Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together

Apr. 19th, 2024 08:02 pm
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Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together
 
 
Key points: Voice can be an active part of developing plots and character arcs. As the character changes, their voice changes. Characters learn. Allow yourself to love to write. When you can't write with joy, reach for craft. Use the tools in revision. Use pacing, punctuation, word choice, accent, sentence structure to make the character more them. Allow yourself to be yourself as you write, use the personal voice! Use the smiley face! When something is good in what you are reviewing or critiquing, put a smiley face by it. Look for the key phrase, the sentence or paragraph that really sounds like the character, and use that to ground yourself as you revise or write more. Take big swings! Push yourself, and aim at the home run. Watch for falling into the same rhythm, sentences, and repetition by accident. Try reading it aloud to catch this! Check the musicality of your text. Deconstruct what you're doing, just step back and look at what you are trying to accomplish and how you are doing it. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 15]
 
[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.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com
 
[Season 19, Episode 15]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Tying It All Together.
[Mary Robinette] 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 Howard.
 
[DongWon] So, this episode, we are reaching the end of our first sort of module, talking about This Is How You Lose the Time War. We want to focus a little bit on both recapping some of the stuff we've talked about, but also making sure it feels actionable for you, the audience, about how you can start to apply this to your own fiction. So one of the things I really wanted to focus on, I think we've hit a number of times over the past few episodes, is we can sometimes think about voice as a very passive element of your story. You decide the voice at the beginning, and then once you sort of finish your opening section, you're like, "That's the voice for my book." I hope you can see from the past few episodes as we looked at Red and Blue and the letters individually, how voice is an active participant in developing the plots, in developing the characters, and really carrying the reader through in a way, with much more clarity than if the voice hadn't evolved.
[Mary Robinette] This is something that is a factor that you will find in most fiction that you're going to be reading or writing, that… If you have a character arc, I should say. If you have a character arc, your character at the end is not the same person they were at the beginning. So it is natural that the voice of the character would evolve over the course of the story. But we often don't think about it. We just let it go for a ride. So, thinking about some of the tools that we've used here, the big one that I would say for adjusting things is the experiential nature of the character. Like, that they are seeing things differently at the end than they are at the beginning. So you're going to be using different language to highlight things, as one example.
[Erin] I think another thing is, building on that different language, is also that characters learn things. You know what I mean? There are things we always carry with us, like, if you were the child of fisherfolk, maybe you always use fish metaphors throughout the rest of your life. But if you suddenly learn magic, or you learn how to become an engineer, or you go to space, the type of language that you use will change. I think a lot of times, again, we will sometimes think, "Oh, I've set up the knowledge that my character has at the beginning of the story," and then that knowledge changes. But has the language changed with it? So you can sort of look at a paragraph from the beginning of something you're writing and something at the end and say, "Do these seem the same?" If they do, is that a choice that I've made, or is that something I've defaulted into?
[DongWon] Well, one great example of that is in the letters, they start referencing this thing that's like Mrs. Levitt's Guide, which is some kind of…
[Mary Robinette] Etiquette.
[DongWon] Etiquette manual. Thank you. That teaches them how to write letters. Red is using this actively, and we see Red discover postscripts and all kinds of different aspects of letter writing. But it's also a cue for the audience as well of showing how literally Red and Blue are teaching each other how to speak to each other. Right? We'll see poetry start to appear in Red's letters. We see this back-and-forth about different elements of letter writing, about postscripts and things like that. I think it's really reflecting what Erin is talking about, of how you can actively and deliberately have your characters learn how to speak and how to write in a way that shows their ongoing entanglement in the way that language changes.
 
[Howard] The tool that I would first recommend that you, fair listener, take from this whole close read. Allow yourself to love to write.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Let yourself love it. Lose yourself in it. In our previous episode, I used the word luxuriate, Erin used the word indulgence. Embrace those. Please. Luxuriate in it, indulge yourself in writing. And that joy will begin to lock in some of these tools for you. Because I'm watching Mary Robinette work from notes as she talks to us and lists these things that we can do deliberately, and I think I will never be able to do all of that deliberately. That's fine. I'm just going to have fun with it, and then remember those rules and rewrite deliberately.
[Mary Robinette] Well, so frequently the tools that I list are things that I used to punch up my fiction, that it's… Sometimes it's stuff that I do unconsciously, because I come out of theater. So, getting into a character voice and rhythm is something that I was trained to do and have internalized. But other times when I'm writing with depression, I cannot write with… Through the joy. I lean… I reach for the craft, and I'll let myself get something down that's messy, knowing that I can come back and I will look at it and say, "Okay. Pacing wise, where does this character pause? Is this a character that speaks in long fluid sentences? Or is this a character that speaks in short punctuated sentences?" I will go through and I will adjust my punctuation, I will think about the word choice, I frequently go back in even with something that I have written from a place of joy, will go back in and look at how I can dial up a character's particular accent. Like, what are the word choices and sentence structure that makes this character more specifically them? How do I remove the ambiguity, so none of the other characters on the page could have said that sentence?
[Erin] I think we do a lot of this subconsciously all the time. I think about being in a meeting, or even listening to this podcast. You'll be like, "Oh, yeah. That's such a so-and-so thing to say."
[Laughter]
[Erin] Or, like when somebody says to me, they're going to use a long metaphor and talk about their cat, because that's what they always do…
[Mary Robinette] Have I told you about Elsie recently?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Who is Elsie?
[Mary Robinette] Elsie is my cat, who uses buttons to talk. It's very much… Carry on.
[Laughter]
[Erin] That was absolutely… The cat who has no shame. I've been looking at pictures of my own cat all day. But I think that… Think about the things that you do. How do you recognize somebody else's voice? Then, what is it about it? Is it the lens… Is it the things that they reference? Is it a specific word that they always use? That is a thing that they always come back to? Then think about how can you create characters that have that same depth and richness?
[Mary Robinette] Also, think about who your character is addressing, because that is one of the things, again, that we do naturally that Erin was just talking about. So when your character is speaking to someone else, do they have the same rhythm every time? Or do they change it based on who they're talking to?
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I think one thing that comes through clearly in this is kind of going also to what Erin's saying that allow yourself to be yourself as you write. This is the 3rd part of voice that we didn't talk about, which I'm forgetting the exact term you used for it, but…
[Mary Robinette] Personal voice.
[DongWon] Personal voice. Right. Red and Blue sound very distinct because there written by different people. I get the distinct pleasure of being friends with these people, so I know how they talk. These are such heightened versions of how Max speaks and how Amal speaks. But their natural rhythms and their natural proclivities in how they talk, how they construct a metaphor, are coming through and they let that happen. Right? There was no hiding who they were. They were in fact amping that up, I think, to make that distinction very clearly felt the different sections. So, I think one other lesson you can take here in addition to let yourself have fun, write from a place of joy when you can, is also just because we're giving you all these tools to manipulate voice, to use it in different ways that are very deliberate, don't feel like what we're also saying is you have to hide who you are. The way you talk, the way you think, the way you speak. Sometimes, the most distinctive fiction is the one that feels like you are talking to the person who wrote it.
[Mary Robinette] The way I often describe this is you've spent your entire life honing your tastes as a reader, and you've got good taste. So trust your taste when you're writing.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I would say as both a reader and a listener. Because I think there are ways of writing, ways of speaking, that actually don't make it into fiction as often. So if you love the way that your auntie tells a story, you know, maybe there's a way to take that and put that on a page in a way that nobody else could because nobody else has your auntie. Well, except your relatives.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So, just get that and put that on the page. Because it comes from you and your experience, it will feel real and it will feel valuable to the reader…
[Howard] Depending on the relatives, it might be a sister or a daughter.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] You are still right. None of them have your version of her.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's the personal voice. So, the thing about this is that what we're trying to do here is to teach you the mechanical and the aesthetic voice and how to manipulate them. What we hope is that you can learn to inhabit your own personal voice. Because mechanical and aesthetic can be learned. Personal is all about just learning to trust yourself.
[Howard] I have a smiley face for you. After our break.
 
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[Erin] This week I want to talk to you about Princess Weekes. She has some of my favorite YouTube video essays on the Internet right now. She has this way of bringing excellent story, culture, and media analysis that has helped me immensely in crafting my own work. She looks at popular or unpopular works of media, asks the right kinds of questions to get you thinking, and explains why it did or didn't have the impact it was looking for. Specifically, her video on why The Last Duel failed was an excellent critique of how you can look at a movement like Me, Too or see the problems in representation of women, and then try, but fail, at addressing the true reasons the movement happened. But you should really go watch all of her things. That's Princess Weekes on YouTube.
 
[Howard] One of my biggest fears when I pick up the long lists of tools and techniques is that it will suck the joy out of whatever it is that I've written, that it will become mechanical, that it will become cookie-cutter or recipe or whatever. My solution for this is the smiley face. In red pen, when I am reviewing my manuscript or when I'm critiquing someone else's, if there is something that sings to me, makes me laugh, it was a wonderful metaphor, whatever, I put a smiley face next to it. That means there may be other things you need to change in this document, but don't break this bit. Don't break this bit. I gotta tell you, the smiley face has been the most valuable critique mark that I write to myself, because it stands as a reminder.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Howard] Because when I go back over the text, I don't always remember how much I loved that the first time I wrote it or the first time I reread it.
[DongWon] It's such a huge mistake I see early career editors make. Right? When they're starting out and doing their first books that they're working on, they'll give feedback and the author will be like, "I thought I wrote a good book. What happened?" I'm like, "You did write a good book. This person just forgot to write down all the parts where they liked this." Right? They forgot to do what I think of as an alignment exercise of, like, first you tell the writer here's what I loved about this book, here's why it's important, here's why all these things are working. Now let's get on to some of the stuff that isn't working that will further highlight what does work. Right? So I think when it comes to voice, when you go through your manuscript, I think this is great advice from Howard, of learn to recognize what things do sound like you and you like that fact. Right? Lean into that going forward.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a more of this, please. This is something… I love calling it an alignment exercise. This is, again, trusting your own taste, trusting that personal voice. You… Books that you love, you're not the only person that loves that book. When you read it, you have an emotional response to it every time you read it. So when you're reading your own book and you have emotional responses, trust those emotional responses. Those are genuine things that you experience as a reader. If you like it, lean into it. It's like, "Oh, okay. I did that well." And when you're learning, you can use these tools to say, "Okay, what did I do well here? How can I do that intentionally, and heighten it later in other parts of the book, so that this thing that I love, I continue to be good at?"
 
[Erin] I also think with voice specifically, because it can be hard to really capture the voice of a character, at least it is for me, is sometimes I'll go through and find a sentence or a paragraph where I feel like, "This is the person." Like, I really got it here. Sometimes I'll have to write my way into it. Like, I'll start writing the story, it's not quite there, it's not quite there, and then I'm like, "This is the phrasing that this character would absolutely use 100% of the time." I will highlight that, and then when I go to either revise or write more, I will start by grounding myself in that sentence or paragraph and say, "Okay. This is what I'm trying to get to, this is the feeling. Now, can I carry it forward?"
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] As someone who has built PCs, I love the word grounding myself…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because if I forget to ground myself, I'll destroy a $1500 video card…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Absentmindedly.
[Mary Robinette] Well, this… In audiobook narration, we call this thing that you're talking about, we have a word for it, it's called a key phrase. It's used to get yourself into the rhythms of the character, so that you remember what is your pacing for this, what is the accent of this character, what attitude do I have? I think that that's the thing that you're looking for when you're looking for this phrase, it's like… It embodies all of those things in a single moment.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. Kind of building off of this, the one thing that I also want people to remember when experimenting with voice, in addition to the other elements we've talked about, is don't be afraid to take a big swing. Don't be afraid to push yourself and reach for the tonality, the voice, the emotion that you're looking for, whether that is the blunt muscular brutalism of Red or the deep poetic organicness of Blue. These are huge swings in terms of voice. Right? There really aiming for the fences with how far they're pushing this, and I think that's part of the joy of the book and that's part of the playfulness of the book, is this sort of high wire formalist act that they're pulling off here. Then we see that again in the letters, the way they become so profoundly hugely romantic. That's… That is not a thing you see very often in text. I think one of the reasons people responded to it so well is both the humor, but also the "Oh, my God, these characters are so in love with each other," and feeling that in your body as you read it is really wonderful.
[Howard] Sports ball has the best metaphor here. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] You take that big swing, and, speaking as someone who is at this moment remembering very vividly some of my young writer mistakes and fears, you will miss some of those pitches you swing at. The good news is that as a writer, you get to go back…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And rewrite. You get to put the novel in a trunk, or the story in a trunk, and come back to it 10 years later and say, "Oh. Now I have the skill set to finish this thing that I wanted to do," or, you come back 10 years later as Dr. Frankenstein, and this is more liked my approach, and say, "Oh, that corpse is only good for parts."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But I know which parts!
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah. Not to stress everyone out, but from a publishing perspective, we're in an era where base hits aren't good enough. Right? You've gotta be swinging for the fences. It can be okay if you get on base, but that shouldn't be your target. Your target should be the home run. So I encourage you to do all these things that we're talking about in terms of finding a way to get to that joyful place that you're writing from, but also to make sure you're pushing yourself and reaching for the thing that is really distinctive, is really going to stand out, is really personal.
 
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] As we're talking about this, I want to flag a thing that I see happen with early career writers with voice, that is an… Asking for a mistake, and I see it happen a lot, which is this idea we've been talking about pacing and finding the rhythm of the voice, is that you will have a character or the… Just the language of the text itself, where everything has the same rhythm, where all the sentences are the same length, and you have this accidental repetition that, again, can flatten something. All your paragraphs are the same length. In the real world, you have this variety of rhythm. Something that you can really see when you look at This Is How You Lose the Time War is how intentionally they're using when the character speaks in long sentences versus short sentences, when the switch happens, when the variety takes place. So look at your own work and think about if you've been thinking my prose falls flat, and your urge is to add more adjectives, take a look at it instead and see if it's something that you can fix with your punctuation. Fix by just breaking up how the sentences are structured.
[Howard] I am almost shocked and amazed, Mary Robinette, that you didn't tell us to try reading it out loud. Because often that is how I identify it, when I realize just in the pattern of my breathing, in the pattern of my nodding, of my body movements, I'm like, "Oh. This is all written to the beat of the song I was listening to…"
[Laughter]
[Howard] "When I wrote it."
[DongWon] That's what I was going to say is…
[Howard] Oh, my.
[DongWon] I encourage people to think about the musicality of the text. Right? Think about the rhythm, the sound, all of those things. One way to switch stuff is to change the music you're listening to. If you write to music, whether it's wordless or with lyrics, find something with a different BPM. Find something with a different tonality. That can help you shift out of one rhythm. Or, even if you're not using that specifically, just think about it as a piece of music, of when do you want to change your time signature, when are you heading into the bridge, when are you heading into the verse. Right? Those are all things that will help you unlock those tools of rhythm, of sound and poetics, and of repetition, which is also a very common thing in music, of when are you coming back to the same beat, the same note.
 
[Erin] I also think it's just fun to sometimes deconstruct what you're doing. There's this song that I love called Title of the Song in which each ver… It's like declaration of my feelings for you, elaboration on those feelings. The ver… The actual versus are telling you what the song would be doing. Sometimes, when something feels off to me, I'll actually say like, "A long ass sentence that appears to be explaining the world. A really short quip." Like, I'll actually look…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] At what my thing is… What my sentences are attempting to accomplish. If it's the same thing 8 times in a row, then it doesn't quite work.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because, to think about musicality and karaoke, one of my favorite things, even the most amazing singer, if they just come out and belt, with no variety, they never make their voice softer, no matter how good the tone is, people will start to tune out, about 2 like sentences in. Because they'll be like, "Oh. Okay. That's what's happening here. Back to my conversation." The way you keep people in a song is the way you keep people in writing, by using variety so that not quite sure what's coming next and they feel like you're taking them on a journey that they want to go on with you.
[Howard] The song between the servants, This Is As Good As It Gets, in season 2 of Gallivant, the actress is trained as a Broadway singer, and they don't let her off the leash until the last 2 verses of that song, and she belts… I get chills every time I hear it, because I realize that was the message of this song. She is breaking free from a life of servitude and accepting that she is good enough to not have to eat olives off the floor. They communicate that with that note of… Just a couple notes. Oh, I get chills just thinking about it. So, yeah. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Changing the rhythms. It's something that we're hardwired… We're hardwired to pay attention to repetition and then to also tune it out. The reasons are that if there's something that's a sameness, that's… If you think of us as humans as animals, that's not important information. You know what it is, you've identified it. So you're listening for the threat or the opportunity. The threat of the rhythm of someone stalking you. Or the drip drip of water that is a food source… A water source. So, again, like when you're placing those repetitions in your text, you want to be placing them in points where it's carrying information that the reader needs as opposed to just accidental repetition that the reader tunes out as unimportant. It's like, "Oh, yeah, it's all green. It's true, it's leaves."
[DongWon] Yeah. If you want an example of how pacing and repetition can really enhance your experience, I love Tina Turner's rendition of Proud Mary, which starts very slow and then gets incredibly fast and intense by the end of it. I think that sense of… That increasing excitement and thrill and danger, all those things are communicated in that song as it changes very differently tonally from the beginning to the end. So, I want all of you to sort of think about the musicality and think about that tonality. Think about rhythm and repetition, as I'm demonstrating right now. As you're like really digging into how to keep building the voice of your work.
[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.
 
