Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout

Sep. 5th, 2024 04:10 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
 
 
Key points: Tension: how do you create, build, and release it? Various forms, contextual, in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution. Lizard brain or primal tension, intellectual tension, emotional tension. Discordance. Historical fantasy pits what the audience knows about history against the tension of the story and how you have changed the world. Tension as potential energy, the rock on the top of the hill. It's going to roll! Tension can be horror or suspense, released by the jump scare or awful revelation, but it can also be released through a joke or comedic drop. Sometimes we braid physical, emotional, and intellectual tension. Tension: someone walking towards an open manhole. Tension plays with pattern recognition, tapping into narrative inevitability, patterns and expected resolutions.
 
[Season 19, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[DongWon] So, this week, we are continuing our close reading series by looking at Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark. We wanted to talk about this book in particular because as we're looking into the segment on tension, and how do we talk about how you create, sort of build, and then release tension over the course of a story, we realized that shorter works can be really useful in examining how these techniques work in the best ways to go about doing that. So we wanted to pick a novella, and this is a very tense, very dark novella that we want to talk about in a little more detail.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I particularly found compelling about it is that it uses tension in more than one way. We'll be talking about a bunch of these throughout the next couple of episodes, contextual versus in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution, but you're also seeing it in terms of the speed with which the tension is deployed, and many of the tools that he's using from the character to the situation. It's got a lot of good examples for us to use.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I also think it's just really cool as a… To compare with our other novella from earlier in the year. Because This Is How You Lose the Time War is about fantastical, imaginative landscapes and this is a very grounded, very sort of feels like it's got a foot in the real world, but still fantastical story. So I think it's really important to think about how do our tools work, both when you're creating something completely new and when we're drawing from something that we know maybe a lot better.
[Howard] I loved reading this so much that I read it all in one afternoon. Maybe that's because the tools were just used so well to keep me tense that I couldn't put it down until I was done with it.
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say, for those of you who are a little bit jumpy, I was listening to this audiobook, and I had to stop because I needed to be able to skim over the parts that were too much for me. I can't do horror. While this book is not actually horror, it's a straight up monster book. It's monster hunting, and it's basically an adventure novel. There are parts of it that are using tools from horror to create tension, and I couldn't listen to it in audiobook.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It was really good, and I was like, I have to stop. This is not okay.
[DongWon] As the cover might indicate, it is also dealing with a lot of real-world trauma and tension. A lot of this is pulled from actual history or begins in actual historical events, and then adds a fantasy layer on top of it. So, just a heads up to all of our audience, that we're going to be getting into some pretty heavy topical topics and conversation here.
[Erin] Be ready for it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Or as ready as you can be. So, but it is good to note, especially if you're just starting to read the book now, so that you're not… So that you have some preparation for what is to come. But who can really prepare for tension in truth?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] No. No. That was… That's actually one of the things… We'll talk about this deeper into the episodes, but one of the things that I particularly appreciated and why it was so hard is that I would see the tension and I would brace myself for one kind of problem, and then it would be something else that was sig… I was not prepared for.
[DongWon] The bait and switch is such a useful technique.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] One place I'd love to start, actually, as we're diving into this conversation, is actually to not start with the writing itself, but to start from a publishing angle, because I just touched on it briefly, but I think the cover of this book is absolutely brilliant, and does such a fantastic job of signaling the kind of story that we're going to be engaging in, and already increasing the tension there. It really hits on the thing that you were just saying, Mary Robinette, of you have this figure of the white hood, which is very iconic and symbolic and menacing. But then when you look closer, Erin, you and I were talking about this right before we started, you can see the teeth eyes… The teeth in the eyeholes, which again, I think is for you, like, expecting one thing and then realizing, oh, there's another layer here that's upsetting and difficult.
[Howard] Okay. I didn't even look at the cover. I was… Admission, I read this on assignment. I had not picked it up before I knew we were going to record it. But then I picked it up and immediately just opened it up and started reading. Sat down and started reading. The first time I stopped and set it down and looked at the cover, I looked at it and went, "Ewww."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because they… Because now I knew what might be there and, whew, boy, it was fun. It's very stylized. It's not like…
[DongWon] The cover. Yeah.
[Howard] You're looking at something graphic. It's just… That's just cool.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have to admit that I was reading it in the airport and I had the thought of this book does not look like the book that I'm reading to someone who does not know what this book is.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That creates another additional tension. That I think is very intentional tension.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's a book designed to make you uncomfortable in a number of ways. Some of that is the contextual elements in terms of the packaging and the design and how it was published and some of that is the content itself.
[Erin] Yeah. I just keep thinking about the teeth eyes.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] Sorry, I'm like…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The teeth eyes… I have a… Uhn Uh.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] I love that. I always think… This is a slight tangent, but I think there's something about putting things together that just don't feel like they could ever belong together that creates like a visceral lizard brain tension.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I think that we can have tension, like, in the front of our brains, where it's like this is an intellectual tension. Why is it like this? But then there's like the part of us that's like, "No. Eyeholes with teeth? Bad!"
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] Like the parts of you that would have been afraid of, like, a wolf back in the day is activated. I love when stories are working both on that primal tension level…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And the intellectual. And the emotional tension level. I think this one does all three, which is so cool.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. For me, one of the big things for me is like a kind of discordance. Right? So if I'm watching supernatural horror, I could ride with lots of gore, lots of violence, doesn't throw me at all. But you put me in a real-world context, like a home invasion story, or somebody using something that's not meant to be a weapon as a weapon, I'm deeply unsettled and very uncomfortable, and often have to bail. There's a memorable scene in a movie called [Taten?] Involving a knitting needle that if anybody's seen it, I was like, I'm done. I gotta bail on this movie. I very rarely bail on movies. But sometimes that discordance, being able to lean into a kind of tension where you're making people uncomfortable by creating things that shouldn't go together can be so powerful and disruptive.
[Mary Robinette] It is one of the best tools to use when you're writing anything that's set like any sort of historical fantasy. Because there is the tension of what the audience knows about the history that is in conversation with the tension of the story that is also in conversation with the tension of the way you have changed the world. These three things can cause the story to become wildly unpredictable to the audience, and for them to also bring their own… Like, the places where they're putting their own pressure on the story from the outside, from a… Which this does great things with.
 
