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Writing Excuses 21.36: Twists: How to Make the Unexpected Feel Inevitable

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-36-twists-how-to-make-the-unexpected-feel-inevitable

Key Points: How do you do a twist? Not expected, not random. Unplanned! I'm going to twist, but I don't know how. When the reader figures it out a half second before the protagonist. Ideal story works with or without twist. Backbone of tension and emotional punch for characters. Twist recontextualizes everything. Bury information in the middle. give the other stuff rich descriptions. Characters misunderstand. Categories. Character motivations.

[Season 21, Episode 36]

[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 21, Episode 36]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Twists, how to make the unexpected feel inevitable.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] This week we are talking about one of the most hotly contested topics, I think, in any kind of narrative, which is how to do a twist. When you get it right, everyone loves it. When you have a surprising element that comes in at the end and it feels like this is how it was always going to happen, but you didn't see it coming. I think a twist is something that people reach for a lot, and in its failure states can either be very expected and therefore not that exciting, or feel incredibly random and therefore disappointing in a very different direction, where it just feels like a deus ex machina, or unconnected to everything else that's happening. So, I'm going to toss this to the rest of the crew. How do you all think about setting up a twist so it feels like it was always going to happen that way without people seeing it coming?

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to say a thing that is going to probably put people into despair, which is that my best twists are ones that I did not plan. Where I was setting up something else, and so you can deconstruct this and figure out how to do it when you want to, which is that I was setting up something else and I was aiming for a particular trajectory. And then as I'm writing, realized I've got all of these other elements that are on the page that were these ingredients. And I'm like, "Oh, secretly, she's been a duck the entire time."

[laughter]

[Quack quack quack quack!]

[Howard] I like that approach. Just the idea that I know I'm going to twist. I just don't know exactly how. So, I am going to put the things in the story that need to be in this story, plus maybe some extras, and then we'll figure out where the twist is and we have to edit and prune later. I love that approach. The approach that I don't like is the one that I got from a fellow comic book panelist a decade and a half ago where he said, "Yeah, I'd read the letters in the back of the letter and anybody who had guessed how my series was going to end, I decided if that was one of my endings, I couldn't use it." And I remember listening to that and thinking, "Okay, I mean, but you guys were getting the email weekly. You were... weekly, you were having people guess at the end of your story and if somebody got it right, you just had to can the whole thing?" I will allow myself for some readers to figure it out. I do not have to be... I have never been the smartest person in the room, but I don't have to outwit all of my readers.

[DongWon] I actually think the most masterful execution of a twist is when the reader figures it out half a second...

[Mary Robinette] Yes!

[DongWon] Before your protagonist does. You want your reader to feel smart. You don't want them to be completely surprised. You want them to go, "Oh, my god." and then the twist happens. And I think that is the most satisfying experience. I think Rian Johnson in his the Glass Onion and Knives Out movies nails this vibe perfectly. He's very good at setting things up in a way that you get it right before it happens.

[Howard] Well, in the horror genre, it's critical that that happen so that you're imagining as you're reading, what's the worst thing that could happen to these characters? And then the surprising but inevitable comes to you, the reader, and this huge sense of dread which accompanies you on the page turn to when you find out you're right.

[DongWon] Talk about a show that recently came out when we're recording this, which is Widows Bay. There is a thing that they do at one point in that show, which is a significant twist. And everyone I've talked to figured it out an entire episode before, and they make you sit in a conversation for at least 30 minutes of the next episode where you know what the twist is, but they're just not giving it to you in a way that is beautifully done. And they do it just long enough that I go, maybe I am wrong. And then you're right.

[Erin] Well, I think that points to one of the things that twists can do well. So, first of all, like, I think that an ideal twist to me is one in which the story works, like, with the twist and without it. Where the twist is not holding up the story, like the only reason this is a great thing is because you didn't see this coming. I read a story recently that had. like, an absolutely masterful twist and it's sadly not out yet, but it is, like, what's great about it is all the elements are there, they're just hidden. So, I think first of all, there's a lot of misdirection. You can have, there's, like, an obvious interpretation of what's going on, and then the story does the thing that is the I would have never thought of that interpretation of what's going on. It's very similar to how a lot of really great humor works, where you go for the thing that the audience is thinking and then you go slightly off from that, but they're like, I see how you got there. But also, I read the story and I did not get the twist the first time, I was not the careful reader, and when I got it, it was hilarious. And then I reread the story and loved it just as much for seeing all the moments I had missed that were obvious clues in retrospect to where it was going, but just made the story so much more delightful.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and I think that that's really the key, especially if you want people to do re-reads, that if you write a book or a story that only works when people read it once, then that's not going to be satisfying. But if the second time through, if that twist adds another element of tension, whether because you get to enjoy the "Haha, see how clever they are." or because you're like, "Oh no, doesn't anyone see this?" Then for the people who guessed the twist before they get there, they're getting that tension. So if you're thinking about it as a backbone of tension in addition to the "Haha, look how clever I as the writer am." And I think that's the failure mode of a twist...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Is when you are writing it not for an emotional punch for the characters, but for the reader to go, "Look how clever that writer is."

[Howard] And two excellent twists that we've seen in cinema in the last 30 years. One is The Sixth Sense. And we come back to that because that... what was... that was Shyamalan's trademark or practically. And then The Matrix from... I think a few years later. Yeah. I think so. I don't know.

[DongWon] I don't remember the timing.

[Howard] I don't remember the timing exactly. Point is in both cases, our protagonist realizes that they are not in the real world. Bruce Willis discovers he's a ghost, and Neo discovers he's a Duracell battery.

[DongWon] Spoilers for 27-year-old movies.

[laughter]

[Erin] I literally was like, "Spoilers!"

[Howard] Wait, he's a... Yeah. But here's the thing. I have watched Sixth Sense twice. I will watch The Matrix any old time it's on. And that's because Sixth Sense completely depended on that twist and invited me to go back and watch it again to see if I could spot the clues and be clever this time. Matrix gave the twist, expanded this whole world view, and when I watch it again, well, yeah, I just have the expanded world view. Now I'm going to watch the bullet time over and over again. And it's fascinating to me how they're both really good twists.

[Mary Robinette] So there's a... I learned about the twist, since we're talking about things from last century, from a writer

[DongWon] That was an act of cruelty saying it that way.

[laughter]

[Erin] MY BONES!

[Howard] DID I EARN IT? I earned it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So, but I seriously learned about this from a writer from the 1910s. Which was O. Henry and most people know him from The Gift of the Magi. What people don't realize is he was an incredibly prolific short story writer and what he was known for was that all of his stories had a twist. The thing that he did was that the twist causes you to recontextualize everything that came before that. And that I think is one of the keys is, like, how does it make you view things differently? Not just, oh, I didn't expect this, but how does this make you view things differently? So when you look at The Gift of the Magi, which is this... it's been remade and, it's this young couple and they... she's a pianist and he... I can't remember what his fancy job was, but they both are like, yes, I'm going to my work today. And he turns out... he's actually had to take a job doing boiler make... boiler repairs and she is working as a scullery maid. And they sell their most precious possessions, each of them, in order to buy Christmas presents, that are the Christmas presents that... like, she buys him a watch fob for the watch that he has sold in order to buy her the combs for her hair. What people don't notice when they talk about this, or forget when they're talking about that. They talk about the sale, but that's not actually the twist. The twist is that she... the reason they... that they realize that she has a burn on her arm and he knows... he realizes that she got her arm burned as a scullery maid, because he was working in the boiler room and had to send up a grease soaked rag for that maid who had been burned and he realizes, oh my god, that's my wife. And so they... it recontextualizes everything, that they both realize that they haven't had this fancy job the entire time, but they are so in love with each other that that love continues as the through line. And so... anyway, O. Henry is really great, but I think it's... the point is that that recontextualization does... recontextualizes not just that single thread of the twist line, but also everything that connects to it.

[DongWon] The thing we've been circling around in all this conversation is reader expectation and how to play with reader expectation. So, we're going to take a break, but when we come back, I want to talk more about expectation and how that dovetails with your character motivations.

[DongWon] Okay, before the break, we've been talking about twists and how to make them feel inevitable. And the thing that kept coming up was audience expectation. What does the audience think the story is? What do they think is about to happen? And then how do you reveal that what they thought wasn't, but also is connected to what's been happening all along? That recontextualization that Mary Robinette was talking about. For me, how I think about that a lot of times... I mean, when I'm setting up a twist, when I'm doing creative work, is usually...