[DongWon] Our homework for this week is I want you to write a short outline of your work in progress. This would be a new outline. I want you to instead of focusing on what are the plot beats for your characters or… You could even do this for a single character arc if you don't want to do it for the whole book. But instead of writing down what happens to the character, make notes about how the voice of that character will change with these events. Make a little bit of an outline so you have a sense of the arc as the character changes how they see the world, how they're going to talk about the world, and experience it.
 
[Mary Robinette] I love that homework. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.
 
[Mary Robinette] Support for today's show comes from the Inner Loop Radio. If you listen to us because you're a writer, then you'll also want to listen to Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to stay focused, and how to stay sane. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused, and get lit on the Inner Loop Radio.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.08: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Working with an Editor

Feb. 29th, 2024 06:52 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.08: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Working with an Editor
 
 
Key Points: Working with an editor or agent! First, your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team, trying to make your book a better book. What's an edit letter? There are stages of editing, starting with developmental or structural. This tends to be broad structural questions. E.g. this character arc doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the book. These are often phone conversations, not letters. Edit letters should be a compliment sandwich, starting with what is good about the book, and ending with more things that are working. When the editor asks you to do something, can you say no? Absolutely. That helps the editor or agent know what is important to you. When the editor or agent offers a suggestion, they are asking whether you can come up with a better idea. Sometimes they offer ideas that they know are not good ideas, to help you react and find a direction. Suggestions identify that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Ask questions! Sometimes "no, this is a terrible idea" shows that you are tired, and it's time to take a break. Editors and agents are people, too. Alignment comes with asking questions.
 
[Season 19, Episode 08]
 
[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 08]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Working with an Editor.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Ali] And I'm Ali Fisher.
 
[Mary Robinette] Now, I am very excited about this episode. Let me tell you what we are about to do. I'm about to ask DongWon and Ali all of the questions that I wish I'd been able to ask an agent and an editor before I had published a novel.
[Ali] [garbled]
[laughter]
[DongWon] We are so excited to answer these questions. I wish I could transmit from my brain all the information I know about how this process goes to every writer in the world. Because that's the whole point of this. We want them to feel comfortable coming into the process and see how it's not scary. Even though it is difficult at times, that we're all pulling for the same goal at the end of the day.
[Ali] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. I will say, one of the things that's straight off the bat, dear writers, that you should know is that your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team.
[Ali] Yes. It's true.
[Mary Robinette] You're all trying to make the same book a better book.
[Ali] Amen.
[DongWon] One of the reasons I wanted to have Ali on in particular is that we are working together on several projects at this point.
[Ali] Yes.
[DongWon] Having a sense of Ali's perspective, but also so that you guys can hear a little bit of the working relationship between an agent and an editor working together. I think there is this idea that is the agent versus the publishing house sometimes, and that it's the author versus everybody sometimes. The more that, I think, if we can find ways that… To be clear, that we are all trying to accomplish the same thing. That doesn't mean that conflict doesn't happen, that doesn't mean that there aren't problems. But at least we're starting from a place of understanding and conversation and alignment in what our goals are.
[Ali] Yeah. Yeah. Which doesn't mean that your agent won't advocate for you when needed and it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be conflicts of sort of ideas or like [garbled thoughts on] campaign, etc. Like, that's just smart people working together. But when it comes to the book itself and especially… I don't know, overall, I think, there's no question that success of the book is a win win win for the whole team.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. So, writers, you've probably heard that at some point you're going to get something that's called an edit letter. What's an edit letter?
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Never heard of it. Sounds suspicious.
[DongWon] Sounds like to me…
[Ali] Well, DongWon, do you want to start with the types of, like letters or calls you do before I do?
[DongWon] Yes. So, I think, there are different stages of editing. Right? What we sort of think of as developmental or structural. Then, sort of like editing. What I tend to do is very much on the developmental stages. I love to be involved early in a project. Or when a submission comes to me, and it's a debut, then I'm doing a lot of structural edits working with the editor to make sure that the book is in a great place before we send it off to the publishing house. So I'm asking… I tend to be asking incredibly broad questions, like big structural questions, word count questions, of, like, can we add 20,000 words? Can we cut 30,000 words? Right? Like, that's scale of question tends to be what I'm doing. So, often times…
[Mary Robinette] Can you give some examples of what a structural question is?
[DongWon] Yeah. So, a structural question can be as much like, "Hey, I'm not sure this arc for this character is lining up with sort of the central themes of the book." Right? I'm being a little bit abstract. I'd say it more specifically of like, "This character's situation feels really disconnected with our protagonist's situation. Can we make that feel more connected, or should this be here?" Like, what are… What was your intention with writing this character into this book, and how are they tying into the rest of it? So that might be a structural question I'm asking that could affect an entire character arc, which is… A solution set could be rewriting that character's entire central conflict so that there arc ties more closely in. It could be cutting that character entirely, because we all realize that they're extraneous and were vestigial from a previous draft. Or it could be changing the central thematics of the book, because that character is actually really important and their arc is more important than the protagonist's arc, and we need to make those pull into alignment in a different way. Right? So, when I'm asking these structural questions, they are kind of that big and that broad about, like, "Hey, the pacing doesn't feel great here. The act two turn, the big reveal, isn't landing in an exciting way. This character isn't feeling like they're exciting and connected. This romance isn't working right, these 2 characters don't come together in the way that I kind of wish." So that's kind of what I'm doing at that stage. Because they're such big broad questions, and because I really do frame them as questions, not like, "Hey, do XYZ," I tend to do that is a conversation. So I'll get on the phone with the author. I know, everyone's dreaded phone call. I will have edit conversations that are 2, 3, 4 hours, sometimes. As we're really just talking through the book, like, what were you trying to do, what… How does this work? What are possible solutions? For me, those are some of the most exciting, most fun conversations I have. They're very difficult and stressful for me, and for the author, but in ways that I think are really energizing when they go well.
[Ali] Yes. So, not dis-similarly, by the time it comes to me, normally, it's in more polished condition or it is… It fits more firmly within the expectations of the types of things that the house that I work at publishes. Right? So, like, it tends to be in a state that is quite recognizable to me. Then I do a lot of the same things. I'm a different reader, different eye… A different sense of… Understanding about where the author's coming from or, probably a lot less understanding of where the authors coming from, and probably just a lot more sort of like generic reader experience. I'll ask a lot of the same questions, very high structural things. You mentioned worst-case scenario twice, and we never saw it. Which made me want to see it. So, something like that. Right? Then, all the way down to sometimes through sentence level style questions or suggestions, mostly for matching things up or, like smoothness, that kind of thing. Just, for anyone out there who's curious, I am an acquisitions editor and an editor, and not a copy editor. Bless them, because I am not nearly qualified enough to make sure a book could actually go to print. But, so a lot of the same things, a lot of the same questions. So brace yourselves, this is also a part where, I think, the agent turns into a little more handholding as someone's going back into…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Revisions after they felt like we just finished, and then we went out and the book sold, it's so exciting. So, sometimes that happens. Similarly, I also… I love and I offer a phone call as often as I possibly can because an edit letter, even though those are really fantastic, and I've also obviously found that authors with audio processing issues or who just need the time… They just need to read it, they need to think about it, and otherwise it's just not a free flow conversation. Happy to write it down. But if we get the chance to have that conversation, you avoid sort of the asynchronous issue of my assumptions running through the entire thing, whereas there can be a quick, like, "Oh, I actually intended this," and then that changes a lot of my responses. Right? So, I guess all I'm doing is sort of pitching the concept of if you can muster the confidence or the desire to get on the phone with an agent or an editor, I do think it's a really helpful thing. If you can't, that's totally fine too. Edit letters themselves look really different, editor to editor, and, for me, book to book. Sometimes it is… I go through… I have big chunks that's like character A, character B. I'll have worldbuilding questions. Then, sometimes, they're 2 pages long, and it's like bullet points of, like, this is where I cried, this is… My one big question is this. And can you add like a whole section where she's getting from here to here? Because I was desperate to know more.
[DongWon] Yeah. Sometimes they can be really brief, like you were saying, like, one or 2 pages. I think my longest edit letter, back when I was at Orbit, I think was 25 pages.
[Ali] Whoa!
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I think sometimes…
[Ali] Oh, my God.
[DongWon] Hey, I know people who wrote longer letters. You ask [garbled] sometime what the longest letter she wrote was…
[Ali] No.
[DongWon] So, sometimes, like having… Sometimes you just need to dig into lots of detailed things. Especially if you're going chronologically through the book, of, like, chapter 1, Chapter 2, like, breaking things down. Depending on the writer and what they need and what kind of conversation and what kind of changes you're suggesting, sometimes, a lot of details was called for. But the long edit letter, I think, is very rare, don't let that scare you. That was something that was produced in conversation with the author, I didn't just spring that on them.
[Chuckles]
 
[DongWon] But one thing that I wanted to point out about edit letters that's really important is what I think of as the compliment sandwich. Right? Where you start your letter with talking about the things that are good about the book, and hopefully you end the letter also with reminding the author, here are the things that I liked about the book, here's the things that are working. Right? I think… I see sometimes younger editors, newer editors, skip that. I think that's a huge mistake to do so. Because it's not just… We're not just like blowing smoke and we're not just complimenting you for no reason. It is… Kind of going back to what we were talking about last episode, it's showing that we are in alignment about what your intentions with the book are. If I'm telling you, here are the things that I think are working, and you read that and say, "That isn't the book I wrote. That's not what I was trying to do." Then nothing in between that compliment section matters anymore. Right? Because I don't understand what you were trying to accomplish, so all of my critiques aren't going to land now. Right? So those alignment sections are… Perhaps as important if not more important than all the critical stuff in between. It's not just to make you feel good. It is to make sure that I understand as deeply as I can what it was you were trying to accomplish, so I can help you write the book that you meant to write. To make it the best version of the thing that you want it to. So don't skim those compliments, don't cut them, don't not give them, if you're an editor yourself. I think they're really, really important and really interesting, and very fruitful conversations come out of them.
[Ali] Also, that's… I think I flagged this in our last episode, so we share credit, but it's also where I say, like, please don't cut this. Like, I love this. Like, I might be telling you to make some sweeping changes, and this could get caught up in that, and I don't want to lose it. So those are genuinely… I find those very important.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As a writer, I can also say, that now I recognize that those compliments are some of the most useful things, because it is telling you what I'm doing well, and, as writers, we are spectacularly bad at understanding what our strengths are, because those strengths are usually things that come easy to us, so we don't acknowledge them as being valuable. Having someone else recognize that allows us to be like, "Oh. Okay. So that's something I'm good at. I should look for more places where I can do the thing that I'm good at."
[Ali] Yeah. It… A lot of parts of the process to focus on what could be improved or, like, what opportunities are there that aren't here yet. So it's very important to focus on the things that are there and that are working and can be expanded, like you're saying.
[DongWon] Yeah. Again, flagging the things that, like, this is great. This made me cry. This made me laugh. Like, as you go through the manuscript, are just really helpful, because getting… Somebody telling you the stuff that doesn't work about your book over and over again for a long period of time can be quite demoralizing. We understand that. So I encourage any people who are trying to be editors or agents out there to really remember that. Even [garbled] just like have your little notes of like, "Yay, thumbs up," like, this part is so important just to make the whole process go more smoothly. Whenever I see an edit letter that's like too harsh and sometimes even sarcastic a little bit, it's like, "Uhh, this is not working, we can't do this. We gotta switch up how we're approaching this writer."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, when we come back, I will ask my 2nd question.
[Laughter]
 
[Ali] My things of the week are 2 incredible podcasts. One is called Rude Tales of Magic, and the other is called Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Both of these podcasts just so happen to feature me regularly on almost every episode. So if you like the sound of this, what's happening now, I simply must recommend Rude Tales of Magic and Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Rude Tales of Magic is mostly fantasy. It's a collaborative live-action role-playing…
[DongWon] I believe the phrase I said earlier is that it's a collaborative improvised storyteller podcast that is…
[Ali] Yes.
[DongWon] Roughly using the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to lightly flavor the type of story that you're telling.
[Ali] Correct. Then, Oh These, Those Stars of Space is the science-fiction version of that. Also, we have so much great merch. Go to rudetalesofmagic.com/store, get a sweatshirt, and don't listen. It's entirely up to you. The sweatshirts are so soft. I'm wearing one right now. Thank you.
[DongWon] I can attest to the quality of the merch. As someone who owns some. I'm a huge fan of the podcasts myself. As you can tell, as I'm stepping all over Ali's pitch here. But, Rude Tales in particular is a really wonderful podcast if you like things like critical roll and Dimension 20, then absolutely you should check out Rude Tales. It is much more irreverent than those, but it is a group of truly hilarious comedians and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
[Ali] Yes. Thank you.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] I… As… I'm just going to flagged here for our listeners, even editors can be really bad pitching their own stuff.
[Laughter]
[Ali] What do you mean?
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Yeah.
[DongWon] I promise we're all better at talking about other people's stuff…
[Ali] I know.
[DongWon] Then our own stuff.
[Ali] That's… Other people's stuff…
[DongWon] That's why we do what we do.
[Ali] Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] Anyway. All right. As we come back in, I'm going to ask another question. So, we talked about what the edit letter is. One of the things I just wanted to draw a line under is that a lot of the edit letters that I get and that you all have talked about is really about the editor asking questions rather than giving an answer to the author. It really is about the… A trust between the editor or the agent and the author. But when you're a new author, you don't necessarily know that that trust is there, and you don't know what the rules are. So they've asked you a question, they've asked if you can add more of this and more of that, can you really say no?
[Ali] [deep breath] I don't know. What do you think, DongWon?
[Chuckles]
[That's really tough]
[DongWon] No. Absolutely. Please say no. [Garbled] people say no all the time. You have to say no. It's your project, you know it better than us. Know what you… This goes back to what I was saying earlier about loving your darlings, know what you can change and what you're not willing to change. Right? Know what the things are that are untouchable to you. That's fine. We will work around that, because what we want to know is what do you care about and why have you written the book that you've written and how can we make that the best version it can be. Right? So we will constantly be poking at stuff, and you say, "No. Actually, I don't want to do that." My best case scenario is I make a suggestion of how to fix something and the author does something completely different. They do answer the question, but they just run off into the distance and come back with something wildly different. That's always more exciting than whatever stupid idea that I had.
[Chuckles]
 
[Ali] Yeah. Oh, 100%. I have a piece of text that I put at the beginning of all of the edit letters that I send to new authors that I'm working with. I really hope it gets through. This is what it says. It says, "I'm trusting you to safeguard what makes this story for you. When I offer you suggestions for changes and opportunities for deeper exploration, I'm hoping to initiate your creative process. I fully expect you to come up with better ideas than the examples and suggestions I come up with to illustrate my thinking." Because that is really how I think of it, which is, when I'm offering a suggestion, or like a directly actionable specific recommendation, I'm really saying, like, "can you think of something better, actually?"
[DongWon] I love that so much.
[Ali] This is kind of what I mean, is, really what I'm trying to say.
 
