is, like, you're cleaning your room, and you get to the point where you've taken a lot of things out because you were organizing everything, but it looks really bad at that moment. You're like, oh, gosh, everything is everywhere. You could put things in the new places you've picked for them, or you could shove it all in a closet and then, like, close the door. So, sometimes, when things feel like they've ended… When I've written endings and I'm like, this feels unsatisfying… It's because there are things I just didn't want to deal with. Like, I was like, I just didn't really want to answer how they got to this place. So I just decided to ignore it.

[Laughter]

[Howard] In act one, you hang a snow shovel and a trash compactor on the mantle, and everything will fit in the closet in act three.

[Erin] Exactly.

[DongWon] Well, speaking of unsatisfying endings, I think we need to go to break for a couple minutes, and then we'll be right back.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Erin] Chants of Sennaar is one of my favorite games that I've played in the last year. I'm not the only one. It was nominated for the Nebula award for game writing. So it is a great experience for anyone. Here's what happens. You basically show up in a tower, and people are speaking to you, and it's like, "Mum, mum, mummum." You're just seeing symbols and you have to figure out from context what their words mean. That's what the gameplay is. You're figuring out, oh, okay. Mammut means plant, and blah blah blah blah means upstairs. And you're figuring it out and you're putting it together. And then, you move to another level where people are saying cheek check bawk bawk… Whatever. They're using a completely different language, and whatever it is, you have to figure out that one. Then you have to figure out how to understand what each of these different level people are doing, what their language is, and figure out that, like, tick-tock in one language means rawr rawr in another, and bring people together through puzzle solving and language. It's amazing. The art is great, the music is great. And if you've ever thought hey, writing can drive people wild, this is a game that I know that you'll love. So, check out Chants of Sennaar.

 

[DongWon] Okay. So we were talking about this a little bit before the break. But I was wondering if we could talk about cliffhangers more specifically. Right? Because I think there's a specific art to ending on big open questions leading into book 2, leading into book 3, whatever it is, but still giving readers a sense of completion. Right? I was thinking… I re-watched the second Spiderverse movie the other day, which ends on an incredible cliffhanger. But also I… When I watch that movie, it's such a satisfying sense of completion, because questions were answered about the characters. Things were closed off about when Stacy started here, she ends here. Miles starts here, Miles ends here. So how do you get people… Characters to a sense of conclusion while the overall plot clearly is still hanging open and there's huge questions about what's going to happen to these people?

[Erin] I think… I love the Spiderverse as well as an example, for one thing, because it's just a great movie.

[DongWon] It's incredible.

[Erin] Also, it reminded me that there are different types of questions. I think sometimes we forget that. That there are character questions and relationship questions that we're answering that are different than plot questions or world questions. So I think figuring out what the core is of the story, going back and looking at the beginning. What was the promise you were making? I feel like Spiderverse, for example, is a movie that promises an emotional… That there's going to be an emotional and character development. And since it delivers that and answers some of those questions, I don't care as much about the theory dangling plot questions that are going to be…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Answered in the next movie.

[Dan] Yeah. For me, a lot of this comes down to making sure that you really know what your story is about. I… For example, and this is a very thin example. I'm sure I could think of better ones if I tried. But, Fellowship of the Rings… The movie, in particular, ends on this, well, and now we are out of time. Please come back next year. But that's the plot. Emotionally, what most of this story has been about is Frodo trying to decide is he in control of his own destiny, and is he willing to put other people in danger? And that emotional plot conflict gets resolved very solidly at the end when he's like, yes, I am in control. No, I won't put anyone else in danger. I'm going to go do this myself. So, from that perspective, it does feel done and satisfying. Because we have tied off a major thread. Even though there's clearly many others. So… Fellowship, I think, is an example where they could have tied that off better if that had been a priority for them. But making sure that you know what the story is actually about. I just watched a really wonderful movie called Polite Society which is a Pakistani British action comedy thing about sisters. These two sisters start off best friends, and then this huge rift shows up and it ends up with this giant like martial arts punch out. They defeat the villain, and a lesser movie would end there. This movie remembered, nope, this is a story about sisters. So we get that breathing room denouement at the end where they are back together, best friends, doing the things they used to do, and that lets us know that the real story is over.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will surprise no one. So, the M.I.C.E. quotient…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But, the M.I.C.E. quotient is a very useful tool for thinking about these and categorizing them. So. Sometimes what I will do at the end is I will sit down and look, okay, I started with an event story and then I've got a character story. Most of my middle is actually spent in a milieu, and then I wrap that up. But then I still have my event and character that I have to wrap up at the end. And I will often make a plan to go back and revise the beginning so I'm opening things in different orders. But at the end, going back to something Dan said earlier about the order in which you present the information to the reader, that's what I think about most when I'm doing these endings is what emotion do I want the reader to walk away with. If you think of it like a drug, what is the lingering effect? Like, you put up with a bunch of side effects, but there's this one long term effect that you want. What is that one long term effect? So, for cliffhangers, the long term effect that I want is what happens next? So that's the beat that I'm going to land on at the very very end. And if I don't want that cliffhanger, the what happens next, then I'm either going to not raise that question at all or I am going to put it earlier so that the beat of oh, I feel good about these characters and they seem healthy right now.

 

[Dan] We have talked so much this year about establishing shots. But we haven't really talked about this kind of resolving shot. The satisfying shot at the end. How do you want… What promises do you want to make at the beginning, but then what emotions do you want to leave them with at the end? I think that's a really smart thing to think about, and I'm going to call it a resolving shot.

[Mary Robinette] That's great. I'm going to claim that and copyright it right now.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] One of the questions I ask myself when I'm writing and ending… And I ask myself this question because I'm the sort of person who consumes a thing and then immediately does what I'm going to get to in a moment, and that is where will the reader's head canon take them after they read the last line? What's the story they are automatically going to try to tell themselves next? I don't control that. I… They're going to take what I wrote and then they're going to… If I don't write an ending, they're going to write their own ending. If I write an ending they don't like, they're going to email me.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If I… But what is the head canon that I want to leave them with. And often, that… Using that as a framing for the resolving shot, that's… The cowboys riding off into the sunset. Well, you know, there's another Silverado down the road that will need their help, and that's the head canon that we get for that kind of thing.

[Erin] I'm wondering in setting up these sort of resolving shots, how do we know? I think that we've been assuming that you know exactly the feeling that you want to end with. But what if you're not sure? Is there anything you can look to, sort of in your writing so far, in order to figure out what is the best way to end things? Where… What is the thing that will satisfy the reader and yourself as the writer?