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[DongWon] In a GMing context, right? So, it's an interesting thing because I have to plan the twist ahead of time, but how we get to that point... I'm doing the opposite of what you're doing, Mary Robinette, which is you're setting up plot points and then Agatha Christie-like realizing what the twist is halfway through. I'm kind of setting a twist out as a destination somewhere down the road and then we're improv-ing our way to that point and that is kind of... So, the way that I have to do that is to play with character motivations. What do my characters want? What do my villains want? And then how do I get those to intersect in a way that will feel really surprising for the players?

[Mary Robinette] Okay. I have... I do have twists that I have plotted. But I was also just recently on a panel where we were talking about twists and all of us were like, "Yeah, my best ones just happen." But when I plan them, for instance, without telling you which book, in one of the novels I kill someone. And I knew from the beginning that I was going to kill them, but the arc that I set up was not the... You know when you're watching a film and you're like, "Oh, okay, I'm sorry, that person's dead. Look how happy they are." But if you set up a... What I did was I set up an argument arc. And so the obvious thing that was going to happen was that they were going to drift apart and they were going to come back together and the resolution of that arc was them reconciling their differences. And I truncate it. So I don't set up the we're so in love. I interrupt the... an arc that is planned that I make very clear and very obvious to the reader, this is the journey that we are on. We are on a reconciliation journey and then I just murder someone.

[Erin] Always the solution, I think.

[Mary Robinette] Always.

[Erin] I... it's funny because we're talking a lot about twists on sort of a macro level because we're talking about structures, but I always often think of them on a micro level because I love to play with unreliable narrators, where they... like, it's not necessarily a twist so much as you don't realize this person's true motivations or you don't realize what this person is truly about. And so I just wanted to share, in the spirit of tools not rules, a couple of, like, micro things that help me as I'm trying to, like, create this kind of arc or set these kind of things. One is to play with where, like, actual information that would help you discern the twist or the information is within a paragraph or page. Humans really are into primacy and recency. We tend to remember the first thing and the last thing. So, last lines of paragraphs and pages and first lines really stick with us. So if you have something you want to hide, it's always great to put it in the middle. This is also true of sentences. If you have a list of several items and something important is like the third from the last, a lot of times, people will just get into oh this is a list and just kind of... not fully skim it, but kind of get into, like, okay, okay, I see what this list is and not pay as much attention to the individual items. So you can sort of, like, hide them in there. And I think a lot of this has to do with, like, focus. Like, where are you... where are you directing focus? In a film, you can actually misfocus, put something out of focus...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That you don't want people to pay attention to, and in focus, zoom in on what you want them to, even if that isn't the important thing. But we can do this as writers as well, by really putting more description towards an item that isn't as important, because if it has a lot of adjectives or lush description, we draw focus...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then take something that isn't as important and kind of downplay it by not making it as... not making... giving it the amount of richness because the richness will come from the context that is driven by the twist that you read later.

[DongWon] I think of this as overwhelming the reader with detail, right? You describe a bunch of things or you give a bunch of different information, half of it is not relevant, half of it leads directly into the thing. I think the other thing that you can do to sort of, in a micro way set up these reveals is lie to your readers, right? And I think it's really important that you, the narrator, you, the writer, are not lying to your audience, but you can have a character misdirect your audience, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, when you reveal information, somebody says, "Oh, yes, of course, that was because somebody did X, Y, Z," which has nothing to do with anything. That person is just wrong. You can have a character be wrong in a scene, and then that will lead your readers down one direction, when really what's happening is another direction. So, it's a way to give people information. You also have to show that the person who was wrong is an idiot in some way or set up ways to...

[Mary Robinette] Or that they have a real reason for thinking that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Howard] It's helpful to... for me, anyway, to categorize plot twists at a high level. And like simple stuff, friend is an enemy, enemy is a friend, truth is a lie, a lie is the truth. Just thinking about it at that high a level, you can say, "Oh, enemy is a friend. Oh, goodness. Wow, that gives me a whole..." just by having the category handy. The last one is, that I could think of, was world building, and it's very very very general and all I could think of to say was "McMuffin is a McGuffin." Something about the world building is not what we thought it was. Something unimportant is magical. Or something magical is useless, but like I said, that that category's early days.

[DongWon] Well, I think one thing that is really important in all of this is connecting your twist to character motivations, right? What your protagonist want and what your antagonist want and the way that those move in different directions and the way that the twist should reveal something that the protagonist, your POV character, didn't understand about the forces that oppose them and what they want. And so, I think the best twists are ones... The reason The Matrix twist works better than The Sixth Sense twist, right? The Sixth Sense is famous for a rug pull moment, but it's not narratively satisfying in a rich way, the way The Matrix one is because what The Matrix one does is it reveals here's what the heroes want and here's what the villains want and how diametrically opposed they are. And then that changes the status and then the whole back half of the movie is contending with that. Versus Sixth Sense is just a oh, my god, and now the movie's over. So, I think what you really want is a recontextualization in that moment that echoes back through the story and that means that character motivations have to be aligned in a way that connect with that.

[Erin] That's interesting because I think, like, twists can sort of be seated in the world or seated in the characters.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, you can have the... the character isn't what... who I thought they were, like, type of moment in which it turns out that probably their motive... you understood their motivations, but not the actual thing they were trying to get to. So, I wanted love, but I wanted it by killing everyone in the room, is a very different motivation than I wanted love by hugging everyone in the room. And since those are both physical actions, you could write a story in which you think... a very weird story, like, a character's going in for a group hug, but it's murder. And so, please write that story someone out there.

[laughter]

[Erin] And send it to us so that I don't have to.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Welcome to Erin's free story idea.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Good luck.

[Erin] But you can also have something where... and I think this is more typical, especially in movie world, where a lot of what we're seeing is externalized, is, like, we're talking about the motivations and the character remains the same, but their understanding of the world around them shifts radically...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And they then have to understand how to reseat their motivation in this new world.

[DongWon] It's a misunderstanding of the systems that they're embedded in, right? I think Brandon Sanderson does that a lot with his magic systems...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Where you realize, oh, the magic is different than I thought, and that says something about what... how we thought the world worked and how my character was interacting with that world. And so I think if you... if you don't have an antagonist involved in the twist and it's more the world respond... or them understanding the world in a different way, I think that still has to connect with, ideally or ideologically, what your POV character hoped the world was and now they're realizing something different or vice versa.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, as you were... as you were talking you made me think about another category of twist which is the twist that happens in a heist. Which is that all of the characters are in on the twist, but the reader is not. And that is the thing where you have to have... or a thing that I have found, I guess it's a tool that I have found, is that the... giving the character something else to worry about that still points at the problem, but points at it in a way that the reader thinks that they understand a different thing. So it's a form of lying to the reader, but like... if the... like I used a situation where there was a magic system that was in a danger of of having a seizure. And so when a character goes through the motions of faking a seizure, the reader does not know that they're faking it. I have set up the entire time, this is a dangerous thing that might happen as a result of doing this. And so the reader believes that they understand what is happening. And my character's reaction is this is the sound out of her nightmares. Which is true. I have not lied to them at any point, but I have pointed all of my... all of the things that I've pointed at are look over here, and instead of this is the thing that's happening.

[DongWon] I think the role of Julia Roberts in Ocean's 11 is a great example of this because it gives Danny Ocean a different motive other than just pulling off the heist. And so, at parts in that movie. we just think, oh, he's going off script.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] He's leaving the heist behind, going after his own personal goals, but really what's happening is this is all part of the plan. This is all connected. What he's doing is deceiving the villain, whose name I'm forgetting.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] He's deceiving that character and us at the same time. And then it puts us in the seat of everyone around Danny Ocean, which then is the joyful reveal at the end...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of like, oh, this is all connected, and he's going to get the girl. Again, spoilers for a movie that's over 20 years old.

[Erin] I feel like we should put on this episode, caution: old people spoilers.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, 20th century spoilers.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[laughter]

[DongWon] Well, I think maybe we should go ahead and leave it there. That was a really fun conversation about how to set these things up.

