wetranscripts | Entries tagged with climax

Writing Excuses 19.51: And That Was That

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

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

[Season 19, Episode 51]

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

[Season 19, Episode 51]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] And That Was That.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

[Erin] Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] It's incredible.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Answered in the next movie.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Just write.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Dan] That's not an emotion.

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

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

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] Accompanying it.

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

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

[Yeah]

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-47-nanowrimo-week-4-climaxes-or-oh-my-god-no

Key Points: Making the turn from opening to closing. Beware the three-quarters mark! Switching modes, from opening questions, introducing new problems, etc. to solving problems and wrapping things up. Treat yourself with candy bar scenes! Switch from yes-but to yes-and. Keep track of the questions and promises from the beginning. Use the MICE Quotient! What's the impossible choice the character faces here? Concentric circles of nested problems! Write yourself notes. Leave notes in square brackets. Ask your writing group what you forgot. Ask yourself what new goals your character has.

[Season 18, Episode 47]

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[Season 18, Episode 47]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 4. The three-quarter mark. Making the turn from opening to closing.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Erin] Today, we're going to talk about, as we move from the opening part, the gallop away of writing through NaNoWriMo, to the end. Which is near. But my question for you all is what is the difference between the way that you write when you're starting something in the way that you write when you're ending something? Because we're going to be transitioning between these two. What are we transitioning between?

[Mary Robinette] So, this is a thing that it took me forever to figure out. Why I always bogged down at the three-quarter mark. I think it's because you're switching modes. So, for me, what I find is at the beginning, I am opening questions, I'm throwing out possibilities, I'm making things worse. I'm introducing new problems. At the end, I have to start solving problems and wrapping things up. It's like the difference between when you arrive on vacation and you've got a bag and you just open it and you pull your stuff out, and then when it's time to go home and you have to somehow get everything back into the suitcase. It never goes back into the suitcase the way you think it's going to. But also, you don't want to. Because you just want to keep pulling things out. So, for me, it's the difference between asking questions, in a general sense, and answering them.

[Erin] That makes sense, but it almost sounds like it's the anticipation of that ending part. So, like, it's not the last… You're not throwing the things in the suitcase yet, but you're figuring out what you're going to wear the day before the last day, and you're like, "Oh, gosh. There's stuff all over this hotel room."

[Chuckles]

[Erin] All over this cruise cabin, and at some point, I'm going to have to do it. It can almost make you not enjoy the thing that you're doing right now, as you're like thinking ahead to what's coming.

[Dan] One of my favorite stories about writing is an interview Neil Gaiman gave when he was writing… I think it was Coraline, it might have been The Graveyard Book… He said that he hit this point in the book where he just hated everything, the book was not working, the characters didn't work, the story was terrible. He called his agent and he said, "I'm sorry, I don't think I can write this. It's awful." She laughed and said, "Oh, you're at the three-quarter's mark aren't you?"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "You call me every single time and give me the same thing. Keep going, you'll be fine." A lot of it is just our tendency to get inside of our own heads and to think I'm almost to the end of the tight rope. Of course, I'm going to fall off these last few feet. No you're not. You're doing great. We have to… Like Mary Robinette said, start answering questions instead of asking them. Asking questions is so easy because we can ask anything we want. That's a problem for future Dan...

[gasp]

[Dan] But then…

[DongWon] Now you're future Dan.

[Dan] Now I'm future Dan, and some jerk asked a bunch of questions. I have to find not only answers, but good answers that make sense and pull all the threads together that I've been carefully laying out and make them into this beautiful, beautiful perfect ending. It can be incredibly overwhelming even if it isn't actually difficult. It's just it looks like it's going to be so hard.

[DongWon] I can't tell you how many times I've had that exact same phone call…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Where I told my writers, "It's okay. You're most of the way through a book. You're two thirds, you're three quarters. It just feels not great sometimes when you're there." I do think it's really interesting to hear from your perspective why that is, that making this turn from rising action, where you get to be introducing things, and now you start having to answer the questions that you've asked. Right? So, I guess my question for you guys is how do you start answering those? Right? Like, how do you start bringing people moving away from each other and having to have them re-intersect, having your villains and your heroes, your antagonists, romantic interests, whatever it is, start actually reaching the point that they're on their collision paths and start colliding?

[Erin] I think that's a great question. But, actually even before that, just to kill this metaphor of the vacation, is that there's something nice about like you've got the outfit that you feel really great in for that particular day, and it's that you want to find something that you can treat yourself with in this part of the book. Like, there's something at the three quarters mark that you get to do, which is that the big huge explosions, whatever those are, whether they're literal explosions or emotional explosions, like those get to happen at this moment. There's a person that I know calls them candy bar scenes. The scenes that you're sort of waiting for that are rewarding yourself. So, if you think, yes, I do have to bring everything back together, but also, this is the part where I get to open and eat this candy, it's a way to keep yourself excited while you answer that question of how you're going to pull everything back together.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a great idea. I've talked before about how there's scenes that I've been waiting to get to. Like, just eager to write. One of the tricks that I use is that I shift the way that I'm handling try-fail cycles. So, up to about this point, I've been doing the yes, they succeed, but something goes wrong. So if you think about yes as a progress towards a goal, and no as progress away from a goal. Reversals. But you think about and as a continuation of motion, and but as a reversal. So, I switch from going yes-but to yes-and. So I start giving my characters bonus actions. Like, we're trying to break into this safe. Does it work? Yes. And there's also this other piece of secret information in the safe that we weren't expecting to find. So I'll give them bonus actions. With the no, it's like are we able… If, instead I'd been like, are we able to get into the safe? No. But in the process of doing that, we accidentally set off the alarms, which is now preventing the cops from getting to us. So we have extra time. So, like that, giving them that tiny bonus action, I start sprinkling those in. So when I'm starting to move to the end and I can sort of feel story bloat happening, I will look at it and be like, "Okay. How can you give them success and a little bit of a bonus action?" If I want to keep the tension going, then I give them no and then a little bit of a bonus action.

[DongWon] I love this idea of candy bar scenes. This plays really well into what you're saying in terms of switching from one model to the yes-and. Because there should be joy as you're heading into the climax. There should be emotional resolution. Right? I was thinking about the Spider-Man into the Spiderverse. Right? Where before you get to the big climactic battle, there are all of these like incredibly heartfelt emotional scenes that lead to this... one of the most triumphant scenes I've ever seen in cinema, when Miles like finally owns his own power and does an incredible jump off the building. That's such an iconic shot. It's like you have these incredible emotional highs in that that come from getting to have… The candy bars of his dad telling him that he loves him and he's proud of him and all these things. Of him believing in himself. Like, we've been going through it with him for so long and so hungry for that, that by the time we get that treat, it's a whole feast. It's such a powerful moment. So, I think when you're thinking about how to go into… We started by talking about why this is also hard. This doesn't make it easy necessarily, but I love this idea of framing it as a treat for you, the writer, a treat for the character, and a treat for the audience. This is the reward we've been hanging out for this entire time.

[Dan] It always helps me to remember that so many writers are also bad at this.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Right? We talk so much about movies. How many action movies have you seen that have two acts, an hour and a half, whatever, of brilliant dialogue and funny stuff, and then Act III is just a gunfight or a chase scene and then it ends? Right? Like, most of the Marvel movies are this way. Incredibly interesting questions in Winter Soldier about the… Where's the line between safety and security? How far can we push this? What are we going to do? What's the answer to this question? At the end, the movie doesn't answer that question, it just has a big fight scene. But then, one of the ones where they did it really well was in Endgame. Where, yes, the 3rd act is a giant fight scene, but it is filled with these candy bar scenes, these character moments. That's when we get on your left, and all the people show up. That's when we get Avengers Assemble that we've been waiting 23 movies for. That's when we get all these little heroic stand up and cheer moments. So it's not just a fight scene, it's more than that.

[Erin] And, at this moment, we're going to take a break. When we come back, more candy.

[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating, but you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turn to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh, I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then, I can save all my decision-making for the stories. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh's chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak ripeness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping. Yeah, that's right. 50WX. 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.

[DongWon] Hey, writers. You're doing a hard and difficult thing. I'm sure at this point it feels like you've been doing it forever, and will be doing it forever. That said, I'm not going to tell you it gets better. I'm here to tell you that you can survive this. Doing hard things is hard. That's okay. Making art should be hard. Especially in the middle of it when you're past the initial rush of starting and you can't yet see the finish line. It's like walking a very long way. When you're doing something like that, I think a lot about the mile markers. For me, they're a blessing and a curse. They remind me of how far I've come, and how far I have to go. For me, surviving any kind of endurance activity requires focusing on the present moment. Thinking about the next step that's in front of me and putting out of my mind how far away the end is. So, sometimes I try to ignore the mile markers. To refuse to acknowledge how long I've been walking and how long I will be walking. But the problem with that is it means I forget to have joy in the process. I forget the mile marker means I've accomplished something great, I walked another mile. I took another step. If the answer is to be truly present in the moment, that also means honoring what it means to have made it this far. So, I'm asking you now to stay in the moment. I want you to celebrate today's word count. Don't focus on the total. Focus on the accomplishment. Focus on what you've done. I know it's hard. I know it's long. But you've come this far, and I'm so proud of you for doing so. You've got this. Keep taking that next step. Keep putting the next word down and keep going. I'll see you at the end.