[Howard] I sometimes think of tension in terms of potential energy, the rock at the top of the hill. I know that there isn't much keeping this from rolling, from heading down the hill, and I think I know which way it's going to roll. It doesn't have to be frightening. It doesn't even necessarily have to be uncomfortable. It just has to be this awareness that this state of things cannot hold. Something is going to move. I don't know what's going to move, but it has to move, because this can't keep up. That's every other page for me on the way through Ring Shout.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Love it!
[DongWon] Well, this is something you talk about a lot, Howard, is that tension can be multiple things. Right? We're talking about tension in a horror context, or, like, a suspense context, because of this particular book. But tension also can be released through a joke. Right? You can use a comedic drop instead of the jump scare, or the reveal of something awful. That's still tension building the same way. I think about the movie director Jordan Peel, being such a brilliant horror filmmaker, because he's a brilliant comedian, too. Right? So many of the skills that go into one can go into the other. There's a moment in the Candyman reboot that they did a few years ago where a woman opens the door down the basement stairs, and it's like these long stairs descending into darkness. This is like this incredibly tense moment. It just feels awful. Then she just goes, "Nope," and closes the door.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] The theater I was in just burst out laughing completely. It was like a perfect use of tension and release in that moment, although, even though in a horror movie, not for a horrific purpose. In a way that, as we're talking about this, I want you to think about all the different ways in which tension can be deployed as a narrative tool, even though, because of this, we're going to be focused on the dark side of it.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think we often like braid the different types of tension, and just… Like you're saying, call them all tension. But, thinking back to kind of the, like, physical, emotional, and intellectual tension, I was thinking about it again when you are talking about the rock at the top of the hill, because I'm thinking, if you're watching a snowball go down a mountain and you're at the bottom, like, intellectually, you know it will gather speed and eventually crush you. Eventually, it will come close enough that you will really know that it's about to crush you…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Also… I don't know, your mom's standing there. So you have to save her from the avalanche that is about to come up on you. But, different people will react in different ways. Like, some people can see the most terrific physical, like a slasher movie, forever…
[DongWon Yep.
[Erin] And it will have no impact. They will not feel any tension. They're like, I don't care about physical danger, but emotional danger gets me.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Like, somebody being embarrassed to me is harder to watch than somebody being hacked into bits.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] So, if you're thinking about all the time where are you deploying each of those types of tension, then you'll get the widest audience possible feeling tense.
[DongWon] Yep. Speaking of keeping balls rolling and moving things along, we're going to take a break for a moment and we will be right back.
 
[DongWon] Late last fall, Netflix released a new animated show called Blue Eye Samurai. I was initially skeptical, but was completely won over by the stunning animation style and impeccable action choreography. Frankly, I expected a simplistic good time, kind of like a John Wick thing, but was surprised by how thoughtful the show is about race and Empire and violence. It's one of those hyper kinetic action shows, but one that knows when to slow down and ask questions about its hero and the world she inhabits.
 
[Howard] Mel Brooks famously said that comedy is you falling into a manhole and dying. Tragedy is me with a hangnail.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] When I think of tension in terms of this, you see someone walking and you see an open manhole and there is tension, but you don't yet know if the resolution is going to be comedy or tragedy, because you don't know what's in that hole. That's part of… That unexpected aspect of it. I mean, there's the tension of the potential energy of something is going to fall, but there's the unexpected, the darkness of that manhole. It might have a very silly octopus in it. It might have a very ferocious octopus in it. I don't know.
[DongWon] I talk a lot about pattern recognition when it comes to fiction. Right? I think tension is a thing that is very consciously playing on pattern recognition. It taps into something I think of as narrative inevitability. Once you start setting up a certain pattern, people will expect that to conclude in a certain way. They'll expect a resolution of that. Right? The example I was talking about earlier of heroine opens the door to a dark basement, you're like, "Oh, she's going to go down there and something bad's going to happen." You expect that resolution. That's where the tension, that's where the dread, that's where the energy in that scene is coming from. As you're talking about, Howard, it was a release in comedy instead of in horror by her closing the door in a very funny way. But it was the refusal to resolve that tension as opposed to giving into it, I think, is a thing to think about as you're building it. So, how do you actively use the patterns of storytelling to manipulate your audience's emotional state?
[Mary Robinette]. It's something that we talked about in a previous episode… Previous season, when we did a dive into tension. We talked about anticipation and the patterns that the listener… Or the reader, recognizes. As we're talking about Ring Shout, one of the things that I want to point out is that you'll hear us using different terms than we used previously. That's because the terms of art for tension, there are so many different ways to apply it, that all of the things that we're talking about are basically us attempting to apply a lens or some sort of words to "this makes me feel some feels."
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah. Tension's about emotion is the main thing to think about here.
[Erin] I'm feeling some kind of way [garbled]
[chuckles]
[Erin] Expressions. I also think it just occurred to me that, like, thinking about the manhole. There was a recent question put out in the writing world, of whether or not twists make sense. Because the theory is if the twist is actually completely unexpected, it actually feels like a trick. Like, if you could not anticipate it at all, it feels like the author being clever at your expense. But I think one way you can actually get around that, if you want to have the truly surprising twist, is by making the emotions carry through even if the facts don't. So if you're walking down the street and there's a manhole cover, the, like, open hole in front of you. But you step on it, it turns out it's an optical illusion. It was just a sidewalk artist doing it. So the audience is, like, "Aha. You fooled me." Then the person takes another step and gets hit by a truck.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The hitting by a truck makes no sense, maybe, but you were still in that moment of tension, right at the moment that something happened. So it feels more earned.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Even though the truck came out of nowhere.
[DongWon] Yeah. The example I always think of is the red writing from the Game of Thrones. Right? It's like this moment that is such a famously twist moment, of, like, "Oh, my God, nobody anticipated that," but it made so much logical sense and emotional sense where the characters were at, that you could see how it was inevitable in retrospect. Right? So tension can also be… I'm talking about narrative patterns, and you know something is going to happen, but it's fun to hold that back, of understanding exactly what the event will be that will release the tension. Right? So it's another way to think about that.
[Howard] One of the things that I want to point out before we wrap up is that as part of the close reading series, we want you to read the book before you listen to the episodes. When you are doing this… Read the book. Do a close reading of the book. Think about why the book is making you tense. Think about choice of language, the choice of point of view, what decisions are being made. By all means, enjoy the book. But read it closely and try to learn from it. That's… At the beginning of the episode, why did we pick Ring Shout. Because we can learn from it. We can learn a lot from it.
 
