wetranscripts | Entries tagged with collaboration

Writing Excuses 18.29: Collaboration And Partnership

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-29-collaboration-and-partnership

Key Points: Partnerships with other people or other IP's or groups. Even sequels and short stories set in established worlds need collaboration. Working in someone else's IP or working with your past self. Fit into the existing continuity or play with it. Collaboration is not the same every time. With some IP work, the canon rules. In IP work, you don't get to pick the audience. Get to know the audience, at least a little. Learn what kind of collaborator you are, and what type of collaborations you enjoy. Know who you are working with, too. Writing for a property you love may still be harder than writing your own thing. What do you do to make a collaboration work? First, accept that writing is egotistical, and collaboration requires you to let go of part of that ego and listen to other people. An effective tool is focusing on fiting your story within this framework. You've been picked for your personal voice, use it! Match their mechanics and aesthetics, but express your personal voice. What is intrinsic to the first part, what does the audience love, and how can I tell a new version of that? Collaborators sometimes see different things. Collaboration challenges you to think about the essence of the story you want to tell because you don't have full control of all aspects. Collaboration can teach you new tools. Two writers working together works best when each one knows what they are bringing to the partnership. Each case is a little bit different. Sometimes you have to put your foot down if the collaboration is going towards something harmful, or a story that doesn't need to be told in that way. This is a delicate process! Know where your line is.

[Season 18, Episode 29]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Working in Partnership.

[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] I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are going to talk about working in partnership with other people or with other IP's which can often be an entire group, rather than a single person. Part of this is collaboration. But this is also something that you often will find yourself doing with your own work when it's time to go back and write a sequel to something or a short story set in a world that you or someone else has established. There are rules you have to follow in order to make sure that it stays true to the original thing. So this is something that all of us have done to varying degrees. So let me start by just kind of throwing this out as a general question. Why is it important, or rather, how is it different when you have to work within an established IP versus just creating something whole cloth?

[Mary Robinette] So, there are built-in constraints that you have to work towards. I've done this in a couple of different modes. I've done this in someone else's IP for games. I collaborated with Brandon on the thing for The Original. But the thing that I'm doing right now is, that is, is basically collaborating with my past self. I'm writing the fourth book in the lady astronaut That series, and I have to fit it in between the novels that I have already written in the short stories that are farther down the timeline of this. As I was working on it, I had… Like, I worked out this whole outline, grabbed one of the short stories to reference a character name, and realized that it takes place two years after the end of this novel. So I could not have the ending that I was aiming for because it broke the rest of my canon.

[Howard] Kevin J. Anderson, who famously has written a number of Star Wars novels, was on the podcast and gave us what I considered the high water metaphor, which is Lando Calrissian and Han Solo in Return of the Jedi, when Lando Calrissian needs to take the Millennium Falcon and Han says, "Don't scratch it." Your job as a tie-in fiction writer, according to Kevin J. Anderson, is you need to take the Millennium Falcon, blow up the Death Star with it, bring it back to Han without scratching it. I love that metaphor so much.

[Mary Robinette] There's a number of different things that I think that you're thinking about with that. It's the fitting into the existing continuity. So there's a couple of different ways you can play with it. One is that you can… You could play that as Lando manages to do all of that without scratching it. The other is you can have this whole side quest of, oh, crap, I have, in fact, scratched it, now I have to clean it up before Han knows. So there's a certain amount of gleeful playfulness that you can do where you're like, "Hum. You told me that I can't do this thing, but let me see if I can…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And still be respectful to the IP.

[Howard] The back-and-forth that I got to have with Doug Seacat when I was writing tie-in fiction with Privateer Press. We were talking about coal technology and magic. I told him, "Hey, are you aware of coal tar?" He said, "What's coal tar?" I said, "Well, it's a 19th-century thing that was a byproduct of coal processing. It's a mild acid that got used in medicine all the time." He said, "I didn't even know about that. Well, it's going into the book." So… That level of the partnership for me was so much fun because I got to reach into Doug's head and find out what they'd said and then see if I could add things to the universe. He paid me a very high compliment at the end and said, "I love what you did with the technology inside this war jack. We haven't had anybody actually try to describe how one of these works, and you just went for it." I'm like, "Yeah, I stared at pictures of railroad engines for hours, but this was fun."

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I want to say is that I think understanding that collaboration is not going to be the same way every time.

[Right]

[Mary Robinette] So, Brandon and I have collaborated on a thing, and Dan and Brandon have collaborated. Both of these are audio… Things that were intended for audio. Our collaboration processes were completely different. With me, Brandon handed me a script… Or, not a script, an outline and a world Bible. I sat down and we had a little bit of back-and-forth, fleshing out the outline where I turned it into scenes that made sense to me. Then I started writing it. In the process of writing it, I would hit these worldbuilding things, which is the thing that Brandon is known for, that made no sense at all…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Because what he realized in that process was that so much of his worldbuilding was figuring it out as he was going. So we had to have a lot of back-and-forth about that, and jettisoning those things that had been planned and plotted that didn't actually make sense once we actually got in there. Whereas Dan was given this very blank slate, which we talked about in the first episode in this series.

[Dan] Yeah. The Dark One novel was similar to what you got. He gave me an outline, but actually very little if any worldbuilding of how the secondary world… It's a portal fantasy… How does that actually function. The collaboration for this process was just, "Hey, this would be cool to do this podcast story. Do it. It has to explain how this character in's up in prison." That was the entire thing that I had to work with.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think, I have a number of clients who do a lot of IP work. Right? I have clients who have written for Bioware and Blizzard and Marvel and Star Wars. Right? Some huge brands. It is always fascinating to me seeing how that process works when there is decades sometimes of canon, and canon that's incredibly important to the fan base. Right? So, if you play with the worldbuilding of Dragon Age, you're going to have a lot of conversations around that. Now, the problem is, there's an asymmetry here, because you're dealing with a big corporation who is trying to develop a videogame, make movies, make TV shows, in parallel with what you're doing, so it's also trying to hit a moving target with people who are very busy. So sometimes as the writer, when you're coming into this, you need to find a way to manage your time and sort of protect your time, so that you're not spending… You're not doing revision after revision after revision chasing a moving target of what the current canon and what the current lore is. Working… Doing that kind of work for hire work can be incredibly rewarding, financially, and it can be really fun to write in these universes, but it is a particular skill that's almost a management skill as much as it is a craft skill of finding a way to fit into that world.

[Erin] I think that's so important… Two things that you said that I love. One is that you don't get to pick the audience. That's, I think, the biggest thing in working in intellectual-property work, IP work, is that the audience for this work has been determined for you, and often times has been built up for a long time. So you may be able to play with the world and with what you're doing, but ultimately… When you write a novel, you might think, "Here's the audience that I want for it." But if you're writing for a game, it's these gamers. So you need to know a little bit… I think it's always wise to get to know the audience a bit. You don't necessarily have to pander to them, but it's good to know what the expectations are coming in, what people sort of want from this property or from this world, so that you have a sense that you're playing to the strengths of it as opposed to fighting it, which is never a good thing to do. I would say the second thing is, if you do a lot of collaborative work, is learning the type of collaborator that you are and the type of collaborations that you enjoy. Because not everything is going to be your cup of tea. Sometimes you don't like working with, like, big multinational companies because ultimately they hold a lot more control. You might consider like more of a one-on-one collaboration like Mary Robinette was talking about. I love writers' rooms, where your getting together with a group of people to create something and you're doing a lot of the generative work together. Then going off and writing and coming back to see how it went. Just because it plays to things that I think are really fun. Sometimes you don't know these things until you do it. But if you've collaborated on anything in your life, a school project…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] A grocery list, like, a vacation, you know a bit about yourself when you work with other people. You can then try to use that and build on it when you collaborate in a creative space.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think it's really important to not only know who your audience is, but who you're working with. Right? Because I've seen writers go into collaboration with some of these big IP that have a fan base that may not always be the easiest to work with. Especially if they're fem, especially if they're queer or a writer of color, they can get a lot of pushback in a way that can be very unpleasant. Coming up, I have Mark Ashiro is collaborating with Rick Riordan. One of the things that collaboration was specifically because Rick did not feel like he was in a position to write these queer characters. So he wanted to find a queer writer to take that on. It was a thing that Mark and I looked at very carefully in terms of how is Mark being positioned to the fans and in what way. I mean, we could not have a more wonderful partner than Rick on this. Then he and his team have taken absolute care to make sure that Mark is seen as a full collaborator and is front and center in the fans' eyes. So, knowing that we had that backup going in really changed the calculus for us of, like, is this a thing… Or, like, how do we approach this, what do we need to do to make sure that, like, we're going to navigate this well. Right? The book's coming out soon. Fans are really excited, we're really excited, I think it's going to be a really beautiful partnership.

[Dan] Yeah. This is such an important thing to consider. Especially, remembering back to my days trying to break into this, where I was like, "I will take anything." But also if you let me write for a property that I love, that's even more exciting to me. It is often so much harder than just writing your own thing. I sat down, back when Star Wars kind of ramped up its new slate of novels a few years ago, I sat down with Claudia Gray who's been writing a ton of Star Wars stuff, and said, "Tell me everything, I would love to work in this." By the end of that conversation, I was like, "Absolutely not."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "This is not for me." I love Star Wars, but this process that you go through that produces very good books and the people who do it enjoy it is definitely something that I would not have enjoyed. So you do need to pay attention to who you're going to be working with, what their process is going to be like, how much do you love the property. Given the same opportunity to write for Star Trek, I would absolutely say yes, because it's more of a personal connection for me. But there a lot of extra considerations when you get into this kind of work. Let's pause now, and when we come back, we want to talk more about how this collaboration works.

[Mary Robinette] I wrote a story with Brandon Sanderson called The Original. This story is about a woman who wakes up and discovers that her husband has been murdered, and, more than that, that she is a clone, and her original murdered him. She's been given a period of time in which to track down her original and bring her to justice. It is science fiction, it's immersive, but it is audio. It is specifically written for audio. It was a lot of fun to write. So, if you're interested in someone who's doing a lot of self reflection out of force, this is something you might want to pick up. It's called The Original. That is by me, Mary Robinette Kowal and Brandon Sanderson.

[Dan] All right. So, how do we do this? We've talked about a lot of the perils of collaboration, and a lot of the benefits that you can get. Specifically, how is it different? What do you need to do in a collaboration to make it work?

