Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-47-final-thoughts-on-our-close-reading-series 

 

Key points: Reading for an aspect is exciting. It's nice to have something concrete to tie concepts to. You don't read authors because of what they do poorly, you read them because of what they do well. In your own writing, celebrate what you do well. Try compliment sandwiches. Start with what works, what you like about the book, then go into the critical part, then back up and point out what works, what shouldn't be changed. Try cheerleading critiques, highlight the awesome parts! Analysis! First find the healthiest part, then lift everything else up to that. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 47]

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, there. If you missed out on the very cool special edition of one of our close read books for this season... I'm talking about the Orbit Golden Edition of the Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. This is so beautiful, and we've arranged for you to still get 20% off. Listen. The set includes an exclusive box illustrated by Justin Cherry/Nephelomancer, a signed copy of The Fifth Season, fabric-bound hard cover editions of the trilogy, gilded silver edges, color end paper art which I love, brand-new foil stamped covers, a ribbon bookmark, and an exclusive bonus scene from The Fifth Season. You need to read this scene. All you have to do is visit orbitgoldeditions.com to order and use the code Excuses for 20% off. And to let them know we sent you.

 

[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 47]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Our Final Thoughts on Our Close Reading Series.

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

[Howard] And we need to read more.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I still need to read more. I'm Howard.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dongwon] Yeah. So this is… We've come to the end of this season of Writing Excuses, where we took you all through very detailed readings of five different works that we love, through five different aspects of the craft of writing. We're just going to chat a little bit about how we felt about it. Things that we thought were highlights. Any low lights that came up. But, for me, I had the best time in the world doing this. For each of these books, they're books that I know well, by and large, and in each case, there was a thing that they were doing that I was always so impressed by that I wanted to understand better. So, this was such an opportunity to get some of my favorite people together and force them to talk to me about it. That's, I think, what all these podcasts should be.

[Mary Robinette] We… I mean, we could completely change the format of the podcast forever, and keep doing this. I was also extremely excited because… I don't know if our listeners can tell, but we like each other and enjoy talking to each other.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But, in fact, we do. What was fun for me was that some of the stories I had previously read, and some of them I was coming into for the first time. So it was interesting… Like, the ones that I had already read, This is How You Lose a Time War, I had read some of the C. L. Clark stories, and I had read The Fifth Season. But reading them this way, going back and seeing things, knowing how the story was going to end… Like, I was still emotionally tense through those stories, but I was also… My writer brain was able to dial in, because I was reading them very consciously for specific things. Whereas the two that I hadn't read, going in and reading Ring Shout and thinking, okay, I am reading this and I am specifically looking at how tension is being handled. It didn't break the story for me at all, like, the rest of the story, I was still moved by it. But it caused me to pay more attention to things than I normally do, and that was exciting for me.

[Erin] I have to say, I'm getting, like, a little nostalgia moment…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because I'm remembering when we were sitting, all on the cruise, actually, like, having I think some sort of meal…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

 

[Erin] And, like, now we've actually gone through and done it. I think what I loved about it is that I love talking about random abstract things, but I think sometimes it's nice to have something concrete. So that when you talk about a concept or you're mentioning something, it doesn't just feel like it's floating in the air, it feels like it's attached to a work. So, even if you like these works, you hated the works, at least it's something where you can say, "Oh, I get that is a specific example." It also stopped us from using Star Wars as examples all the time…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which was… It is a personal love of mine.

[Dongwon] I love Star Wars. But it's not that useful as an example, actually, is what I've found over the years of teaching.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it is a movie.

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, getting to talk about actual books that were complex in specific ways, and let us really dive into what is voice, what is worldbuilding, how do you use it? We kind of touched on this, but each of these books could probably, or each of these works could probably have been used to teach any of the subjects. Right? We could… Absolutely could have used Ring Shout to teach character. We could have used the C. L. Clark to teach structure. By God, the structure in his stories…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.

[Dongwon] Right? We could have used Time War to teach worldbuilding. Right? Like, we could have swap them around. So, the puzzle for us as we were planning this series was often, like, where do we put these books?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dongwon] It was a very fun puzzle to solve. I feel really good about how that kind of worked out. But, I'm curious, was there one where you found yourself restricted from talking about an aspect of the book because we were focused on one aspect and you wished we could focus on a different thing?

[Mary Robinette] I really wanted to be able to talk about character when we were in Fifth Season.

[Dongwon] Yeah. That is absolutely true. Yeah.

[Erin] I don't know. I think I liked the mismatch. In fact, I was just thinking that it'd be, like, a fun game to, like, take all of these aspects, think of them as, like, you have, like, a regular D6 six-sided die and then, like, next time I read a book, or in my rereading something, roll and be like, I'm going to pay attention to its use of character this time, or this time I'm going to pay attention to worldbuilding.

[Dongwon] Well, that's a great way to introduce the concept for next season Writing Excuses where we're going to do the same five books… No, I'm kidding [garbled]

[laughter]

[Howard] For… Gosh, 16 years? Writing Excuses started in February of 2008. For many, many years, the conversations that we would have about books were… That we had all read… Were restricted to kind of a narrow overlap of things that everybody had read. We didn't do deep dives on them at all. But, off mic, we would often have really deep conversations, one or two of us, about a book we'd just picked up. Then a third one of us would come into the room and say, "Why aren't we mic-ing this? Why aren't we having this conversation?" The answer is because it's going to take another eight years for us to be clever enough to figure out…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] That if we just give ourselves homework to all read a book, we can do this thing.

[Dongwon] Well… [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] It's not so much giving us homework, it's giving you…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Our dear listeners…

[Howard] Well, yes. We gave our listeners homework. But you gave me homework.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Okay. I had to read… I hadn't read… I'd read Time Wars. I think that may have been the only one of these.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, wow.