[Erin] All right. So we are back from our break. I actually want us to answer… Sort of answer a little more the question, DongWon, that you asked earlier before we got distracted. Which was how do you actually start bringing things back in. So you're treating yourself, but you can't treat yourself so much that you forget the story that you're telling. I think one way, actually, is to be more explicit about the questions that you're asking. Because I think what happens in those action movies, Dan, that you were talking about is that sometimes the story gets so excited by the treats that it forgets the questions that it's set up in the first half and actually doesn't think to answer them because there's so much like, "Oh, I've gotta do this," or, "I've gotta get to the ending." But you forget that you left out the questions about safety and security, or these bigger thematic issues. So, I'm curious, how do you keep track of like the promises that you made at the beginning and sort of how to make sure that you're keeping track of them as you move towards the end?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, this is why I lean on the M.I.C.E. Quotient so much. Because it… Usually, there's a fairly clear question-y kind of thing at the beginning and… So, like… I often describe this area of the book is one of the places where the character has to face an impossible choice between their goal and a failure state, or between which goal they're willing to sacrifice in order to obtain the other. So, like, if they're afraid of heights, they're absolutely going to have to go out on a ledge right now. So, I will often look back at what I have at the front of the book. Part of my mechanical process, which is harder doing Nano, but I will often pause at the three quarters point and read through what I've already written. Then keep going with the pieces I'm excited about, knowing that some of the stuff I've written I'm going to discard because it's less exciting to me. So it's less candy. But, for me, those are some things. The other thing, for me, mechanically, is something that Dan taught me, which is the 7 point plot structure. This is the point where I'm going to look at Dan meaningfully…

[Dan] Oh.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was excited for you to just talk about how smart I am for a while.

[Mary Robinette] so, yeah, the 7 point plot structure is specifically… There's the point where, right around in here, the hero finally has all of the tools that they need in order to solve the problem. So, recognizing… It's like, "Oh. This is something that I can do on purpose. I can look for what does my main character need? What are the problems? What is the goal and the failure state?" They're going to have to make that impossible choice. Then, like, what tools… we're coming up on that impossible choice. What tools do I need to have in their hand so that when they get to that choice, they can make it?

[Dan] Yeah. I love to think of these choices specifically as like kind of concentric circles of nested problems. The example that leaps to mind is The Nice Guys. That's probably my favorite detective movie ever. So we start with this kind of outside problem. Here's a weird mystery, we need to solve it. Then, we introduce, here's this detective who's an absolute mess and his daughter doesn't respect him. Then we introduce here's this other detective who the daughter thinks is probably a bad guy. Then we're going to resolve those in opposite order. In the final fight scene, we get Mr.… Is it Haley or Holly, whatever his name is… If you kill that man, I will never speak to you again. Of course, at this point in the movie, that means something coming from this 12-year-old girl. We love her. She's the best character in the story. So he leaves the person alive, and we get… We've tied off that inner circle. He has proved himself a good person to this girl. Then we tie off the next one. Ryan Ghosling succeeds, he saves the day, he doesn't screw up for the first time in his life, and his daughter smiles at him. Okay. We've got that respect. Then, at the very end, we tie off the whole thing, we've solved the mystery, we know what's going on. So if you think about it in those terms, of there's not just one conflict, there's several, you can nest them like that and then solve them in reverse order. That gives your ending a lot of structure that you might not have known was already there.

[DongWon] This really ties into one of the things we were talking about last week when we were discussing raising the stakes, which is introducing multiple threads of stakes. Right? This gives you the opportunity to build to your… Keep increasing the tension and ratcheting things up, even though you're closing things off, because if you do have those nested stakes, if you do have that multiple thread, your heroes can defeat a mini bot, have an emotional resolution. The big conflict is still coming, the last sort of act of this is still playing out, but you have these beats to give you those candy scenes, to give you those points of resolution. The more you have those little things closing off, that is a signal to your audience that, okay, we are in the denoue… Not denouement, but we're making the turn here. Right? We're in the three quarters mark, we're moving towards the big climax here. So giving people those little signals can be a great way to build tension as well.

[Erin] This can be difficult, definitely, all of this during Nano because you're just… You're moving at a pace. You're going really quickly. But one thing that I like doing during a Nano project is actually writing myself notes about what threads might be or what the concentric circles might be as I'm going. So, like, at the end of the day, I might write, like, one note of, like, the coolest thing that I randomly wrote that day. Like, I'll be like, "He [garbled smashed?] the spider."

[Laughter garbled comments]

[Erin] Maybe that doesn't come up again because I forget about it but then when I get to that three quarters mark, I can't do the thing Mary Robinette was talking about, where you read the whole book, but I can read back a page of very slightly incoherent notes, and be like, "Oh, yes, that is a spider…"

[Chuckles]

[Erin] "This is a chance for me to like make that kind of come back."

[DongWon] Erin, I'm not sure about this Spider-Man reboot. I know it's like any other one, but this one might be a little tough for me.

[Dan] I'm hoping this is part of the "the house is full of bees" universe.

[Laughter]

[Erin] It is.

[Mary Robinette] That's why it's so traumatic for him. I do a very similar thing during Nano because, as you say, I do not have time to read through the whole thing at this point. But I… All through the process, I am leaving notes for myself in square brackets. So I will, at this point, just look for any note that I have left for myself to see, like, what great idea I had earlier that I'd totally forgotten about by the time I get to this. Because you've probably left something to yourself, a note someplace. It doesn't make any sense. That's okay. You can still, like, try to fold it in here.

[Erin] Yeah. Even if you haven't left a note to yourself, a lot of times people work collaboratively during Nano so if you have any friends that you're working with in your writing group, you can ask them, "Is there something I was mentioning like 2 weeks ago maybe…"

[Laughter]

[Erin] "That you haven't heard me say anything about recently?" They'll be like, "Yes. There was a spider dead." You're like, "Yes. The time is now."

[DongWon] That's what it was.

[Erin] Spider dead and the bees.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's one of the reasons I find writing group so useful, is because if there's something you forgotten about, they haven't. Because you have asked this intriguing question and they really want to know the answer to it. They'll be like, "Why haven't we ever gotten back to his dad being a spider?" Like, "Oh! Yes! Don't worry, I have some really cool plans."

[DongWon] Again, all of the things we're talking about our big structural tools. Right? These are stuff that will be as useful to you in editing and in drafting when maybe you are trying to hit this insane deadline every week of getting certain words out. But, hopefully, all of this is at least giving you some framework and some ways to think about, "Okay. How am I approaching this week of work?" Right? Now that we're in week 4, how am I thinking about the words I'm going to get down on the page?

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that you can do, particularly as a Nano thing and if you're discovery writing, remember way back when we were talking about objective and super objective, one of the things that will happen to the character is that their goals will shift as they change. So you can look at it now and say what new goal does my character have based on their new understanding of who they are. Because… Like, it still needs to be tied to that super objective and to those initial opening questions, but, like, what is their new solution? That will often help you get towards the final final climactic battle because the new solution is an easier thing to solve. Or their new… Like, oh, this is what I can do. Their new goal is an easier thing to solve then whatever thing they have been continually failing at.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] This sounds like a great point to get some homework.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, this is a trick that I picked up from Dan. Which is, read through what you wrote the session before. Not the day, not everything, but just the session. So if you wrote for 10 minutes, that's all you get to reread. You can make minor edits if you're adding words. But you can't cut anything because it's Nano and every word counts. Use brackets to make notes to yourself about stuff you want to go back and plant earlier, things that you are going to need for your character to solve what's coming up, but you don't have to actually go back and do that right now. You're just going to use this as a launching pad to move on.

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

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We're 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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.6: Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/06/17-6-hitting-reset-without-getting-hit-back/

Key points: How do you reset expectations, break old promises and make new ones, without breaking the trust of the audience? Deliver something different and amazing! Yes-and, keep the old promises and make new ones. No-but, break the old ones, but give them a different wonderful experience. Oh, crap. I broke it, and I don't know how to fix it. Dash through the red paint and hope no one notices. Telegraph the change as much as you can, and accept that you may lose some audience. Long-running shows often do a reset during season breaks. Give them a big moment of character change instead of the big climax they expected. And a Big Can of Worms for resetting your career...

[Season 17, Episode 6]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[Howard] We are talking about resetting expectations. We are talking about breaking promises and then making new ones without actually betraying the trust of the audience. I'm trying to think of a good example of this. It's possible that the good example may be Million-Dollar Baby…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which breaks a promise to the audience, this is a sports movie, by giving us 1/3 act that shows that it's actually a drama about euthanasia, about… It's very dramatic and it's not very sports movie. As we pointed out when we mentioned it earlier, it's got a 90% fresh rating from critics and audiences over at Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe part of this is because it's 15 years old. But it won a lot of awards and it did great grossing in theaters. It was something which broke promises that audiences felt had been made to them, and then delivered something different, but delivered it so well that the majority of the audiences put up with it, they accepted it. They loved it, they came out of the theater… I don't want to say happy, but having experienced something amazing, which is what the filmmaker set out to do. So let's talk about that. What are some examples of things where you feel like the expectations have had to be reset and they did it well?

[Kaela] Well, I think that, personally, for me, there are two main movies that come to mind for this. One is Kung Fu Panda Two, which is one of my favorite movies ever, and How to Train Your Dragon, for different reasons, but both of them playing with expectations. I think Kung Fu Panda Two does multiple things with your expectations. For one, it kind of gives you an origin story again, except it's deeper, it's bigger, it's… You're like, "Whoa, I didn't think I was going to get this from a Kung Fu Panda franchise."

[Laughter]

[Kaela] So I think that's the other thing is, tonally, it's a lot harder, it's a lot… It's more explorative of pain, of destruction, of trauma, of working out issues like… Heavier themes than the first one. Like, the first one had a good heart still, but the second one just really dives in there in a way that you wouldn't have expected. But at the same time, I was not like, "Why is my fun movie sad?" when I watched it. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, they do a great job of acclimatizing you." They start out fun and everything too, but they do a good job of acclimatizing you to this is going to be a bit heavier of a movie. It's still going to be an amazing adventure, but it's going to be more emotionally in-depth than the first one without losing you. I don't know anybody who was lost with Kung Fu Panda Two. I think… I know most people just sat there stunned and in awe instead. Not disappointed.

[Howard] Yeah. I was kind of slack-jawed. I was, "Wait. How did they do that?" Usually, the origin story has to come first, and the two movie is a raising of stakes and a new adventure. But you managed to raise the stakes and give me a new adventure and give me an origin story and it's… Wow. It seems to defy… It seemed to defy the number two.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Which was pretty cool. Meg?

[Megan] I actually have an example of something that did it badly, that raised my expectations and then turned it on its head.

[Howard] Okay.