[Howard] For young writers, and when I say young, I mean writers who are new to writing, what are the things that you read that you liked the way it made you feel? Model your writing on the feeling map of those things, and… That's a great place to start. For writers who are more advanced, you already have a million techniques that are better than anything I can tell you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Just write.

 

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, really it is digging down to what is the emotional thing that you want to leave. Right? Like, what's the thing that will make your reader feel the book in their body, when you leave them with it. Because that's the thing they're going to be the most excited about. So, if you're me, how do you make them as sad as possible in the last scene?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Right? Or, in the case of Spiderverse, ending on a beat that is so exciting everyone's jumping out of their chairs and yelling. Right? Like, it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But I think leaning into the genres of the body is the way to go for these last beats. Making them laugh, making them cheer, making them cry. Those are the kinds of things. Or making… Feeling a saccharine sweetness. Right? I think that's… When you want to leave that lingering taste, think about how do you do it with this kind of intensity.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I want to say that that feeling in the body is really the key because sometimes I will see writers say I want them to think, ah, that was a really clever twist. It's like, that's not… That's a… That's not a…

[Dan] That's not an emotion.

[Mary Robinette] That's a beat and a moment, and it's not something that lingers with you. It is not something that you necessarily feel in your body. Sometimes… But, ah, that writer was clever. It's like that's not… That's not a useful goal.

[Howard] Yes. Surprising yet inevitable is not satisfying if it doesn't also have the body shot…

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] Accompanying it.

[DongWon] Horror movies end on that last jump scare because they want you feeling bad and nervous as you walk to your car as you leave the theater. They want you to be afraid as you leave because that is going to be the thing you remember about that movie. If you feel that way, then you're going to get home and be like, yo, you gotta go watch that movie. I was so scared the whole time. Even if you were only scared in the last 10 minutes of it. Right?

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you can do if you're… We've talked about looking at other media that you consume, but the other thing that's really simple is you can make yourself a playlist.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] That encapsulates the moods that you want. If you listen to a song and you're like, that! That's what I want my book to feel like. A lot of times it is because you're feeling that song in your body, and you can start to reach for what are the tools that I can use. Some of the tools that we talked about earlier when we were talking about character, some of the tools that are coming… That were coming out of language. These are all tools that you can use to manipulate that last moment and, yes, manipulate your reader so that they have that body feeling.

[DongWon] Think about mood [garbled], think about playlists, those kinds of things.

[Erin] What I love about all this is we talked earlier about looking at the beginning, and then look at the beginning and the ending. I love that, because I'm thinking on my playlist, maybe I want to relisten to that first song…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That got me excited at the very end. Because that reminds me of the feeling that got me into the story, and that's maybe the feeling that I want my reader to have going out of it.

 

[Erin] And, with that, I have your homework for the week. Which is going to be to think of how your story, how your novel, how what you've been writing this month is going to end. Think of the first ending you can think of, and then think what might be the next scene, then write that. And then, the very last thing that we want you to do, is to celebrate yourself. Because no matter where you started, no matter where you end up, you have tried something really difficult this month, and we're really excited for you, proud of you, and really want to see whatever story that you have. I can't wait to read it.

 

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

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/14/16-46-world-and-plot-the-only-constant-is-change/

 

Key Points: To make your world feel real, make sure it incorporates change! A past, a present, and a future, with the events of your story and the historical context interacting. Plot is about constant change, and you need to think about how that intersects the changes in the world. At whatever scale suits your story. Pay attention to why a status quo exists, and what is holding back change. People don't all react the same way to changes. What can you use to give your story a sense of time? Break it into chunks. Use labels for times and events instead of dates. Idioms! Pay attention to diaspora, the movement of people and the interaction of cultures.

 

[Season 16, Episode 46]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Fonda, the only constant is change. That's a phrase that we hear a lot. What do you mean by that? How does that relate to worldbuilding?

[Fonda] So, often times, we come across fantasy worlds that feel unchanging. We're out of time. I think we see this especially in portal realm fantasy, fairy tales, fables, stories that have that once upon a time feel to them. We know that in our world things are always changing. Our society is constantly evolving, technology is changing, social norms are changing. Even though I think there's absolutely a place for those sort of timeless ancient unchanging fairytale fable type fantasy worlds, personally I aim to create worlds that feel as real as possible. Part of that is making the world feel like it has a past, a present, and a future. And that the story that we're experiencing exists in a historical context, and the events of the story are also impacting what will be the status quo after you close the book on the final page. The fact that in our world the only constant is change intersects with the plot, because plot is also about constant change. Right? Each scene, each chapter, is a change that is driving that story forward. Because if you finish a chapter and you're in the same place that you were at the beginning of the chapter, that chapter is not necessary. So when you have change in the world intersecting with change in the plot, you're able to heighten and reinforce both.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to make sure to point out that this applies to a story of any scope. We're not suggesting that even the lighthearted romantic comedy that you're writing has to fundamentally alter the entire world. That's not what this says. The world of your story might be much smaller than the entire planet. But that it still needs to have that sense of past, present, and future.

[Fonda] Yeah, definitely. I mean, you don't necessarily have to be working on the scale of global change, it could be very small change, and world being the scope of what your characters immediate circumstances are. It could be change in a small town. Change in a high school. Change within this family. You have plot intersecting with world and that the changing world could be complicating the plot. For example, you have a romantic story, you have two protagonists, but some element of the world changing the industry in this town, causing one of the protagonists to have to move or a war pulling one of these protagonists away. I mean, all those potential changes in the external environment could complicate your plot. You could also have the events of the plot acting upon the world. So there is a give-and-take between plot and world.

[Howard] I like to think of change from the other side of the coin. Which is, why would things stay the same? Why does a status quo exist? There are status quo's that exist literally because we don't know any better. Because the technology hasn't been developed. In the 19th century, status quo for traveling around town was being a pedestrian or riding an animal or riding something that was being pulled by an animal… I mean, there was railroad obviously, but that was for longer trips. All the way up to the point that there were electric scooters and that there were people you could hire to take you to an airport to get on a plane. That degree of change was huge and a lot of it was driven by us learning things and things… Learning to do new things. But there's also status quo that is artificial. Where there is some sort of force keeping things from changing. Whether it's an economic force, someone has something to lose if we change things in the following way, or something, some structure has been built that prevents us from making the changes we want to make. Then there's status quo changes that are natural or huge, nature-sized, like… Was the story… Series of stories, Hellconia Winter, Spring, Summer… I can't remember the name of the author. Where you've got a planet that orbits twin suns, and it orbits on the outside… Complicated orbits. They have, like, a 1500 year year with hugely long seasons. So there would be these seasonal changes where suddenly the snow begins melting and it stays melted and what the heck is going on. So there are things that might change as a result of nature actually changing around you.