[DongWon] So, I have a little bit of homework for you which is putting this into practice. If your work in progress has a twist in it, what I want you to do is write out all the logical steps that lead up to that reveal. How do you get there as a writer? Why did you put this into place? So, put... lay all those out. And then, take that list and begin to remove details until you reach the breaking point where your twist no longer makes sense. What can you take out that isn't load-bearing? Play around with this. Take some out, see if that works, and then swap some back in, right? And until you can find the breaking point of that, and then see if that's a better way to structure your reveal in the story.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.34: Knowing The Distance

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-34-knowing-the-distance

Key Points: Distance, between what you're writing and your readers' context. Inside or outside audience? Distance between the reader and the story. Senses! Layers of abstraction and genre. Think or feel? Include everyday experiences. Familiarity. Grand epic or individual journey. Focus and pace. Tense, perspective. POV. Character interaction and interiority.

[Season 21, Episode 34]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Knowing the distance.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] And I want to talk about the physical metaphysical distance between the thing that you are writing, the setting that you've created, the work that you're making and the context, the environment of your reader. The best example that leaps to mind for me is if you've grown up on the coasts, if you know that your readers have grown up on the coasts, then you can freely drop the terms wharf, pier, jetty, key, dock, and they will know what you're talking about immediately. You don't need to define it. You don't need to describe it. But most people, myself included, actually have to go to a dictionary to find out what those mean. And so understanding the distance between your reader's understanding of this world and your understanding of this world is key to writing it correctly.

[Mary Robinette] There's a lot of different things to be thinking about with this distance issue. So, one of the things that you're essentially talking about is the question of whether you're writing for an inside audience or an outside audience. This is something we run into a lot in science fiction and fantasy because we're dealing with invented worlds, but it's also a matter of thinking about who your audience is. And for me, I... because I've got this background in puppet theater, there's the difference between my audience, which was children, and the people who had to buy the show, which was adults. So, I had to be thinking about that. It has to play for this group, but it has to be accessible to this other group. At the same time, there's also this other use of the word distance, which is part of how you're controlling this distance between the reader and the story, which is the narrator's distance from the story. Sometimes you're narrating from an omniscient point of view. Sometimes you are creating a deliberate distancing. Sometimes it's tight third. And I think it's basically getting into, the why of it is, well, what story are you trying to tell, and for whom, is a lot of what we're talking about here. Some of the tools that I use when I'm doing that are thinking about the difference between filtering words. If I want to create more distance, I'm going to use more filtering words. If I want to tighten the distance, I use less filtering words. That's an easy one. But then when you're dealing with the outsider insider, it's also the when am I going to define something and how.

[Howard] I love looking at distance in this way, in terms of our senses. Generally speaking, I can see it before I can hear it. I can hear it before I can smell it. I can smell it before I can touch it. And I can touch it before I can taste it. And so the closer I want the reader to feel they are to the setting, the closer senses I use. If a character can smell something, that to my mind draws the reader much closer to what's happening than if they happen to see something or hear something.

[DongWon] One general note I want to make at a meta level is as a literary trend or storytelling trend really over the past, I don't know, decades at this point, we've seen a real collapsing of distance. Distance we... in general, the default storytelling mode is much closer in than it was midcentury, or early 20th century, right? And there's a lot of theories as to why. Some people say it's social media, some say it's the way movies and video games are, but since, like, '70's realism rose in cinema, we've seen just, like, increasingly shorter and shorter distance narratively from where the perspective of the narrator is to where the experience of the character is. This is the rise of, like, first person perspective in so many novels, to the extent that sometimes there'll even be push back on third person. There was... I think we're moving out of that moment a little bit. But for a second, there was like a lot of push back if you did third person, especially if it was third person present tense, there was like... you would get real friction in reader feedback, and it was very interesting to sort of see that collapse happen, and you can still play with it, but just something to keep in mind, that there's a real expectation now of being very close to this perspective and experience of the characters.

[Erin] Yeah. And I think that... two things. One, you made me think... start thinking about tense, which is interesting because I've heard people say that present tense is more distancing because you know you're not doing the... like, as the present tense character is, like, saying like, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, you yourself, the reader, know that you are not. And so it's different than the way that a lot of us tell stories to each other, which is in the past. And so like, it makes you more conscious of the fact that you are reading a story. And so therefore, oddly, creates more distance, despite it feeling in the moment of the story like it's more present, which is just, like, mind-blowing to me. But also, I've been trying to make a box in my head. And in that box, it's sort of thinking about outsider and insider and then close and far. And I wonder if part of the reason that we are seeing more... like, less distance between where we're right on top of the narrator is because we are open to more outsider perspectives in our fiction. And when someone is telling you their story, you don't feel like you need it to be your story. Like, if you're telling me your experience of doing Writing Excuses as a podcast, I'm not going to disagree with you because it's your story. but in a much more, like, if you're doing third person omniscient, you're telling me how everyone is feeling in the moment, which can feel alienating if you're not part of the group or you don't share that perspective as a reader.

[Howard] This raises a question that I'm going to pose to all of you. How do you decide? I mean, I believe that it's better to consciously decide than to just accidentally have done it, although the vast majority of the things I've created, I have accidentally done stuff...

[DongWon] [garbled] Feeling matters. Right?

[Howard] How do you decide the distance that you want to have... the distance that you want to place between the reader and the narrative, between the narrator and the setting between the characters and the environment? How do you make that decision?

[DongWon] It's interesting because, you know, for me, this decision happens at game system level, right? Because it's layers of abstraction, right? Something like Dungeons and Dragons is modeling very... in a very detailed way how... it's like a physics engine for the world. Here's how things move through space. Here's how characters move through space. Here's how they interact with each other. Versus something like Blades in the Dark, which is very abstracted, where you're making cinematic moves. The dice roll represents a series of things that's... here's how this fight went, and you can describe a set of things, versus I swing my sword once, I swing it a second time, I swing it a third time. Right? So there's different layers of abstraction there. And there are genre implications in that as well. Not necessarily in terms of fantasy, science fiction, but in terms of are we doing something really cinematic and broad in that way, and abstract in that way, or are we doing something that's, like, very in the details nitty-gritty, where we really want to think about the mechanics of this world, right? And those are two different slightly different genre questions in terms of how much abstraction are we using. And in games that is sort of that close farness.

[Mary Robinette] I think that with that, there's kind of also the question of do you want the charact... the reader to think about this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Or do you want them to feel it? And often we want them to do both. I will sometimes use this kind of distancing as a tool within a story that is not particularly distanced, if a character is going through shock or something like that. There's a novel that just came out. When you are listening to this, as we are recording it, it is not out yet. But when,,, it will have come out in June. It's called Sublimation by Isabelle Kim. And it's fascinating because she is creating deliberate distance in three different ways. The first is that parts of the story are told in second person and it is... the premise is that when you cross a boundary, a border, that you instance. That there is a person who stays behind and a person who goes and that these are actual physical people. And so then you can reintegrate later. And so she uses you... she has two different you POVs for the different halves of this person who later integrates, and it is a deliberate distance because she is thinking about this is how this other me did things.

[Howard] I want to have read this book now.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This is... it's a fantastic book. But then when they integrate, we switch to third person. and it's a different kind of distancing and disorientation, because there's an immediacy to it, but it's always the Rose did this, so Yong did this. It's this back and forth between which half of this reintegrated person did this thing, which you could only do by going into this third. It's not omniscient, but it's showing the contrast. And then there's this third distancing thing, which is that in the middle, like, there will be a scene, and then in the middle of the scene, we suddenly go to this kind of academic text about, like, how instancing happens in Odysius, because it's... in this version of our world, it's always happened. It is just a fascinating, really good use of how you can create this narrative distance, contrasted with places where we get very close to the characters. It's phenomenal. You should...

[DongWon] This book sounds so cool.

[Mary Robinette] It's so great.

[DongWon] I have been dying to read it ever since I heard about it.

[Mary Robinette] As we record this, I will say I have not finished it. I'm about halfway through and I have been want... I have been recommending it to everyone, like, basically since chapter 2.

[Howard] All right, we're going to take a quick break and then I'm going to come back and quote Mel Brooks.

[Howard] Mel Brooks, and boy, I sure hope I've got the quote right, famously said that, humor is you falling into an open manhole, tragedy is I have a hangnail. I love this, in this context. because it talks directly to proximity to the events. It's easier for me to laugh at it if it is distant, even if it's a disaster. It's easier for me to be pained by it, if it is close to me. And that's one of the tools that I think I unconsciously use when I am shifting between humor and horror in some of the darker things that I've written.