[Megan] It's the anime Attack on Titan. Which is about humanity fighting to survive when they are constantly attacked by huge giants who are referred to as Titans. We have are very strong protagonist character who's going to get revenge on all the Titans and he's going to save the world. They kill him off, seven episodes in. I was like, "Amazing. I love this. Now his meek sidekick character is going to have to step into his shoes and become the new protagonist and…" No. Protagonist came back, magically, and with magic powers.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And is so magical now. I was like, "Man. I mean, that's cooler now, but… I wish he'd died."

[Laughter]

[You want a ghost?]

[Howard] Why couldn't you stay dead?

[Howard] As I categorized these in our outline, I talk about yes-and, which is a raising of expectations, making new promises while keeping old ones. I feel like yes-and is the easiest expectation reset. Because really, all you're doing is raising the bar. It's not like you've broken promises. No-but is the next one, and that's the actual reset where you had to make promises by breaking earlier ones. Yes, I know I promised you a sports movie, but I'm going to give you an amazing cinematic experience that's going to touch your soul and you wouldn't have come out to the theater to watch this anyway, but it's important and, thank you, everybody, and I'll take my Oscar now. I may be projecting a little bit. The third category is what I call oh, crap. It's the one where I felt like I most often lived in Schlock Mercenary, which is the discovery that you've broken a promise but only after it's too late to fix things. I foreshadowed something and got the technology wrong. Oh, crap. Oh, I can't actually make that work, what do I do instead? So in these three categories, what are our strategies?

[Sandra] I remember watching… Oh, it was decades ago, the making of Indiana Jones. A documentary. So it was like one hour long, the making of show. Listening to Steven Spielberg talk about how when they're writing the scripts, they would actually literally paint themselves into a corner. The opening sequence, Indiana Jones has just run from the boulder, tumbled out, and now he is standing trapped, facing a circle of spears, and there is literally no way to get out. Spielberg basically says, "Well, what you do when you've painted yourself into a corner is quickly duck and dash your way through the red paint and hope that nobody notices the footprints."

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Which is pretty much what that movie does. There may be better tools for this, but honestly, I think of like the Pirates of the Caribbean, I think it's 5, that begins with we're dragging an entire building through the middle of town using a horse-drawn cart.

[Howard] Yes.

[Sandra] It is absolutely completely and totally ridiculous, but basically what it's saying is, "This is the movie you're getting. If you're not on board, just go ahead and leave the theater now." So if you have to reset, any time you have to reset expectations, you're going to lose some audience, you're going to shed some audience who don't make the turn with you. That's just normal and expected. If you need to make the turn, make the turn anyway. Telegraph it is much as you can, so that people are ready for that moment. Okay, we all need to lean to the right. Lean to the right so we can make this turn, and… Now the wheels are back on the ground and we can keep going.

[Howard] There were a lot of turns in that scene where they were dragging the…

[Sandra] The whole building.

[Howard] The bank through the village, and, as I recall, they lost all of the money.

[Sandra] They lost the entire building.

[Howard] In the course of doing that. Yeah. Nice. Good choice of scenes. Nice metaphor. Well played. Bravo.

[Megan] There's something, especially in long-running television series, where, in between seasons, they will reset. So it's always sad sometimes when they come back into a season and these characters are now gone, and, oh, no, the set where they spent all their time, that's different now, they're going to spend all their time here instead. Sometimes writers rooms will literally just reset the world and which characters we have and we just never mention it.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Yeah. That becomes part of the expectation of watching a long-running show. You just kind of know that there's going to be a reset. A…

[Howard] Sorry. Let me interrupt you there. That's the experience of someone who has watched lots of long-running shows.

[Sandra] Right.

[Howard] There are plenty of people who watch a long-running show for the first time and as those things happen, they're like, "No!"

[Yeah]

[Howard] No. Because they feel like they've been betrayed.

[Sandra] An excellent reset to examine is the movie Serenity versus the TV show Firefly. Because you have this TV show that only ran for a very short time and then was canceled. Then you have this gap of time. Then they make a movie. In order to… Which is actually a jump in media. It's… A movie is a different medium than a TV show. Which meant that there are different expectations, different language you can use, and in order to make that shift, they had to do some reset. The one that I… That jarred me the most, was that by the end of the run of the show, the doctor character had kind of become reconciled with the captain character as we're a family. When they start the movie, there's a lot more friction between them and it's more like the beginning of the show than the end of the show. They had to do that reset in order to give the proper arcs to the movie, because the movie had to be able to stand alone as well. So, it jarred me, as a watcher of the show, but once I was like, "Eh," it was not so jarring that I was knocked out and walked away. I was like, "Eh, I don't like that, but… Okay. Take me along for this ride." So…

[Megan] As an example for the no-but resetting expectations, Avatar the Last Airbender did that to me in, like, the third season. Like, the day of black sun. Because they really built up to it. I was watching this is a kid at the time, about 13-ish. I was like, "It's finally happening." We've had seasons building up to this day, they really built up to it in those moments, too, where they're like, "We're really… This is the day we lay siege on the Fire Nation." It's the eclipse that we risked all our lives to find information about in the previous seasons. This is it. It's a two-parter, and everything, so I was like, "Oh, this is finally going down. We're going to take down the Fire Nation." And it doesn't. It does not pan out. They fail the invasion. Because they already knew and were already ready and just gone. They're shocked and terrified, and I was too. I was like, "What?" But what they did was a great job in that, because otherwise it could of felt like really deflative, where you're like, "Well, great. Okay, but what did we spend all this time for, then?" But what they give you is a bunch of other things that you really wanted and needed, like, most particularly, the Zuko storyline carries out the days of black sun two parts. Having Zuko come in and that's the moment where he decides to defect from the Fire Nation and healthy avatars make his new plan to take down his dad. Like, that ends up making the story worthwhile. So, no, I didn't get like the big climax that I was really prepared for, but I got Zuko's storyline intersecting finally and his big moment of character change.

[Howard] You can argue that we set out to defeat the Fire Nation, and we got the victory we didn't expect, which was turning Zuko.

[Megan] Yeah.

[Howard] So, you can make the argument that you actually fulfilled the promise. I think that's part of how you make no-but work is that you take the new thing that you hand them and say, "By the way, this actually fulfills all of your other expectations." Trust… I'm just going to paint it red so that it looks like what you were…

[Giggles]

[Howard] Yeah. [Garbled a neat] trick.

[Howard] We need to have a book of the week. Or a thing of the week. I think Meg's got it.

[Megan] I have a thing of the week that also ties up a lot of the things that we've been talking about in all of the other episodes. This is a Korean drama that I originally watched on WB's drama streaming service, which no longer exists. But you can purchase the show on DVD which I have. The show is called Circle: The Two Worlds or Circle: the Connected Worlds depending on your translation. But every episode is two completely different stories. The first half of the episode takes place in 2017, the other half takes place in the far future. The 2017 story is about these twin brothers who are going to university and there's some strange things going on and they're investigating it. It's a smaller story about brothers investigating a mystery. The future story is high sci-fi, and there's this town where you can only live if there's a chip implanted in your brain that regulates your emotions and there's no pain and no fear and there's no crime. It's about a police detective who is trying to investigate an alleged murder that's happened inside the perfect city. But the guards won't let him in. But it turns out he has a second motive to get in there. He believes there's evidence about two twin brothers who disappeared back in 2017. It's these two completely different stories, completely different genres, and you've got expectations set up for how these kinds of stories work. It's slowly about how these two storylines tie back into each other and influence each other. Circle: the Connected Worlds.

[Sounds cool]

[Howard] That sounds really cool, and I wish I had it on a streaming service right now.

[Megan] Howard, I have my DVDs here in Utah. They could end up at your house on accident or purpose at some point in time.

[Whew!]

[Howard] Well, see now you're making all of our listeners terribly, terribly jealous…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which just doesn't seem like a fair thing to do.

[Howard] Early on in Schlock Mercenary, I was writing… I mean, the design principles for Schlock Mercenary were I am not making fun of science fiction in my science fiction comic, the comedy will come from other things. But it was very newspaper humor, dad joke type stuff. Would have fit right in in the age of people collecting newspapers. But this was a web comic. About two years in, the Teraport wars begin, and the stories begin getting bigger. Brandon Sanderson wrote the introduction for book 2, The Teraport Wars, and said, "This is the book where Schlock Mercenary figures out what it wants to be when it grows up."

[Accurate]

[Howard] It very much… This was not a thing that I did consciously. It certainly wasn't a thing I did expertly. But it was a thing I did. I had an existing audience, an existing brand, and I decided to take them from a quick episodic fast beats sort of story to a much larger form story. I got lucky in that I guess the audience was so small to begin with that when it grew, we didn't notice that we lost anybody. But this was definitely a case of something which at the time I began creating it was one thing, and at the time I finished it was very much something else. Even though you still have this blob character and mercenaries running through the core of it.

[Sandra] You had an assist from the fact that web comics are expected to evolve. So there is a genre expectation that there will be evolution which totally assisted in the redirect, which [garbled can be…]

[Howard] Yeah. That is the… That is what we called the low expectations of audiences watching amateurs.

[There's that. Anyway…]

[Howard] Good times. Wow. Are we really already 19 minutes in? What else can we say? I had a… We just need to can of worms this part. The whole career level can of worms of how do you rebrand yourself after spending 20 years as a cartoonist. Whatever I go do next, how do I keep the promises of my old brand…

[That's]

[Howard] Or break them in such a way…

[Another can of worms]

[Howard] I don't know.

[I think we just need to…]

[Howard] That's an old can of worms.

[Garbled]

[slap a lid on that, and say, whoops, can't cover it.]

[Howard] Whoops. Sorry. That's another eight part thing.

[Howard] Okay. We ready for homework?

[Homework. You are giving us the homework this time.]