[DongWon] There's a thing that I'll do, and this sounds worse than it actually is. But there's a thing that I do sometimes where I will suggest something that I know is not a good idea because… And that the author will also recognize is not a good idea. Because then, they'll have a reaction to it. Right? When you have a reaction, now you have a direction. Right? I do this a lot with titles most clearly. I'll just start suggesting the worst titles in the world…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] So that they'll bounce off of it, and in bouncing off of it, a direction is going to start to emerge, because, like, they keep running in this direction, like, "No, that's too comedic, it has to be more like this…" Then I'm like, "Okay. Now we have more information that we can start building around." So, the… When I make a suggestion about an edit, I mean, usually it is sincere of, like, what if we did this, what if we thought about it this way, but really what I'm looking for is a reaction to the suggestion, not an execution of the suggestion.
[Ali] Yes. 100%. Did you see Hannibal? The show?
[DongWon] Not that much of it. Only the first few episodes.
[Ali] Okay. Well, in the first season, there's an episode where Hannibal commits a murder in the style of a murderer…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] To show Will Graham, like, what it isn't. Like, what is actually special about that. I think about that all the time. How I'm committing bad murders to show…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] How their murders… This other murderer to try to figure out that's actually like this.
[DongWon] If you take nothing else away from this episode, please remember that we are the Hannibal to your Will Graham.
[Ali] Yes. That's all I'm saying.
[Mary Robinette] That's beautiful, and I'm making notes about being alone in a room with both of you.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] But it is… I will say that, as an author, the thing for me is, is that suggestion, for me, it identifies that there is a problem that I need to address, and the suggestion is usually wildly wrong. But the problem is usually one that's present. So, when I don't understand why a suggestion has been made, I will go back to the editor and I will ask clarifying questions.
[Ali] Beautiful.
[DongWon] Yes. I think if there's anything you truly do take a away, not joking this time, is that if you don't understand what the editor is asking you to do, or if you don't feel it's right, just ask questions. Just start a conversation.
[Ali] Yes. Please.
[DongWon] Whether it's your agent, whether it's your editor, if you feel that you cannot go to them and have a conversation about what is going well and what's not going well, then there's something that needs to be tweaked about that relationship. Because it's your book at the end of the day, and you should feel empowered to make sure that your writing the book that you want to be writing. That means asking questions, advocating for yourself, advocating for your ideas. If there is something you really care about that they're really pushing back against, then that should be at least a conversation, if not an adjustment that everyone's working around what your goal is.
[Ali] Yeah. I remind myself all the time, it's your name on the cover. Right? Nobody else that you're working with, their name's going to be on the cover. So, that's your… It is your vision, it is your job to safeguard things and to also, like, keep your ears open and be really honest with yourself if something causes friction within you. But that discomfort might settle into a realization of an opportunity. Right? So, sometimes our initial reaction can be really intense, and we thank you for your 3 day waiting period before telling us.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Right. That too.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, I'm going to give writers a quick moment of perspective from some of my experience. And then a tool that's extremely valuable. The first is that, with my first series, I would hit things that my editor would say, and I'd be like, "No. This is very wrong, and I'm doing this for a reason, I'm going to keep it." I only did that a couple of times, but without exception… Without exception, my editor was right, there was a problem, and that is a thing that got [garbled] in reviews, that people would say… It would get brought up. So, my editor's suggestion on how to fix it was the thing that I was objecting to. I didn't recognize that at the time. But now, when I get a suggestion and I don't agree with it, I will ask for more clarification, but I will see if I can dig into it and find a way to do something that makes me happy that addresses whatever the problem is. The other piece of that is that sometimes the reason that you are having the no, this is a terrible idea, is just because you're tired. You're feeling a little bit defensive, because your baby… Someone has come in and told you that your baby is ugly. So if you hit 3 editor notes in a row that you think are stupid, walk away from the edit letter. Go take a walk. Go do something else, you're just tired and angry.
[Ali] I mean, clear your vent. Tell them how stupid we are. Get mad. Be… It's…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Ali] It's totally, absolutely appropriate and shows that you give a shit about your book if you're mad at… Like, suggestions that don't feel right immediately.
[DongWon] I would encourage you to do that in private.
[Ali] In private.
[DongWon] And not on Twitter or Blue Sky.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Ali] yes.
[DongWon] That is a thing that I don't recommend you do.
[Ali] Ideally in private. Rage in private. But then come back and then see what still feels bad. Or feels different.
 
[DongWon] One more thing I just want to point out that may be too obvious to bring up, but editors, agents, are people. Right? There individuals with strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, I know, we're…
[Questionable]
[DongWon] We're all just robots and… Yeah, very questionable. But have their own personality quirks, have their own modes of communication, have their own styles. Right? One thing that may be happening if you're feeling really frustrated is an editor might just have an abrasive style or a style that just doesn't vibe with you. Sometimes I will get an email from a client being like, "Hey, I got notes from this editor. Can you take a look at them and tell me what's happening here?" Sometimes the answer is, "Oh, they're missing XYZ," or sometimes I'm just like, "They just kind of talk like that, and that is rubbing you the wrong way." I've seen that both go in the too harsh and too nice directions. Right? I've seen both send up a flag for the writer. So much of this is matching personality, matching style, matching how we communicate, how we connect. Again, that alignment stuff I'm talking about, this is where it becomes really important. So, sometimes, if your editor has left or you didn't choose your editor or for whatever reason, you might be stuck with someone for a second that… And you need to find a way to work it out. But other times, it is a question of, like, make sure that you're working with someone you're excited to work with. Don't just be taking the first thing that's offered to you or the biggest number that was offered to you when you don't like the person. The connection with your team is so important to making sure that everyone is happy with the end result.
 
[Mary Robinette] So how do you get that alignment with… Between the writer and the editor on a project? Like, are there tools that are useful to make sure that everyone's actually on the same page?
[DongWon] I mean, I think it's asking questions. Right? We kind of keep coming back to the same things in certain ways, but it's that… The compliment section of the edit letter, not to sum up what's wrong, but talking about what's going right. Sometimes it's taste stuff, right, like sometimes even talking about other books, other movies, and things that you both like can be really useful, because then that gives you a shared language of, like, "Okay, we both love Hannibal. So our series [murder] like, we want it to feel more like Hannibal than we do like Scream." Right? So having that shorthand of vibes that you both are feeling can be really, really helpful to think about it.
[Ali] Yeah. Even on that… If you have that initial call with an editor who's interested in your book, you can ask mildly irrelevant questions. Obviously, nothing like to personal or inappropriate, right. Because that's probably not your business. But you can ask questions, because the more someone talks, the more they display their values and their interests and their thoughts, and, like, it's kind of just reaching out and touching someone else's mind for a little while and seeing if you like it.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Well, with that, let's segue to our homework as we try to touch the minds of our listeners.
[Ali] Yes, yes.
[Mary Robinette] Not creepy at all.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Not creepy at all.
[Ali] For my final style…
[DongWon] Exactly.
 
[DongWon] So, I have our homework this week. I would like you… Thinking about this alignment question, I would like you to take a work you haven't written, and come up with 3 questions you would ask the writer to help them clarify their intention in the text. Whether this is a project your beta reading for a friend, a short story, even like a movie that you've seen, take a piece, a story that you engaged with and really figure out what are the questions I would ask the creator of this to really help them understand better what it was that they were going for. Then, for bonus points, I want you to apply those questions to your own work in progress.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go edit.
 
[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations. Also, let us know. We'd love hearing from you 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

Aug. 16th, 2023 06:19 pm
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Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale
 
 
Key points: Schlock Mercenary, a daily webcomic from June 2000 to July 2020. Why a daily web comic? Because Howard imagined it as a newspaper comic. Buck Rogers and Bloom County! Big save the universe plots and characters that we love with their own arcs. How do you balance those? Like a bumblebee, keep flapping!  The guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. Worldbuilding, character work, and the punchline. An outline to hit the ending? If you find yourself diverging, you may need to redo the outline. The drumbeat of the daily strip versus the graphic novel format. Humor and context. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 33]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive Prep: The Schlock Mercenary Finale.
[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 on the spot for this episode. Also, I think, for the seven episodes that follow.
 
[Howard] We're going to talk about... We're going to talk about finishing big things. And building big things. And... Um... Oh, boy, Schlock Mercenary ran from June of 2000 to July of 2020. Daily webcomic. Wrapping it up was one of the most difficult and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I feel like a discussion of how I did it and why I did the things that I did could lead us into all sorts of interesting and wonderful places with regards to the things that we've worked on, the things that you might be working on, things we love, things that maybe weren't done so well. There's so much to cover, so much to cover when we talk about wrapping up big things.
[DongWon] Before we dive into the end, I'd love to rewind a little bit and talk about the beginning. So, I think to understand how you wrap this up, I would love to understand first, why did you make it a daily web comic? Like, what were the things that drew you to that format? And, like, what was… What did that… How did that wire your brain in a certain way to think about how to structure things when you're putting content out on such a regular cadence?
[Howard] The enormous power of the default. When I began writing Schlock Mercenary, I imagined it as a newspaper comic. I submitted it to a couple of syndicates and was told in both cases, "This is not what we're looking for." I don't blame them. I'm actually quite happy that it didn't get picked up. But I… Up until that point, I really only imagined a comic strip as being a daily thing in newspaper format. I mean, the default was so powerful that I literally didn't imagine other things. Why does Schlock Mercenary look the way it does? Because in 2000, Howard really didn't know very much about what was possible with the web.
[DongWon] I mean, you were starting in an era when I think a lot of web comics were like that. Right? They were all coming out of this model of newspaper strips. They all were very episodic, very serialized. Then, over time, I think we saw a lot of these like daily gag comics suddenly start to develop meta-plot and structure and like these huge events that sort of overtaking them. Was that something you knew that you wanted to do when you started Schlock or were you starting with more of a gag of the week structure? And then, suddenly realized, oh, there's plot here. There's story here. There's worldbuilding in a bigger, more complex way.
[Howard] My two biggest influences going in on this were a great big book of collected Buck Rogers comics I had from the… I want to say 1940s. It might have been the 1930s. Newspaper comics. Where it was definitely long form, and there was some Monday reminder of what we were doing Saturday, cliffhanger. There was some of that going on. But I got the feeling that back then the newspapers just assumed, no, everybody's onboard. They're just picking up this paper and Buck Rogers is what they're reading. We own this audience. It was very streamlined storytelling. And Bloom County. Which did gag of the day sorts of things, but they would string together themes. There was one where, during the Iran-Contra scandal, the Oliver North stand in was an alien puppy dog that was just big eyes and cute and he's there on trial and no one can prosecute, no one can come down on him, because he's a cute puppy, look at him. Look, oh, look at what his antenna do. So we got a week of those gags, and then we move on. I thought, "Well, I could tell a longform story that does this thematic sort of thing on a weekly basis, and plot arcs will probably last about a month." I was wrong. Plot arcs, I found, lasted about a year to a year and a half. It wasn't until about two years in that I realized I had sort of the makings of a mega arc. I did not know where it was going to go. But I knew where it was going to start. It was going to start with some of the injustices that were created by monopolies and by top-heavy power structures and whatever else. Because those are great things to make fun of, but the more I made fun of them, the more I thought, "Man. I want to topple these. What happens if I topple all of them at once?"
 
[Mary Robinette] At what point in the process did you know the end that you were writing towards?
[Howard] That wasn't until around book 10. That wasn't until around book 10.
[Mary Robinette] For the listeners who have not experienced it, how many books are there?
[Howard] 20. Yeah, right about the time… Right around book 10, I thought, "Yeah. I could finish this in five more books."
[Ha ha ha!]
[Howard] I could wrap this up in five more books.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Howard] And then I started noodling… I was just having so much fun with… I would
the thing and realize, "No, I haven't finished exploring this. There are more jokes to be told, there's more character development, there's… Oh. It's now been another 18 months. I'm on book 12 and I'm literally no closer to the conclusion I've envisioned than I was 18 months ago." But, yeah, right around book 10, I think it was book 3… The first book's called The Tub of Happiness. The second book, The Teraport Wars. Teraport wars is the one where we start seeing the grand Galactic whatever. Then, book 3 was Under New Management. Book 4, the Blackness Between was where I introduced dark matter as something that could have complex structures and life with desires that conflict with ours. Goals that bring us into conflict. Spoiler alert everyone. That's the piece right there which I think aired in 05, 06… That was the piece that ultimately needed to be resolved by book 20.
[Mary Robinette] Since you said the word spoiler, I do just want to let new listeners know that when we do these deep dives, that we go full spoiler. So we encourage you to read the material that has been linked to in the liner notes. Because later you're going to get all the spoilers.
[Howard] The good news is even if we spoil the big ending for you, there are so many beautiful moments… Yeah, I'm blowing my own horn here a little bit…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But as I read in preparation for this, I wrote this. Obviously, I know how it goes. I loved rereading it. I just had so much fun with the characters and with their individual plot resolutions. That was something that I learned fairly early on, which is, yeah, you can have a save the universe plot. But if we don't have characters that we love who have their own desires and their own plot arcs and their own disasters and their own recoveries from those disasters, the end of the universe doesn't really feel like it matters.
 
[Erin] You've mentioned a couple of elements, like the characters and all these things that go into it. How did you sort of decide in day-to-day when to devote time to the larger arc, when to devote time to an individual character moment or a great line? How did you balance that out over the course of one day going into the next?
[Howard] That. Feels. Like. The. That feels like the bumblebee and the laws of aerodynamics question. Because, very often I would stare at what was happening on the page and I would say I feel like I planned this. I feel like I did all of this on purpose. But I don't know how I'm doing it. Sandra is standing there next to me and saying, "Yeah. It's the bumblebee and the law of aerodynamics." Law of aerodynamics does not explain how a bumblebee flies. Bumblebee's job, keep flapping. So she would, right there, she said, "That's fine, honey. Keep flapping."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Since then, I have learned, one, the laws of turbulence in gases and liquids very nicely explain how a bumblebee stays aloft. It amounts to keep flapping. Two, I have become much more conversant with the sorts of tools I was unconsciously using. One of those tools was a prioritization of what is important… What is most important to have happen. For me, the most important, the guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. People have to be getting a reward for reading the strip today. So I would often begin with do I have a structure that is going to have a punchline at the end? There's a question that often gets asked, how do you know whose point of view to follow? The answer is I follow the character who is in the most pain. Because that's often going to be the most interesting. For me, it was, yeah, the character who's in the most pain is the most likely to be the one where there's going to be a good joke. But that's also… I'd rephrase the question. Who's going to be able to tell the best joke? We should pause for a thing of the week, and we'll come back in a moment.
 
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week, when we talk about very long-running series that have come to a conclusion, is a series of books by James S. A. Corey that is collectively known as The Expanse. Several of the books were adapted into a TV show as well. But the entire book series runs nine volumes, and wrapped up a couple years ago. It covers an enormous amount of territory, both in terms of story, character, and world. It starts very focused in our solar system, it's a big space opera. Then it continues to expand and grow in these leaps and starts that are endlessly fascinating and have endless complications with the characters. It jumps around in time as well as in space. I personally think that those two authors who cowrote the series stick the landing beautifully. It is worth going through the journey for all nine volumes that does a beautiful job of managing to balance the big ideas, the politics, and the individual character journeys. I adore these books. I'm very biased. I got the opportunity to work on the first couple of them. But watching where they ran with the thing from there all the way to the finish line was a thing of beauty, and I highly recommend everybody check out The Expanse books.
 
[Howard] I would like to return to the question Erin asked.
[DongWon] I have a thought on that actually.
[Howard] Oh. Go ahead.
[DongWon] If you don't mind me jumping in. It's more of a compliment than a thought, actually. One of the things that I thought that you do beautifully in this is really balancing three different toolkits you're using. I could see how you do that in a daily way. Right? I was reading these as a big block, not as a daily strip, but you have… The three tools I'm seeing in your kit here is, one, you have the world building, which gives you all this like big ideas stuff. Right? Whether that's dark matter being sent in, whether that's a civilization structured around this idea, whether it's like these digital heavens spaces that people get teleported into. You have all these high concepts that are sort of driving the metanarrative that's thematic. Then you have deep character work and relationship work that is driving the minute to minute plot of the story that keeps things flowing in such interesting ways and interesting dynamics and people are making choices rooted in who they are. But then you have the third tool in your kit, and this is what a lot of people don't have, which is, as you were talking about, the need for the punchline. So, on a daily basis, you have a structure of we need to get to that joke. So you're able to rely on the motivation of the joke, the guiding rails that you're on because of the character work you've done, and then the overall target, which is these huge intellectual world building structures. I think those three things operating in sync, almost in tension with each other a little bit, just… I can see it like laser targeting you towards that finale that you're getting towards. It was really fun to watch that unfold.
[Howard] Thank you. That's… It took me a long time to figure out that was kind of how I was doing it. One of the things I found out… And this is returning to Erin's question of how did you select which pieces you were working on. I realized that the way I had been creating individual strips and individual story arcs was not going to work for creating the ending. I needed to outline my way all the way to the very end with some big structures so that I could start aiming things. Otherwise I was going to ramble. I mean, the ramble was fun. We'll talk a little bit about in a future episode about that. But…
[DongWon] When did you realize you needed to do those outlines?
[Howard] Putting a year on it, that would have been 2015, 2016. I knew that I needed it and I wanted each of the last books to be about a year of comics. So it was…
[DongWon] So you're like two or three volumes before…
[Howard] Late 2017 is when I'd… When I was committed… When I actually started the last of the three books. That was… The way I structured it was I wanted to treat the ending as a trilogy. I want the first book of the trilogy to set up the final conflict and to bring all of the characters and put them in good… Get all the pieces on the chessboard and end us in a way… End that book in a way that feels triumphant but also propagates a disaster into the next book. That structure served me really well. If I'd tried to do it in five books, if I'd tried to do it in one book, I don't think I could have pulled it off.
 