[Howard] That I had already… That I already read. From one standpoint, I was like, oh, gosh. They're giving me homework. Never used to have homework.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Used to be I could just talk about Star Wars.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But from another standpoint, to use the rotate the object and see how the shadow changes, from another angle, what this looked like for me is, wait a minute, I get to have these fun conversations that we had off-mic on mic. With friends who love reading and love writing and understand craft in ways that I do and in ways that are way better than I do. I still love being the you're not that smart part of the tagline, because that's still my job. So this close reading series… It's been magical for me.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think that that hits on a really important point for me, which is I'm still relatively new to the podcast as a full-time host, and I have never felt so connected to our audience than I did through this series. Because we ask you guys to read along with us. Right? Knowing that, knowing that we could have these really in-depth conversations because you guys showed up, you did the work, you read the works, and we didn't have to worry about spoilers. It really felt like we were having a conversation with you all in the room with us. Right?

[Mary Robinette] It's one of the things that I've been enjoying on our Patreon…

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Going into the Discord that's attached to it. Because watching… That's one of the places that we can really see the listeners having a conversation and we can engage in it too. That has been a lot of fun watching people… Especially when we did Ti… Well, I guess, as we are recording this, not all of the episodes have released yet. So… But I recall this whole conversation about Time War where people were going, oh, my goodness, I understand what's happening now. My mind is blown. I'm like, yes. This is why we picked this episode.

[Dongwon] Exactly. So, making this, which is largely us talking in a room that you guys get to hear, feel more participatory, feel more open to the audience as well… I don't know. It's been really nice.

[Erin] Yeah. I was thinking about during our last book, we talked about what's in conversation. What books are in conversation with… And it just occurred to me that a podcast is us in conversation with each other, but because we all read the books, and you've read the books, like, we are in true conversation with you. I think of that as like, really beautiful, and I think one of the things I'd love to chat about more… I'm sure we have to go to a break soon, but… Is how do you create that kind of conversation now that you're going forward?

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Erin] If we're not doing this, if we're doing something different, how do you keep that up so that you can have that kind of conversation outside of our podcast?

[Dongwon] One of the best ways to do that is to go to patreon.com/writingexcuses and join our Discord… No.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to talk about that more in depth, but let's take a quick break first, then we'll come back on that.

 

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Erin] My thing of the week this week is an article, making you do the work of reading essays that I really love. I have recommended the essay Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency to, like, everyone I've ever met, and so now I'm going to recommend it to you. It is a great look at how do we make the characters, in a game in this case, but in your writing as well, how do you make them feel like they live when the focus isn't on them from the narrator, the focus isn't on them from the main player? How do you make your NPCs, how do you make your secondary characters feel like they exist? This writer, Meghna Jayanth, she talks about it from the perspective of writing the game 80 Days, but it really works from anything that you're doing, thinking about how do you not center your protagonist to the point that it feels like all of the other characters are just paper dolls waiting to be played with by them, and instead, make them feel like real living people that your protagonist gets a chance to hang around with. So, check out the essay Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency. It has lots of pictures in it. So, it's fun, it's cool, and you should learn from it.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, the thing that you were talking about, Erin, is actually homework that I assign to my short story cohorts sometimes. I will give them a short story to read. Sometimes it is as simple as saying why don't you all subscribe to Sunday Morning Transport or to Uncanny? So that you get reminders, so that your all reading the same story at the same time. But you can do this with just a group of friends. Yes, does this sound like a book club? Yes. Secretly.

[Dongwon] Was book club the thing we keep accidentally calling this series internally? Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But, the difference is that, as you will hear about later in the season, when we have a conversation with Gabriella from DIY MFA, one of the things that you can do is to do this kind of deep read and read specifically for anything. So if you have a group of friends and you're like, hey, let's read a book, but let's read specifically for how they're handling voice. Or maybe even assigned, if you want to assign each other homework, you can be like I'm going to read for voice, and someone else can be like I'm going to read for tension. And just go in and read intentionally. But still reading for fun.

[Dongwon] Yeah. That's such a cool idea. Like, I could see each of us having done that with this. A different way to structure it is each of us have taken an aspect and recorded an episode per book on each aspect. But… Not to rebuild this season as were wrapping it up…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] That would have been a fun way to do it.

 

[Howard] I just realized that one of the things that Sandra and I love most doing together is TV time where we're just watching anything together, but we're both very writerly, very artsy, in the way we approach things. One or the other of us will often grab the remote and say, nope. Stop. I gotta rewind this because this thing… Just look at what they did with the light, or the color, or the dialogue, or the whatever. We deconstruct it on the fly, and you can't do that in the movie theater, and you can't do that with friends who don't get why you're doing it. You only get to do it with your friends who love taking art apart in order to be able to make their own art better.

[Mary Robinette] When we talk about taking art apart, frequently what we're talking about is nitpicking and being like, oh. They did this. I'm so annoyed about that. Why are all of these women in the Regency wearing spandex gloves? But I was talking to… Spandex doesn't exist yet, Erin.

[Laughter]

[Erin] I looked at my hands like what is wrong with them?

[Mary Robinette] But I was… I took this class by Tobias [Bechel?] called Finding Your Spark. One of the things that he said in it, which so resonated with me, and is what we were doing with this whole series. He said you don't read authors because of what they do poorly.

[Dongwon] Yeah

[Mary Robinette] You read them because of what they do well. So, example that I have of this, it's something that most of you have read, maybe, or at least are aware of. Nobody reads Isaac Asimov for his characterization…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Or his portrayal of women. Like, that is not why you read him. At all. But you do still read him. And you, as a writer, there's… Well, some of you still read him.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] His career seems fine.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Let's put it that way. When you do read him, it is not for those things, is for the ideas, it is for other things. And with your own writing, we tend to discount the things that we do well because those are easy for us, and we think easy is not valuable. And it's not that you shouldn't push, but when you're reading something, when you're doing one of these deep reads, when you're watching something in… A fun way to look at it is to celebrate, like, what are they doing really well. I'll do that even when I'm going to something that is really terrible. I try to find at least one thing… This is some live theater that I'm thinking of very specifically…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But at least one thing that they've done well.