[DongWon] That dovetails very beautifully with my homework. Which is, I basically want you to do what Howard described to a book that you love or a movie that you love. Take a suspenseful story that you really enjoyed, that you feel the kind of feelings that were talking about. Either anticipation or dread or that kind of emotional tension. What I want you to do is write an outline for that work. Create that outline. Note where that tension was coming in for you and how it was resolved. Right? From that, you'll have a little bit of a map and a little bit of a key to begin to understand some of the stuff we're going to talk about in the coming episodes.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?

Sep. 21st, 2023 06:19 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?
 
 
Key Points: Deep Dive into A Function of Firepower. The title comes from a maxim, "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." AI, Oafans, Petey, all these guns versus "The pen is mightier than the sword." I.e., an academic conference. Mutual assured destruction. Fermi's Paradox. Comedy depends a lot on subversion. Petey is an antagonist, but not villainous. Being a villain and being sympathetic are not necessarily separate. Sympathetic and monstrous at the same time. Sometimes you need a new tool. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, A Function of Firepower.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Howard] And I'm in charge for this episode, and I have been for some of the other ones. Kind of in charge. Mostly, the questions from my friends here are going to steer what happens…
[Laughter]
[Howard] The title of this book, A Function of Firepower, title comes from one of the 70 maxims. The maxim is "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." Which obviously means sometimes who is in charge is not a question of who was elected to be in charge, who is most qualified to be in charge, it is who is the best armed. Which is, as I think we can all agree, a terrible way to decide who gets to run things. The story here begins with a crazy AI who has lots and lots of big guns and who is bound and determined to blow up anything that could cause the sort of mess that she's upset about. Then we have the return of the Oafan race, who own a whole bunch of spaceships that our heroes took because they didn't think the Oafans were still alive. But, hey, surprise, they are. Now we want our stuff back. Now, instantly, they are the largest armed force in the galaxy. Then, of course, throughout Schlock Mercenary, there's been Petey, where I always imagined as the sci-fi equivalent of an enlightened desperate. A benign god-king. Who is not as powerful as he used to be. Then I balanced those questions, all of those guns against the old saw… I say the old saw. It's Shakespeare, isn't it? The pen is mightier than the sword? That's Shakespeare?
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say yes. I don't actually know.
[Howard] It's probably Shakespeare.
[DongWon] Odds are high, let's say.
[Laughter]
[Howard] [garbled ballad] is Shakespeare. So, yeah. The pen is mightier than the sword. I wanted to drive some of the actual solutions from an academic conference where people are trying to answer the question, where did all of the civilizations go that came before this galactic civilization? Are we doomed to wipe ourselves out? Is there a great filter? What is it that's going on? I really enjoyed writing it, but it was a challenge, because I knew it had to be more than just a thing that keeps the conclusion from sitting right next to the beginning. It needed to be more than a spacer.
[DongWon] You managed to create in the way that middle volumes are kind of a really dark chapter of this story. Right? I mean, the thematics as you just laid them out, tapping into Cold War era of mutual assured destruction. There's, like, overtones of almost, like, indigenous reparations. Then, answering this big question about like Fermi's Paradox in certain ways. Right? I'm… I know you grew up sort of child of the Cold War in some ways. How much was that weapons of mass destruction, mutual assured destruction, finding other answers to that and asking that question in a slightly different way… How much was that [garbled driving]
[Howard] That's been… I mean… Sigh. People use the word DNA wrong in this way all the time. That's been part of my DNA my whole life. I grew up… Yes, child of the Cold War. Parents telling me how incredibly scary the Cuban missile crisis was. And I think it was Korean Airlines flight something or other… Seven… KLA… I want to say 007, but it couldn't have been that because nobody would name their plane, their flight, 007. Korean Airlines flight shot down by the Russians in the early 80's.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I remember that.
[Howard] I remember everybody at school thinking this is it. This is the thing that sets it all off. So, yeah, there… That's in my blood, that's the thing that my brain grew up with and grew out of… Not in the same way that you grow out of a pair of clothes, but in the way that a tree grows out of a given patch of dirt. So, yeah, I had to explore those themes. Also, those themes are… When you look at the various solution sets for Fermi's Paradox, one of them is the set that says intelligence always gets greedy and destroys itself in a way that leaves no traces. Which is a horribly negative thought to have, but it's fun to ask the question.
[DongWon] I think, because you've kind of created inverted war games here in certain ways. Right? Like, Chinook has decided that the long guns are bad, we need to get rid of the long guns, and she's going to do everything in her power to make that happen. Unfortunately, that also means the Cold War is now a shooting war.
[Howard] Yep.
[DongWon] And a lot of people are going to die as a result. Also, the actual problem is completely external to whatever is happening here. This is a misinterpretation of the data. But I guess I'm kind of curious, like, how did you get to that iteration of this? It seems like you took the basis… The base narrative that we see a lot, of the AI goes amok, decides humanity is the problem, but pushed it one step further in this way that she really is trying to save civilization in a certain way. Right? She believes she's doing the right thing. In a way that I found to be very relatable and kind of fascinating, watching her kind of go off the rails, even as she's editing herself and coming to some erroneous conclusions. But what was… I don't exactly know what I'm asking, but there's something very interesting in how your thinking about mutually assured destruction that I don't feel like I've ever quite seen in this way before.
[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because at some level, everything Schlock Mercenary is, is derivative of things that I've consumed. I named a book Big Dumb Objects because there's this whole sci-fi trope about big dumb objects. Better authors than I have gotten to many of these questions long before I did. So when I addressed them, I wanted to subvert or distort… Because comedy depends a lot on subversion, and maybe that's just… Maybe that accidentally resulted in something that from a philosophical standpoint is interesting rather than comedic. I'm so glad you noticed.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, like… Circling back to Chinook when we're talking about the goals. Like, there's the authorial goal of these are the things, the questions that I need her to take. Then there's the character goals of this is why she's doing that. When you were mapping it out, when you were doing that outline, how aware of her internal motivations were you, and how much of that did you discover in the process of writing it?
[Howard] Ah. I knew pretty much all of what was driving her from the word go. There were the overt motives which is that her creator, her jailer, and her savior were all killed at the same time. It was very emotional for her. She suddenly had no way to process it. But also, the event triggered or set off a trigger like a timebomb in the system that she was now inhabiting, because the intelligence that had all of the Oafans trapped was so unhappy with themselves for what they'd done that they built this thing that would let them rewrite themselves so they could forget having committed the crime so that they could continue to keep the Oafans trapped. Well, now Chinook was there, the AI that used to live there moved out because they were ready for a new life, and she has this horrible emotional event and trips a system that begins rewriting her psyche in ways that she doesn't know she's doing. I got… I mean, when I first described that to myself in the outline, I got chills. I was like, "Oh, my goodness. Oh, what a landmine you've created for this character."
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] "This is going to be fun." Then, everything after that…
[DongWon] Well, the core metaphor…
[Howard] Everything after that was just exploring the outgrowths of it.
[DongWon] I love the core metaphor of for these cycles of violence to perpetuate, for us to continue these wars, to continue these oppressions and genocides, we have to erase our own memory of what happened and rewrite our memory so we don't remember what we did a generation ago.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And then we will repeat the same error, which keeps people oppressed, which keeps people in these positions, which perpetuates this long Cold War and all of that.
[Howard] Yeah, that when I did do on purpose. But… And I can't remember when, but I recall at one point deciding, "Oo. You know what? I don't want to say that part out loud. I want to just leave that at that level as a discovery exercise for the reader." Speaking of discovery exercises, we're going to go discover something and come right back after the break.
 