[Erin] I feel like I hear people a lot coming to this realization, who are writing longer works, where they're like, "I started out, and I was just doing a thing. Then, outlines came upon me, and it turned out I needed them." I'm curious, how did that change… Did it change your process at all? Did it make it easier? Was there anything that was more difficult once you realized that you had to do that for the ending?
[Howard] For my own part, and I begin with that phrase because I don't want to force discovery writers into the same path that I was in. For my own fart…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Fart.
[That's it for… Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I mean, you were talking about the gaseous nature…
[Howard] For my own part, I felt very… It felt very precarious to me. I was very worried that by outlining these things, I was going to break a portion of my process and wasn't going to be able to follow through. Fortunately, I was, at the time, hanging out with some really strong writers of outline and fiction in short form and longform and whatever else. I count their friendship and their examples and their instruction is critical pieces of getting me passed the fear of the precarious and into the understanding of Howard, you've got the toolbox. You've figured out that it's turbulence that makes the bumblebee fly. Now flap that direction, and it's going to work.
[DongWon] How much did you stick to the outline?
[Howard] The bigger part… The biggest part of the outline, I stuck to it. Five nines as accuracy. I know this book will feature this cast, this book will feature that cast, last book will have people split up and they come back together. So, at that level, yeah, very, very accurately. At a lower level, there was a place in the second book where I realized I had diverged wildly from what I'd originally imagined, but I really loved where it was going. So I sat down and re-outlined things and was pleased by with what… Where that went.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've definitely done that too. I'm partway through a book and I'm like, "Oh. I'm going to do a different thing than I'd outlined." One of the things that I was struck by was the difference between the way it reads when you're reading it as a single strip versus the way you're reading it on… When you're reading it in graphic novel format. I wond… I've heard you talk a little bit about this in the past, about the way you think about it. I was wondering if you could unpack that for us now, the way you're thinking about…
[Howard] Sure. It's… The way I think about it is it was a horrible, horrible compromise. I worry still about people who read it in the longform. That's because the pacing of reading one strip a week… The pacing of panel panel panel punchline panel is very, very… It's like a drumbeat. When you read the whole thing as a graphic novel, it's the cognitive equivalent of just a constant pounding that I'll admit was not necessarily pleasant for me. But the pacing here is weird. I keep pausing for punchlines. Why am I doing that? Oh, because that's how this was constructed. That's just what it is.
[Mary Robinette] So what's interesting for me is I have a different experience. So when I read it… When I'm clicking through and read it strip, strip, strip, I get the beat, beat, punchline, beat, beat, punchline. But when I'm reading it as a full-page, as a graphic novel, the size of the jokes vary, and the other thing that happens is that I start to have… I start to carry context with me across the things. One of the things, like, that is so difficult about humor is that so much of it is contextually based. When you're writing something where you need to land a punchline, you've only got the context for those two or three previous panels. But when you're doing it longform, a lot of the… You're able to have a lot of the jokes that are landing for me bigger, because I'm carrying context through the whole thing, than when I'm doing it in an individual beat. For me, that was an instructive thing when I'm going back to my own stuff, which is in a completely different form that I can… To think about the way context is carrying across and having the jokes that are… Where the context only needs to be like one line before, but then also the ones where there's like a page off, that you've been setting up for pages and pages.
[Howard] Yeah. That was always difficult for me because, I knew, on any given day, the way the Schlock Mercenary website was built is when you arrive at the website, the most current strip is there. So I always wanted the most current strip to give you enough context that when you got to the last panel, there was a reward. Maybe you didn't need the whole joke, but you needed some of it. But if you went back and read more, then obviously there would be more.
[DongWon] Well, that's what I really love about using humor in this way, in the rhythm of that humor being at the end of every strip. Then you have the longer Sunday strips or whatever it is. But that rhythm… Because humor is fundamentally… Or not maybe fundamentally, but often about changing the context of information you have. Right? You're given information, the punchline is the abrupt recontextualization of the information you have to see it from another angle. Which, when you're trying to get your readers to absorb an enormous amount of complex worldbuilding it's such a useful tool. So the end of every four or five panels, I was getting not just the information that was given to me in a complex way, but then you would have an opportunity to tell me, "Here's the important thing you need to take away from this." It was like gathering the executive summary at the end of every strip in the form of a punchline, which really helped me absorb all the stuff that I was looking at. Because it's quite dense. Right? But it's... 20 volumes of complex military science fiction worldbuilding means there's a lot of information that you need to be having in your brain as context for why is this character making this choice, why is this civilization invading X, Y, Z. So the humor and that rhythm of the daily joke, I think, was an enormously beneficial tool for you in being able to deliver that in a way that if you had just done a straight graphic novel may have been incredibly dense, like Alan Moore style, like what am I looking at at this point? So I think that structure actually was… Ended up being a really beautiful tool in your kit
[Howard] Well, thank you. I… I'm admittedly self-conscious about it. The very first Schlock Mercenary book, Tub of Happiness, the only reason it got printed was that Sandra said, "Honey, people want to give us money for it. We can just put it in print." I'm like, "I can't even look at those strips and lay them out. They're so awful. I want to redraw them." She said, "Then don't look at them. I will lay out the book and we will sell it. Because I would like to eat." So there is a huge measure in my heart, there's this huge measure of it is what it is. Compromises were made. Which of the words between Schlock and Mercenary says that I won't sell out my art in order to feed my family?
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Howard, if you didn't grow between volume 1 and volume 20, I think I'd be more concerned than you looking back at volume 1 and being concerned.
[Howard] Yeah. But, yeah, I love the perspectives that y'all are bringing to how you're reading it. One of the things that we're going to cover in a later episode is writing endings and how, from about book 10, I was laying the groundwork for what I knew was going to be the resolution to the conflict. I kept that piece. But I ended up being wrong about what the real satisfying piece of the resolution was. That, to me, feels like a great place to end the episode.
[Mary Robinette] Maybe we should actually do homework before we end.
 
[Howard] You know what? Let's do some homework about ending things. You may have seen on YouTube there's a little series called How It Should Have Ended. Where they take a movie and then they give you an ending that actually makes more sense. The one that leaps to mind immediately is using the eagles to fly the ring to Mordor. Take a thing that you love. Something that you've really enjoyed. Try to write a new ending for it. Something maybe that makes more sense to you, or that maybe it fits your head canon better, or you would just be happier with. But outline a new ending for somebody else's thing that you love.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

Aug. 20th, 2020 10:43 am
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Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul
 
 
Key Points: How do you make the second act interesting? When you're stuck, make something happen. Also, admit that it is going to be rewritten. Think about the second act as the fun part, where trailer scenes come from. Play with things, build fun scenes. Connect the dots! Know what you have to do, and find the most exciting ways to do it. Treat your chapters and scenes like episodes, with plenty of escalating miniature arcs. Act one, introduce things, Act three, blow them up. Act two, make trailer moments, show us a new context. Fill the second act with try-fail cycles. Foreshadowing moments, little lessons and pieces of information building towards the resolution. Use the inherent tension of how. Make the problem larger, involve more characters, expand the scope. Try-fail cycles can give the reader some awesome, too! It's not just a hamster wheel, more of a winding path towards the climax. Character change. Don't worry too much about this during writing, but use it for outlining, revision, and when you get stuck. Get your Muppet chest buster.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 33.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] Howard named this episode, if you couldn't tell.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Second acts. Let's talk about second acts. We got a lot of questions about how to make middles of your story interesting. One question is, "I'm pantsing my SF book and started with a vague wouldn't it be a cool idea to begin with and went from there. I quite like how the character's progressing, but I'm basically stuck in the second act."
[Howard] The best advice that I've got for pantsers. It's in two parts. The first part is, when you are stuck like this, make something happen. Blow something up, burn something down, a couple of people get in a fight, just make something happen. The second is admit to yourself that this is going to need to be rewritten. That you may need to chop off the front, you may need to rewrite the ending, you may need to prune bits out of the middle. But, for me, when I pantsed, getting unstuck was way more important than sitting down and outlining the end. On several occasions, that exercise of getting unstuck… I'm going to make something really exciting happened… Reinvigorated me and I realized, "Oh. Oh, that's right. Oh, that's what I wanted to do." And off I go. The thing, in about half the cases, didn't end up exploding. It did something else.
[Dan] So, one of the things that made me change the way I think about second acts was I was reading a screenwriting book. It was talking about the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. In talking about the second act, it said, "This is the fun part where most of the scenes in the trailer come from." I thought I've never thought of it that way. This is the part where the characters have entered a new situation or they've gained some new powers, they're doing something new and they're playing with all of those new things. So now I try to put that into my second acts, and say, this isn't just the part you slog through to get to the end. This is where you get to play with all your fun toys and build the fun scenes that are going to end up in the trailer.
[Victoria] I mean, the hard part is, right… The first act, you get to introduce all your toys. The third act, you get to make them blow up. You get to put them where they're going to land. In the second act, somehow, you have to get between those two points. I mean, I fully admit, I am not a pantser. But, even before my extreme outlining days, where I am now like finding so much joy in execution, I would try and give myself what I used to call the connect-the-dots theory. Which I would try and make between 3 to 6 points in my story. Even if I didn't know where the story was going or how I was going to get between those two points, even having three meant that I had something I was moving towards. I could say, "Okay, here I am in the story, and I have this one spot, one thing I know I want to have happen before the end, and I am moving toward it. What's something that could happen between here and there?" And I figure out another dot. Now I've got half the distance between. I go, "What's something that could happen?" You're essentially playing a choose your own adventure game. I had a friend who used to say, "How do you make it worse?" Basically, like, she wrote a zombie novel, and the zombies chased these two kids up the tree. There up the tree and it seems like it's pretty bad. The question is how do you make it worse. She set the tree on fire. Right? Like, it's that moment. Sometimes it's just finding ways to play, but I do think this is the hard part. It can't just be play, because you also need to progress the story. Nothing is more frustrating than when you get to a really interesting book that has an amazing first act, you get to the second act, and all of a sudden, they're in the fire swamp, right? They're just like wandering through it, without any real purpose except to kill time.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] And maybe gain assets and like toys and things that they're going to need to fight the final battles.
[Dan] So, let's look at Star Wars. I'm old enough that when I say Star Wars, I mean Episode IV. Okay? Act Two Is the Death Star. The things that have to happen narratively are we need to rescue the princess and we need to lose our mentor. Both of those are opportunities for big set pieces. We lose the mentor, and it's not just well, we're going to… They die in the fire swamp. It's a lightsaber battle. That's the only lightsaber battle we get in that movie. Rescuing the princess… There's this whole gun chase, and then they get thrown into a pit with a monster that tries to eat them, and then they drown and all these things. So, knowing what you have to do, and then finding the most exciting way of accomplishing that is kind of what the second act is for.
 
[Brandon] I think readers/viewers are really sensitive to the second act thing, without knowing it.
[Victoria] Yeah.
[Brandon] This is one of these things that, just by consuming media, you pick up on. I've noticed that a lot of the movies that people love and the sequels that people love are all ones that are surprisingly good in the second act. Right? Star Wars is a great example. But even when people say, what are the best sequels of all time? It's always the second movie that you expect to be bad because the first one was good, and we've been trained that the middle's the weakest. Yet, the best Star Wars movie, a lot of people say it's the second one. The best Godfather movie, The second one. The best Toy Story's movie is the second one. I think this is partially because people are expecting it to be bad, and it's good. Those expectations are then subverted. If you can do a good second act in your story, I think that that will just make the readers unconsciously say, "Wow, this is fantastic. I don't expect this to be the most exciting part, and it is."
[Victoria] I mean, this is one of the reasons we discussed in a previous episode that I was on where we disc… I discussed treating my chapters and scenes like episodes. I think it's in part to help me avoid the lull of the second act by creating miniature arcs within the story that bring their own satisfaction, and then stitch together into something. To me, a part of it, and we can talk about this more later, is I pretend there is no second act. I don't break it into three. I find that very, very stressful. I work forward from the beginning and backwards from the end, and I populate it with escalating arcs, because I think we put so much pressure on the second act that it becomes a place of dread. The middle of a book is already a place of dread because it's when you're most likely to quit writing it. It's when the shiny new idea sweeps in, it's when you're full of distraction, and you're beginning to get bored because everything's becoming familiar and you have to begin delivering on promises that you made in the first act. It's a very treacherous place to be. So I do think maybe also like take some of the pressure away of thinking of it as the 2A and 2B, of thinking of it as this central part of your narrative which has to hold the whole roof up. Start to look at those exciting episodes like in Star Wars where there are things that need to be accomplished and there's a very exciting way to do those things.
 
[Howard] Something you said earlier, Victoria, about the first act is where we're introducing all the things, and that's fine and that shiny. The last act is where we're blowing them up, or there blowing each other up. For me, if I don't break things into three acts, I will continue to introduce things through Act Two, and that breaks the story. Because it just… It bloats in bad ways. So it's useful for me to think about it as if we're describing the items in a room during Act One. Act Two, we change the lighting in the room, and now everything looks different. It's the same thing, we're just now seeing them all in a different light and were tripping over them. It's now whatever. Then, Act Three, the house is on fire. I don't know. It's a dumb metaphor.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The idea here is that the point at which you stop introducing things structurally kind of defines the second act. So that's a point for you to create these trailer moments, like Dan was saying.
[Victoria] Yeah.
[Howard] By changing the lighting, by changing the environment, by changing the context. That'll make it a lot more exciting, I think, than just a fire swamp.
[Dan] One of the reasons I think people get intimidated by Act II is because Act I sets stuff up, Act 3 resolves it. What do I do… I'm treading water for half my book. So one of the things that I try to do is make sure the second act is filled with try-fail cycles. It's not that my characters know they have to wait to a certain point before they can end the story. They spend all of second act trying to end the story.
[Brandon] It should always be upping the stakes and escalating. Your sense of progress for that middle is that things are getting worse or the stakes are getting bigger and bigger.
[Victoria] I think of… So, obviously, we referenced the fire swamp. The Princess bride is one of my favorite examples of an archetypal narrative that follows this very, very well. You meet your players by the end of Act One, then spend Act Two with Wesley and the Princess trying to flee, being continuously failed, being abductive, being separated, trying to reassemble. We reassemble the teams by the end of Act Two, and then in Act Three, we have the fight in the war and the conclusion. It's a beautifully simple story. But it's a very satisfying story across all three acts. It starts… One of the other things that Act Two gets to do is introduce the foreshadowing moments, the little lessons and pieces of information that we're going to need in that resolution. So in a… I always say it's like it's getting all of your weapons together, it's gathering all of your forces. These are beautiful moments in Act Two, through that try-fail cycle, to achieve the motifs and the little things which are going to come back around in Act Three.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You actually, Dan, have a book you were talking about how great the second act is.
[Dan] Yeah. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which I talked about a while ago. Tiffany Aching is my favorite Terry Pratchett series by a mile. Wintersmith is an interesting one to bring up in a structural episode, because it has a very weird structure. But its second act is its strongest one by far. Its second act is basically Tiffany Aching is apprenticed to an older witch named Miss Treason. Miss Treason is very weird and she's very dark and she's very spooky. It's very slice of life-y. We know from the prologue that there's going to be this big evil problem with the Wintersmith. The third act, we deal with the Wintersmith. In the middle, it's just Tiffany learning how to be a witch. She will go through kind of the daily life and she will learn various lessons. It's so powerfully done because it is framed with her arriving there and it ends with Miss Treason… Spoiler warning… She dies. We get her funeral. We know she dies chapters before she does, because she's a witch, so she knows everything. But the way that it is built, I think really is a fantastic example of how to do a powerful second act.
 