[Dongwon] It's… I think more of my job than people realize is sitting authors down and telling them what they're doing well. Right? I think it's hard to see when you're in it sometimes. So I view a lot of my job as being like, hey. You're really good at this part of this. You are doing this really well. Yes, do we need to work on X, Y, and Z? Sure. But there's all this other stuff. Right? There's a form of critique feedback called the compliment sandwich…

[Mary Robinette] I call… Yeah, go on.

[Dongwon] What do you call it?

[Mary Robinette] I just realized, the moment I heard sandwich, I realized we're talking about two different things. So…

[Dongwon] We are talking about two slightly different things, but go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] No. Talk about yours first, and then…

[Dongwon] Okay. Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Do you want a segue into that more neatly, or…

[Howard] This is fun. Our listeners love this stuff.

[Laughter]

[Howard] This is compliment sandwich Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] Carry on.

 

[Dongwon] The compliment sandwich. um… The compliment sandwich is very, very important. And that… Whenever I see somebody skip the bun as it were, which is you start talking about what works about the book, what you liked about the book, then you go into the critical part, and then you come back out and you explain again. Yes. Also remember these are the things that work, don't change these things. Make sure that that stays. Is what people don't understand about why that structure's really important. I think a lot of people are, like, yeah, yeah, compliments. Let me get to the hard stuff, the work that needs to be done. I think both editors can feel that way and authors can feel that way. But from my perspective, the compliment part is an alignment exercise. It gets me making sure that I understand the vision of what you're trying to accomplish. There are many times where I've done the compliment sandwich, and the author's like, wait, wait. Nope. You've misunderstood. This is what I'm trying to do. Right? Like, or you haven't read this part yet, because I only sent you the first 10,000 words. Here's what's happens in acts two, three, and four. Right? So that exercise of understanding how the parts of this work is really important both for me as an editor, but also for you as a writer. I encourage you to as much as possible when you're reading… Engaging with art that you're interested in, think about what does work about it as much as you think about what doesn't. That will give you some of the tools to look at your own work and be like, damn, that was a good sentence. I like this character arc. Sure, do I need to fix the villain? Absolutely. But this part is working, let's preserve that and [garbled]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, the type of thing that I was talking about is very similar, but it's a critique that's called a cheerleading critique. You… I had this idea that when you're critiquing, and we're talking about critiquing as opposed to…

[Howard] As opposed to critical reading.

[Mary Robinette] As opposed to critical reading. But in… I ask usually people to tell me about things that are awesome, boring, confused, or disbelief. But with a cheerleading one…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I only want them to tell me awesome. And that is so important for writers to know. Frequently, they do not know what they are doing well. We had a… I ran into one of the authors and I won't betray which one, but one of the authors that we've been talking about this season. Ran into them at a convention, and one of the things that they said was, thank you. I've never had anyone talk about my work this way.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, oh, no. But they just… It was so meaningful to them…

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To hear someone get really critical, really like in the how is this working? Why is this doing? They'd never heard anyone discuss their work in that way before. That's something that you can set up for yourselves with a critique group, or the type of reading that you're doing.

[Howard] I would say analytical instead of critical, even though the word critical is the right word.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Because analysis is less value laden.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] I love analysis. We took form and analysis classes for music in college, and I came out of some of those classes wishing that I could hang out with this group of people once a week and dissect a piece of music together again. And I just now remembered that wish as I'm realizing, oh. I'm kind of getting to do that with a new group of friends and a completely new medium, and it doesn't have music in it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I'm okay, because I love words too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I think there's something really nice about figuring out, also, like, how sometimes the things that you maybe need to work on are themselves complements of things that you've done well.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] In the way that it is not maybe until you are listening to a particularly amazing piece of music that you realize that your speaker system could be better.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] You see what I mean? But until then, you're like, whatever.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] But then you're like, oh, wow. Like, so sometimes it's like I love the characters so much that, like, I really wanted them to experience more tension, because I just wanted to see how they would deal with that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And really, celebrating that, like a lot of times, there is some gem that is shining so brightly that it's just that we want the rest of it to shine as brightly as that.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to… The other parts are not holding it down it's just that we just want to make the entire thing shiny and bright.

 

[Mary Robinette] Have I told you about my re-wilding of the landscapers experience?

[Dongwon] A little bit, but go on. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, it has… Is changing the way I'm approaching revision. Because we've got this property, it's got a lot of invasive species on it, so we are re-wilding it. We're pulling out the invasive species, replanting it with native species or species that are at least are not poisonous. And so one of the things that I expected was that they would start in the section that was filled with privet hedge and English ivy. The landscapers said no. We want to start in the healthiest part of the landscape, because that tells you what the rest of the landscape is supposed to look like. I found that when I'm… Now, when I'm looking at my manuscripts, that I look at, okay, what is the healthiest part of it, what am I trying to support, what am I trying to nurture? When I'm reading other people's, I'm like, what is the healthiest part of this? What is this doing really, really well? Let's lean into that, let's play to those strengths. How can we lift everything else up so that it's doing this too? How can we get that better sound system? How can we pull up the English ivy?

[Dongwon] Yeah. What I love about this is you need to learn what the good version of this thing is. The thing that you're trying to accomplish, need to have a sense of what the healthy version is, what the accomplished version is. The only way to do that is by encountering it in other people's books.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dongwon] That's where you start. You start by reading. If you want to write, you have to read, and you have to love reading, and you have to be excited about the category that you're in. Because, again, it's a conversation. If you want to participate in the conversation, you need to know where it came from. Now I'm not saying you need to have read the entire canon. You don't need to read X, Y, Z work. But what you need to do is understand why you're excited to write this thing. Why do you want to write it? What's the conversation you're trying to start, to participate in, to evolve?

[Howard] You're using the word conversation… If you want to participate in a conversation, you have to spend a lot of time listening.

[Dongwon] Yes.

[Howard] If all you do is talk, it's not a conversation, you're lecturing a group of people who already know more about what you're trying to say then you do.

 

[Dongwon] On that note, I have a little bit of homework for you that's going to help you start this conversation, participate in it, and be an active participant in the work that you're trying to create. So, what I want you to do… This may not be surprising, given the conversation that we had, but what I want you to do is get a group of friends together and pick a book you love to discuss and unpack what makes the book tick. Then I want you to find us on Instagram and tell us what book you picked and how that conversation went.

