Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-40-an-interview-on-tension-with-p-djeli-clark 

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 40]

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 40]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

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

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What drove you?

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

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

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

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

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

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

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] You stopped it.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] It is well and truly stopped.

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

 

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

[Phenderson] Right.

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

[Phenderson] I wish I was doing that consciously.

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Erin] Oh, my God. I…

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God [garbled]

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] The food of my people.

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Howard] For some of that deep South cooking.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Erin] Yes.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

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

[laughter]

[Erin] It's not a good thing.

[Phenderson] Exactly.

 

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

[Phenderson] Yes.

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

[Phenderson] Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott?

[Erin] Yes!

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

[Erin] It was…

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

 

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Chuckles]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] Right. Shows up. Yes!

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

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Right.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Erin] That's a top place.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Phenderson] [garbled] around, causing problems.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] Table 17 needs…

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah, they are.

[Howard] [garbled]

[Phenderson] Basically.

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

 

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

[Erin] No.

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

[Laughter]

 

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

[Phenderson] We love it. Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Wow.

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

[Howard] Sixth Sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Still mad about that.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Phenderson] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The tension…

[Phenderson] Very well.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Erin] Oh, sorry.

[Mary Robinette] That you did…

 

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

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

[Erin] Please do.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Laughter]

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

[Phenderson] Right.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

 

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

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

[Mary Robinette] Awesome.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, well done.

 

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

[Phenderson] In some ways, yeah.

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

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

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

[Phenderson] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Phenderson] There's something, again…

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Erin] Oh, yeah, that works.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

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

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

[Phenderson] Yeah.

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

 

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

[Howard] That's awesome homework.

 

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

[chuckles]

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/23/17-4-the-gun-on-the-mantel-is-actually-a-fish/

 

Key Points: Red herrings help make the inevitable surprising. Aim for inevitable first, build surprise second. Deconstruct shows and books that have deliberate twists to them. Drop fish into your foreshadowing to keep us distracted. Use the tricks of a stage magician, give us other things to watch. Make the red herring story significant, while the actual foreshadowing is just a small thing on the side. Include clues to support multiple endings. Beware the sudden change, and unintentional storytelling without knowing where you are going. Ambiguity can be useful! Use your context to highlight the wrong thing. Use the character that everyone likes to point the reader in the wrong direction. Synonyms, homonyms, and other misdirection. Make sure you deliver in an enticing, wonderful way.

 

[Season 17, Episode 4]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[pause]

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[chuckles]

 

[Howard] I was late with my line about who I am. Okay, last episode, we talked about foreshadowing. I described it as creating a thread which makes a surprise inevitable. This episode, we're talking about red herrings. This is where we create the thread which makes the inevitable surprising. As we said last week, aim for inevitable first, and then build the surprise second. Because if you fail at inevitable, you've got a deus ex machina and we're disappointed and bewildered and we feel llike we've been lied to. If you fail at surprise, we're like, "Oh, I saw that coming."

[Which, depending on...]

[Howard] I would much rather have the reader feel like they're smarter than me than feel like they're better than me.

[Laughter. Very true. Very, very true.]

[Howard] So. Red herrings. Let's talk… Some good examples of 'em? Where have you seen them done really well?

[Fish market. [Whisper] I'm kidding.]

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mmm. So tasty.

[Kaela] You just really went for that one, Meg.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Straight in.

[I was going to give a serious answer.]