[Howard] Hey, everybody. It's Howard. If you go to kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler spelled T.A.Y.L.E.R. all one word, you will find that we are getting ready to put Mandatory Failure, Schlock Mercenary book 18 into print, and you can get a copy for your very own self. We are super excited about this. I've done a bonus story for it that [Ethan Kozak] is illustrating. The book is glorious and wonderful. It's one of my very favorites. It's one of Sandra's very favorites. I'm sure that the moment we're able to put it into your hands, it will be one of your very favorites. Kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler all one word except not with the all one word part, I didn't need to tell you that, you knew that. Just spell it with the ER and you'll be fine. Thanks.
 
[Howard] And we're back. What are we going to discover next?
[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk a little bit about Petey and what Petey is going through here.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Again, like, by this point, we really like these characters. You're doing stuff to them that I have feelings about. Why? Why?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] For a long time, when I created the character of Petey, the trope that everyone expected and they been waiting for this shoe to drop for a decade or more, was, "Oh, yeah, he runs a galaxy. He's going to turn out to be awful. We're going to have to kill him, we're going to have to fight him. He's going to be a bad guy." I needed to set things up so that that didn't happen. The easiest way to do that was to put pressure on him where he has to do violent and unpleasant things, and he always manages to do it in as nonintrusive a way as possible, and actually to back away from the options that a true tyrant would have taken.
[DongWon] Do you consider Petey a villain?
[Howard] I don't, but I consider him frightening.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, he definitely serves an antagonist purpose, but…
[DongWon] Yeah, he fits the antagonist role, especially in volume 3, which will talk about in [garbled episode]
[Howard] He's an antagonist, but I don't see him as villainous. Does that make sense?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Which is, I think, why I'm like these are characters that I wind up caring about because it's not just the… It's like all of them.
[DongWon] I mean, Chinook is like the primary villain of this book. Right? I also find her probably to be the most sympathetic character in this book as well. Right? Those things aren't necessarily separate. There are ways in which I really like Petey. Also, I find Petey to be the scariest thing in these books. I consider the arc of all of this is… Or the fundamental arc really is as much what do we do about Petey as it is what do we do about these dark matter intelligences that are determined to destroy the universe.
[Howard] Well, the fact that… There's that… The UNS, they're having some High Admirality meeting and somebody mentions Petey and somebody else says, "What are you doing? You might as well just invite him in." Then he shows up and says, "I don't actually need to be invited."
[DongWon] I was already here.
[Howard] "I've been here the whole time." One, that's a fun joke to tell. Two, that's yet another cementing of, guys, when something is super intelligent and superpowerful whether or not it is super benign, it's scary.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
[Howard] That's actually echoed by something that happened very early in Schlock Mercenary, which is my discovery that from any perspective other than Schlock's, Schlock is a monster. So, placing a character we like in a way that you don't have to turn the book very much to one side or the other to realize, "Oh. You're really scary." That was very fun for me.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Well, I mean, you do such a good job of that, of so many of your heroes are also quite monstrous in certain ways and capable of truly mind-boggling acts of violence. Right? Like, even your human scale protagonists are often capable of truly astonishing acts of violence. Right? Whether that's pulling the arms off the enemy ship's captain or…
[Mary Robinette] I was thinking that that…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] When you were talking, it was like…
[DongWon] Or one person in power armor just destroying an armada.
 