[Mary Robinette] The other piece of this is that people are going to have uneven reactions to that change. Depending on where they are in culture and society. So some people will embrace the change, some people will actively fight against it. You're going to have both of those things happening simultaneously, which is part of what makes something feel vivid and alive is that not everyone is having this even reaction. When you've got an event, whether that's the invention of a new technology or an invasion or just even class change, the events affect culture and culture affects events. Like, one of the kind of on a very granular level, when you're looking at rules, rules in a school or laws in a society, those rules… Or the ones that your own family sets… Those rules, the things that get delineated are always set in response to something. You don't have to create a rule about something if you don't… Aren't either afraid that someone is going to do it or if someone hasn't already done it, and often, it's, like, why would any sensible person… There's a… Why do we have a rule about the number of questions that is appropriate to ask a guest? Not saying that we have someone in my family is perhaps a little too curious, but…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] These are the kinds of things that can exist and can make that sense of history. Because people will… You can always have someone who remembers before the rule. Like, I remember flying bef… When you could go and meet someone at the air… At the airplane door. At the gate. That's… That is outside of memory for many of my peers, just because of where I was born. Or when I was born.

[Dan] There's a park just about a block away from my house that has a big sign posted that says, "No fireworks, nudity, or horseback riding."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I would love to know what event prompted the creation of that sign.

 

[Dan] But, let's pause here. Let's get our book of the week from Fonda.

[Fonda] So, the book of the week is Black Water Sister by Zen Cho. I wanted to highlight this because it is a great example of a story in which the fantasy elements interact with a changing society. So it is set in modern-day Malaysia, and there are ghosts and deities, but they are interacting with greedy land developers who are potentially going to be destroying a temple. The way that Zen Cho makes those elements interact is both very… It's very on point and it's also very witty and hilarious, and I really think it's a good example of what we are talking about. Because often times there are… We talked about choosing where you want to build the world in order to reinforce your themes, and Zen certainly does that because there is this sense that the fantasy world, the fantasy elements, are not unchanging. They are being affected by the real world, and things like… Like land development.

 

[Fonda] One of the reasons why I set the Green Bone saga in an analogy of late 20th century was because there were so many forces of modernization and globalization that were going on at that time. Some of them continuing to this day, but especially post-World War II and the economic boom of the Asian nations, and intersected really nicely with one of the things that I wanted to bring to the forefront in that story, which is that there is this magic element, and for a very long time it has been the birthright of the people who live in this place and control that resource. But there's no way that that would be immune to technology and to economics. Someone would find a way to, and they do, a foreign power finds a way to develop a drug so that what was once exclusive to these people is no longer exclusive. That intersects with the plot, and that's why these clans start having conflicts in going to war. So, let's talk a little bit about ways that you can make your fictional world, your invented world, feel like it has a sense of time.

[Dan] Yeah. So, I've… An example I'm going to throw out is my own book, Extreme Makeover. Which is set in our world, but is specifically about how that world is slowly degraded and destroyed by a new technology. It's a hand lotion that overwrites DNA. I realized quickly early on that while I was telling a kind of an apocalyptic story about the end of the world, that would necessitate massive societal changes over time. So the… My solution was to split the book into four distinct parts, each of them presenting the world in a different way. There aren't necessarily huge time jumps between each part. But it… Categorizing it that way gave me a chance to kind of make more obvious this is our world today. This is the part of the world where this new technology has been invented and people are focusing on that. Then, as that gets worse and worse, and as the world changes, these little breaks and it make it kind of easy for me to convey those changes over time.

[Mary Robinette] One of the tricks that I use sometimes when I'm trying to create the sense of change is to make sure that my cast of characters are not all the same age for the reasons that I've already talked about. But the other thing that I found very, very useful is the way we identify time, with the exception of 2020…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Is rarely by the year. It's usually something like before the war or after… Mid-panini, I've heard people talking about. But we come up with a catchy label for it. The something something dynasty. One of the things that you can do to create this sense that your world is very thought through is to just have people refer to something in the past with a label instead of an actual date. Because it also implies that… I've used this example before, that I had the battle of the seven red armies. Like, I have literally no idea what this battle is. I just needed to reference something that happened in the past, like a far distant event. That makes it sound like, oh, yeah, there was this whole big cultural war that went down. I don't know. I don't know what that is.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But it makes my world sound richer. It's the shorthand…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] [of cheats?]

[Fonda] That can apply to not just things that happened in the past, but the sort of echo of the historical origins for names and customs and behaviors. So, like, for example, there's… In my story, there's these people who are known as lantern men, and they're sort of patrons of this clan. But the reason why they're called that has a historical origin that dates to wartime. So having a… Having little idioms that people say to each other. I have placed interludes in my book that are structurally a way to create a sense of history. They're these brief looks back into myth or history. But then I bring them into the main narrative by having them tie into sayings or legends or TV shows and comic books or pop-culture that the current day characters are experiencing. So there's clearly a link between what came before and how that has, like, filtered into current day culture and behavior.

[Dan] We're getting… We're running out of time, but one aspect of this that's in your notes, I want to make sure that we talk about, is diaspora. Which we talked about a little bit during lunch. But I feel like the Green Bone saga is very good at conveying the concept of diaspora, and the way that different cultures migrate and kind of interface with an interface into other cultures. So can you talk a little bit about that?

[Fonda] Yeah. I mean, that was an element that I very much wanted to capture in my books, because I rarely see it depicted in fantasy novels. There's always races, different fantasy races, but they don't always take into account that people move. I mean, our whole world history is so based on the migration of people. There's a lot of cross-cultural pollination and cultures mix and they change and diaspora cultures are different from the culture that those people came from. That is an element of change and time and history that was very important to me when I was writing those books. I wanted to make it really obvious when you're reading them that these people who might be ethnically the same but have migrated to different places, now feel very distinct. Yet they have also some commonalities, and they've… So that was a tricky balance to strike.

[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite real-world details for this is the food in Peru. Peru is South American, it is very deeply steeped in the indigenous cultures, and then the Spanish who arrived. But also, they have had Chinese influence in their culture for hundreds of years, to the point that the traditional like grandma's house Sunday dinner is a stirfry in a wok.

[Fonda] Yes.

[Dan] Which changes… We don't tend to think about that being in a South American country, but this concept of the way the cultures have pollinated each other is present.

[Fonda] Yeah. In the before times… Dan, you're making me hungry, because I visited Peru, and the food there was one of the highlights.

[Dan] Oh, for sure.