 

[Sandra] I think it's useful to look at shows or books that have a deliberate twist to them. Where… A frequently used example of this is the Sixth Sense. Where you have this twist that I can see… The kid sees dead people. Oh, our protagonist is dead is the big twist at the end, and the surprise. And yet it is the surprise that makes you want to go back and rewatch the whole movie and see how absolutely clearly inevitable it was. It was absolutely there. So much there that there are many people who saw it coming from scene one. Some people were not surprised. So you go into the movie and you deconstruct and say where… How did they mislead the majority of the audience into believing that Bruce Willis was alive and interacting with the world? They put him in scene after scene after scene where there's another human in the scene who our brains fill in the blanks, because they are sitting opposite each other in chairs. We assume that there was a part where Bruce Willis knocked on the door and came in and was welcomed and invited to sit down. We don't see any of that. So the show uses the medium and the automatic back and fill that the medium asks of the audience to get us to back and fill something that absolutely wasn't there. So the show actually is getting the audience to create their own red herrings. Which is kind of a cool and interesting thing that that particular show does. So that's one of my examples and it's fascinating to go through and figure out where was I misled.

 

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. I think that's a really good example, particularly leaning into the strengths of your medium to accomplish that. I think one for books was Harry Potter, the first one. I think that was one of the best, like, at least… I mean, admittedly, I was young when I read it, but I still think it holds up really well. The way that they make you think that Snape is the one who's trying to steal the Sorcerer's Stone. Because, by all means, it seems completely reasonable. Snape was the one that was muttering a curse when Harry's broom bucks around and he nearly falls off. Snape seems to hate Harry for absolutely no reason. So you're like, "Yup, I believe he's a bad guy." And, like… There's the cut on his leg after everybody runs through the troll in the dungeon. So we have pieces of evidence that imply that it is him. But when we find out that it's Quirrell, we also suddenly remember that Quirrell was in all of the scenes, that Snape was muttering the counter curse, Quirrell got knocked over by Hermoine's fire stuff, and that broke his concentration for the curse. That Quirrell had run through the dungeon, Snape headed him off, and, like, they were there with Fluffy. Like, they… We forgot Quirrell was there because we were wrapped up with a very good and reasonable explanation of Snape.

[Yeah. And…]

[Howard] The… Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, what you've described here is a pattern that has a tool built right into it. Which is, any time you are laying a piece of foreshadowing, grab a fish and drop a fish next to it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay? You want to have a red herring in there with your foreshadowing, so that the audience can be misled.

 

[Sandra] Right. We can also take a… Learn things from stage magicians. Where there's the patter and the hands that are waving because he is moving something from the table in front of him into his pocket. He does this big gesture with his opposite hand and tells a joke because he knows that the audience can only pay attention to a limited number of things at a time. Then there's also that video with the passing the basketballs and the gorilla that dances through the middle of it. Nobody sees the gorilla because we're so busy paying attention to the balls. You can do the same things in what you are creating. You can teach them, and teacher audience, okay, pay attention to the ball. Your job is to count how many times the ball is passed. When, truthfully, you're hiding the gorilla in plain sight. Meg?

[Megan] Yeah. So the idea is to give your red herring story significance while making the actual foreshadowing something that's just happening to the side or… Like, a small joke in the conversation, where we're talking about the big important thing. A show that I think does this very well is The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin. It has some of my favorite examples of long set up and payoffs for a joke in an episode. I'm going to tell you one that just happened now. The payoff won't be as good because I'm telling you the beginning and the ending right after.

[Howard] Go ahead.

[Megan] You need to imagine there's 40 minutes in between. But there's a news anchor, and he's complaining to his wardrobe assistant that, "Is there something wrong with the pants you give me? Because I keep trying to put them on, and both my legs end up in one side." The assistant's like, "You can't put your pants on, and you think there's something wrong with the pants?"

[Giggles]

[Megan] The A story of this episode is someone is here to do a hatchet job news article about the news agency. He used to date the main producer of the show before she dated the main character, the news anchor. So the reporter and the producer are having a huge argument. She is standing up for the news anchor. She's like, "You don't understand. He is a great man. I mean, he struggles with things, but he's a great man." As she says struggles with things, we see him hop into the scene, trying to put on his pants.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Then he falls over in the background. It's been a half hour since we mentioned the pants, but it just comes back at like the best moment. So… Check out The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin.