[Howard] Okay, I am. In the first episode, I talked about how this intensive was expectations and promises, and how I didn't call it Eight Expectations because that would have forced me to drill down and to configure the content in such a way that there were eight discrete elements covered across seven episodes plus a… It was a headache. Your homework is to fulfill the promise that I decided not to make because I would have broken it. Call this intensive, call this discussion we've had over these last eight episodes, Eight Expectations. For you, for your toolbox, write down eight different categories in which promises and expectations can be used as structural elements, as troubleshooting elements, as critical elements, as career elements. Laying over all of the other tools that you use, that we all use, when we write, when we create. So there's your homework. Write the thing that I was either not smart enough or into much of a hurry to write, the course outline for Eight Expectations. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/09/26/16-39-deep-dive-into-event/

Key points: Event stories are driven by disruptions of the status quo, the normal. They tend towards externally driven conflicts. Begin with a disruption of the status quo, end either with a restoration of the old or a new status quo. Events happen! But mostly, sequences of breaking, over and over and over. Cascades following one decision. But not just big events, small disruptions too. Obstacles are when each action further disturbs the status quo. Complications are when one problem opens up a different problem. Focus on where the characters are expending effort, what are they trying to solve. External events can be overwhelming, how do you avoid that? First, every try-fail cycle does not need to be the same size, or have the same difficulty. So, control pacing by picking smaller events and consequences, and stacking them. Make a list of possible problems, and slowly escalate them. Consequences are what matters to the character. When you start a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of a story, you only have one. Gradually take away choices, close doors, until there is only one left. Make it a hard choice!

[Season 16, Episode 39]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive into Event.

[C.L.] 15 minutes long.

[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.

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

[Dan] I'm Dan.

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

[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We are back with the fifth episode of our M.I.C.E. Quotient master class. So excited to have you all here for it. Today we're going to talk about the fourth and final element, event.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So event stories are driven by disruptions of normal. These are… Tend to be very externally driven conflicts. They began when a status quo is disrupted, and end when it is restored or there's a new status quo. So many things that we think of as plot are actually event. There's a tendency I've noticed among particularly science fiction and fantasy readers to think that the big actions that are happening are all of the plot, and they forget that all of the other pieces are also plot.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But event is all of the things that happen. But it's mostly about things breaking over and over and over again. It's that thing that happens in the real world where you're like, "I'm just…" And I should say, we are having our bathroom remodeled as we are recording this.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The cascading effect of making one decision to change a status quo, which is, let's have a new bathroom, winds up impacting everything else. Because once you decide that you're going to peel up the floor, then you discover that since your grandfather built the house, that the floor beams are actually two by sixes instead of two by tens which is standard for a floor. So that then in turn breaks their ability to put in water lines and air conditioning because they have to fit them into smaller spaces. Also, then you have to have things reassembled. Then, when you're trying to record a podcast, there are contractors who are constantly coming in and interrupting. None of you have heard any of this because we have solved it by managing to record around things. But it is this cascading chain led from one decision to make one change in the status quo that is then breaking all the rest of my normal. Good times.

[Charlotte] Good times. I'm so glad that you said that, because I think certainly for me when I was starting out with event, I always thought of it is something massively big, explosions, a meteor coming, Independence Day type thing, but it can actually be something much, much smaller, like a bathroom or a tap on your sink breaking, something like this. Anything that disrupts the status quo, or your normal. Right?

[Mary Robinette] That is absolutely correct. So, again, as you say, this is… But a lot of times when we think about ramping up the tension in event stories, we think about needing to make things bigger and bigger and bigger. It's really just about this cascade of normal breaking, that you attempt to fix something and not only does it not work, but something else breaks next to it. So, again, in the obstacle versus complication thing, obstacles in this form are when each action causes the status quo to become more disturbed. So, again, in small frame world, if someone has a problem with their boss, that's an external problem. That's not the problems they have with themselves, that's an external problem. So they want to change that status quo. They go to HR to try to resolve it. That action then directly causes them to get fired. So that's an obstacle. It's where they tried to change something and a problem in the same thread line causes it to just go wrong. Complications are when a question opens up to a different problem. So someone has a problem with their boss. They go to HR. That, in turn, leads to them being held prisoner by terrorists. Who are the terrorists? Where did they come from? This is heading things in a completely different way. So these are… This is the kind of thing that you're looking for. I mean, you could make the argument in some cases that this is a continuation of a disruption of status quo. I am thinking of it is kicking off an inquiry thread about who are these people and the milieu of escaping a hostage situation.

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say, event is the one that is the hardest for me to get my head around. Is that your experience as well? Is there something trickier about event, or am I just thinking about it wrong?

[Mary Robinette] I think that it is that… Because event is action driven, everything feels like it's an event. Stories are inherently about change. That's a thing that happens in stories. So when you're looking at… Let's say that you're doing a milieu story and your characters… Let's say your characters crash land on a planet. If they arrive on the planet, that is definitely a milieu story and the thing that they're trying to solve is getting off the planet. If they are explorers and they land under a controlled set up in the story begins after they have already arrived on the planet and they are attempting to… Their ship breaks. Okay, the ship breaking is, at this point, an event. Because it has disrupted their status quo. Because they're supposed to be there and they're supposed to be exploring. Whereas if they are crashing on the planet, if they are there unexpectedly, and trying to leave, their primary goal is to leave the planet and fixing the event of the problem with the ship is incidental to the primary thrust, which is getting off and surviving the planet. That's why it is… With this one, and with all of them, the question that you're looking at and the thing that is often the deciding factor isn't necessarily… I mean, a lot of it is where you start and stop. But a lot of it is what are they trying to solve. Where are they expending their effort? In a murder… If someone is murdered and you put the focus, the primary effort goes into trying to answer questions, that's an inquiry. If the primary focus goes into learning to live after this person has been murdered, and someone else's dealing with the question of who did it, there are detectives who are going off and solving things. But the focus of the story is on how does the widow survive, how does the widower learn to fold his own laundry… It's a little bit of gender stereotyping, and…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We're just going to roll with it right now. My husband is actually the one who does laundry in our household. So… But this is… That's the… One of them, the focus is on trying to establish a new normal, and the other is on trying to answer a question. That tells you the kind of conflicts that go in the middle and where you're putting your emphasis.

[Dan] Okay. So, as with some of the other ones we've looked at, the value then of figuring out what kind of story, which of the four M.I.C.E. elements you're dealing with is that it helps you to focus your story and it helps you take it in the right direction, so that you're not spinning off like you said into story bloat and adding unnecessarily unnecessary elements because you know more exactly what your story is about.

[Mary Robinette] That is correct.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, I'm going to talk… Pause here to talk about our book of the week, because I think that's a good example of this, and the trickiness there. So I am the audiobook narrator for Seanan McGuire. Also, currently, as we are recording this, I am in the process of recording When Sorrows Come which is her new book. When you hear this, it will be out. It's book 15 in the October Daye series, so FYI. But the thing about these books is that they are a combination inquiry-event with character going on as well. But the thing about the inquiry… Toby is a detective, and there are things that she needs to answer. But really, when you're signing up for the books, what you're interested in is watching her kick some ass. So the primary driver in a lot… Is arguably that these are event books. Chaos just surrounds her, things are constantly going wrong. She's constantly getting stabbed, she's constantly needing to solve problems. There is much less emphasis put on the actual detecting. The detecting exists is a set up to give us all of the events that go wrong. Are we there and interested in it? Yes. Does it need to carry weight? Absolutely, because it's a novel, and it has multiple threads. But the driver for most of this is about this… These events, these things going wrong. There's also character stuff that's happening that is wonderful. There's… It's kind of a constant coming-of-age. But it is a coming-of-age that is always being kicked off by things going terribly, terribly wrong. And that affecting everything else in Toby's life. I like these books a lot. I enjoy narrating them. I… In every book, Seanan makes me cry while narrating.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, I highly recommend them. I get better as a narrator, FYI, over the course of 15 books. So don't judge me too harshly on the first books. But…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] But that was… The new one is When Sorrows Come. Correct?

[Mary Robinette] When Sorrows Come by Seanan McGuire. Yes. It…

[Dan] Awesome.

[Mary Robinette] Is absolutely a… It is status quo disruptions, just constant status quo disruptions. Like, we're going to check this thing out. Then the process of checking this thing out causes someone to get killed. The process of checking out how they get killed causes someone else to get killed. This is not a spoiler if you ever read an October Daye novel.

[Chuckles]

[Charlotte] So, with an event story, if it's about action, external things happening, status quo's being disrupted, how do you keep that from becoming overwhelming? Like, something happens and then something else happens and then another thing happens and it's all related, it's all consequence and staying in the same M.I.C.E. element. I guess it's a question about pacing, really. Like, how to control that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, pacing… The… One of the things that I misunderstood what I was first learning to apply the M.I.C.E. elements to things is thinking that every try-fail cycle had to be the same size, and that they all had to be the same levels of difficulty. So, similarly, that I that all of the consequences had to ramp up at the same proportional level.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that you can do when you're trying to control pacing through the events that happen in the consequences of those events is to think about smaller consequences and stacking them. Sometimes what I will do is I will make a list of possible consequences, things that can go terribly wrong. Then I'll… This is in a… I should say, this is in a phase when I'm stuck and brainstorming. It is not the way I just… Normally I just write. But when I'm stuck and brainstorming, I'll list the consequences and then I'll rank them in kind of best case scenario to worst-case scenario.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Then remove the best case scenario and sort of dole out the worst-case scenarios in a slowly escalating piece of rolling disasters.

[Charlotte] Right. This is all…

[Mary Robinette] But, like pacing is… Go ahead.

[Charlotte] No, I was going to say, this is always in relation obviously to your character, because what is devastatingly awful to me might not be the same for my sister or my friend. So it's always with the character in mind, right, the list of consequences?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlotte] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Right, right. Exactly. Because you're thinking about the character's status quo being disrupted. Although… So it is their sense of normal and their place in the world. The world being disrupted, for instance, there are big disruptions like the horrible disruptions happening in Greece right now as we're recording this. Terrible, terrible fires. Those are not affecting me. So it is a disruption of the status quo, but it is not a disruption to my status quo. C?

[C.L.] There was something I wanted to add around pacing. One thing that really got my head around the concept of pacing was the idea that when you begin a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of the story, you have one. Pacing is all about taking choices away, gradually. Closing more doors until there is only one thing left to do.

[Dan] Oh, that's brilliant.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here going, "Yeah. Yeah, because it really is…" It is about getting to… Trying to get them to a point where it's an impossible choice, it's a choice that is hard.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Speaking of things that are hard, should I give them homework?