[Mary Robinette] I think that using familiarity or... can really be one of the ways that you can bring a reader in close. There's a thing that Jackie Chan does when he's... someone gets thrown through a plate glass window.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] None of us know what that feels like, but he can make it understandable by then having the character stumble back and hit their head on the shelf, which we all understand.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So often when you're... when you've got this insider versus outsider, one of the ways that you can invite people closer in, is including things in there that are things that probably everyone has experienced, mixed in with all of the things that are unusual and unfamiliar.

[DongWon] Well, you can use distance in that way for such impact as well, right? So, if you think about, like, a Marvel movie, there's an incredible amount of violence happening on screen of all different types, versus a horror movie which is usually one person experiencing violence rather than hundreds of people experiencing violence. But because you're so close into it and this thing of familiarity, you're using that tool of familiarity where often they're being attacked with household objects, rather than a laser gun that doesn't exist in reality. Right? Even if that laser gun incinerates 50 people, it's not as impactful as one man with a hammer, right? And I think you see that visceral intensity comes from familiarity. And when you get close to the subject because you want that feeling to be relatable to you. It's why home invasion fiction works. It's why, like, certain types of horror are so unsettling to us.

[Erin] Yeah. I think, like, getting back to what you're trying to accomplish with distance makes me think about the concept of killable bodies, which is the idea that, like, in large war scenes and large, like, fantasy fight scenes, there's often a group of people who are basically considered to be, like, no one cares if you, like, got rid of the entire... the red shirts. Like, you got rid... you blew up the entire ship, whatever. Like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Oh, well. Like, I mean it's sad, but nobody really stops to, like, think about those people and there's like a trope among, like, GMs in TTRPGs that, like, after your party goes and, like, kills the horde of whatevers, you find the sad, like, art from the kid...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Of, like, the head goblin that's like, "Daddy, have a great day at work." Which makes it feel small... like, that, like, all of a sudden narrows that distance. It's actually a horrible trick because you as the GM set your characters up to do the murder...

[DongWon] It makes them insane.

[Erin] And then made them feel bad about...

[DongWon] And by horrible, you mean useful.

[Erin] It's like [laughter] I hope you feel bad about the thing I told you to do.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Erin] Which is an interesting thing, but I think that talks about how there are reasons for distance. Maybe you're not telling a story in which you want to pause...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And think about how bad it is for the people on the USS Red shirt that they blew up. You really want to talk about the broader war that's happening, or how it's affecting the characters on the ship that you are writing. And in those moments, zooming out allows you to kind of tell the kind of distanced, more thinky version of the story, the strategy of war or conflict as opposed to the impact, the emotional part.

[DongWon] Well, there's a great example of classic fantasy fiction that plays with scale in this way, and plays with distance in this way, which is the Lord of the Rings. Where you have two sides of the story. One is grand epic battles where thousands of people are dying on screen constantly, and then the other side of the story is two people walking through the wilderness for a long time, having an incredibly bad time of it, right? And I think one... the story of Frodo and Sam and and Smeaggel is so close in to this tight interpersonal drama, and then the other is all the broad sweeping things that are happening that add weight to their individual journey, right? And so the the relative distances in these two stories of here is Aragorn, the heir to the throne, versus here's these two simple people that are incredibly relatable to our own lives and experiences, trying to do a thing that is in a story that's too big for them, right? And using the contrast of that scale, I think Tolkien ends up sort of inventing an entire genre of fiction in that friction there, right? In that space there.

[Howard] Gandalf, between the two groups, saying, "All right, well, we got to do this big thing. I hope Froto's having a nice hike."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And what we're talking about here, I think, as we're talking, I'm like, "Ah, this is just, in many ways, another way to control reader focus."

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And also, it's another way to control pace.

[DongWon] Yep. Weird that it's all about focus and pace.

[Mary Robinette] Weird, huh? Where do I want you to look and how long do I want you to look at it?

[DongWon] Is that all structure is?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] So, in the last...

[laughter]

[Erin] The season's over...

[Howard] Well, okay, I'll just send us to homework.

[laughter]

[Howard] Okay. No, in the last couple of minutes before we go to homework, what are some tricks in your toolbox for changing the distance quickly?

[DongWon] I think...

[Howard[ I mean, we may have already covered all of them.

[DongWon] I mean, tense and perspective are some of the easiest ones, right? And you know the Isabel Kim is doing such interesting things with it, as you're describing it, of moving deliberately from POV, in terms of first person second person third person. We saw this in the Fifth Season as well, the way Nora Jemisin... N.K. Jemison plays with that... the narrator perspective, I think, really shifts closeness and far, and when you suddenly realize the narration is much closer than you thought it was, it's a really startling shift, right? And you can... I totally lost my train of thought. I'm sorry.

[Mary Robinette] But you can... I was following you and I unders... I was on board that train.

[laughter]

[Howard] And it's still rolling...

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because the thing that they're doing is they are creating a sense of immediacy by having the character interact.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like it's the thing that Howard was talking about, about the senses, that when you are... when you don't realize who that narrator is in the Fifth Season...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's because they are not interacting with the scene. They are reporting on stuff, there is a distance there. And as soon as they interact with the scene directly, that's when you're like... when everything snaps in very close. So when people talk about this character feels very distant, a lot of times it's because there's no physical sensations.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it is because we don't have any interiority. We don't know what they're thinking. We don't know where they're feeling it in their body. Which means we don't know what they're planning, which means we are separated from them. Sometimes it's because they aren't taking any actions. They are static. And so there's this distance. And sometimes they just... in one of the failure modes, they are all over the map. They aren't focused on anything in particular. So I think if you're thinking about those kind of sort of four areas, that... what are we focusing on? What actions are we taking? I always go back to this thing that Erin said, I think last season, about identity as a verb. How are we interacting there? What sensations, what are the thoughts? Those are the things I think that can really bring you in close.

[DongWon] Well, one example that comes to mind as you're talking about that in terms of the difference between being close in with sensation and things like that versus more out in the world, I'm thinking of Severance, right? Where the Outie's are experiencing the entire world. They have their whole life history. They have all this context. And then you get that transition moment, of that incredible dolly zoom into... that has this, like, crushing collapsing effect, where now you're in the Innie's perspective of the world which they don't know anything. All they have is the immediacy of their experience in this inside life, right? And so you're so much closer to the Innie characters than you are the Outer characters, which is why in a lot of ways their emotional journey is the core of the show. Even though we are also deeply invested in what's going on outside, but the the experience of the Innies is really the heart of it and we sort of see it at the end of the last season in really exciting ways.

[Erin] And what you talked about with the dolly shot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which I have never seen one second of Severance, but it sounds awesome, is...

[DongWon] It's an incredible show. You have to watch it. I'm sorry, but yeah.

[Erin] All right. That's what I'm doing. Bye, guys. No, but before I go, the dolly shot, the thing that I like about it is that I think tracking an object...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And tracking physical space...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Is a great way to bridge distance. And I think it's because, Howard, of something you said, which is that, like, how sight... I can't remember how far out that was. Is that the furthest out or the...

[Howard] See, hear.

[Erin] Yeah. So seeing is like one of the furthest things. We can see the furthest. And so a lot of times, you'll see, like, an object, an arrow fly, the bouncing basketball, you see the whole basketball game, like, in a movie and then you follow the basketball as it rolls against one particular person's shoe...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And now you're in that person's perspective.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And in terms of books, actually, one of the ones that I think about is, like, the earlier books in Wheel of Time, because Wheel of Time starts every book with, like, the wheel turns and, like... I'm sure this is not what actually happens. A tumble weed, like, tumbles across the world, and it tumbles past this guy, and it tumbles past this guy. And they usually... there's these small scenes that are meant to show how the larger stakes of the entire world impact people we will only see for this one scene, who are just, like, trying to take their wheat to the next town as the world falls apart around them. And I love that because it uses an object as a way to connect us. So anything you can use physically is a great way to do it.

[Howard] In the course of this discussion, I realized something that probably should have been just incredibly obvious. The reason that we have all the songs and all the food in Rivendell is so that we can get in close to the Lord of the Rings because it's a really big story.