[Howard] Yeah. That's the… As a professional humorist, that sort of thing is something that I use a lot. Sandra mentioned stage magic. In the second edition of X-treme Dungeon Mastery, we call attention to the way in which surprise, for a magician… The deception with a magician there should never be a reveal. They have red herrings, but they are never going to tell you how they perform the trick. Whereas as storytellers, the deception needs to be gentler. It can't be, as we mentioned last week, can't be animating Hans having a loving, kind, totally genuine expression of love while the music cues and the lighting all say this is a good boy for her to be interested in, when in fact, he's just making a play for the kingdom. That's deceptive. We want our reveal, for storytellers, the big payoff is in the reveal. For audiences of magicians, the big payoff is I was deceived and I don't know how. I use the example… We illustrated the example in the book of the trick knife. If the magician says, "Aha, see, this is where I switched out the actual knife for a knife with a collapsing blade. You didn't see it, though, did you? But, yeah, the knife just has collapsing blades. Stab, stab, stab." Big deal. In the movie Knives Out, we are told that there is a knife that has a collapsing blade, and in the very last scene, someone attempts to commit a murder with it, and we find out that they've grabbed the wrong knife, and it is delightful. Because we get to see the trick knife.

[Kaela] Knives Out is a master.

[Howard] I just realized… Oh. Go ahead.

[Kaela] I say, Knives Out is a master class in red herrings and guns on the walls and like, seriously, like, pick it apart.

 

[Howard] So, very, very many. On the subject of red herrings, I have the book of the week. It is And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. I picked this one because it is arguably the place in which red herring cemented itself in the colloquial… The jargon for a distraction. The character Vera scolds everybody for being distracted, because in the verse that applies to one of the previous character's deaths, a red herring swallowed one, and then there were three. She's saying, "A red herring's swallowed one, that clearly means Armstrong was not dead. There was a distraction here." And Then There Were None is a fine book to read. It's short and it's very tightly woven.

[Megan] In my eighth grade English class, I disagreed with the ending. I remember meeting with my teacher afterwards, because she was talking about, like, it was inevitable. This is the only way it could end. I'm like, challenge accepted.

[Laughter]

[Megan] I wrote a different ending as to who the murderer was and what they were doing. I pointed out it could have happened this way. She's like, "Okay, Megan. It's not that deep. But good job."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Here's the thing. This is… I can't remember where I got this. I could be speaking out of class. But I have heard said that Agatha Christie often wrote these things three quarters of the way through without knowing who the murderer was herself, and then went back and made sure that the foreshadows in the red herrings all aligned and she had a proper ending in place. Which means if you… Depending on how much of the book you let yourself rewrite, yeah.

 

[Sandra] Yeah. Well, it's fascinating, the movie Clue, I don't know what year it was, but it's the Tim Curry movie Clue, which did an experiment that they actually filmed three different endings with three different murderers. Then they sent different endings to different theaters.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] So, theoretically, you could go see the movie in multiple different theaters and get to see the three endings. Now, in the age of streaming, they just play all three endings one after each other.

[Howard] Yeah, they've concatenated the endings and they've given the third one, they're saying, "But this is what really happened."

[Sandra] Right. But the whole thing is written so that there are clues to support every single ending. Which is valuable as a writer to deconstruct, because the vital clue for one ending is a red herring for a different ending, and so you can pull that apart.

 

[Megan] So, the writers' strike of 2002 hit a lot of shows very hard. One of the shows it hit quite hard was the procedural Bones…

[Yes]

[Megan] Which is one of my favorite shows of all time. There is a recurring murderer in the third season. Which is rare for this show. Normally, we get our guy every time they show up. But there is a recurring murderer that is a cannibalistic cultist that eats people's faces. Like the Sith, there's always a master and an apprentice. At the very end of the season, it is revealed that someone on our team is the apprentice of the murder. Even though throughout about 90% of the season, this person has been making discovery after discovery, helping us track down the murderer. So you try and rewatch that season, and there is no clear moment when this character betrays us until you can see in the writers' room that… Well, or lack of a writers' room, I'm not entirely sure how the writers' strike wrapped up the season. But…