[Howard] I want to start by saying that there is nothing is inherently egotistical as writing a novel that you expect other people to read. That's good. It is an inherently egotistical act, and I accept that. I accept that and I embrace that. It's important to accept and embrace that, because the moment you're collaborating, you have to recognize that at least a little bit of that ego you gotta let go of it. You have to let go of that and learn to listen to other people over the voice of your inner artist who is shouting for the things that you want. This may sound like a 101 level technique, but I'm here to tell you, the world is the place that it is because it ain't a 101 level technique.

[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, one of the things that I have found to be a very effective tool is to think about, there's your goal. You have to tell a story for someone else in this world, or in your own world. But that you want to bring… You can fit your story, the story that you want to tell, within this framework. There's a reason that they picked you to tell this is opposed to someone else. That is your personal voice. So I'm going to draw… Take a brief sidestep to draw out the distinction in voice. There's three types. There's mechanical, there's aesthetic, and there's personal. If I use puppets as a metaphor, which I'm very fond of doing. When we say mechanical, it's like what kind of puppet is it. When we say mechanics in writing, it's like third person, first person, game, YA, whatever you're doing mechanically. That can be taught, that can be mimicked. Aesthetic, what does that puppet look like, what does it sound like. Those can be taught and mimicked. Personal… If you loan the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it looks like a different character. Which is why everyone freaked out when Kermit's original puppeteer, Jim Henson, died and Steve Whitmire took over, even though it's clearly the same puppet. So it's matching mechanic and aesthetic. So when you are coming in, you want to make sure that you're matching their mechanics and their aesthetics, but recognize that your personal voice is part of why you were hired. So your ideas, your personal experience, those things are going to express themselves in the fiction, and that has value. At the same time, you're also going to have to make decisions about which pieces of your personality you are sharing with them, and which pieces you are retaining, and which pieces you're willing to say, "You know what, we can overwrite that," because it is getting in the way of my paycheck and the things that you want me to do.

[Dan] Another consideration here when you… One of the things that you mentioned was the story you want to tell. I think that that's such a big part of this. One of the things we said at the beginning was even when you write a sequel, you are essentially in collaboration with yourself. It is interesting to me to look at sequels or second seasons of the show and realize, "Oh, this creator misunderstood what the audience loved about the first thing." Right? One of the examples I like to use for this is The Temple of Doom, the second Indiana Jones movie. What Spielberg and Lucas loved about the first one, and what they were trying to do, is not necessarily what the audience took away from that first one. The things that the audience loved were not… About Raiders of the Lost Ark… Kind of weren't present in the second one as much. That was a case of them identifying different things than the audience did in terms of this is what I'm going to continue, this is how I'm going to keep this story going. You can see the same thing with season two of Heroes, people developing superpowers. What the creators thought we all loved about that and therefore what they focused on in season two was people coming together and forming a super team. Whereas the audience was like, "No, we already saw that. We want to see the team do something together now." Because what the audience kind of pulled out of season one was, "Oh, I love these characters, and I want to see them continue to grow along this path." Rather than I want to see them walk the same path over again. So identifying what it is that really makes this click, and how can I give you more of that while being different, is part of not only writing a sequel, but also writing an episode of a TV show, writing a short story set in a larger world. What is intrinsic to this, what does the audience love about it, and how can I tell my own new version of that?

[Erin] I think one of the challenges and excitements of working in collaboration is that you may feel differently about that than a collaborator does. You may believe, like, that the audience is getting character and they may believe, no, the audience is really into the tension of it. So, sometimes you do have to set aside, especially if you're working with a collaborator that has more positional power, like, they're a big company, and ultimately you're not going to convince Marvel that they are wrong about the character. They're going to tell you, "It's this," and you're going to have to work with it. But I think that that's actually some of the most fun of it, and why I enjoy collaborating, is figuring out what are the mechanics and aesthetics that I need to fit my personal voice to, and how can I still make things that are core to me as a storyteller come through in this different format. Sort of like when we were talking about writing in a different format, when you're using someone else's mechanics and aesthetics, it is its own, like, sort of genre of writing. Figuring out how to tweak things and say things differently, but still get the core through, is so important. I remember Mary Robinette several episodes ago, you talked about, I think, essence and form.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which I always say as essence and expression. It's, you change the expression, but the essence is there. I think what it challenges you to do is think about what is the essence of the story that you're trying to tell in a way that you might not when you have full control over all aspects of the storytelling.

[Dan] I understood this principle you're talking about in a completely different way when I took the time to look at my favorite X file episodes and realized they were all by the same writer. There was something that that writer was putting into the stories, that essence, that personality, that intimate connection to what was going on, that I responded to. It's one of my favorite shows, I like most of the episodes. But these four or five in particular spoke to me in a very unique way, because it was that singular author's voice coming through.

[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that we have to do in puppet theater a lot, that… They say it takes 5 to 10 years to establish a company, and during that time, you have to do names, like Pinocchio, Snow Queen. So the goal is to figure out how to do the story that you want to tell while still having the audience feel like they came out of the theater seeing Pinocchio. It comes down to figuring out, okay, what are the markers, what are the things that are important in these stories? Like, I know that in The Calculating Stars, and this is part of what I get from reading the five and four star reviews, when I'm in the right frame of mind, is that people like seeing women in STEM, they like seeing someone who's dealing with anxiety, they like a happily married couple, and they want to be in space. Like, I have to make sure that as much as possible, I give you at least one scene in space.

[Erin] I also think you can get tools from collaboration that are like random things you would never have to have known otherwise.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] A good example of this is, so Zombies Run is based out of the UK, and all of the characters are British. I am… Was, when I was writing, the only non-British writer. So I would write things and they would be like, "This is very American." They'd be like, "You just used this American slang. This is not how things work. Stop saying… Whatever… The floors start at zero." It really made me, like, open my eyes in a way to sort of what are the things that I'm making assumptions about in the way that I tell stories that I wouldn't have thought about if a collaborator hadn't said we tell stories a little differently and you're going to need to adapt to that. I actually think that even though I don't write in Britishisms outside of that, it really helped me think differently about the assumptions I was making as a writer.

[DongWon] Mostly, up until this point, we've been talking about writing for IP or writing for an existing universe in those ways. There's another type of collaboration that is two individual writers working together. I've been fortunate enough to work on a number of co-written projects that were quite successful. Your talk about tools is what made me think of this. I think they've worked the best when I could see each writer knew what they were bringing to the table. So, in the case of James S. A. Corey, that was Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Like, Daniel was really bringing this sort of like rich worldbuilding, really thoughtful politics, very expensive sort of systems oriented thinking. Then, Ty was bringing a really strong sense of action and pacing and all of these things. It was one of these things that each of them individually… I mean, Daniel is a truly wonderful novelist in his own work, but I could see how the alchemy of the two of them working together were making something that was so dynamic and so fun, and created this really fantastic science-fiction series. Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, working on This Is How You Lose the Time War together, that is a collaboration that's really driven by their friendship, and each of the two characters, Red and Blue, are kind of reflections of both their styles and ways of being in the world, and then figuring out a little bit of how their friendship worked through these two characters interacting and talking to each other. You could just sort of see, like, Max's more mechanical thinking, Amal's more like organic thinking… I'm obviously being very reductive here. But, like, these two I think coming together in these two characters in these really symbolic ways and weaving together to make this really beautiful story. So, what I love is each of them knowing what their toolkit was and also understanding there was a way that that would we interact with someone else's toolkit to make something that works better together than individually.

[Dan] Well, let me follow up and ask you some questions about that. Was there a point in either of those processes where you, as the outsider, saw them start to click into what those roles were?

[DongWon] I think with Daniel and Ty a little bit more. Because that was a little bit more not clearly what section was written by which person. They did alternate, and then they would sort of pass and edit together. That was meant to be seamless. With Max and Amal, it really was more… Each… Red sections and Blue sections are meant to sound different. So those were written separately, and then sort of edited to work as a whole, but that was… Also that just showed… They didn't even tell me they were working on this. It just appeared on my desk one day. I was like, "What did you guys do?"

[Chuckles, laughter]

[DongWon] Which turned out to be a beautiful sort of surprise. So it depends a little bit on the project. Right? With Mark working with Rick Riordan, it has been, again, a little bit more deliberate of Mark. Like, okay, how do I fit into this voice, into this style of storytelling, while bringing their own sort of personality and their own perspective to it. Which is what, as Mary Robinette was talking about, they were hired to do. That's why Rick wanted Mark, because they had read Mark's other work and said, "This fits. This is the perspective that these characters need to have. This is Nico." Right? So I think in each of… Each case is a little bit different is one of the things that also is really useful. Not only look to who you're partnering with and what are they bringing to the table. Know what you bring to the table. It's always a little bit of a tap dance, always a little bit of give-and-take.

[Dan] Yeah. The first collaboration I did with Brandon was for a book called Apocalypse Guard, which is not published and might not ever be published. We back burnered that one. But that is a book he wrote for Delacorte and wasn't working. He basically handed it over to me and said, "Is there any way you can fix this?" Which meant that I came into it kind of more with that mindset of, well, what are my strengths here? I had the benefit of looking at an existing thing and realizing, okay, what do I… I know Brandon is better at endings than I am, he is better at worldbuilding than I am. What am I going to bring to this? Character and voice and humor. That really helped us crystallize, this is what I… My specialty, this is what your specialty, we're going to put these together and create something neither of us could have done on our own.

