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/20-05-lens-1-who

 

Key points: You and I must have seen a different movie or read a different book? Save the world or dragon killing game? Relatability. Depth. POV. Emotionally compelling moments. Relationships. The why of a character enriches the who. What is the lie that your character believes about the world? What is the truth that your character is afraid to know? Interesting details! What makes this person tick? Specificity. I'm so happy you noticed that. Tabletop gaming gives you a world, a story, a setting reflected and refracted through the players and the characters lenses. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 05]

 

[DongWon] We're excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you'll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We'll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining our writing. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you'll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[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 05]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The lens of who. 

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

[Howard] And we've got a whole bunch of episodes queued up for you talking about the lens of who. I want to introduce this tool, this lens, by asking a question of my fellow hosts, and, sure, of you, fair listener, what's the most, you and I must have seen a different movie, or, you and I must've read a different book, moment you've ever had with a friend?

[Erin] So, mine is actually a game, and it's one of my favorite examples, so I may have said it before. But when I played Dragon Age Inquisition, a friend of mine also played it, and it's a game where you save the world and magic, what have you. But my friend was like, "Oh, I love that dragon killing game." I'm… I was like, "Dragon killing game? I guess there's a side quest where you can kill dragons…" He was like, "Yeah. I killed every dragon in the game. And then I was upset because there's no achievement for that." I was like, "Yes, because that's not what the game is about at all."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The game is not… That's not the purpose. But, for him, he was playing this epic dragon killing game, and only saving the world enough to level up to kill more dragons. I thought, wow, how exciting that this game has room for both your hunting experience and my actual narrative saving the world experience.

[DongWon] This is a face of me trying to remember, there are dragons in that game?

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[DongWon] I mean, it's called Dragon Age, but like… Anyways.

[Howard] The point here is that, and I've said this before, the largest part of what you get out of a book or a movie or a game comes through what you brought with you to the book or the movie or the game. I can't count the number of times where I've come away from a film, just having loved it and talk to somebody. They're like, oh, that was cliché, it was awful, it was boring, it was whatever. And I'm like, it was exactly what I wanted. I… How are we so different? Often these conversations, jokingly, end with, well, I guess you and I can't be friends.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Our perspectives are two different for us to have had that.

[DongWon] Yeah, but I think what you bring in with your interests and your… How you engage with it does change it quite radically. Right? Like, to bring another game example, I'm a huge fan of From Soft games. Those games are this is the Dark Soul series, Eldon Ring, Blood Born, and they're most notorious for having a part of the community that we derogatorily call the Get Good part of the community who just insist that you're not… You have to play the game in the hardest way possible, never looking anything up, never asking any friends, and that… If you're not good enough to do the game, then you just shouldn't be playing it. And I think they could not be misinterpreting the intention of the design more. That, to me, the game is very much about how difficult it is to go… To do things by yourself, and that instead, what we need to do is to reach out to the people around us, to the community, and find resources, find information and find help. But also, like, how hard it is to get clear information, to get help. I think it's a really beautiful meditation on the human experience. Because of its difficulty, but also because of its community. But that's maybe just me bringing my own lens to it, or my own perspective of what it means to be a person in the world.

[Erin] What I love about that is thinking about fiction, like, if you took your get good player and you your bring your community in player, and dropped you both in the zombie apocalypse, how differently would you approach things? Like, how differently would you take the exact same urgent problem… Like, you would be like, who can I reach out to, and they'd be like… I don't know… Get good killing zombies or what have you?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that's so interesting, is that a lot of times… I think it's easy to get really attached to a character as a person, like, you're like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Embody them like, this is what Ginny would do. So you sometimes don't get a chance to think about what are all the things that make up the character that you've created, and, like, what are all those lenses that they bring from other situations that happened before they were in this plot of this story right now.

[Mary Robinette] That's also… That's one of the things that will lead a character to being mono dimensional is that the writer only brings one lens…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To the character, that… I mean, how many characters have you seen in stories that appear to not have a family or friends outside this story? Like, they don't have anything outside the story, they exist only to do this one quest, and they feel extremely flat. When you start thinking about all of the different lenses that you can apply to that character, often by looking at the lenses in your own life, that's when you can start making a character that's multidimensional.

 

[Howard] In talking about this, this overarching concept of the way who we are colors our perception, influences our perception of what's around us, the lens of who is how your audience will relate to what's on the page. If you don't understand how that lens works, you will put things on the page and the audience will have reactions that you did not expect. Or not just that you didn't expect, that you didn't want. Because the lens may have been distorted. When we say lens, though, there's so many pieces to this that we're going to cover in episodes that come up. Relatability. When we say that a character is relatable. When we say a character has depth. When we talk about POV tools. First person, second person, third person, omniscient, limited, so on and so forth. All of these are aspects of that lens we'll be covering in upcoming episodes.

[Mary Robinette] We've been talking about this. The last episode, we just discussed puppetry. That was a lens that I bring to the way I experience the world. Much like that, one of the things that will happen to me as a puppeteer is that when I am performing some types of puppetry, I will remember the scene later as if I am looking through the character's eyes, view, gaze. Even though it's obviously an object that is in front of me or above me. This is a thing that will happen to readers as well. If the character is having moments that are emotionally compelling. It's always, like, the really emotionally compelling things that happened to… When this happens to me in performance. If the character's having emotionally compelling moments on the page, your reader is going to remember things through the character's eyes. They're going to… How many times have you had this experience, right? Where you're like, oh, yeah, I can't remember much of that book, but I really remember being at the side of the road, I remember the rain pelting down, as if you had actually experienced it yourself.

[DongWon] It's important to remember that humans are wired to care about other humans. Right? It's why when I talk about, like, stakes, right, in a story, I'm always like, well, what relationship is at stake here? That's where tension comes from, because… But that's true of the reader to the character as well. Right? We want to know the person's emotions, interiority, and perspective, and that's how you pull people into the story. That's how you get people to understand it. Because we are always already seeing it through the lens of the character. There's… It's impossible for us not to do so. I think.

[Erin] Yeah. I think also you don't have to share… And I don't think any of us are saying this, the character's lens, in order to care about that character.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Because I think sometimes there are characters who are difficult, who challenge us in some way, who make us uncomfortable, that we don't want to be necessarily looking through that lens. But, it's still so compelling. In the same way that people look at horrible things online all the time, that they don't wish they were, but yet they keep doing. So I think it's really interesting to think about the main thing is that the lens is true to the character, not that it is necessarily both shiniest or the prettiest, just that it is actually emotionally grounded.

[DongWon] I mean, so many of my favorite characters are just absolute miserable bastards.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And, just like… But one that comes to mind is… I watched True Detective Night Country recently. Jodie Foster plays the main character in it, and is just miserable. Just like an awful person who is still trying to do good, and is still trying to do a thing, and is still the protagonist of the story. I ended up caring about her very deeply. But the joy sometimes of having a character that you don't necessarily automatically align with is it starts… It gets you to ask the questions of why is this person like this? Right? What made them this way? What are their reasons for being the way that they are? Then that gives you an excuse to dig into all the context of that character. Where did they come from? What was their childhood like? Why did they believe what they believed? What systems are they embedded in? All of those things. So the lens of a character… you don't have to do an awful character. I think that's fun and delicious. But, to each their own. But the excuse to dig into the why of a character… And I know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but like, that is the thing that enriches the who.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Howard] I've got another exciting question for my cohosts. After these messages from our sponsors.

 

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[Howard] So, we've talked about getting characters as lenses. It sounds to me like it would be helpful if you just wrote the character… Every character's biography before sitting down to write the story. But I'm pretty sure none of you have actually done that level of pre-writing. Where's the shortcut?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Can you please tell me where the shortcut is so I can write less? Pre-write less, and be able to write write more.

[DongWon] When playing tabletop games, there's a character generation sheet that I like to use that has a list of questions on it. Some of them are [just like what's here] character's name, blah blah blah. The one that I think is the most useful to understand where the character's coming from, and this comes from Aabria Iyengar who's an Internet professional GM [DM?]. She asked the question that blew my mind, and I use in every game now, which is, what is the lie that your character believes about the world? When you can answer that question, that automatically put you in so much deep context about the character. So if you just have that one sentence about each character in your setting, you can already have so much to play with in terms of how they're going to bounce off each other, how they're going to react, how they're going to see the world.

[Erin] That just made me think of… I love that, and it just made me think of another question that I would ask, which is, what is the truth that your character's afraid to know? Because I think those could be completely different things, or they could be related to each other. But I really do think that I wish I thought that deeply.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Honestly. Wow. I wish I knew that about my characters. I think a lot of times, I… Dan talked, in a previous episode, about details and the importance of details. A lot of times, I like to discover characters through the details. So part of that is that my own subconscious mind is doing some work somewhere. So that when I start writing, I will throw… Like, my mind will generate an interesting detail, like, she only ate grits for 10 years.

[Laughter]

[Erin] For every meal. Don't know why. Then I'll think, well, why the heck would anybody do that, subconscious brain? Then I try to take the things that are subconscious and make them conscious. That tells me a little more about the character. Maybe I've decided that she's just, like, a grits enthusiast. Okay. Interesting to know. Then, knowing that, I keep writing, and maybe another detail comes out. She likes to light kites on fire. Okay, like, that's an interesting second thing. How does that relate to the information I know? So it's a very discovery… Because I'm a discovery writer, it's a very discovery method of character. But the more details you add trying to make them all connect, it's like having a friend that you learn a really interesting fact about and you go, well, how do I make this fact work with everything else I understand about you?

[Howard] Let me come to the grits really quickly, because… No, hang on. If I were to say oh, yeah, when I was in college, I ate nothing but potatoes for four years. Okay. That's not true. Right? That might be a thing that I would say, because I was eating cheap. But if we roll back and look at my budget when I was in college, one of the things that I ate a lot of was other people's pizza. They would share a slice of pizza with me. Maybe that, and I'm now speaking as if I'm the character of grits, maybe they did eat other things, but it was food that was given to them. There was some shame in having had to rely on other people for the actual nutrition. They remember making the grits for themselves, but they don't remember the gifts of food that were keeping them alive. So we have this truth that they are telling themselves about how much they made grits, and the lie that they're afraid to face, which is that they didn't depend on other people when in fact they did. So… Yeah, when… The question that you ask about that one thing that they said explodes into so many different things.

[Mary Robinette] So, I don't use either of those approaches. I love them both. But I don't use either of them. The approach that I use varies… My shortcut varies. Sometimes it's the, well, what is the hole that the character is trying to fill. Sometimes it's the interesting telling detail. I do use that sometimes. But I don't have a particular set thing and, using a puppetry metaphor, because I've got them. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, each of my… I was embedded in the show, and there were three principal characters… Three principal performers. Each of them took time to teach me. They would all say, this is how I approach the character. One of them said, you start with the figure, and you look at what the figure can do, and then that tells you the choices that you need to make to support the figure. Another one said you start with the text, and you figure out what the text tells you, so that then you can figure out how to make the figure do what you need to do to support the text. And another one said you start with the voice, and then you figure out how you use the voice to shape the text to support what the character does. The thing is that the audience didn't know and didn't care what their process was. At the end of the day, all the audience cares about is that your character feels alive. So whatever tool it is that we offer to you over the next episodes, that tool is the tool that works for you, and it'll be a different tool for each character probably.

[DongWon] Well, this is what I love about talking about tools, not rules. Right? Because as we're giving you tools, the lens of who you are as a person influences your tool choice. Influences your lens choice. What you reach for, whether it's the interesting character detail, or, like philosophically, what makes this person tick, or a variety of different ways of reaching for things as Mary Robinette does, like, all of that are rooted in our experience and our perspective and our interests as people. Right? Like, I'm very much somebody who is, like, what does make that person tick? You know what I mean? Like… And what those things mer… Or how those things emerge will influence your writing and your process. But the goal is that the audience, you're right, doesn't know what tool you used. They're enthralled by the story, they're charmed by the character, they're connected.

[Howard] And, as I said… I said earlier, you want to have a measure of control over what it is the audience is going to come away with. Except the audience has their own lens, so there's really only so much of that that you can control. It may sound like a rule when I say, oh, you want to be a good enough writer to be able to have some control over this. And yet, the exception to that rule is so glorious. If you can be a good enough writer that what you put on the page, you have no idea how anyone else will react to it, well, that is its own…

[DongWon] This is why specificity matters. Right? Going back to what Dan said about Erin's thing earlier, the reason specificity contains the universal in it is because if you're trying to be general, you're trying to control how your audience is going to react. When you're trying to be broad, you're saying, oh, this is for all of your lenses. Right? But if instead, you focus on your own, if you lean into the specificity of your perspective, lean into the specificity of a character, that they are a person who comes from a place, who has a context, then other people will connect their own lenses to that in their own way. If you try to do that work for them, it doesn't work. Because we each bring our own things to the table so the best thing that you can do is to be as specific as you can, and accept that you can't control everybody, and that your book, in being for someone, is not for somebody else. And that's okay.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's not just okay, that's essential.

[Mary Robinette] I was just at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they have is they have a place where they have three different literal lenses looking at the sun. One of them is showing you the sun in white light, one of them is showing it to you in only infrared, and another is breaking it apart into a spectrum. So you're seeing the same literal object three completely different ways. That's one of the things that the lenses we bring to bear does, is it… The reason it's important that each of us bring our own lens is that we are looking at these universal truths in these very specific ways that allows people to understand and bring their own truths to it. But the thing is also that, again, everybody who approaches those… Somebody who is red green colorblind is going to look at that spectrum one and not see the same things that I do. They will still see something that is amazing and wonderful, but they will have a different experience. So thinking about… thinking about the experience that you want the reader to have, which lenses that you're going to bring to bear to try to help them see the things you want them to see, but also be okay if they don't see it, if they don't get it.

 

[Howard] One of my favorite tools is one that… And this is an after-the-fact tool… Is one that Mary Robinette provided to me. Which is when someone comes up to you and describes something in your book that really affected them, and clearly it's because you did this and this and this, and the response is, "Oh, I'm so glad you noticed that."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "I didn't put that in there on purpose," is not the thing you say. The thing you say is, "I'm so happy you noticed that." Because, honestly, as a writer, and when I say honestly, I mean literally honestly, the thing that I get the most joy from is when someone notices a thing, when they feel a thing, when they have an experience with the thing that I put on the page. That is the best thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I love that I know a lot of other writers hate is I love listening to someone else read my stuff out loud. Because the way they interpret it is not the way it is in my head, and it is the closest I can come to experiencing it through someone else's lens. It's really disconcerting sometimes, but also glorious. One of the other things that I just kind of want to slip in here is when we're talking about these lenses, I also want you… The reason we're talking about let's give you all of these tools is that you, as writer, will be a different person on every day you sit down to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You're having a bad day, you're going to bring a different lens to the table. You're having a really fantastic day, different lens. It's just… This is why we want to give you as broad a toolbox as possible.

[Erin] I also just think that's a fun thing to remember about character, is that characters grow and change. Not just in the big moments, but sometimes, like, characters can have an off moment, or say the wrong thing. I think there are sometimes where it's like you love your characters so much that you don't want them to, like, slip in any way. But it is the variations within us, it's the variations in our lenses, that also make them so special.

[DongWon] And this really gets to the core of why I love tabletop gaming so much, because it's entirely about character. Right? You're always experiencing a world and a story and a setting through the individual character's perspectives. But because it's collaborative and improvisational, also, what I put out there immediately gets refracted back to me by filtering through the lens of all the other players at the table. So we are collaborating on a thing by reflecting and refracting constantly what each of us is bringing to the table, and through the character's perspective of their own lens in addition to ours. So the interplay of all that is the thing that I find so delightful and fascinating and endlessly entertaining about tabletop.

 

[Howard] And I think those notes lead us perfectly into the homework. Sort of an inverted Mary Robinette here. Instead of having someone else read what you wrote, I want you to write what someone else says. Interview two friends. Write down their answers, and yours, if you want to contribute, as completely as possible. Just two questions. What is the happiest memory they think of first? And, describe a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them before the age of 18.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-49-getting-to-know-you 

 

Key points: Romance elements you might use in your story. Buddy films! A bond of some kind. The meat cube... meet cute! Two characters meet because something goes wrong. A bit in common. Or the odd couple meeting. Conflict to friendship. Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. The half orange, the person who completes. Two aspects, the characters gaining knowledge about each other, and the reader gaining knowledge about the characters. DREAM: Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. Enemies/rivals to friends. Use other characters as foils. Catalyst actions. Flip the polarity, allies to enemies. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 49]

 

[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 49]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Getting to Know You.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about using elements of romance in your story. This does not, I have to say, necessarily mean that you have to have a love story or even romantic attraction. You can use romance elements for... This is what buddy films are. It is the coming together as a team, as a couple, as hey, we have a bond. So we're going to be talking about some of the tools that you can use when you're doing that. One of them, we foreshadowed last week when we talked about the meat cube...

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The meet cute. This is a romance trope in which your characters meet each other. Does anyone want to chime in and talk a little bit about how they...

[Howard] So they both walk into the flesh pot...

[Laughter]

[Dan] It's a cyberpunk story now.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Or the new Netflix reality TV show.

[Erin] Right. [garbled] I think what I like about... I love a good romance. What I like about meet cutes is they're usually a situation in which there's a tiny amount of tension because something is kind of going wrong. But the cute part is, like, my dogs got away from me and they jumped on you or, like, I almost spilled my coffee on you. It's something very small and one character's able to put the other one at ease in the way that they approach it shows that there's something that's very simpatico in the way that they deal with the world, see the world, or deal with conflict. I think that helps to foreshadow the way that they will deal with each other going forward.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great way to describe it. The other thing that I think that happens about that is that there's always, in addition to the thing going wrong, and that moment of oh, yes, I care about you, there's the desire for that connection to linger. And there's usually some revelation about something that they have in common. Something that is an unexpected thing that they have in common. It's like, oh, we both go to the same gym, or, what? Your grandmother's name is Emelda as well? It's some common thing that starts to… Is kind of the first thing that's cementing the friendship.

[Howard] Yeah. You mentioned how romances and buddy cop films… Buddy films, are both at some level, fundamentally the same formula. I pose the question, what does the meet cute look like in a buddy cop film? It may end up being something like these two law enforcement officers or these two professionals at arms both come to the same scene from different agencies and there is gunplay and there is a little bit of mutual respect and then, oh, no, you two have to be partners. I work alone. And off we go.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's really important about the meet cute is… It forces the characters to actually interact. Right? Interact about something. There's so many times when I'll read a book and I feel like the author's assuming that these two characters are in the same space. They're working in the same office. They're both in the same patrol car. Therefore, there's a relationship. Right? But we, as the audience, are not seeing that interaction. We're not getting a sense of that relationship. So, the meet cute, by having a thing that goes wrong in it, again, we're talking about sort of, like, those little micro tropes we talked about last episode. Where there's almost, like, that thriller component of, like, oh, no, something has happened. But the end result is one where we're leaning into interaction as opposed to a plot event and a plot hook in that way. Right? So those characters interacting, having a conversation, one person solving a problem for another person, and then leaving us on a note where it's like, oh, there's a possibility for future interaction here, because they share something in common, or they exchange numbers, or some aspect of it that lets us carry that thread into the future. Right? So you really want to make sure, as you're exiting that interaction, that there's something that carries us out of it with momentum.

 

[Dan] I don't want to get into a long definitional conversation about what is and isn't a meet cute. So I'm just going to say this is a different kind of meeting now to talk about, because there's one thing that you also see in a lot of relationship stories, is not the cute meeting where they kind of have some common ground that they can see, but the odd couple meeting. Where they are forced into conflict with each other. This is really common, I think, in a lot of buddy comedies, because they have that sense of butting heads. Until they become friends. But you see this in romance as well all the time. You asked about, Howard, what does the meeting look like in a buddy comedy. For my money, the best buddy comedy ever is The Nice Guys by Shane Black. And that… The time the two characters meet is when Russell Crowe breaks into Brian Gosling's house and breaks his arm. Like, that sets them up as antagonists, and then we get to watch them come together and become friends.