[Fonda] But they have this fried rice dish which is called chaufa. I learned that it's called chaufa because the Chinese immigrants who moved to Peru and started these restaurants, the Chinese word, and I'm going to butcher it because I don't speak Mandarin fluently is chaofan, come eat. So when they would say choafan, like, that got transmuted into chaufa, which is this fried rice dish. [Garbled] That's just like a little, very cool worldbuilding detail that if you can find ways to create little moments like that in your story are just going to make your world feel so much richer and more real.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to actually recommend that people who want to dive deeper into food, because we could talk about it for hours, go back and check out episode 14:30, Eating Your Way To Better Worldbuilding. Which digs really deep into this. Including a fascinating detail, which is that often a side effect of a diaspora is that the food of the people who have emigrated to someplace else will freeze at a particular… At a cultural moment. The moment that they left their home country. Whereas the home country will continue to carry on and the food will continue to change. Which I found fascinating and totally relevant to this conversation.

[Dan] Yes, very much.

[Mary Robinette] But you can go listen to the full episode.

 

[Dan] Awesome. This has been a great episode. Fonda, take us out with some homework.

[Fonda] So, the homework this week is for you to take a timeless story. So pick a fairytale or a fable and reimagine it happening during a period of change in that society. So my example would be, let's say, Sleeping Beauty falls under the curse and she wakes up 100 years later. But that kingdom has been through a socialist revolution. Now the Royals are in exile. How can you imagine a timeless story being very different as a result of the world changing?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to tag onto that really fast, and then will let everyone go. Beauty and the Beast, the Disney film, if you look at the fashions in it, takes place about 10 years before the French Revolution.

[Dan] Yeah. Sorry, Belle. Anyway, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/29/16-35-what-is-the-m-i-c-e-quotient/

 

Key Points: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient? Milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Milieu stories are driven by place, beginning when a character enters a place and end when they exit. The conflicts keep the character from leaving. Inquiry stories begin with a question and end when the character answers it. The conflicts keep the character from answering the question. Character stories start with "Who am I?" and end with recognition of self. The conflicts focus on blocking change. Event stories are action, starting with disruption, and ending with return to normal or establishing a new normal. The conflicts are all about blocking that restoration. Most stories have multiple threads, nested like Matryoshka dolls. The M.I.C.E. Quotient can help you decide what to include or remove, by identifying what kind of thread you are working on. The M.I.C.E. Quotient originated with Orson Scott Card, although his idea element has been renamed inquiry. Almost all stories, from short stories to novels, have multiple threads, involving several M.I.C.E. elements.

 

[Season 16, Episode 35]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, deep dive into the M.I.C.E. Quotient, episode one, What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?

[C. L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[C. L.] I'm C. L.

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

 

[Dan] We are very excited to have you here. This is the start of another eight episode master class. We're going to have Mary Robinette teaching us all about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. This is something she's an absolute expert on. We're very excited. Before we get into this, let's get some quick introductions. We've got two incredible guest hosts with us this time around. C. L. Polk and Charlotte Forfieh. C. L.… C, can you introduce yourself?

[C. L.] Hi. I'm C. L. Polk. I write fantasy novels. I wrote a trilogy called the Kingston Cycle. I have a standalone book called The Midnight Bargain. I had a short story read on LeVar Burton Reads.

[Dan] [Oooo] That's awesome.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Dan] Well, we're excited to have you. Thank you very much for being on the show. Charlotte, how about you? Tell us about yourself.

[Charlotte] Hi. Hi, everyone. My name's Charlotte Forfieh. I'm coming to you out of the UK. I'm an emerging writer. I've written a few short stories and had them published. I'm currently grappling with a novel.

[Mary Robinette] I invited both C. L. and Charlotte to join us for this for related reasons. We've all… All three of us have had long conversations about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. But C approaches writing in different ways than I do. It's been interesting… I subscribe to their Patreon and it's been interesting to watch the way they talk about writing. It's really cool. Highly recommended. Charlotte is early career, but actually has formal education in writing, which I do not, and is one of my mentees and is actively working on her first novel using the M.I.C.E. Quotient. Some of the conversations that we were having around that also made me think, you know, this would be useful, I think, to a lot of the… You, listeners, because one of the things that happens with Dan and I is that we've been doing this for long enough that we forget sometimes about the things that are hard at the beginning. We also shorthand so much that frequently it's like, well, obviously. Obviously you're doing that. Everyone's like, "Uh, excuse me. Um, that? What is that?"

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, with all of that, here's how this is going to go. We're going to do an overview of the M.I.C.E. Quotient today. You're going to hear a lot of me talking today. Then, in the subsequent weeks, we're going to take each individual element of the M.I.C.E. Quotient and look at it, do a deep dive into it, and then we'll look at how you can use these tools. 

 

So, I should probably explain what the M.I.C.E. Quotient is. The M.I.C.E. Quotient is an organizational theory. It's an acronym. It stands for milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Longtime listeners will have heard me talk about it is the MACE Quotient, because there was a time when I was experimenting with using Ask-Answer for the inquiry. But I realized that in podcast it frequently sounded like I was saying Ass Cancer, which was not helpful…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] As a descriptive phrase. So, inquiry. It turns out that you can pretty much explain every story, fiction and nonfiction, through this fairly simple organizational theory. I'm going to talk about this through the lens of fiction, but it is everywhere. So, stories are made of these four elements. They're mixed in different proportions. Milieus, inquiries, characters, and events. These elements can help determine where a story starts and stops and the kinds of conflicts your characters face. 

 

So, for instance, milieu stories are driven by place. These stories begin when a character enters a place and they end when they exit. So, things like Gulliver's Travels, Around the World in 80 Days, are classic examples. The neat thing is that if you know where a milieu story ends, this also tells you what sort of conflicts go in the middle, because your job as an author is to figure out what your story needs to do and then systematically deny them the solution. So, milieu conflicts end when your character exits the place. That means that the conflicts are all about keeping the character from leaving. So these are things like struggling to exit, trying to survive, and attempting to navigate. That's milieu.

 

Inquiry stories are driven by questions. They began when a character has a question and they end when they answer it. It's a super complicated structure. So, mystery stories, classic inquiry stories. Like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot. For an inquiry conflict, your goal is to keep your character from answering the question. They're lied to, they can't understand the answer, the answers lead to dead ends, so many red herrings. These are inquiry conflicts.

 

Character stories are pretty much driven by angst. In the simplest form, they began when a character's unhappy, they end when they are happy. But the real start of a character story is when a character says, "Who am I?" and it ends when they're like, "Oh. This is who I am." They begin with this shift in identity, the self identity, and they end when that character solidifies their self-definition. So, coming-of-age stories, romances. The big thing there with conflicts, your character's trying to change, stop them. Don't let them break out of their roles. Fill them with self loathing. Have the change backfire. I'm not really a writer. I mean, that's a character story, right?