 

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/17/17-29-the-job-of-dialogue/

 

Key points: What is the job of dialogue? Conversation has no real purpose or direction. Dialogue, however, needs to move the story forward, provide information, and help with characterization. It also has authorial intent, the reason the author put it there, and character intent, why the character is saying these things. Another part is to be entertaining, funny, to reward the reader for reading. It conveys information, but we mask that to keep the reader from noticing. Beware the unmasked info dump! Evoke an emotional response. Transition. Questions and answers. Sometimes you need to cut dialogue, because it doesn't move the story forward.

 

[Season 17, Episode 29]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Episode Two of our Dialogue Masterclass, The Job of Dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And I wish I sounded as good as Maurice.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] Oh, he sounds good when he's laughing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's Howard.

 

[Dan] So, this week we're going to talk about the job of dialogue. So, Maurice, I'm just going to ask you, what is the job of dialogue?

[Maurice] So, first off, I mean, there's a difference between dialogue and conversation. Right? I think we touched on this last week with the whole idea of just recording a conversation between folks, between friends, family, whatever. When you listen to a conversation, I mean, a conversation is just this… Well, it's people who are in each other's presence, they're enjoying each other's company, hopefully, but it's going all over the place. There's no real purpose or direction to it, it's… It's a conversation. It's an exchange of ideas. Versus dialogue. Dialogue has a very specific purpose in writing and in telling a story. So the way I look at it is that whenever I'm coming to a scene and dialogue's involved, it's like, all right, I'm keeping in mind, I need to be moving the story forward, I need to be providing information, and I need to be honing in on characterization of the people who are engaged in this conversation or in the dialogue. All right. So I see those as the… Those three things, that's the actual job of dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Within that, there's… Something that I'm going to be talking about a couple of times throughout this course, which is the area of intention. The area of intention is, like, why the dialogue is, why the spoken line is happening. This goes for, like, actually verbal and unspoken dialogue. But whenever someone is talking, there's a reason they're saying the thing. Every piece of dialogue has two areas of intention. There's the authorial area of intention, the reason the author needs it to happen, and there's the character area of intention, which is why the character is saying the thing. So in this episode, what we're focusing on is the authorial area of intention, that's why is this here and what loadbearing thing is it doing for us.

[Howard] As often as not, when I'm writing a portion of the job of the dialogue is to be entertaining. It needs to be funny, it needs to be witty, it needs to be pithy. It's… It has to do more than just advance the story and inform us about who the characters are and what they want or don't want and where conflicts are and… I mean, that's a huge load. That's… That's… That's some seriously heavy lifting, but then, for my own part, I have to make sure that the reader feels rewarded for reading some of these lines of dialogue, that the banter is entertaining.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a lot of what you're doing is… Like, I joke, and it's not a joke, that everything that happens in a story is exposition because all of it is… It's conveying information and sometimes that information is about the tone, sometimes that information is about the characters, but it's all conveying information. Part of our job is to mask that and to use a bunch of different techniques so that the reader doesn't notice that. So, banter, keeping them entertained in whatever form, whether that's through tension or humor, all of that is to mask the fact that I'm giving you a piece of information that you need in order to understand what happens next.

[Maurice] So, yeah, cool. I keep remembering, because there's always this conversation like, oh, wow, in terms of providing that information, it's like… We see a lot of bad examples of that, because… All right, let me confess. First off, I'm a TV junkie.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Particularly of like police procedurals. I just love police procedurals. So, CSI is like one of my comfort watching things. Actually, I'm watching… What am I watching right now? Assignment Witness, which is basically a British version of CSI.

[Mary Robinette] Aha.

[Dan] That's cool.

[Maurice] But it's all… But you see all of the best… And by best, I mean worst examples of this providing information. Right? Because you have these scientists, and they are explaining these tests out loud. Right? But they're explaining it to their colleagues who hopefully took the same classes and understand the same things that is going on. That's a poor mask.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Maurice] Of providing information, that's a poor mask of info dumping. So I often get that question. It's like, "Oh, when is info dumping bad?" I'm like, "Well, bad isn't quite the word we're looking for." Right? Because we need the information as readers, as viewers. We need that information. It's how do you mask that because one of my favorite books is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is literally one big info dump. The whole book is just one big info dump. But we don't care, because, what Howard said, because it's entertaining. Right? So you don't really notice, oh, he's just… It's literally an encyclopedia giving us information all the time.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was just watching… We've been re-watching CBS Elementary. The Sherlock Holmes with Johnny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. There was a moment where Johnny Lee Miller asks a scientist on screen, says, "Tell Watson what you told me about DNA profiles." The old scientist says, "I would be happy to. But I think I need to ground you first in a bit of molecular cellular biology." At which point Holmes says, "Hold that thought a moment," and cuts the connection and turns to Watson and says, "He can get kind of long-winded." I love that moment because it tells us, yes, there's a whole bunch of science here, and we're going to hand wave it and just arrive at the conclusion. There's this tension release where the old guy starts talking and you think, "Oh, please, no. This is going to be boring, and I want to hear Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu talk." Then he disconnects…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And there's a moment of joy as the old guy gets cut off.

[Maurice] Great.

 

[Dan] Yeah. Those are, I think, another kind of entertaining. In addition to all of the loadbearing informational properties that dialogue has, sometimes it's funny, like Howard said. Sometimes it needs to be frightening or it needs to be triumphant or bad ass or something where we are evoking a specific emotional response. Because that's the part of the story where we want the audience to feel a certain way. We want them to be quoting a particular line because it's so good. Yeah. All of these different kinds of entertainment.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes the job is to transition us into another part of the story. So, sometimes it's like this is the line of dialogue where everything shifts. It's representing the moment when a character changes their mind. Or the moment when I need the reader to understand that this is not the story that they thought it was. Not quite a reveal, but it's a… Like, oh, no, no. Reader, just remember this looks like we're all having a good time, but you are actually in a horror story.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Which is most of [garbled]

 

[Dan] So, speaking of transitions, let's transition into our book of the week. Which, this week, Mary Robinette, is you. You were going to tell us about The Murder of Mr. Wickham.