[Erin] This is making me think of one really specific type of collaboration, which is that I also do some cultural consulting, where I come onto projects and collaborate with them to make sure that there thinking about the world beyond the one that they just know from their own cultural background, is the way I'll put it. So, just bringing my own experience to the table. Those tend to work better when it really is a collaboration, versus, like, a we wrote this, please fix it so we don't get canceled, which is a thing that sometimes happens. But when it's truly collaborative, it's really interesting because what happens is you're bringing your understanding and, like, I'm bringing my worldview and saying, like, "how is this worldview a little different than the worldview that you would bring?" Even though you're in sort of more control of this property and what's happening with it, I'm trying to bring something different to the table that I want you to listen to, because it's going to reach a whole new group of people and also, just, I think, be a broader and more interesting story. I would say that one thing that I've really gotten out of doing this is, even in other collaborative projects, I will put my foot down if I feel that the collaboration is going towards something that I think is harmful, or just like a story that I don't think needs to be told in that particular way, because it's not… It's putting things out in the world that I don't agree with and I don't want sort of my name associated with. That can be a really delicate process, which is why I'm bringing it up right here at the end of the episode. But I think it can be very delicate to figure out when can you take power in a collaboration, and when is it important to say, "This is my Hill to die on. I do not want us to tell this type of story." And when do you have to let things go, and really understanding the difference between something you may not like aesthetically or a choice you may not have made as a storyteller, and something that you think is a deeply personal and, like, thing that you don't think should be out in the world in the form that it is in the particular collaboration.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I've seen… We mostly talked about when things go well. I've also seen collaborations not go well, and those projects not make it to publication, which I think, in each of those cases, was for the best. Right? I think that's also something to keep in mind, is that there are failure states of this that are different from the failure states of writing your own solo project. Sometimes it's knowing what's important to you, knowing where your line is and saying I'm not going past this line and holding that ground, which can be very difficult to do, but it's important to have clarity about why you're doing this and what you're bringing to the table.

[Dan] Okay. It is time for some homework. What we would like you to do today as an exercise… This is not going to produce salable fiction, because you are taking words from somebody else. Grab something on your TBR pile, a book that you are intending to read and haven't gotten to yet. Open it up, find a random paragraph, and use that paragraph is the opening of a short story.

[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we learn what all the one star reviews for I Am Not a Serial Killer have in common, and we talk about the two halves of a reader's brain. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.19: Working in a Collaborative Environment

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/05/08/17-19-working-in-a-collaborative-environment/

Key points: One part of collaboration is meetings and suggestions. One reason to collaborate is to tell stories that you just don't have the time to tell. Sometimes the other people can bring things to the story that you can't. One nice thing can be ideas and advice. Beware creative squabbling, making creative disagreements personal. To collaborate effectively, you have to let it go.

[Season 17, Episode 19]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Working in a Collaborative Environment.

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

[Meg] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Meg] And I'm Meg.

[Dan] We have Meg Lloyd with us today, who is one of my favorite people. Meg, tell us about yourself.

[Meg] Well, I am a storyboard artist and a screenwriter working in animation out in California. That means I'm one of the first wizards on call when it comes to making movie magic. It's usually my job to take the scripts from the writer and then turn them into the pictures, the designs, the sets, and the camera work that will be turned over to the other departments in order to make a final animated scene.

[Dan] Cool. What are some of the things you've worked on that our audience might be familiar with?

[Meg] Yeah. So, some of the stuff that I've worked on… Well, a lot of it is still a secret because since I'm at the beginning of the process, I don't get to talk about it until a couple of years after it's all done and out of the way. But some of my released work includes boarding on Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous and Star Trek: Lower Decks. This week, Nickelodeon finally title dropped a show I worked on for them called Transformers: Earth Park.

[Dan] Whoa. Awesome. So, we are going to talk about creating in a collaborative environment. Whether that is authors collaborating with each other, like Brandon and I are doing, or you working in a whole company full of creatives who are constantly having to be creative together. How is… This is such a dumb question. But, how is that different from just making something on your own?

[Meg] Well, I get a lot of other people telling me what I did wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] Instead of being able to gauge that for myself. One of the things is where you're positioned on a creative project, because… I've directed as well as like boarded. There is a very clear chain of command. It differs from show to show on how much you're allowed to pipe up in a meeting and make suggestions. Like, I've been with some directors and some heads of story that really welcomed jokes and riffs in a meeting. But I also remember with a great fear my very first job when I raised my hand and made a suggestion, and the supervising director, and then later my director, and then one of the producers pulled me aside, one by one, and said, "You can't talk in a meeting."

[Laughter]

[Meg] I was like, "Whah?" Which is like a real shame, because I talk all the time.

[Dan] So conducive to the creative process, as well, is, like, telling people to shut up.

[Brandon] Yeah, I've… Hollywood's this weird place where it feels like everyone knows the rules but you. I've been in some of those meetings too, and I'm like, "How do you know?" And it's different in every meeting. Yeah, I don't envy you trying to navigate some of these things, because it gets really weird.

[Meg] So, animation and just moviemaking in general is one of the biggest team projects that there is. There's a reason why our credits are 10 minutes long. If you're in a short schedule hi rush production like TV, you only are going to be touching an episode for a specific amount of time, and then you have to pass it down to the next person. The only thing that stops this from being an absolutely garbled game of telephone is the people who are sort of steering this ship, which would be your director and your head of story. So, a lot of times you have to gauge the water yourself, to be like, "Okay. Can I… What can I bring of my own flair?" Or what do they need me to just get done and pass on to the next person?

[Dan] Let me ask Brandon, you have recently, in the last few years, started to do a lot more collaborations.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] With me, with Jancey, with others. What prompted that decision, and kind of what got you into that frame of creative mind?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, this was kind of a very specific thing, which involves the explosion of audiobooks, and several of the audiobook producers, the companies, coming to me and saying, "Hey, Brandon. We would love some exclusive content. Is there something of yours that you can provide?" Meanwhile, I had been having various stories that I wanted to write for years that I'd never been able to get to. The one I'm doing with you, the one I'm doing with Mary Robinette, these are stories that I had outlines for. I'm like, "Someday I'm going to write this story." Then, other demands just kept taking me away from them. These two things intersected, where I said, "Well, maybe if I brought on a friend, I can take one of these stories that I really think is really cool that I've wanted to tell, but I just don't have the time for because the Cosmere's dominating more and more of my attention." So, for me, collaboration was a way to tell more stories that I just don't have the time to tell.

[Dan] So, question for both of you then. Can you think of something that the collaborative process brought to a story that you hadn't seen there or you wouldn't have come up with on your own?

[Brandon] Well, I definitely have one, but I don't know… I'll go ahead and go first, then you can. The story I wrote with Mary Robinette, we'll just bring that up because she's one of the other cohosts. So, this is a story about a woman, who, for reasons mysterious, has murdered her husband. Right? She… A clone of her wakes up, with missing… Her whole life she remembers except the week that led to murdering her husband. The clone's like, "I would never do that. I love my husband. Why would I ever do this?" They're like, "Well, that's why we brought you. Your job is to figure out why you would do this." It's that kind of story. Never having had a husband, Mary Robinette was able to… Like, I wouldn't have been able to approach this from the same direction she could.

[Dan] She has had a husband, but you have not.

[Brandon] I have not.

[Dan] Okay.

[Brandon] So, she was able… Like, in the mindset of a woman in her… She's in her 30s. Mary Robinette isn't, but she has been a woman in her 30s, which I never have been. As a writer, we're trained to get in the heads of people that aren't like ourselves. That's what we do. That's one of the main things. But in this specific case, I knew I couldn't write this story as well as she could, and that she would bring certain things to it that I could never approach. Lo and behold, when I read the story, I'm like, "Those are the things." I could point to them. Say, this is what Mary Robinette brought, that I didn't even know I was missing. Otherwise, I could have maybe faked it.

[Dan] Yeah. A lot of times we just don't know what we don't know.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] What's the name of that story, if people want to go look at it?

[Brandon] It's called The Original.

[Dan] The Original.

[Meg] Something that's been really hard during the pandemic is working all alone at my house with my cats who don't know the first thing about moviemaking.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] Because I usually get to do it at a studio with all of my friends who are very good at making movies and TV. So I really like working in a collaborative environment with other artists because when you just get stuck on something, it's really easy to reach over and be like, "Hey. What's wrong with this picture?" They can, like, literally tell you, "Oh, your composition's off." You need to like lower your camera, or fill it out, or all these other jargon thing that I could fire off 50 times in a row.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] It's very fun because at the storyboarding level, we're all on even footing, we're all like this portion of the team is we're [off and days?] Oh, wait. Am I allowed to sing copyrighted…

[Dan] You are totally allowed to sing copyrighted things.

[Meg] Probably not. So one of the things I value the most out of collaboration is building elements of trust with the artists that you know and admire. That it's easy to ask for advice and it doesn't feel like they're criticizing you when they give you ideas and feedback.

[Dan] Yeah. That's something that I've seen with Brandon as we worked together on Apocalypse Guard and now on Dark One. We know each other very well, we know each other's creative process very well, and we know each other's strengths very well. So it's easy for me when he says, "Hey, the ending to this absolutely doesn't work." I can think, "Yeah. You're right. It doesn't. You're better at endings than I am." That's one of the reasons why we work so well together.

[Brandon] Yeah. You shore up one another's weaknesses. Right? Like, Dan is really good at voice. The reason I went and brought him onto Apocalypse Guard, which we haven't released yet, but we're going to…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] Is the voice was broken. Dan's the best person I know when it comes to writing narrative voice for a character. So I went to Dan and said, "Dan. Help." In that specific case, because the book was broken and I'd pulled it from the publisher because I couldn't get it fixed. Now the ending of that one was also broken. So Dan fixed the voice, but Dan's like, "I don't do endings."

[Laughter]

[Dan] I mean, I do, just… Technically. But…

[Brandon] You have lots of really great endings.

[Dan] What I don't do are Brandon Sanderson endings.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Which are distinctly different in flavor. So, to make sure that works. We're actually… Now, we forgot to tell you this in our intro. We are currently at LTUE.

[Cheers]

[Dan] That was very hesitant cheering. We actually read from… An excerpt from Apocalypse Guard at this con two years ago.

[Brandon] Two years ago.

[Dan] It's still not published.

[Brandon] Still not published. This is my fault, not Dan's.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Dan kicked it back to me and said, "I fixed the voice. The ending's still broken. You need to fix that." I'm like, "I do."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But the whole point is I don't have time to work on things anymore.

[Dan] Yeah. Which makes it tricky.

[Brandon] Which makes it tricky. But we will find a time.

[Dan] Okay. Now, Meg, we did not prep you in any way for this, but we do want to do a thing of the week in the middle. This can be something of yours you've worked on. It doesn't have to be a book. It could be a book you've read by somebody else. It could be whatever you want to recommend for people to go out and see.

[Meg] Okay. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but I deeply enjoyed Arcane on Netflix.

[Dan] Yes.

[Meg] I mentioned before about how TV schedules are so crunched. They had five years to do their storyboards for their episodes. I only get six weeks at a time per episode. So I was both blown away by the artistry and also incredibly jealous of like the flexible creativity everyone showed. I would check out Arcane. It's an animated series inspired by the League of Legends videogame, and it's on Netflix now.

