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mbarkerWriting Excuses 20.32: Revision and Character Consciousness Tea Obreht
Key points: Think of your characters in layers. Start with one thing at a time. That's my secret, I'm always panicked. Give yourself the freedom to say this is just an exercise. Give your character a discomfort. HALT - hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Character consciousness, the gestalt of what you know about your characters. Generative phase, stumble around in the dark in this abandoned house, then in revision, curate that experience for the reader. What is your character's level of self-questioning? Trauma points, safety, connection, and empowerment. Never tell an editor oh, I'll just have to add a line or two, or three words.
[Season 20, Episode 32]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 20, Episode 32]
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] Revision and Character Consciousness with Tea Obreht.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Mary Robinette] And we are joined today by our special guest, Tea Obreht. Tea and I have the same agent, and Steph said, "Hey, you should have her on, because she's super smart." And it turns out when you do even a tiny bit of digging, she is incr… In fact, very smart. So… And also, a damn good writer. Tea, would you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
[Tea] Thank you so much for that, Mary Robinette. I'm going to mortify myself now, as a result of this high praise. I'm Tea Obreht. I am a short story writer and novelist. I have three books out, The Tiger's Wife, Inland, and, this year, The Morningside. They touch on Balkan diaspora and myth and folklore, in different applications throughout history and time.
[Mary Robinette] That's… Like, they are so… I don't… Fun is the wrong word. But they… I love the way that you play with genre in them. Specifically, the way you… You're [garbled] a lot of the things about character and expectations. Through the whole thing. So, we're going to be talking, as much as I want to spend a lot of time actually talking about the books, we're going to be talking specifically about revision and character consciousness. This is something that you had pitched, and I was excited about it because I feel like a lot of people think that you have to get all of the beats about a character right immediately the first time around. And it is actually something that you can address in revision. When you are thinking about it, what are some of the things that you're thinking about, like, when you're saying revision and character consciousness?
[Tea] Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, I think of my characters in layers, essentially. I suffer in regenerative ways horribly. I find the first draft of any project, especially when I'm entering it with a character I don't know very well, I find it to be a harrowing slog. It feels unstable, it feel shaky, it feels unreliable. And I think some people really love the adventure of that. They love to explore the unknown and see what will come out. But, for me, writing is really about getting down to the knowns, and being able to shape them kind of as efficiently as possible. Which is why character exploration becomes such a frustrating enterprise. And I've learned now to sort of take the basic elements of somebody's life, and try to start with one thing at a time. So, what is their emotional condition entering the stakes of the plot? What is their job? Do they have… What's the relationship with their mother? That's a really fun one for me, always. And to sort of work outward from that one kernel. Especially if I can't see the totality of somebody right away. I mean, I think sometimes characters kind of walk in and they're fully formed. I've had that miraculous experience. It's just the most wonderful thing when it happens. But, for me, for the most part, it's trying to circle around and around and around in, like, a widening gyre around this character.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Do you know…
[Erin] I'm curious…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, go ahead…
[Erin] No, I'm curious, like, as you're doing this, is this something you're doing just as you're writing or is this sort of before you start that first draft? Like, are you knowing the relationship of the mother before page 1, or are you on, like, page 100 and you're, like, actually, now that I think about it, how does she feel about her mother? Like, when does that process take place?
[Tea] It usually takes place, like, in the meat of the work. So, I write towards event first, and then the characters sort of come creeping out as themselves. But, yeah, for me, it's usually I get to page about 100 and then I'm like… And then an interaction happens. Right? With another character. That forces a reckoning about the relationship with the mother, or the fact that they secretly… That they secretly ran over a best friend's cat last week, and actually this is the thing they're hiding. And then it becomes… Then the revision kicks in almost immediately, because the reverse engineering of that fact into every element of this person's interactions has to happen sooner rather than later, so that it can set the tone for the rest of what's coming. So that's how I work, in a big, disorganized mess.