[Mary Robinette] So. The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray. This is a book that was basically written for me. It is a Jane Austen murder mystery. By that I mean Claudia Gray has taken all of the Jane Austen main characters and their love interests. They're all married now, and brought them to a single house party for reasons that makes contextual sense. Then, Mr. Wickham shows up, and someone kills the guy. It's a good murder mystery, it's a good Austen pastiche, it has a romance between two new characters that are the children of some of your beloved characters. It's so good. The reason that I brought it up particularly for this is that as a murder mystery, every line of dialogue contains a potential clue. So, the authorial area of intention there, the amount of loadbearing that the dialogue is doing, is so good. They also all sound like Austenian characters, they all sound like distinct characters. Then, kind of one of the other things that I love about it is the absence of a thing that we have not yet talked about, which is maid-and-butler dialogue, or, we haven't talked about it by name, which is basically where a maid and a butler stand around and have a conversation about things that they both know about only so that the audience will also know about this thing. So… There's none of that in this, even though there are in fact maids and butlers and they do speak. It's great. It's just a good read. I really enjoyed it a lot. So that's The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray.

[Dan] That's awesome. I remember when she told me about that book, and I said, "Please make sure you send that to Mary Robinette." She said, "I already did. Don't worry." So, that's great.

 

[Dan] So, yeah, let's talk some more about the job of dialogue. One of the things that we have referred to, but haven't really gone into in detail is how dialogue can move the story forward. We said that's not the only thing it has to do, but that is one of the things it has to do. How do we make sure that our dialogue is actually advancing the story instead of just spinning wheels?

[Maurice] Right. So, one of the things that I think about is this whole idea of like dialogue is kind of like conversation that confronts conflict. Right? So one of the things that we do as… Actually, Mary Robinette has got me thrown off, because I'm still thinking about this whole idea of areas of intent, so let me see if I can weave these two ideas together. Right? So we have this whole idea as an author each conversation has to confront conflict that's either in that scene or in the overarching narrative. Right? But then as a character, dialogue's a tool that they used to achieve their objective. Which still serves the authorial intent, but on the character level, dialogue becomes a tool which they are trying to work out what it is they're trying to seek, to complete their arc. So I've… Yeah. Sorry, Mary Robinette, you just… I'm like, "Oh, I've got all these things going on in my head." So you talk right now while I get all this stuff untangled.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. This is why I love hearing these podcasts because every time, I also have the oh, yeah. Yeah, I had this whole unpacking thing when you were talking earlier, and wrote a ton of notes. So when we're talking about moving the story forward, basically stories… We've talked about this in other episodes, that stories are a series of questions that you're answering for the reader. Some of them are things where the reader supplies their answer based on the information you've given them, and some of them are here's the next piece of information you need. So it's this causal event chain that's happening. So, one of the things that dialogue can do as part of that moving forward is that it can either give the reader a piece of information that they need or it can raise a question for the reader that creates tension that causes them to want to keep going. There's also the entertaining aspect, which is just this is funny. Which is part of like keeping them engaged as other things are happening. But if it's just funny, eventually they will opt out. Because they'll get frustrated that there's no forward momentum. So the two things that are moving the story forward are providing information or providing a question. Raising a question.

 

[Maurice] Yeah. Sorry. There is a… You just reminded me of that. So I think… There's a lot of times when I'm in the act… I'm going to call it the Howard mode, where I have my two characters and their doing this rapid banter, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. There comes a point where I realize, usually in editing, that I've just fallen in love with these characters.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] And I just wanted to hear them talk.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Maurice] So then I have to ask myself, does this dialogue scene, does this actually move the story forward or have I just fallen in love with their voices and I just want to keep that going and is it actually necessary to the story?

[Howard] That's what we call Brandon mode or Mary Robinette mode which is to I step in now and cut off Howard?

[Laughter]

[Howard] I love the idea of conversation, of dialogue being inherently funny, because the compression algorithm that we used put a conversation from real life into dialogue in a book breaks some of the rules that we implicitly understand about the way that people converse. For instance, information should not flow that quickly from a conversation. But in dialogue in a book, it can flow that quickly. That's a thing, any time you are breaking a rule, whether it's throwing a crusk… Cuss word or falling into a manhole or whatever, there's the opportunity for humor. So the very fact that we compress conversations into dialogue can be a source of humor just because of the pacing. I love that, and I exploit it a lot.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You just also reminded me of a thing that I should've mentioned when we were talking about moving the story forward with the information or the questions, is that sometimes the thing that moves the story forward is achieving a goal. When you're doing that compression that you're talking about, it's… Part of it is compressing it to the point where it is serving that need. Whichever needed is that you've pegged as this is the thing that the loadbearing thing that this piece of dialogue is doing. A conversational… Like, not just a line of dialogue, but a dialogue that is ongoing, will serve multiple functions. Each individual line may serve one or more. But it is this constant pull-through and you use whatever carrot you can pull the reader through.

[Howard] Yeah. In the novella Shafter's Shifters and the Chassis of Chance, which is probably going to hit Kindle in June or July, there's an interview scene where it could have been hugely info dumpy. One of the characters, yes, this is a Howard Taylor thing. "Tell us what happened," said Judd. "Start at the beginning." "No," said Chris. "I'll start with what's important. And then you'll tell me something important, and will keep taking turns until we run out of important things to say." Everyone in the room was like, "Oh, that seems really smart." It sets up this enter pattern of reveal after reveal after reveal. The reveals include some lies, which we find out to be lies later. But it fixed a huge pacing problem that I had in the first two drafts of the scene which is, no, I can't let this guy tell the story from the beginning. That breaks everything.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. That's something I'm struggling with in a book right now, which is all about… Or one of the main functions of the magic system is memory loss. Which meant that I had three different points in the second half of the book where a character had to reexplain everything to a character who should already have known it. It just got so boring. I had to find different ways to get around that or to have it happen offscreen or to do compressions or abridgments so that we weren't bored recapping the book 4 times.