[Brandon] They cheated though. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] When you have League of Legends money, which Riot did, and they just said, "We're going to make our own show, and you're going to publish it." People are just like, "Okay. We don't have to pay any money for it. Do what you want." So they just… They spent through the roof, and just made the cool thing that they wanted to make, because they wanted to make a cool thing. It's off a budget that no one would ever pay for that.

[Meg] Yes.

[Brandon] Except for the people who are like, "We don't have to care. We have League of Legends money."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, it shows. It's… The music in that show, and just how they integrate the music original songs by big bands and thing. It's just really cool.

[Meg] [Provo loco], Imagine Dragons.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] Now, kind of germane to our discussion, usually when someone roles in with a ton of money and says I'm going to make whatever I want to make and screw you all, it often turns into a very self-indulgent kind of piece of nonsense. It didn't in this case because they were willing to listen to each other. They didn't have to listen to Netflix, but they listened to each other and said, "Okay. Let's tone down these things. Let's make sure that everything lands as perfectly as possible."

[Brandon] Yeah. That's what made it work. Right? Like, League of Legends is… Has the advantage that it's not one person rolling in with a bunch of money, thinking they know how to tell a story and then not doing it. It's a videogame company, which is another big collaborative environment where everyone knows and understands they need to collaborate, deciding to make something together and therefore being willing to collaborate to make it good.

[Dan] Yeah. So, Meg, let's ask then, what are some of the pitfalls of collaboration? How can it go wrong, and how can we avoid those things going wrong?

[Meg] It's very easy to disagree over creative thing. Because all creativity starts internally, and it's very hard to make it something external from yourself. I think the biggest pitfall is… I don't want to say infighting, because that sounds way more dramatic than it is. But...

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Squabbling.

[Meg] Yeah. Taking a creative disagreement and making it feel personal. Sometimes you just have to take one or two steps back from what you're making. It's almost like you have to shut the feelings… Turn down the volume on the feelings part of your brain in order to talk things through with someone. I don't think great art comes from argument. Great art can become an argument. But if you're not enjoying your collaborative process, you will forever look back on the thing you made with the same negative feelings that were stewing while you created it.

[Dan] Brandon, do you have any collaborative pitfalls?

[Brandon] I mean, that's a really…

[Dan] Juicy stories about when you and I went at each other?

[Brandon] Good one. Well, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We don't, actually.

[Brandon] [garbled] The first thing I had to do in order to collaborate effectively was I had to let go. Right? The first of these I did was The Original, which I pitched earlier. This was an interesting experience for me because I had had the story in my head for years. I had been planning to write it, I had an outline, and I just could not find the time, couldn't justify it. For whatever reason, it was never the right project to do. Then I thought of this, and then there was a moment that I'm like, "But if I do that, I don't get to write it." That actually is… It's… Painful is the wrong term, but there is something there where it's like giving the other person permission to let it be theirs, too. This is a different kind of collaboration, because I have a thing and I'm giving it to someone else. But I think this is a really important thing. If… Our mutual friend, Kevin J. Anderson, once tells the story of collaborating… I'll leave out the other collaborator. But Kevin was going to write with another author. He wrote with this author, and he came up with something really cool, and he gave it to the other author. The other author's like, "Nope." Put it aside and wrote it again from scratch. Kevin's like, "Why did you bring on a collaborator if you're just going to do this?" The other author's like, "I realized that I just can't let go. I know how this story's supposed to go in my head. You can't do it because it's not in your head. I just have to do it my way." So you have to be excited by the prospect of what the other person's going to bring, not expect the other person to do the things the way that you exactly would do them.

[Dan] Exactly. I would add to that, that clear definitions of responsibility or domain have also helped a lot. If you know that it is one person's job to do the outline, and a different person's job to do the first draft, or however it is that you divide things up… The way that Brandon and I are like, "Well, you are going to do this ending, and you're going to do this other part." Then we know that we're less likely to step on each other's toes.

[Meg] It's very enamoring to think of the idea of a solo, solitary creator that's an absolute genius. Everyone else around them is… If we're talking about filmmaking, that you have a director who's just head and shoulders above everyone else, and everyone on the team just bows to their will. There's no way that a single person can create every aspect of a movie themselves. Even if they have a say in everything that goes on, there's no way they can fabricate all the costumes, there's no way they can location scout all of the places. So the idea of a genius solo creator on a collaborative project is a myth. Because they're not a creator, they're a dictator.

[Dan] Exactly. That is a great note to end on. Meg, what homework can you give to our listeners?

[Meg] Listen, you're going to have to find a buddy.

[Chuckles]

[Meg] So, your homework is to find one of your friends and pull up an old idea that maybe you haven't been able to get off the ground, or the nugget of a new idea you're not sure which direction to take it. It's to sit down with them and talk it over. Figure out with them what the next step on your story is going to be.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.26: Working with Teams

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/27/16-26-working-with-teams/

Key Points: Game writing tends to be more collaborative. A good team player unlocks the best in everyone. Recognize that you are all on a project together. You are not working in a silo, so acknowledge and do what the group decides. Learn to compromise. Empower those around you. When you correct people, step on their toes, but don't scuff their shoes. Honor other people's skill sets, give them freedom to inspire you. Praise coworkers, be fans of their work and ideas. Steer with praise, aka positive reinforcement. The game industry is not a zero-sum game, where praise for a coworker detracts from you. You can advance in the company and still be friendly and team-oriented. Sometimes you have to push. Be careful not to overinvest yourself emotionally in promotions or projects. Keep or make your own creative outlets. Don't do other people's jobs. Avoid head canon. If it's just in your head, it doesn't exist. Write it down, get it accepted by the team, and then use it.

[Season 16, Episode 26]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Working with Teams.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pause]

[Howard] Oh, I'm sorry. Was that my job?

[Giggles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] There is no I in mistakes.

[Laughter]

[James] Yeah. And Howard is funnier.

[Howard] Oh, wait. There is an I in mistakes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, this is… We're going to wrap this up today, our wonderful intensive course we have had about game writing, by talking about working with teams. Writing can often feel like a very solitary thing if you're in standard kind of novel short story. But other industries are much more collaborative. Game writing is one of those. So, tell us, what do we need to know about how to work well in a team?

[James] Yeah. So, in my experience, how good you are at working in teams is even more important than how good you are at actual game design. Because a good team player will unlock the best from everyone around them, while a bunch of cantankerous geniuses, which describes a lot of the game industry, will frequently crash and burn when they don't need to. So I wanted to just talk with everybody about how you work well in a team. Cass, what do you have for working well in a game team?

[Cassandra] I think the most important thing is recognizing that you are all on a project together. Whatever you do, you're contributing to the main body of this animal. You're not working in a silo, it's easy to think that, especially as a creative. But ultimately anything you do connects with every single other department. So you should absolutely show off your ideas. But at the end of the day, you need to acknowledge and you also need to do what your group decides, at least within reason. Because there's always the risk of people who are a little bit more controversial trying for things that are not quite so nice. So it is a little bit of a balance. But being able to understand that you are part of a group is valuable.

[James] Yeah. Something I always used to tell my team members is you never get to a point where you get to stop compromising. As a new writer, you want to show off your ideas, like you said, but in the end, you need to sort of salute and do what the group or your boss decides. But the flipside of that is that, as I learned as a creative director on Starfinder, being a good creative director means flexing that muscle and that authority as little as possible. You want to empower those below you, technically, in the hierarchy. The thing to remember there is that if your default is yes, then when you do have to say no or why don't we go this other direction, then you will have built up the good will that hopefully people will really listen to that and take it to heart, rather than just automatically butting heads.

[Howard] I was a terrible team player when I worked in the software industry. I was just not good at it. I got put in charge of $100 million product line. That's not a great environment in which to learn good practices, because there's already so much at stake. One of my bosses pulled me aside and said, "Look. When you correct people, yeah, it's because they're wrong. Go ahead and step on their toes. But don't scuff their shoes." The point being it is possible to issue corrections, it is possible to tell people, "No, that's not fitting the course we're going." It is possible to do that and let people retain personal self-worth, retain pride, retain whatever. You don't need to smack talk people in order to make your point. I don't want to suggest that that's the level to which I was a terrible manager of other people. But that's the advice I got, and it has stuck with me.

[James] So, one of the things I think about a lot with this regard are art orders. When you're ordering art for a game, you want to give other people room to be creative. Something an art director I worked with told me once was, "After two sentences, the artist stops reading." That can feel like a smack in the face as a writer, where you're like, "But I have 10 pages of description about this character." But the thing to remember is that you want to honor other people's skill sets. A visual artist is likely going to be way better at coming up with cool creative compositions than you are as a writer, because, like, that's what they do. So giving people just enough information… So a good art order is something like, "This is a black woman wearing practical knight armor, with a phoenix on the shield." You don't need to say which hand she's raising her sword with, you don't need to say everything about what type of armor she's wearing, unless it's really key to the project. The more freedom you can give that artist, the better the end product is going to be. You're giving them a chance to inspire you and make it a conversation, rather than just a top-down, "I am telling you what to do and you are doing it."

[Howard] Yeah. This is a combat alchemist who needs quick access to lots of different chemicals. The artist is going to go crazy designing shoulder things for test tubes and whatever. Let them do that, rather than you trying to describe all of those things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I always found that I got much better results when I talked about the mood of the character and the intention. Cass?

[Cassandra] I think our own skill sets is important in regards to other disciplines as well. It's not just the relationship between an artist and a writer. Working in video games, you have the opportunity to collaborate with level editors and level designers. It's easy to go, "No, you just put the nice things down. I will tell you how the story goes." But if you're willing to make space for them, you eventually will recognize, I know, because they're the ones who put things down, they know exactly the structure and how people might approach it and also have little tools and little tricks that might not necessarily be things you think about that can enhance whatever story you're trying to tell in the videogame.

[James] Yeah, absolutely. It's not just people from other departments, it's people in your own department. Every writer is coming with different skills to the project. So recognize when somebody's got a good idea. Support that idea. Praise your coworkers. Be fans of your coworkers. The most fun jobs are the ones where I'm on a team and everyone there is a total bad ass. I'm just happy to be there.