[Howard] I have homework. I have homework for you. Y'all, this is going to be fun. We talked a little bit about Marvel movies, about action scenes. I want you to write an action scene that feels like an action scene where the heroes are violently dispatching their enemies. And now I want you to rewrite it with a perspective shift and a distance shift. So, it is a horror scene about the enemies of our heroes being so miserably dispatched.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.35: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Where

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-35-deep-dive-into-all-the-birds-in-the-Sky-using-the-lens-of-where

Key Points: Place! Grounding? Context. Lived in. Details. Unnecessary details. Interactions. Senses. Familiar place and character interacts with place, draws reader in. Setting as immersion, but also as a lens on what the character thinks and feels. What is the emotional function of the place? Sense of wonder?

[Season 20, Episode 35]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Where.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Howard] And I'm here to talk about places. All the Birds in the Sky had, for me, some of the most memorable and grounding place moments in anything I've read recently. One of them was when Lawrence is taking his trip to, I guess it was MIT, to go see a launch, and someone tells him, oh, I'll give directions to your parents so they can find their way there. And someone comments that they'll never find their way there without specific directions. Because I remember a couple of occasions driving in Boston and complaining about it to someone and having them tell me, oh, yeah, the budget for the Boston MTA is handled like here's the amount of money you have. See how wrong you can make all the maps.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I bring that up because it feels like something that everybody who lives in Boston knows. And it's something that, by the characters brushing up against it in this flirtation with the location, we become very grounded in it. Oh, yes, that's Boston.

[Mary Robinette] What I like about that, actually, is that the way Charlie Jane is handling one of the tools that we have, which is context. Anyone who knows Boston knows that this is true, but she also provides context for people who don't know Boston. Which is a great trick that you can use with, like, secondary world fantasy. It's not just for real-world places.

[DongWon] Well, I mean, what I really love in the later portions of the novel is how lived in this vision of San Francisco feels. It feels like the author has such a deep connection to this place. And, I don't know if Ernesto's bookstore is real, and if it's inside the mall that is described in the book, but I believe that that's a real place that has been transformed in this way. I believe that these streets are laid out like this. And there's so many details from the bus stop to the parks to all these that feel very authentic to me in a way that is so detailed, that gives this backdrop, and this context, to the characters. Right? And so this fight between magic and technology feels really rooted in this fight over San Francisco that we've seen unfold over the last couple decades. I can't remember exactly when this book comes out, but, like, it is definitely in the heart of that conversation. Right? And so place is really informing the characters responses and goals in a very deep way.

[Erin] Yeah. I think something really interesting about, like, why it feels lived in is that there's always the unnecessary detail which is often the way we think about place. You know what I mean? It's like if you… I think sometimes the mistake you can make as a writer is to be like I'm describing the beach, so I'm going to talk about how, like, there's sand and waves and all the things that a beach contains. But a lot of times, it'll be, like, that's the beach where, like, every spring, the penguins, like, flood it for some reason. How they got there, I don't know. And leave behind penguin eggs, and, like, then you have to step over them. That's the thing that, like, if I went, I would remember about the beach.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It is either something emotional context to me or an interesting detail that distinguishes it. Like, the mall where all the signs are in… Or half, or all the signs are in Spanish, is something that, like, you're going to remember that's going to distinguish it, and I love that she manages to put that in.

[Dan] Well, and so much of the description of place is couched in interactions. Yes, she's not just describing the bookstore, she's not just describing the restaurants, but giving real specific details about how the characters interact with those places. Two of the ones that really stood out for me were, at one point, they flagged down a food truck, which is so completely outside of my experience with food trucks that it immediately took me somewhere else, and I'm like, oh, this must be a thing that the author has experienced. This must be unique to that place. The other was they… I think it was Lawrence was eating fried chicken at some point, and just going on and on about how it didn't leave his fingers messy. And that's such a small little detail about this one specific chicken place that fries in such a way that it doesn't get all greasy. And those are such a brilliant way of letting you into that space.

[Mary Robinette] I also am just going to… That the interaction thing made me remember a line… When the kids are in middle school, and they run away to try to go to the river, because it makes a pew pew sound.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And there's this line, well, this sucks. Lawrence squatted down to examine the river, nearly soaking his butt in the slushy ground. What's the point of ditching school if we can't go make laser noises from the ice? But the… That squatting down to examine the river, nearly soaking his butt on the slushy ground. Even if you haven't experienced that kind of wetness, that kind of… If you are someplace that doesn't get snow, that doesn't get sluggish, you know what it's like to have your butt wet from sitting on something that was unexpectedly damp. And I love that she gives us this very tangible thing that implies the rest of the world, and also through a way… Like with your fried chicken example, you know what it's like to eat fried chicken and thinking about the wonder of, oh, wow, fried chicken that doesn't make my hands messy. It's like… It just… It invite you in and implies everything else through one of the other things that we use for where, which is that… The senses.

[Howard] Yeah. There's a chain here that I want to make sure we've established the connections. Having a place that I'm familiar with in the book grounds me in the book. Having a character interact with a place makes the setting and the character work together. If you've got all three of those, to where I know the place and the character interacts with the place, then you've completed this link that has drawn me all the way into the story. And yes, Mary Robinette, as you were saying, the senses. I think of the spice house. The description of that house where the wood smells like things used in curry. The woods in the first chapter… If any of you have gone wandering in the woods as a kid, and been lost, there is an emotional element to a forest where you don't know which way the road is. And Charlie Jane connects us to that, and connects the characters to that, and uses where as a lens to pull us… Me, anyway, all the way into the story.

[Mary Robinette] I think the other thing that she does that's related to this is that she's also using the where, the place in the characters perceptions of it, to underline some of the major themes of the book. There's this line… I'm going to read you a fair bit here, but…

The parrots were eating cherry blossoms on the top of a big tree on the crest of a steep hill not far from Grace Cathedral. A half a dozen green birds with red splotches on their heads just tearing the ship out of those white flowers. Petals scattered across the sidewalk and the grass as the birds squawked and worked their crooked beaks while Lawrence and Patricia watched from the steep bank of the parklet across the street. San Francisco never stopped astonishing Lawrence. Wild raccoons and possums wandered the streets, especially at night, and their shiny fur and long tails looked like stray cats unless you looked twice. And he talks a little bit more, and then says, the only reason Lawrence ever saw these urban twists of nature was because he hung out with Patricia. She saw whole different city than he did.

And that, for me, is like cap… Like encapsulating the strength of their friendship and the crux of the book, that they see different worlds. And so, by presenting these different worlds, by having this moment where Lawrence is looking at the birds, but we know that he is not seeing the birds the same way Patricia experiences birds, is, I think, one of the fun ways that Charlie Jane is using where to support this theme that we've been talking about with the book.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, sort of encapsulating a lot of what we've been talking about. So, I think the mistake that people make when talking about setting or worldbuilding is that it's about immersion. Right? People think it's about immersion, and it is, to some extent.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You want to, like, have your reader smelling, seeing, what do this feel like when they touch it. I think all that is incredibly important, but even more important than that is the lens into how the character thinks and feels about the world. Right? And that is everything from both examples, in terms of, like, the fried chicken and the slush are telling us something about Lawrence, in that he's kind of fussy.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] He doesn't like to be dirty. It would be so bad for him if his butt touched that slush, in a way that Patricia would be not notice it at the same level. He's thinking about, is there grease on my hands? Right? And the thing about getting, and what I love about what she has done here with San Francisco in the latter half of the book is… The way I talk about New York City is that it's haunted. Right? Because anywhere I go in New York City, after having lived there for the majority of my adult life… I no longer live there, sadly. But is I have so many memories of every neighborhood, and versions of that neighborhood, and versions of the person I was in the people I knew and who I went there with, who I was hanging out with then. All of these things are layered on any space I go to in New York, pretty much. Any neighborhood, any region. They're… I just have lived so much of my life there. Right? And so setting, I think, when I think about it is this leads into character and emotion, because it's about what they were connected to in that time, how the people that they are with… In the way that that scene you just described is changing literally how Lawrence sees the world. He is noticing the parrots of telegraph Hill. He is noticing the raccoons. He's noticing all of these different elements that he just would have been invisible to him without this person that he's with.

[Howard] Okay. I have a question that I want to ask all of you. And it's a tricky one, so we're going to wait until we've taken a break.