[Erin] I think, to build on what you're saying about the kind of buddy… Because I had the same thought. Like, it's like they're forced into the same patrol car, but I think it's like a moment of intrigue in the, like, most blasé versions of that, which is that, like, oh, we maybe have something in common. Again, it's finding the commonality. It's the, like, you do this by the book, and I like to just shoot things. But also, we both like kittens.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, a lot of times in buddy… Like, it's about finding the commonality in an unexpected place. So whereas a meet cute is I never thought I would meet you here today, in a buddy like film, I think it's more like I never thought I would find anything interesting about you, who I have already met.

[DongWon] Or any respect for you in some way.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So there is a… There's this theory that my mother-in-law has, which I call the Kowal relationship axes…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Based on her dating advice she gave to my husband, but it's great for characters, which is that if you think about these as sliders, the more things you have in common, the greater your compatibility is. So, it's mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. So, mind is that the closer they are in intelligence, the more compatible they are. Money, same opinions about money, what it's used for, not necessarily the same amount of money. Morals, the same ideas of what is right and wrong. Manners is the same idea of what is polite, correct behavior. So this is why you can have someone that you get along with, they're so charming in person, and terrible monsters on the Internet. Because their morals… Morals are completely opposed, but their manners are aligned. Monogamy is not actually you have to be monogamous, but you have the same idea of what the relationship is. You all have had the person that totally thinks that you're BFFs, and you're just like we kind of vaguely know each other. And then mirth, that you have the same sense of humor. So you only have to tip one of these off just a little bit, one or two of them off, to have like major conflicts and fractures. When you look at Lizzie and Darcy, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, they are actually really closely aligned in pretty much everything except manners because of her family and a little bit on mirth. Then, in the proposal scene happening, they're wildly misaligned on monogamy.

[DongWon] Excuse me while I spend the rest of this episode having a minor crisis about my last few relationships.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Sorry. Well, let me ease your mind a little bit. Okay?

[Erin] All you need is a meet cute.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Where does one find a meet cute these days? I've been going to the park and…

 

[Dan] It's all on the Internet. So, to ease your mind, a little bit, because while this is true, I also think that there is a lot to be said for the half orange. I talk about this a lot in relationships, that what a person, what a character really needs is the other half of themselves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Someone who completes them, someone who has all the qualities they don't have so that together they are a single complete person. So, yes, you need to be aligned, you need to think about some of the things in the same way, but also, you very specifically, I think, need to have someone who can do things you can't do, who thinks of things in a way that you don't.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it doesn't talk about personality. So, introvert, extrovert? Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree with you that you need someone who balances you. That is one of the things that I love about these is that they're both correct, I think.

[Howard] The title of this episode, getting to know you, I'm ready to visit that in a little more detail after our break.

 

[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] Today, I want to talk to you about the podcast Ancient History Fangirl. It's a history podcast and the hosts tell you history through story. Ancient historical figures like Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, [Rudicuff?] Or even the mythological [Coolcollon] have never felt more like real people to me as they did when Jen and Jenny told me their stories and brought them to life. They do in-depth research, and then weave it into a fantastic way to learn more about history. They have a lot of seasons and episodes, so I suggest finding a season or an arc that appeals to you. I started with their sci-fian episode, and I highly recommend it. You can find them on any major podcast platforms or at ancienthistoryfangirl.com.

 

[Howard] So, getting to know you. There are two aspects to this. One is the characters growing in character knowledge about each other, and the other is the reader gaining knowledge about these characters. You have to pull off both. You can't just say, A now knew all about B, you have to give the reader something to chew on. Something to enjoy.

[Mary Robinette] I have a tool for that. Which is, looking at the escalation, the arc, of the relationship. Much like the… One of the reasons that meet cute works is that it is the disruption of the normal, going back to our thriller episode. But there's this other thing called DREAM which I learned from Elizabeth Boyle. Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. So this is the arc that a person goes through… She got it from an anger management class, but…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] She is a romance writer, and she's like, oh, this is…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The building block of every romance ever. So, denial is that they deny that there is any kind of problem at all. What you do is you pick an externalization of that, you pick an action that the character takes in which they are clinging to that original identity. It's like, oh, who would go out with them? So, you make very… They're going to be at what? No, I'm definitely not going to that. So what action do they take? Then, resistance, that's when you acknowledge that, okay, I see why some people find him attractive, but I will never date him. Then exploration is where you start to think about it just a little bit. All right, well, maybe one date. Then, acceptance is, oh, no, I'm in love. Then matrimony is what you do with that. Or… Uh, excuse me. Manifestation is what you do with that. In a classic romance, it's matrimony. But if you think about the end of Casablanca, when Rick realizes that he is in love with Ilsa still, and that she's still in love with him, and his manifestation is not matrimony, it's to send her off and to take himself away because that is actually what's better for everybody that's involved. So what you do with that knowledge, the action that you take. And what's fun about this is that you can go through this cycle multiple times in a single book. What I see people do a lot is the characters will just hang out in denial, and then suddenly they get married.

[Howard] I've found that… 27 years of being married has probably taught me some of this. Demonstrations of one character's understanding of another usually take the shape of actions. Okay. Blow my own horn a little bit here. The whole cast went out falconing in the cold, except for me. I made a point of arriving at the house with hot drinks because I knew everyone would be cold.

[Mary Robinette] You were correct.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Was that thoughtful? Okay, yes. Sure. But the fact that I was thinking about these other people and had an idea of what they would need and the fact that they trusted me to bring something that they could drink, that gives us a picture of a relationship. Wow, these people are friends. They like each other. In a way that us saying, oh, thank you so much for the stuff. Oh, you're welcome. Just doesn't.

 

[DongWon] Having covered some of the tools, can we dive into another one of the classic tropes of the category?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[DongWon] So, one of my favorite setups is always the enemies or rivals who are caught in each other's orbit who have to build a relationship and grow to some kind of understanding or accord by the end, if not full on romance. To me, this is always such an interesting dynamic, because you… As we were talking about, you need to have the understanding between characters, but you also need the audience understanding of these individuals as well. So, often one is more in focus than the other, so we're getting the perspective of our protagonist and only bit by bit are we learning more information about the rival to begin to understand where they come from and why they are. So it's almost like building the romance for the reader in addition to building the romance for the character. Initially, we're like, wow, that person's a jerk. They're being so mean to the person I like. They might be hot, but, like, I hate them. So, learning bit by bit why we could respect them or be interested in them, I think is one of the delicious parts of this category.

 

[Erin] Yeah. You can also use other characters as a foil there. So, it's like you've got the rival who's a jerk, but then you've got, like, the truly evil, like, not even rival, like, person who makes the rival seem like, well, I disagree with their tactics, maybe, but at least I understand where they're coming from, unlike this new person. It's one of the things I loved growing up, watching soap operas, was that there's always characters in different stages of romance so that you're always… There's always one couple falling in love, one couple getting married, one couple settling down, and one couple breaking up. So there's always… So you know, like, when you see two people interacting, you're like, oh, this fits into this type of romance. I'm not going to mistake this couple falling in love for a married couple, because I have another example on the page, and it's also a way to give you something like, oh, this is something for this new couple to aim for. So I'm excited to see them make this journey down the line.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I think that goes with that with the couple that's making the journey, tying back into what you were talking about with the friends still lovers or variations of that, is there's always some, like, catalyst action that is happening. There's a point at which everything gets re-contextualized for the POV character, where they been watching this thing happening, and then there's suddenly, like, oh. This person that I thought was an asshole is actually leaving abruptly because he's taking care of his aging mother. Or when, again, Darcy and Elizabeth, when she suddenly realizes the reason he's been such a jerk to Wickham is because of the history with his sister. That's… It like recontextualizes every interaction that she's had with them up to that point. That's one of my favorite things, is that recontextualization.

[Dan] One of the things that I love about this type of relationship… At least for me, it's one of the things that separates it from odd couple. Odd couple is these two people, their personalities clash. One of them's messy and one of them's clean. Whatever it is. Whereas kind of enemies and rivals, or enemies to lovers, they are specifically opposed to each other, and they are trying to one up each other or they're trying to attack each other or whatever it is. What that allows you to do is crank the competence of both characters way, way up. Higher than you could do in a lot or most other relationships. That helps build that reader attachment. We don't like this person, but we also kind of really love this person, because they are so good at being terrible that when you get to whatever point midway or two thirds of the way through the story where suddenly they find themselves on the same side, we know that they're going to be an incredible team because we watch them be incredible on their own.

 

[Howard] Now, let's say for a moment that you're not writing a buddy show, you're not writing a romance, you are writing a thriller, you are writing a mystery. All of these tools apply, and you can go all Jordi Laforge and flip the polarity and have the trope be allies to enemies and it works exactly the same way. The more they learn about each other, there's a twist, there's a reveal, and now we have a broken relationship at the end.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah, it's funny, thinking about when you were mentioning the genres, I was thinking fantasy and science fiction, I think character relationships and dynamics are really at the heart of a lot of the classics. Like, your crew that's going out into space, like, has to… How do they get along with each other? This person doesn't quite like this person, but they accept it, they're a great engineer. Or when you have your fantasy party, like, going across the country, can the Bard stand the fighter? Like, a lot of these smaller dynamics, you can have as people's relationships change help to make things interesting, and I think why it's good for this week is, helps to make it interesting for you when you're like, I don't know what's going to happen next in the plot, they're not even halfway to the mountain of doom yet. That's a good time for, like, what's going on in their relationship? Is there a small thing that can happen that can make two people grow closer together or further apart? That makes your story, like, come alive to you a little bit as you explore how they, like each other or don't?

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that that brings us to our homework. So, your homework for this week is, in this scene, the one that you're working on right now, what is something that your character finds attractive about the other person in the scene? And no, this does not need to be a romantic attraction. And then the other thing is what does your character think is their own least attractive trait, and how can you make them more anxious about that right now?

 

[Howard] This has been 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/19-40-an-interview-on-tension-with-p-djeli-clark 

 

Key Points: Multiple influences. Make it a people story. Food is an unsung hero of worldbuilding. People live in color. Relax with a meal, then a monster comes. Fight scenes in places that shouldn't have fights, like schools, hospitals, playground, kitchens. Clues and seeds in the beginning, then bring them out later. Tell a story that sings to people and can change them. Write something for yourself. Absurdity, trauma, and horror. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 40]

 

[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 40]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] Today, we are joined by our special guest, P. Djèlí Clark. We hope that you've been reading along and listening as we've been talking about this phenomenal book, Ring Shout. We've brought him on to talk to us about the ways in which he tortured us through the tension. Phenderson, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?

[Phenderson] Sure thing. Thanks for having me here. I'm Phenderson Djèlí Clark, people probably know me as P. Djèlí Clark. I write stuff. Mostly science fiction when I can. Apart from my day job, where I'm an academic historian. So, this is how I attempt to let off steam. Thanks for having me.

 

[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much. So this was… I've talked about this with the listeners before, that this was a really difficult read for me, because you do crank up the tension quite a bit. There's a number of scenes that we will… We will discuss. But one of the things that I'm wondering about, when you sat down to work on this, were you thinking about, like, the historical era, or were you thinking about how can I make people super uncomfortable? Like, what kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What drove you?

[Phenderson] Yeah, that's a great question. I think perhaps a little bit of both, one subconsciously, one consciously. Certainly, I was thinking about the historical era. As I said, I'm an academic historian, and one of the classes I teach is Slavery in Film. So I've gotten to know Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, the 1915 film where the Klan are heroes, quite well. I was trying to figure out a way to bring that story to people in the genre I love. So, Ring Shout came about from that central focus, as well as, as we can talk about, a lot of other little interesting ideas from ex-slave narratives that I've read, from stories that I've liked when I was younger, people may catch some Miss Whoozits, Miss Whatzits, what have you, from A Wrinkle in Time, down to the aesthetics of Beyonce's Formation Review.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] There were multiple inspirations that I threw into this big pot of gumbo and hoped that it would work.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] Absolutely. I love that. Like… I will say, I did not catch all of that, or most of it, probably. But I remember when I… The Birth of a Nation comes really early, and I was like, "Oh. Oh, I see what he's doing. He did this thing, he did this other thing, it's and he puts them together into this thing." It really made me feel good. It made me feel like, okay, like, all the time that I've spent, like, watching like, sad narrative slavery [garbled twenties] and all those eyes on the pride where my parents were saying, like, it's all [garbled] like, paying off, which I thought it was a really, really fun thing. But I have to wonder, like, does that… I mean, does it ever feel like too much? Do you ever feel like I'm trying to juggle all these influences and not get overwhelmed by them?

[Phenderson] it's Well, yeah. When I was… To answer your question, when I was doing this, when I finished it, I was, like, well, this is a mess. I was like, this is just way too much going on here. I want to just throw some space aliens in here while I'm at it. Right? There's just so much going on. I didn't know if this thing would work. I always say, as writers, sometimes you create something that… I didn't have a full genre for it. I was like, this is all over the place. I didn't know how it would be received. I was pleasantly surprised. Shocked, even, at times, that you guys liked this. Okay. Great. So, it's one of these things where you take scotch tape and you put together this giant thing, you don't know if it's going to work, and it did. I don't even know if I could re-create it again. Because it was such a in the moment type of creation.

[Howard] Say, you're looking at your editor, you're like, "Wait. You took a heat gun to the scotch tape? No, are we supposed to fix that?"

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] So, I have to ask this question, did you still feel like it was a mess when it went to print?

[Phenderson] Again, luckily, so many people had read it and given it all these great… I was like, "Oh. It worked. Pshew." I guess what I was going for worked. I was so surprised, I still am surprised, at how many people like it. How much it's liked. All the countries that people have read it. When it was something that I wrote kind of as a stopgap. For my first novel. [Garbled] remember, hey, this guy's a writer.

[Howard] Okay. I'm here to tell you that whatever that gap was…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] You stopped it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] It is well and truly stopped.

[Phenderson] So it worked. I'm happy. Right? I… Certainly, anything, I think, of any writer, you certainly have these deeper meetings. But I didn't know if anybody would get them. Like, Erin was saying. I didn't know if people would be able to latch onto those things. People really did. I'm just grateful.

 

[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things that we talked about when we were… Earlier, when we were discussing the idea of the narrative versus contextual tension. That there's the tension that happens on the page in the story, and then there's the tension that the reader brings to it, the contextual tension, that the reader brings to it by what they know about history…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] And what they know about the larger world. You do a really good job, I think, of making sure that there is narrative tension there even for people who do not have a deep understanding of the contextual tension. I think that's why it works when you go to another country that is not as familiar with the history of American slavery and oppression. Were you thinking about that? Like… When you were structuring scenes, that you were like, oh, I need to make sure that there's something here for people who are a little clueless?

[Phenderson] I wish I was doing that consciously.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] I mean… I could hold forth and have a very long discussion, like Max Gladstone on how things work. I wish that I had, like… That I had that ability. But really so much of my writing is from the fact that I love reading, I love listening to storytellers, I come… My mother was an excellent storyteller. My mother could give you directions and it was riveting.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Right? She would build up tension… You're like, oh, man, I got it, which Lane I'm supposed to switch into. That's amazing. So I think I've brought some of that to this. It's just… I mean, I want to tell the largest story. Like you said, about ideas of oppression, about being in slavery and everything else, but I also want to make it a people story. I wanted the characters to shine. I wanted it to have their own lived experiences and how I would imagine people dealing with everyday life. Having a love life. Not getting along with the people in your little monster fighting group. How you would butt heads with people that you have to work with. I wanted to bring all of that to the story as well. In some ways, to make it more human, so people could relate to it. Also, to show that in the midst of this oppression, people still go to a juke joint. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] People still talk about sex and all these other things in life. That it's not just fighting the oppression, it's people living their lives. I wanted to make sure I got that across as well.

[Erin] Oh, my God. I…

[Howard] There was a lot of joy in that book for me.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I… Gosh, I can't remember which scene it was. I remember which scene it wasn't. It wasn't the scene in the butcher shop.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God [garbled]

[Howard] But there was a scene where I literally had to go make some jambalaya. Because you made me hungry for…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] The food of my people.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] For some of that deep South cooking.

[Phenderson] Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think food is one of the unsung heroes of worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] There's a way that I think food can evoke things. I've been in moods before where people like show a plate and I can hear people behind me going, "Mmm. Mmm."

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] I heard someone's stomach growl once in a film. I think it was in the movie Soul Food. Somebody's stomach growled in reaction. You know what I'm talking about, Erin, when they show that one plate…

[Erin] Yes.

[Phenderson] And I'm like… They're like, "Mmm. Mmm." I always thought it was ironic, though, the very plot of this movie is that food kills. Anyway.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] People do love their food. So I think there's a way that… I'm glad you said that, that… I know that… I think I know the scene you're talking about, like, when they're sitting down to eat. Because I just wanted to show that that communal experience of eating and enjoying these things after having a hard-fought battle… What's better than sitting down… Like, in the first Avengers movie. You go and you have some [garbled]. Right? There's something about that that is just very real. I… So, yeah. I think food is the unsung hero. I tell that to writers all the time. Don't neglect your food.

[Erin] If the food is bad, that tells you something too.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] You get out there, with [garbled vibration] plate after [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] It's not a good thing.

[Phenderson] Exactly.

 

[Erin] [garbled] When you were talking about oppression versus the real life, it may be think of one of my favorite things to do is to look at old black-and-white photos where they actually colorize it. Because I think people forget, like, people were living in color. You know what I mean? Like, well, instead they like put them on the wall, like they're not…

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Erin] Real. When you see them, like, I just think I saw one the other day, I think it was like Martin Luther King looking…

[Phenderson] Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott?

[Erin] Yes!

[Phenderson] They've re-announced it. People are like, "Whoo, they was fly." [Garbled]

[Erin] It was…

[Phenderson] Did you think they dressed in black and white? I think that's so true, is a historian, how people think of the past. It's hard sometimes for people to think of the past as these were people. Right? All of these events were happening, but they were still people, living their lives, bickering, getting along, joking. They were just people, and yes, they dressed in color. They matched the things. [Garbled] it was just, I guess, my gray drab suit. My other drab suit, now. No. It was… But there is something about that, how it brings it to life. I'm so glad you brought that up. I saw that effect in this. [Garbled] I understand that. It's still… It's something human about seeing those colors that makes you understand, like, yeah, these are people.

 

[Howard] When you… Coming back to tension for a moment, being able to sit down to a meal. That's a relief. That is a…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Relaxing thing. If you let your leader… Your leader? Your reader relax…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] Into some food that they are imagining and you're describing it and they're getting the smells and the tastes…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] And the sounds and all that. And then you spring a monster on them later. It's going to be even sharper. It's going to work even better.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I loved that. I don't know if you were doing it deliberately, but as I had gone upstairs eating the jambalaya, I was thinking, I may have walked into a trap here.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] I may have walked right into a trap. I'm letting my guard down. Something terrible's going to happen very next.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I think that's good points you're making. I don't even know if I do it deliberately, but I think, like, I'll tell you, there's some stories I read and there's so much action and, like, do people stop and go to the bathroom? Right, you gotta stop someplace. Give me a pause. Right? I'm really big into if I'm reading a story, I want to pause. I want people to [garbled] I want people to stop. I think… It's okay if they don't have a big scene, I want a pause. Nothing like that communal, like you said, this way that people let their guard down when they're eating, especially if they feel they're in a safe place here for people. Then there's also still a time… That was my time to let people… For Sadie and Maurice to still have their little bickering bit. All right? But also to show that they're closer than people know. Right? Also, the juke joint, right? I could have easily made this a weird mean girls thing where they just don't get along, but I wanted to show that, no, underneath all that, they absolutely love each other. Right? That Sadie will tear down this world for Maurice even if they also bicker. I think there were those scenes that allowed me to do that. I really liked it… Like I… When I started the story, for instance, starting there, that conversation. I didn't worry, because you know we're taught, like, oh, the story should start. Don't have them… Don't have people in conversation. I was like, no, I want this conversation. I want this convo in the very beginning to start the story off. I thought there I could build a little tension between this group, and then the tension explodes, and, oh, there's a monster.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Right. Shows up. Yes!