 

[Dan] Anyway, let's end with our homework and you can probably guess what that homework is. Mary Robinette, what is it?

[Mary Robinette] So. Your homework is about area of intention. I want you to do two things. That's right, this is a two-part homework. One is to grab a book or a movie or whatever that you really enjoy. Or, it's okay if you do it was something that you don't enjoy, because this may break it slightly. Identify the area of intention for the lines of dialogue. So what you're doing is, you're looking at how an author has… Another author has done this. Because it's often easier to identify with someone else's work. Like, why do you think each line is there. Then, the other thing that I want you to do is I want you to go back to that transcript that Maurice had us do previously. I want you to decide an authorial area of intention for yourself. Like, if I were going to have this happen, what is my intention for this scene. I want you to cut every line of dialogue that does not serve your authorial area of intention.

[Dan] Sounds good. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/06/28/15-26-taking-the-chance-with-david-weber/

 

Key points: Taking the chance, taking risks, is the only way to be successful. "He who will not risk cannot win." To succeed, take the risk of failing. If you don't submit, you can't make a sale. Be a storyteller. At some point, it will turn into work. Keep going. When you can't get the platonic ideal book on the page, what do you do? Write the damn book. Learn from it. Characterization is critical. You have to be you. Write the story that interests you. Choose your verbs wisely. Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. Sentences are what you build books out of. Characters are what stories are about, sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, episode 26.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Taking the Chance, with David Weber.

[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, David Weber. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us.

[David] Thank you for inviting me.

[Brandon] David Weber is one of the best-selling science fiction writers of all time, so we are super excited to have him. We are alive again at SpikeCon.

[Whoo! Applause!]

 

[Brandon] So, this topic was one that you suggested, David. The idea of taking the chance, meaning taking risks with your writing. What made you want to do this topic?

[David] Well, it's not just taking risks with your writing once you're an established writer. I cannot tell you how many people I've encountered who I think could have been successful writers, except that they were afraid to take the chance of failing at something that they had dreamed about. I could have been published easily 10 years earlier than I was if I hadn't kept finding excuses to do other things instead. That means I've been publishing for 30 years and I've lost a third of the time that I could have been published at this point. I mentioned in the preshow when I was talking to our hosts that there's a quote from John Paul Jones which has become increasingly important to me over the years, and it has nothing to do with not giving up the ship. But Jones said that, "It seems to be a law inflexible unto itself that he who will not risk cannot win." So if you don't take the risk of failing as a writer, you can never succeed as a writer. So you're sitting there, and you have this dream that says I could be a writer. Perhaps you could. But if you keep saying I could be a writer long enough, one day you wake up and it's turned into I could have been a writer, but the opportunity is gone now. Okay? So if you want to write, you have got to take the chance of being rejected, and possibly being rejected over and over again, until you find the right first reader, the right publisher that says, "Oh. I could do this." Okay? You have to remember while you're doing this, you control, or writers in general control a resource that publishers have to have. Publishers exist to publish. That means they need things to publish. Which means that they are constantly on the lookout for things to publish. Yes, they get a lot of dreck and there's… the first readers pile is the slush pile, and people read it and they go, "Oh, my God." I actually know of one book that was submitted on brown paper written in purple crayon. Okay? You don't get read when you do that kind of submission. But if you don't submit, you cannot possibly make a sale. I cannot emphasize… Over emphasize how important it is to be willing to do that. The other thing that I think you need to bear in mind is you can learn to write better with editorial support and with the practice. You can learn to write better. But what you have to be to make it work in this business is a storyteller. You have to have that bug. You can increase the skill with which you exercise that need to be a storyteller. But that's a critical element. If you don't feel that inside, if you don't feel the story that needs… That's growing that needs to come out, then you don't need to try and be an author. Because you're going to be fighting your own nature the entire time that you're trying to write a story. Unless that is what it is your nature to be. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, storytellers have to tell stories. That's certainly true in my case.

 

[Brandon] Howard, you had something you wanted to say?

[Howard] Yeah. I was just going to… I like the John Paul Jones quote. We've had the opportunity to visit NASA a couple of times. They have that famous slogan, failure is not an option. Because there are times at which, boy, you just… You can't allow yourself to fail. I created a maxim within my own universe, which is "Failure is not an option. It's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."

[David] Yeah.

[Howard] The idea there… I mean, that doesn't get you past the John Paul Jones quote, which is that you have to take that chance in the first place. But I am always reminding myself that I am going to fail. It's just gonna happen. All I get to choose is whether or not I learn from it and whether I let myself quit.

[David] Well, NASA's failure is not an option stands on the shoulders of every single thing they did that failed as they were doing the engineering, when they were developing…

[Howard] They blew up so many rockets.

[Laughter]

[David] Absolutely. Okay? Failure is not an option means that ultimately we must succeed. It doesn't mean that we won't have the occasional catastrophe along the way. That we won't have Columbia. That we won't have…

[Dan] But, to your point about the whole premise of this episode, if NASA had never done anything that could have failed, they never would have gotten into orbit, they never would have gotten on the moon.

[David] Exactly.

[Dan] They had to be willing to take those risks and screw up horribly in order to achieve what they eventually have achieved.

 

[David] That's absolutely true. It's… Okay. No task worth doing springs fully blown and fully performed from the brow of Zeus. Okay? You have to go out there and make it work. All right? Now, most of the successful writers that I know would write whether anyone was buying their work or not. We have to do it. That's part of that storytelling bug that I was talking about. Okay? Whether we're writing for our own entertainment, our family's entertainment, or just because, my God, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep, I gotta do some more writing, we write. If you don't have that kind of… Robert Asprin once said, and Robert and I did not necessarily see together on all things…

[Laughter]

[David] But he said, "Successful authors are like rats. If we don't wear our fingers down on the keyboard every day, our fangs grow through our brains and kill us.