[Brandon] So, let me ask about this. Along those second act ideas. I feel like it can get frustrating for a reader in that second act because it feels like you're going nowhere, as we've mentioned, but also the heroes, the protagonists, are often failing over and over again. How do you keep a sense of momentum when you're failing over and over again? The reader knows, in the back of their head, because they have the page count, that they can't succeed here. So, how do you work with that as authors?
[Victoria] I like to break it up. I like to break up the literal team. I often write ensemble casts. That's one of my favorite times, where they get separated and they're finding their way not only toward the goal but back towards each other. I like to put them in peril. I like it because you know, with so much of the book left, that they're going to find a way through that, that there's going to be things that happen. Then, the question becomes how. I think that there is an inherent tension in the how of something, in the understanding that there's a lot of book left, what feels like it might be a climactic moment is almost like a tease. Then it becomes a lot like, "How are they going to pull this off? How are they going to achieve this goal?" I think we can sometimes underestimate the inherent tension of how.
[Dan] One of… So the book and movie Crazy Rich Asians does something very cool in its second act. I think one of the ways to do what you're talking about is to expand the scope, use the second act to expand the scope of what we're looking. The problem itself gets larger or it starts to involve more characters. Crazy Rich Asians does this with the cousin Astrid. A lot of the plot focuses around the main character trying to fit in better with the very Asian sensibilities of the fiancé's family. She doesn't have any allies. So, second act throws Astrid at her, the cousin who A) becomes a powerful ally, but B) is rejecting a lot of the very Asian attitudes. Becomes much more independent and much more Western in the way that she views her own family. So it's exploring the same themes from a different direction and including more characters, but all in a way that eventually is going to give the main character the tools she needs in the third act.
[Howard] I think that the try-fail cycle model, Dan, that… Or… Yeah, Dan, it was you that had described the try-fail cycle, coupled with the idea of scenes from the trailers. Yes, the viewer… I remember my son, we were watching a movie and I asked him… I just turned to him and said, "You think their plan's going to work?" He was 10. He says, "If their plan works, we don't have a whole movie."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I was so proud. I was so proud. I wept in that moment. It had nothing to do with the film. But the reader knows that the plan isn't going to succeed, because they can tell how far through the book we are. They can tell through the page count. So, the try-fail cycle has to give us… Has to give us one of these trailer moments. Has to give us some awesome. We should come out of it not with a sense of, "Oh, that didn't work," but with a sense of, "Hah! That went terribly, but now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho."
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] Then we're cheering during the second act.
[Brandon] Well, I always also like the structure that in the second act, you try something, you succeed, and then you realize…
[Howard] You've made it worse.
[Brandon] You've made it worse. This happens in the story structure… What is it, the seven points, the nine points?
[Dan] Seven point.
[Brandon] The seven point, that Dan really likes. When I was reading about that once, there's this broadening of goals during the second act, where you realize the thing that you wanted, even if you achieve it, is not the thing you wanted all along. Suddenly, you realize, "Oh, by achieving this thing, we are in much bigger trouble." To reference Diehard again, "Oh, the FBI's here, everything's okay. Oh, crap, that was part of the plan." Those sorts of moments are really great.
[Victoria] Yeah. I agree. I think that it's also… When we talk about try-fail cycle, I think there's an erroneous visual that happens, of like a hamster wheel. That's not what it is at all, because when you get forward and you realize something's wrong, and when you fall backwards, you gain some advantage. There's always something happening, which is giving you kind of a winding path towards your climax.
[Dan] Well, I'm glad that you brought up the kind of the character change that can happen in the second act. Because sometimes that is I'm about to get what I want and realize that'll make everything worse. But just as often, it can be… The second act is where they change their attitude. They realize the goal they been pursuing is actually bad, and they decide to pursue a different one. That is going to change the focus of the rest of the story.
[Victoria] Can I say one last thing before we run out of time? I also just… I'm going to be the devil's advocate here of I don't think about these things when I'm writing.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Like we're articulating things in a way that I do not sit down and think, "Oh, I'm here in the second act, I better think about the way that my character is going to evolve." I think part of that is like, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, there is an intuitive level here. I think it can be really overwhelming when it becomes a codified level. Like, yes, these are things which you should be able to analyze, perhaps in the revision cycle or if you get stuck, but I think it's also okay if you're operating on a draft level in an intuitive way, and you don't feel like you're stopping and checking your map for these kinds of things every step.
[Brandon] That's really great to bring up. It can't be reinforced too much. The idea that a lot of what we do, we're doing by instinct. The more I've written, the more I am conscious of these things during outlining and revision. I still, when I'm actually writing, am not focused on this nearly as much as it might sound that we are. But when I wrote my early books, I wasn't focused on it at all. I was just learning how to write a story. Some of those books got published, and people loved them. Even though I wasn't as conscious about it. It's talking about it, it's teaching it really that forces you to analyze these things and look at what you're doing.
[Victoria] I just refer to it as developing an internal story monster, which is like a tiny Jim Henson-esque monster that lives in your chest and feeds on narrative. The more that you watch and the more that you read and the more that you write, the more you teach that internal demon figure what works and what doesn't, and the more…
[Howard] You've given me a Muppet chest buster.
[Victoria] Exactly. Exactly.
[Howard] Thank you. Thank you for that visual. Thank you.
 
[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Howard, you have some homework for us.
[Howard] I do. I just turn the page from it, which was a very silly… Ah, there it is. Pick your favorite book or movie, or favorite entertainment of whatever kind. Identify where the second act begins, where the second act ends. Then, with a notebook in hand, make a list of the things that you love about that second act. Now, if your favorite thing, the second act is your least favorite part about it, make a list of the things that allowed you to muscle through the second part in order to get to the ending that you love. But, this is homework that involves writing. Because you're going to take that list of the things that you love, and you're going to try to map that onto the second acts where you are stuck.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.24: Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher

Jun. 17th, 2020 11:15 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.24: Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher
 
 
Key points: How do you keep a series fresh? Do you reinvent the story? Try to write a story that is just a little bit more than you think you can do. Force yourself to stretch. Do you focus on specific things to improve in each book, or do you tackle different styles of stories? Some of it is different styles, but the basic skeleton of each story is the same. How do you write ongoing stories about a changing character, without losing what people love about them? Start with what is going to change in this book, and work backwards from that. Craft is fundamental. How do you use different genres to keep your career fresh? Different genres offer different opportunities. It's fun to try different characters, different arrangements, different stories. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 24.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher.
[Howard] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Jim Butcher.
[Yay! Applause]
[Jim] Hello.
[Brandon] Jim Butcher, many many time best-selling author of many many awesome books. We are super happy to have you on the podcast, Jim.
[Jim] Thank you very much.
[Howard] We're recording here live at NASFIC Spikecon in Layton, Utah.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Howard] So that was the audience noise that you heard. Thank you, live audience.
[Applause]
 
[Brandon] All right. So, keeping it fresh.
[Dan] I love that this sounds like an after school special from the 80s about rapping. [wrapping?]
[Brandon] Yep.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Yep. Well, it would probably be an after school special about something important that would have rapping in it incidentally.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] Done by people who look like us.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Jim, we decided to talk about this because you have one of the longest-running series in science fiction and fantasy going right now. Some of the latest books and last books in the series are some of the best. So I consider you an expert at keeping a series fresh. It's something that's very kind of near to my heart because I am writing book 4 of a very big series right now.
[Jim] Of course.
[Brandon] That's kind of in my head. So I guess my first question to you is how do you keep the Dresden Files so fresh? How do you keep reinventing the story?
[Jim] To me, I don't think I'm reinventing… It doesn't seem to me that I'm reinventing anything. When I do a Dresden Files story… I kind of had the general shape of the whole thing in mind when I got started. So, I mean, I got to plan it all out. So I would know, well, okay, this is this. This is what's going to happen in this part of the story. This is going to be the book about necromancers. This is going to be the one about… This is going to be the personal one where he gets an apprentice, and stuff like that. So, I mean, I had the plan going from the get go. So, in a lot of ways, it doesn't seem like it's particularly fresh to me. I think the real thing that keeps the books being interesting and involving and longer and longer is that I keep trying to write the story that I'm not sure I'm skilled enough to write. When I plan the story, any time when I sit down and I get set to, where I'm here's how I'm going to do the dramatic action, here's how I'm going to do the personal tensions, and stuff like that, I always try and plan the story just a little bit more than I think I can readily do. So that when I'm going forward, I'm never sure I'm going to be able to get the story done the way I wanted to do. As a result, I think that makes you keep growing as a writer.
[Brandon] Forcing yourself to stretch.
[Jim] Sure. Sure. You keep trying to reach a little bit further than you've done before. As long as you can do that, you can keep improving. I think that's kind of the meta-strategy that sort of has the side effect of making the series more fresh and interesting as you go along.
[Howard] It's the self-contained version of the yes I can principle.
[You suffer like that, yeah]
[Howard] Mr. Taylor, can you draw an entire Munchkin deck in a month? Yes I can!
[Jim] Right, right.
[Howard] I'm going to have to figure out how to do that. I stretched from it, and I'm super glad I took on the project. But the correct answer was I don't think so, but I want to.
[Chuckles]
[Jim] Right. Yeah. Something like that.
 
[Brandon] Do you ever take a book… I ask this, because it's something that I do… And say, "You know, in this specific book, I'm going to work on this one thing. This is something that I don't know, that I want to learn to do better." Like, I'm going to work on my humor in this book. Or I'm going to work on my interpersonal relationships or things. Do you take it that specifically, or is it more just here's a style of story I've never done before?
[Jim] A lot of it is here's a style of story that I've never done before, because I'll change it around. But, on the other hand, the Dresden Files, I mean, the basic skeleton of every story is the same. Somebody's up to something, Harry Dresden starts poking around in it, and then things go crazy. I mean, that's how you write it. But as far as the… As far as focusing specifically on areas of my writing, not so much. I mean, I just sort of figure that as long as I'm trying to cover the entire range of human experience, or at least as much of it as I can within the books that have purple haired fairies and stuff like that. That as long as I'm trying to include all that experience, it's going to force me to grow in other ways and in ways I wasn't expecting. So I'll be writing along, and occasionally I write a scene and I'm like, "Man, the humor was really good in that scene. What did I do?" I'll have to stop and go back and think about this as I was producing it, how did I get that result. Other times, I'll just write a long, going, "Wow, I did not expect this to be this soul crushingly intense emotional scene." But it worked out there. Then I have to stop and figure out, "Well, why did it work out there?" Occasionally, I can't explain it. I do a lot of writing by instinct. Once I get going and I'm actually doing it, I'll trust my instincts pretty firmly. If they start taking me in a direction, it's like, "Yeah, I'll go that way. Let's see what happens." I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that you write something that wasn't quite right, and you delete it, and you do it again.
 
[Brandon] Dan, you kind of had… Not kind of, you had to do this with the John Cleaver books, right?
[Dan] Yeah. Six books in that series.
[Brandon] How did you keep those fresh? The second third from the first third, or how were you looking at each book and trying to do something different?
[Dan] The big problem for me that I kept tackling with each new book and with each new trilogy was this is an ongoing story about a character changing. How can I show that he is different than he was, while still being recognizably the same person that everyone loves from… If you read the first book, you love the character for certain reasons. I need to advance him, but I can't throw away all the things that people love about that. So, I kind of focused on character arcs. What is he going… How is he going to change in this one? What is going to be different at the end of this book than at the start? Then, kind of work backwards from there. I'm curious to know, I wanted to ask about Harry Dresden with the same thing. How do you… Because he does change, he does grow. But he is always intrinsically himself. Do you think about that consciously, or does that just come very natural to you?
[Jim] For the most part, it comes naturally. There's some things where I'll stop and look at and I'll go, "Now wait a minute." If I've just had Dresden take some given action and I'll think, "Well, that's not necessarily in character for him. So why is he doing something different?" A lot of times, I'll be writing along and the beta readers… The way I operate is I'll write a chapter and then the chapter goes off to my beta readers while I'm working on the next one. Then I start getting feedback from them, to hear about what they thought about the previous chapter. A lot of times, I'll come across something, the beta readers will be like, "This is really out of character for that character." They'll list specific reasons why. I mean, I've got beta readers who'll be like, "Well, in this book on this page in this paragraph…"
[Chuckles]
[Jim] Then I've gotta go, "Okay. They're right. That is out of character for what I've established." So why… Do I need to change it or do I need to explain why it's different? Depending on how much room is left in the book… I love exploring why is it different. Have Dresden show up later and talk to that character and be like, "What's up?" Try and find out what's going on in their life and so on. Characters change as they go along. But at the same time, the core stuff… I don't know, I think holding onto the core character is as much about craft as it is about psychology. By the time you're… By the time you've gotten your language established of which language it's used for which character, whether you're talking about tags and traits, or just their personal dialogue. By the time you've done that, it establishes a very very firm picture in the reader's mind if you keep it consistent. The longer you go, the more firm that picture is. So in that sense, the long series is really on my side. It's much easier to manipulate you guys when you let me do it for a long time.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I want to take a moment and call our listeners attention to a couple of things you just said. On the one hand, you said, "Oh, I do a lot of this by instinct." Which feels very pantsy, very discovery writery. But what you just said about craft, when you talk about the craft of the dialogue, of a character's language… We've done probably a dozen or more episodes where we've drilled down on that. How with one line of dialogue, the reader should be able to tell which character is speaking, without any other tags. How do you make that happen? What I want to illustrate here, just by calling this out, is that when you say instinct, I think part of what you mean is that you know that craft enough that you've stopped needing to think about it when you're writing Dresden's dialogue. It is just there.
[Jim] Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, yeah. That's the whole point of craft. The whole point of craft is the wood worker at his bench who knows his tools so well he doesn't need to think about using them, he doesn't need to think about how they're going to be employed or even where they are. He just reaches out and picks up his T-square and goes to work. That's the foundation of what you've got to be if you want to be a professional writer. You've got to have your craft down well enough that your brain is free to do these other things. Like, to be able to suggest to you, hey, maybe this character needs to have this sort of revelatory scene right here, so that we know more about who they are. Then, when you go back later, once you're going back and you're brushing up the stuff after you've gotten it written, then you can go back later and go, "Well, you know what, I really need to establish this character a little bit better, more firmly, if he's going to have that big a role late in the book. I need to have him hit harder early on." Stuff like that. Which is why I've got to do that right now. I got Marcone doing big stuff at the end of this story, but his introduction is a little bit soft. Even though he's got a much larger presence in the overall series, there's going to be some people that pick up this book and it'll be the first book they've read in the series. So that means, just from… Purely from the craft standpoint, I got to go back and make sure he's got a good entrance that is going to be commensurate with his role in the story.
[Howard] He's gotta be in the establishing shot…
[Jim] Yeah.
[Howard] And he's gotta be front and center.
[Jim] Exactly. He's gotta be there. So that's one of the things I'm working on. That I've got all that to do before the manuscript goes off to the editor, but… But, yeah, the craft is indispensable. I can't think of anything… I mean, when I first started learning about writing craft, I hated the whole idea. I hated the entire concept. My teachers told me so many things that I just didn't like, and I sat there, all huffy about it. Because my teacher would say things like, "The business of writing is the business of manipulating people's emotions." It's like, "That sounds awful." But she's right.
[Chuckles]
[Jim] When you're a writer and you can write characters and you can make people laugh when you want them to laugh and you can make them cry when you want them to cry and support who you want them to support and hate who you want them to hate, that's a good story. That's the story everybody wants to read. Oh, I hate this guy. What's he doing next?
[Laughter]
[Jim] That's… To do that, that's the entire point of writing craft. That is why it exists, to help me manipulate your emotions.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and do a promo, and talk about our book of the week, which is The Aeronaut's Windlass.
[Jim] Okay.
[Brandon] Can you tell us a little bit about it?
[Jim] The Aeronaut's Windlass is a steam punk series. I told my editor I wanted to make it a… I wanted the genre name on it to be steam opera. She's like, "Well, you can't make up your own genres." I'm like, "Watch me!"
[Laughter]
[Jim] But essentially, it's a story that's set in a world that's very hostile to human life. So humanity exists inside these enormous towers called spires. The only way the spires are connected is by airships. So all trade, all military stuff, all travel, it all happens by airships because the surface is just… It's a green hell, and you don't want to go there, so we'll be there next book.
[Laughter]
[Jim] But… So, it's a really… It's a fun series, because you've got all these spires, so you've got all these human cultures that are evolving entirely separate from one another, so you can get in… You can get just all kinds of crazy nonsense, which is so much fun. I mean, it's… In a way, I'm just riffing off the Odyssey here, going from island to island, adventure to adventure. But that's what we're doing in the Cinder Spires. So the characters are… There's an air ship captain, there's a privateer so we've got a pirate, and there's an heir of one of the wealthier and more influential houses, so we've got a princess. There's a girl who can talk to cats, so… That's her big thing is she talks to cats. The cats are smart. The cats can… The cats understand, I mean, they understand humans, except when they don't want to.
[Chuckles]
[Jim] I mean…
[Howard] So, cats.
[Jim] Cats, yeah. So then we've got a cat who's a prince of his people and he's just such a jerk and everybody loves him. I don't get that. But [garbled]
[Howard] What's the series? What's the series name?
[Jim] The series is the Cinder Spires.
[Howard] The Cinder Spires.
[Jim] The spires are all made of these giant… This ancient black stone that is all but indestructible and nobody knows where it came from.
[Howard] And the genre is steam opera.
[Jim] Steam H-opera. Yeah.
[Brandon] I've read the first book and it was one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had in a while. They're just… It's a wonderful book. So you guys should all read it.
[Jim] Yes, you should. Everyone.
[Laughter, applause]
 
[Brandon] We went really long on the front of the podcast, so we are almost out of time. But I do want to touch on one other concept, which will tie into this idea of what we just talked about. You are mostly known for writing urban fantasy, even though I know that that's not where you started in your pre-writing career, your prepublication career. You've since published your epic fantasy, and you've now got steam opera.
[Jim] Right.
[Brandon] Like, how do you approach different genres in keeping your own career fresh?
[Jim] Going to the different genres is a lot of fun, because, I mean, really, you get to play with different toys, and you get to arrange them very differently, and you get to tell slightly different stories based on which… What is strong in the various genres. I just took out… I've got like half of my first science fiction done, that's been done. I did that like 10 years ago. I stopped writing that book with my poor science-fiction character… He had just ejected from his ship whose core was about to explode in a decaying orbit over the moon with a solar flare coming on. He's been there for like 10 years.
[Laughter]
[Jim] I'll have to get back to that one someday. That was sort of Men in Black meets X-Men on the moon. So that was a lot of fun, too. But, yeah, when you get to go to the different genres and you get to make the different characters and you get to build the wild new stuff that you… It's like, wow, I really wish I could do this in the Dresden Files, but really, laser beams are not really a thing there. Laser pistols are not really a thing there. Oooh, but in science fiction, I can totally do this. But the different genres, they just offer you different opportunities. I mean, at the end of the day, you're still working with humans, and humans are always the same thing. I mean, it doesn't matter at what point in history you go to, human nature remains the same. So… It's just fun to take humans and plop them into weird situations and see how they react. That… just erase this part, okay. I'm starting to sound like a psychopath at this point.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I know, drop people in, poke them with a stick, see what happens.
[Jim] Sure, sure.
[Brandon] That's storytelling, right there.
[Jim] Sticks. Yes.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience, Spikecon.
[Applause]
[Brandon] I want to thank Jim for being on the podcast. Do you by chance have a writing prompt you can throw at our audience?
[Jim] A writing prompt?
[Brandon] Yes.
[Jim] Let me think here. [Pause] Yeah. Something we didn't know was intelligent has been intelligent all along. Go.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Dan] Nice.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.48: Character Death and Plot Armor

Dec. 5th, 2018 10:56 am
mbarker: (MantisYes)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.48: Character Death and Plot Armor
 
 
Key points: When and why do you kill off characters? First, ask yourself what is the worst thing that could happen to your character. It may not be death. Character death should be the best move for the story, not just an easy way to make the reader feel loss. What are the consequences of the death? Do writers look at character death differently than readers and fans? Everybody hates it when you can predict a character's death. Make them care, but don't telegraph a death. "Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact." A death, like any event in a story, should be surprising yet inevitable. Set up a longer arc for the character, follow through on consequences, and make it pay off. Beware of fridging! Killing a character as inciting incident, as backstory… Make sure the dead character has a purpose beyond simply acting as motivation for the protagonist. When do you decide to give a character plot armor, because they are too important to the story to die? Consider ablative plot armor!
 