 

Event stories are driven by action. These began when the status quo is disrupted. So when normal breaks. They end when it's restored or there's a new status quo. Yes, everyone dies does count as a new status quo so this is disaster stories, like Inferno, Deep Impact. By this point, you probably understand the drill. You do not let your character restore the status quo. You get fight scenes, chase scenes, explosions. They try to set things right. It has unintended consequences. Just being mean. Like, that is your literal job as an author.

 

Now, it is easy to confuse character stories and event stories. Character stories are about internal conflicts. I'll never be popular. Event stories are about external conflicts. Oh, no, an asteroid is coming at the Earth.

 

So that's what the individual M.I.C.E. elements look like. We are going to do a deep dive into each one of those. But as we do that, I'm just going to go ahead and flag for you to think about, that you almost never see single thread stories. Most stories are made up of multiple threads. Because, honestly, the single thread stories tend to be really dull. So, how do you do it? Think about nesting code. For those of you who have ever done any HTML, if I just say nesting code, you understand what is happening. You'd have milieu, inquiry, inquiry, milieu. For those of you who've never done any HTML, think of it like unpacking a box from IKEA. You open the box… Or just a toy chest. You open the box, and you pull out all of your inquiry toys, and you're going to play with those. Inside that box, there's another smaller box that is made up of character. You pull that box out and open it and you pull out all of your character toys. You play with those toys. Then, at the end, you pack them back into the box. In order to get the boxes to nest neatly, you have to put the character toys back into their box, put it back inside the inquiry box, and then put those toys away. Otherwise you will never be able to return it to IKEA.

 

So, to use a concrete example, Wizard of Oz is a beautifully nested story. It begins with a character story. Dorothy is dissatisfied with her role as a Kansas farm girl. Then we open an event. Tornado! Then we open the milieu, Welcome to Oz. Then we get the inquiry. What do the ruby slippers do? We get to the end of the story, the movie, and then Glinda says, "Oh. The ruby slippers will carry you home. Oo…oo…oo." Which, honestly, she could have said at the beginning. But that closes the inquiry. Dorothy leaves Oz, which closes the milieu. She returns to Kansas, where everything is fine, which closes the event. Then, Dorothy says, "I didn't need to go looking any farther for adventure than my own backyard," which closes character.

 

So when you have stories that feel like the endings fizzle out or the ones that feel like they end and then end again and end again. Two Towers, I'm looking at you. This is often because the nesting code is broken. So, what we're going to be talking about is how to understand what each piece of the nesting code does so that you know which toys you're pulling out, and which ones you're going to use, and how to put them back.

 

So, there is my big overview. Now we're going to talk a bit as a group, after I've just blathered for quite a while.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] Should we pause for book of the week before we talk as a group?

[Dan] Yes, we should. You've kind of already covered the book of the week. Why don't you tell us about the Wizard of Oz?

[Mary Robinette] [laughter] Why? Why, yes, thank you, I will. I'm going to recommend the Wizard of Oz as my book of the week. This is the film version. One of the things… It's a film that comes on frequently in the US. But in my childhood, with broadcast television, when you only had three channels, when it came on, you watched it because it was on. I have watched it as an adult. It is beautifully nested. It is fun. To my surprise, it's actually quite funny when you watch it. There's a lot of jokes in it. I got to see it broad… Broadcast. I got to see it screened on the big screen with a full auditorium [in the before times]. I was amazed that it is really very much a comedy. When you think about it, this makes sense because all of the… The scarecrow, the cowardly lion, and the tin man all came out of vaudeville and were noted comedians and song and dance people of their day. So, it's good. It's like worth watching again. Then, we're going to give you homework about it. But that's the thing I'm going to recommend watching this week.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It is maybe beside your point of M.I.C.E. Quotient, but I will also say, the Wizard of Oz has entered English vocabulary to a Shakespearean degree. It gets quoted by people who don't even realize they're quoting it. Because it has so many incredible lines of dialogue that have just kind of become part of the fabric of how our brains communicate.

[Mary Robinette] Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] So, I have a question for you to kick off this conversation. What do we do if we are not really a planner or an outliner? How can we still use M.I.C.E. Quotient stuff?

[Mary Robinette] I'm so glad you asked. Yeah, so this is one of the places where I actually think the M.I.C.E. Quotient shines. If you are writing instinctively, and you're going along and you hit a point, you're like, "Oh, no. I don't know what happens next." The thing that the M.I.C.E. Quotient is really good at is it's not talking to you about pacing, it's not talking to you about like how things… Like, the moment by moment structure. What it's really good at is helping you make decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. So if you're paralyzed by choice, what you can do is look at what you've already got happening. So if you're sitting there and you're thinking, okay, my character is trapped in this room and I need to get them out. Oh, I'm in a milieu. This is a milieu. Okay. What are the things that can go wrong related to trying to get out of the room? Then you can find your way out that way. Where you run into problems and you get story bloat, which is one of the things that can frequently happen to someone who is pantsing, is that you're like, okay, my character's trapped in a room and I need to ramp up the tension. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have their sister call them and ask them why they aren't at… Why they're not at the wedding yet. Why they're late to the wedding. Okay, but now you just introduced this whole wedding thing that you have to close down, and, that's a character thread, because now they feel like a bad sister, and that's terrible. So it can help you make that choice about what things you want to… What toys you want to play with in that moment.

[Dan] Awesome.

[C. L.] Very nice.

[Charlotte] Choose your can of worms carefully. 

 

[Charlotte] I have a couple of questions, actually. Where did the M.I.C.E. Quotient come from, because the first time I heard of it was on Writing Excuses and now I'm on Writing Excuses talking about it.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I learned it from Orson Scott Card, when I took his Literary  Boot Camp. He and I do not see politically eye to eye at all. But he was a gifted teacher and he had a book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which included the M.I.C.E. Quotient in it. I have done some tweaking and expanding. In the original, inquiry was called idea, which was confusing. What he meant was that a character was trying to chase down an idea. But it began when you asked a question and you ended when it answered it. So I renamed it to ask-answer and then inquiry.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I think the nesting code thing is me. I'm not sure about that, though.

 

[Charlotte] Okay. Thank you. My other question is there's a rumor going around… I mean, you've already said that M.I.C.E. stories have more than one element, but there's a rumor that I've seen in more than one place that a short story has one thread, a novella has more than one, maybe two, and a novel has two plus, maybe three or four. Is that right?