[Chuckles]

[Megan] They had to cut the season early, and about two episodes from the end, this character starts actively working against us. But it's clear to see that that was a decision made much later on in the season, and it doesn't logically follow. So what we have earlier aren't red herring, it's just unintentional storytelling before we knew where we were going. Because you can't go back… [Garbled]

[Howard] It was the writers' phone booth, not room, because…

[Yeah]

[Howard] Phoning it in. Because… That joke would have played better if I told it sooner. What other tools do we have for creating satisfying red herrings in order to make the inevitable surprising?

 

[Kaela] I think one of the things that… You have to use this carefully, but ambiguity is a very helpful tool when depicting things. Because ambiguity is the… Or almost an objectivity. Like, this is what happened. These are the facts of what happened. But a lot of storytelling is contextualizing what has happened. So, if you can show what happened and either just leave it there as if it's not important or touch on the… Like, use your context to put only one part of it in focus, without obscuring the view of the rest of what happened, you can use that ambiguity to your advantage to get people to look at the wrong thing or to pay attention to the wrong thing. That still makes sense, but you haven't hidden anything from them. You're just leaving it ambiguous or uncommented on.

[Howard] One of the things that I try to do is take the character who is the most charismatic, the character that everybody likes the most, and have that person look at the wrong thing. The right thing is someplace else, but the person we like is looking at the wrong thing. Now, obviously, you can't do this all the time, or you're just like, "Okay. Check everything in the room that he didn't look at. That's a possible clue. That list of things will thread to the answer." But, yeah, the audience is going to follow… They're going to follow the funny, they're going to follow the cool turns of phrase, the… When I write, I try and put the funny around the wrong thing enough of the time that people mislead themselves.

[Kaela] The power of misdirection. Like you were talking about with the magician's stuff, where you're shoving the context over here. That doesn't mean that you turn out the lights on everything else and you are deceiving them, but you're like, "Hey, look at this cool thing." I love using a trusted, likable character to do that. Where you're like, "Oh, I love this character. I appreciate this character." Or even "I trust this character, they're really smart." Then, you're like, "Oh, but they didn't have all of the picture either. They didn't tell me that this thing was the answer, but I thought it was."

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] Sandra. Sorry.

[Sandra] A quick set of tools depending on what medium you're working in. If you're in a prose medium, you can use synonyms and homonyms carefully. That's a potential tool depending on what you're writing. Auditory, then you want things that sound the same but mean different things. Then visual mediums, you can do visual misdirection again. So it's all… Just another set of tools to think about. Meg?

 

[Megan] I want to kind of wrap this up by saying it's okay if the audience guesses what's coming, if you can deliver on it in a very enticing way. That's Chekhov's cauldron of hot lead is coming back. Because I had just assumed they were going to put on some red and orange lights when it's time to spill it, because we're in a small theater, we're inside. They set off fireworks inside the building.

[Gasp]

[Megan] There was just a fountain of real live sparks and fire on the stage. So I knew the scene was coming, and just didn't care. Then they delivered with an actual explosion. I was like, "Oh. I was wrong. Oh, my gosh." So, that was great. That was wonderful.

[Howard] The 1812 overture…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Done by the high school, in which the sheriff is backstage firing his shotgun into a bucket.

[Laughter. Yeah.]

 

[Howard] Sandra, I think you got this week's homework. We could keep talking and talking and talking about this. We need to get people homework.

[Sandra] Yeah. The homework is, this is a paired episode with last week's episode. So, do the reverse of last week's homework. Instead of finding a thing in the beginning and writing a scene at the end, find something that is important at the end and find a place early where you can rewrite the scene to put that on the mantle in some way. Then, maybe, take some of the tricks and tools to magician misdirect so that it's there, but it is not the focus of attention. So…

[Howard] Outstanding. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.