[Howard] In one of the episodes we've… I don't know if it's going to air before or after this one, because time is weird that way. But there's this famous saying that all acting is reacting. And sometimes you don't know what a character is until you see how they react to something. You can have them be proactive and just do stuff, but when you see their response to someone else getting angry or someone else being sad or someone else messing up their order at the drive through, or whatever, that's when, for me, the characters really start to come to life, and I recognize… And sometimes I have to be careful. Wait! Is that character reacting the way I would? Are they reacting the way they would? And so I have to dive back in on that filter.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Tea] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] I often will do some of this work before I start writing, when I'm working a novel. In short fiction, I'm just like, let's see who they are. And then in novel, even though I've done some pre-work, I will always have that moment of discovery. Where there is a piece of information that I didn't have about them that comes out, as you say, because of that interaction, because of the way they're moving through the world. I will… For listeners who have read The Relentless Moon, I will say that there is a compelling character trait that I did not know until that scene happened. And you will know what I'm talking about, if you've read the book.
[Erin] I love a real world example.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I find that, like, I personally fall a little bit in the middle, like I often know the what but not the why, if that makes any sense. So, because I tend to be very voice full, just in my work, I'll take a long time to hone in on the character's voice, but I don't necessarily know why that voice works for me. Like, it's like there's some subconscious character work going on that I don't understand. And then sometimes, in the middle of writing, I'll be like, oh, that's why that character speaks in this particular tone. That's why they use this level of language. It's because… It sounded right to me that they always used 10 dollar words where a five cent word would do. And later, I figured out it's because they feel embarrassed about their level of formal education, and this is their way of making up for it. But at the time, it just kind of felt right. So I feel like, sometimes, I'm like deep diving on my own consciousness, getting back to the phrase, of the character, because I'm doing things subconsciously that I have to surface consciously so I can really work on them, and, like, make them a real thing.
[Tea] Totally. Can I ask you, if you don't mind, do you find that when you're trying to zero in on that thing, you feel a sense of panic about it, like, when you don't know it yet, and is there sort of a time limit by which you hope to have the answer, beyond which you don't want to progress with your work until you have it?
[Howard] You know the scene in Avengers where Banner says, "That's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry." That's my secret, I'm always panicked.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Tea] I feel it's true.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Yeah. Sometimes I fret about it. But it… A lot of times, it is that the fretting happens because I need the character to do a thing for plot purposes, and do not feel like I have laid the groundwork to have them make that a realistic compelling choice.
[Tea] Absolutely. And then it feels… Then the work itself feels wasted. Right? You've arrived at this point, or suddenly it feels this way for me. Like, you've arrived at this point, hoping that you will know who this person is, inside and out, and there was supposed to be maybe three layers that were revealed to you by the time you got to this interaction or this choice they have to make or this event that's going to impact them irreversibly. Right? And instead [garbled go little bare?] and now you are forced to write this kind of important scene without all the correct knowledge. And I find that the only way to relax myself entering into that is to say this is not… This scene is going right in the trash. Like, I'm going to find something in here that is going to reveal that extra layer to me. There's a lot of work left to do, not just in the scene that's coming, but everything that precedes it. But I have to do this with the bare stick that I have. I had hoped to arrive here with a better arsenal, but here we are, I've got a twig I tore off a tree. And now…
[Chuckles]
[Tea] That's what we're doing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, when we come back from our break, we're going to talk about what I like to call how to fix it in post.
[Tea] All right. I have a recommendation for you. The husband and I are re-watching Deadwood. Start to finish. I saw it in the early oughts, and then I made him watch it, kind of as a compatibility test when we were first dating. He passed. We've been married now for almost 11 years. Deadwood is so sordid, and it's still tough going, and there are scenes of such brutality, but it's such an incredible study of character and such a profound reminder that you can do anything if you find the right voice for it. You can create a whole setting, a whole mood out of language alone. And I really think that show would work just as well if the actors were wearing track suits and walking around an empty stage.
[Mary Robinette] So. We've been talking about that moment of arriving and realizing, oh, I don't actually know as much about this character as I thought I did. I sometimes call this internal motivation, character consciousness, there's a bunch of different terms we can talk about, like the character's interior life and when you're like, oh, hello! Aaaa... So I have a couple of tools that I use to audition characters, to try to draw this stuff out. When you find yourself in that phase, you've already talked about one tool which you use, which is that you give yourself freedom to say this is fine. This is just an exercise. Are there other tools that you have found useful for kind of drawing that character consciousness out?