[Mary Robinette] So, no. I mean, yes and no. It is extremely rare to see something that only has one. You'll see that in flash. But most of the time what you have is, you have what I call kind of a major and a minor, or a light frame with short stories. The thing is that all of those elements are present. What you're looking at is which ones are pulling you all the way through the story. So if you think about the thread as a piece of elastic and you stretch that piece of elastic out. That, you're putting tension on that. The reader is holding on until that elastic releases. When it releases, you get this cathartic burst. So the more pieces of elastic you pull on, kind of the more strength you need to stretch that, and the more cathartic bursts you're going to get. But in a short story, you don't necessarily have enough room to tie on each of those pieces of elastic. So what you have is… Like, this moment right now is an inquiry thread within a larger thing. Arguably, Writing Excuses is frequently all about inquiry. But you'll… If a character is asking a question within a scene, and it's not an inquiry story, then asking it and then getting the answer, that is a very tiny M.I.C.E. thread that's happening within it. Whether or not you want to let it become a driver and be something that you maintain and sustain all the way through, that's the thing that adds the length. So anything that you're trying to sustain all the way through, those are the things that add length to the story. Which is why you almost never see more than one or two. I see, usually, that there's… Most short stories have two. 

 

Wait, wait. I think we've just been joined by a tiny cat. Yes, there is a tiny cat who's just joined us.

[Inaudible little tiny cat]

[Mary Robinette] If you hear a small mrrp sound, that is Felix. So, anyway. So, that's basically it. A novel can have 50 bajillion of them. But every time you add one, it kind of has the potential to make the thing half again as long, because you're… Every scene that you're sustaining it in, you're having to spend words to sustain it.

[Charlotte] Right, thank you.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, we should wrap this episode up. It was long this time and mostly me talking. The next… The rest of them will involve other people way more. But, as it happens, I'm going to talk just a tiny bit more to give you your homework. Which is to actually watch Wizard of Oz, but what I want you to do is I want you to watch it with a piece of paper and I want you to track the M.I.C.E. elements. So you're going to be using M, I, C, E. What you're going to be looking at when you're watching it is when the elements open, when it closes, but you're also going to look for the smaller elements within it. For instance, when Dorothy gets to the witch's castle, she has to go into the castle and back out of it. So that is a milieu within the larger milieu of Oz. So, just track when she's keeping them alive… When things are being kept alive. The initial disruption of reminding us that things have been disturbed. So track them through, and see what you learn from doing that.

[Dan] Awesome. Well, thank you very much. I know that we all have lots more things we want to say, but that's what the other seven episodes are for. So join us again next week when we're going to dig really deep into milieu. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now. Go. Write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/24/13-51-wrap-up-on-the-year-of-character/

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Wrap-Up on the Year of Character.

[Valynne] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not going to get through all this in 15 minutes, but we're going to try anyway.

[Brandon] So…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We have come to the end of another year of Writing Excuses. I think there's another episode next week, but this is kind of the end of our character year, right here.

[Howard] This is also the episode where we say farewell to Valynne Maetani.

[Brandon] Aw… Valynne, you've been awesome. Thanks for being on…

[Valynne] Thank you.

[Brandon] But you still have one left to do with us, where I'm going to throw kind of hard questions that you guys. Such as… Let's do this one.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I've got… These are hard questions.

[Howard] Okay.

[Brandon] Now I've warned you.

[Howard] I'm ready for hard questions. That's fine.

 

[Brandon] All right. Are there characters in fiction or some sort of story that you have read that have changed your life in some way? Either recently or in the past?

[Howard] Yes.

[Brandon] Okay. Who are they, and why?

[Howard] I don't actually remember the character's name. But the story was Heavy Weather. The novel was Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling. It is a character who is handicapped, has a hard time breathing. Joins a group of storm chasers and at one point, one of the characters asks him, "So what do you hack?" The term hack meant what is it you do, what are you good at? At the beginning of the story, he couldn't answer the question. They're resource strapped, getting an education is hard. But he sets out to learn things. At the end of the story, the thing that he can hack ends up being really important. That moment really stuck with me. That someone was asked, "What do you do?" and he couldn't answer the question, so he went out and made an answer. Can't remember the character's name, but I loved that.

[Brandon] That's awesome. Dan, you said yes.

[Dan] I did say yes. I'm just trying to decide which one. As cliché as it is, the bishop from the first 70 pages of Les Mis. I mean, they… He gets like one scene in the musical. Then you say, "Oh, that's gonna be cool. I'm going to go read the book." You realize the entire first like 90 chapters of that massive book are all about this guy before we even get to Valjean, and you just learn about this bishop and who he is and why he is so nice, all building up to the moment where Valjean steals his silver, and instead of accusing him, he gives them all the rest of the silver and says, "Here. I've bought your soul for God. Go be a good person."

[Howard] "You forgot some."

[Dan] Yeah. He really did change me. Because he's just an incredibly cool guy.

[Valynne] One of my all-time favorite books is To Kill a Mockingbird. I first read it in sixth grade. I was 12 years old. Atticus Finch, his… That character has just stuck with me forever. There's a line in that book where he talks about walking in someone else's shoes. That is something that has stuck with me for so long. Also, just trying to… I think that as we… As a writer, that's what we have to do all the time, is walk in someone else's shoes. But I was also just so in awe of his ability to do the right thing no matter what. No matter what other people thought. I think as a child, especially that young, you're always worried about what other kids think about you. Having grown up in Utah and being Japanese-American, I was always worried about what people thought about me. So I loved that, where you just do what you think is right no matter what anyone else thinks. That was very life-changing for me.

[Brandon] I've often mentioned Dragonsbane is one of my favorite books. Jenny from Dragonsbane is the main character. What this did to me… It's more meta than what you guys… You guys have inspiring characters…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I actually… I love [garbled] I've often mentioned that. But to be different, what changed with me when I read this book was it felt like… And I'm probably wrong in this… But it felt like society had taught me that as a teen boy, I should read books about teen boys. Right? I was so bored of the books people were giving me, and this is a book about a woman… Middle-aged woman having a midlife crisis. Kind of. In a fantasy world that's really cool. She's choosing between her family and magic, and stuff like this. She's probably younger in the book than I am now. But in my head, it was like this woman is so old. You can't get more removed from who I am. Yet I love this book more than any book I have ever read. When I was reading it. It was part of what taught me, all that stuff about I should be reading only books about 14-year-old boys when I was a 14-year-old boy, that… It just threw that all out the window. Said, "No, I'm not…" I mean, I'm sure there are great books about 14-year-old boys, but that's not what I have to read. I can read anything I want about anyone I want, and I can find it more interesting when they're really different from me. That was kind of game changing for me and my teenage brain, particularly because the woman in the book reminded me so much of my mother, in kind of good ways. Like, she reminded me of my mother because my mother had always had to choose. When she had been in college, she'd chosen between having me and going and getting a prestigious degree in accounting. She'd always talked about this choice, where she went back to accounting, but when she had a young kid, she wanted to raise the kid. That was her personal choice. As a teenager, I had always thought, "Well, of course she did. That I am awesome."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] In reading this book, I was always like, "Forget your family, woman. You can be a wizard. Leave, go do the magic." I'm like, "Oh, wait. That's the choice my mom made. Accounting is magic to her." It was one of these really eye-opening things. So, there's my Dragonsbane rant if you haven't heard it before.