[Erin] It seems like it's really on cue with the theme… Like, getting back to that kind of mutual assured destruction, like, I think there's something really… Wholesome is not the right word, but in realizing that monster… Like, everyone is… People are both sympathetic and monstrous at the same time, and that's what makes the whole situation so terrifying.
[Howard] Yeah. The… Again, coming back to the question of Fermi's Paradox, the idea that as civilizations developed technologically, their ability to destroy themselves permanently… Not just a portion of themselves, but to just wipe themselves out of existence, increases. That's an important theme here, and I wanted to illustrate it in a way that lets us explore a possible alternative. Which is what that whole scholarly convention was, and is… Elizabeth, who ends up running the scholarly convention, she was roped into traveling with the Toughs because her boyfriend was one of the mercenaries and she just followed him onto the ship and suddenly realized she was cooking for a group of professional sociopaths and wasn't sure she fit in. In this book, I wanted to put her in a position to steer things, to guide things away from all of the violence and disaster.
[DongWon] Well, she's really the antidote to the title. Right? Like, rank is a function of firepower, but also, we see her get promoted out of being a cook, just for being smart and competent and willing to say the thing that no one else is willing to say. Right? It's almost like your… In creating this hero organization of these mercenaries, the antidote to just taking power at the end of a long gun really is recognizing and rewarding competence and forthrightness. It's in a world where not only rank is a function of power, firepower, but ethics is a function of firepower, to have an antidote to that, I think, really essential to making this book work.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, along the lines of making this book work, it also had to function as setting up in the launchpad for the final book. So when you were… So let's talk about, since this is a deep dive and we're full of spoilers, let's talk about the ending.
[Howard] In the end of the previous book, the end of Mandatory Failure, the Pa'anuri, the bad guys, blow up one of Petey's cities. It was during this book that someone figures out, "Oh, I think I know how the Pa'anuri long gun works. They don't have a targeting mechanism… Their targeting mechanism… They can see certain kinds of power sources, and they are walking their shots. What are they aiming at? They're aiming at Petey. They're trying to destroy his core power generator, which, by the time we get to the end of the book, we realize that's the tool that he needs in order to fight back. They blow a piece of it up. I knew that was… That was part of the original outline, is that we blow up something that creates a puzzle in book 18, we blow up something that creates a disaster in book 19. Cueing that up was a lot of fun. Honestly, one of the things that was the most fun about it was… And this is going to sound silly, I'm sure. Using brush pens and circle templates to create some of the energy effect shapes that I wanted to create, and then sending them to the colorist and saying, "Look. There is no actual astronomical or physics analog for the colors that these things should be. Just make it look scary and dangerous and loud and hot and big and whatever." Travis ran with it.
[DongWon] Yeah. I was going to say, we… We're a writing podcast, so obviously we're talking about the narrative structure and the writing, but on the art front, you really pushed yourself to a different level it feels like here. You got on… I don't know, you kind of got on your Jack Kirby bull shit in the best way.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It was really fun to see some of these bigger scope, bigger scale intergalactic war things happening. You really start pulling out these big guns, no pun intended, by the end of this one.
[Howard] I leveled up the writing earlier in my career than I leveled up the art. That might be because I joined the Writing Excuses podcast…
[Laughter]
[Howard] In 08, and have never been part of an art podcast. Never. But I remember, it was a convention, it was at GenCon, I was talking to Lar deSouza and complaining about how much my hand hurt using this one pan trying to create lines. He looked at what I was doing and said, "Here. Take this." A [fidona suke] polymer nib short brush pen. I grabbed it and was like, "Oh, my gosh. A light touch makes a skinny line, and a hard touch makes a fat line, but it doesn't splay like a brush. Oh, this is amazing. This is so cool." Took it back to my booth. He gave it to me because he's a hero. Took it back to my booth, and drew a book cover with it. I think that was 2015. Just started to learn to use those tools and that piece of the toolbox was critically important for the finale, because now I could render some of these pictures that I just didn't have the skill set for earlier. Weird to talk about that on a writing podcast.
[Mary Robinette] But it's I think it's very much to the point, that there are… There is a tool that you don't know that you need to add to your toolbox. Like, that's… We talk about it as a metaphor all the time, and you're talking about it is a very literal real thing.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, here's a new tool. Physical tool." I think that that's something that everyone can take away. It's like you… Just getting the tool is not enough, it's learning how to use the tool that's really where the magic is.
[Howard] I think one of the things that Lar said was "When the student is ready, the master will appear." I had tried to use brush pens before and just couldn't. I tried several. Simply could not make them work. Then I sat down with him, and in 30 seconds, the lines were coming off my hand the way they needed to. I was like, "This pen is magical. I never…" Then he said, "When the student is ready, the master will appear. You are now ready for this tool. Congratulations." We are just about out of time. The conclusion of this book needed to set up the final story. That involved what I call like character arc blocking. Where I had to put chunks of the cast in different places. I had to scatter them because I knew that the final act, the next book, was going to come together with them in the very end coming together. I know that sounds shallow and silly and obvious, but shallow and silly and obvious… I've made the Schlock Mercenary joke already. Which of those words suggested that I would not do this? But sometimes those simple tools are the best. We work with those forms, and then, as you drill down on them and make them your own, they actually work. Hey, work. Homework. Who's got that?
 
[Erin] Yeah. I do. Speaking of tools you can make your own,what we're going to ask you to do for the homework this time is to work three words into your work in progress. They are expeditious, sock, and dragonfly. The best words. So, enjoy those and set them right into your work.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any questions that are on your mind.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.37: Mandatory Failure

Sep. 13th, 2023 05:28 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.37: Mandatory Failure
 
 
Key Points: Deep dive into Mandatory Failure, book 18 of the Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. Book 1 of the three-book finale! Start with an explosion, due to enemy action that continues through the last three books. This book focuses on a refugee crisis that the mercenaries are dragged into help resolve. Setting up a big galaxy event, with a logistics problem? Big problems matter when you see the effect in small places. People growing up and stepping up. How should we behave in a crisis? The world's worst apology. A comedic tool, cascading failure. Emotional for you, the writer, versus emotional for the reader? Check your alpha reader, crit partner, or reasonable facsimile. Do figure out what level of feedback you need. Authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion? Balance emotion and craft. Mandatory failure -- you are going to fail. But don't let that stop you.
 