[Mary Robinette] One of the tricks that I will use as a manager sometimes is steering with praise. That I praise the things that I want them to do more of, and I don't necessarily have to tell them, "That other thing, I don't want you to do that." People notice. It's like, "Oh, they really like it when I do X." They'll start to deliver… They will self guide, self-correct over to that direction.

[Dan] Yeah. This is a principle that I learned early in a child-rearing class, when my first kid was born. They talked about the difference between positive and negative reinforcement. Both of them work, but one of them works so much better and makes everyone so much happier.

[Howard] There is a point is a team member… If I'm on Mary Robinette's team and she's telling me all of these things that she likes and there's this thing that I enjoy doing that she hasn't praised… At some point, I should ask Mary Robinette, "Hey, this one thing I'm doing, you haven't said much about it. Can you please tell me how you feel about it?" Then we get to have that discussion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… At the same time, like… Getting mad at someone because they… Because you… They keep doing a thing that you haven't told them not to do. Like, you should do clear communication, but it shouldn't be… It doesn't need to be retributive to say, "Don't do that thing." You know, like, "You stupid wankedoda!" It's like… "This is… This piece of it is not in line with the overall aesthetic that we're working for. Can you… But these pieces that you do. I love that. I love this, I love that."

[Cassandra] This is something I heard very recently from a friend who works with animal. Clicker training works with humans, and it works surprisingly well.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's depressing, but true.

[Dan] Oh, that's wonderful.

[Dan] All right. We're going to take a little pause here for our game of the week, which is me again. This is one of my absolute favorite new role-playing games. It's not new, it's a couple of years old, but I discovered it very recently. It's called Heart, The City Beneath. It is by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor. It's kind of a dungeon crawl game. It's very free-form and it's very narrative. But the thing that I love about it, and the reason that we're doing it on this episode, is the experience system of how your characters grow over time is based on something called beats. Every character class and every character kind of calling has a bunch of like two or three lists of what they call beats that are things like "Take a certain amount of damage" or "Betray someone you love" or like all of these story elements. Then every session, each player looks at their list of beats and says, "Well, I need to pick three of these." You pick them and you tell the game master. Then that becomes this very collaborative way of you as the player have control over what you want to do and how you want to steer your character. The game master knows exactly what gets you excited and how to build the story in order to enable those beats. It becomes this wonderful collaborative session. It's one of my favorite game mechanics I've ever seen. So, Heart, The City Beneath.

[James] So, jumping back into working with teams and working in the industry, I want to throw out… We were saying be a fan to your coworkers, praise good work, honor other people's skill sets. I think sometimes people misunderstand and the think that there's… That the game industry is a zero-sum game, and that if they praise what their coworkers are doing, then they'll be less likely to succeed, or, on the flipside, they feel like, "Oh, well, I can't self advocate, because if I do, my coworkers won't like me." I think that, like, that is absolutely a thing that people run into, that especially runs into issues of privilege as well. But I do believe that you can absolutely climb the ladder and self advocate, while still doing your best to be responsible and friendly and team oriented. If you do good work and you're pleasant to work with, hopefully, if you have a good team, people will be happy to see you rise. But I guess another thing I'll tag onto that, is, I at the same time, advancing in a company, in my experience, you… Sometimes it's about just being there a long time and doing good work, but sometimes you really have to push, because there's often not a lot of structure in game companies that are smaller. People just sort of put things together, so they don't necessarily have a plan for after X years, you become senior designer or whatever. So you need to show the company what you can do for them. I feel like every promotion that I got as I went to… Senior editor, executive editor, creative director, all those things. It was always about me going to my bosses and saying, "Hey. You've got a problem. I can solve it if you empower me. If you give me this team, I will give you this game that you want." I think that can be hard, because it's not about what you deserve, it's not about necessarily who does the best work or who's been there the longest. There's not a clear path like that. It's really about what you can convince your employers to give you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think along those lines, one of the things that I want to remind people who are… Women, people who are from marginalized communities, is that women especially, we are socialized to not push. It's not universal, but as a general rule, we are socialized to let other people have the space. So it's important to understand that when you go in and say, "Hey, I can do this thing," or "Give me the opportunity" or "Here is an idea that I'd like to present," that you're not… That that's normal, that's what people are supposed to do. So you're allowed to take up space in a room.

[Cassandra] I think it's important when talking about teams and talking about promotions, to not overinvest emotionally. Which I know sounds a bit self-contradictory, compared to the other points. But it's just… If a promotion is not there for you at that moment, it does not mean you're a terrible person or you're not deserving of it were that people are keeping it from you, although the latter is sometimes. It just means it's not the right time. That's fine. Similarly with projects, if you have ideas, things that are precious to you, and you run into say, a creative director, who goes, "I like that idea, but it doesn't work for this project," you should be able to let it go. Working in teams does mean you have to be able to stand your ground, but also not overinvest and become caught up in the minutia.

[Howard] I've got a couple of friends who are very interested in building things that are much larger than themselves, much larger than what one person can build. Neither of them have worked as part of a team with a large organization to build something. In both cases, they're looking at things like Kickstarter or [garbled going dark?] and going out and finding other self-starters, whatever. The piece of advice they don't want to hear from me, but which I keep repeating, is "Until you've worked with a team to build something, nobody with money is going to trust you to spend money to build a team to build something." You have to learn this first. It can be a small thing. It can be… Go volunteer for Habitats for Humanity and build a barn over the weekend with a group of people. That will teach you some of the skills you need.

[Mary Robinette] If anyone would like to volunteer for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, I'd be happy to set you up as project lead on something.

[James] I also want to just throw out, tagging in on that, don't overinvest emotionally, I've seen a lot of friends get really hurt because they poured all of their creative energy into the job or they gave a company the ideas that they'd cherished since childhood. Their one big setting, they sell to a company. Then they can't… A, they can't do anything with it outside of that company, which can be really hard, and Be backspace, like, they've got other people who want to mess with their thing because it's their job to mess with that thing and try and make it the best it can be. So, one of the things that I have found really kept me sane in the 13 years that I was working at Paizo as part of the teams on Starfinder and Pathfinder was to have a creative outlet outside of work that could be just mine. Or at least different. So I'd pour all my creativity at work into those settings, but then I would go home and I would work on a novel or I would play with the band or do something that allowed me to get that same creative release without having to always be compromising with the same people, because it can really chew through friendships if you're trying to get along with your coworkers and they keep touching your things.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… One of the best pieces of advice that I got… A lot of my experience came from starting off in theater. One of the best pieces of advice that I got was about boundaries and not doing other people's jobs. There's two reasons for that. One is that if it's a job that someone else is already doing, you're going to annoy them that you're doing it, that you're trying to micromanage or change directions, and they have to reset it. But the other piece of it, and this one is really hard, is that if you do someone else's job, it will eventually become in your job. So I was in a show and one of my cast members didn't preset a prop. So I preset it for them. I saw it and I moved it into place. The show had already started. So when they came offstage, the prop was there. I'm an intern at this point, but being treated as if I'm a full cast member. It happens again another day, and I do it. The third day, one of the other cast members says, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "Well, he forgot to preset this." He's like, "If you keep doing that, it's going to become your job to preset that. You need to let him fail on this." The hardest thing I've ever done was to leave that prop in the wrong place. Even though I knew exactly where it was supposed to go. Like, I didn't just leave it there. I said to him, "Hey, you've been forgetting to preset this." He's like, "Okay, okay." He didn't preset it again. Even after having been reminded. He came off… Tearing offstage. Prop wasn't there. He had to go running around to find it. He never forgot to preset it again, and it didn't become my job.

[James] I'd like to throw out one more rule that I have for myself, which is no head canon. What I mean by that is when I'm working on a game or something, until it's written down and has been published or at least accepted by the team, it does not exist. Because it's really easy to fall into the trap of you've decided a thing in your head, but you have not communicated it to your team or the audience. So then later on, somebody else on your team comes along and introduces something that conflicts with it. You get mad because it conflicts with what you've already decided, but you haven't communicated that desire. So I think it's really important to… I always say, when I leave the office, like, I turn off that part of my brain, and I don't invest extra time in it, both for my own mental health, but also because I don't want plan a bunch of stuff that I don't actually get to implement because it's just going to lead to version control problems down the road.

[Dan] Awesome. This has been a really great discussion. I think that we could talk for a long time about it, but we do need to end.

[Dan] So, Cass, give us our homework for today.

[Cassandra] Your final homework is spend some time brainstorming a game idea with a friend. Try to draw out and explore their best ideas. Encourage them to make changes to your homework, and make sure you're both contributing equally. This is a chance for you to try out working in a team.

[Dan] Cool. That sounds like a fun thing. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/06/15-36-collaboration-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

Key Points: How do you do collaboration? Plot together. Outline. Outline, revise, split it up, revision again. Love your collaborator. Work times? Not really. Book, then screenplay, may make the story worse, or make it better. How can you encourage better? Check your ego. Collaboration takes time. Collaboration forces you to explain why things happen, and sometimes it helps.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 36.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Collaboration.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] Once again, we have Shannon and Dean Hale, our awesome friends.

[Shannon] Whoohoo!

[Dean] I'm Shannon.

[Shannon] Opening so much…

[Dean] I'm awesome.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys collaborate quite a bit.

[Dean] Yes, we do.

[Shannon] Some would say too much.

[Dean] Ooo. Two children too much.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] But which two?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, we have talked about collaboration before on the podcast, but whenever we get an opportunity to talk about collaborat… Talk with collaborators, we like to bring them on because it feels like everyone's collaboration style is so different from every other one. Basically, we just want to know how you guys collaborate. I guess I can kind of start you on the how did it begin? What were your first collaborations like, and how did it start?

[Shannon] Besides the children.

[Dean] Yes. The actual, like, literature… Like, books.

[Shannon] The very first one, I'd been publishing novels for a while…

[Dean] First Kiss Then Tell was probably the first one.

[Shannon] Oh, that's true. We did write… We wrote a short story about our first kiss in an anthology.

[Dean] Yeah, she was asked to do an… It was like a YA anthology about first kisses, all the different authors were asked to do it, and she wrote about our first kiss. Which I don't think was her first kiss, really.

[Shannon] Well, it was not my first kiss. But it was my first kiss with you.