 

[Brandon] Let me ask you guys this one. Is there a character you want to write about or that you've tried writing into a story and they've failed that you still want to, but haven't found a chance to get in the right book? If so, who are they? Why didn't they work, or why haven't you found the right story for them yet?

[Valynne] Well, in the book that I'm currently working on… It's called Seven Deadly Shadows. I'm cowriting it with Courtney Alameda. It's a Japanese young adult dark fantasy with all these yokai, demons, and every twisted Japanese monster you can think of. We have this character that I wrote that I absolutely loved. She is a teenage girl. She is a loligoth and dresses really cutesy and has the filthiest mouth you have ever heard.

[Laughter]

[Valynne] We had to cut her because she just didn't really add… She just wasn't adding to the story. I hope, at some point, I can use that character just because I love the idea of having this cute little like Sailor Moon type girl…

[Chuckles]

[Valynne] Just running her mouth off at everything.

[Brandon] Mine is similar. I actually just found a place for them. About four or five years ago, I came up with this idea for a character who, as a little girl, loves stories of like barbarians and like Genghis Khan and like great warlords, and always spoke in these dramatic like, "I will drink the blood of my enemies from their skulls," as like a five-year-old.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Which is just like… Then I'm like, "Oo… I'll grow her up to a teen and she'll still talk like this." I didn't write the book, and I didn't write the book, and I didn't write the book. But I finally found a book to write. It's actually… Should have just come out last month. Called Skyward. But I finally found a place for her. There's other characters still floating around. But that's the one I've kind of had a quest to get right for a while. It finally kind of came out.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It's just she's so much fun to write.

[Dan] I have twice now over the last 10 years of my career tried and failed to write a specific book that is kind of my… Take Gaston from Les Mis… Or not Gaston. What's the name of the little boy?

[Brandon] Oh, yeah. Gavroche.

[Dan] Gavroche. Take Gavroche and grow him up into Enjolras, and show that entire process of the street urchin becoming the rebellion leader. I… That's like a Holy Grail for me. I've tried it twice. I haven't gotten it to work. At some point, I'm going to make that work.

[Howard] In the course of creating the Planet Mercenary RPG, I wrote a dozen or more encyclopedia entry type things about locations that mentioned various people. I did the first drafts, then I went back and added details here and there to make those people more interesting. Insofar as I was able to fit that in encyclopedia entry stuff. Many of them are so interesting to me. I just want to sit down and write entire stories about them. Because that's how you end up in an encyclopedia is by being important and historical and fancy and interesting and cool and stealing spaceships and whatever. Their stories are not mine to tell yet.

 

[Brandon] All right. We're going to stop for our book of the week. We have a special treat for you guys this week. We have Dan the audio man, as we call him. Dan Thompson, our audio recorder for all the episodes recorded here in Utah. Sometimes we have other audio recorders abroad, but Dan has been helping us out for a number of years and he never gets to be on the podcast.

[Howard] Everything you hear from us runs through his wires, and yet… We never hear his voice. In fact, Brandon and I haven't even let him talk yet.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, he's going to give us a book of the week this week.

[Dan Thompson] Perfect. Thanks, guys. Book of the week this week is actually Mysteries of Cove. It's that series by J. Scott Savage. It is about a young boy, named Trenton Coleman. He grows up, or he grew up, in a world where… As you start reading it, you don't realize the world's inside of a cave. The various things that he sees, he views, he does is based around the fact that he has never left being inside this mountain. In the book, being an inventor is actually a curse word. So… I don't know what else to tell you about the book, except for it's…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But you love it.

[Howard] You like it.

[Dan Thompson] I love the book. I love the descriptions that Savage gives. I love how he introduces the characters, the character arcs that are in the book. It actually… His character arc takes several books to develop out.

[Brandon] That's awesome. The name of the first one is?

[Dan Thompson] The name of the first one is Fires of Invention.

[Brandon] Excellent. Thank you to Dan the audio man for our book of the week.

 

[Brandon] I've got one last question for you, and then we'll talk… We'll do just a little bit of housekeeping. Like talking about what we're going to do next year and things. But your last question. Who are the best and worst characters you've ever written?

[Ooo…]

[Brandon] Woo hoo hoo. Best and worst characters that you have ever done?

[Dan] Worst as in I really screwed this up?

[Brandon] Yeah. Sure.

[Dan] Kind of worst?

[Brandon] However you want to define this.

[Dan] Okay. It's very hard for me to pick any character other than John Cleaver. Simply because I've written six books and a novella and two short stories about him. I know him backwards and forwards, inside and out, and I have taken him on to incredibly long and painful character arcs. So, yeah, I gotta say John Cleaver is certainly the best developed, and one of my favorite characters to write. In terms of the worst character I've ever written… Oh, man. In a published book or anything?

[Brandon] It doesn't… It can be unpublished.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It can totally be…

[Dan] Because if it's unpublished… I'm currently going on… On my Patreon, I'm going back through some of my old trunk novels, and writing annotations on their chapters. I had a guy in… Do you remember The Legend of Krag?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] The Barbarian. Krag was okay as a character. He didn't really come across well. But the character that totally falls down in that book in hindsight now, looking back, is his sidekick named Drudge. One of the weird conflicts in that book is that people who died don't actually die anymore, they just wake up and are still there. The first person that happens to was named Drudge, and he was supposed to be my kind of snarky evil zombie thief character. He just never works. His character is different from chapter to chapter. Nothing he does is important or adds to the story, except for the fact that he exists.

[Howard] Maybe naming him something…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Less… Less…

[Dan] Less on the nose?

[Howard] [garbled plodding]

[Dan] Yeah. He didn't work.

[Brandon] So, I'll force myself to go next, so you guys can think some more. Best is always hard, right? Because people ask, "Who's your favorite?" and I can never answer this. Because I'm like, "Well, it's whoever I'm writing right now." That's who my favorite is. Who is the best and most nuanced? Like, what does that even mean? I'm kind of on a Dalinar high right now, because I just finished Dalinar's book, so it's probably Dalinar right now. But I don't know if he's actually the best. Worst, I'm going to take a different tack on, because I'm going to answer this… The character I probably treated the worst is in the Wheel of Time. Because I inherited 2000… 2200 characters, I think, named characters. The one I think I flubbed the most is probably a character named Padan Fain. It's not like I knew I was flubbing them, but, judging on fan reaction after the fact. He is the one that there's the consensus of Brandon just did not do a good job with this character, didn't seem to know what to do with him. In truth, when I was writing him, I was just like, "Oh, yeah. This guy, we'll do this thing with him." It was just kind of part of my big massive spreadsheet.