[Mary] Season 13, Episode 48.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Plot Armor and Character Death.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] [squeal]
[Dan] I'm okay. Don't worry.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] Well. That line… I'm okay. To kill off this season of Writing Excuses, we're going to be talking about character death. So. First question. When do you kill off characters and why?
[Mary] Chapter 6. No.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I've come back to…
[Oh, he's serious…]
[Howard] Any time I'm thinking about killing a character or threatening the reader with that as an option, I always come back to what I think Pat Rothfuss said on one of our casts years ago, which was there are so many things that are worse than death that can happen to your characters. I ask myself that question first, because I want to know that I am choosing character death because it is the best failure mode or the best success mode that this particular story can have. I can't just default to it, because I think that's the only way to move the story forward or to make the reader feel loss.
[Mary] I look at the consequences of the death, for exactly the same reason. Because the death itself, sad that that character's dead and all, but people who survive, those are the ones that I'm going to be traveling with. The consequences of that death on the plot, that… If it's just, "Oh, and then everybody's going to be really sad…" That's not a consequence. I mean, yes, that is a consequence, but that's not a unique consequence that's going to drive things, usually.
 
[Brandon] Let me ask you a follow-up on that, because it prompts something in my thoughts. Do you think we look at this differently because we're writers than readers and fans do?
[Mary] I started doing this because deaths in books as a reader annoyed me so much. It wasn't a structural thing. Because I didn't know why they annoyed me. I just… I hate reading things where I'm like, "Oh, that character's going to die." Or where they die…
[Howard] I hate reading things right can do that…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Where I can say, "Oh, they're dead."
[Dan] Where you can tell.
[Mary] I hated it when characters would die and I didn't feel anything. Because I just didn't care.
[Brandon] I would say that annoys me a lot in cinema. They do that sometimes.
[Dan] My brother and I came up with the phrase, "That character wants to live in Wyoming." Which comes straight from Hunt for Red October, where there is the one Russian officer who's like, "I would like to live in Wyoming." He's gone. You know he's dead as soon as he says that.
[Howard] Was that Sam Neill? Was that Sam Neill's character?
[Dan] Yeah. So as soon as somebody starts talking about how they're going to retire soon or they're going to go to this place, all their plans for the future… They want to live in Wyoming. It's hard, because the space that you're aiming for is in between those. You don't want to telegraph it, but you also want to make them care. Those were the two problems that you had. Finding that middle ground… This is a character I love and don't see their death coming. That's what I shoot for, basically, with most of my characters.
[Howard] But I don't want that death to feel like a cheap shot. This is one of the places where the argument for narrative-driven fiction versus fiction that feels real is often centered around that. Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact. That's probably not how I'm going to go. That's probably not how any of us are going to go. But when you look at deaths in stories, we always have… Always is the wrong word. But we very often have the narrative is shaped around that death. When it isn't, often I'm annoyed. When it is, sometimes I feel like it was too convenient. There's no pleasing me. Just stop killing your characters.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] See, I asked this question as a writer just because the thing that it prompted in my mind is how I will have people come through my line, and just really be torn up by a character death. Which, for me, this is kind of maybe seeing in my brain, I'm like, "But that was a really good death." Right? I'm like, "Why are you torn up about that?" It was… They fulfill their character arc, it came to a good conclusion, it… They sacrificed for something they believed in. This was a really good death."
[Howard] I respond… in that exact situation, my response has nothing to do with my work and everything to do with the person at the table in front of me. The person at the table in front of me is grieving, and what they need me to do is grieve with them. My response is, "I loved that character too. In fact, I may even have loved them more than you did."
[Mary] Now, see, I'm evil because my response to that is, "I am so delighted I made you cry. Thank you for telling me. I worked really hard on that."
[Dan] My usual response is, "That's why I killed the character, is because I knew you would react that way. If you wouldn't react that strongly, what's the point?"
 
[Brandon] Though, I will say… This is something that's maybe just a little pet peeve of mine. I remember… This is going to date me, it's a long time ago, but there was this TV show called 24. This had a really big cultural impact on myself and my friends when the first season came out. We watched it, riveted. In that scene… Spoilers for a 20-year-old show or whatever… The main character's wife dies. The whole plot is set up for we need to save her. He's going to save her. He's the action star. He gets there a little too late, and she's dead. I was… totally thought it was great, until I listened to the commentary, which was the wrong thing. Where they said, "Yeah, we weren't sure if we were going to kill her or not. Then we decided, well, what would the reader… Or the viewer, not expect." For me, hearing that, that is not what I wanted to hear. I did not want to hear you just said, "Well, what's going to… What's the most unexpected?" This may just be a thing for me, because that's good storytelling in some ways. But I don't want it to just be what's unexpected. I wanted to be what the story's pushing for.
[Howard] I don't want it to be unexpected. I want it to be surprising, yet inevitable. It's startling, but when you look at it in retrospect, you're like, "Nope, that's…"
[Mary] I'm really sympathetic to the, "Well, what would the readers not expect?" Especially when you are trying to decide in the moment. Because sometimes… Like, I mean, I have done things where I have plotted, planning for the character to live, and thought, "Well, maybe I will kill them. I'm not sure." It's not until I get there that I really… The story itself kind of… The shape of everything that's come up to that point makes it clear to me which choice I'm going to need to make. I have a… This is going to involve spoilers.
[Brandon] Okay. For?
[Mary] For one of my own stories.
[Brandon] Which one?
[Mary] The Worshipful Society of Glove Makers. Which is on Uncanny. I kill a character in that. I can avoid… I'll just tell you which one. I did not plan to kill that character. At all. I had planned for them to have the… We're going to try to work this out. There's… Trying to deal with the situation. The simplest solution for this problem character was to just… If they were just dead. So another character just kills them. I wrote it, and I was like [gasp]. Because sometimes you just… Sometimes you do just right things and discover it. I looked at it and I was like, "Oh. That… Huh."
[Howard] Surprising, yet inevitable.
[Mary] Because it's the simplest choice. But, because I had set up this longer arc for the character, people consistently tell me that they actually gasp out loud when they get to that death. So… That's why I'm like… I'm a little sympathetic to that.
[Dan] Well, I think the way to make that work is to follow that up. You kill a character on a whim like that, which I've totally done. But then, like you were saying in the beginning, you need to follow…
[Mary] Consequences.
[Dan] The people who survive, and follow through on the consequences, and you can totally make that pay off, even if it isn't inevitable.
[Brandon] I think it is good storytelling. It just didn't work for me, because I wanted to believe they were doing what was best for the story, not what would surprise me.
[Mary] But it worked for you until you knew their motivation.
[Brandon] It did. That's what I'm saying.
[Mary] Never asked the author why they did something!
 
[Brandon] Let's go to our book of the week.
[Howard] Ah, yes. Schlock Mercenary book 13, Random Access Memorabilia. I did two things in this book that I totally loved, and I'm totally going to spoil for you, because there's so much more going on in the book that's fun. One of them is that I killed Sgt. Schlock and brought him back from a completely… Like, from a backup. From a clone. He'd lost five days. At one point, he's watching the video of his death, and somebody says, "Are you… How do you feel about this?" He looks at her and says, "It's kind of cool." It was significant to me because one, it pulled plot armor off of everybody. I demonstrated that anybody can be killed, and can lose something. Yes, I may bring them back. Second was if this is the only consequence for death, if the reader doesn't have to mourn, how can I possibly threaten characters with death in the future? The second thing that I did was part one, part two, and part three were called Read, Write, and Execute. When part three aired, all of the computer nerds in the audience were like [choke] surprising, yet inevitable. Just by the naming of the chapters.
 
[Brandon] All right. So. Question for you. Can you kill off a character, as… Like a side character and have it provide motivation for other characters, but not simply fridge the character? Do you know what I mean by fridging?
[Dan] Yes.
[Mary] But why don't you define it? Or shall I define it?
[Brandon] I'll define fridging. Fridging comes from an old Green Lantern comic book, where Green Lantern arrives home to his house and finds his girlfriend stuffed in a fridge. Famously, without any kind of warning that this would happen. Simply to add more character to Green Lantern himself, to give him something to mourn over, to provide motivation. It's become a cliché of the comic book, and just at large, media industry, that if you want to provide motivation, for often a guy, you will then kill off a female love interest or friend, to give them something to mourn over. Yet, at the same time, we've just been talking about killing a character when it's completely unexpected, and the effect it has on the people around them. What is the difference between these two things?
[Mary] So, for me, this was the thing that I had to reverse engineer, because I was planning to kill off a character. For me, it's making sure that the character has a longer plot arc that is clear and obvious, and they're going to be fulfilling this all the way through the story. It usually involves something with the main character. Like not, "Oh, we're going to go be happy together," but "I am disagreeing with you about this thing." That there's a conflict they have with the main character. So that when you kill them off, that is left unresolved. Which is the way things happen in real life. That there's a lot of unfinished business that you have with the people who are gone. There's a whole that they leave. I think that that's one of the things that happens when a lot of these characters are fridged, is that they don't leave a hole in the plot.
[Howard] It's very, very difficult… Very difficult for… If you kill a character as your inciting incident, and that character has a close relationship with your protagonist, you're going to have to have done some miraculous writing to not be accused of having fridged that character. Because that piece as a motivation to start the story is very, very hackneyed.
[Brandon] Well, let's… 
[Howard] It's super hard to do right. I wouldn't try it. That's just the way I feel about it. At this point. And I work in comics. So.
[Brandon] You're extra sensitive to it.
[Howard] I just gotta steer away from it.
 
[Brandon] I mean, I'm going to push us on this one, just because… I do think this is totally a thing. I'm not trying to discount fridging as a cultural thing we should avoid, but at the same time, some of the best stories are told about people who wear loss as a motivation. If we look at… Just even Batman. Batman is a guy who lost his parents, and it changed him into this thing. That's like this archetypal story that has been retold and retold and we are fascinated by it. What's the difference between that and fridging? Is there a difference?
[Mary] Well, Batman, it's backstory. Which is, I think, a little different.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary] The… I mean, honestly, you can fridge someone mid book. I think when… I mean… I keep feeling like I'm saying the same thing over and over again.
[Howard] That character needs to feel like they had a purpose beyond simply dying as a motivation point, as an arm bar for the protagonist, for the plot.
 
[Brandon] Okay. So, spoiler for the first Avengers film. When Agent Coulson dies and it brings the whole team together and that's like the pivotal moment of the whole thing. Agent Coulson? Not a fridge? Because he had had all these interactions with them before, or is he a fridge because he…
[Dan] Well, Coulson specifically sacrifices himself. So it's a very different situation. It's not an inert character being acted upon. It is someone making a choice.
[Brandon] So you think… That one you would say… That was a [big point]
[Howard] Well, Nick Fury even… Nick Fury knows that he needed something to pull these characters together, and so… To pull the heroes together. So he dials up the emotional impact by throwing the bloody trading cards at Capt. America. Coulson never did get you to sign these, did he? He staged that. He went and got them out of Coulson's locker, and made them bloody. So, yes, you can argue that this is fridging, but you could also argue that it wasn't because Fury… Fury didn't want this to happen. He used it. He used whatever he had to turn the team into a team.
[Mary] But Coulson is also an example of how you can give a character a sense of a life outside. I've pointed to this in previous podcasts. The scene when he's getting off the elevator with Pepper and he's… And she's like, "Are you still dating that cellist?" That's just… It's like, "Oh. There is this whole other life to this character." Whereas most of the time, you're like, "What can I tell… What can you tell me about the character who's been fridged? They really, really loved the main character so much. They just loved them."
[Howard] One of the reasons that Coulson works so well is that Stark really just does see him as… "Why are you calling him Phil? His first name is Agent." Then we come around to Ironman facing off against Loki and saying, "And there's one more person you upset. His name was Phil." We realize that yes, he liked… He had come to recognize that Agent Coulson, Phil Coulson, had a life that Tony Stark was now wishing had continued.
[Mary] This is an example… Thank you for bringing that up. This is an example of that thing I was talking about, about making sure that the… There is a conflict point that the dying character has with the main character. Because it looks like the arc that they're setting up is Ironman learning to recognize the puny ordinary people. Which is actually an arc that Ironman goes on. It's just Phil is not there at the end of it.
 
[Brandon] I appreciate you guys letting me push you on this one. It is something that I'm really interested in. So thanks for putting up with me on it. I do want to ask just a different question. We have very little time left. I want to ask when do you decide to do the opposite and give plot armor? This is the phrase where we say a character is too important to die in the story right now. They haven't fulfilled their plot arc. I'm going to prevent them from dying. I'm going to rescue them in some narrative way from the consequences of their choices. When do you do this? Why do you do this? Mary's wincing, so maybe she does…
[Mary] I haven't done that. I haven't done that yet.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Well, I did that in book 15. Lieut. Sorlie, who I had kind of planned for her to sacrifice herself heroically. I got to the end of the story and realized nothing she can do at this point will seem more heroic than what she has already done. The death would be a downer, and it doesn't need to be a downer. That's… I don't need that sacrifice in this story. So… She lived.
[Brandon] I've done it before. I have a character that their story isn't done and I feel it will be less sat… More satisfying to rescue them and continue their story than it would be to let them die there with unresolved major plot things. But I don't always make that choice. It's always a really hard one.
[Dan] Well, Howard touched on this earlier, but there is so many things that are worse than death. So if I find myself in this situation, I'm not going to kill that character, but I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to make them live through something, or experience something, or maybe even they get off scot free and all their friends are dead because they are the only one that lived through whatever it was. So that there are still consequences for the scene. They don't get off scot free.
[Howard] That's ablative plot armor.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Something hits them, it explodes outward…
 
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to give you a writing prompt instead of some homework this time. A good old classic Writing Excuses writing prompt. I've been thinking a lot about the story Mary talked about last month, where she had the people… The alien race where they went through a kind of butterfly-like transformation at the end of their lives and lost all of their memories and had to be reminded of them. I thought this is an interesting take on death. That a story where the characters die, but don't die. So your writing prompt is that. Do something where, perhaps fantastical, perhaps not, one of your main characters is going to go through a major transformation that is going to feel like death to those around them, but they're not actually dying. Write that story. See how it goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.34: Q&A on Character Arcs

Aug. 29th, 2018 11:30 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 13.34: Q&A on Character Arcs
 
 
Q&A Summary: 
Q: How do you fulfill your promises about a character arc without being cliché?
Q: How do you subvert a common character arc without it feeling like betraying a promise to a reader? 
A: How do you give them what they want without just being obvious about it? Use the predictability test: If at the beginning of the story you can predict the resolution, there's something wrong. BUT some stories, readers, genres or subgenres, fulfilling expectations is the right thing to do. Name that tune, or sing along? Make sure the promise can be fulfilled in multiple ways, then pick a surprising one that is more fulfilling. Have the character wanting at least two things, and then give them at least one. Make the character original, unique, and their reaction will also be original and unique.
Q: Do you need to complete each character arc in the story? For a character in a series, should each book contain a complete character arc, or should the entire series cover one large arc? How do you tie multiple character arcs together when you're writing the first book of a trilogy? With lots of character arcs, how do you interweave them?
A: If all the character arcs follow the same shape, that can feel artificial. However, if the arcs are staggered so that one person has a completely unresolved crisis at the end of the story, that may feel unsatisfying. Look for plateaus, stopping points along the arc, for individual characters.
Q: What separates an iconic character from a caricature? Or a stereotype?
A: Make the character unique. Caricatures are exaggerated and one-sided, while iconic characters don't change from episode to episode. Separate iconic, not changing, from archetype. If a similar iconic character from another series can replace your iconic character, you may have a caricature.
Q: Have you ever had an iconic character, upon further exploration, become a character in need of an arc? How would you make that transition?
A: Comics are often forced to reboot because they are trying to do this. However, books often take iconic characters from one book and put them in a second book where they have an arc.
Q: How do you continue a character's story after they've completed their original arc?
A: Think about your parents' roles in your story. Put the character and what they've learned in a new situation. Make sure your character has enough depth and layers.
Q: How much does a character need to change in their arc? Does it always have to be a major, permanent, life-redefining change?
A: It needs to be enough to see a difference. Satisfy the reader that a change has occurred. Set up the right conflict and make the right promise. Some change, some growth, even if they're not perfect at the end.
 