[Season 18, Episode 37]
 
[1:30 minutes inaudible advertising Hello Fresh]
 
[1:51]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, Mandatory Failure.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Howard] We have reached that point in this eight episode miniseries where we're actually doing the deep dive part and diving into the books. Mandatory Failure is the 18th Schlock Mercenary story and is book 1 of what I structured as a sort of a three book finale to the 20 book mega-arc. So that's really the way I think of it, or the way I thought of it. Yes, it's the 18th book in a thing, but it is the first book in a trilogy that will end in a big way the fellow cast members here have just read it, and I'm sure have bazillions of questions for me. I'm anxious to not be able to answer them.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I'll just start. The question that I have actually comes from what you just said, which is knowing that this… You meant this to be its own sort of self-contained thing within the larger. How did you decide where to start? To make it a satisfying beginning for the trilogy?
[Howard] I gave it a prologue with an explosion, and the explosion in the prologue was an explosion… It was enemy action, and it is enemy action that continues throughout the trilogy. But in this case, it sets off a very specific local series of events that this book focuses on. So the fact that the enemy action… We have non-baryonic entities, the Pa'anuri in the Andromeda galaxy, and, oh, no, they have actually developed a weapon that lets them fire plasma through hyperspace and destroy targets kind of at will, and there's nothing we can do about it. That drives the next three books. That is… They have a plan, and that drives the next three books. But for this book, the first thing that they hit creates a disaster, creates a refugee crisis, and our heroes, the mercenaries, get dragged in to… It's not very mercenary-ish, they get dragged into help the refugees.
[Mary Robinette] They were voluntold, I mean, really.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] They were voluntold.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Well, I mean, they were voluntold, and the way… It was fun to create it that way. One of the mercenaries is related to someone who's there on the scene, and because of the weird and very very racist laws in place in that system, they couldn't hire outside help unless they were related to somebody who lived there. So she makes a call to her sister, and her sister talks to the CO, and off we go, as mercenaries that nobody wants to have.
 
[DongWon] It's such an interesting, almost counter-intuitive plot decision that you made because you know that you're setting up this big galaxy event. Where you start is an entire volume that's really focused on a logistics problem in a very specific area of how do we deal with all of these corpses, I guess. They're kind of corpses.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] So much of that initial section is taken up with the mechanical logistics. How do we harvest them? How do we bring them back? How do we feed them? Then, also the political problem of how do we make this… How do we not start three wars or whatever it is, by doing this thing? You know you want to get to point C. What made you decide to spend so much time in this very narrow slice? That is not a critique, I think it works beautifully, but…
[Howard] It was a lesson that I learned early on, which is big problems don't matter until you see the effect in small places. Famine? Yes, that's a disaster. Me being hungry? Is an F-ing catastrophe. So that's… I wanted to drill as far down as I could. Having refugees begin waking up before we're ready for them and wonder where their family members are. That is extremely poignant, extremely relevant to millions of people on the planet Earth right now. It was difficult for me to write because it was so raw. But by doing it that way, when I blow up more and more things later on, you can extrapolate. People have already felt it in the small space, and now they can project it on the big screen, and I make you feel even worse. As an author, that's kind of how we think. What can I do to make you feel worse than you feel right now.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You did a good job of that.
[Howard] Thank you.
 
[Mary Robinette] Really, I like that… Like, one of the things that I want to just draw attention to is that… DongWon, you mentioned a number of different things that you're doing with that, but you're also doing like you've got these character arcs that are also happening for multiple different characters. So you set up this thing with Peri where she is pretending to be in charge and is like trying to figure out the balance of where power is. What is too much, what is comfortable? That's again reflecting like this larger power struggle that's going on.
[Howard] Well, it's one of the themes, one of the quiet themes which were actually going to try and reflect in the cover art. These books aren't in print yet. Book 17 features Capt. Tagon on the front cover, front and center, there really aren't any other characters there. Books 18, 19, and 20 will feature other characters in the center positions, and Capt. Tagon's picture gets smaller with each volume. Because part of what is happening here, and maybe this is the parent in me, is that his company is… These people are growing up. These people are stepping up. Having a corporal need to take charge and actually boss people around as if she is a flag officer, that's kind of huge.
[DongWon] It really effectively set up the narrative rhyming, or the thematic rhyming we're going to see over the next three volumes of who gets to have power, who should have power, and who takes power. Right? Over and over again, we see entities, people, taking control who shouldn't, people trying to resist that, people getting control when they deserve it. I don't know. You keep asking this question from all these different angles in each of these different scenarios. What I love about this disaster and the logistics is A, it sets up sort of the moral stakes in a certain way, of like this is how people should behave, this trying to care for each other in this type of crisis, which then when things go off the rails in the future, it gives us that grounding. But also really sets up this understanding of thinking about power, thinking about authority, in these ways, because we get to see the characters thinking about it in a very explicit on page way.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the other things along these lines that I also thought was really lovely in the first book is how that question of power dynamics is playing out, not just in the hierarchical nature of the ship, but also in the marriage, the Foxworthy. Like, the scene where he realizes that he has… Where he's trying to apologize to his wife for casting a shadow, and then he's like, "No, wait. That's wrong because that's still centering me."
[DongWon] The world's worst apology.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Such a bad apology. So bad. But it's also the kind of thing that you encounter in real life, and again, it's that becoming aware that you have power, that you have been exercising in ways that you really should not have.
[Howard] When we come back from the break, I want to talk about why that apology was so important. Why that was one of the most difficult scenes I've ever written.
 