[Yes]

[Dan] I think that's great.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Grab your fairytale. You are going to attempt to strip out everything except the event stuff. So with Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the three bears come home, there is a home intruder in the bear's home. Furniture has been broken. They have to drive this little blonde girl out of their home. Their dinner has been eaten, they have to re-make dinner. Papa Bear has to repair furniture. Then, and only then, after they have restored their status quo, are they truly safe.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Mary Robinette] Or there's a home intruder and Papa Bear just kills her. Now they have to live with the consequences.

[Laughter]

[garbled… Porridge. What are you doing, Papa Bear? I'm retiring.]

[Laughter]

[Dan] Okay. So I want to ask, and I know this is homework, but I want to dig into this for a second. Is there a way to cast Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an event story from Goldilocks' point of view without making it just a milieu story?

[Mary Robinette] So, it is about a disruption to the status quo. If we start…

[Dan] If we start the story when she's in the house and the bears show up?

[C.L.] I think in this case…

[Dan] I don't know.

[C.L.] Goldilocks and the Three Bears, as an event story, Goldilocks is the antagonist.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. The only… Like… I think if you… Huh. So, it is about a change in the status quo. If Goldilocks wants to make a change in the status quo, then she would need… What does she want to change? Goldilocks. Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch. You have to start it at a different point.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch and is trying to force her to take a nap. She doesn't want anything to do with that. So she is going to make a forcible break from her family and she's going to run away from home. It gets back into character again.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wow. I'm not sure. I think there's got to be a way to make Goldilocks an event story.

[Dan] Well, rather than puzzle over it now, that'll be a bonus homework. If anyone comes up with a really good one, let us know.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] But, for now, you are out of excuses. Go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/18/15-42-writing-the-end/

Key Points: How do you pick the right kind of climax? Your beginning, the first act, telegraphs the ending. How do you pick the right one for the story? Identify what kind of story fulfills the character's journey. Write backwards, plan the ending and let that determine the rest of the story. The ending defines the story. Start with who are the characters when we leave them, then rewind to figure out what leads them there. You need to know what you're making to figure out the ingredients. How can the characters fail and still satisfy the audience? Give them hope. It should be satisfying, but still a train wreck. Build up to it. Fulfill the promises, and still surprise them. Don't change your ending just because someone guessed it. Satisfying does not necessarily mean happy.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 42.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing The End.

[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] And we're done.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Brandon] I don't usually get to do that joke.

[Brandon] We're going to talk about writing endings. We have questions from listeners, and a couple of them are really curious about how we pick what kind of ending we do. So, the first question is, how do you decide what kind of climax fits your story? They list battle, escape, conversation, inner turmoil, etc. All of those together sounds like a great idea.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, the… There's a school of thought that says your… Whatever your first line, your first paragraph, your first chapter, that will tell you in some sense what your ending will be. That will telegraph the whole story. That works much better for short things than for long things. But, by the end of the first act, you should know what kind of an ending… Whether this is going to end in a gunfight or a conversation.

[Brandon] Yeah, I agree. Now, if you're a heavy duty discovery writer, you may not discover that till the end, and then you need to rewrite it in. That's totally fine. But let's just say in the finished product, the reader should be able to anticipate what kind of ending it is… You are looking for after the first act of your story is done. Most of the time. That said, sometimes you do get twists, like, Into the Woods by Sondheim is a classic example of sometimes reversing expectations. It's very hard to do. But it's very rewarding if you do it right.

[Dan] I'm not sure that we're answering this specific person's question. Because they said, here's my list of things, a battle, a chase, a conversation. If I know that my book has to end with the hero defeating the villain, that could take the form of a battle, that could take the form of a chase, that could take the form of various different kinds of violence or action. How do you pick which one of those is going to be best for this particular story?

[Brandon] I like your reframing it that way. Because we're taking the easy answer to this…

[Yeah]

[Brandon] I think the harder answer, because… Looking at something like MCU films. One of my favorites is Doctor Strange. I know a lot of people think it's one of the weakest, but I love it, because magic and wizards. The ending of that one is basically a conversation.

[Dan] Yeah. And it's a very clever one. It is a puzzle, and especially coming on the heels of so many where, so many Marvel movies all ended with we're all over a city and the city is blowing up and we're flying around and shooting each other, that one ended with a conversation and a puzzle.

[Brandon] And you totally could have ended that one with a fight instead, and it would have felt appropriate for the themes that were happening through the story.

[Howard] Let's look at that ending a little bit. There is a whole bunch of very satisfying fight leading up to that ending. That ending is the capstone to the fight, the capstone to all of this action there at the end. To me, that's what made it satisfying. If he had arrived and immediately gone and had his chat with Dormammu, I wouldn't have felt satisfied.

[Brandon] That's true.

[Howard] I wouldn't have seen all the fun magic stuff I wanted to see.

[Brandon] Although, I will say, part of the reason I like that ending is it was a theme for the character, learning patience…

[Right]

[Brandon] We had seen that his trouble was he wanted it now, he wanted to be the best, and he wanted his answers. If you haven't seen the movie, he travels to get healed from a terrible injury so he can go back to being a doctor. He finds people who will help him, and they turn him aside. They send him out. He's like, "No, no, no. You've got to help me." But he has to learn to be patient with his flaws and with himself to find inner peace. Then he uses that to defeat the enemy.

[Dan] Now, to Howard's point, a lot of what's going on in the early action stuff is try-fail cycles. I think we can win by this. No we can't. I think we can win by this. No we can't. Then he puts the pieces together and completes his own inner arc, and that's when he figures out how to do it.

[Howard] I think that comes back to the original question. Am I going to end with a battle? Am I going to end with a chase? Am I going to end with a conversation? Well, Brandon's first answer was, these all sound nice.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You can have all of those. You can have, in the final six minutes of act three, you can have a battle that… Or, excuse me, a chase… Well, a battle that fails and someone gets away and you have to chase them and you catch them and you have a conversation, and then we're done.

[Brandon] I think the key here is for you to identify what kind of story will fulfill, not necessarily what you need to do, but will fulfill the character's journey. Then you could pick any one of these things. Whatever feels right at the time. As long as you are completing that character's journey. That's the harder decision.

[Victoria] So, I feel like I'm the monster at the end of this conversation.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Right? Like, the thing is, I have been waiting to talk until the end of this because I write my books backwards. So I actually don't do anything until I've planned the ending. The ending, for me, and that climax basically through the last page, determines the entire story I'm telling. So, for me, the total cohesion of it is second to figuring out the ending of the story. So I feel like I have perhaps a different perspective on this, because rather than write toward the end, and think what kind of resolution do I need in order to fulfill the promises that I've made early on, I write backwards, from the end to make those promises from the ending that I know I want to achieve.

[Dan] So, you are still then at a point in the process deciding how your ending is going to work. I actually write the same way. I think about the ending first. So, how do you pick?

[Victoria] It's the story I want to tell. I feel like the ending is not a culmination, it's the definition. For me, the ending is the punctuation at the end, it's the thing that we're working toward. An entire sentence has to end at that moment. I… It is part of the fundamental questions I am asking myself when I begin to have an idea and when I begin to ask what kind of story I'm telling. I really treat the ending is the opportunity for the absolute collision of all of the ideas that I have, of all of the places that I want to end. The thing that I actually ask myself, before I figure out if it's a battle or a chase or anything, is who are my characters at the moment we leave them? So, really, it comes down to who's alive, who's dead, where are they act physically and psychologically, and then, from there, I begin to rewind their last moments in order to figure out what is the thing that leads them there, and I rewind from there all the way until I get to the beginning and figure out who the characters are when we first meet them.

[Howard] Your Doctor Strange metaphor is feeling even more fitting now.

[Victoria] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The bit about working backwards from the ending, it does not feel backwards to me. When I'm outlining, these days all of my discovery writing tricks are now rolled into my outlining process. The… I've talked about the process where my first outline is a 10-year-old boy tells you about his favorite movie at high speed. The 10-year-old boy will say, "Ohohoh, I forgot to tell you this one thing." That actually goes into my first pass at the outline, because it's silly and it's fun. But I begin that process thinking, "What is the big awesome moment at the end that got the 10-year-old boy to come home and tell me, 'Oh, I have to tell you about this movie, it's so great!'"

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Howard] "Because there was this thing. But before I tell you about the end…" And then off we go.

[Victoria] Also, I have used, I feel like over the course of the episodes that I've been here, a lot of food metaphors. But to use yet another food metaphor, it's like the ingredients, like, you're gathering apples along the way, and you end up with an apple pie or something. I don't want to end up with, like, an orange cake. Like, if I grew… Like, I don't want to, like… If you write towards a discovery and you don't actually have a plan in mind, you risk gathering ingredients which result in a different end, which result in something that doesn't feel cohesive. Whereas I want to know what it is I'm making, so that I can figure out the ingredients that I need to find along the way to make that dish. It is all about that dish.

[Howard] If you're gathering apples, it is entirely possible to end up with cyanide.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because there's cyanide in apple seeds.

[Victoria] Okay. Different fruit, then.

[Howard] But that's… No no no, but your metaphor works perfectly, because you can gather apples, you can be gathering these things, and still have some options for what happens at the end. That's, for me, where surprising but inevitable will come in.

[Brandon] Let's stop and talk about your book.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[Victoria] Yeah. I have a new book out. Or I will, by the time this airs. It is called The Invisible Life of Addie Larue. It is essentially about a young woman in 18th-century France who is deathly afraid of dying in the same place she was born. She decides to summon the old gods to help her out of her life, out of her predicament.

[Brandon] As one does.

[Victoria] As one does. As one does. But the problem is, none of them answer. She prays that Dawn, and no one answers. She prays at midday, and no one answers. She prays at dusk, and no one answers. The one rule she has been taught all her life, never pray to the gods that answer after dark. She makes a mistake, and she does this, and she accidentally summons the devil. When he asks her what she would be willing to trade for her soul, she wants time. She doesn't know how much, she wants to live forever, and the devil says, "No." Because if you live forever, he doesn't get your soul, he gets the soul at the conclusion of the deal. So, in a moment of desperation, she says to the devil, "You can have my soul when I don't want it anymore." Sensing an opportunity, the devil agrees. The deal is done, and she discovers afterward that he has granted her the ability to live forever and cursed her to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

[Brandon] There you go.