[Erin] I also think in real life, I think we talked about this on the episode, like, we all are much more, like, going to have tension in our conversations than because monsters attack us. Like, that's a kind of tension we understand. Like… I don't know what you all do in your spare time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] But, in general, so it's like it feels so real, and then you're like and it goes to 11. It's sort of… I was thinking about, Howard, what you said about the food. When you read a food scene, it's like your nose opens up. Like you suddenly think about how things smell. Then, if the next thing you smell is like monster, like, you are… You're taking that in with a soul whiff, you know. Because you're in that moment.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] You're ready for it, and all your senses are already being engaged, versus, like, sometimes when you know tension is happening. As a reader, like, you'll tense up. Your hands will curl, you won't take in full breaths because you're in the moment. So I kind of like the idea that there's enough slowdown, that we're just chillin', laying back, and then [crunch].

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I… It's one of my favorite things also that… The… Making the reader feel like, oh, no, you're safe now. Everything's all fine. All fine… Then very not. Very, very not. I actually… Since we were talking about that first scene, I had a question as well. That kind of… I been thinking about it while I was reading it, but then when Howard said, oh, no, this is a trap… There are potential narrative traps as a writer in some of this… In some of the things… Any time we're writing. One of the things that I was… When I was reading it, I was waiting for the parade to turn on them. Because that's something that I would have seen in cinema or…

[Phenderson] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In the hands of another writer. You take us a very different place.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With, hello monsters, and then going into the warehouse, which, like, is full and should not be full, and, like… So you keep ratcheting up the tension, but you avoid the obvious one. Did you avoid that because you were just not interested in writing it, because it was a little bit of a trap, or… I realize that's asking someone to tell us… Tell us what you were thinking when you were writing this however many years it is after you wrote the book is like monumentally unfair, and yet I'm still asking.

[Phenderson] Well, you know, as a writer, it's also like a ret con. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Like, people are always asking you to figure out why you did the thing you did. I end up coming up with an answer, and I'm like, "Is that true? Or am I…"

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Just [garbled] like, am I imagining that was what I was thinking at the time? So, I know that's interesting that you say that, that you thought the crowd was going to turn on them. Right? Because they're in this dangerous place, that certainly was a Klan march. Right? So I don't think I ever thought of the crowd turning on them. I knew that they were going to be doing something away from what most people could see, only because what they have to do is so wild that everyone can't see this. Right? It has to be like this is the secret underground world. Like Blade. Like, nobody knows I'm fighting vampires. Right? This is what I do. This is the… What does he say in the movie? There's the candy coated world, and there's the one underneath. Right? I wanted to get that idea of, like, there's this underneath world that most people are simply unaware of. For that, to me, it had to happen away from the main crowd. It had to happen away from the main block of people for them to be able to have this open warfare. So, yeah. The warehouse came to me, I mean, this is where I literally had a… I've been to Macon, Georgia, but I had a map and I had a warehouse that was actually there. That's from an actual warehouse. It was… I have photos of it. It was actually used to house cotton. So it gave me the… It gave me something from the landscape to look down upon. Then I would be, like, I want a fight in a warehouse. That's a great thought. All right. So I like having fights in places that you just shouldn't be having fights in, right? Like in schools, hospitals, warehouses. It's just like that's not what this is for. But this is what we're going to going to turn it into. [Garbled] So, yeah. That's how that came about.

[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. Now I'm sitting here going what is for having battles in…?

[Erin] I was just like… I was like playgrounds, playgrounds are really…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] That's a top place.

[Phenderson] Some of the best fight scenes, right?

[Howard] There really isn't a good place to have [garbled] battles

[Phenderson] If you like Star Wars, like, they're constantly having fight scenes in industrial centers. Hey, we're working here. [Garbled] with light sabers running around. They're just trying to get this work done.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] [garbled] around, causing problems.

[Howard] We are on a space station. If you break that, everyone dies.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Does ownership know what you guys are doing right now?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Every time there's a battle, a fight scene, that runs through a kitchen and the cooks just keep on cooking while they're going through…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, what? How does that…

[Phenderson] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Table 17 needs…

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] They're more scared of the chefs than they are… 

[Phenderson] Yeah, they are.

[Howard] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Basically.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of interrupting things when fights come running through, we're going to interrupt right here and be back in just a minute to talk a little bit more about tension.

 

[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It's not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it's easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. Head to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]

 

[Phenderson] My thing of the week is… I am always late on TV shows. I say this to everybody. We live in a golden era of television. There's more fantastic TV that has ever existed in my lifetime. I no longer have to choose between the A-Team, Knight Rider, and Auto Man. That was like a weird show about a guy who turned into a car. Very ridiculous. In the eighties, eighties was a wild time. But now there's so much TV. But I'm always late. So what I've decided to watch this week is something that came out in 2019. It's a series, a short series, called The Terror. It is on Netflix. It's about these two British ships, the Erebus and I think it's the Terror, trying to find a way to the Northwest passage, and, whoo boy, these strange things begin to happen. I've long wanted to watch this film, then it went away. Now, thanks to the magic of Netflix, it's returned. I'm able to watch it. When this is over, I'm going to enjoy another episode. As I do constantly. So, yeah. That's my thing. Some of you have seen it. If you haven't, The Terror. Watch it at night.

[Erin] No.

[Mary Robinette] Making mental notes, do not take Phenderson's advice.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Here we are, back on the other side. The heroes have fought their way through our kitchen, and we have to talk about some more ingredients of tension. So, I was so pleased with myself for that metaphor, it's not really great.

[Phenderson] We love it. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. I appreciate you. Some of the other things that we talked about were things like anticipation and resolution. There's a bunch of stuff that you set up early on that then has a nice payoff later. For instance, talking about the film that's going to be on Stone Mountain. You talk about that right at the beginning of the book, and then it comes back and plays… It continues to play a larger and larger role as we move through the book. Did you always have, like, and we're gonna go to Stone Mountain?

[Phenderson] Yeah. I always knew we were going to Stone Mountain. We were always going to Stone Mountain, because part of the origin of this entire thing is the fact that in real life, the second Klan has its origins on Stone Mountain. Right? And literally is created after D. W. Griffith releases Birth of a Nation in 1915, which is where the Klan arose. By this time, the first Klan is mostly died out, because they got what they wanted. They've taken over… They've instituted Jim Crow. The second Klan comes about really based on the film. The film so inspires this guy, Al Simmons, in Georgia that he decides to create the second Klan. The second Klan now has… It's still hates black people, but it has a larger enemies list. Now it doesn't like Catholics, it doesn't like German immigrants. It really doesn't like Jews. In fact is the killing of Leo Frank, the murder of Leo Frank is very much tied up with the second Klan being born in Georgia. He goes to Stone Mountain and they do a ritual. The ritual is based heavily on the film, the Birth of a Nation.

[Mary Robinette] Wow.

[Phenderson]'s It would almost… I mean, the group is not a terror group. It would almost be funny to call the movie Klan. Because the way they do many of the rituals they do are based more on the film Birth of a Nation than the first Klan that comes about. Right? This second Klan, of course, is much more massive. Where is the first Klan was maybe tens of thousands, this Klan rises to some four and a half million. Where is the first Klan was mostly in the South, and also in California where they're harassing the Chinese, the second Klan is everywhere. It swallows up the Midwest. It's in Maine, it's in Connecticut. It's everywhere. They're running people for office. They're not even wearing masks, because everyone can be a member of the Klan. Right? So I always knew I was going to Stone Mountain. Because Stone Mountain was that symbol. To this day, Stone Mountain is still a place where Klan and white supremacists meet. It has these giant reliefs on their, actually, of Confederate generals like Lee and others. Right? So it's still this place, this tension. So I always knew I wanted to go there, and, yeah, I definitely seeded it in the beginning. Because I'm a believer that if you give somebody something late in the story, I want to see it later on, but don't just put it there. I like people… I like to give people clues so that they can know that it's coming. Like, when I first saw M. Night Shyamalan… What's the movie with Bruce Willis? In the…

[Howard] Sixth Sense.

[Phenderson] Sixth Sense. I love the fact that when we figure it out, we're like, oh, the clues were always there. Right? We just saw it differently. So I like to make certain that I've seeded things so that when they do happen, people aren't like, whoa, what are you doing on Stone Mountain? I want them to get these little hints before, and then take them back now. See, I gotta do it, I'm an academic historian, so if you ask me things, I have to plug the history.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] I was right there with you. I spent a lot of time in Atlanta, and as you were talking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who was… Went to Atlanta for a job and was picked up by his boss at the airport. His boss took him, the first stop they made on the way from the airport to the job was at Stone Mountain.

[Phenderson] Okay. It's good that people go. It's beautiful scenery.

[Mary Robinette] Well, yeah. Contextually, a little more challenging when the person who's showing up for the job is a young black man and it's an older white guy who takes him there.

[Phenderson] It's not the best place. Especially if you know the history of, like… Why are we here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, those are questions that are still being asked.

 

[Howard] So, one of the things that I love the most about Ring Shout… I'm a middle-aged white dude who grew up in Florida. I have zero childhood knowledge of the history that you're talking about. That was all completely obscured from me. I… It's just been the last 10 years that I've been looking back and realizing, oh, wow. I know nothing. Well. Less than 50 percent of what was happening in that time. In that area. The way you wrote the novel, I was able just contextually to tell immediately, okay, this is P. Djèlí Clark creating fiction and this is P. Djèlí Clark telling me history.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] That dance that you did between the fantastic that you wove through your story in order to create a mythos that was brilliant and wonderful and horrific and full of scary meat versus…

[Mary Robinette] Still mad about that.

[Howard] Versus the history which is… I am ashamed for not knowing it sooner. But that dance you did was wonderful. I loved the book for that.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Unfortunately, in Florida, they're trying to make it so that people will not know about these things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I just think that there is this way that I think you're hitting on the head, there are these aspects of American history that just aren't spoken of. I think about when HBO re-did Watchmen and they decided to do it from a perspective of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma is something that I've known about since I was a kid, because in black spaces, it's just talked about. Even if people don't know everything, they've heard of black Wall Street. They know what happened there. People just bring it up. My parents are from the Caribbean. So they didn't come here and tell like the late sixties, early seventies. They knew about it. I heard about it in a barbershop somewhere. This is just something I knew. But most people, even the show runner for that show. He was a 40 something-year-old black male. He had never heard of it. Right? Until, like a few years before. It fascinated him. He went to look for it. Therefore he knew he had to put this into the film. That night that it premiered, I think Google almost broke because people were googling what is Tulsa Oklahoma? What happened there? Now it's just become something that everyone knows, but there is this way that there are a lot of things that the national narrative doesn't like to talk about. That doesn't make us feel good. So these kind of things become knowledge to like a few people where it's just known in the black community, like this thing happened, but in the larger community, it's just completely unheard of. So, yeah, I wrote… Part of what I was doing as the historian in me, I'm trying to bring these things out by using fiction. Right? What inspired me, for a lot of this, what inspired the story, were actually the ex-slave narratives taken from the last generation of enslaved people who were living in the 1920s continuing into the 1930s, during the depression, the WPA narratives. They talk about this first Klan. They described them as monsters. When I first… I was like, whoa. That's amazing. Now they know they're not monsters. But they're using this notion of describing the Klan as haints, saying that they have horns, that they could drink tons of water, do these supernatural acts, that they have chains, and they would blacken their faces I always had this idea that the using this idea of storytelling to talk about the trauma that they were faced with. Right? Turning these people… Who they knew who they were. They're like, yeah, that's Judge so and so. I know who he is. He owned me, or I worked for him. But he dresses up and he comes and he terrorizes us. What better way to talk about your trauma then using horror? Which is what the scholar Kinitra Brooks, she always says this is what horror is. Right? It's about us trying to find a way to talk about trauma. So, all this to say, I took my cue from these former slaves using folklore to talk about this history, and saying, what if I did that as well. It was just me trying to… Constantly trying to make it not get to historical, so that people like, oh, no, it's history, I'm running away. But yet, imbuing it with the fiction enough to keep people there in the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think you just did a great job of walking that line. I also enjoy writing historical fiction.

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The tension…

[Phenderson] Very well.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. The tension that you can put on things by inviting the reader into…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I feel like when you use real history, you are making space for the reader, because your engaging their curiosity.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In a way that is harder, I think with some other forms of fiction. One of the things…

[Erin] Oh, sorry.

[Mary Robinette] That you did…

 

[Howard] This might be a little on the nose, but I feel like our listeners at this point really need to be able to draw a line between the way Birth of a Nation as a medium, as a story, was so incredibly destructive… I mean, it was very influential on culture, but it was very, very destructive. And the stories that we tell now that attempt to correct that can be so corrective. Writing is important, and getting it right is important. Telling a story that will sing to people and can change them is important. This is a good work that you did, that we want to do. It is a good work.

[Phenderson] Thank you. Thank you. That's great to hear. I mean, so much of… Yeah, I can't say I didn't write this in a sense of this is a corrective or for my own catharsis. You know? People hunting Klan members? Yeah, it's cathartic. So, thank you, that's great to hear. I… Like I said, when I say I wrote this with the idea that a few people might like it, I still had this idea this is what I want people to get from it, and that people come away with this notion of it's a corrective, but also this… Giving them this inspiration to go, I want to find out more. As a historian. Of course, I want you to find out more, I want you to be able to look and say, oh, wow. This was a real part of history. This is a fictional part, like you said, these things actually happened. So, thank you very much. That's… You make me want to go write.

[Erin] Please do.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Please do write more. One of the things that I just wanted to draw a line under that Phenderson is talking about that Howard has mentioned is that Phenderson wrote this for himself. We talked about the idea of writing for… Of having a story that's written for an in group, a group that has a shared common experience. Then, knowing that people who are outgroup are also going to read it and engage with it. I want you to understand… I want you to bear in mind that this is something that he wrote for himself, and it is… When you are sitting down to write something, the thing that you can do to make it most true and most interesting is to write something for yourself.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think not be apologetic about it. You know what I mean? I think that there are… The world will tell you, like, oh, you need to approach this really carefully and you need to… It's not to say that you can just do whatever you want, but, especially when you're talking about things that are about what you know, what you grew up with, and things that your family talked about, things that are part of your history. I think it's what I really liked about this book is that it's bold. You know what I mean? It's not shirking from engaging the past. It's going all the way in. This is going to… I'm going to take a complete 90 degrees turn here for no reason other than I can.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Don't try to stop me! Which is that I also think tone is so interesting and important, because one of the things I always… I was about to say one of the things I always loved about the Klan, not an actual thing, but…

[Laughter]

[Erin] My favorite part is that one of the things that undercut them was when comic books started mocking them, that actually it was these are ridiculous people who took hate in the weird movie and decided to like cosplay evil. When that was being made fun of by like old-school comics, they were like, oh, we can't recruit as much because it turns out that our stuff… Like, we aren't able to get the recruitment. It's not scary anymore.

[Phenderson] Right.

[Erin] It just feels silly. So I think there's so many different tones, and I'm curious, like, what made you decide to go, like, all the way on horror? Because there's something ridiculous about it, but also something horrifying.

[Phenderson] Yeah. I thought that's a great… That's interesting. Thinking about recent happenings in politics, the notion that when you can make hatemongers and fascists, you make them feel weird and simply laugh at them, how much power does that rob from them? Right? The fact that you can do that. So that's an interesting point that you're making their. In this case, again, I was taking my cue so much from those ex-slave… To a great… You're… I mean, I should point this out, that I first read those narratives when I was doing a Masters degree. 10 years before I would sit down to write Ring Shout. Those ideas, I was introduced to those ideas there, I was introduced to the night doctor in those narratives. I kind of sat… I know, like I said, I want to do something with this. I didn't know what. So, it took me 10 years before I was, like, okay, I'm ready to actually approach this. So I want to say that I was really trying to honor… The fact that they gave me these wonderful ideas and trying to be truthful to it. Yeah, like, so much of it was I wanted to show the horror of it. Some of it's also absurd. Right? Like Butcher Clyde is absurd. But he's also terrible. I wanted to have that bridge between absurdities, but also it's frightening. Right? I just wanted to get that down. The notion that, you know, there's a point where Nana Jean says, like, "The Klan members we haven't turned yet," and she calls them, like fools. Right? I wanted to get this idea that they're dressing up and they're clowns. They're fools…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Right? But if they let that hate consume them, they can become this monstrous danger, that can destroy others. But she says of the ones who aren't, she just says, they're fools. Right? She said… She makes this distinction between the fools are the ones who turned. But I wanted to get that across. Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Again, you just… I think you walked those lines really nicely. On the subject of the narratives, the slave narratives, you've got a bunch of the sections that are transliterated from the Gullah.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And… I loved… Like, I got… They're just so juicy, and I love them all. But I'm looking at notation 25 in particular, the shout Eve and Adam tell about them to that wicked snake and the fruit from the forbidden tree. That one, it's interesting to me the way it is talking about the shout and how you wind up using the shout later. So I'm curious again, like, having… There's so many decisions that go into making these kinds of interludes. There is the where you place it. There's the content. There's the tone of it. There is the… Like… How many of these are you jumping straight off of something that you had read, how many of them are you are completely riffing on your own? Tell us… I don't have a question there, I just want you to talk about them.

[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Because I don't get asked about [garbled] those parts are so important to me, because I thought they set the tone for each chapter, they set… They were able to say so much in their… In between interludes. I actually pulled a lot of that from, first of all, I looked at actual shouts. I wanted to know what the shouts were about. So each one is pulled from an actual different shout. I thought the shouts were so fascinating because I said this is philosophy. People are giving phil… And I even have something in their where somebody says how many intellectual philosophers were lost to the droning work of slavery, and so forth. How many did you lose? How many minds that could have thought up these fascinating things? I thought when I was… So I… There were the shouts themselves, and I read people who were interpreting the shouts. Some of these were Lomax and others who were first doing interviews. Later there are books that talk about shouts where people say, well, this is what the shout is about. As I'm listening to people, I'm like, this is philosophical. They're talking about how humans think about themselves and their place in the universe and how… It was all of that. Right? It's as deep as Kant and anybody else. That's what I wanted to get across here in these shouts by… So some of it comes from quotes that I've read, and I'm also adding my own take to it, and my own riffing of it, and trying to give an interpretation, but trying to let their voices come through there. I have this transliterated because if anybody noticed that supposed to be [garbled] not memory for name… Our favorite Jewish radical who's a member of the monster fighting crew. If anybody knows, those are her initials, she is the one who supposedly a hero throughout this. So I'm putting a little bit in there. I kind of have her as a Lomax or something, like, using that the way that they would write about what they saw. So it's a bit of that. But, yeah, each one was important, each one was supposed to be kind of linked to the chapter that was coming. And you should know that I also had little quotes that I wanted from the slave narratives themselves, direct quotes. They ended up having to go, because I think, like you said, if people were like, okay. You have the interludes, then you have the little narrative parts…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Phenderson] Of the chapter, it's too much. So it was one of those things, okay, it hurt, but I had to cut them all out. But I kept one. That is in the very… In my acknowledgments. The one about Oma. It was like the Klan came into her house and she whooped them one at a time. That's an actual quote. I love that. Because here she's talking about her mama's like… I mean, just fantastical that her mother's just… It's so Paul Bunyan, John Henry. Klan members came in, I'm home with the baby, I'm just beating each Klan member one at a time. I said, that's… I have to have… I have to keep this quote in here. So there were a lot of quotes like that, I wanted to get these voices of these ex-slaves. But I definitely kept that one about Ma. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Awesome.