( A bunch of questions and answers! )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on Character Arcs.
[Valynne] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Valynne] I'm Valynne.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We have your questions. Ian asks, "How do you fulfill your promises about a character arc without being cliché?" Good question.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I don't know.
[Brandon] Oh, come on.
[Dan] I'm a very cliché author.
[Brandon] Get on it, get on it.
[Dan] Okay. Fulfilling problems without being cliché. I don't know if there's a direct tracking line between those.
[Brandon] Okay, here's another…
[Howard] Let me approach it a different way.
[Brandon] There's actually another question… The next question is by Connor and… I think it's the same sort of thing.
[Dan] Okay.
[Brandon] How do you subvert a common character arc without it feeling like a… Betraying a promise to a reader? That's what they're all getting at. How do you…
[Dan] Okay. How do you give them what they want without just being obvious about it?
[Brandon] Yes. That is the question.
[Dan] Subvert that without feeling like you've deceived them.
[Howard] There are so very, very many movies, stories out there, whatever, where the character arc for our main character is discovering the importance of their friends. We see that all the time. If, at the beginning of your story, you know that's where you're headed and you can predict it… If that is predictably the resolution, you may have cliché problems. You can still fulfill a promise along those lines, you just need to not… I use the predictability test all the time. If I can predict a line of dialogue in a movie, then something's probably wrong. If I can predict, "Oh, this next scene, this is where they kiss. He's going to drop something. They're going to…"
[Brandon] Now, let me say, there are certain stories and readers where fulfilling the expectation in the way that you anticipate and want is the right thing to do. It depends on the story you're telling, the way you… The promises you make. Some books will promise to subvert expectations. Some books will promise not to. In fact, I remember reading through several romance novel entries on Amazon where the description of the book says, in big bolded letters, this is a book with a happily ever after and no cheating. That was repeated on most of the pages I went to in this sub genre. Big, bold letters. That is a promise that that trope is not going to get subverted because the reader's looking for it. So you really have to decide, am I trying to subvert things or not?
[Dan] I remember when we had Mike Stackpole on the show, and he talked about writing plots as playing name that tune with your readers, and you want to be just ahead. If they guess the tune too early, then you've lost them. But I do think there is another kind of reader that just wants to sing along with the song, because they know it so well.
[Brandon] Right. There's nothing wrong with that. I would say this is something that I really enjoy doing, is playing name the tune with the reader. The way that you make it not feel like a betrayal, but not like a cliché either, is you make sure that this promise can get fulfilled in multiple ways, and that the one you pick is not necessarily the first one they'd pick, but is in some way more fulfilling. So you kind of have to identify what is the need and how do you fill it, and you promise you're going to fill it in a certain way in the middle of the book, but then you give a better promise… You always have to do a better job.
[Dan] One of the things that I do a lot… We talk about the Hollywood Formula a lot on this show, and how you need to set out knowing what a character wants. I have found that if I can make sure my character really wants at least two things, then I can totally screw one of those up on purpose, and you will still be happy when he or she gets the other one. That's a way of making sure that the character arcs are still driving this plot.
[Valynne] Well, I think if you've invested enough time in making sure that your character is original and unique, then the way that they're going to solve that problem or get to… Or what we want fulfilled, will also be original and unique. You need to write a character that he's not like anyone else, and so it makes sense that character would solve the problem this way.
 
[Brandon] So, we've got multiple questions on a similar topic, so I'm going to kind of meld them altogether. This is from Ben, and from Jessica, and from Anthony, and they're asking about multiple character arcs in the same story. Do you need to complete each character arc in the story? Like, Jessica asks, "For a character in a series, should each book contain a complete character arc, or should the entire series cover one large arc?" Then Ben's question… Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, Ben's question is, "How do you tie multiple character arcs together when you're writing the first book of a trilogy?" A lot of questions about lots of character arcs, how do you interweave them? What do you do?
[Howard] If they all form… And when I think of a character arc, I think of the narrative curve, that bump shape that drops off kind of sharply at the end. If all of the character arcs in the book follow that same shape, it's going to feel kind of artificial and kind of weird. If, however, all of the arcs are staggered to the point that one person is in crisis at the end of the story and you can tell it's completely unresolved, that may feel unsatisfying. So what I try and do is find plateaus, stopping points along the arc, along a character's arc, where, for this story, I can park them there… Maybe for the whole story. Their arc is not complete, their arc is six books long, but I can park them there, and we'll be happy. So thinking of it as tiers along this arc, and within a given story, which steps are they moving between? That model works really well for me.
[Dan] As an example, the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke and Han each have an arc in each movie. It goes and it's complete. Whereas Leia has one larger arc that takes all three movies to fulfill.
 
[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week is Fat Angie.
[Valynne] Fat Angie, by e. E. Charlton-Trujillo. One of the things that I love about this book is that it's both funny, but just really has some tender moments. It's about a girl who is overweight in high school. Her older sister is in the military and missing. She's the only one who thinks that her sister is still alive out there somewhere. So I think that for a lot of military families, this is… Might have a lot of meaning for them. She, in the beginning of the book, has tried to kill herself, commits suicide in front of the entire school, and is working through a lot of those issues of just learning to figure out the kind of person she is, the kind of person that she wants to be, what she wants to be known for, and that is not this act that she is currently known for. It's a wonderful romance, in terms of the fact that she's trying to figure out her sexual identity. I think that the way that the author handles this book is just perfect. The mix of just being so realistic, and having the teenage angst of dealing with these really important issues, but handling them very realistically.
[Brandon] Excellent. So it's called Fat Angie?
[Valynne] Umhum.
[Howard] By e. E. Charlton-Trujillo?
[Valynne] Umhum.
 
[Brandon] All right. Questions. Back to questions from the audience. There are several questions about iconic characters. John asks, "What separates an iconic character from a caricature? Or a stereotype?"
[Dan] Oooo... Interesting.
[Valynne] Well, I think that you're still going to make that character unique in some ways. I mean, not everyone is Superman and has the powers that he does and can… Run as fast as he can and has the superstrength. He's an iconic hero, and so is James Bond. They have completely different attributes. So, I think what defines an iconic character is, and we've discussed this in a previous episode, is just the situations that they're thrown into, and the way they react.
[Dan] Well, I think that a caricature is arguably much more exaggerated and one-sided than an iconic character. You look at… If I say Capt. Kirk, most people are going to imagine a hotshot who just sleeps with weird alien women and disregards the rules. You look at the original series, he is definitely an iconic character. He doesn't change from episode to episode. But he is much more layered and nuanced and interesting than what we tend to think. He is an iconic character. Our vision of him now, looking back, is very caricatured.
[Brandon] Right. I think it's good to separate iconic, meaning not changing, from an archetype, which iconic character can totally be. But Mr. Spock is also iconic. He's not changing through that series. But also very layered, very interesting, very in conflict with himself. So separate those two things in your mind. If you're worried about clichés and stereotypes, you can build a character who is not one who still doesn't change, if that's what you're interested in doing.
[Howard] If your iconic character can be, in your book, replaced by an iconic character of similar skill set from someone else's series, it might be a caricature.
[Dan] That's… Yeah.
 
[Brandon] So, next question on iconic characters is, "Have you ever had an iconic character, upon further exploration, become a character in need of an arc? How would you make that transition?" Now, this is dangerous, because we've talked about how comics basically keep trying to do this, and then get forced to reboot and things like this. I totally think it's possible. In fact, I see a lot of books, what you will see people doing is there will be a series where there's a main character and kind of several iconic individuals around them. The main character has an arc. Then they write a second book that takes one of these characters that is maybe… Was a little bit… Didn't have an arc in the first book, didn't change, and then they get an arc, and then they get an arc.
[Dan] You can see this in a ton of webcomics in particular. Sluggy Freelance, that was just a joke a week, and then turned into a long story. Same with Sam and Fuzzy, same with Dr. McNinja. Same with, I think, Schlock.
[Howard] Yup. I gave him a character arc. He's an iconic hero, and then I gave him a character arc and established a new baseline for him. Because it's not a brand like Frosted Flakes or DC Comics, I am allowed to keep those changes. I don't have to reboot. I think better examples than comics are Death in the Terry Pratchett books. For most of those books, he is always the same character, and he's delightful when he shows up. Then we have a book in which Death decides to retire for a while, and becomes, I think, Bill Door. It's beautiful. He gets his own little arc. Hogfather kind of gives him his own little arc. So, yeah, this… Totally, you can do it.
 
[Brandon] All right. How do you continue a character's story after they've completed their original arc? I love this question.
[Valynne] So are we talking about sequels or… Okay.
[Brandon] Yes. I think a sequel. You've written a story. This one didn't have a name on it. Whoever asked this question, good question. You've written a story. The character's had a big, complete arc. And then you're going to put them in the next book. What do you do?
[Howard] What are your parents' roles in your story? Because when they were teenagers, they were very distraught individuals who were the heroes of their own story. Probably every bit as self-absorbed as the average teenager. But now that you're growing up, or that you're an adult, what are your parents' roles in your story? Because fundamentally, I think that's the question that's being asked here. When you… When we emerge from our period of change and stabilize, what do we become to the next generation of heroes?
[Valynne] Or, even if you look at it in terms of a shorter timeframe, for like a young adult book, you're looking at maybe just like a few months sometimes from beginning to end, but the arc suggests that their character starts in one place and grows and becomes something else, so I think that you just look at what are the nat… Like, this person is now not exactly the same person they were before. They are… You take that character and what they've learned and then throw them in a new situation and see how what they learned can affect whatever they're going into next.
[Dan] A lot of the time when this is a problem, it's because the character was originally designed around one specific conflict, and there's not enough depth to keep going. You look at what happened with Data in the Next Generation movies. Once he finally got emotions, the writers had no idea what to do with him. Compare that to say Oz in the Buffy series who went through tons of different phases of his life and completed long character arcs, but he was an interesting enough and layered enough character that the writers were able to say, "Well, what can we do with him next?"
[Howard] That's why I used the parent example. Parents are not… It doesn't have to be that kind of a timeframe. It can be a fairly short timeframe. They are, for many people, sources of stability, sources of rescue, sources of advice. They are, for other people, sources of continual conflict because they disagree with them. When you have a character who has completed their arc, if you want to tell a story about a character arc, you're telling somebody else's story, and the character who has completed their arc features into that in some way that's critically important.
 
[Brandon] Last question comes from Kalika. They ask, "How much does a character need to change in their arc? Does it always have to be a major, permanent, life-redefining change?"
[Valynne] I don't know if that's always realistic, but I think it needs to be enough that you can see a difference.
[Howard] Satisfy me. If you promised me that this person is going to be changed by the experience in this book, I have to be satisfied that a change has occurred. It can be a tiny thing, it can be a big thing. I guess it depends on the conflict, it depends on the character, it depends on the length of the story.
[Dan] I think figuring out what you want to do, so that you can present the right conflict and make the right promise… If you set us up where this person's conflict is that they are a terrible person who can't connect with everyone else because they're mean all the time, and then they end the story still a terrible person and mean all the time, you haven't resolved the conflict or kept the promise you made in the beginning. If you present that same character, but give us a different conflict that is smaller and less life-changing, then, okay, I'm willing to go along with them still being a jerk at the end. Because you've still resolved the thing you told me you were going to resolve.
[Valynne] I don't think you… I don't think everything has to be magically perfect in the end, I just want to see some change. Some growth.
 
[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Thank you guys so much for sending in your questions. These have been great questions. Dan has a writing prompt.
[Dan] Yes, I do.
[Brandon] Did you forget?
[Dan] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I warned you ahead of time.
[Dan] I know, I know. I don't have a writing prompt.
[Brandon] Howard? Do you have a writing prompt?
[Howard] I did at the beginning of the episode, but then Dan assured us that he…
[Dan] I assured no one. I merely said okay.
[Howard] You said, "I'll have this by the end. I'm on this."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I felt very reassured.
[Dan] Dear listener. We actually before recording this talked about how we use to blindside our guests with writing prompts. So, Brandon is taking great delight in now doing it to us.
[Brandon] [inaudible]
[Dan] Even though it's not even technically blindsiding, because he told me. I want you to write, dear listener, a story in which Brandon asks someone for a writing prompt, and that person is unprepared, and Brandon receives great karmic justice.
[Laughter]
[Valynne] Ouch. Pretty savage there.
[Brandon] All right. I guess I'll…
[Howard] Alternatively…
[Dan] I didn't say which side of karma Brandon was on.
[Howard] Alternatively, do an image search on mountains. Trace a mountain onto a piece of paper. Now make that outline the arc for your character.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. I hope we didn't give you any excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships

Jul. 4th, 2018 10:12 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships
 
 
Key points: Beyond the character arc, with characters changing and developing, other characters get involved. That's where character relationships come in. Some people plan them in advance, while other people discover them in the writing. Leave yourself wiggle room, and when you find two characters that work well together, let them show you great scenes and better stories. Try the Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Mind: intelligence. Money: what is money for, and what are your goals? Morals: what's right and wrong? Manners: what's polite? Monogamy: hot, burning kisses? What is our relationship? The Marx Brothers: what's funny, and what's not! Alignment makes compatibility, differences create friction points, tension points. Another tool is position power versus personal power. How can you introduce backstory in a relationship quickly? A shared in-joke. Free indirect speech, aka internal monologue, reflecting on the relationship. Final question: the relationship after HEA! How do you write that? The classic romantic arc is a character arc, from I am dissatisfied with being alone to they hook up. After that, don't break the relationship, use an event arc, with something disrupting the status quo. External conflicts plus friction in the Kowal relationship axes equals story! Don't just strut like a hawk, scratch for your own worms.
 
( Putting words on the outline... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Character Relationships.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, we know what our characters… They have a big arc, and they're changing, and they're developing. Now other people are going to start interfering with that. Helping or hindering it. We're going to talk about character relationships. This is something that I do a lot ahead of time. But I know that Dan, for instance, just kind of… Often they…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Mess each other up and you see what happens.
[Dan] Sometimes. I do a mix of both. I like to plan out in advance when I know, for example, that I'm going to have a group of friends. I want to know how they all interact with each other. But very frequently, and in fact the book that came out earlier this year, Active Memory, turned into a father-daughter book. Not because I planned it that way, but because as I was writing the other two in the series, that relationship became more and more interesting every time the father came on screen. So by midway through the third book, I'm like, "Okay, you know what?"
[Laughter]
[Dan] "We're just going to focus on this, and we're going to do it right."
[Brandon] I would say… I mean, I joke about being a heavy outliner, but this is one of the places, no matter how much you outline, you have to have wiggle room for. When your characters are quote unquote on screen together and you find that you write them with great chemistry, that they are working… When those two characters are on screen, you have a better scene than when either of them are apart, you know that something is going on there, and you need to be willing to run with that and explore it. You want to write the scenes that are best. You want the characters to give you the opportunity to write better stories.
 