[Victoria] I did not start writing it until… I had the idea eight years ago, and I didn't start writing it until two years ago when I figured out the ending.

[Brandon] What an awesome premise.

[Howard] And is this under the name…

[Victoria] V. E. Schwab.

[Howard] V. E. Schwab. The Invisible Life of Addie Larue.

[Brandon] All right. So. Another question we had… Kind of take this from a different direction, is, how can you end a climax without neatly resolving the conflicts, or, also, how can you have your characters fail without leaving the audience disappointed? How can you build up all this tension, and build up all these indications that there's going to be a heroic victory, and then… Not. Give. It. To. Them?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Well, in YA, you would say you would need to have hope. So you can end with a bad ending or a failure in YA, but the thing that you don't want to end up with is the lack of hope. I'm also a really big believer in saving the day, but not the world. I love it when your characters survive to fight again, maybe solve one of the problems, but in so doing, much like the try-fail cycle, end up creating another problem that they're going to have to face at some point down the line.

[Dan] Yeah. Unsatisfying endings are like my favorite thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Unsatisfying is the wrong word, because if you do it right, it will still feel satisfying and it will still feel resolved, even though you didn't get what you want. So, in all of my John Cleaver novels, except, arguably, the very last one, he does what he's trying to do. He fills the goal he sets out to fill, and then looks around at the wreckage surrounding him and goes, "Oh, my gosh. What was the cost of actually destroying this demon? I've lost my family, I lost everything that I had." And I just over and over for five books because I'm an awful person.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] The ending of Extreme Makeover does this same thing. It has an incredibly dark, desolate ending that a lot of people come back to me and they're like, "How… Why did you do that?" Because that's where it needed to end. That is actually the resolution of the arc that I set up, is that these characters are going to fail in the world is going to end.

[Brandon] It's why everyone on Seinfeld should end up in jail…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] At the end of the series. That is the satisfying resolution, under some understandings of how the plots were going.

[Dan] Okay. So. Taking Extreme Makeover as an example, all of my early readers, all of the offer readers, the writing group that I ran it through, they all came back and said, "What? How dare you end it there? We thought they were going to pull it out." I realized, okay, this is satisfying to me, but I need to make it satisfying to the audience. So, I played a lot of tricks on you. First of all, I started every chapter, and this came very late in the revision process, started every chapter with a countdown to the end of the world. So that you know, even if you think that I'm going to cheat at the end and pull it out, you at least have been told, every couple of pages, nope, the end of the world is coming.

[Brandon] That worked really well. What it did was it made the end of the world become a thing you're anticipating, and kind of looking forward to.

[Dan] Yes. Then, the other thing was, I kind of amped up the darkness inside of all the characters, so that when it happens, you're like, "Oh, good. That one just got his comeuppance." Then, "Oh, good, that one just got it." We get to the end and you realize, like, the worst thing that any character does in that book, in my opinion, happens in one of the last couple of pages. If you actually look at the dates and the times of this countdown, it's not counting down to the end of the book, it's counting down to that one betrayal. So, by the time you get there, you're like, "Well, yeah, he deserves to die. I've been following this whole time, I've been waiting for him to pull it out, he just did this awful thing to her, I want him to die."

[Victoria] This comes back, again and again, to promises. Right? To promise versus expectation, to finding a way to surprise people even when they know what they want. Because that's essentially the bargain that you're trying to strike here, is, a reader reads and, if you have a cohesive narrative, they have an idea of how they expect it to end and how they want it to end. You, somehow, have to find ways to surprise them, and not be predictable, while still fulfilling the general promise. You made a tonal promise over the course of your book. So, then, they can't be betrayed by the tone. They can't be betrayed by the ending. So there's like… It's a lot of promises to keep up with. You're going to end up with somebody upset. Like, no matter how well you end a book, somebody is going to wish you ended it differently. That's one of the hard parts of this.

[Howard] The one counsel I'd give is that if you have a public audience for a series, and you have not yet published the ending of the series, don't let the fact that someone correctly guessed the ending of a thing make you change the ending. I was on a panel with a guy who wrote for comic books. He would go through the letters and if somebody guessed his ending, he would just change it. I thought, "That is no way to live."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I assume that somebody is going to put all these things together, even if they're just rolling dice, and figure out what I had planned. That person gets to do a little dance…

[Victoria] [garbled… They get a cookie]

[Howard] And know that they are smarter than me, and that's fine.

[Brandon] Going back to some of the things that Dan and Victoria were saying, I think satisfying doesn't have to mean happy. If you can learn to split apart those two things… George Martin made a career on being satisfying but not happy in his epic fantasy. That is what people came to expect. That… Being satisfying… Even satisfying deaths is like a thing in the Game of Thrones series, that if you don't fulfill on, reader expectations are like, "Wait a minute. This is not what I was promised. I was looking forward to satisfying deaths."

[Dan] You can see that in the final season of the TV show.

[Victoria] We can't… I can't even talk about it, I'm so angry.

[Dan] So many people…

[Victoria] I'm still angry.

[Dan] Started to complain about halfway through the season, "Wait. All of the main characters are going to live through this!" That is not what they had been promised, years and years ago when that first book started. Then the show kind of flinched and stopped killing off main characters. It didn't satisfy.

[Victoria] That is a tonal promise break. You promised not only death, but satisfying death that adequately reflected the crimes which were perpetuated in life. It is one of the only things we all had to look forward to…

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I am still upset about it.

[Brandon] Moving on. Let's go ahead and do some homework. Dan, you have our homework.

[Dan] Yeah. So what we want you to do is just practice this. Take something you've already written, whether it is a short story, a novel, or whatever length. Then, rewrite your ending so that the opposite thing happens. This is not just let a meteor land and kill all of your heroes before they succeed. Find away that they can fail, but that it's satisfying. Whether you do this the opposite kind of tone or the opposite kind of… The opposite person wins. However you want to define opposite. Write it, but do your best to make it feel satisfying.

[Brandon] I'm really curious to try this on some of my own stories. I think it would be… This is going to be a fun exercise to practice kind of pantsing an ending, where you're taking all the things you've set up, and then coming up with a new ending. Very hard for someone like you or me who always knows our endings.

[Victoria] I was going to say… You've gathered all your ingredients for apple pie, and now…

[Dan] Now I'm telling you to make orange juice.

[Victoria] You have to go and bake something completely different with it?

[Howard] I've already told you, there's cyanide in there.

[Victoria] I know, I know. [Garbled] poison.

[Howard] You've got this.

[Brandon] You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/16/15-33-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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/29/15-13-using-elections-in-stories/

Key Points: Don't make the outcome of the election the climax of the story! Election day is anti-climactic, just waiting for the votes to roll in. Do use elections as a background that affects your characters' lives. Do use the fun, quirky people in the campaign. The candidate, with or without spouse, is arrogant and emotionally fragile. The campaign manager is counselor, manager, has plenty of experience, and is willing to put some spin on it. They also have a deputy. Next is the communications director, a people person who interacts with the press and social media. They have to balance responses and how does this make the candidate look, will it persuade people to vote for the candidate. Again, they may have a deputy to help. The finance director tells the candidate who to call and how to ask them for money. They're accountants who know how to schmooze. Finally, the field director knows the statistics and how to manage volunteers. Volunteers have time but no money, and go out to knock on doors, call phones, or whatever you do for this selection. Donors have money but no time. Volunteers and donors can be kooky and eclectic and strange. Know what the stakes of the election are for your characters, on a personal and societal level. Think about how elections are run, across history and across geography. Think about what your characters have to do to schmooze, and what are the consequences of schmoozing and the election.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 13.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Using Elections in Stories.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We have special guest Daniel Friend. Thank you for coming on.

[Daniel] Thank you for having me.

[Brandon] You have been running or part of some political campaigns…

[Daniel] That's right. So the reason I want to talk about elections in stories is because I've been involved in a lot of them. Normally, I'm a science fiction and fantasy editor, and I don't see nearly enough elections in stories considering how often and how important they are to our own lives. So, in 2012, I actually worked in the Utah County elections office during the Presidential campaign between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. In 2017, I was the communications director for a US congressional campaign in Utah. In 2018, I ran for the Utah House of Representatives as a candidate. Lost, but that's okay.

[Dan] Well, then you have nothing important to say.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] We'll see.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] This year, I am reprising the communications director role for a third-party US congressional campaign. So I've been around elections a lot, and they're a very strange little world that not enough people know about. There's some really cool things that we can do in stories with them.

[Brandon] All right. Well. Take us on that trip. You pitched this episode to us. It sounds really interesting. You actually have an outline. You're way more prepared than…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We have ever been.

[Brandon] Yes. So let's go through it.

[Dan] Well. Mahtab.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Mahtab.

[Dan] We've got to give her props.

[Mary Robinette] Fair.

[Daniel] Well, I'm glad I can be second in something. Besides just a vote.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled... reminder]

[Daniel] So, the first thing… I want to start out with how not to use elections in stories. Because there's a really big pitfall in thinking that the outcome of the election is the climax of my story. That's the most important thing that's going to happen. But, don't do that.

[Brandon] Why not?

[Daniel] Because elections are inherently anti-climactic. It's a very strange thing. Because if you're working in an election, you're going out every day and you are meeting strangers and you're working so hard. You're putting your heart and soul into this thing that is really important to you. At least presumably. Then, at the end of the day, all that work you did boils down to hundreds or thousands of other people making a decision about you. So when election day comes, that's actually the most laid-back yet high strung day of an entire campaign.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Daniel] Because there is nothing left for you to do. You're sitting there, biting your nails about what's going to happen, and you are completely powerless. Now, you don't want to have a character be inactive as your protagonist. On election day, despite all the activity that they've done up to that point, they're just really sitting around, watching TV, waiting for those results to come in. So, make sure that there is something going on in your climax other than just what's the results of the vote.