[Erin] I am so excited to talk about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Which is one of those novels that I think lots of people are talking about and I came to it late. My main question was why did I not read this sooner. So, it's a book, it's a historical fiction novel, that follows the descendents of one woman who has two children, one of whom marries the governor in Ghana, in present-day Ghana, and basically helps to oversee a slave castle, and the other one who is one of the slaves sent over to America. It basically continues to track their families. So each chapter, you go one generation down as you see what happens to the half of the family that remained in Africa and the half of the family that went through slavery all the way down to the present day. I'll warn you, it's a bit brutal at times, it does not shrink away from its subject matter. But it's beautifully written, and each individual descendents story is just this wonderful sort of short story life experience that really puts you in the mindset of the character as she tells this amazing historical fiction tale. So, again, that's Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
 
[Howard] So. I'm going to go ahead and confess, full confession here. When Kevin apologizes to Elf, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote that. I must have broken down into tears half a dozen times while doing it. Because I kept trying to tap into that relationship and into the experiences of someone who knows he has unjustly but accidentally exercised power over someone else, is preventing them from becoming what they could be, and wants to fix it, but the very act of trying to fix it is itself an exercise of power. Wading through that… It was fun to write, in that… DongWon, you said worst apology ever. Clumsiest apology ever.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] But the whole time I was writing it, I could tell that for Elf, it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever received because it was so genuine.
[DongWon] Well, that's a wonderful end to the scene, [garbled] of the scene of her tearing up. It just shows how much it landed, even though we, as the reader, have that… The comedy in the scene is him trying to explain this thing that is so… He keeps, like, apologizing for the thing he just said in the scene. Right?
[Howard] It's… That is a comedic tool, the cascading failure… The cascading failure where it's…
[DongWon] The mandatory failure.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I love that tool. But here's the thing. When I was writing it, I knew that part of what I was creating was a character moment that made this Kevin precious, and I was about to kill him, and he would never come back. Elf would forever have this memory of something her husband had done for her, and even if we are able to restore her husband from a backup, that backup doesn't include this data. As she says later in the story… Schlock says, "The doctor can bring him back." She says, "I want the one who apologized."
[DongWon] It's a heartbreaking moment.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's so… Yeah. It's like…
[Howard] I had been waiting… No lie. I had been waiting five books for the opportunity to put paid on that… This promise that, hey, just because I've introduced a form of immortality doesn't mean death is cheap.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Doesn't mean there's no cost to it. I think it was book 13 where Schlock dies and they try and bring him back from bits they can find and end up having to restore him from backup. We actually had a conversation in a Writing Excuses retreat, and I remember the cast staring at me kind of wide-eyed like, "You know what you've done?" My response then was, "I think I know what I've done. I… You're making it sound worse than I thought it really was. Maybe I should pay more attention."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Yeah, it took me five books to find the point where I could really turn the screws on the poor reader.
 
[Erin] I was thinking about what you just said about writing the apology itself and how it made you feel. I often hear people talk about I was crying… I know I wrote this, and it was working because I was crying while I was writing it. It never happens to me because I'm cold inside.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But I'm wondering…
[Howard] Yeah, just dead inside.
[Erin] Chaotic dead inside. But I'm wondering, how do you know in that situation, like, if what you are writing is emotionally landing for you versus emotionally landing for the reader? Because I think you got in the place you needed to in the end, but, like, how do you separate the you who's experiencing it from the you who's trying to craft it?
[Howard] I have a cheat that is not available to anyone else. I'd been using it for a decade by the time I got there. I would write the scripts, and then I would hand them to Sandra, and I would watch Sandra read. I could see… I mean, I learned… I mean, I already knew a lot of the body language and the things… Micro expressions and whatever else. We've been married now, as of this recording session, we are coming up on 30 years of marriage. This is someone I'm very, very close to. I would watch her read. I watched her read this scene, and she teared up and she giggled, and she teared up and she giggled. Then she handed it back to me and said, "I want pictures." I knew, okay, this one's right. This one is right. I could not have created the Schlock Mercenary that I did without Sandra as the pre-alpha feedback loop. Because many times I would hand her a script and should look at it and she'd say, "Okay. Yeah, no, I think with a picture…" I would snatch it from her and say, "Stop! Just stop talking. I can tell it's wrong because you have confusion and there should be no confusion at this point. The words should be enough." I'd storm off to my office and I'd make it better. Then I'd bring it back, and she would look at it and say, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes. Now I…" So…
[DongWon] I will say, you say this is not available to other people. But it is, maybe not in the exact form like…
[Mary Robinette] Sandra is not available.
[DongWon] [garbled a third of your marriage is not available]
[Howard] You can't have my Sandra. No.
[DongWon] But people… You can have a beta reader. You can have a crit partner. You can have a collaborator in some ways. I think having those people in your life that you can rely on to be early readers or even people just to bounce ideas off of. That… I mean, that is available to people in certain ways.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've heard it called an ideal reader, which is that you think about the person that you want, that you are writing for. So, like, I with the Lady Astronaut books in particular in writing for [Alessandra?] and I'm looking for the moment where she is like… Where I'm like, "Oh, she's going to hate this so much. She's going to be so mad at me." I'm like, "Yes!" That's what I'm writing for is a lot of times is will it provoke that? It gives me a way to kind of AB test things in my own brain even before I commit them to the page by thinking about how the person is likely to react to it.
[Howard] I actually struggle when I'm submitting things to writing groups because when I get their responses, it's already been filtered. No. I wanted to watch your eyes while you read. I wanted to watch everything happen so that I knew… So that's… It's difficult to find.
[DongWon] That is too much feedback for some people. Right? For some people that is to intensive of a process to feel that disappointment immediately in that way, to filter is necessary. So, no for yourself, as you're figuring out who your crit partner is, who to work with, what writing groups to work with, what level of feedback you need.
[Howard] But coming back to Erin's question, I could not know that I got things right until I checked it with Sandra. That one especially, because it's a relationship between a man and a woman, and he's famous and she's not, and draw whatever parallels there you care to, I really needed to make sure that it worked. Once I had her approval, I knew that it did.
[DongWon] It felt like a very personal authentic moment. I felt a realness in that scene as I read it, but I think that comes through very well.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think… A secondary question, I think, that was lurking beneath my question, is authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion. Because I think sometimes… Like, for example, when I'm not being cold and dead inside, I might cry at like a Hallmark movie when the music swells, but I don't think that's… That's just like I can feel the thing working on me. You know what I mean? It doesn't feel like it comes from a genuine place, it comes from like all the things that are happening around it that are telling me to react in a specific way. Like, when the music changes in a horror movie, it might not be scary, but the thing is telling you is scary. There's a difference between that and when the emotion is genuine and it's coming from a real place. Being able to tell the difference between when you're writing a more surface, and there's room for all levels… But when you're writing a more surface level emotion, and when you're really getting to the heart of things, I think can be really difficult because they both feel emotional.
[Mary Robinette] So the… I hear what you're saying, and the reason I'm over here making faces that if we had a video feed, the viewers would be like, "Ooo, what's going on there?" is because i think that when… I think that… For a long time, I would say, "Oh, yes, you can feel it." That there's this idea, but there are some people who don't have those reactions. Like, when I'm writing with depression, I am strictly crafting my way through that, and I know from experience that the reader cannot tell. Then, people with varying forms of autism often don't have the same kinds of reactions, so it's much like telling someone that you have to read your work aloud in order to know whether or not it flows, which is not a process that's going to work for a deaf writer.
[DongWon] It's just another tool in the set. Right?
[Mary Robinette] It's another tool.
[DongWon] Being able…
[Mary Robinette] It's a tool that can't… I understand what you're…
[Erin] Let me just… My question is actually less about the emotion and more about the craft, though. What I'm saying is you can fool yourself into thinking you are writing something because you are putting all the emotions into it on a surface level. How do you ensure that the craft under it is doing the emotional work needed so that you may be making yourself cry on a surface level, but in fact, you're not getting to something else because you are… It sounds right, if that makes sense…
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] But it is not right. So it's actually the opposite.
[DongWon] That is tricky. Especially the things that are so raw in a way that's… It's so intense of an emotional place that there's not enough craft on it to make it legible to me or connect to me. Sometimes it just feels… I'm so inside someone else's experience that I'm like, "I don't know how to take this in or respond to it." So you always need that balance. Right? You always need to… The score has to be right, the lighting has to be right, all these different things. Right? I think what's so interesting about this conversation is we're seeing that it really is finding that balance point between something that feels very true to you, and something that is rooted in however many years of craft you apply to it. You've got to that moment, Howard, not just by tapping into the emotion of it, but also you've been drawing these characters for years and years and years.
[Howard] Oh. So much, so much craft.
[DongWon] You know how to hone a joke. You know how to do this. And you edit it and reworked it and all those things.
[Howard] So much craft. There was… Gosh, eight years ago, I don't know exactly. I was asked to narrate a Christmas program. The way it had been written was very we are going to tell the congregation how they should feel. I objected to that on several levels. But the uppermost level was my writer brain. It was like, "No. No. We can do this so much better." So I asked them permission. I said, "Can I rework some of this? I think I can trim it a little bit and make it a little smoother. Do you mind?" "Okay, fine." I took all of the tell statements out of it and reframed everything in ways that encourage people to begin imagining feelings for themselves without telling them to do that. The response from the person who created it was, "Ah! Can I have this? Can this be the new edition of… Can I just use these?" I'm like, "Fine. It is my gift to you." It was all craft. It was all craft. It was very much the toolbox of I'm just going to remove all of the statements that tell you how you should feel, and include characters feelings.
 