[Tea] Yes. I love to give them a discomfort. I think we have a real impulse, and a very understandable impulse, particularly in the early phase of something, to protect our characters to some extent. To protect them, maybe physically from the world, to protect them from their own bad decisions, and maybe to protect them from the worst aspects of their own character. And it's really that… Or their own personality. And it's that worst aspect of this person's or that individual's personality that I'm looking for, that I often feel unlocks the character for me. So I like to give them an injury or… I like to give them an injury, or just like really… Or…
[Howard] Important thing is we like to protect our characters from us.
[Tea] From ourselves.
[Howard] Because we are their worst enemies. Really.
[Tea] Exactly. They don't stand a chance. Yeah, I like the idea of… I'm always very curious about how people react to things when they're in pain. Right? Or when they're hungry or when they're thirsty or when they're tired. I think it reveals so much. It reveals a lot about me, you know. I wouldn't want anyone to meet me in any of those states for the first time. And, yeah, I think discomfort is a very good way to kind of force the character into a corner and have them react as poorly as possible.
[Erin] You're reminding me of that acronym HALT. They say that if you are, like, grumpy, that you should halt and see if you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] And that those, specifically, because no one works well under those conditions. And so I love the idea that you should not halt and give all of them… Not, maybe, I should say one…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] To your characters and then…
[Howard] No, it is Howard, asshole, leave the room.
[Laughter]
[I'd like to stay in the room]
[Mary Robinette] Stay in the room and expose your pain for the character.
[Howard] Oh, goodness. Tea, I love the term character consciousness that you've kind of introduced us to. I've been mulling over it this whole time, the idea among psychologists, psychiatrists, students of neurology, what is consciousness? Well, it's kind of this blurry, foggy Gestalt of everything we experience and everything we are thinking and moving… And if you take everything that you know about your characters on the page, how they feel about mom, what is giving them pain, what are their motivations, and start to roll that into this Gestalt, this consciousness, they start to become people. In your head. And I didn't realize it for years. I had it super easy, because with Schlock Mercenary, there were a dozen different characters that I knew well enough that I could just as I laid down in bed for the night, I could just say all right, you to, talk about something. I'll check in on you in the morning. And it practically… Once you have that consciousness, it almost writes itself. You just put them in front of things and cool things happen.
[Tea] Totally. And I think part of that, too, is, like, the longevity. Right? Of that notion, this idea of, like, getting this steeped in the… Well, getting these characters to steepen themselves, and then getting to steep yourself in them until you're sort of almost inextricable from each other, and, like, maybe their reactions are not the reactions that you would have in real life. But it is so clear who they are. Right? And I think that's why we spend so long on this idea of, like, character development, what makes up the personality of someone that we're crafting on the page. And then the consciousness part I think has to be rounded out by this idea of, like, how does this personality react to the stimuli around it. Given all the factors that it's been filled with. Yeah.
[Howard] So we're fixing it in post. Mary Robinette, we're fixing it in post.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Howard] What... Tea, what are your steps for this? You're going back through a manuscript, you're revising and you either have a clear picture of character consciousness or you don't. But you're making your way. How do you… Tell us how it works.