[Laughter]

[David] Okay? It's still a valid metaphor, even though I use voice recognition software when I write now. But it's true. If you… I have this need to be crafting stories. Okay? Now, for the last year or so, I haven't been, and that's because I face planted into a cement floor in Atlanta the day before Dragon Con and gave myself a concussion, broke my nose into places, stitches inside my mouth, the whole 9 yards. It has taken me effectively a year to recover from the concussion status to where I am once again really writing. Okay? It's been a real trial for me and for people who were expecting books from me and everything else, but sometimes, the need to tell stories is sort of temporarily stymied by the fact that, you know what, my brain's not working.

[Howard] One of the first things that I learned about… I'm a web cartoonist, and one of the first things I learned in this regard was when I still had a day job, early 2000's, we would take… I was in the software industry. We'd take two weeks off around Christmas, because kind of the whole industry wound down. For that two weeks, I told myself my Christmas present to me is that I'm going to pretend I'm a cartoonist full-time. I'm just going to do this. I would tell my plan to people. They're like, "You're going to pretend to have a job over Christmas?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Okay, one, you're a broken human, and, two, what does your family think?" What I found is those are some of my fondest memories of this. Yeah. Storyteller gotta stug… Gotta story tell."

 

[David] There comes a time, in a given project or whatever, where it turns into work. Where you have to drive yourself to it. You have to do that. I have, in every book, I have what I call the chapter. That's the point at which I say, "This entire book is dreck. What was I thinking? Oh, my God, I can't get this to come together." The only thing that I can do is just keep grinding it out and saying, "Boy, this is sucky." Okay, that kind of thing? Then, when I get to the final edit, I can't identify the chapter.

[Howard] I was going to say, you've refined your process to the point that only happens for one chapter doing a project?

[Laughter]

[David] No, that's… Pretty much, yeah. You know. It's this kind of thing.

[Howard] Winning.

[David] Yeah.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and… Let's stop for a book of the week, then we'll get back to it.

[David] Okay.

[Brandon] You have our book, or books of the week, this week.

[David] I have two. One is The Gordian Protocol, which came out in May, with Jacob Holo. Who is a BMW engineer in an alternate universe. I think that our backgrounds, the synergy was really, really good. He's got three or four self published novels out. This will be his first traditionally published novel. Is his first traditionally published novel. This was not one of the two I was thinking about, but he has just handed me the draft of the Valkyrie Protocol, which is the sequel. It's pretty much ready to go. We have to wait for him to get a hiatus in that real-life job to do a little tweaking that I pointed out to him. The other book that I've just handed in is the sequel to Out Of the Dark, which, yes, is the one with vampires in it. This one is rather cleverly titled Into the Light. I did it with Chris Kennedy, of the Four Horsemen universe and whatnot. He was my co-author on it. I'm really pleased with the way that it worked out. The vampires are a little flamboozled when they begin finding out some things about their own past and their own existence that neither they nor the earlier writers who didn't like the vampires didn't know. Okay? For… I won't go any deeper into it than that. But suffice it to say, that Vlad Tepes was a tiny bit mistaken about exactly how and what he became when he became it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

 

[Brandon] This topic's very interesting to me, because I work with a lot of aspiring writers. I teach at the University, and of course the podcast, and things like this. Looking back at myself when I was first making the choice to start writing, one of the things that I think holds back new writers, and I've kind of found some language that I can describe this more recently, is that, for me, there was this beautiful book I imagine somewhere out in the aether, right? It was like the Platonic ideal of a book. As, having read for many years, and sitting down to write the first time, it was like I knew this book was out there, but then my crude fingers could not get that book on the page. It was really frustrating to me. Because it felt like… It wasn't fear that I think stopped me, it was this sense that I was taking something beautiful and I was making it something flawed and terrible, because my skill wasn't good enough. I've found multiple other aspiring writers that kind of have this same attitude that… Less fear, more like, I guess I must not have done enough worldbuilding or I must not have thought it through enough, because this beautiful story, I just can't make it come out on the page.

[David] Well, that's…

[Brandon] So, I guess my question to you is strategies for writers who are having trouble making that transition, taking that chance, giving themselves permission to fail. What are some strategies that people could use to do that?

[David] Write the damn book.

[Laughter]

[David] And when you're done, if it's not what you thought you were going to come up with, file it under this was a learning experience, these are the things that I can see that I did wrong. Do those right in the next book. I have an entire file cabinet at home that has probably 300 short stories in it, that were written solely because they were things that I wanted to play with as a writer. How was I going to describe this? How was I going to handle this bit of characterization? You… Basically, this is one of the crafts that the only way you can learn to do it is to do it. There's not a credential program somewhere that is going to say, "Okay. Now you have a diploma. You'll go out there and be a successful writer." Okay? There are all kinds of courses that you can take and training that you can seek that will help you, give you tools that you might not have otherwise. But there's nobody out there who can teach you how to be a writer. Anybody who says we will teach you how to be a writer is taking your money. Okay? Because what they can do is they can teach you how they are a writer. They can teach you how these three guys over here are writers. They can't teach you how you're a writer. Okay? Characterization. Characterization is a critical component of any story you're going to tell. How do you build a character? Okay? One of the things that I do when I'm doing writing workshops is I rollup a character from one of the role-playing game series. I tell my students, I say, "Okay, this is the character that you have. This is the age, this is the gender, everything else. Go home, and between now and the next session, write me an explanation for why this character exists with these skills, these abilities, these disabilities." They frequently turn it into what is actually a very good short story. Okay? In getting out who this character is. That's the kind of thing that you have to be able to build on your own. I can give you that assignment, and tell you to go home and do it. But I can't say to you, the first way that you should do it is by doing thus and so, because the best that you could learn from that is how I do it. What makes a writer succeed is that writer's voice. You can take exactly the same story, the exact same plot, even the exact same characters by name. Okay? And have two different writers do the story. You have two totally different stories. Okay?

[Brandon] Absolutely.