[Erin] I love the way you were thinking about… As you were talking about the shouts in the stories and the narratives, because so much of the way I took some of this actual story is that it's about the stories we tell ourselves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's about the stories we allow ourselves to tell, the ones that we hold back, the ones we are afraid of, the ones we should fear. So, so much of it being rooted in you wanting to tell people's stories.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] I think is just really cool and deep and like an extra level, knowing that that was part of what went into it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When you said that the shouts were philosophy and about thinking about their place in the universe, I'm like, that is what this entire book is, Maurice trying to figure out her place in the universe.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, well done.

 

[Howard] This episode is titled discussing tension, and the real tension I'm seeing here is your tension that is relieved by writing this book.

[Phenderson] In some ways, yeah.

[Howard] So, this was done and it was out and you told that story.

[Phenderson] I wrote this book in a few weeks because it was one of those things you know, as writers, you have this idea. I pitched the idea months before. It was due, like, in August. I hadn't written a thing. This is when I had the idea in my head. I'd been percolating this story for several years. But I just hadn't let it flow out. When it flowed out, like, I think it was like two or three weeks, I just wrote it. Let's get it all out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, this is where one writer says to another in a friendly collegial way, "You ass hole."

[Phenderson] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] There's something, again…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] wrote this award-winning book in just a couple of weeks.

[Phenderson] [garbled] The idea for it, like I'd taken this stuff like a decade before. It was sometime around… I would say around 2015 or so, I really started thinking about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] I was on a fellowship. My last fellowship. I was working on my dissertation in Indiana, Pennsylvania, literally nowhere Pennsylvania. My wife came to visit me one time there, when she was living in DC. She's like, "I'm not going back again." I saw tractor pulls and people chasing greased pigs at a fair.

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Okay, at a fair. So I would drive almost every weekend back to DC, several hour drive. I'd be driving through this misty mountain, I don't know if anybody listens to Old Gods of Appalachia, but it was that. Right? I was… So, while I'm driving, I'm listening to some shouts. I'm listening to these songs sometimes I'm just imagining. So there was a way where some of my built-up tension, I had so much of it in me, that when it came out, it just all poured out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] Because it was something I'd been spinning with for so long that when I finally came to write it, I could just write it.

[Howard] So what I'm hearing is if you want to write a book in three weeks, think the book for a decade.

[Erin] Oh, yeah, that works.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Erin] I find that reassuring. There are several things I've been thinking about for a decade, so, like, I feel like any day now…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I have… I've had things that I've had to sit on for a while. That's a question that we get a lot from listeners or early career writers who are like, "I have this idea, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it justice." I'm like, it's okay to sit on it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's okay to sit on it and think about it and noodle on it until…

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And write other things while you're leveling up.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of leveling up, and writing other things, I think it's time for us to give some homework. Phenderson, I think you have homework for us?

 

[Phenderson] Yes. If anyone is really interested in building tension and storytelling over a short amount of time, I have something that you can go watch. If you seen it already, go to Netflix, I want you to find somebody else's Netflix if you need to, and I want you to watch Midnight Mass. I want you to watch a show that builds so many different areas of tension that by the time it all hits, you will have realized I haven't slept in 12 hours watching this show. And you are a balled up knot of tension watching and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. It's an amazing show. Midnight Mass if you haven't seen it yet. By Howard's face, Howard has seen it.

[Howard] That's awesome homework.

 

[Howard] You're out of excuses. Now go turn into a balled up knot.

[chuckles]

 

[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/19-31-a-close-reading-on-character-tying-it-all-together 

 

Key points: Recap. Personal stakes engage readers. Specificity. Embodied. Sensory details. Voice. Muscular prose can be both forceful and sensory oriented, with poetics and imagery and rich language. Ability, role, relationship, and status. DREAM: denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, manifestation. Make a choice! Pick the protagonist who is least suited to solve the problem. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 31]

 

[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.

 

[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Season 19, Episode 31]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: Tying It All Together.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we have been looking at the short stories of C. L. Clark. We've looked at three of them, and we've been using them to examine character. This is the episode where we take the kind of higher view and just talk about the techniques that we've been looking at and how you can apply them to your own work. So, kind of think of this as a summary recap. What are some of the techniques that you were kind of most excited about as they are embodied in these stories?

[Howard] The first, and it's probably the most concrete for me because I actually have an example for it, is the blending of tools about agency and choice and barriers versus stakes. Because when you talk about a character choosing a thing, the stakes have to matter, not just to the character, but to the reader. At the end of the lighthouse story, our Sigo has chosen to return to the lighthouse with medication for the lighthouse keeper, for Audei. This has two sets of attached stakes. One is, yay, ships won't crash, and the other is, oh, Audei won't be lonely. I'm making light of both of them, but only one of them resonates with me. That is that Audei won't be lonely. It's the personal stake that resonates for me. The lesson that… The piece of tape that I would use to label the tool for myself is that personal stakes will engage the reader. Impersonal stakes might be fun for worldbuilding, might be cool for scope of story, but if you want to engage the reader, making… Letting characters make choices that have personal stakes is… That's the tool. That's…

[Mary Robinette] It is about the specificity, I think. The specificity and tying it to individuals. As humans, we tend to respond to stories about people. So if you read about there's a war that's going on in another country, that's very sad. But when you see the photo of the child who has been orphaned, that makes it much more immediate, because you can imagine that child. That a specific child who's lost specific parents. You can also, I think, tie it to an experience that you have yourself. So any time you can kind of create space for the reader to insert themselves by having those common experiences, those are times when that specificity of the author choice is going to make the character seem richer and more alive.

[DongWon] Well, this is the thing that Clark does so well. I've mentioned this a few times on past episodes, but the way that they write embodied characters, the way they use sensory details, physicality. Because those things are very relatable. I don't need to have been a warrior going off to war to understand the pleasure of smelling rosemary in a kitchen, of tasting a beautifully cooked potato, to have exercised to the point that I'm having trouble walking down the stairs. Right? These are all things that we can experience in our own lives. Those sensory details carry us into these fantastical situations. The way they use external information to give deep, deep interiority into the character is really fascinating to me. For me, because we have very little access to what these characters are thinking and feeling necessarily, but a lot about what they are doing.

[Erin] What you said about embodiment also made me realize that all three stories, I believe, have a sex scene.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] But they're all in… some are very embodied and there's sex happening, which is a very embodied act…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And yet it feels so dreamlike in its own way…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] In each of the stories.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It feels, in some ways more to me personal, and it resonates more than an… A really explicit scene might. Because it… The way in which each of these characters view their bodies comes through in the way they view using their body in that way. So, you have the… In You Perfect, Broken Thing, it's about the stretching and the concentric and the muscles, because this is somebody who's actually going up and using their muscles. For The Cook, I think it's a lot more of, there's like food involved…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it's about feeding someone. So each of these things are about the way… In the lightkeeper, it's about the light in some ways…

[DongWon] And the burn.

[Erin] And the fire and the burning. I love the way that it's not just embodied, but it's embodied in different ways. In seeing the same act take place in three different stories really shows you how different those characters are, and how embodiment can be different from one story to the next.

 

[Mary Robinette] The other thing is… That I just want to point out is that C. L. Clark is using a tool that we've talked about in our first series, which is voice. The specific language choices are underscoring the choices that the characters are making, not just the now we're going to be talking about food, but in You Perfect, Broken Thing, that wonderful section when the character is actually running the race. We're just like, "Punctuation? What is that even?" Like, we are breathless, we are… It is nonstop, it is completely in the moment. I love that. It's again, one of those things where I'm like, am I being too… Is there someplace where I should just pull all the punctuation out?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It is something that I got very excited about.

 

[DongWon] I think when we talk about muscular prose, people have this idea of, like, Hemingway. Six word sentences. Very short sentences, that are very to the point and very grounded in literal. I just want to point out the way in which C. L. Clark has incredibly muscular prose. Like, very forceful, very clear, very sensory oriented, but still incredible poetics in it, incredible imagery and richness of language and word choice. These stories are incredibly beautiful on in imagery and sense level, and the fact that those things don't have to be in tension with each other. I think sometimes people talk about it as if they are.

[Mary Robinette] So, since we've just drifted over into language, because we get very excited about it.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] Some of the tools we've been talking about our ability, role, relationship, and status. The thing that I… This is a tool that I find so much fun, and that they use in all of the stories to shift kind of what the characters focus is, what their motivation is, by shifting which aspect of self is most important to them, which one is highlighted on the page, at any given moment. That's something that you can do. Look at your work in progress. This isn't even homework. This is just like a good practice. Look at your work in progress. If you're stuck in your scene, take a look at it, and just jot down, like, what is challenging my character's ability right now? What is challenging the tasks that they have to do? What responsibilities are they feeling like right now? How can that break for them? Which loyalties are being tugged on in this scene? How is their status affected? Just… By… A quick reminder for you, status involves a lot of different things. If you have imposter syndrome, that's a status issue. That's where your internal status does not match the external status. Where your idea of what you can do is very different from what other people think you can do.

[Howard] If you turn that upside down, imposter syndrome, you have Dunning-Kruger effect.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So those are things that you can play with in your own fiction, whether writing short form or longform. These… This is a tool that works at any length that you're playing in.

[Erin] What I also liked in looking at all these, because a lot of these are tools that are, like, newer to me, so I'm always like trying to figure out how they work and like get inside of them. I think thinking about that, you can… It's like twisting the facet like of a diamond, and looking at different facets. But also, that you can create, when we were talking about barriers, I was thinking, you can create different barriers on all of these axes, you can create different stakes on all of these axes. You can have them, like, fight each other. You can have a story where it's my ability against my status, and I've got to pick one or the other, and that's the choice that I'm making, and that's the agency that I have in the story. So I think with all of these tools, no tool is static. It's, like, you can take a tool and use it to do a lot of different things. So I've had a lot of fun thinking about how can we use these tools in very different ways and think about them in our own stories.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You actually just made me go, oh, yeah. Actually, one of the things that's happening in the lighthouse is that we have the role of I am a pirate in the relationship of Audei, and these are in direct conflict with each other. Yeah. That's smart.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's take a moment. We're going to pause, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some more of the tools and how you can apply them to your own fiction.

 

[DongWon] I've talked before in our thing of the week about Rude Tales of Magic. But it's one of my very favorite podcasts. It's nominally a D&D actual play show, but the cast takes D&D more as an inspiration and runs from there, and tells hilarious improvised stories that still find a way to have deep character work and heartfelt storytelling. I'm talking about it again because we just started a new season last fall, so it's a great time to jump in and discover how delightful a rude tale can be.

 

[Mary Robinette] Welcome back.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Okay. We are back now. So, one of the things I got so excited about I didn't even know how to express it in words was the DREAM…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I think this is the first time that I've been hearing about it. My bad, I'd forgotten about it and having it come back was really exciting for me. I was thinking about how that all works. So, that was a tool that I think… I know it was just in our last episode, but… What was it again?

[Mary Robinette] Denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation. I learned about this from Elizabeth Boyle, who was describing romances. So you… The thing that I have been enjoying about this series is that previously when I have talked about it, I've had to use really, like, very loose examples of it, but I think seeing it applied to a story makes it much more concrete. I got super excited when I was in Elizabeth's class and learned about it. So, denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love this framework, because I can see how it came from romance. Right? I can… When we talked about it last episode, we were applying it to a romance arc. But I can see this applying to so many character arcs. Right? Because accepting your role in the world, accepting your limitations, accepting the various aspects of the other framework we were talking about in terms of… accepting what your status is, what your ability is. Then, getting to that point of manifestation. All of these things are stages of any character arc along any of the axes we've talked about before. Right? So, again, we're not talking about these tools in isolation. They are all mix-and-match, and you pull from different aspects and apply them to other aspects. That's how you get a rich nuanced character, like the ones that we're meeting in these stories.

[Mary Robinette] You'll see that again, also, in You Perfect, Broken Thing. Like, yeah, I can totally do this race. I'm going to be tired and exhausted, but I will do it. Then, oh, actually, no, maybe I can't, maybe I in fact dying. Okay, what happens if I run this race for someone else entirely? Yes, that is what I am doing, I am going to win this race for someone else. Then, the manifestation of you take the shot.

[DongWon] Then in The Cook, it's the same thing. The stages are externalized into we're going off to war and coming back, more and more traumatized, more and more injured, as she's forced to accept the condition of her life until she can get to a place of manifestation.

[Howard] At risk of briefly confusing and conflating the tools, it's easy to look at DREAM and to see symmetries between that and the very popularized stages of grief. What I love about DREAM is that we don't and with acceptance. We and with manifestation. Because this isn't for how to recover from grieving, this is for a writer who wants to make that plot turn or that character turn or whatever towards the end of the story and then and the story with something that is hopefully satisfying.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Acceptance, in and of itself, can be satisfying, but a manifestation of it that meets… Surprising yet inevitable or that mirrors… Creates a bookend from something at the beginning of the story… That's where I start blending these tools together.

[Mary Robinette] I should say that Elizabeth actually got this from an anger management class. She tells this when she's teaching the class.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That she was forced to go to an anger management class while she was working for Microsoft, and she's like, "Well, this is ridiculous. I don't need to be here." Still in denial. Then, as soon as the teacher put that up on the board, she's like, "Hum, I suddenly became the best student. Sat in the front…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Because it's like that is a romance arc right there.

 

[DongWon] Well, what's great about the manifestation point, as you were talking about it, Howard, is it's a framework to getting the character to make a choice.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Because manifestation is about claiming one's agency, claiming one's choices. So that is a character arc. An arc has to end with a character choosing something. That choosing may be accepting their fate in some way, in which case acceptance and manifestation are very close together. But it's getting a character to make a choice is the thing that you're really trying to do to get us to understand and empathize with a character's journey.

[Howard] In You Perfect, Broken Thing, the acceptance is I will choose to give my prize to others so that they can live. The manifestation is, for me anyway, the surprising yet inevitable of somebody else did the same thing. Other people are now looking at this, and are now sharing the gift. The character already made their choice. They are now helpless to further influence the story. But other people begin choosing things that carry that choice even further, that make it manifest as a satisfying ending.

[Mary Robinette] You made me think of a thing that I'm going to talk about, because one of the things that people ask me about when I teach this elsewhere is how it applies to series. We've been saying all along that you can take all of the tools that we've been talking about and you can use them anywhere. So we've been talking about a tool in short story. But DREAM will work for novel length, but it will also work for series. Basically, whatever manifestation point your character winds up at at the end kind of becomes the problem for them for the next thing. Or, another way to look at it is, they think they've solved the problem, but it only lasts for a moment. The best example that I can give this for you is extremely rude.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, denial. I'm not a writer. Resistance. Well, okay, so I've written some things. But I'm really not a writer. Exploration. Okay. Maybe I'll try finishing something. Acceptance. Oh, I finished it. I finished. I think I a writer. Manifestation. I'm going to show it to somebody. But I'm not really a writer, because I haven't submitted anything yet. Okay. So maybe I'll submit it to a market, but I'm going to get rejected immediately. Okay, fine. So I submitted it to a market. Then acceptance, I got rejected. But I'm going to submit it again, because getting rejection means I'm a writer. Manifestation. I sent it out again. But I'm still not a writer. This is a thing where every time you think I have solve this thing, you haven't. Because what you're shifting here with this DREAM are these things we've been talking about before, this ability, role, relationship, and status. You level up, but then there are new monsters in front of you.

[DongWon] Think of this as a try-fail cycle.

[Howard] You level up, but…

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[Howard] So your imposter syndrome leveled up with you.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. So you can do that over a series, that every time they level up, they… That core problem in them, that hole in them, is still there.

[Erin] Something that's really relatable about that is that this is… Like, you're saying this is what humans do. We tend to, like, go through something, it's like extending a long rubber band. Then, the minute you get to manifestation, you kind of forget…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, all of the difficulties that happened. You snap the rubber band back and you're like, "Oh, I manifested it. So it couldn't have been that hard to do. All that stuff I did was obviously meaningless. Like, now, I'll never be able to stretch this next rubber band." So, when characters are doing that, there's something that, even if they're going through something will never experience in our lifetimes, we understand it a little bit and it feels very human. It keeps people wanting to be invested in your character and in the story.

[DongWon] Giving your readers these micro arcs are the things that are so satisfying that ultimately, as you stack those arcs on arcs on arcs, ends up feeling like a fully realized three-dimensional character, as we call it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You can also… I'm glad you said the word micro arcs, because you can also use DREAM within a single paragraph.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's a lovely tool. I… It's… I… Also, I'm not going to pull them out in the text, I'm going to let you all do that. But there are multiple examples in all of these stories where there are… The DREAM arc happening within a single paragraph. Also, things where the different ability… Different aspects of self are tugging on each other. It's… These stories are just fun. I really enjoyed this.

[DongWon] They're wonderful stories. I found them also meaningful in the way that the characters always come back to community and connection over everything else. Right? As we were talking about last time, seeing that resistance to the call to adventure and sort of that disruption of traditional fantasy narratives, you can get there by routing it in character. When you root it so deeply in a person's perspective and wants and needs, then when they're making those choices that run counter to our expectations of here's how a fantasy story is supposed to go, it feels organic and exciting. Nothing is more thrilling than in the lighthouse story, her choosing to come back to the lighthouse, her choosing not to be living the life of adventure. It is… And then she has to do this difficult task. She has to prove herself, by climbing the wall and getting the herbs and things like that. It really rewards us for that journey that were going on with her, even though it's a nontraditional one.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned from a class on writing middle grades was that you should pick the protagonist who was least suited to solve the problem. That was fascinating to me, because previously, I had heard that you should pick the protagonist to… Only they can solve the problem. But thinking about who is least suited. It causes the character to have to make different choices that constrain to the agency that you were talking about. So who is the least suited to win a race? Someone who is dying of a disease. Who is least suited to stay in the lighthouse? An adventurer who is… Who chooses to go from place to place. Realizing that by introducing these characters and this… The people who are least suited to this thing. Who is least suited to stay in a kitchen? Barbarian warrior. But those…

[Howard] Hygiene? Come on.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Those… That kind of shift of discovering that something is more important to them, to me, is significantly more interesting than the stories where we start with a character who is deeply flawed, so flawed that they are an ass hole that I don't want to spend any time with…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] On the page. That's something that I love about these, is that these are complicated characters, but it's about them learning what they value.

[Howard] And there's more to it than just us connecting with the story. There's also the fact that you as a human person, us as human people, we were not cut out perfectly to be the best possible person to solve the problems that will face us. Life does not follow that sort of narrative. So these kinds of stories where a character makes choices, where they choose between different sets of stakes, where they exercise their agency in ways that hadn't occurred to them earlier, in order to bring about positive change. Boy! I would like us all to be able to do that kind of thing, and… This, there might be a little bit of envy speaking here… I want to be able to write the kind of story that makes other people feel that way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I want to be able to write things that make you feel like you can change in amazing ways.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, you'll be happy to know that I have homework that's going to feed into that. So, for your homework, I want you to write a character study. This does not have to be a full story, but, as you've seen with The Cook, it can be. Write a character study in which two characters meet twice. Something momentous has happened in between the meetings. It's offstage, and I want you to imply it by the way these characters have changed, using all of the tools that we've been talking about.

 

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now? Go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-29-a-close-reading-on-character-barriers-vs-stakes 

 

Key points: Barriers and stakes. Speedbumps and clinking jars. Use stakes that are tied to the character. Which stakes impact their sense of self. Setting up a barrier? What is the character's goal, and what stops them from achieving it? Barriers and stakes in ability, role, relationship, and status can interplay. Connect the reader with the character to make the barriers and stakes resonate. Use sensory details. Metaphorical heavy lifting.