[Howard] I promised you a tricky question. It's so tricky that I have to explain it first.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In many stories, the place that a thing happens, the where, is chosen because something… It had to happen somewhere. It's… They have to be standing on something. They have to be breathing something. San Francisco, in this book, is not that place. It is a character unto itself. But are there places in this book, and I can only think of one, are there places in this book that are used because the plot had to do a thing, but it doesn't really matter where it happened. And the only one I can think of is the flashback to Siberia. We had to have a thing happen that was bad, and it had to happen where there was methane [clathrate?] And so on and so forth, and so we picked Siberia. But it could just as easily have been Canada or Alaska or something.

[DongWon] I'm going to disagree with the premise of your question a little bit. And then I'll sort of circle back to answering the thing that you're asking. But, to me, I don't think that San Francisco is just a character of the book. I think the book is about San Francisco in a very, very deep way. Right? And it's about this sort of fight for the soul of the city in terms of this community and connection on one side, this pursuit of technological solutions on the other side. Right? This technocracy that has sort of taken over how they think about the city versus this person, Patricia, who is out there helping people who are living with AIDS, helping people who are homeless or being taken advantage of. Right? It's this real fight over what it means… And also just sort of the myopicness of what is happening outside of San Francisco that influences so much of the book, of, like, oh, yeah, that happened in Korea. That happened in Florida. That happened over there.

[Howard] I will concede that in my haste, I understated the importance of San Francisco.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Howard] To the story. The question stands, though.

[DongWon] The question does stand, and I do think that it's one thing that's really interesting is when she does jump to other locations, aside from Boston, Boston and MIT feel really important, because that's like where a lot of his tech starts from and then ends up in San Francisco in the Bay Area. Right? But then the stuff that is happening outside that, whether that's Denver, Colorado, maybe it wasn't about Denver… Colorado or [Saguaro?] they all feel a little bit like, oh, this could be kind of anywhere. Because the book isn't about those places, the book is about this place over here. Right?

[Erin] Oh. I was just going to say that… You're talking about place as a character, it occurs to me that place being a character doesn't mean it has to be a particular type of character. So, like, in this way, perhaps, like, it is a… It is the thing that the two… It's like they're trying to, like, fight over in this divorce type of thing. The two sides are fighting over. Where Siberia, to me, feels like an antagonist. There are a few times in which the place is the antagonist. The Eastern European city that Patricia gets dropped into and can't understand anything that they are saying. The maze part of the school where it's like… It just… The way that that places described, it's just a litany of bad things that happen to you there. The maze isn't really described, it's like, and then maybe you get stuck in a whole or, like, then, maybe you fall off a wall, and, like, your flat, or whatever happens in the maze. And then it's like… But we don't ever see it, other than that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And so, maybe, the thing to think about a little bit is what kind of character is the place playing? Is it just a one off, is it a deep part of it, is it something that the characters are going to have to fight with or against?

[DongWon] Well, thematically, bad stuff happens when you don't have deep connections to the place. Right? All the places you're describing, the characters aren't connected to and that's where all the bad stuff in this book happens.

[Mary Robinette] So, I actually want to talk about one of the places that is a literal character, which is the tree.

[DongWon] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] And one of the things about the tree is that when she first sees it, it is just a place. The birds occupy it. And then the second time she comes across the parliament of… Where the parliament of birds, she… It is just the tree and her talking, and it's just a character at that point. But then when she returns to it as an adult and looks at it, she is aware of it as a place, but also as an entity. Which is, I think, one of the interesting things about this, because one of the… It's something that happens with the other characters. We see it happen with her and Roberta, that her relationship to them changes, so her understanding of them changes. And I think that also happens with place, but I think the tree is the only thing really that she experiences as a child and as a… Like that we… Has a continuity all through the thing, that her relationship to it changes.

[Howard] The tree functions as opening and closing parentheses. And if you include Lawrence's closet, and treat Lawrence's closet as Peregrine and then as Caddie, we have opening parentheses twice with the tree and the closet, and then at the end of the story, we have closing parentheses for the tree and the closet, Caddie, become one. That's a neat structure. And it's not there… I say it's not there for the reader. It's there for the reader, yes, because structures like this, even if you don't see them, they help resonate with you, they help you know that the story has ended.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] But, as a writer, knowing that you are going to come back to a place helps you build the story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like, when she describes the tree the second time, or when she comes back to it as an adult with Lawrence, it says Patricia had forgotten how massive and terrible the tree was. But when we… It's described earlier, it is not described as massive and terrible. How overwhelming the embrace of its two great limbs, how, like an echo chamber the space in the shadow of its canopy was. She'd expected it to seem smaller, now that she was a grown-up, just as… Just a tree after all. But instead, she looked up at its great hanging fronds and its gnarled surface and felt presumptuous for even coming into its presence again. And that is such a different perception of the tree and her relationship to the tree than she has at the other time she experiences it. So this is, for me, one of those things, one of the lenses we talked about was the lens of time, and this is one of the things for me that… It's, I think, a great example of how you can use place and a character's place trip to show their growth and evolution.

[Howard] The roles of these places… There's a tool that I use a lot, which is what's the emotional reaction I want the reader to have to this chapter, this scene, this whatever? What is the emotional function of a thing? When I first began reading the story, the woods were grounding me. There was this sense of joy and comfort, of a child in the woods. Because I had that experience as a kid. Which, we then get to the tree, and it becomes sense of wonder coupled with a little bit of dread. Because I don't know what's going to happen. And in reading back over some of these places, I looked at the emotional functions of Siberia… I like the antagonist. The emotional function of the bookstore, the emotional function of San Francisco, which is manifold and hugely layered, and even so, I am understating it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But that tool, as I look at the lens of where from the perspective of a reader, I step back through the meta- and ask myself, okay, as a writer, how did she do this? How much of this is deliberate in the selection of place and the writing about place, and how much of it did Howard just happened to bring to the story because… Because Howard?

[Mary Robinette] I guess we'll find some of that out when we get to interview Charlie Jane later.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Meanwhile, we should probably go on to homework.

[Howard] You know what? I have homework, and it's related to that thing what I just said. List the locations in your current work in progress. Next to each one, describe it story function. Is it there to ground? Is it there to evoke sense of wonder? Is it purely plot logical, a thing had to happen in a place, and so I picked this one? Is it worldbuilding? So make this list, the places in your work in progress. And then take a step back from it, and ask yourself if any of these places can be changed or should be changed, based on what you now know about them.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-21-the-lens-of-context

Key points: Context, worldbuilding, and setting! How do you know what you really need for your story? What will my character interact with? What does the plot need? The 8 gems of Rohisla! Where do you want to create emotion or conflict? Tie worldbuilding to character conflict. Think about the cost of this piece of worldbuilding. Think about implications! In prose, suggesting a broader context is okay, but in gamewriting, people get irritated if there's nothing behind the door. For GM's, don't build more world than you need. Think about what the reader needs to tell the story in collaboration with you. What if you have a context, but no story? First, what can go wrong and who is affected by it? What were you interested in when you built that context? Try a mashup, borrow a character from somewhere else and shove them into this context. Play with unspoken or hidden context!

[Season 20, Episode 21]

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of…

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[Mary Robinette] 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 21]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] The lens of context.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] And this is our first sort of episode now that we've introduced the lens of where and when. I thought the very… The very next thing we needed to do is actually talk about creating context in a story. And what I mean by this is that when you are worldbuilding, especially if you're doing science fiction and fantasy, you can create, like, so much world. You can create all the where's, all the when's, especially in science fiction and fantasy. So how do you figure out what the… How do you figure out, like, what actually is needed for your story? How do you use the world and the setting to create the context in which your story is going to succeed as opposed to sort of just everything you could possibly know about that setting?

[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about things that my character is going to interact with. So I tend to break things into details that are plot specific in that there is a plot event that's going to happen around it, there's a piece of worldbuilding, something is going to happen at the… With the gems of [Releasia?] So we actually really need to know what those gems are.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I love that it changes every time you say it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have no idea what you said [garbled]

[Howard] For context, in a previous episode, we created… And by we, I mean Erin…

[Laughter]

[Erin] The eight gems of Rohisla.

[Chorus: Rohisla!]

[Dan] How can you not remember the important…

[DongWon] That was like the 13 gems of Rho…

[Dan] Context?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Okay, you know what? Let's… I just want to talk about this for a moment, because as… From the standpoint of a humorist, I want to be able to tell jokes in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, where I'm not making fun of sci-fi or fantasy. And so what I establish is a context in which a thing is funny. The gems of Rohisla thing is making fun of the fact that we can't keep track of Erin's worldbuilding.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to write it down…

[Howard] And that's…

[Mary Robinette] So that I can remember it in the future.