[Brandon] Right. I didn't really grasp this until you said it. But now I can totally see that the last day is the most boring day, with a really nice exciting moment at the end of it.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm trying to think.

[Daniel] Or a soul crushing disappointment [garbled]

[Dan] I'm trying to think of stories about elections. I remember there was a movie with Chris Rock and Bernie Mack years and years ago. They got to that point where there is nothing left to do, and they showed that moment where he was sitting around bored. He's like, "You know what, I'm going to go drive people to work." So he got a bus and he went… They had him doing something during that period.

[Daniel] Another example is I just finished watching the season of Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope runs for city council. Now, that isn't exactly a great example because they treated it like a U.S. Senate campaign.

[Choked chuckles]

[Daniel] There was way too much money going on in that race for a small town city council. But…

[Brandon] That's the joke, right?

[Daniel] That is the joke.

[Howard] It's Parks and Rec.

[Daniel] So do use it for… As a good example of what people do to each other in campaigns. Don't think that a city council race looks anything like it. That's U.S. Senate and above.

[Mary Robinette] You're making me think about Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly, which is all about this political campaign that is going on in the background. It is… None of the characters are directly involved in the campaign, but their lives are being influenced by everything that's going on around them. It's… You're right, it's fantastic in that way.

[Daniel] That's an excellent way to use elections in a story, is to have this thing that is really going to affect your characters' lives happening in the background, and to what extent do they pay attention to it, to what extent do they understand that this is actually going to matter to them? Do they get involved or not? So, to use elections as a vehicle for telling interesting stories, doing it within an election campaign is actually a great idea, because there are so many fun, quirky people in a campaign. Everybody in a campaign is automatically a little bit weird. Because they are willing to take a job that's going to last for a few months, and it does pay decently for those few months, but then after that, you're out of work, and you either have to move to another place to get a new job, or you have to do a completely different kind of job, which is what I'm lucky enough to be able to do. They're really just a little bit kooky because they're not just getting involved like, "Oh, I'm going to donate." "Oh, I'm going to have a yard sale." They're actually putting their 40 hours a week or more into this. So I want to just run down the cast of characters within an election campaign and tell you a little bit about why they are going to be fun. So, the most obvious person is, of course, the candidate, the person who is running for office. Whether or not they have a spouse is also going to be a big deal, because candidates' spouses make a huge influence. But the candidate is going to be arrogant. Arrogant enough to think that they can win. And yet also emotionally fragile. Candidates are always needing reassurance from somebody that they're doing okay, that they can actually win, that this is worth all of the time and effort they are putting into it, because everyone is so invested.

[Howard] It sounds like writers.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was going to say, the TV show Veep, in the season where she was running for President, they did that beautifully. That combination of just absolute bullheaded arrogance and complete fragility. So that's a good example to look up.

[Daniel] Yes, it is. Now, the person who is most often going to be helping the candidate feel better about these things is the campaign manager. Besides being the psychological counselor for the candidate, their main job is to manage. Now, campaign managers tend to have lots of experience under their belts. They tend to not really… Like, they want to make sure that they're supporting someone that they like, but, there also very willing to spin things, to color the truth a little bit. That's part of the job. So, campaign managers tend to be interesting that way. Under… They also usually have a deputy to help them when they're not around. The next job is the communications director, which is what I know the most about because I did it. Communication directors are usually a people person, because they have to interact with the press. They have to figure out social media. Beyond them, you have the finance director.

[Brandon] Wait, wait wait wait. What makes communication directors weird?

[Dan] Yeah, you skipped over that.

[Daniel] Oh, now I have to tell you something weird about me. Communication directors are the people who have to think about how we are going to persuade people to vote for you. What's the message? So they kind of have to get into other people's heads. They like this. They think of it as really, really fun when somebody drops something, like some insult on Twitter, and they get to respond to it and really burn the other guy. Yet, they've also got to balance this with how is it going to make my candidate look. They're always the ones who want to get the zinger, the "Oh, yeah, gotcha!" But they've also got to be really careful. How well your communication director balances those things or how well they don't, makes a really interesting character. Now, when I tell you these things that the person should be good at, a really interesting thing to do in a story is make them not so good at one of these things. Now, in the real world, your deputy should cover for you. I'm not the best at social media. My deputies do that really well. But what if in your story, they don't have that deputy for whatever reason, and they have to fail really hard at something that's really important.

[Howard] It's interesting to note that when you describe the communications director… I mean, I have years of corporate experience as a marketing guy. I realized, oh, that is squarely in the middle of the marketing wheelhouse. Squarely in the middle. All of the skill set of marketing, whether or not you think marketing is evil, that is where it fits. It's just that the product you are marketing, the message that you are marketing, is… It's this weird sort of flexible undulating brand that is a person whose brand will necessarily change during the course of the campaign.

[Daniel] Yes. That is all very true. Just to give you a real life example in me, I was told the other day that I'm really good at writing fundraising emails. Which is something I have never aspired to be.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just making a note of that for my own [garbled]

[laughter]

[Brandon] Let's pause here for book of the week, then we'll come back to the rest of the roles. So. Our book of the week, you were going to pitch at us…

[Daniel] So, every year, there is the Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium in Provo, Utah, that is a wonderful conference. I'm sure it has been talked about multiple times. Now, last year, they started having a benefit anthology that keeps prices low for students going to this. I'm in that first benefit anthology. My story is called Launch, and the benefit anthology is called Trace the Stars. So, it's available on Amazon. All of the stories in there are fantastic, I've read every one. The reason I want to bring this up is because the next benefit anthology is already opening up their call for submissions. The topic is A Parliament of Wizards. If you don't think elections go into that, well, I'll just tell you, I'm going to write something for it. We'll see if it gets in.

[Brandon] Now, this is for charity, right. So there's no payment for the stories once they been picked up.

[Daniel] That's correct. It is a benefit anthology to benefit students who are attending this writing symposium.

[Brandon] Excellent. All right, let's get back to our roles.

[Daniel] All right. The next one is the finance director. This is the person who sits next to the candidate while the candidate is calling up people like Brandon and saying, "Brandon, can you give me $2700, please?" The finance director is the person saying, "This is how you ask. This is what you need to do." The thing is, they're usually only paid on commission. So their job is to bring in money so that they can actually get paid.

[Brandon] Wow. So they're getting paid on commission to raise money for the political campaign. So a percentage of what you're giving is going…

[Daniel] To the finance director.

[Brandon] Interesting.

[Daniel] For their services and figuring out who to call, figuring out how to ask them for money. Because if I just walk up to Brandon and say, "Hey, please write me a check." I'm probably not going to get anywhere. The financial director is the person who goes, "I know that Brandon has enough money to give you a max donation, and this is the best way to ask him for it." Whereas they'll say, "Daniel doesn't have enough money to give you a max donation. You probably want to get him to volunteer for you instead." So the financial director is a very strange numbers punching kind of person. They have to have a weird mix of an accountant and someone who can really schmooze people.

[Dan] Well, someone who can read people, it sounds like.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that's common in all fundraising. Most fundraising, except at some nonprofits… But most fundraising, you do get a commission for the amount of money…

[Brandon] I had no idea.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. My mom was a fundraiser for years. She is where I learned all of my schmoozing from.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is this constant interplay of a political and financial conversation that you're having.

[Dan] When I was raising funds to put together a scholarship locally… I built an endowment at one of the local universities. We would 100%, every person that we targeted, we research them and we figured out what's the best way to approach this person specifically.

[Brandon] What did you determine about me?

[Dan] We said, "Hey. Brandon."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "I've known you forever. Give me some money." It worked.

[Daniel] Sometimes that works. Finally, the last person in charge is the field director. This guy has to be really good with numbers, because he's looking at statistics. This is the guy who actually figures out how many voters do we need to win this election? Where do they live? How do we contact them? Then he leads a team of volunteers to go out and knock on doors, call phones, do whatever you need to do. Go on the Galactic Inter-Webz and give them a holo-projection, whatever it is that works in your election. That person's got to have both the numbers aspect and a managing aspect. Those don't always come in the same package. Finally, you'll have volunteers who are always kooky and eclectic and have more time than they have money.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] You also have donors, who are exactly the same as volunteers, except that they have more money than they have time. So you can make them just as strange as you want them to be, and it will not be different than real life.

[Howard] That feels so incredibly safe right now…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I have insufficient quantities of both money and time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We're almost out of time on this episode. Is there a last point that you want to hit?

[Daniel] Yes. Just really quick. Make sure you understand what the stakes of the election results are for your characters, both on a personal level, because either they'll lose and nothing will change, or they win and everything in their life changes, and also on the societal level. What are the impacts to the society, based on who wins this election? Also, make sure that you take some time to look at not just how American elections are run, but also how elections across history and across geography have been run. You've got parliamentary elections where it's based on what party gets a percentage of the vote. That's how the seats are allocated. You have ranked choice voting, like you have in the Hugo awards, which we've all done. You also have very small electoral colleges, like in the Holy Roman Empire, where seven princes would choose the next Emperor. Each of those elections plays out differently. If you only have to schmooze seven people, that's a very different election than if you're trying to schmooze a Galactic community of several billion. So, know what your race is, if it's local, if it's provincial, if it's national, if it's Galactic or what have you. Then follow the consequences of that.

[Brandon] All right. What's our homework?

[Daniel] So, your homework is to go out and volunteer for a political campaign that you support. It doesn't matter if it's local or national or what have you. Then go out and do whatever they have you do, whether it's knocking on doors or calling phones or whatever. Then, when you get home, start writing down what you did. When your imagination takes off in a different direction, start writing that story.

[Brandon] So, this was a really awesome episode. I learned a ton. I can imagine that there might be people out there who are writing books about elections who might need a really good editor, and you freelance.

[Daniel] Yes, I do.

[Brandon] How could they get ahold of you?

[Daniel] You can email me at dcfeditor@gmail.com. Daniel Craig Friend initials editor at gmail.