 

[Season 19, Episode 29]

 

[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.

 

[Dan] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Season 19, Episode 29]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: Barriers vs. Stakes.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Howard] I drove over here with some glass bottles in the back of the van that were full of what is essentially marmalade for making hot tea. For making, like, citron or honey [honey tea]. Every so often, I would hit a bump, and I would hear the jars clink together. There were no speedbumps. A speedbump is kind of a barrier. Slow way down for it. The glass jars in the back of the van? Those are stakes. If you don't slow down for the speedbump, you will get marmalade all over everything in the back of the van. So there is my one-trick pony explanation for barriers versus stakes. Now, let's get out some other tricks. More ponies, please.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So we're looking at You Perfect, Broken Thing by C. L. Clark for this episode. One of the things that I very much like about it is… Well, there's a bunch of things that I like about this story. But, it's a really good example of barriers and stakes. The barrier in this story is very clear and escalates. It's that our main character has to run a race. Not only… So, that's barrier one. Barrier two is that they have to run a race while they are sick. Then, we've got this additional thing that there are family members that are dependent on them, and the more that they practice, the sicker they get. The family members depending on them are the stakes. This is the reason that they're running the race. The need for the cure which is what they earn when they run the race is the… Is one of the stakes of this. So, it's a really short story, but there are multiple barriers and there are multiple stakes, all interacting simultaneously.

[Howard] One of the things that works so well for me with this story, and I wish it worked less well, because it's a me thing not a story thing, that is the description of physical pain. The description of… Well, it's this line at the very beginning. 

 

When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women's locker room. I can't stand anymore. But I know if I sit, I'll never get back up. At least, not for another hour. 

 

Oh, I feel so seen. What do the kids say these days? It's me. So much, it's me right there. If I sit down, I will never get back up.

[Erin] I also think that that… There's a great technique that's being used to demonstrate this a little later in the story, the, 

 

I use the railing like a cane. All my strength bent to keeping my feet for one, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Ten, eleven, twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen stairs.

 

You just feel in the punctuation… There's nothing else going on in this sentence. At that moment, everything stops for the I need to get from step one to step fourteen, and I cannot think about anything else because it's taking all of my will to get past this pain. Without even saying exactly what's happening, it's coming through so clearly in that moment.

 

[DongWon] One of the things I really love to see is when I can feel the writer in the story itself. I can feel their perspective in it. I can… I get such a sense of C. L. Clark's own experience with exertion, with working out, with pain, with exercise, and it's coming through so clearly. I think, when you think about character, when you think about projecting and empathizing with someone who's not us, but also don't forget the ways in which you can utilize what is you to really enhance the reading experience.

[Howard] One of the places where the barrier and the stakes… The line between the two begins to blur, is the… If you've experienced the pain of that with a really tough workout, and have experienced the pain of, I think I've injured myself. We get both of these. "It takes a long time," I'm quoting now. "It takes a long time for the lightning pain in my ankles, knees, hips to dissipate to a dull throb." For my own part, when I work out, which is not a thing I do much anymore, but when I've worked out in the past, if I start getting lightning pain, it's time to stop. I am past the barrier of I am exhausted and I am into the stakes of how much do I really want to pay for the rest of this work out. Do I want to pay with not being able to walk tomorrow?

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that this is a great example because it's so personal to you. When you're trying to choose a stake for your character, you're looking for a stake that is tied to the character. You can have big global stakes, but when we're talking about character stakes, it's something that is going to affect the character's sense of self. So… We have this, right in that first sentence, or in the first paragraph. "When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women's locker room. I can't stand anymore. But I know if I sit, I'll never get back up." So, that is directly tied to the character's ability. That… This very small stake. If I sit, I do the thing that I want to do, which is to sit down. That's my goal, I want to sit. But I can't. I can't. What is at stake is my ability to stand back up. I can't… I don't have that ability anymore. So when you're looking for those, you can interrogate the character's identity which we talked about in the previous episode to find the stake that is going to most directly impact their sense of self.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that the barrier… I think one of the things that really works for me here in terms of that identity barrier is if it's hard to sit, to stand, to climb, and the stakes are so high for something that is much more physical exertion than, Lord knows, I'm doing on a daily basis, then how hard is it going to be? I really feel when the race starts, I'm not anticipating that the main character's actually going to make it through.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To be honest. Like, I'm like… Like, you are not even making it from, like, barely to the starting line. How are you going to make it…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] All the way through? There is a surprise… I think I get the same surprise in ability that the character does, which is great. It brings me on the journey with the character, because as Coach is learning, like, Oh, I actually did climb this wall, and did murder that person. I'm also learning that that's what they're capable of. Then that, actually, makes me identify with them more, and makes the emotions of the story hit that much more… Like, much more… With much more of a punch.

 

[DongWon] In what is a very brutal story, one of the most brutal lines, in my opinion, at the end of the first section when it just says, "This is not my first race."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] We understand that she has done this before, and she may do it again in the future. That's how she's thinking about it. Even though we see how much her body is breaking down, we see how much she's at the limits of her ability, but the idea that she's been doing this for a while is just heartbreaking, and it sets the stakes of how important this is, that she is going to keep pushing herself to accomplish this.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to read a bit of the breakdown for you, after the break.

 

[Erin] This week, I have got to plug one of my favorite books of all time, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. This is a voice story, like, from start to finish, in my opinion, which is why I love it so much. It starts with this opening paragraph. "My name is Mary Catherine Blackwood. I'm 18 years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead." If that doesn't get you to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I don't know what will. So check it out.

 

[Mary Robinette] When you write a novel, there are often things you have to leave out. Scenes that predate the main book, situations that just didn't fit in, character moments that hit the cutting room floor. I've taken nine stories like that from the Lady Astronaut series and put them together into a short story collection called Silent Spaces: Tales from the Lady Astronauts. It's on Kickstarter right now. It includes stories about the arrival of the meteor in 1952, the race to the moon and Mars, and my Hugo award winning novelette, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. And there's one story, Silent Spaces, that is 100 percent new for this book. The Kickstarter funded in eight hours, so this is not so much a please help me make this, as a please help me make this even cooler. Because the stretch goals bring the Lady Astronaut series off the page and into the real world with tons of memorabilia, like patches, drinkware, teletype reproductions, recipe cards, spacesuits, and more. I hope you'll be a part of its journey and help out Silent Spaces on Kickstarter.

 

[Howard] Welcome back. I promised you some reading. There we go. Our protagonist is climbing a climbing wall. 

 

The colorful rubber is rough under my fingers. I think of Little and try to imitate her gibbon's grace. Each contraction of my lats pulls me higher and my biceps thrill at their strength. My legs forget their fatigue and I'm –

I'm a goddamn orchestra.

Until I'm not, and numbness webs across my back, a note out of tune. Maybe it started in my fingers and I didn't notice and now it's too late.

 

I have been in… I have been in that… Not exact position, not on a climbing wall, but I've been in that position more times than I care to count. It really struck home to me. The feeling of oh, I can do this, I've got this, oh, I'm fine. And then all of a sudden, there is pain and I realize not only am I not fine, I'm not fine and I'm in a place where I should not have put myself. This is another one of those barriers that blurs into stakes because we failed to clear the barrier properly.

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about how to set up a barrier. Again, you're looking for something that your character can't get through. So if you think about what their goal is, like, her goal is to run the race. So, if she can run the race well and quickly, then story's over. Immediately. So you have to put barriers. The barriers are the things that stop your character from achieving their goal. So the first thing we do at the beginning is we establish what our goal is. Then we have a series of barriers. You can tell the reader what those barriers are, and disguise it as part of the character thinking. So when there's a part where right before the section that Howard read to you where she's thinking about, she puts the climbing harness on and her teammates say, "Don't do that. Shut that shit down. You just ran a mile's worth of sprints." "I didn't need them to tell me that. I calculated our needs the night before, our weak spots. I accounted for his lack of stamina, for Shell's lack of speed. My pain. Our weakness will come with us to the race. The wall is there, too, and I need to be able to take it." So, very clearly, we've laid out exactly what the problems are, we've foreshadowed what's going to happen in the race. Doing that allows the reader, knowing what the barriers are ahead of time allows the reader to anticipate those and to anticipate the failure points and also to be surprised when they play out in different ways. But all of these things are, again, still tied to that goal of I need to run the race and we've also been told what's at stake if we don't run the race. So it's the here's the goal, here are the things that are going to stop me from hitting that goal, and then when we actually get into the race, there are even more things that go wrong.

[DongWon] I still love that line, our weakness will come with us to the race.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's just… You just feel it in your chest when you read that.

[Erin] That's life, though.

[Laughter]

 

[Erin] Also, Mary Robinette, when you were talking, it made me think about the fact that there… The barriers also can exist in those ability, role, relationship, status, and that when a barrier hits in one, then maybe one of the others can be the thing that gets you past it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So I'm thinking about the other moment in the race, where, like, the strength gives out, and then somebody's like, "You got this, champ." Which, as a former [crossroader?] Like, there is something very powerful weirdly about some random person being like, "You can do it." It is the role. You are a champion. A reminder of the role that helps you get forward a little more. Then, when that runs out, it's something of the relationship.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Erin] To the people that you need to bring this medicine forward to. So it makes me think about my own work, how can I create a barrier in one of these areas and then solve it with another, and then hit a barrier there and solve it with another, and sort of pass back and forth between the different aspects of character is a way to create story moments.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I want to be clear that there are other ways to create barriers for character. You can use milieu. So… We'll see this in the race itself, where the place itself is the problem. You can create things with the questions. That… If a character has a question, they can't get the answer. I'm specifically in this section, because we're talking about character, thinking about barriers to the character and to their sense of identity. But I want to be clear that barriers can, in a lot of different ways.

 

[Howard] It's important to note that the… This several extreme connection that I developed to this story grows out of the very close parallel between the physical experience in the story and some of my own physical experiences. It's challenging to set up a barrier or to set up stakes when that connection isn't apparent. For instance, the wizard who just needs to cast that spell right. But it's not tied to exhaustion or hunger or migraine headache or any… It's tied to some magical sense. Finding a way to communicate that so it is personal to us, the reader, can be a challenge. That's where, for me, stories that fail to deliver barriers and stakes in ways that resonate? That's usually why they fail. It's because, for some reason, worldbuilding didn't connect me to those things.

[DongWon] Because it's really about character choice. Right? To bring all these barriers and all these stakes back to creating a character that we are interested in, engaged with, whether we hate them, whether we love them, whether we empathize with them or not, it has to be about choice. So when this comes down to that moment of Coach in the mud pit, right? And making a choice about what she will do to win this race, what is worth it to her? I think that's one of the things that communicates so much about the character, about the stakes that are going to occur, and our understanding and compassion for her, even as she does something that in some ways is unforgivable.

 

[Erin] I also really like how we're taught a little bit how to read that moment. So, one of the things that I love is the series of, like, the very long kind of sentence paragraph of just things that are happening, that I will not read, because it's very long. But there's a series of things that is going on as she's in the mud and trying to get out of the mud. When I was looking back and doing a close reading, I noticed that we… It's not the first time we get this long sentence paragraph. We also get it with the meal the night before, which is also, like, a moment of, like, just really being in the moment. So, sometimes you can be in the moment with the food and enjoying it and the companionship. Then, the next day, you're in the moment of survival. I don't necessarily relate to life or death survival in that way, but I do relate to eating a good meal. I feel like the story sort of taught me a little bit how to take in that kind of sentence, and how to be in that moment with the character, and then used it for something that I was less comfortable or less familiar with.

[Howard] We actually talked about that principle in the very first season of Writing Excuses, a bazillion…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Bazillions ago. The idea of get one thing, one small thing, exactly right and we will follow you along for the big thing. If you can connect me with the character enjoying a meal, then I will stay connected when they are trying to cast color magic using their sense of [oxareen].

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] I love picking Clark for character because they do embodied character so well. Right? They do sensory detail. I always feel I am in the room with them. I feel like I can smell the things that the character smells, tastes the things, feel the pain and the burn in my body.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's so wonderful to be so deeply entrenched in a perspective like this.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that I love about it is how they managed to do that with such often sparse description.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like the section...

 

I don't want to tempt the ache in my body, but I don't want to die tomorrow without remembering the good things my body does. So we’re two bodies, in flexion, extension, the slow eccentric stretch and the isometric clenching hold, over and over, until we can release.

 

Like, she does not tell you what is exactly happening in that scene, but you can understand it and feel it in your own body. The other thing that I want to call out about that particular section that I read is that this is also one of the two moments where she makes… The character makes it clear that she is not expecting to survive the race. That her motivation has changed. Which, for me, also helps with that moment in the mud. Knowing that this is something she's doing for other people. That the relationship aspect of it…

[DongWon] Drowning another runner is okay because she doesn't expect to survive herself?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? There is… If she weren't willing to sacrifice that much, it would make that moment less sympathetic. Then, of course, we get the moment at the end which… I don't know why, it caught me off guard. I was surprised by it, when she turns down the shot for herself…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And gives it to the kid. In retrospect, it's, of course, and that's what so lovely about that moment is when you're doing character and you're setting up the stakes and all these things, getting to that moment of, oh, of course, this is what they would do even when you didn't see it coming, is so much what let's character drive a story. Because it means you're leaning into choices, it means you set up the stakes well. Right?

[Howard] It's ironic almost to the point of a pun to say, Mary Robinette, that example you read is a fine example of muscular prose.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because it's giving us so much information. All of the words are doing the metaphorical heavy lifting for us, explaining to us what's going on.

 

[Howard] I've got the homework for you. We're going to return to the speedbump metaphor. But you're not allowed to use my speedbump and my jars.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Write a short scene in which your character has to deal with a mundane obstacle. Then, rewrite it as if that obstacle now has life or death stakes. How do you shift it to make those stakes clearer?

 

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

 

[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-24-an-interview-on-worldbuilding-with-arkady-martine 

 

Key points: Deep historical roots, in Byzantine history. Medieval empires. Did the novel come from the research, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just reach for the things you knew? Was it a challenge to blend elements from two different cultures? How do you know when you've done enough research? Complexity of history versus complexity of worldbuilding? How do you keep track of all that stuff? How often do you find yourself looking stuff up, or does writing it down once mean it stays in your head? How do you take that research and make it come alive for the reader? You tie character and theme together, and connect it with worldbuilding. Are your characters a lens on a thematic element, or is it scene-by-scene? Is there an example of someone with a different set of lenses that impacts what they see and how you portray the world? Was the novel always from Mahit's point of view, or did that come partway through writing? 

 

[transcriptionist apology: Arkady seemed to be talking in a metallic echo chamber, which I found difficult to understand in some spots.] 

 

[Season 19, Episode 24]

 

[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 24]

 

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

[DongWon] With us this week we have a very special guest. We've spent the last month talking about A Memory Called Empire. I'm very pleased that we were able to get the author, my friend and also client, Arkady Martine, to join us today to talk about her experience with writing the book, how she thinks about worldbuilding, and some ot the stuff that went into it. So, Arkady, welcome to the podcast.

[Arkady] Hi. I'm so glad to be here.

[DongWon] So, obviously, I love the book and I loved it from the very first time I… It came across my desk. One of the things that really stands out to us is all of the dense, intricate, and complex worldbuilding that you put into this novel. Right? Science fiction/fantasy kind of lives and dies on the worldbuilding a lot of the time. But this one felt very distinct and unique and special. I wanted to hear a little bit of where all that comes from. I know you have, like, deep academic roots as well, in history, and… I would love just to hear from you about where the origins of this novel were for you when it comes to the cultures and societies you decided to put in it.

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Okay. Great question. So… Things not to do when you have a [garbled] in medieval history in Sweden. Write a book about the same things that you are working on in your [garbled] instead of writing the academic book that might have gotten you tenure.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] So I kind of did that. Which is all to say that I am trained as a Byzantine historian with a specialization in the eleventh century sort of eastern frontier. Armenia, Byzantine, are two different Arabic speaking kingdoms. I'm super interested in diplomacy and letter writing and empires and frontiers, and I spent like a decade of my life doing that professionally as an academic. It's a curious thing about being an academic, where you're not really supposed to get emotionally involved with what you're working on. At least, not in how you write it. I have always been emotionally compelled by that whole suite of subjects. I've also always written science fiction and fantasy. So, there was a point, like, the summer after I finished my dissertation where, for complex reasons, I was living in Phoenix for three months. Which I don't exactly recommend, those three months being Jun, July, and August in Phoenix. Yeah, I decided that I clearly needed another enormous project. That was getting kind of annoying that I was one of those people who had never successfully written a novel. So, clearly, I was going to try that. Having just put down the 250 page nonfiction thing I had written.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] What came out of that was trying to figure out a way to work on and work through all of that fascination with Empire and assimilation and medieval frontiers and frontiers in general. And, like, seeing it through a science fictional lens. And then some stuff that I had always been fascinated by and had written some very juvenile early attempts at novels. Like, what happens if you have the ghost of the person who used to have your job in your head?

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] The first version I ever tried to write was actually fantasy. That did not go well. It did not last. You may recognize a bit of it. But, anyway, that got in there too. So, Byzantium, the medieval Empire in general, that's the deep basis. I pulled a ton of little cultural events out of that. The poetry contests in my writing come from that. The dilemma of the succession crisis comes from that. I kind of started with, like, the succession crisis at Heracles in the, like, six hundreds and then it went… It doesn't follow. But it starts there. So I've used a lot of historical plot to inspire my plot.

 

[DongWon] Do you think that came from… You were studying this, you are interested in it, you are avoiding writing your nonfiction about it…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, did the impulse to write this novel come from that research and that knowledge, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just instinctively reach to the things that you knew? Like, was there a chicken or an egg there?

[Arkady] I feel like 60 percent egg, 40 percent base. I really knew I wanted to write about the scenarios that I had encountered in my research. Not a historical novel where I would, like, tell those stories. But, then where I found myself imagining the emotional impact of living through and experiencing historical events I had been studying. You can either write a historical book or you can just take that question and use what I love science fiction for, which is sort of expand it, explore it, it really up close to it. Then, as I was writing, because it took me a while to write the book. I had never done this successfully before. The longest thing I had ever written before Memory was, like, for Asimov's. So it took me about three years. I did find myself reaching for tools I knew. Those tools were sometimes things like, "Oh, right, I want to do political poetry contests, because I love them. I think they're very cool. I need something like that here." But there was a point also where I deliberately didn't make those choices, where I reached for other tools instead of the instinctive ones on purpose. I do want to mention, before we get away from, like, direct historical inspiration that Teixcalaan is not Byzantine in space, exactly. That's on purpose. Because if I had done Byzantines in space, I would have needed a monotheistic religion. I really didn't want to write a book about that. That's not this book. Someday, I'll write a book about God. But it's not going to be this one.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] I had too much going on. So I needed to get away from this kind of mono-ism, like one Emperor, one God, one, like, line through history, like this [detelogy?] that's in Byzantine texts. So, I was like, okay, I need a different source of completely outside of the kind of monotheistic Western traditions. I ended up being deeply interested in another very complex, very colorful, and quite simultaneous imperial power, which is the [Mehico?]. I pulled a lot of inspiration from [Mehico], the Aztecs in English, and the way that that Empire did assimilation and all of its cultural tags. Because I didn't want my readers to feel like… Well, I knew that my readers were probably going to think that space Byzantium was just space Rome.

[DongWon] Right.

[Arkady] Because that's the instinctive thing. I also wanted to make things weirder than just [people one?]. So, I, like, I very much deliberately combined cultural myths.

 

[DongWon] I mean, I guess what you're saying is that you didn't want to write a historical novel. Right? You wanted different aspects in there. So… Was it a challenge to find a way to pull different elements from two different histories, two different cultures, and blend them, or was it a pretty straightforward process of, like, oh, the names are coming from here, the religion's coming from here, the poetry battles are coming from here?