[Dean] Right. Right, exactly. Then I read it, and wrote a rebuttal. They published that, too.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] They did. Then, our official first book was… I'd been writing novels, and I wanted to write a graphic novel. This was pretty early, most publishers were not doing graphic novels yet. But he was a lifelong comics reader, so I thought he would have a lot of insight into the medium. So we did a book called Rapunzel's Revenge that came out in 2008.

[Dean] Nominated for an Eisner.

[Shannon] So, but now…

[Dean] [for those inaudible]

[Shannon] We've done…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] 15+ together. Graphic novels, early chapter books, novels. We've done quite a lot.

[Dean] Everything except for one that I've written has been a collaboration with you.

[Shannon] Yes, you did that special picture book, all on your own.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Out-of-print.

[Shannon] So, how do we do it?

[Brandon] So, how do you do it?

[Dean] She does it.

[Shannon] So, at first it was really important that we identify who was the chief writer and who was…

[Dean] Who was…

[Shannon] The subcontractor.

[Dean] Exactly. Exactly.

[Shannon] But we had to establish who was in charge.

[Dean] The steward.

[Shannon] That was obviously me.

[Dean] Yes. That was how everything worked at home anyway.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] So we just fell right into it.

[Shannon] Yeah. But we've done it so much now that I think we've kind of ironed out the process. I would say the biggest thing that we do that is…

[Dean] Different from when you write alone.

[Shannon] Yeah, we plot together. This is… I mean when you… It's unusual to cowrite in novels, but it's like very common in screenwriting and in television, of course. So that kind of getting into a room with one other person or a few other people…

[Dean] And breaking the story.

[Shannon] And breaking the story is like really a healthy great way to work. I used to not like to outline, but when you collaborate, you have to outline, you have to outline completely.

[Dean] [after we made an error]

[Shannon] Or you have many errors. So we get together, we figure out the plot, we break it…

[Dean] We walk around the lake holding hands.

[Shannon] Like every time a commercial.

[Dean] Chatting plot.

[Shannon] It's beautiful.

[Dean] It is. I love this job.

[Shannon] Actually, it's really kind of a fun process.

[Dean] Yeah, it is.

[Shannon] We make sure we get good food, [pestering all of those]

[Dean] We're just banging ideas out. Ideas are the most fun part of it.

[Shannon] For us, we're not precious about ideas. So, for people who, like, ideas are the harder part, that might be harder. But for us, we have never-ending ideas. So it doesn't bother me if I throw out an idea, and he's like, "No."

[Dean] Bleah.

[Shannon] It's not like I don't have 12 more waiting.

[Dean] Right. It doesn't bother me because I only have three.

[Shannon] Right. Whatever. You're the idea engine. Then we outline, extensively. There are times, for example when we're doing a graphic novel, when our outline can actually be longer than…

[Dean] The script.

[Shannon] The final book. Then, we, after we've outlined and revised the outline over and over again, then we split it up.

[Dean] Yeah. There are certain pieces of the story that often call to one or the other of us. Or, if during the pitch process, I'm totally behind this idea…

[Shannon] This particular idea I'm excited about.

[Dean] I can visualize it more than…

[Shannon] Or if we have different characters. So, in our Squirrel Girl novels, there are different point of view characters, so I did all of Doreen's chapters. This is in the first draft. I wrote all of Doreen's chapters and all of Sephia's.

[Dean] I did the squirrels.

[Shannon] You did the squirrels and the villain. Then we both wanted to do Squirrel Girl chapters, so we split them. But then in revision, we just trade it back and forth, so… We're not precious about it. So… We can read and add and delete and add...

[Dean] We each take credit for the best… For the funniest parts.

[Shannon] We have no idea what… Who wrote what.

[Dean] Except I did the funniest parts.

[Shannon] No, but they were probably mine.

[Dean] Oh, okay.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Does that clarify everything?

[Brandon] Oh, yes.

[Mary Robinette] That's completely repeatable, too.

[Shannon] Everybody needs to take that model…

[Dan] Replicate it right across…

[Shannon] Take it home.

[Dean] It does help when you love your collaborator. I mean, when you know that whatever they're saying, how rude and insensitive and evil it sounds, you know at the end of the day that they love you.

[Shannon] I cowrote a screenplay with Jerusha Hess, and her process was any time I said anything she didn't like, she'd say, "That's stupid." It took me like a couple days to get into it, and then I was like telling her what an idiot she was in return, and it was lovely.

[Dean] Then, our next collaboration, I'd say something and she'd say, "That's stupid."

[Shannon] He's like, "Whoa!"

[Garbled]

[Brandon] So, let's talk about that. Keeping the relationship…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And the work relationship, like intertwining those, how have you made that work?

[Shannon] I don't think it's healthy for most people what we've done.

[Dean] Yeah. I don't know that it would work.

[Shannon] Honestly, the main question I get from most people is how are you guys so happily married?

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] We talk about…

[Dean] And you say, "Are we?"

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Well, I want to keep some mystery in there.

[Dean] Right. Exactly.

[Shannon] I think… I've also collaborated with LeUyen Pham, the illustrator. So, there… I've collaborated closely with three different people. It is different when it's your husband…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] And you live in the same house and you have relationship outside of work. I think we're just lucky.

[Dean] Yeah. Yeah.

[Shannon] We like and respect each other.

[Mary Robinette] Do you have… I mean, you talked about, like, go for a walk by the lake and… But do you have specific like work times and…

[Shannon] When the kids are at school.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I was wondering if you had separated work and family relationship a little bit… By time or if it's just like…

[Shannon] I mean, not really officially.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Shannon] Yeah. No. It just… Just because logistically it's easier when they're out of the house.

[Dean] Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true.

[Laughter]

[Dean] I mean, sometimes I try to… Like, when you're… Just this last week, you were on a heads down deadline.

[Shannon] I was working 10, 12 hours a day, which is really unusual for me.

[Dean] I'm trying to run interference with the kids, but… Oh, man.

[Shannon] He's really bad about running interference with the kids. Let's be honest. He's really good at ideas, but…

[Dean] I only practiced football one year.

[Shannon] They slip past him.

[Dean] Yes. Like, what, where… Hmmm? Then I found them in your office. "Mom!"

[Shannon] Weeping at my feet. I'm like…

[Mary Robinette] But you're so tall and they're so tiny.

[Dean] I know. It's hard. Slippery.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Which is Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dean] It is. You're right.

[Shannon] It is Kind of a Big Deal. I have a new YA novel. It is just bra… I haven't done one in years. It's just out. It's about a girl named Josie Pie. She wanted to be a Broadway star, dropped out of high school to pursue Broadway, and failed spectacularly. A year later, she's trying to figure out her life and she starts reading books and being pulled into them. Trying to figure out what's going on…

[Brandon] Like, magically pulled into them?

[Shannon] Like magically pulled into them. So she's trying to figure out how at the same time using this opportunity to, like, live out her truest fantasies.

[Brandon] Awesome. And this…

[Dan] Just to be clear, for listeners who didn't get it, the actual title is…

[Shannon] Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] And the release date is…

[Dean] Not sure.

[Brandon] Right around this time.

[Shannon] I have no idea. We are just… We're having so much fun with it, even now, because we're… We're recording this in advance. One of the books she gets pulled into is a comic book. Which we just are getting the pages of that right now. It's really fun.

[Dean] All the books… The fake books that you've made up for this are super funny. They're like examples of a genre.

[Shannon] Yeah. So she gets pulled into a tawdry romance, a historical romance, and…

[Dean] Post-apocalyptic horror.

[Shannon] Yeah. And a YA rom-com. A horror. She gets pulled into Anne of Green Gables, that's the only real book that I didn't make up. A fantasy. Anyway. A nonfiction book.

[Dean] I've read it, it's very good.

[Dan] Someone's going to read this, not realize that Anne of Green Gables is real…

[Dean] That's true.

[Dan] And encounter it like 10 years later…

[Shannon] I know. I thought of that.

[Dan] And it's going to freak them out. It's going to be awesome.

[Shannon] I wrote a book that was called The Goose Girl that's based on a Grimm Brothers fairytale.

[Mary Robinette] Which I love.

[Shannon] I would get letters from people saying, "I saw this story in a book at school. You didn't make it up. The Goose Girl's a real story."

[Dan] You cheated.

[Shannon] "This is plagiarism." I'm like, "Oh, no."

[Brandon] So, looking at some of the collaborations I've been involved in, a lot of mine lately have been I write a book and someone writes a screenplay of it, which is a collaboration, but a different style of collaboration.

[Shannon] Yeah. You're not in the same room.

[Brandon] I've noticed that sometimes this turns into a process that makes the story much worse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's just say that.

[Dan] None of his screenwriters listen to our show.

[Brandon] One time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled with him]

[Brandon] One time, I got back a screenplay, and every aspect of my story was better in a way that made me embarrassed.

[Oooo…]

[Brandon] At every turn, they took the better option that I hadn't considered, and just leveled up the entire story to an amount where I was really excited, but also kind of embarrassed. Right? It was like, "Oh, man. They just…"

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Brandon] So, I got to see it work, finally, right? Because that's what's supposed to happen in collaboration is that the things that you both bring to the table, you enhance each other's abilities, you make up for one another's maybe weaker areas in writing, you get something better than you could have done alone. This has happened to me in writing with Mary Robinette where we did a story together. But only once in screenplays. So I guess my question is how do you make sure it goes that direction instead of the other direction? Dan actually raised his hand on this one.

[Dan] Well, I was just going to say that you and I just did a convention last week, and we've collaborated on a novel. It's still unpublished, and we did a reading from it. Which was the first time that either of us had really heard it out loud. It was astonishing to me, first of all, how well it worked, but second, how I couldn't tell what was mine and what was yours.

[Brandon] Right. I…

[Shannon] I thought that's what…

[Brandon] You doing a reading of that chapter made me think, "That book's way better than I remember it being."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It's gotta be Dan's influence. But I can't figure out what was Dan's influence. It made me really excited about… I have to dig into it and fix part of it, but… Yeah. So. Collaboration can be energizing and it can be exciting, and when I got the screenplay back, I'm like, "Wow." Again, how do we make sure that collaborations go that way?

[Shannon] You have to check your ego, first of all.

[Dean] That's true. Definitely.

[Shannon] You can't be remembering this was my piece and this was your piece and you can't touch my peace. I just don't think it works that way.