[Howard] You weren't a Padan Fain fan.

[Brandon] I wasn't a Padan Fain fan. Well, I didn't even know that I wasn't. Right? I was just like, "Oh, of course, he just does this thing over here." Like I didn't even… It wasn't… [Garbled]

[Howard] You didn't even know that there were Padan Fain fans. That wasn't a thing.

[Brandon] There are other characters that I've done that that are in the Wheel of Time that are controversial. But I don't think I did as bad a job. Some I got better at, and others, I defend my interpretation. But I have no defense for this character. Just because universally people are like, "Yeah, he just… Just dropped the ball." Vanished from the last book when they felt like he was supposed to have a really big part in it.

[Valynne] Okay. Well, I'll go next. I think the characters… I see this… They're not main characters. But I think the characters I did the best were in Ink and Ashes, her brothers. The reason why I say that is because I've gotten so many comments on how realistic their relationship is, with their sister and how they are really horrible to her sometimes and then at other times they're sort of protective and loving. I like the way that they came to life and just seemed like real people. So I think those are the characters I've done best. I think the characters that I have not done such a good job on our fortunately ones that are not published, so…

[Laughter]

[Valynne] I don't ever have to worry about that, and we'll just pretend that they never happened. You don't need to know.

[Brandon] Howard?

[Howard] I'm going to fall on my sword here. The entire first year of Schlock Mercenary is full of terrible caricaturization. Because the characters themselves were caricatures, and I wasn't consistent with them. My idea of… I didn't even realize that I was writing a cast full of people who were like me. For starters, there was, I think, one female. Had no idea that this was what I was doing. I was just writing something that was fun. I got better, to quote Monty Python. But, yeah, the whole first year of that. I'm not happy with the caricaturizations, I'm not happy with the whole cast. But…

[Brandon] You have the misfortune of having… And the fortune of having your first year… Anyone can just go look at it.

[Howard] Anyone can just go read it.

[Brandon] The rest of us, they're in the trunk, and you have to… Go to Dan's Patreon to see [garbled into]

[Dan] To see all my crappy early…

[Howard] One of the reasons why I'm just going to pick all of them as bad, because for any given week of comics, you're going to find things that just ring wrong for that character if you've read them later in the strip.

[Brandon] That's legit.

[Howard] The one that I am… I mean, there's several characters that I'm very happy with currently. But the one that I think I've honestly done the best job with was… I can't remember their name right now. They're the ancient Oafan librarian who now speaks GalStandard West with a GalStandard Peroxide accent which is full of lots of gerunds and wind metaphors and water metaphors. Writing that voice… I mean, they've only got maybe 30 lines of dialogue in the strip. But every one of them reads to me like perfectly in character alien poetry. It was hard to do. I spent a lot of time on it. When I go back and read it, I get sense of wonder from that character. Which just doesn't happen to me with the other characters I've written.

 

[Dan] So, can I turn this around, at the risk of running wildly over time? And ask us to point out great characters from each other? I will star… I'll go ahead and start.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] Because one of my favorite characters of Howard's is one of the many iterations of Capt. Tagon. Because they die and they come back. There's one of the strips where he sacrifices himself, basically, by running a massive warhead into a room full of enemies and killing them all. Enough of him survives in a databank somewhere that they bring him back a few years later. Now, the new version of Tagon is one who has to live up to the legacy of himself, and realize I don't know if I could do that. I don't know if I could run a nuclear warhead…

[Howard] Who was that guy?

[Dan] Into a room. I don't know if that's who I really am. He is a fascinating character, and I love him.

[Brandon] All right. I'll go with Valynne.

[Valynne] Okay.

[Brandon] I really like the stepdad. He was… He's not on the screen that much. But the menacing/loving mixture that he balanced back and forth with, where I couldn't decide if I were scared of him or if I were thinking of this protagonist, the main character, I'm like… Half the time, I'm like, "Oh, you're just an idiot. He obviously loves you. Stop. You're being a teenage idiot." Then I'd be like, "Oo… He might be scary!"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That was part of what kept… I mean, that was what… Not part of. That's what pulled me through that book. Page to page was the mystery of this person and who he was.

[Valynne] Okay. I'm going to name one of your characters that probably doesn't get talked about too much. Alcatraz.

[Brandon] Oh. Okay.

[Valynne] I just loved that idea of… Part of it is just the world that it was set in, but I love the idea of… I think that we are all so flawed, and just thinking how nice it would be if some of these things could be looked at as positive things. That's like a dream.

[Brandon] So, Howard, now you have to say something about Dan.

[Choke]

[Howard] Um… Yeah. The character didn't live very long. It's the second book. The cat.

[Laughter]

[Howard] No, no, no, no, no. John Cleaver's mom. Whose arc is beautiful and heartbreaking and perfect in ways that John Cleaver's arc never could be. I mean, I like John Cleaver as a character, but his mom gets… She earns…

[Dan] The best hero moment in the entire series.

[Howard] She gets the best hero moment in the entire series. And in terms of… And it is because, in part, her role as mother is already societally sort of the role of saint. She excels at that. In a situation where anybody else would run screaming, terrified, from what's going on. So… I don't remember her name, she's just John Cleaver's mom. Probably had a name, huh?

[Dan] April.

[Brandon] Now that we're done patting ourselves on the back…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That was actually really good, Dan. That would have been a better way to phrase that question is we pick our worst and someone else picks our best.

 

[Brandon] We are done with the year of character. Next year, assuming I finish the outline…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And it looks good, it's going to be world building. So we will do a year of world building.

[Dan] I'm very excited about that.

[Brandon] We don't know where the cruise is yet, because we're recording this in January 2018…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] For December of 2018. But those go up in January, usually, right? [Garbled]

[Dan] I think we'll find out next week, actually, where the cruise is.

 

[Brandon] Your homework, by the way, as is tradition, in our last episodes of the year, we just say you have no homework. You may go and enjoy the holidays and not feel stressed that you're not getting your writing done for this week. We give you an excuse to take some time off.

[Howard] But if you feel guilty, flip back through the homework you've done and try to identify something that you've gotten better at in the last 12 months.

[Brandon] Awesome. We are, as always, very thankful to our patrons for supporting us. Thank you to our listeners for supporting us. Thank you, Valynne, for being on the podcast this year with us.

[Valynne] Thank you.

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. A year of character. You're… Yeah, you've got an excuse this time. But… If you feel like it, go write anyway. Happy New Year, guys.