[Arkady] It felt pretty organic, except for the languages. Which I made some pretty stark choices early on. Because in my early drafts, I was using a lot more Greek in, like, the backdrop of the Teixcalaanli language. It just did not work. I'm not a con lang person. Like, I don't do this for real. Like some people who come up with vocabularies. No. But I am a person who unfortunately spent a while taking historical linguistics courses and I care about phonology. So, everyone had to sound like it went together and sound culturally appropriate when I use, like, [poems?] and metaphors. But, aside from the religion choices, which is probably where I had this moment of, okay, I'm going for a more Mesoamerican feel, it was pretty organic. That's partially because a lot of medieval empires actually work in very similar ways. So there's more commonality than you expect. Secondly, because I'm absolutely working off of my own aesthetic sense, like, the things I wanted to have. I love flowers. I don't think we do enough in science fiction in general, like, everything is all chrome and steel and glass. It's all very like iPhone. I find this boring. I like flowers, I like declaration, I like weird architecture. I like a kind of [Romanticism?] to my science fiction. All of that led me very easily to meso American cultures, which I have not spent a decade of my life immersed in the study of meso American cultures, I have, and am still doing a ton of research there as well. So…

 

[DongWon] I mean, obviously this question doesn't apply to the Byzantine component's so much, because of how much you did there, but, like, when you're doing research on meso American culture, on [Mehico] and like these ancient empires, how do you find the line of, like, this is enough research? I need to stop researching, and start writing. Like, was that a difficult balance for you or did you just sort of naturally find that flow?

[Arkady] Well, this is why I don't write historicals. Because if I wrote a historical, I would have to be able to re-create a depth of field in my [garbled] bank that matches what we actually know. When I'm working in science fiction, I do a lot on… I don't want to say just on vibes, because that's not enough. But I do a lot on defaults, I do a lot on in… If I'm pulling this kind of influence that got me interested in, like, sacrifice rituals. Why do people do that? I don't need to reproduce the argument of what scholars have come up with about why people use sacrifice rituals to accomplish political things in a particular culture. What I do need to do is understand that myself, and get a feel for it, so I get my characters to reproduce that feeling for my audience.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I'm curious. You were talking about the difference between, basically, the complexity of actual history and the complexity of worldbuilding. Which is, I think, naturally just less complex, because there's only so much you can bring in. I wondered, are there areas where you felt like you decided to go, like, for more complexity versus, like, more of a… More vibes? How did that intersect with the story that you were trying to tell?

[Arkady] So, the places I ended up with complexity that I hadn't originally planned to do are where the story that I was writing demanded that I knew things that never went on the page. This meant that I had… Several. Several lists of, like, okay, how does the government work? Who works in what department? How are they related? What is their history? When did they develop? None of that needs to be on the page for the story I was telling. All of that needed to be in my head so that I didn't contradict myself, and so that at some point, hopefully, some of the political intrigues stuff resolved into understandable lines of action. I did a similar thing in Desolation when I was trying to work out how the Teixcalaanli army worked and how people were promoted and how they work through it and like how… Just like the practicalities. I did a lot of, I guess what I would think of as traditional worldbuilding for that. Where I sat down and was like, "Okay. There are this many regions. Why are they called regions? Because I don't want to deal with coming up with another name for them."

[Laughter]

[Arkady] "How do you become commander of a region? What happens when you retire? What happens with training? Do people swap jobs? Do people swap, like, different parts of the military? Like, if you are a fighter pilot, are you always a fighter pilot? Or could you end up, like, a logistics officer?" All of that stuff I thought about on purpose, and sort of like brainstormed to myself and wrote down so I didn't end up making up something else later on impulse. But in terms of some of the other places where it looks like I did that, like, on the poetry contests, all of that was pretty much it should feel like this and I know there are historical examples where this worked. So I can do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] It's so interesting. It almost sounds like… Sorry, it almost sounds like the things that you were more emotionally tied to, you didn't feel as much the need to, like, research is the things that were like, intellectually… You know what I mean, like, you love the poetry contests, so, like, you knew how they needed to feel and didn't need to do as much, like, notetaking. Maybe I'm wrong there, but…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] particularly deep, but…

[Arkady] There's a hidden thing, which is that I had already done the research. I just didn't do it for this project. I didn't do it [garbled] I knew it already. Although I think something like a poetry contest is like anything that becomes more plot or aesthetic or theme. You can kind of, like, let it exist on its own without having to justify it. You can just decide that's true. Then the question… The worldbuilding question to ask afterwards is given that this is true, what else is true? What else must be true? That's actually how I do a lot of worldbuilding, like, when I'm doing it on purpose. Like, there's a ton of edible flowers in [pig plot?]. That was a… I think, this is cool moment. But in response to that, I thought a great deal about how do these people get their food? What kind of cultural signifiers are there between eating plants and eating animals? That got more interesting for me because I have characters from place were eating luxurious food is commonplace and others from a place where eating luxurious food is exceedingly rare, if it ever happens at all, and eating animals is weird, because where would you get a whole animal just to eat it?

[DongWon] I love that moment of her horror at watching somebody eat something that was cut from the side of a cow. Right? Like, just like this idea of…

[Arkady] [garbled] turnip space sandwich.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled] more… Oh, that scene is an absolute delight. I want to dig into some of the more mechanical things about how you take that amount of worldbuilding and make it feel felt and relevant to the characters. But before we dig into that, let's go ahead and take a quick break.

 

[Arkady] My thing of the week is a relatively new novel by Paz Pardo called The Shamshine Blind which I just finished reading this past weekend, actually. It is a kind of classical noir, but with a deeply exciting science-fiction premise. The premise is during the Falklands war… So the war over the Falkland Islands off of Argentina, between Argentina and the UK, the Argentinians came up with a method to kind of by spraying this special powder on people, they can feel emotions. Those emotions are actually, like, weapons of mass destruction. This changes the whole course of history. The book is set 30 years after that, so it's all part of the backdrop of the world. It is… I love noir and I love, like, noir detectives and how broken down and brutalized they are by the world. Having that incredible twist and having the entire noir be rooted in is this character going to feel emotions that are hers or is she always going to rely on thinking that emotions are something that are externally imposed, like, took all of the stuff that we love about noir and made it both incredibly thematically obvious and incredibly thematically hidden, and also just incredible.

[DongWon] It's a great pull for an episode on worldbuilding, because it… The worldbuilding… It ties into the central question of noir, which is this really shut down emotionally unavailable hero, and then, it's like all the world is about these big emotions. I think that's super cool.

[Arkady] I loved it. I think you all should read it.

[DongWon] Thank you so much.

 

[Erin] All right. We are back. Before we get into sort of the nitty-gritty of the mechanical tools, I have a nitty-gritty process question which is you mentioned all these things that you documented and thought about, and I'm kind of curious, like, how did you actually keep track of all that? Like, how did you actually know what you had investigated and what needed to be investigated as you were doing your research?

[Arkady] So… I'm not anybody's poster child for how to do this in a sensible way. I have a Word document labeled what is everyone's motivation? That was an editing artifact, but I still only have a Word document labeled The Teixcalaanli Military which is just everything I ever thought of, but didn't really go on a page about the Teixcalaanli military. In terms of like research research, when I wanted to go find out about something, I basically used a lot of the same methods that I've always used for doing academic or policy work, which is I have a physical notebook and a pen, and I underline things in a document that I'm reading, or take notes and mark page numbers. That just… I just have a million of those. But I didn't do a ton of that. At any point. For Memory and Desolation. Some of the things that like look a little bit more like I must do research questions, like, some of the biology stuff in book 2… And I know you guys haven't talked about book 2, but there's, like, weird alien biology in book 2 that matters. A lot of that involved medical textbooks and like zoology textbooks. I didn't exactly take notes so much as, like, stick post it's all over them. I'm not actually organized. Except the lady inside my own head.

[Chuckles]

[lovely]

 

[DongWon] I love the simplicity of that process. I love just having Word documents that are like this is about this topic, and I know I reference it. How often do you find yourself going back to, like, those underlined passages or marked passages? Like, how often do you find yourself having to look stuff up? Or was just the act of writing down the military structure enough that it stayed in your brain when you needed to call it up?

[Arkady] The big structure stayed. Right. I understand it, I could explain it right now. Although I haven't written about it directly for a couple of years. But the thing that I always have to go back to is if I have named something, I have to write down what I named it. This can even sometimes extend two characters who actually have speaking parts. The number of times I've called… Well, the guy in chapter 3. That guy.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] But especially if I've done cool names, like names of spaceships, names of continents, names of planets, all that has to get written down somewhere because I will forget it and I will make up a new cool thing. And confuse people, including myself.

[DongWon] Suddenly you just have 10 cool things, 10 cool planets you didn't need, you know.

[Arkady] Yeah. Or you've named absolutely everybody in book 2 the number sign 2 and then a word starting with steam and you hadn't noticed.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] Intel you did the dramatis personae at the end.

[DongWon] Hum... Yeah.

 

[Erin] I often wonder how… This may be the question we were getting at before we went to break, which is, so you've got all of this stuff. Because I find sometimes people do a lot of research and they know a lot of stuff, but then it's hard to, like, translate it into making the overall come alive. Which your world absolutely does. So how do you take all these things that you know, and then, like, make it exciting and juicy and wonderful for all of us readers?

[Arkady] It's character work which is to say it's theme. I know that sounds weird, but they are, for me, very, very close. The things that I want to show the reader, I'm going to show them through either a close point of view with a character or through a deliberately selected broader point of view, like an omniscient, or one of the more fun ones, like second person or like an unreliable person narrator who's telling you a story. So the secret of… The voice is always going to point out specific things about the world. Those are choices that I'm making that guide the reader's like mental eye, I guess. What do I want the reader to notice? Because the reader doesn't need to know what research I did in 99 percent of the cases. I mean, I love footnotes, but most of the time, fiction doesn't need them. The reader has to want to come along with me, so I need to give them a reason to keep looking in the direction I'm pointing. That's usually the inside of the character's head. Why is that character looking at the thing? Why do we need to know? Or, it's a POV voice that is also pointing something out to the reader, that it's doing a frame. I'm a very structure and theme oriented writer. I like playing games. The Teixcalaan books are actually pretty straightforward for me. They go in one direction, and while most of the characters are unreliable, they're not unreliable on purpose. They're trying to tell you what they see. In a way, that directness let me do more with the world. Because I'm not ever letting or making the character voice, or the authorial voice, deliberately misdirect the reader. So the reader is… If I tell the reader to look at something, like, look at these buildings, look at this edible flour, look at all the strange clothes people are wearing for a reason that are political, I'm telling them that because it's story important or character important or creates a sense of thematic community. That keeps the reader with me, even when I'm doing a bunch of fancy footwork.

 

[DongWon] You immediately tie character and theme together. Right? You're also underlining the way that worldbuilding and theme are connected. When you're thinking of a character, are you thinking of, like, them being your lens on a specific thematic element, and therefore a specific worldbuilding element? Or is it more scene by scene, oh, this is a good time for Mahit to illustrate this aspect of assimilation or how language works or… Like, are you looking at it on like a very granular level or are you starting at a very high level of, like, this character's about assimilation, this character's about succession, this character's about whatever it happens to be?

[Arkady] Well, they're all about assimilation and they're all about succession. But some of them… Well…

[DongWon] I picked the broadest ones, I'm sorry.

[Arkady] Sorry. Mahit is in some ways… I suppose I'm glad I set this only in her point of view, except for little tiny interludes in the whole book. The whole first book. Because she has a very narrow thematic lands that… And that lens has a very wide scope. Her lens is she is… She is from the border and she wants to be assimilated if that means something different than what it does. That sounds complex, but it's actually kind of like a pretty focused thematic lands. But that touches practically everything she sees. So I just pick that up whenever I need it and pulled back to it whenever I want to sort of ground the reader in it. It also lets me show off all the world because Mahit loves it. But it's also new to her. It also is going to make her think and be uncomfortable. So I get to do all those things while I'm showing the reader what I've made, and all, hopefully, stay with me, because they care about how she is seeing what she's seeing.

 

[Erin] I love what you said about the, like, the width and the depth of the lens the thematic lands and the character lens. I'm wondering if there's an example that comes to mind for you of somebody who has a very different set of lenses and how that impacts the way they see and you portray the world? If that makes sense.

[Arkady] In Memory specifically, or anywhere?

[Erin] Ummm...

[DongWon] I mean, I think you can talk about Desolation if you wanted. I mean, our readers won't be as familiar with it, so be a little bit more careful about spoilers, but, like… That's one that has more POVs.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I can see that being…

[Arkady] It's easier to talk about in Desolation, but I think it might be more interesting to think about it in Memory. Because… Well, there's one scene in Memory that I desperately wanted to write in someone's point of view that wasn't Mahit. I didn't do it. I actually didn't even let myself do it for fun, because it would have not… It would have ruined it for me if I had done it, like, the way that I [garbled view it like the squibs in your id?] for me, which is… So, the poisoning scene, the aftermath of the poisoning scene, with the flower and the hallway and 19 Ads and Mahit. I wanted so much to write that from 19 Ads's point of view and it would have ruined the book. The book does not work when you do that.

[DongWon] [garbled that] would have been…

[Arkady] But, all my God.

[DongWon] That doesn't… I do want to see it, though.

[Arkady] But that scene played through my head from her point of view, and I kind of like had to write it deliberately. Like react against that instinct. 19 Ads has a very different lens. [Garbled] 19 ads That's lens is actually… Well, in Memory is about dealing with being in charge and being deep middle-aged and also grief. Also, like, deliberately not making choices that you might have made before. Like, not repeating your own mistakes. That's what she's thinking about all the time. Which [garbled] making new mistakes, which is always fun. But the way that she approaches that scene is from a position of a lot of knowledge and a lot of power and also a position of incredible amounts of emotional stress. Which [garbled] the book, you have figured out why she's under that much emotional stress, because it very nearly is the [garbled] commit murder again and doesn't and then has to deal with it. Like, also, there's like a different sense about sex and desire and death. So that scene would have been completely fun from her point of view. But very different. Thematically very different. It would have pulled the thematic lands of the book to be about questions of rulership rather than questions of assimilation. Like, what do you oh people? What do you oh people when you have power? Which is, like, one of my favorite questions in the world to write about. It's a lot more there in Desolation, like, on the surface. In part, that's because of who else gets point of view in Desolation. But it is an undercurrent in Memory. Where the question of okay, who has power? What can you do now? What responsibilities do you have? Can you abdicate them? Those questions are there for Mahit, but they're underground.

 

[DongWon] When you conceived of the novel, was it always from Mahit's perspective? Like, where you always intending it to be from the perspective of this outsider whose new to this place who loves this place. Like, she has, you're right, that super wide lens, but also all of that depth. Which is almost like very impossible to get in a certain way. Did she come to you at the beginning or was that a thing that arose part way through to solve a problem?

[Arkady] She was there from the beginning. The question I had about midway through writing was whether I was going to add anybody else. I thought about that a lot. It would have been a very different kind of book had I, because, structurally… At least the very first draft of Memory is a information control spy novel, which means that the audience and the characters… Main character, should find out about what's going on at approximately the same time. The questions about what is happening in the world are hyper dependent on who knows what. If I added more people, I could have shown a lot more things, but it would have been a novel that wasn't about what does Mahit know and when does she know it. It would… That would not have been the plot driver that allowed me to move the story forward. So I thought about it a lot, and I did not do it, because… In part, because I was absolutely terrified of what that would do. Remember that I had never written a whole novel before. It seemed difficult enough to deal with one person, and also to try to, like, go back and layer in more people. I also thought about that in some of the revisions that I considered. Essentially, voted against it, except for very, very small bits, the interludes are not, in fact, in tight third like everything else. The interludes are in a kind of omniscient third on purpose. Because of…

[DongWon] Those were a late, late addition, right?

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Like, not the first revision I did, which got me the manuscript that I submitted to you, DongWon.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Arkady] But the… I think, like, maybe not even the first revision I did for my editor. Might have been there, might have been the second one when I realized I had accidentally… I needed a second person.

[DongWon] I think it was in the first or second revision. Yeah.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Arkady] I collapsed too much motivation into one character and needed him to be two people. I still think I probably could have ended up with three people, but it was getting hard to get them all on stage.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's already a big book.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Amazing. Thank you so much. I believe you have some homework for us as well?

 

[Arkady] I do. So this is a prompt about worldbuilding through observation. I actually, to my delight, I think there's set it up as a conversation. It is using the character in the story that you are currently working on, could be your main character or somebody else, look at the nearest building you can see out your window and describe it from their point of view. What does that say about the world that you are in and the world that they are in?

[DongWon] I love that. I love returning to that idea of the lens and the few focus and all of that. Arkady, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was an absolute delight.

[Arkady] It was super fun. Thank you for having me.

[DongWon] With that, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-13-a-close-reading-on-voice-blues-perspective-confidence-and-vulnerability 

 

Key points: Confidence and vulnerability. Love may weaken you and expose you to pain. Long rolling sentences, with punctuation to guide you. List after list. Gradations of vulnerability. Change in voice can show change in character development. What mechanism causes your character's change? How does that affect the voice? 

 

[Transcription note: I have tried to get the quotes from the book correct, however, I may have made mistakes. Please refer to the book if you want the exact wording!]

 

[Season 19, Episode 13]

 

[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 13]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm terribly vulnerable. Also, I'm Howard, and I get to drive this episode. I love Blue's perspective. I… Maybe it's because I love plants, maybe it's because I know now who is responsible, as we've learned, for most of the writing of Blue's perspective. Let's begin with a reading from London Next.

[Mary Robinette] London Next. 

 

"The same day… Month… Year… But one strand over is the kind of London other London's dream. Sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles. The viciousness of Empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow, redolent of spice and peddled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it. All meat pies and monarchy. This is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving."

 

[Howard] Embodied in that last sentence, for me anyway, is the very soul of confidence and vulnerability. The ability to love a thing and to acknowledge that loving it is problematic. Loving it may, in fact, weaken you. Loving may, as many of us have discovered, expose you to pain. Let's talk about this.

[DongWon] There's so much in this voice that I love, that is so distinct from Red's voice. Right? We're getting such a different rhythm, such a different kind of imagery. We talked about how short the sentences are when it comes to Red. You get those short sentences in contrast with longer ones to communicate different kinds of emotion. Whereas Blue talks in paragraphs, Blue thinks in long, poetic thoughts. Right? "Viciousness of Empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow." I mean, you just keep going. It just keeps rolling and unfolding and you get a sense of how rambling Blue's thoughts are, and how organic, and… In this contrast between Garden and Agency, we get the sense of, like, shoots spreading across the ground. Right? Like, a rhizomatic structure to how she thinks. It's really wonderful. Yet we're also getting something very parallel to what we got with Red, which is a core internal conflict. Her conflict with herself as we see Red trying to enjoy the thing and can't, because of Agency. We get this thing of Blue loving a thing that she doesn't… She hates the fact that she does love it. Right? So these tensions within the character are foregrounded in both cases, but, wow, is the technique different in how Blue gets that across.

 

[Howard] I think that it's worth looking back at our first introduction to Blue. Because Blue is the one who initiates contact… Blue's letter to Red, which we talked about a little bit during the Red POV.

[Mary Robinette] And we'll talk more about when we get to the epistolary section.

[Howard] Yeah. When we get to the epistolaries. In the 4th paragraph, "I shall confess to you here that I've been growing complacent, bored, even, with the war." Blue reaches out to Red at first out of boredom, out of desire for some sort of a connection beyond the incredibly rich connections, as we learn throughout the rest of the book, that Garden, and that Blue's own up thread activities allow her. She spends an entire lifetime, on at least a couple of occasions, married with kids, having careers and activities and building things and doing stuff, and just one of those lives would be enough for me. Yet, here is this goddess almost, for want of a different better word, who has become bored with that, and so reaches out to the enemy for conversation?