[Dean] Yeah. Well, you can't be precious about anything. Like, I'll think, "Oh, I've got this awesome idea, and I still believe it's awesome." But you're like, "It just doesn't fit for the story." I have to be like, "Yeah. All right."

[Shannon] He'll send me pages and then I will see the heart of what he's trying to go for and I will delete 75% of it…

[Dean] She's the screenwriter in this case.

[Shannon] And then add a few more sentences. He'll get it back and go, "This is exactly what I was trying to do."

[Dean] It's so awesome. I'll be like… I'll feel like it's my work, but suddenly, like, better.

[Laughter]

[Dean] That's, I guess, what it is. But…

[Shannon] But I would say collaboration takes longer than doing it by yourself. So you don't… I think people often think, "Oh, there's two people, so you only have to work half the time." But it actually takes more work. So the benefit of it, as you were saying, Brandon, is that synergy that comes from two different people and you're wrestling out something together.

[Dean] You get more edit passes, because I go through and see what you've done, and then you go through and undo whatever I've done, and I go through and try to redo it.

[Shannon] I have a couple friends who collaborate and they said never they get to the point where they can't… They often agree, but if they each have an idea of what should happen and they can't agree, then they have committed to throw out both of those ideas and come up with a third option. But we actually don't really get there. We…

[Dean] No, I back off way too early.

[Shannon] We pitch to each other a lot, and, like, and really try to explain why we want to go that particular way. But often, in the process… What's great about collaboration, too, is that you're forced to explain…

[Dean] Why this is awesome.

[Shannon] This is what… Why this should happen, and sometimes when you're explaining, you realize…

[Dean] Ooooo...

[Shannon] Actually, it's not that great. But sometimes when you're explaining, you realize, "Oh, it is that great, and in fact…

[Dean] Even better…

[Shannon] Even talking about it is giving me more ideas about a way to expand it." So it is… It's a totally different kind of writing. I don't think it would… I actually really enjoy writing novels on my own, as well, so I don't think it's the only thing I need to do. But for certain books, I'm always like, "Oh, this would be better if I do it with Dean."

[Dean] Well, I love having an early reader. Like, sometimes when I feel like I can't… I feel like I don't know where to go, like what tack to take, I know that I can write for you. So I will insert a joke in there that I know is not going to be in the final one.

[Shannon] And I'm like, "Ha ha, that's funny."

[Dean] It's a gift for you.

[Shannon] Delete, delete, delete.

[Dean] I need to give you something to do.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time for this podcast. We want to thank Shannon and Dean who have been here to record some awesome episodes with us. We're going to leave with Dean giving us some homework.

[Dean] All right. So this is a thing that I do with my kids. I collaborate with my children, and with my wife. That was named Picture Word by one of my kids, I'm not sure which one. What we do is we just get a single piece of paper, and we fold it into four so that we've got four separate like pages. We sit down and we draw pictures on each page. We're telling a story. It's like a picture book or a graphic novel. But you only draw the pictures. Then you pass it to the next person. They, sight unseen, draw… Or write the words that are supposed to go with that picture. Or you flip it. Or you start down and you write… You write the title, The Egg. You don't put any pictures on the next page. The Egg had something in it. Then whoever it is, the kid who's next, draws the picture that is related to that. You end up getting a story that neither one of you really thought was going to happen.

[Brandon] That's awesome. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/29/14-52-game-mastering-and-collaborative-storytelling-with-natasha-ence/

Key points: How do you design a story knowing that your audience is going to have direct control over what happens? Like a landscape architect, set up little areas with lots of seeds. Go in knowing the beginning story, the big arc, where you want to end up, and the big markers on the way. Then let the players add characters. How do you keep the story going? Remember your story seeds, and your notes on what they liked before. Collaborative storytelling let’s you come up with things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. Take what someone else throws out there and roll with it. As GM, steer the story by asking them to make choices, then telling them what they find on that fork of the road. Good GMs make sure everyone has a fun experience. You have to let go, and let the other people tell their own story. Beware the recurring villain who cannot be caught. Also beware the main characters always succeeding! Make sure that every player gets to be special in their own way.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 52.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, GMing and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence.

[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 are live at LTUE again.

[Cheering. Applause.]

[Brandon] We are super excited to have Natasha Ence on the podcast with us. Tell us just a little bit about yourself.

[Natasha] All right. So I'm actually a professional game master, which means I have the amazing opportunity of learning an amazing life where every day I get to wake up and play tabletop RPGs with really cool people who have hired me to create stories through them.

[Brandon] All right. I know the first question everyone is going to ask when they hear this is how in the world did you end up being a professional GM and how can they do it?

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] I decided that pretty much any time you have to spend time doing something that takes in the amount of talent, creativity, and skill, there is a market for it. So you can sell that.

[Brandon] All right, so I'm… I'm going to… Howard's like, "Wait… What?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's very wise.

[Brandon] Yeah. Very wise. So I just want to throw the first question out. How do you design a story knowing that your audience is going to have direct control over what happens? Right? I'm… As a novelist, I… My characters never surprise me. Some novelists talk about this, right? Oh, I didn't expect my character to go do this. No. I know what my character's going to do, and if they aren't doing what I want them to, I either rebuild the outline for them or I force them. I find a way to make it work. But you can't really do either of those things. So how do you tell a story, not knowing where it's going to go?

[Natasha] So, my background is… My background and education is in creative writing. I like to consider myself like a landscape architect. I go in and I set up my little plots, my little areas where I plant my seeds. Then I let them grow. But I have to go in and trim that back every once in a while. I go in with my beginning story in mind and a plot that's big arc. I know where the beginning is, I know kind of where I want it to end up. Along that way, I can plot the big markers. Then I get the characters, right? I don't get to pick those characters. I get someone else who comes in and says, "Hey, I really want to play this half-orc barbarian with a crush on cats."

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] Or "I really want to play a bard puppeteer who is a fallen angel."

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] No. This is legit. This is legit with multiple personalities.

[Laughter]

[Natasha] It's amazing. It's amazing. I love it, though. Okay. Then I get to sit down and plot out, okay, what are these persons' flaws that they have given me? What are the good things about them? What is this person's arc going to look like? Very basically.

[Dan] I love that metaphor of being a gardener and planting all of those seeds. Because when you're doing collaborative storytelling like this, it really is kind of a matter of planting as many seeds as you can, and then seeing which one the audience… The players or the readers or whoever it is… Grabs hold of. There are certain story seeds that they're going to love. They're going to be fascinated by that one character, they want to go back and talk to her all the time, or that one kind of magic or that one weird monster. As long as you got lots of those, and a lot of them tied into who the characters are in what kind of person they are, then no matter what direction the players or the readers want to go, you're ready because you've planted enough seats.

[Howard] My friends and I used to joke that our definition of the problem player was when the GM says, "Okay, we're going to be playing a 16th-century age of sail game, no magic. Let's talk about our characters." He's the guy who says, "I wanna play a ninja."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Reflecting on that now, I think, "Hum, you know what, the GM's job is to now roll a ninja into a 16th-century, age of sail game. That's going to make a story that none of us have ever heard before."

[Natasha] Very much so.

[Howard] Or hadn't heard before Pirates of the Caribbean.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, you're designing a story, you're coming up with these sort of prompts, these hooks and things like this. When you're designing this story, do you design everything, every place they could go? I'm going to assume not. So when you're doing it in the moment, any tips, tricks, suggestions on keeping the story going when it goes a direction you're not expecting?

[Natasha] So we just talked about story seeds, right? You fall back on those. You keep your notes of things. Okay, they really like this, like two towns back, or three sessions ago, or however many… However long ago that was. Right? You say, "Oh, they ran into Hogar, the bartender, who has a three-year-old who's kind of sick and need some medicine, and this one character really connected with that." So maybe I'll riff off of that and how they run into a medicine woman. Right? You can tie that back in and allow them to take off with those tiny plot hooks when they have nothing else to do.

[Brandon] Dan, I know a lot of the role-playing games you're a part of kind of go off the rails a little bit. Because I've been in many of them.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] What do you do? You really like collaborative storytelling. Like I've played some card games with you that are collaborative storytelling card games that really are about just building a story. What draws you to this? Because this always scares me. I don't want to be out of control as an author. But you obviously really enjoy it. What can writers learn from collaborative storytelling?

[Dan] Yes, Brandon and I have been in a lot of role-playing groups together for about 20 years now. One of the things we learned very early on is that one of us had to be the GM.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Because if both of us were players at the same time, the game would go so far into the weeds that it was unrecoverable. I know Natasha's thinking, "I could've fixed it," and she probably could have.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I love collaborative storytelling because of your ability to come up, like Howard was just saying, with things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. I know I've talked about this on the show before, that if I create a scenario that is exactly what I need to be, it runs the risk of feeling very artificial. If I didn't know that that story was going to have a ninja in it, or a shepherdess, or a whatever it is, then it runs that risk of feeling flat. So I am drawn towards role-playing games, collaborative storytelling, in general, because taking what somebody else throws out there and rolling with it, saying, "Oh, I was not expecting that twist, but I've got such a great follow-up to it." It ends up being much more than the sum of its parts.

[Mary Robinette] So, much of my background was in improv, which seems like it has a lot of parallels to what you're doing. One of the things that my coach told me very early on, because I was coming in from being a writer… He's like, "Don't let the narrative brain come into this." Because as soon as you let the narrative brain come in, what it does is that you're making decisions for the other actors in the thing. We would always talk about this idea of yes-and, that you would say whatever… Like, ninja on the sailing ship? Yes, and… You also have… That you would fold it in. But you are actually… You are the narrator. So I'm curious kind of when you're doing this, how much… How much do you steer them? Like… Okay. Apparently this question was not as well formed as I thought it was…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Going to be. Because now I want to talk about puppet theater.

[Natasha] Keep going.

[Mary Robinette] Because one of the things that we brought from puppet theater was when we're doing an interactive story thing with the audience, where they are participating, is that there are ways to actually steer the choices that the audience made. That's kind of the thing that I'm curious about, if you can do that in this interactive storytelling?

[Natasha] Oh, absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] You're nodding.

[Natasha] Oh, absolutely. Because you don't… So, when you put a fork in the road, you don't have to tell them which fork castle that you want them to go to is that. You just have to say, "Which fork would you like to go down?" Then they pick one, or they pick to go down the middle and go into the field that is between the two forks. But the castle is in there, too.