[Howard] And the best example I can come up with is the one where… And I've used this in my humor classes… Where the puppeteer alien and the Kzin alien are talking about where human's sense of humor comes from. And the puppeteer is an herbivore, the Kzin is a carnivore, and the Kzin says, "I think that humor is an interrupted defense mechanism." And the puppeteer says, "Humans are insane. No sane creature would interrupt a defense mechanism." And knowing that the puppeteer is an herbivore just makes that funnier, because they're like sheep. Why would you interrupt a defense mechanism? But you have to have the context for that joke to play. And so, for me, the decision on building context is where do I want to be able to tell jokes. And that's… At one layer of obstruction up, where do I want to be able to create emotion? Where do I want to be able to create conflict? Where do I want to be able to create a platform that has no railings?

[DongWon] Ultimately, context only matters if it's giving context to something. Right? If you're just giving me context for the sake of having it, I'm not going to remember it. The reason we can't remember the eight gems of Revisla is that it's not tied to anything, other than the fact that we find this word funny for some reason. And it's… Which is why when I talk about how do you introduce worldbuilding, I always say to tie worldbuilding to character conflict. If a piece of information about how the world works is connected to something that the character wants, needs, or has at stakes, or is afraid of, then that is going to make it so that it's memorable. Right? And that can be as simple as children get report cards, when your eight-year-old MC goes home, there's going to be a report card waiting for him, and he doesn't want his parents to find out what it is. Now the piece of worldbuilding that's important and relevant, which is report cards, matters. Right? That could also be children are executed when they turned nine.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That's going to be an important part of worldbuilding…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Unless they have all eight gems of Rohis…

[Laughter]

[Howard] They were report cards [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] They just sort them into the poop chute.

[DongWon] Exactly. But all I'm saying is that… I think [Steven Universe Show] does this incredibly well. Where you start with a very simple premise and end up at the end of that show with an incredibly massive space operatic level of worldbuilding and scope. And the way they get there is that at each element that they're introducing to that worldbuilding, they're tying it to a very specific character in their conflict.

[Mary Robinette] And one of the problems that I think writers run into is figuring out what pieces they're actually going to need. And, for me, it comes down to the cost of it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] How many words am I going to have to spend on it to make the reader understand it? For instance, you all do not need, in order to understand this podcast, you all do not need to know that we are sitting in a hotel room. You don't need to know the order that we are sitting, which chair type people are, that Marshall stands when he is engineering and looks like a DJ. Actually, you do need to know it, it's pretty awesome. You don't need to know any of that to understand, but sometimes we get so excited because we thought these things through that we will put them down on the page, forgetting that it doesn't actually carry any story burden.

[Howard] And worse still, we put these things down on the page, forgetting that any context that is co-… That is made up of information that could be in any way relevant is going to suggest… Is going to have implications. Things that can grow out of it. I think of… And the books and the movies did just fine, so it's okay for me to complain… Hunger Games. The idea that a Battle Royale has become a central societal point post some sort of apocalypse suggests a huge measure of historical worldbuilding that I was never satisfied with the presentation of. And so the story fell apart for me. And I'm not saying that these stories are bad, because clearly they did just fine. But as a writer, I try to make sure that I'm not going to put anything into the context that I have to explain away later because it suggests something that makes my story hard to grab.

[Erin] This actually reminds me of something I learned when I was moving between prose and game writing. So, a lot of times in a short story especially, if you want to make your world feel like it has more depth, you will… You can include detail that suggests a broader context than this story has time for. So you could say, like, we met while searching for the eight gems of Rohisla, and you're not… That's not what the story is about, and it gives… And the context that matters is, like, this is my relationship with the character. So you've provided a relationship context, but not a world context. And yet, knowing it, makes you feel like there's a bigger world out there. In game writing, if you do that, people'd be like, in our next mission, we should go collect those gems, and, like, you have not written anything…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] For the GM, or if it's a videogame, like, there's nothing behind that door. And so then, players get frustrated, because there like, why did you create a context that I can't explore?

[Howard] You now need help from the eight GM's of Rohisla.

[Erin] Oh, wow.

[Howard] Oh… [Garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] But I think that that's something that, like, even in fiction, you can do. It's like you really have to be careful, like…

[Yeah]

[Erin] You don't want it to make it seem like the more interesting story is happening outside of the page that the reader is being forced to follow.

[DongWon] A piece of advice that I give to new GM's is don't build more world than you need. Right? And, like, if I am starting a new campaign setting, if none of my characters are playing a paladin or a [garbled] or somebody who intersects with religion, I'm not writing down what that pantheon is. I'm not going to sit here spending six hours making up 12 gods for this world if nobody here is religious. You know what I mean? And it's just like religion isn't a major component of the story. We don't need to know all the details of it. We can be pretty vague about it. And then, when you stumble into a situation that requires that, that's when you build it out. Right? And so a little bit of, like, a… You build the track right ahead of the train. Right? You're building it as you cross. And you don't need to have every single piece of this imagined out… Maybe have some idea of where that might be going. But think about, what are your characters interested in? Right? If you have somebody who is a merchant, then, yes, you're going to need to understand the economics of it. If your characters are children, no, you don't need to understand where the grain is being shipped from. You know what I mean?

[Howard] You brushed up against here the concept of just-in-time manufacturing, which became a huge market force in the 30 years leading up to the pandemic of 2020. At which point, we broke enough supply chains that everybody looked at just-in-time manufacturing and said, oh, no. This doesn't work anymore. And I loved how, as somebody who world builds, I was able to look at something that seemed very sensible and suddenly see circumstances in which it completely fell apart, because now I understood, in a way I just hadn't understood before, the way things are inextricably related.

[Mary Robinette] You'll hear a lot of times people talking about worldbuilding as there's an iceberg, but you only need the tip of the iceberg. And then there's an implication that you actually need to build the entire iceberg. For me, it's like if I am telling a story in which Titanic runs into the iceberg, yeah, I need to know that there's this mass under there. But if I'm telling a story about some fishermen who are going nowhere near the iceberg, I don't need to know it's there. When I was building puppets, I would build the armature that needed to be in underneath in order to hold their clothes up. That I would have where their bodies were… Like, the joints would be in the right place. Everything that caused the puppet to move in a way that was believable. But I wouldn't build the muscles, because they… The audience would never see them. They were not anatomically correct, except sometimes, when I was trolling on another puppeteer…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] There, it had a point. Right?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It had a purpose. So, for me, what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it is where do I want to put the effort, but where also do I want the reader to put the effort. Because the reason you don't have puppets be anatomically correct and you try to eliminate all of that stuff is every piece of that adds weight that then the puppeteer has to carry. And because your reader is actively building that story with you, every piece of context that you give them gives them a narrative weight that they have to carry. It's a memory that they have to hold onto. So if you use the context to direct their attention, to give them the tools to tell the story that you want to tell, to tell that in collaboration with you, you're going to have, I think, a more successful story. Do you need to know how things move? Yes, if it's in relation to something else.

[Howard] When I look at Fawzi bear, I think of him as being fluffy all the way through. I don't think of your hand in him. I just think… I mean, the surface of Fawzi bear, the way he moves… He's a big fluffy bear. And so the piece that you didn't build, because you couldn't, because there's no room for your hand, is a piece that I go ahead and imagine for you.

[Erin] And on that beautiful metaphor, we're going to take a short break.

[Erin] So the question that I have, now that we're back, is, we've sort of been presuming in our first half that you know the story that you want to tell, and you can then shape the context around that story. What if you've just been worldbuilding in worldbuilding and worldbuilding and you've got all context, and you're not sure, like, where the story is in there? Are there any tools that you can use to actually figure out how to use that context as a lens and not just a landscape?