[Mary] This is one of those things that we're always talking about, that writing is a spectrum from outlining to discovery writing. This is one of the areas that I also tend to discovery write a lot. But I also have a tool that I use when I need to… Like, when I know that I'm going to need these two characters to fight, but I don't want it to be a stupid fight. Because… Oh, I see this all the time, where the characters are fighting and I'm like, "Why are you fighting? You're fighting… There's no…" Or conversely, the characters who really do not get along at all, and then suddenly wind up in bed together. I'm like, "What? You've got nothing in common." So allow me to introduce you to something that I call the Kowal relationship axes.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary] It's actually named after my mother-in-law, who used it as dating advice to my husband… Or to her son. I realized that it actually works incredibly well for describing the ways we interact with not just a romantic partner but kind of for everybody. So the idea is that there are six axes along which relationships exist. The more closely you are aligned on any one of these, the more compatible you are. The farther apart, the less compatible. It… The sliders don't have to be very far off. So those are mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers.
[Laughter]
[Mary] I will grant that my husband added the Marx Brothers after he realized… After we were married, that I had never seen…
[Laughter]
[Mary] We'll start backwards and work our way up. Marx Brothers basically represents that you have the same sense of humor.
[Brandon] Right. You laugh at the same thing.
[Mary] It's a very simple one. Monogamy is not that you're both monogamous, but that you have the same idea of what the relationship is. I mean, you've experienced the thing where someone thinks that you are BFFs, and you're like, "I kind of vaguely know you from work…" It's really super uncomfortable. So it's just you have to have… She labeled that one as hot burning kisses, which is better for the romantic stuff.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So they weren't all iterative?
[Mary] No.
[Brandon] When she… You being a writer have…
[Mary] Well, it was actually… The first four were alliterative, and then…
[Brandon] Then, hot burning kisses.
[Mary] Then hot burning kisses.
[Dan] Then hot burning kisses. Which, to be fair, can stand alone.
[Mary] It's true. So, manners mean that you have the same idea of what is polite… What is… And what is not. Morals are different from manners. Morals is your sense of what is right and wrong in the world. So you can have morals that are in close alignment and manners that are wildly off, or the other way around. I mean, that's often why you know someone on the Internet who's a terrible person on the Internet, and you meet them in real life and they're so nice. It's because your manners are really closely aligned, while your morals are wildly off. Money is that you have the same sense of what money is for, and the same goals towards money. It doesn't actually necessarily mean that you have the same amount of money, but that…
[Brandon] For swimming through in your giant money vault, obviously.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That's what you do with it.
[Mary] Yes. Obviously. Mind is that you have comparable degrees of intelligence. What's interesting about this is that they really do not have to be very far off. So you can have people that are compatible. Like, the upper ends of all of these sliders in terms of their compatibility, but even just a little bit off… Those are the points where the friction is going to happen. What that does for you if you know that, if you know the places that they're a little bit farther… A little bit off, it tells you what the fight is going to be about.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] The… Why would you even say that?
[Mary] Yes.
[Howard] That surprise… We are so like each other, and yet you just… That thing.
[Dan] Yeah. The… Using those, some of them being close together can also be a good reason why the characters stick together, even though the others are far apart. I mean, the Lethal Weapon franchise is almost entirely founded on the idea that their morals are completely aligned and their manners are wildly 100% off.
[Mary] They have very similar… They're also lined up on mind and they're also… At the beginning… What's, I think is interesting is that they are in agreement on what their relationship is. Which is that we don't like each other.
[Brandon] I work alone.
[Mary] Yes. For both of them. Their understanding of what the relationship is evolves together. So those sliders move in the same…
 
[Howard] I have a much simpler tool that I deploy much differently, which is the two scales of power. Position power and personal power. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer has position power over the employee. But a very, very charismatic, intelligent, effusive employee has gobs of personal power, and without even trying, can undermine an employer who doesn't have any personal power. In fact, you see this a lot in workplaces, in all kinds of relationships. Where someone assumes that their personal power grants them position, or assumes that their position power grants them… For instance, friendship with everyone under them. I pay close attention to this in Schlock Mercenary, because the military organizations that make up so many… Or that encompass so many of the relationships in the books are inherently about position power, and there's a wide array of differing personal powers in there. I need to make sure… We talked about manners. Something that you would say to a fellow grunt is not something that you would say to an officer. That… That dichotomy, I have to keep track of that, because if I get it wrong, it knocks people out of the story.
[Dan] I had… I worked in an office, and was there for the moment when the guy with all the position power realized that he didn't have any personal power.
[Mary] Oh, hohoho.
[Dan] The office became unlivable. It was fascinating to watch that. That has just given me the dialogue to describe what happened.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have a book coming out!
[Mary] Yes. I have two books coming out, actually. I have a duology, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Book one is called The Calculating Stars. That's coming out this month. Actually, has just come out last week. The sequel, The Fated Sky, is coming out in August, at the end of the month. The set up for the first book is basically, it begins about two minutes before an asteroid slams into Washington, DC, in 1952, wiping out… It's actually the Chesapeake Bay, because it turns out that a water strike is way worse than a land strike. But it kicks off the space program hard and fast and internationally, with 1952 technology. So the first book is push to the moon, and second book is push to Mars. It's a woman-centered cast, because I've got a lot of… Because it's 1952, all of the women who are in Hidden Figures, all of those computers? Not only are they computers at that point, but historically speaking, a lot of them were also left over WASPs, Women Auxiliary Service Pilots from World War II. So you have a lot of people who are lighter than men, better able to handle gravitational blood pressure shifts, and who are walking computers.
[Brandon] It's out, it's awesome, I've read it, it's great. You guys should all go read it.
[Mary] So one of the exciting things for me about this book also is that I had astronauts reading it, and we are actually going to be at NASA and do a project-in-depth about The Calculating Stars, which is the first book in the series, in two weeks. Although we will have done it already… It's time travel, don't worry about it. So this gives you two weeks to read the book before we get to NASA. Go ahead. Three… Two… One… Lift off!
[Rumbling]
[laughter]
[Howard] Was I supposed to make a rocket noise?
[Mary] No.
[Howard] Oh.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] That was a terrible joke.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I was waiting to see. Is she going to say lift off? Or are we not going to do that? Nope, she did it.
[Brandon] Either way, there will be massive spoilers for Mary's book in two weeks, so you should read it now.
 
[Brandon] Let's… Let me ask you guys another question about relationships. One of my favorite things in books and in film and whatever is when you get two characters who minutes after interacting, you can read in their interactions an extensive history that they don't have to tell you point by point by point, which is boring. Characters who just… You can read their relationship in moments. How do you write this? Any tips, any tricks?
[Mary] An in-joke. Just one. You don't have to do a lot. But an in-joke, like if two characters are talking and one of them is like, "Oh, yeah, like the time with the pumpkin."
[Chuckles]
[Mary] You don't have to do anything more than that.
[Dan] You said you wouldn't bring that up, Mary.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Sorry.
[Brandon] They did that in the Dirk Pitt movie, and it worked really well, to kick off the fact that these two characters have been in lots of crazy hijinks together.
[Dan] A story that does this really, really well is Sneakers. Because there's that whole little group of misfits and people, and one of the great things they do is the character Mother, who is always bringing up weird conspiracy theories. The first time he does that, Sidney Poitier, who's the ex-CIA guy, he reacts before he starts the story. I mean, he starts the story, and before he has a chance to get to the weird stuff, he's already rolling his eyes. You immediately know, "Oh, they do this all the time."
[Laughter]
[Dan] They have this very specific relationship to conspiracies in government, and it tells so much in the timing of his reaction.
[Brandon] That's awesome. Yeah.
[Howard] The Rocket and Groot scene where we are introduced to them in Guardians of the Galaxy… Groot's only dialogue is "I am Groot," where Groot is drinking out of the fountain, and we establish very, very quickly that the relationship between these two is kind of father-son and kind of boss-employer and kind of brains and brawn, and yet there is something woven in there that we just don't know, but it's there.
[Mary] I think that the thing with that is not just the in-jokes, but also, tying into what Dan was talking about, that... the characters' reaction to each other. So this is a place that you can use one of the tools we talked about when we were talking about character voice, which is that indirect… That free indirect speech, where the character's internal monologue can be a little bit about their relationship. "Oh, no, no, no, not this story again."
[Brandon] You see this in relationship… Romantic relationships a lot. Someone walks on screen, in a movie or television show, and you know instantly that those two characters have a history, a relationship. Often times it's that they're extremely cold to one another, which we read as, "Oh, something happened in the past between those two." I would say, less is more, in a lot of these instances. 
 
[Brandon] Now, different topic. I wanted to make sure we asked you, Mary. You had an entire series where two characters went through a classic romance relationship, and then multiple books afterward where many people would have just stopped the series. In most movies and things, they just stop at the point where the first book ended. You wrote wonderful, awesome books about a different kind of relationship in some ways.
[Mary] So… Why, thank you. So, anyone who's married knows that you can actually be in a committed, happy relationship… Anyone who's in a committed, happy relationship, whether or not you're… You can be in this wonderful relationship, and there's still conflict. But the conflict is external. So the way I actually structured that… Okay. It took me a while to figure out. So I tend to think about the MICE quotient a lot. What I realized was that a romantic arc is structured as a character arc. The character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and then… That is, "I am alone." Then they hook up. That what happens when you… For the most part is that when people attempt to write relationships later, what they do is they're still writing a character arc, but once you're in a relationship, that couple is now a single unit, and you have to treat them as a single unit. So when you have the "I am dissatisfied with an aspect of self," that means that it's all about an internal conflict between the couple. So what I did was I treated it like an event arc instead, where they were totally happy with each other, but any event arc is when something disrupts their status quo. So I made sure that all of the conflicts that were hitting them were external conflicts, and then used the Kowal relationship axes to talk about how that friction expressed itself between them.
[Brandon] I would say that one of the reasons I like this is, it's a pet peeve of mine… Maybe that's the wrong term… That when the two characters hook up, the story is done. Which it's totally not.
[Howard] Or we have to make them break up so we can put them back together.
[Mary] That drives me crazy.
[Brandon] It's the sort of thing that I feel like, as storytellers, sometimes we internalize this thing which is a complete lie. Sometimes the best stories, in fact often the best stories, are when the reader's personally invested in both characters and personally invested in this relationship, which only happens once they are together. It's the same sort of thing in a different way that happens with Mistborn, this trilogy. If you haven't read it, the story that I originally wanted to tell was how do you keep an empire together after you've conquered it? When you're the Rebels and you've blown up the Death Star and taken over, and none of you have any experience in leading an empire or whatever, a republic, how do you make that happen? It's gotta be way harder than blowing something up, keeping it together. That's what made me initially start working on the series. With relationships, keeping together a relationship, I wouldn't say maybe it's harder, but in some ways it is, right? Because you have to work on it every day. The initial euphoria is gone, and something deeper is growing and building, but that's way more interesting.
[Dan] There's a beautiful quote from the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, in the fourth one, where the kid just wants to go off and be a hero. One of the witches says to him, "It's easy for the chicken to strut like a hawk. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." I always think that… That is such a more interesting story to tell, is how do you actually live rather than do this one cool thing and then be done.
[Mary] I think that it's also important to note that this is… This thing you're talking about of working on a relationship is not just a romantic relationship. Like, if you've met someone at a con or just school or… And they've moved away, it's difficult. You have to work constantly to maintain that level of friendship. It doesn't just take care of itself. I think that that's one of the things that you can do when… As a conflict point, as a tension point, is not the we want to break up, but we want to hang out and there are things getting between us. That's the other secret that I used in the Glamorous Histories is that I gave them, both characters, the same basic objective in addition to the same basic relationship objective, which was they wanted to get offscreen to a fade to black scene.
[Laughter]
[Mary] All they wanted… It's like, we really want to do a fade to black scene right now, but we're being attacked by pirates.
[Brandon] I would say… You mentioned friends kind of growing apart just because you're no longer in the same social circles. If that's happening to you, start a podcast with your friends…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Then you get to see them and hang out with them.
 
[Brandon] We're actually out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.
[Mary] Yes. So take the elements of the Kowal relationship axes. Look at your characters. Decide where their friction points are. I want you to just pick two of them. Don't pick all of them, if you want them to be friends. Decide why they're that way. It's not enough to say they're… They have different manners. Like one of them is from the south, one is from Hawaii, which is…
[Laughter]
[Mary] [garbled] and I. But pick two, decide why, and then give them an external conflict and let the friction express itself.
[Howard] Can you rattle off the axes again?
[Mary] Yes. They are also in the liner notes. Mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, Marx Brothers.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.43: Serialized Storytelling

Oct. 25th, 2017 10:36 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.43: Serialized Storytelling

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/10/22/12-43-serialized-storytelling/

Key Points: Character progression in the long run, or don't bore the reader with arcs? First, beware of breaking relationships or character to make an arc. Try changing character focus to get an interesting character arc in each story. Separate your iconic heroes, who don't have character development, from your epic heroes, who do. Romance often has one character who is the star of the first book, then later books take characters from the side cast of the first book and give them a romance. To keep it fresh, give them different issues, different love triangles and problems, and often, an overarching background struggle. Use the set of characters as a framework or structure for the series. Another approach is to keep the same character or characters, but have different challenges for them to react to in each book. Different sets of characters, who is working together on what, also can keep it fresh. Avoiding power creep? Different problems. Also, consider a design space that provides consistent problems, character growth, powers, etc. across the series. Not "save it for the sequel" but "here is the set of cool things for the series, which ones am I going to do in detail in this book?" Beware the perfect romance. Yes, characters can resolve issues and be strong, but they should still need the relationship and each other.

( Cliffhangers and other cereal dangers? )

[Howard] You need me to do homework, Brandon?
[Brandon] I need you to do homework.
[Howard] okay. I've talked about beat charts before. Where you write down the iconic moments, the character arcs, whatever for your story. Build a beat charts for a series. Identify iconic heroic moments in which the hero does something awesome. Put each one down on an index card. Identify character arcs. Learns to love. Has a descent into madness. Put those down on cards. Identify what the reveals are. Then take this stack of cards, and spread them out into multiple stories. Order yourself a series in which everything gets to happen, but it doesn't all happen at once.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

Jan. 21st, 2016 11:47 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.3: Layering the Elemental Genres

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/17/11-03-layering-the-elemental-genres/

Key points: Borrow elemental genres (ideas, emotions) from other stories and inject them into your stories as subplots, character arcs, or mashups. Layer your elemental genres to create sequels that are the same, but different. Let each character's arc be a different elemental genre. You can use design elements, set dressing, to keep the story together, and mix-and-match elemental genres underneath that to tell different stories. Check your underpinnings -- what is the feeling you like? Drill down into the elemental genre behind the design elements. Turn your wall into a trench, or darkness, or... with a great unknown hidden behind it.

( Is there icing in between the layers? )
[Brandon] We're going to leave you with some homework. Mary's got the homework for us, and it relates to the homework we gave you last time.
[Mary] All right. So last time we asked you to identify the major driving emotion of the story that you are interested in working on. What I want you to do now is I want you to think of a contrasting emotion. So essentially what you're doing is you're creating a foil plot, a foil emotion for your primary emotion. Because this is going to allow you to showcase ever... Or do a contrast between the darkness of one and the happy emotions of the other. So think about not the design elements, but think about the emotional elements and think about... You don't have to worry about our proprietary vocabulary yet. I just want you to identify the emotion that you want to elicit in yourself if you were hacking your brain.
[Brandon] Now by this point, we will have all 11 of the ideas we've come up with put on our website and we will post them such... We will put them in a place that they are easy to find each week, if you want to come glance over them again. As you can tell from this episode, we're still getting used to this terminology ourselves.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Hopefully, across the course of the year, we'll all start really using the same terminology. This is the purpose...
[Howard] I'm going to put a stake in the ground and say that by the end of the season, we will have altered some of the terminology and changed the list, because it just makes more sense.
[Mary] Yep. You guys will probably be better versed in it that we will, because we just talked about it once.
[Brandon] All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 7.1: When Good Characters Go Bad

Jan. 3rd, 2012 10:08 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.1: When Good Characters Go Bad

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/01/01/writing-excuses-7-1-when-good-characters-go-bad/

Key Points: Why? Character change -- redemption or falling -- interests us! Also, fall and realization is cathartic. Plus, this can set up concern for the other characters. To start, show us their starting state, normal and good, and the choice that starts them down the path. Motivation and slippery slope. Dividing line or shades of gray? Don't tell the reader where the line is, let them decide. Does the character think they have crossed the line? Have they slowly eased over it, or been pushed to the edge and snapped? Does the gradual slip have a moment of realization? What about realizing that the rules, the code, itself is wrong? Consider the tragic flaw, and the archetype of the hero who falls from grace. Is this an Everyman falling? Remember that even villains are heroes of their own story. Make sure your character is motivated, and that the fall is foreshadowed. Use that anticipation.
( Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? )
[Howard] Perfect. You know what, I'm just going to build this off of the last comment I made. Come up with a list of three things that are very, very important to your main character that are all in alignment. Now, outline yourself some circumstances where one of those things is now out of alignment and can drive your character from the protagonist's side into darkness and eventual oblivion.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing excuses 5.13: How do you write the second book?

Mar. 1st, 2011 12:47 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing excuses 5.13: How do you write the second book?

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/11/21/writing-excuses-5-13-writing-the-second-book/

Key Points: The second published book may be mechanically easier, but emotionally harder. Your first book may not have an ending, which can teach you to start with a resolution for the second book. Your first book may fail because you are thinking too big, and need to find a story with a cohesive beginning and end. Your first book may teach you that "you can do this." To make the second book easier, learn the terms for what you are doing (e.g. POV, third person limited, character). After finishing book one, trying to write a sequel often is hard because you need a new character arc, something new for the character to learn. Coming up with a compelling new storyline after putting the galaxy in peril can be tough. Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. "Stories are good because people you care about are doing things you care about." [Brandon]
( Second system syndrome? )
[Brandon] All right. Zombie John Brown. Writing prompt.
[John] Writing prompt. You have developed some strange thing... your character has developed some strange thing on his nose. So you get three different things that you could do. Somebody comes up and says, "I think that's an alien." Or somebody comes up from the occult and says, "I think I know what that is." Or it's a love story. It develops into a love story. Not with the growth. With somebody else.
( the camel's nose )
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Writing Excuses 5.9: Character Arcs with John Brown

Feb. 28th, 2011 01:24 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.9: Character Arcs with John Brown

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/10/31/writing-excuses-5-9-character-arcs/

Key points: Character arcs are about character's change, growth, learning. Often either as a problem in the plot or to provide a key to unlock the problem in the plot. You can either plan where you want the character to go, or throw an issue at them and see what they learn. Watch for being bored with a character -- often a sign of a failing character arc. Make sure they have highs and lows, pits and dilemmas and tests, learning and decisions.
( Down in the pits )
[Dan] Oh, sweet. Well, all right then. Your characters are trapped on an emotionally-responsive roller coaster that mimics their own emotional arc. How do they use that knowledge to escape?
[Brandon] Oh, that's genius. Okay. Man, you just earned your check.
[Dan] Yay!
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
( Public Service Announcement )
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