[Brandon] Awesome. Well, you guys, get out there and knock on some doors. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.52: Elemental Ensemble Q&A, with Claudia Gray

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/12/24/11-52-elemental-ensemble-qa-with-claudia-gray/

Q&A Summary:
Q: Can you fit an ensemble into a short story?
A: Every character adds 500 to 1000 words. Make it concise. Use character types more than individuals. Squeeze!
Q: Is there a minimum length? Is there a perfect number?
A: Seven. Three is possible, with specific roles.
Q: How do you include a traitor in an ensemble story without knocking your reader out of it?
A: Set it up carefully. Telegraph that this story has intrigue in it. Make it part of the dynamic, that this person can't be trusted.
Q: How do I give my ensemble characters equal emotional weight if I only stay in the viewpoint of one of those characters?
A: Secret of life: you are living a first person narrative. Make the POV character aware of people around them. Don't fret too much about equal emotional weight, make sure they are represented well and get equal plot weight.
Q: How do you introduce an ensemble cast early without it coming across like an info/character dump?
A: Assembly of the team scenes and disguises (put a moustache on that infodump!)
Q: If an ensemble is about falling in love with a group of friends, how can killing a character serve an ensemble, except for the obvious example of a horror genre?
A: Funerals change dynamics, often makeing them deeper and more important. Also, someone has to fill that hole. Who will step up to it?
Q: How do you give every character a role in the climax without the scenario feeling tailored to the cast?
A: Start with a list, and match things up. Get creative when it doesn't match. Start with the ending, then tailor the cast to fit. Don't forget one archetype is here's the plan, and how it goes all wrong. Break people out of their specialties, let them adapt!
( Christmas presents behind the wrapping... )
[Mary] But the thing I'm going to talk to you about is next year's cruise and workshop.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Mary] So we have been, for the past two years, spending our time in the Caribbean, which has been lovely. Next year, we will be cruising to Europe.
[Whoo!]
[Mary] Which apparently the people here are kind of excited about. We have decided to time this with WorldCon. So for those of you who are hard-core science fiction and fantasy fans and professionals, this will be the week before WorldCon, and we will be cruising so that you can explore Europe and the Balkans and then go to Helsinki for WorldCon. We'll have a couple of add-ons if you want to have someone else arrange all of your travel. We have people who will do that. It's kind of magic. So that is the plan. The details, which I'm not going to go into right now because we're still nailing down some of the special things that we have. The details are all going to be on the website. Registration will open January 1st. I can tell you that we have three guests already lined up. That is Wesley Chu, Kim Liu, and Aliette de Bodard. We're also going to have agents, editors, and some more writers, as well. And of course, our fabulous, fabulous participants.
[WHOO!]
[Brandon] Well, this has been the elemental genres and the Writing Excuses cruise. You are all out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: questioning

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Writing Excuses 6.30: Help! I can't end my book!

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/25/writing-excuses-6-30-help-i-cant-end-my-book/

Key points: Stuck in the corner with a deus ex machina? Go ahead and do the deus ex machina, then go back and establish it. OR rewrite the situation. Look for solutions that tie into the characters, the world, and the plots -- thematically related. Look for the smallest change, so that your characters still have to work. Lukewarm ending? Raise the tension, simplify, and look for resonances, especially with the beginning. In any case, write the ending and then fix it. Early highlight? Is your story really what you think it is? Make the most interesting part the focus. Ask alpha readers what promises you made. Overlap your resolutions in one scene. Explain before the climax, not afterwards. When do you give up your formula/outline? When you have something better. How do you set up a satisfying ending with sequels? They will talk about that next season.
( cut and paste ending? )
[Brandon] All right. Dan, bring us our last writing prompt of the season, of the year.
[Dan] Help! I can't end the season!
[Mary] So what you have to come up with...
[Brandon] Dan needs a hamburger...
[Dan] Yes.
[Brandon] You need to write a story about Dan needing to get a hamburger, about all the things that stop him from getting to this hamburger.
[Dan] Then, in the end, I don't eat a hamburger, but I get something far more satisfying.
[Mary] Christmas leftovers!
[Dan] I was thinking chile relleno, but that will work, too.
[Howard] Mama Chus...
[Brandon] All the Writing Excuses crew is salivating.
[Howard] I'm sorry, we're going to start naming restaurants we love, and that's not what you wanted.
[Dan] All right. We are completely out of excuses, and so are you.
[Brandon] Thank you for listening all season. We'll see you next year. Go get some writing done.
[unknown] Whew!

Current Mood: shortchanged

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 20: The Difference between Character Driven and Plot Driven Stories

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/11/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-20-plot-vs-character-driven-fiction/

Key Points: What is driving the story -- who the characters are or what events are they involved with? What draws the reader in -- how does this end or who is Sally? Both kind create tension in readers, and require conflict. Is the climax a confluence of events or a character decision/change? When the characters' internal moments and the plot's external moments all line up, that's thrilling. Does the plot revolve around a discovery, a decision, or an action? Strong characters make plots interesting. Make your characters strong enough to carry the story.
( serendipity hides here )
[Brandon] I think that's a great note to end on. Larry, we want you to give us a writing prompt. Just off the top of your head. I'm putting you on the spot. This is what happens. A writing prompt for our listeners.
[Larry] Come up with a plot driven story and try to make it good with boring characters.
[Dan] Ignore all the advice we've just given you.
[Howard] We've just made them run laps for no reason.
[Brandon] Someone's already done that. His name is Dan Brown.
[Larry] Oh. Burn. Snap.
[Howard] You can get Dan Brown's stuff on audible.com.
[Brandon] Yes, you can. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: delayed

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Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Eight: The Three Act Structure

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/12/01/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-8-the-three-act-structure-with-bob-defendi/

Key points: The Three Act Structure: Act I, hero encounters problem; Act II, hero discovers problem is bigger than first thought; Act III, he triumphs anyway. Act I needs to establish the characters and the initial conflict. Act I ends when the main character enters a new world, when the battle is transformed into a war. Act II: try-fail cycles are your friend. Don't forget the twist, and a character hits rock bottom. Kick down the door: any time things are slowing down, it's time for another disaster (a.k.a. mini-climaxes). Act III: monkeys are allergic to cheese, or hidden learning lets the hero win.
( the transcript, more or less )
[Dan] This is more of an outlining prompt. So your outlining prompt for this time is to sit down and plot out a very basic Three Act structure either for what you're already working on if it doesn't have one or for an entirely new idea.
[Bob] All right.

Current Mood: try-fail
Current Music: Lookin' for a Good Time, Lady Antebellum

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Writing Excuses 5.22: Film Considerations [with annotations!]

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/01/30/writing-excuses-5-22-film-considerations/

And special YouTube version at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wJ_3sqyG6g

Key Points: Formulas or patterns can be used for many things IF you understand why they work. Three act structure: introduce characters, setting, and problems. Then add complications. Resolve everything in the climax. If you want your story to map to a 90 minute movie, keep it lean. Know what your story is about, what you are trying to say. Think of a logline/tagline: what is the essence of your story in 8 words? The closer the events of the climax in time, the higher the emotional impact -- don't spread your resolutions out over several chapters, put them all in one. Beware the shootout, the chase, the tail end flurry that's there just to end with a bang. Make sure there is foreshadowing, motivation, and emotional movement, not just fireworks. Give the chicken a reason for crossing the road. Don't settle for a student filmmaker -- check their credits, and get the money up front.
( Watch out! )
[Dan] That's true. All right. So we're just going to make Mary do this. Give us a writing prompt.
[Howard] Writing prompt.
[Mary] So your writing prompt... thank you for the warning.
[Dan] That's our favorite thing to do to people.
[Dave] Put you on the spot.
[Mary] Your writing prompt is that you need to come up with a tagline for your novel, your short story, or something that you would like to write but have not yet written. Eight words or less.
[Dan] Sounds good.
[Howard] A tagline. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. Thank you for listening. YouTube fans, let's all camp to the camera and wave. [Everyone turns to the camera, smiles, and waves] [End of podcast. YouTube continues] Thank you for watching. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: pixels

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Writing Excuses 5.22: Film Considerations

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/01/30/writing-excuses-5-22-film-considerations/

And special YouTube version at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wJ_3sqyG6g

Key Points: Formulas or patterns can be used for many things IF you understand why they work. Three act structure: introduce characters, setting, and problems. Then add complications. Resolve everything in the climax. If you want your story to map to a 90 minute movie, keep it lean. Know what your story is about, what you are trying to say. Think of a logline/tagline: what is the essence of your story in 8 words? The closer the events of the climax in time, the higher the emotional impact -- don't spread your resolutions out over several chapters, put them all in one. Beware the shootout, the chase, the tail end flurry that's there just to end with a bang. Make sure there is foreshadowing, motivation, and emotional movement, not just fireworks. Give the chicken a reason for crossing the road. Don't settle for a student filmmaker -- check their credits, and get the money up front.
( Meanwhile, behind the cameras, we hear... )
[Dan] That's true. All right. So we're just going to make Mary do this. Give us a writing prompt.
[Howard] Writing prompt.
[Mary] So your writing prompt... thank you for the warning.
[Dan] That's our favorite thing to do to people.
[Dave] Put you on the spot.
[Mary] Your writing prompt is that you need to come up with a tagline for your novel, your short story, or something that you would like to write but have not yet written. Eight words or less.
[Dan] Sounds good.
[Howard] A tagline. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. Thank you for listening. YouTube fans, let's all camp to the camera and wave. [End of podcast. YouTube continues] Thank you for watching. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: luddite

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

June 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.51: And That Was That
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.6: Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.52: Elemental Ensemble Q&A, with Claudia Gray
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.30: Help! I can't end my book!
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 20: The Difference between Character Driven and Plot Driven Sto
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Eight: The Three Act Structure
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.22: Film Considerations [with annotations!]
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.22: Film Considerations

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with climax

Writing Excuses 19.51: And That Was That

Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO

Writing Excuses 17.6: Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back

Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event

Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories

Writing Excuses 11.52: Elemental Ensemble Q&A, with Claudia Gray

Writing Excuses 6.30: Help! I can't end my book!

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 20: The Difference between Character Driven and Plot Driven Sto

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Eight: The Three Act Structure

Writing Excuses 5.22: Film Considerations [with annotations!]

Writing Excuses 5.22: Film Considerations

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June 2025

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