[Erin] That's really interesting that you said the word reaching. It's… I think those long sentences almost give you that sense of reaching. Because, like, they string on, and so they almost are like an outstretched arm, which I think is… I mean, I hadn't really thought about until this moment. One of the reasons that I think that sentence length and punctuation are such amazing tools, like, one of the things I love and I'm just saying this so it may not be true, is I notice all the dashes and the commas and…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The use of punctuation in the Blue sections because they are these reaching sentences, and you need that punctuation to tell you… To make it makes sense, and to make you be able to follow that path that's being laid out for you in Blue's prose.

[DongWon] We get list after list after list of things. Because what… One of the things that the author is communicating is how hedonistic Blue is. Right? We get a glimpse of that with Red too. There's a line about she has a fetish for feeling, which is…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Something that I love. But it's so much more abbreviated than Blue, who lingers in these things. Right? There's… She's talking about a tea. "She looks forward to her own pot, anticipates the dark, smoky, multi-path her chosen tea will pick, between the notes of candied rose, delicate bergomat, champagne, and muscat and violet." Going to your point, Erin, in that sentence we lose the commas at some point. That… The list gets away from her and we start just getting ands instead of this list of commas as she [garbled] like, oh, wait, and also this… And also this… Right? It just indicates such a deep connection to feeling alive, to tasting, to eating. We get long descriptions of that in some of the letters as well, as Red and Blue go back and forth about, "Do you eat? What is eating to you? Do you enjoy it?" All these wonderful things as Blue sort of lays out this very seductive path for Red to sensation, to experience.

 

[Howard] In talking about confidence, there is a paragraph that epitomizes Blue's confidence to me. "It is not entirely my intent to brag. I wish you know… I wish you to know that I respected your tactics. The elegance of your work makes this war seem like less of a waste. Speaking of which, the hydraulics in your spherical flanking gambit were truly superb. I hope you'll take comfort from the knowledge that they'll be thoroughly digested by our mulchers such that our next victory against your side will have a little piece of you in it. Better luck next time, then." I love that. I don't know what the hydraulic flanking gambit was or what the mulchers are, but I don't need to. What I need to know is that Blue is confident in victory, and so confident that she can express that. "It is not entirely my intent to brag." Not entirely. But there's some boasting here. To an enemy. Giving them information about what you're doing! Such supreme confidence. I love it.

[Mary Robinette] We also see that confidence in her body language. The actions that she takes… Just… Like, there's a moment when the server arrives and they put down the [garbled]

[Howard] In London Next.

[Mary Robinette] In London Next. The sentence that just caught me is, "As she settles the teacup on its saucer, however, Blue's hand snaps out to circle her retreating wrist." It's like it's this reminder of this enormous physical competence…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And confidence. "The server looks terrified. 'This set,' says Blue, adjusting, softening her eyes into kindness, her grip into a caress, 'is mismatched.'" It's like… I can see that moment so clearly, but also the confidence to go, oh, okay, I know I came on too strong. Back it down. Back it down. Always being completely in control.

 

[DongWon] One thing I really love about this confidence and vulnerability dichotomy here is it creates distance to the character. Right? We talked about this in the voice of Red, about how close we are to her thoughts sometimes, how we are in that immediacy of her thought process, and that when were not, it's creating distance, versus here, we almost never get a real solid glimpse into Blue's thought process. Right? But we are getting the effects. We're getting… It doesn't tell us, oh, that was too much. Instead, we're getting her action of, like, releasing, calming. We get… We know why she did those things, or we're inferring why. But we're not seeing it from the interior. Right? It's such a difference in Blue's, like, remoteness. I have a thought about this book, which is kind of unusual, that I think the book is more from Red's perspective than Blue's. It's almost like the sections about Blue are written from Red observing Blue, than it is necessarily from Blue's. This is not actually true…

[Mary Robinette] No.

[DongWon] This is just like a little, like, thought I have sometimes when experiencing it, because we have that distance from Blue. And because there's like this romanticism and how we see Blue that almost feels from… Filtered through another perspective. I really love that.

[Howard] I feel it… I feel it the other way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] When I am identifying more with Blue. But when I've… There've been a couple of times I've sat down to read where I've just been frustrated with stuff, been perhaps a little more Red in my brain…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And it's felt…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Like you're describing. So I think the book…

[DongWon] I think that may be true. The only thing that I'm…

[Howard] I think that may be something you [garbled] DongWon.

[DongWon] That's what's beautiful about it is… Because of the way the voices work, different people will connect to different parts in different ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I mean, like… I feel like… The… It is equally split between the 2 of them. But I think that it is the difference in the way the characters inhabit their own bodies in the way they move through the world, like, we have this section where she's like… Where she's getting another message. "But she wills herself not to look around, commands every atom of her body into stillness, forbids the need to leap into the kitchen and pursue and hunt and catch." It's… There's… Like, I can feel that moment in my own body, of, like, oh. Nope. Don't look around. Stay put. So… But it is different than the way Red inhabits her body.

[Erin] I think this would be a perfect moment for us to will our bodies into stillness and go into the break. When we come back, we'll speak more about the beautiful voice of this story.

 

[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses has been sponsored by Better Help. You know that puzzle with the eggs and the sand and the jar? If you pour the sand in first, the eggs won't fit, so you put the eggs in first, then pour the sand around them. It's a metaphor about making time for what matters in life. If you're like me, you may need someone to help you label the things you're trying to fit into the jar of your life, and then assist with some of the finer points of… And I'm going to stretch the metaphor here a bit… Placing the eggs in the jar without breaking them. Yeah. A therapist. Better Help makes it easy to find and meet a therapist. Fill out the online questionnaire and Better Help will match you up with a licensed therapist with whom you can connect via messages, chat, phone, or video. Getting help getting everything into the jar may seem like one more thing you need to get into the jar, which is exactly why Better Help makes it easy. Learn to make time for what makes you happy. Visit betterhelp.com/WX today to get 10% off your first month. That's better help… HELP.com/WX.

 

[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, I love Jane Austen. I also love murder mysteries. Claudia Gray has a great series going, in which she takes characters from Jane Austen novels and puts them into classic cozy mystery settings. The 2nd in the series, The Late Mrs. Willoughby, has all the twists I want plus sparkling banter and social commentary of Jane Austen plus it has a romance between our heroine, Ms. Tilney, daughter of Catherine from Northanger Abbey, and young Mr. Darcy, the son of Lizzie and Red  Darcy. This book is delightful. So, check out The Late Mrs. Willoughby by Claudia Gray.

 

[Howard] I want to ask what we mean by vulnerability. I feel like confidence is pretty easy to define. Maybe I'm wrong, and that's just overconfidence. But with vulnerability, I feel like there are gradations, there are inflections in it. There's the vulnerability of the known unknown. The vulnerability of I am falling in love and I know that that can expose me to heartbreak, but I don't know what kind of heartbreak. So there's unknown out there. But I know kind of the shape of it. Then there's the unknown unknown, which is I'm throwing myself on your mercy, and I have no idea what's going to happen next.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that one of the things that we see in the earlier chapters is that Blue is being pretty protective. That she's aware of this thing, and that she's reaching out, those long reaching sentences, but there's still, I think, a slight distance, where she's like, "But I don't want to… I want this, and I don't want it." So there's a protection there. But when we get later, there's a section, Howard, that you had pointed out, that I think is one of the places where Blue is beginning to be like, "No. No. I really am… I'm ready to be… I accept the fact that pain may come."

[Howard] Yes. I love this. A little bit of set up. Red has been discovered, kind of, and been told, "Hey, there's this other agent out there. Blue. She's been following you around. We think if you send her a letter, and we poison it, you can trick her into reading it, and consuming it, and we can completely undo her." Read participates, but not before sending a letter that says, "Don't read my next letter." So…

 

"Her heart should have been broken by better. Her betrayal should have had sharper teeth. All that — all that, and now this. Still, she strokes its leaves. Still, she bends to sniff the stems. A blend of cinnamon and rot. She was always going to eat it, down to the root."

 

This, for me, is the core of not just vulnerability, but confidence in that, and acceptance of I don't know what is going to happen next, but I know I have to do this, even though it is going to hurt. Even though it may destroy me, I have to do this.

[DongWon] Yeah. What I love is how much is communicated through the voice here. Right? We talked in an earlier section, these long rambling lists that Blue loves to make, these different descriptions, these different sensory things, and here she's talking about her own heartbreak and she says… She just says, "All that," then there's an M-dash, "All that." This idea of like she can't even bear to do the thing that she always does, which is due this long, rambling discursive thing, talking about the different aspects of it. She starts to. Right? She starts to make this list, and then she's just too sad. I love how much that comes through and just my heart stops with her… I feel her come to the realization of, "Oh, what's the point of this? What am I doing? This is too painful." Again, the voice gets that across so well, of how different this Blue is than the one… The taunting, menacing version that we met earlier. Sort of the pure hedonist that we see in the tea shop. This is someone different, this is somebody who has cracked herself open for this other person, and now the knife is going in.

[Howard] That difference is key to anything that you are writing that has character development. You want to be able, as a writer, to show us through many tools, but character voice may be foremost among them, how a character is changing from when we first meet them to later in the book.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that one of the things that is really cool about the change here is that you see how each of the characters influences the other. How the voice of one changes the voice of the other. In this case, that makes a lot of sense because this is a conversation between 2 people. But in your story, you might think how… What is the mechanism for your character's change? Then, how might that impact the voice? If they become more confident, do they… Is the… Are the word choices stronger? Like, are they words that are more active? If they become more contemplative, do they have more moments of filtering, are they setback more? It is in those changes that you're showing that character growth.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that… With that, that you can look at is points of repetition, as ways of emphasizing some of the change. Like the, "All that — all that." Choosing where you're going to put those pieces of repetition, choosing, like, why you're drawing a line under something by pointing at it. Like, why are you focusing us there? In this case, that… I think one of the reasons that that gets repeated… Or is so effective when repeated is because of the… You can hear the influence of Red on Blue's voice. The other thing that I was thinking about, looking at this was something, Erin, you said earlier, was when we talked about hitting a character voice very hard at the beginning, and that by the end, since this section that were talking about is much later in the book, the reader… The reader knows already and can… Can fill in a lot of the emphasis that the writer is intending. So we've got this point where… Where Blue is like… Has these rhythms that are very much like Red. But then when we… The confidence that we come back into her own voice. One of the things that's very interesting about the way people inhabit language is that when you are looking at whether or not someone picks up an accent when they moved to another place, it is often related to their confidence in themselves. The people who are very confident in themselves will mimic someone else's speech patterns as a way to make that other person feel comfortable, as a way to experiment. But people who are less confident will cling to their own original accent as a way of clinging to their self-definition. So, for me, one of the things that I find fascinating about the "all that — all that" is that she is leaning into Red's. But then when she is like… When she is eating it, we get back to the listing.

 

"She thinks of Ortalon as she chews the plant's fibers, considers draping her head in white cloth for closer communion. She wipes bright blood from her lips [garbled and laughs?] softer and softer, swallowing every stroke of flavor."

 

We get back into those long things, as she becomes more vulnerable, as she is in the process of dying. Then, going back to that thing we were talking about earlier, we have a sentence that is popped out in italics where we are… It is completely her own thought, very clearly.

 

"She thinks, loathsome in its own deliciousness."

 

That is such a… Such a very, very Blue…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Way to frame things. I love that it's unambiguous, that it is clearly a thought that she is having while this experience is occurring. That's, again, something, a tool that you can use is to think about when do I want to be very clear that this is exactly the sentence that my character is thinking.

[DongWon] Well, just the imagery here, right, of the bright blood coming from her lips. She's wiping her tears and blood off. It's like literally the red mixing with blueness here. Right? She's taking Red into herself and it's killing her. But then it ends with she rises, washes her face, washes her hands, and sits down to write a letter. She has removed the red from her in this moment. Right? She has steeled herself against this thing. We sort of feel a door closing in this moment, as she has opened herself to the deepest vulnerability, and she is returning to, "Nope. I am Blue. This is who I am." There's such a heartbreak in how this chapter ends that is in such contrast to the heartbreak that comes earlier with the "all that — all that."

[Howard] In… The question that I asked for the 2nd half of this episode, the gradations, the types of vulnerability. I love that we see kind of the whole gradient in this section we've just read. "Her heart should have been broken by better." There's heartbreak, but there's also disappointment. Disappointment is something to which we're vulnerable. "Her betrayal should have had sharper teeth." Well, betrayal is yet another level of vulnerability. Then we get to that last one. That's the homework that I want to send you out with. Are you ready?

 

[Howard] I want you to write vulnerability as a known known. Something that is… That the character knows exists and knows the shape it will take. As a known unknown. They know it exists, but they don't know the shape it will take. And as an unknown unknown. They have no idea what shape it will take or how it exists or anything about it. Yet they are confident enough to be vulnerable to each of these.

 

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-09-live-recording-rituals-rites-and-traditions 

 

Key Points: Rituals, rites, and traditions: making beliefs tangible as practices. Building the rites helps you discover a little about your characters, about what they believe, and helps make them more real. Incorporating them into our fiction makes characters more believable, realistic, vibrant, and tangible. Births, weddings, and funerals are what make a culture work. Do you work from culture to tradition or ritual, or start with the ritual, and then work out the culture? Start with an existing culture, but add elements and tweak it. Start with the premise of the story world, and then think about the implications of that. When you're working from a real culture, what can you take or not? Be respectful. Don't dip your quill in somebody's blood. Use characters, individuals, who are resistant, lack understanding, or are trying to understand as buffers for the culture. Rituals, rites, and traditions can do so much heavy lifting for you. One takeaway? Show how communities come together. Remember that rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, community, and each other. During revision, go for depth, and work out the rituals. Remember that rituals and traditions are not just something that other cultures have, we have them too!

 

[Season 19, Episode 09]

 

[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 09]

 

[Erin] This is Writing Excuses. Rituals, rites, and traditions.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Fonda] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

[Erin] We are going to talk today about tradition. We're going to be talking about what happens when you take beliefs in a world and make them tangible by turning them into practices. This happens in our real world, and it often happens in our fiction. I'm wondering how do you all do that? Have you done it, are you interested in doing it, how do you tackle it?

[Mahtab] It would absolutely… I think it is definitely a very important, I would say, a part for worldbuilding, because that is how people… Like, first of all, when you develop rites or any kind of rituals, which is… And I'm talking my experience when… Which is what I did for my novel Valley of the Rats. I built up these traditions and these rites that the people in the village go through. That was actually how I discovered a little bit more about my people. It's what they believe. It makes them a little bit more real. And, it was an aspect of worldbuilding, which made it really interesting.

[Fonda] Same. I love incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions into my worldbuilding. If you think about our own daily lives, we go through the world performing a whole series of rituals, rites, and traditions, many of which we're somewhat unconscious of. Right? Everything from our day-to-day practices of holding the door open for another person to the order in which your family members talk when they're gathered together to big scale traditions like our holidays and our societal values and principles, like, those all feed so much into our day-to-day lives that, to the extent that we can incorporate them into our fiction, it will make our fictional worlds that much more believable, that much more realistic, and that much more vibrant and tangible.

[DongWon] Yeah. One of my clients once told me, Kate [Ballahide] said that the 3 things you need to define a culture are births, weddings, and funerals. If you have those 3 parts of a person's life, you have a strong understanding of what makes that culture work. Because, when I think about worldbuilding, I think less about material physical things that make up that world and more about what are the rules that define this society. Right? That's important to people, what are the taboos that you can't break. So those 3 points of how do we treat a new life, how do we celebrate 2 people coming together, and then how do we honor a loss, I think are the things that we really communicate to the audience this is what our characters value, this is what they aspire to, and this is what they're afraid of.

 

[Erin] I'm curious, does it come that way for all of you? Like, is it something where you decide here's the value, here's the culture, I'm going to create this tradition or ritual? Or are you like, I want to make this really cool ritual, I will figure out the culture that would make it happen? Is it always the same way for you, or one or the other?

[Mahtab] I'm always… Because a lot of my stories have been set in India, I take that… The culture that's currently exists as the starting point, but then I will try and add a few fantasy elements, or I'll try and switch it around a little bit, and go against people's norms of beliefs and just try and make it a little bit more interesting. And, because I love scary stories and horror, I will add a horror element to it as well, which is… Most people are not going to, but the main thing is that I want some kind of a reaction from the reader. So I will take something that's existing, and then I try and tweak it. I think sometimes, you know what, when you take something existing and tweak it, not only are you showing differences between what people believe, but sometimes you can even show similarities between different cultures or different beliefs and different people. So it's a good way to play with things and play with the character and the world, and I love doing that.

[Fonda] I start with the premise of my story world. Which, for me, involves some speculative element. Then I go through the thought exercise of what are the implications that that entails for the society and for the individuals that navigate that world. So, the example of the Green Bone saga, I have a coded East Asian society, but there's a speculative element that doesn't exist in our world. Which is this magic jade that confers powers. So an entire society has been developed around this one resource and there's a whole culture that is grounded around the practices and traditions and beliefs surrounding this speculative element that I've introduced into the world. So I couldn't just go and wholesale take an East Asian culture and then transplant it into my story world, I had to create this hybridized world where I was cueing certain rites and rituals and traditions that readers would pick up on as being East Asian in origin, but then just weaving it together with my own imagination based around what kind of world I wanted to create around the speculative element. The more that you can get down to that microlevel of even the things like the idioms, the sayings that people have, the day-to-day interactions that they have around the speculative element and the rich… Religious aspects, the spiritual aspects, social aspects… Hopefully, if I've done my job right, it will feel like a very grounded place that's been built from the starting principles.

[Erin] I feel like you've hit on two really, really exciting things. One is, I think, a question people often have when they're working from something that's real. They're working from a real culture, is, what can you take and when can you not take? This is something that I've thought about. I've used rituals that come from basically conjure, like, folk magic, that come from, like, a black American folk magic tradition, and I don't want to depict closed practices, which are basically practices only meant, rituals and rites that are only meant to be done by the group themselves. If you're not in the group, like, don't do it, and you'll know if you are. I think, number one, I don't want to be disrespectful. Number 2, I actually don't want a bunch of folk magic practitioners mad at me. They were like… That's not a good group to have on your bad side. So I think that is something that I thought about, is, what is the essence of what's going through? I think that's what you're talking about. What is the core value that is underlying that tradition, which is the thing that that tradition is meant to do. Or what was it originally developed to do. Then, how can I develop it in a different way? What if this same objective was expressed differently? What if it had a different practice, but the same underlying goal? So I think a lot about that in, like, trying to avoid doing things that just seem like I'm kind of using somebody else's closed practices or, as I like to say it sometimes, dipping my quill in somebody's blood. Which is not a good thing unless that's what your story is about.

[DongWon] That is such an evocative image. I love that.

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Mahtab] I think one thing that we must remember whenever you do… Whenever you're writing something like this, is be respectful. Like, make sure that if, one, there is no misappropriation of someone else's traditions or practices. Use your own, something that you have, but whatever you change it into, whatever you tweak it into, make sure that it's respectful. If there is a fantasy element or a speculative element to it, that's fine, but try to make sure that you're not offending anyone by just making it so egregious that it's like it's wow, but it's really, really bad. So, just respect. Keep that in mind.