[DongWon] Can we talk about the title real quick? This idea of mandatory failure. The reason it… Your comments made me think of it was, so much of learning craft, so much of learning how to do all these things, is simply like doing it over and over again. Right? You have to learn by doing. Now, the reason I love this title and I love this idea is inherently you are going to be failing, especially at the early stages, to do the thing that you're trying to do. To access that emotional state, to set the stage properly to execute on all these different emotional levels. Failure is not just part of the process. It is a mandatory piece for success. Or at least that's how I'm interpreting what you said.
[Howard] No, that's exactly right. The quote… And the quote grew out of a subversion of the NASA statement. Failure is not an option. Which is a way of saying this is too important to make any mistakes on. This is the piece we absolutely have to get right. But so many people misuse that and say failure is not an option all the time. I subverted it. Failure is not an option, it's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] That is my favorite of the 70 maxims. It is maxim 70. It's where the series ends. Putting in here nicely set up for me… I mean, it's sort of a theme in my own life. I'm going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again in order to get it right. These characters are going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again before they get it right. In this book, in the next book, and in the trilogy that wraps things up. Speaking of wrapping things up, we should homework.
 
[DongWon] Our homework this week is going to be a writing prompt for you. So what we would like you to do is imagine a major disaster has just occurred. Write a scene directly in the aftermath of this incident.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Howard] This episode was made possible by our amazing Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&A's, livestreams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.34: Humor as a Sub-Genre

Aug. 23rd, 2016 04:45 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.34: Humor as a Sub-Genre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/21/11-34-humor-as-a-sub-genre/

Key Points: Situational comedy relies on characters struggling in an unfamiliar situation. Good for release. Think Lucille Ball on the candy conveyor belt. Physical comedy? Think punching, think pratfalls. How does the character react? Farce is the extreme pursuit of a ridiculous object. What is the hammerlock that forces these characters into this situation? Don't forget the soda! Linguistic comedy, wordplays, puns, and unexpected but accurate descriptions. May be tied to a particular character's view of the world. Making unexpected connections, forcing the reader to imagine something they didn't expect. That's the sparkling gun of linguistic comedy. Which can make us like a character who holds that gun to our head. Watch for the transition between character humor and relationship stories, especially with odd couples. Put them in a crucible, turn up the heat, and see what happens!
( Once upon a time... )

[Brandon] We are completely out of time. We need to move on. I'm going to give us our homework which is I want you to take some of these things we've talked about. At least three of them. The types of humor. Physical humor, situational, character, farce… Whatever it is, or find your own. I certainly don't think we've covered all types of humor in this short podcast. I want you to take a scene and try to write it with an overabundance of one of the types. Then pull it out and try to write the same scene using situational comedy. Pull it out, try to write the same scene using word plays. See how you can do these. You're going to overload on one of these types in order to practice it and see what it does to your scene. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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