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] So it doesn't really matter, they're still making the same decision because ultimately you know where that castle is going to be.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is not a book. It's actually a Patreon. Tasha, tell us about your Patreon.

[Natasha] So, I just launched a Patreon, which is actually encounters that you can plop right into your tabletop games. I wanted to do this because so many times in games, we see repeats of themes. So the first one that I put out was a gamblers' alley. We've seen this in shows like The Road to El Dorado. It's one of the opening scenes where there playing that dice game behind whatever place, right? You see this multiple times, over and over and over again. It gives characters the chance to be characters. Whereas in so many games, with random encounters, it's often a fight. I wanted to have some story in there.

[Brandon] Awesome. So, everyone can check it out, just patreon.com/

[Natasha] Natasha Ence.

[Brandon] That's slash Natasha Ence.

[Brandon] So one of the things I've noticed, a big dividing line between good GMs and bad GMs, and I've been in groups with both, and I've been both in my life… Is that the good GM focuses on making sure the experience is fun for everyone. It's that sense of fun you're looking for. That collaboration, but you make sure that every player is satisfied and enjoys what they're doing. So I guess my question for the whole panel is how do you… What is not fun? What are the pitfalls? What are the things that you've done, that you've done in a role-playing session, or you maybe even found you wrote it in your books, and you thought everyone was going to enjoy this. Then they ran into it, and people just did not have any fun at all.

[Howard] When we were developing the Planet Mercenary role-playing game, I was… We ran some tests, some play tests, and people wanted to play with me as the GM. That is my very definition of not fun. At first, I thought it would be awesome. But then I realized… I actually realized this very quickly, I'm carrying that whole universe in my head, and I have a firm set of rules for what a story needs to be and needs to not be. The product we were creating needed to not being that. I needed to let those people tell their stories. So what was fun for me was when we did a GenCon playtest, and I was one of the players. People kept turning to me… I was the medic. They kept turning to me, like, "What do we do now?" I'm like, "I'm counting Band-Aids."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then they ran with the story. That was wonderful for me, because I let go.

[Dan] One thing that I find that can be done well, but that is very often done wrong, is the recurring villain in a role-playing game. That sounds like such an easy thing to do, because everyone loves recurring villains. The person we love to hate. Oh, good, it's them again, I can't wait to punch them in the face after the insult they gave me last time, whatever it is. But the way that often plays out in practice is this person gets away no matter what you do. Because I need them to come back again in the future. So… That's not fun. The characters have spent the whole adventure, maybe several sessions in a row, trying to catch this person or trying to stop this person. Then they get away because the GM has thus decreed that they shall be a recurring villain and will come back later. That really kind of deflates a lot of the energy.

[Natasha] On the other side of that is always succeeding. You also want the main characters to fail, so getting bye-bye the skin of their team sometimes is what they need to feel successful, or so that in future battles or in future scenes, they can still feel successful.

[Mary Robinette] So, I very much enjoy the ones there were doing problem-solving. Like, puzzles, escape stuff, that's super fun for me. I find it so frustrating when I'm playing with someone like Sam Sykes who just enjoys breaking the rules.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's his fun spot. So, for me, when I'm in a situation like playing with Sam Sykes [cough]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] What I…

[Dan] Don't worry, he doesn't listen to our show.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm sure that none of our listeners are tweeting at him right now saying how annoyed I am with him.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sam.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So what I have to do then is very much what Howard was talking about, it's like I just kind of have to let go and go okay, this is not one where I'm going to get to solve things, unless it is the thing that I solve is drugging Sam's character and strapping him to the back of a horse, which I may or may not have done.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] This plays into kind of my answer to my question, that one of my big moments is a GM, where I feel like I made great strides in being better is when I realized I could… My job was to construct a story where every player got to be special in the way that they wanted to be. This was a struggle because early on, I would be very, "no, you can't have this special thing. It breaks the rules, and everyone will get jealous of you." Because we were all focused on who had the best stats. As we matured as people and as players, we started to realize what Gordo wanted was just to have a secret past. He didn't… It didn't have to actually… He didn't have to have special powers related to it, he just had to have this secret past. What Earl wanted was Earl just wanted to be unkillable. Because it was stressful for him if his character could die. If he just knew that his character could never die… This is a thing that I didn't want to give him, because I'm like, "Well, if you can never die, there's no stress and tension." He did not want stress and tension.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] He wanted to enjoy the story. The moment where we realized we could make Earl indestructible and that was a feature… That the rest of the party could throw him into a room of traps, and it would like… They would all go off, he would start on fire, get chopped to pieces, and then come back to life. They could get through… They could use his superpower to problem solve. The whole team loved this. We had a much better experience than when we had been trying to be like, "Who has the best stats? Who's going to die, who's not going to die?"

[Dan] We accomplished that, by the way, by making Earl a half-dragon troll, who was therefore fireproof in addition to everything else. I think acid was the only thing that could harm him. Which was, in itself, this beautiful little holy Grail thing that could show up as a MacGuffin in the middle of a story. There'd be the one drop of acid on the floor, and Earl's like, "I'm out."

[Laughter]

[Dan] "I'm not in there, I'm not going anywhere near this dungeon." It's like you said, everybody loved it.

[Brandon] We are out of time. This has been a very different episode. I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you so much, Natasha for making this possible.

[Natasha] Thank you.

[Brandon] Thank you to our live audience.

[Cheers. Applause.]

[Brandon] Natasha, I'm going to ask you, do you have a writing prompt you can give us?

[Natasha] I do. All right. Since we just talked about games going a little badly, I'd like you guys to write about a game that's gone badly. We've seen this in the past, like The Hunger Games. Or, let's see… We've seen this in Ready Player One and some other things.

[Brandon] Excellent. Make that game go poorly. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.38: What Do Editors Really Want, with Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/09/17/12-38-what-do-editors-really-want-with-toni-weisskopf-and-cat-rambo/

Key Points:
Q: What do editors really want?
A: Chocolate and bourbon. To give you a contract for your bestseller and $50,000. The next XXX, but not the same. To buy a book that works. The writer to do the work!
Q: What are they looking for when working with the editor?
A: The ability to take direction, to achieve the author's vision. How do we bridge the gap between "Don't write to the market" and "Editors buy for the market?" The first audience is yourself. Readers, like dogs, can smell crap. Write what you are passionate about.
Q: When an editor finds a problem, what is the next step?
A: A challenge to the author. Editors suggest fixes, but good authors don't do that, they do it their own way, in their own voice.
Q: What are some common pitfalls or advice?
A: Be timely. Don't try to be perfect, just respond, and keep the communication going. Ask yourself, "Will this news get better if I wait?" Editors are not parents or bosses. Collaboration is the name of the game.
Q: Is there an exemplary or hilarious incident from the trenches?
A: Don't respond to a rejection slip with the news that your mother liked the story. Arguing with rejection letters is pointless.

( Chocolate and bourbon, over and over... )

[Dan] So let's finish up. I'm very excited to hear our homework. Which is what I have written down as the Weisskopf possum theory.
[Toni] Oh, God. We don't have enough time for that.
[Laughter]
[Toni] Telling the possum story would be at least 10 minutes.
[Dan] Oh, well, we can't do that. Can you give us like a 10 second version of it?
[Toni] Cat, go first.
[Laughter]
[Cat] Here's my writing advice.
[Dan] Okay.
[Cat] Try something new this week. If you always write indoors, go right outdoors. If you always write by hand, try it on a typewriter. Just mix it up a little. See what happens.
[Dan] Awesome. That's great advice.
[Toni] All right. This has nothing to do with possums. But listen to dialogue. Sit down and write down, if you can, how people actually talk. This is not how you write dialogue, but it will help you writing dialogue.
[Dan] That's great advice.
[Howard] When she says listen to dialogue, listen to people speaking to each other. Not TV dialogue. Listen to people talking.
[Toni] Yes. Thank you.
[Dan] Aaron Sorkin…
[Toni] That's why you're the writer.
[Dan] One of my favorite bits of writing advice he gives is go sit in a coffee shop for an hour and just listen to people talking to each other.
[Toni] Yup.
[Dan] Awesome. Well, that is our show. Thank you very much, Cat and Toni, for being here. We are very excited.
[Cat, Tony] Thank you.
[Dan] Everyone else, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 5.12: Time Travel!

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/12/12/writing-excuses-5-12-time-travel/

Key Points: Treat your writing professionally. Learn your own process. Don't just wish, start! Shut up and start. Be wary of collaboration. Be true to yourself, write the books you care about. Try out different ways of writing (outlining, discovery writing, etc.) early. Try new things! Pay attention to what you love, and don't worry. You can make a living writing books.
( Across the great time barrier... )
[Brandon] All right. Your writing prompt is to go forward in time and get next week's writing prompt and write a story based on it.
[Dan] Nice.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: flickering

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 32: Collaboration

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/01/03/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-32-collaboration/

Key points: First, last, and in between: Don't. Collaboration means (a) famous author outlines, skilled sidekick fleshes out (b) alternating chapters (c) brainstorm and split writing/editing (d) come up with a shared world then write your own books. Don't collaborate to try to shore up a weak point -- learn how to do it! Collaboration is hard work. Consistency is a problem. How are you going to handle disagreements? Three rules for collaboration: #1, learn to do it yourself first; #2, Lay groundrules beforehand; #3, Decide on the process.
( hiding the collies )
[Howard] I've got the writing prompt. I'm actually going to provide two writing prompts. Writing prompt number one is for all of those people out there who want to be collaborative writers and think it will solve their problems. On your own, write a story about two people collaborating in which things go horribly, horribly wrong. Writing prompt number two. This is for all of those writers who want to write comics and are saying, boy, I sure wish I could find somebody to draw this for me, because they are looking for collaboration. I'm going to tell you what I had to do, and you go do it. Write your comic, and then go draw it your own dang self.
[Brandon] Amen.
[Dan] Take that, listeners.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, and if you make any, Howard will beat you up.
[Howard] Now go write. And draw.
[Dan] Now.

Current Mood: one is the lonliest

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with collaboration

Writing Excuses 18.29: Collaboration And Partnership

Writing Excuses 17.19: Working in a Collaborative Environment

Writing Excuses 16.26: Working with Teams

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence

Writing Excuses 12.38: What Do Editors Really Want, with Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo

Writing Excuses 5.12: Time Travel!

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 32: Collaboration

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