[DongWon] I think one of the things that can really help there is, especially in fiction, we're seeing these rites and rituals and traditions through an individual's perspective. Individuals have an imperfect understanding of the traditions that they're embedded in. Right? Nobody fully understands why it is that we do this ritual on this day, or why we honor this tradition in this way. So, having a character that is resistant to it, or doesn't quite understand it, or is trying to understand, I think are great ways to build a little bit of a buffer between the culture that you are referencing, that blood that you're dipping your quill in, and what's actually on the page. When you grounded in someone's specific experience, I think that does a lot to add that texture and that subjectivity that makes it feel less like you're just picking something up wholesale from someone else's culture, even from your own culture. Right? So, just remember that as people are experiencing all of these things that we're talking about, you're writing it through characters, you're writing through individuals embedded in that culture. I don't know, my experience is a lot of, like, trying to understand how my culture works, both as an American and coming with… My parents coming from Korea, there's, like, all these different things that I'm trying to puzzle out all the time and trying to get them to fit together. So I think letting that be felt in how your characters experience these moments can be a really thrilling way to go about it.

 

[Fonda] One of the things I love about incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions in fiction, in worldbuilding, is that they do so much heavy lifting for you. You don't need to have pages of exposition when you can show your characters living their day-to-day lives and going through the traditions of their society. It just provides this natural in, where you can very seamlessly include the exposition that you need to. For example, if I was to write a story set in the United States of America and it was for an extraterrestrial audience, rather than explaining the origin of this country and how it came to be and etc., etc., I could have my characters celebrate the 4th of July. There's an automatic in for me to, through the traditions of the society, give a bit of background on where… The origins of the society and how people celebrate it. So, think about that when you are doing your world building. Can you have, as much as possible, these grounded day-to-day experiences of your characters that give you this automatic in, where you don't have to make an awkward cut to explain something about your world?

[Erin] Which is a perfect time for a tradition of our own, to pause, so that we can have our little break, and so, traditionally, this would be the time for the thing of the week.

 

[Fonda] Our thing of the week is a debut fantasy novel called Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao. It is a very action-packed, funny book, that takes place in a Chinese underworld that resembles 1920s Shanghai, and I especially recommend the audiobook that was narrated by Mei Mei Macleod. The reason why I've chosen this is the book of the week is because it is a great example of how one author took rituals, rites, and traditions from our own world and shaped it for a fantasy world. For example, in our world in Chinese tradition, there is the ritual of burning offerings for ancestors, and in Shanghai Immortal, some of these offerings show up in the underworld in very unexpected ways. So, like the lucky ro… Joss roosters that get burned in our world end up just over populating the underworld…

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] And there are roosters running amok everywhere and there's a disaster. Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao.

 

[Erin] Now that we're back from the break, I'm going to break from tradition in a little bit, and actually, we're going to do a quick wrap up section because we are on a ship right now and they are telling us that they want this room for secret rituals of their own. So, if you… We can go down, starting with DongWon, what is the one thing that you wish people knew when they were writing rites or rituals or traditions? One take away, what would it be?

[DongWon] [garbled]

[chuckles]

[DongWon] I think the thing that I wish people would really bring to it is really showing how communities come together. I think these are… The opportunities to make your characters feel embedded in a specific place and a specific group of people. Often times, when we see these scenes, it feels very individualistic, we're so focused on that person's emotions emotional experience going through it. But a thing that I often feel is missing in stories is a greater sense of a wider cast of characters, even if we're not seeing them all as individual POVs. That feeling of community, that feeling of connections, I think these ritual moments are such an ideal place to get that in and, often times, people can be very focused on the isolating experience of the character in those moments.

[Fonda] I would say that remember that at its core, rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, to the community, and to each other. When you incorporate them into your fiction, they are an incredible opportunity to not just world build on a macro level, but also on a micro level, and weave in really tangible details, like food. Food is a part of so many of our rites and rituals and traditions. Dress. Is there special dress associated with certain occasions and traditions in your society? Money. Entertainment. So many of your world building blocks can be put together through the lens of the rites, rituals, and traditions of your fictional world.

[Mahtab] What I would say is try… And the first time that you're writing it, you may not know how many or what kinds of rites or rituals or traditions you want to, but I think during the revision is when you really need to figure out if you have too many strands, too many things going on, how you can roll a couple of things into one another and deepen your plot and deepen some of the things that you put in there, rather than widen it. Just give it some… Like, I would say during the revision process, go for depth, and really work those traditions out or rituals out, whatever it is that you want to work on. But narrow them down and just really work them out. I hope I'm making myself clear.

[Erin] You are. What I would say is to remember that rituals and traditions are not just things that other people have. I think sometimes we can think of rituals as that is a different culture has this ritual or tradition, but I'm just doing things because I am. But there are so many traditions that we have, like holding the door open or moving to the other side of the elevator or even blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is a ritual that exists in the birthday celebrations in America that may not exist everywhere. 

 

[Erin] With that, I have the homework for you. Which is to pick a ritual or tradition that you are accustomed to or familiar with and make it the center of a fictional scene. You can change its meaning, you can change its impact, but keep the actual actions of the ritual or tradition the same.

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-02-q-a-episode-with-wx-core-cast 

 

Q&A:

Q: How do you keep motivation going for long-form projects?

A: What motivates you, generally? What got you engaged in the first place? Carrots, rewards, for the next piece. Short term rewards. Novelty, interesting, challenging, and urgent. Promise someone else? 

Q: How do you find comp titles similar to yours?

A: Think about a Venn diagram. That overlap identifies your audience. Step back, and look at it from a high level. Get someone else to suggest comp titles.

Q: Does a bad self-pubbed book mean you are doomed in traditional publishing?

A: Not really.

Q: How do you keep track in a long project of what you are writing and the hooks you are setting up?

A: Reread. Notes to yourself. Reverse engineer your outline.

Q: What personality systems do you use when building characters?

A: Any tool that works for you is a good tool. Ability, role, relationship, status, and objective. What motivates the characters, how do they react in situations, and what is their emotional core.

Q: What surprises are there in doing your own audiobook narrations?

A: Don't project, and don't get flustered by mistakes, just keep going.

 

[With apologies for possible mistakes on names of the questioners...]

 

[Season 19, Episode 02]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Q&A, on a boat.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is the Writing Excuses workshop and retreat. We are coming to you from the past, 2023, with a roomful of writers.

[Applause]

[Mary Robinette] They have some questions for us. You all get to join in learning about their questions.

 

[Chris] All right. So, I'm Chris, and I was wondering what... How do you keep motivation going for long-form projects, and don't say money?

[Laughter]

[Money!]

[Dan] I'm glad you don't want us to say money, because this is not an industry in which you make money.

[DongWon] It's shocking how ineffective that is at not motivating you in the middle of the project. I think that can be very exciting in the beginning, but you get paid on signature, and then you get paid on delivery. So, when you're in the middle, you're at the farthest distance between the times that you get paid, at that point. So it doesn't feel very exciting, it doesn't keep you in the moment. So, I think you're right to think that that's not going to be the answer.

[Erin] One of the things that I like to think about is that this isn't the first longform thing you've ever done in your life, probably. So, a lot of it is figuring out what motivates you generally. Like, if you're running a race or any time you were in school and you had to do a project, what kept you going? Then, figure out what's the version of that that works for writing. Because what motivates you is going to be very different than what motivates me or any of us.

[Howard] Couple of brain hacks. The first is something about this project got you motivated to start it. Find a way to go back and look at that and remind yourself of why you got engaged in this. What is it about this project that brings you joy? The 2nd is sometimes with the daily grind, you need to place a carrot out in front of you, some sort of reward for writing a thousand words or for finishing this broken scene or whatever it may be that slowing you down.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have ADHD, and I have this problem all the time. What I've found is that giving myself small-term immediate rewards can often help, because then I'm thinking about, oh, if I just write 100 words… Like, there's a program called Written Kitten. You write 100 words and it gives you a picture of a kitten. I will write ridiculous quantities of words for kitten pictures.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, what you're looking for… The kind of 4 things that will drive an ADHD brain, and I think this works for other people, is novel, interesting, challenging, and urgent. So, if you can figure out what's new about what you're trying to do today? What is interesting about it? If you can set yourself a challenge, like, can I write 100 more words than I did yesterday? Urgency. If you set a timer, like, how many words can I write during this time? Sometimes it's just I'm going to go to a different coffee shop, that that's the thing that will do it. But it's tricking your brain into finding the new joy every day.

[Erin] I will say, for me, that… For me, I actually will work better sometimes for other people than I will for myself. So there's this thing that I participated in a few times called the grind. Where they put you in a group of people you don't know, and every day, for the entire month, you're expected to send them a piece of writing. They don't really read it, you don't really read theirs, but the feeling that these people are waiting at their email for me to have written something will help me get words on a page. That's because I know myself, and I know that other people… Like, feeling that I'm going to let somebody down is sometimes more motivating. Which is… We'll talk about that in therapy.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But it's more motivating then thinking that I'm going to let myself down.

[DongWon] This is one of the reasons that when I talk about trying to figure out what your next project is or what you want to be writing, that I say separate out market concerns from what you're interested in. Because if you're writing something purely cynically for the market, then when you run out of motivation, it's really hard to get yourself back into it. Because if you don't have that kernel of love for the story that you're doing, if you don't have that enthusiasm, then that well is much shallower, I think. So, being able to pull from a deeper sense of investment in the project I think is really important.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. Let's go on to our next question.

[Grovewit McCain] Hi, my name is [garbled Grovewit McCain]. I'm wondering… This is a question about querying. When searching for comp titles, are there any tricks to finding books that would be similar to yours?

[DongWon] This is one of my favorite topics. The question is about comp titles, and are there any tricks to sort of finding ideal ones. Unfortunately, there's no real tricks to it. This is always a challenge. It's one of the hardest parts of my job, and it's one of the hardest parts about figuring out how to query. Right? So my general piece of advice that I give about comp titles is to think about it like a Venn diagram. Because what you're trying to do is target the audience for your book. Comp titles are how you kind of zero in on that. So you're looking for 2 things that overlap and define a clear area. That is going to be the audience for your book. That's what you're trying to communicate to the agents that you're writing that letter to. So, really step back, look at it from a very high level. You're… People always make the mistake of digging too deep into, oh, this plot detail kind of works, or this aspect of it kind of works, but not that aspect. You're going for top level vibes. Right? You're going for the overall feeling of what the project is, or, when you say it, what's the first thought somebody has about that book, about that movie, whatever it is. So, keep it high level, look for things that are in your category, look for things that have the energy you're trying to bring, and look for the kind of people who like what you're doing. Who are you writing for? Work backwards from that to what do they like that's similar to your book.

[Howard] It's also useful to find someone who knows how to do comp titles, and is willing to give you a little help. I'm working on a serial prose thing in the Schlock Mercenary universe, and my first comp title was, yeah, it's like Doc Savage meets Douglas Adams. My friend Brandon said, "No, it's like Murder She Wrote meets Guardians of the Galaxy." I realized, oh, yeah, yours is way better than mine was.

[Dan] I love how DongWon's advice was here's how to do this, and Howard's advice was cheat.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Listen, use any tool you've got. If you can cheat, cheat. Please.

 

[Unknown] Let's say, purely theoretically, you published a book as a 17-year-old, self published a book as a 17-year-old, and it's real bad. How doomed are you in trad pub in the future?

[DongWon] If you have published a book previously that you feel like might be holding you back, if it's self pubbed, you are 0% doomed. On the trad side, basically, if you've self pubbed a thing, we care if it has sold a ton of copies. Otherwise, it doesn't really impact what anybody's looking at. When you're going to publish your first book with a traditional publisher, we'll just say it's your debut, or your trad… Your traditional debut or big 5 debut or whatever it is. Right? It doesn't impact it much. Nobody's going to be digging into that history and being like, "Wow. This person published a book as a teenager. We are blacklisting them from the industry." That just doesn't happen. Right? So, we're more interested in success when it's coming from an indie market versus stuff that didn't perform as much as you would have liked it to.

 

[Patrick] Hi! My name is Patrick. I handed a manuscript off to a friend. She read it, and she said, "I really like this part. I'm excited to see where it's going." I don't remember writing that part.

[Chuckles]

[Patrick] How do you keep track in a long project of where you were going and the hooks you were setting up?

[Dan] Practice.

[Mary Robinette] You just reread it. I have people come up to me all the time and tell me how much they liked something, and I'm like, "Um... Good."

[Howard] The lesson that I learned from Mary Robinette was to say, "I'm so glad you like that. I'm so glad you noticed that." I reread my stuff regularly… Well, not regularly, but often, and find that I did not remember writing a thing, but it's right there, and it's making me laugh.

[Dan] Here. Let me ask you a question. Is this someone who read… Because they're excited to see where it's going. So, clearly, this is not a full manuscript. Was this like a chapter by chapter or scene by scene situation?

[Patrick] It's not finished, but I gave them like 18 chapters.

[Dan] Okay. 18 chapters. What I found with people when you're in that kind of beta reading stage, like, I want you to read this, I want to get feedback, you are going to get very different feedback from someone who reads the whole thing versus someone who's reading chunks of it. The people who read chunks of it will give you much more granular feedback, which can often be very helpful, but they tend to hyperfocus on details that don't matter. Whereas someone who reads the entire project might not even notice those little details, because they're looking with a much wider lens. So, it might just be that this isn't a big deal, because… Of course, with 18 chapters, that's a lot, so… Yeah.

[Erin] I would also say to leave yourself notes. I'm a big fan of doing things that your future self will appreciate in all ways.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But especially with writing. So, as your writing, if there's something that you are really excited about as opposed to assuming that you will remember that later, because you very well may not, it's really nice to sometimes go, like, "Oh, this is great. Make sure to come back to this." Leave yourself… Sometimes I literally keep notepaper on the side of my desk, or a PowerPoint, because I'm a weirdo, and I will put in, "This is something that I really want to come back to." I'll do the same thing if I'm rereading a section of a manuscript. I'll be like, "What's jumping out to me right now?" Then leave myself a note about it. So that when, 3 weeks from now, I have forgotten that section, I can look at those notes and use them as signposts to what was really motivating me and when I want to make sure ties back to my original thoughts.

[Mary Robinette] I also look at it as an opportunity. That sometimes they mention something you don't remember writing. This is an opportunity to say, "Oh, I accidentally did something cool." Sometimes you did it on purpose in the moment, but you forgotten it. So how can I use that going forward? If you've read my novel Ghost Talkers, and if you haven't, please do. Mrs. Richardson is nowhere in my outline at all. But I started… She plays a really pivotal moment, because I had situations like that, where someone said, "Oh, I really like this." The other thing that you can do if you did not leave yourself notes is you can reverse engineer your outline. So, you can go back and do that reread, as part of your prep for continuing forward.

[Howard] I'm excited to take some more questions, but we need to wait until after our break.

 

[Emma] Hi. My name is Emma. I'm the producer. I'm going to do the thing of the week this week. Because it is another podcast that is cohosted by Marshall, our recording engineer. It's called Just Keep Writing. It's an amazing podcast. It's a podcast for writers by writers. The whole purpose is to build community and to raise marginalized voices. Marshall and his cohosts are just incredible, and they have some wonderful guests on the show. Some of them are guests we've interviewed. But, as fellow writers and podcast listeners, I highly recommend checking out Just Keep Writing. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or go to justkeepwriting.org.

 

[Emma] I'm going to ask a question that we have from the Discord, which is we have a writer who relies heavily on the Enneagram when they are plotting their character arc. The Enneagram… Dan's looking at me with confusion.

[Dan] Yep. I've never heard of this.

[Emma] It's a personality… It's not quite a test, but kind of similar to…

[Myers-Briggs]

[Emma] Myers-Briggs.

[Dan] Myers-Briggs.

[Emma] Thank you. So this writer is wondering if you all use certain personality type systems when you are building your character?

[Mary Robinette] My feeling on this is that any tool that gives you traction is a good tool. Because I come out of theater, where basically our job was to read the text and then figure out who the character was, I don't have a lot of tools for coming up with characters, because it's the parts of writing that comes most naturally to me. When I do have a problem with a character, I tend to reach for something that's like… I look at their ability, role, relationship, and status, and try to figure out what's driving them. I'll try to think about super objective or objective. But most of the time, I only do that if I'm stuck. Then I will go back and I will… I'll examine my own text to look for those things, to look for those markers to help me understand where I should move next. But I don't do that pre-work. Because it comes naturally to me. But it doesn't come naturally to everyone.

[DongWon] When I'm making an NPC for an RPG, I definitely do sun, moon, and rising sign. Just as, like, a little touchstone to return to in improv moments of like, how is this character going to react in this situation? So, something… I mean, there's a million different rubrics you can use for this. Any of them could be useful. It's just a way to crystallize in your own mind what motivates character, how do they react in a situation, and what is their emotional core.

[Erin] I also think… I love these types of personality tests, and sun, moon, and rising, and all of that. One of the things I like about them is that they make explicit some of the ways in which we relate to and see the world. So, sometimes you won't think... Like, how do I feel in social situations, is not a question people were thinking about as much until everyone started talking about extroverts and introverts. It made people think differently about the world. So, sometimes even if I don't use the specific character type, I'll think, what am I learning about the world from the way that this particular personality test breaks things down. Earlier today, I was actually speaking with somebody about from Myers-Briggs, there's intuitive versus sensing, which is sort of do you like things that you can touch and taste and hold or do you like things like figuring out, like making leaps of logic, I believe is true. I was thinking about what way a specific text was like going through things. So, you could have a detective, for example, in a detective story that is really based on the physical and the sensory, or you can have something that's based on huge leaps of logic and gut feelings. So, even thinking about the way that portions of text can have personalities and can have personality traits is a fun way to use that system in maybe an unexpected way.

[Dan] I… Uh… I've tried to use personality tests before and find that they don't work great for me. But what I do do a lot is kind of fancast my characters, with people I know, or actors, or whoever. What that does is it gives me a clear sense of kind of specific mannerisms and ways of speaking. If I'm writing a character, and in my head I'm thinking of Aqua Fina, for example, that's going to come across in the page. That doesn't mean that it has to, like, were it to be adopted, that it would have to be cast the way that I imagine it. Just because it gives me… Like I said, some specificity that really helps me characterize them.

 

[Rebecca] My name is Rebecca, and this question's probably more for Mary Robinette. I'm looking… I'm indie pubbed, and looking at recording my own audiobook. I got a little bit of a theater background. I was just wondering if there were… Was anything that kind of caught you by surprise as you started doing audiobook narrations? Things I should be looking out for?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that catches a lot of people when they're going from stage in particular into audiobooks is that you don't project. Some people have a really hard time backing off. So you're kind of doing everything as an aside, and it's very intimate, like, you're telling a story to someone who is sitting right next to you. That's… That was a surprise to me. The other thing that was a surprise was how many mistakes I was allowed to make. What they're looking for isn't… I mean, obviously a clean read is ideal. But what they're really looking for is the ability to do a punch record and not get flustered. Like, every time you get flustered and apologize, you're slowing things down. So when you make a mistake, the engineer backs you up, he starts recording again, and then he'll punch in. You're supposed to just keep talking, as if you'd had never stopped. So learning to do that and matching your own tone of voice… That was one of the skill sets that I… It's very specific to audiobook. Everything else translates pretty well. But those 2… Like, don't project, real intimate, it's all an aside, and then learning how to just match your own tone, is… Are the 2 things that I would say to cultivate.

[Howard] There are a bazillion technical aspects of this. One of the things that you may find is that the voiceover community, there are a lot of people who do voiceovers, and who will do tutorials on how to set up your fan studio so that you can create a voiceover reel. Which is a cheap way for you to figure out how to get acoustic isolation and a consistent ambience for the room your recording in. These are things that are going to be important because you don't want your levels jumping around, you don't want the background room sound changing. But it's all very technical stuff, and it's… You end up training yourself to be an audio engineer if you're doing it yourself.

 

[Emma] That's all we have time for. I am going to do the homework tonight, or today. Which is to go listen to the most recent episode of just keep writing That, the podcast that Marshall, our recording engineer, cohosts.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go listen to Marshall's podcast.

 

[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations. Also, let us know. We'd love to hear from you about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success story. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.