 

[David] One of them is going to be the way that you tell the story, and one of them is going to be the way that somebody else tells the story. What makes you a successful writer is your voice finding its audience. You cannot do that trying to be someone else. You have to be you.

[Dan] Yeah. I… Finding that voice of your own is critical and it is difficult. I like to think about this in terms of Ender's Game. Because they had the kids in the Battle School, and they would fight against each other. Then there's this really critical scene towards the end of it, where Bean stands up in the lunch room and says, "Guys. We are doing the same strategies over and over and over. We will never learn anything new until we give ourselves the freedom to fail." That's when they kind of throw out the whole competition system and they say, "Okay. We're going to try this, and it probably will be awful, but we'll learn something from it.

[David] Yeah.

[Dan] So I imagine someone out there listening to this podcast thinking, lack of risk-taking is not my problem, I've tried everything I can think of. It's… I'm just not selling anything. Maybe what you need to do is something ridiculous. Maybe you need to change genre. Maybe you need to try something new. Maybe you need to put that big golden book that Brandon was talking about, that idealized thing that you have in mind, put that on a shelf and write something different.

[David] Okay. Let me tell you one of the most critical things that you should bear in mind as a writer. Write the story that interests you. They say, write what you know. Well, I don't know anybody who's been a starship captain. Okay? I'm sorry, there just aren't too many of them around for me to go interview, that kind of thing. But if there's a type of story that is especially suited to you, that you enjoy reading, etc. Point number one, you're not unique. That means there are other people who enjoy reading that same sort of story. It may not be what's currently hot. But publishers don't necessarily look for what's currently hot. They look for what they expect to be durable. Some publishers do. They want to push you into writing whatever is selling right now. Avoid them. Okay? I'm sorry. But you should. Okay? Now, if they say, "We'll pay you a stack of money to write it," then you can say to yourself, "Okay. They'll pay me a stack of money. I'll get some practice writing, and then I'll be able to go do what I want to do." But, point number one, if you like it, other people will like it. Point number two is if you like it, you will write it better than something you are writing that you feel that you have to write in order to be hot, in order to sell your work. Okay? Point number three is publishers are constantly looking for things to publish. Now, some publishers, for whatever combination of reasons, have blinders on or at least blinkers. Okay? Maybe, it's like, I don't agree with the political philosophy in that book. There's all kinds of idiosyncratic factors that can come into play. But the bottom line is publishers need stuff to publish. Keith Laumer once said that there's not the great unsold novel. There's only the great unwritten novel. Because if you write it, and it is good and you submit it long enough, you will sell it because publishers are looking for things to publish. The editor who discovered Thomas Wolfe… Thomas Wolfe had been rejected about eight or nine dozen times. Okay? Then this guy found… Discovered Thomas Wolfe and made his entire career out of the fact that he was the guy who discovered Thomas Wolfe. He was asked by another editor at one point. The guy said, "I read the first quarter of a million words, and it sucked. Where did you realize…?" He said, "About word 300,000."

[Hmm, hmm, hmm.]

[David] Okay? What I'm saying to you is that eventually, if what you have done is publishable, it will find a buyer. Sometimes, even if what you've done isn't punishable… Publishable. Punishable? There was…

[Laughter]

[David] I've read some horrible books before. But even if what you've written in its current form isn't publishable, sometimes you'll get that little comment back that will tell you why it wasn't. More often than not, you'll get a form letter that says, "I'm sorry. It doesn't really meet our needs at this moment. Etc., etc." But sometimes you'll get that little flicker of a response, and you go, "Oh!" Now, I've been doing this… I've supported myself as a writer since I was 17. I'm 67 this year. So I've been writing… I've been earning my living pushing words around for 50 years. Okay? I've been a published novelist for… Well, we sold the first… I sold the first book in April 1989. So this is the 30th year since I sold the first book. In the course of that time, I like to think I've learned a few things. Okay? There are some very simple things that an author… Okay. For example. Any aspiring writer should realize that the most important word in any sentence is the verb. Choose your verbs wisely. Don't say, "He came quickly to his feet." Say, "He leapt to his feet. He jerked to his feet. He jerked upright." Okay? Never use an -ing verb when you can avoid it, unless you want the voice of what you're writing to be passive. All right? Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. If there's dialogue in a paragraph, start the paragraph with the dialogue and arrange the internal mechanics to make that work. Okay? Don't worry about choppy paragraphs. Worry about where you want to direct the reader's eye. You're setting the cadence, you're creating the rhythm. Maybe you need short choppy sentences and paragraphs at this point. Maybe you need one line paragraphs for emphasis. Okay? Maybe the one line paragraph that you need is, "In the world blew up." Okay? Because you're in the middle of a combat situation, there's a missile incoming, the character you're writing about doesn't know it. There's combat chatter, they're saying, "We're under fire," the character's turning around. Then the world blew up. As a separate paragraph. So think about those sorts of things when you're writing. That's not a question of my telling you to write in my voice. Because these are things that any writer can profit from, in the way that they construct and craft sentences, and sentences are what you build books out of.

[Brandon] We could probably sit here for another hour and listen to this.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because these are excellent points. But we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon. Thank you guys.

[Applause]

[Brandon] I want to thank Mr. Weber for coming on the podcast.

 

[Brandon] Do you have a writing prompt you can give to our listeners?

[David] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[David] Something to do. I would say, go home and create a character. Okay? Not one that you set out to build because this is going to go in your story. But give yourself the assignment of taking a character that you didn't create because you rolled it up or whatever. Then, build in your worldbuilding bible, in your tech bible, whatever, build why that character is who that character is. Because stories are about characters. If the character is not interesting to the reader, the story will go nowhere. If the character is not interesting to you, and understood by you, you will not be able to communicate it to the reader. Your characters will still, if you do this long enough, the characters will evolve in the storytelling, and they should. So, as the life experience of that character is shared with your readers in multiple books, you have to understand how that character changes and incorporate it. Characters are what stories are about. Sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right, and the story will usually succeed. A weak story that is well told will succeed, where a strong story that is weakly told fails.

[Brandon] Awesome. I don't know that we could put it better than that. So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.