[Chuckles]
[Tea] Does it work? I… So… I think of the generative phase as, like, my first time in an abandoned house. Right? Like, I've gotten in somehow, and I'm finding my way around, and there's no electricity and there's no heat and there's no power, and I'm stumbling around in the darkness by the aid of, like, a penlight. I can't see very far ahead. I'm like tripping over furniture. There's no logic to the layout. And then my job, in the next phase, in the revision phase, is to curate this experience. Having had an emotional and psychological experience within this house, my job is to curate this experience for the reader. Right? And their way into this character might not be through the same way that I stumbled into the house. Maybe they're falling in through a window, whereas I found the downstairs door. And my aim is to get them to have as close as possible… To get them to a point where they're, if not mirroring, at least echoing my own sentiments about the character. And, I think that, for me, starts with truth. Like, is this reaction true to this person? Or is it, as you were saying earlier, true to me, or is it what I would like them to do? And are they aware of how messed up they are? Like, what is their level of self questioning? I think that's an enormously important sort of part of the rubric for me where… To question whether a character has any feelings about being a good participant of this interaction, being a good citizen in this reaction, or whether they just want what they want? So what is the level of self-doubt is, like, an early revision question that I often ask of my characters.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with my therapist in which she was telling me about trauma points, that there are these points that we anchor to. That something happened in our very, very early childhood. And it's around safety, connection, and empowerment. And the thing that I realized was that most of my characters have not done the therapy work that I have done. So I don't actually have to know actually what that event was. I just have to know what kinds of things trigger them. Like, I'm looking for those consistencies. So I also will find myself working in layers, if you… As you've described, and going back and saying, "How do I bring this out? How do I make it clear, this thing?" And I described to my… To Seth, to our agent, as, oh, yeah, I just have to go back and add a line here and add a line here, and add a line there. And I know what you mean. Which is that what I mean is that I need to think about are they having an emotional reaction at this moment? Are they feeling it physically in their body at this moment? And that often it's not revising an entire scene, it's just adding that layer in. And when I said that to him, he's like, never let an editor here you say it's only going to take a couple of lines. Because they will not understand all of the other work that goes into the decisions that allow you to do it with just a couple of lines.
[Tea] I've had that same conversation…
[Laughter]
[Tea] With…
[Laughter]
[garbled]
[Tea] Favorite aunts. No, but it's… That's uncanny. And I love that, too, because it… Yeah, it's sort of… It speaks to this idea of, like, I've understood that's what's missing here is the fact that in previous scenes of emotional reaction, that this character has, I've held the reader's hand and let them see it explicitly. And for whatever reason, in this scene, in this particular moment of the book, I've let go of their hand and I'm allowing them to make an inference about it, when, in fact, to make the book consistent, I need to be right there with them. And I know all those things, but the editor doesn't, so it is one line or two lines…
[Howard] Yeah. This is something that, as a cartoonist, you keep saying line, and there are so many illustrations that I have fixed by adding literally one-stroke with the pencil, with the pen. Three little lines in one corner of an object can create the illusion of shadow. And now, suddenly, the object has volume. And so… I mean, I love the fact that this holds true in writing as well. Sometimes I only needed to add three words to a character's sentence in order for it to now have all the emotional import that it needed to have. They said the same things, but it meant ever so much more, with the addition of just three words. And, yeah, never tell anybody that, oh, all I need to do is add three words, but it's going to take me 12 hours of reviewing the manuscript in order to figure out where those three words go. And what they are.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I am in the process of doing that with a manuscript right now, and I'm like, I know that it is one sentence and I just have to figure out where it goes. And then you have to adjust everything around the sentence to make it fit, also, is the other thing that is always, always fun. Well, you have actually already given me some homework because tomorrow I am teaching a class at the Surrey International Writers Conference on auditioning the character, and, like, I am inserting the hungry, angry, alone, lonely, tired stuff in there, into that class. But since we are talking about homework, I think you have some homework for our listeners?
[Tea] I certainly do. Okay. So the assignment this week, the homework this week, is to write an opening paragraph. Not too long, maybe 3 to 6 lines. It can be something new that you write as a result of this assignment, or an already existing opener that you've been working on, being a little dismissive of, not sure. Not going to micromanage the content, but due to the nature of the exercise, let's say it should be a paragraph that introduces a few new pieces of information. Or a few key pieces of information. Maybe a character, maybe a conflict, maybe a desire, a lack thereof, perhaps a problem, event… You're all listening to this podcast, so you know the drill. I'd like you to consider the information that's contained in your paragraph. And then rewrite the whole thing two more times. Ultimately conveying the same information, but in three different ways. How you do this is completely up to you. Maybe in a different voice, maybe from a different perspective, maybe using only dialogue, framing it as a text exchange between two people. As you write the different versions, you have to remember that it's about the information. It has to be the same, version to version. And then consider, at the end of the exercise, the priorities of each different mode, how it's changing the way the information is relayed and whether that then changes the information itself, and whether it changes the reader's feelings about it or your own?
[Mary Robinette] That's great homework, and I'm looking forward to doing it myself.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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