[Mary Robinette] I have a worksheet we've shared with readers before that I will use when I find myself in this position. It hasn't happened to me a lot, but every now and then, I have an idea and I have the world for it, but I have no idea what the story is. Because most of the time, I do have a character in mind. So I go through an exercise to figure out what kind of things that can go wrong and who can be affected by it. So I will list a list of 20 people who can be in that world, looking at the socio-economic spectrum. I will look at power structures. I will look for those things to look for where things can hurt. Which is not that every story has to be about pain and hurt, but that is usually a place to find a stake and defined someone who has a reason to want to change something. Whether it is something about themselves or something about the larger world. So those are things that I will look for is who has a reason to activate and…

[Howard] Just asking the question is often enough to end up with a character or an entire story. When I look at a magic system or a technology system, one of the first questions I ask is if it's valuable, can it be stolen, can it be smuggled, can it be counterfeited? Just asking the question is enough that suddenly a whole smuggling ring pops into my head, and now I have a story. A whole counterfeiting ring, and now I have a heist or whatever. So, asking the questions about, as Mary Robinette said, asking about the pain points is often the easiest starting point.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, one place to start… I think this is kind of tying into what Mary Robinette's saying, is take a look at the worldbuilding you've created. If you've done a ton of worldbuilding, you've done a lot of creating that context, and you're looking for a story to have that context within, then you can look… What you're looking for is what are you interested in. What you're looking for is why am I writing this story? And you will have focused on different parts of the worldbuilding over others. Say you are focused on the religion and spirituality of this world. Say you're focused on the history and mythology, the prophecies, the economics, the technology. Whatever those things are, figure out which one you were drawn to and build on that. Right? Like, this can be Mistborn's magic system. This can be the history and poetry of Lord of the Rings. This can be the Galactic politics of Star Trek. Right? Each of these are pulling the audience, and pulling you, as the creator, in different directions. And that can give you a starting point of what do you want to have your characters interacting with.

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes will… When I'm having trouble with this kind of thing, one of the other things that I'll do is the mashup. Where I'm like, okay, here's this context that's really interesting, this world. What happens if I remove a character from another context and drop them into this one? This is essentially fanfiction, which I think is a glorious thing. But this is a way to have your fanfiction jollies and still get paid for it. Which is that you take a character that you love from another world, you drop them into this context. They're gonna change because of the new context. Obviously, you're going to rename them, but the social circles that they have, all of those things, how do they react? How are they moving through this world? Sometimes I will… Sometimes it's not from another piece of IP, it's… I have this character that has come into my head that I haven't been able to find the world for them, and I just shove them into this context to see kind of… Thought experiment about what happens. And often the contrasts between the two will give me opportunities that I wouldn't have had when I was just, like, single-handedly… Or single-mindedly focused on one thing.

[Erin] Yeah. I think a lot of times… I've been thinking about this in a slightly different way, because of the game writing I've been doing, which is that, while you don't want to create contexts that, like, lead the person down the wrong path, creating game hooks when you are creating a setting is a big thing that people do in tabletops. So you'll write about a world and you'll create little pieces, like little bits of discontent, little pieces of things that the GM can, like, use if they want to, then create a whole story in a place that you haven't written it for them, you've just suggested it. I think of those as, like, the but-also's. Like, if you describe a great place, there's always somebody who'd be like, oh, but also… Like, oh, have you thought about that? Or think about, like, who in your setting would write the Twitter thread that's like…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Hold on to your butts. You think that, like, X thing is great? Like, about this context? Like, here's 15 things that are horrific. Like…

[DongWon] [garbled] Twitter? It's just a horrifying thing to introduce.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You know what? Coming back to the eight gems of Rohisla, you put them into your game, and then in the little sidebar for game hooks, it says, "Actually, six of the gems of Rohisla are genuine and two of them are counterfeits." And now we know that there's a story here that the players might be able to interact with.

[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that I think is kind of fun to play with, which is unspoken context. Where you, the writer, are aware of something and it is affecting the way you move… Everything happens in the story, but you don't necessarily need the reader to know it. For instance, when we recorded these episodes, we recorded them out of sequence. So the episode that you just listen to, we made a ton of jokes about poop chutes. But we were recording it on Navigator of the Seas and DongWon was not with us. In our timeline, the thing that we just recorded was an episode that you heard weeks ago about the eight gems of Rohisla, and we're all present for that. So it's shaping the way we are moving through. So sometimes it can be fun, actually, to have that little piece of that iceberg, you don't need the whole iceberg there, but just a little piece of the iceberg that is affecting the way characters interact with each other. And it's not that you have to make sure that the reader understands it. Like, I did not need to pause and explain this, you would have been fine without that. But it does affect the story. And so sometimes I will play with that. Like, offstage, these two were totally getting it on, and it's affecting small things, but I don't need the reader to understand it. I don't need to do a side quest to go watch the sexy fun time scene.

[Erin] Well, that is fun.

[Mary Robinette] It is.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I do think it's delightful that our context episode is the one riddled with inside jokes.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Dan] We didn't do this on purpose.

[DongWon] Half of them, I'm not getting, because I missed the cruise.

[Mary Robinette] There's a whole thing about trees and poop chutes and Legolas, like, scooping poop at the bottom, because that's where all his… It's…

[DongWon] Okay.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] All right.

[Erin] [garbled] context.

[DongWon] Without this context, actually.

[Erin] It gets away from us. It's time to give homework and move onto a new one.

[Erin] So, now we have the homework for you, which is, I'd like you to take a context, some piece of worldbuilding that you've done, and come up with three different narratives that you could write that use that context. Then, separately, I want you to take a narrative that you've written and come up with three new contexts in which that narrative would succeed.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-06-lens-2-identity-1-history-and-community

Key points: The lens of who, by history and community. How much do you need to know about their background before the story to tell it effectively? I discover as I go, and then layer it in for continuity. Backfill! Beware the statement without narrative weight, without effect on the character. Consistency! History and identity and community are opportunities, not burdens. Make your identity verb-based. Where are they on axes of power? What stakes are driving the plot? What are their idioms? How does the character relate to their communities? Can anybody solve the plot problem, or does the character solve it because of who they are? Use pieces to imply a larger community or world. Make sure they have enough context. Build your net, drop something into it, and then tell us about the three or four threads that caught it.

[Season 20, Episode 06]

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 20, Episode 06]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] History and community.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] Today, we are going to continue our discussion of the lens of who by talking about what your character brings with them from who they are. Their identity, at its core, the communities that they come up in. Like, how much do you need to know… Question for the group… About who your character was before they entered the story in order to tell it effectively?

[Mary Robinette] I find that I often don't know the answer to that when I start writing, but sometimes, I will be writing and will discover a thing later as I go. But then I have to go back and layer into the early part of the story before I have made that discovery in order to have my character make sense and have them have continuity. In a beautiful, perfect world, I will have sat down and I will have figured out how old they are and how many siblings there are. But a lot of times, especially when I'm doing short fiction, I just… I just start writing.

[DongWon] You can backfill all that information in as you go. I think, in a lot of ways, like you're saying, it's not that you have to have prewritten the document ahead of time, though knowing that here's the town they grew up in or whatever. But be prepared that when something comes up, to find the answer in that moment, and give them that context that they're missing. Right?

[Erin] I actually think that layering and backfilling that you're talking about are actually the key things that I really want to talk about in this episode. Which is, how do the ident… Like, how does the lens of identity and community… How does that lay on the story? The reason I mentioned it that way is because sometimes I'll read people's work and they will have a fact about their character, they grew up in this neighborhood or they suffered through… They're an orphan and they grew up eating from a trashcan on the streets. As people do in fantasy worlds often. And it's like, I hear that. Then, when I read the story, if you had never told me that about the character…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I would never know it. It doesn't feel like it has any actual narrative weight. So how do we give the identity of our characters narrative weight in the story?

[Mary Robinette] I think it is a lot of the… It winds up affecting the choices that you make. For instance, if I am… If I have to walk down a dark street at night, I am going to make different choices than a six-foot white guy who lifts. I will be evaluating things extremely differently. So, for me, this gets into something that we'll be talking about later, it gets into some of the reactions that the character makes, and also the language that they use to describe things, the internal reactions that they have. All of those things are informed by their history, their experiences.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, as we're talking about this, I can't stop thinking about a meme that already feels dated, and by the time this comes out, will feel truly fossilized. But the whole, like, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree yesterday. Right? You exist in the context of all that came before. Right? Like, the thing is, is when a character feels like they fell out of a tree yesterday, that's when it feels like a failure state. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon], like, you're saying, like, you can say the detail out loud of, like, oh they grew up on the street. But then they walk into a restaurant and, like, order all the food and, like, feel like so comfortable in that. It's like a diff… It's like is that really a character who just came off the street? Right? Or, like, what is the context that led to that? So, it's not that you have to prewrite all of the context before, but you do need the consistency of it. Like, when you introduce something, you need to make sure that that feels felt in the choices, in the wor… And how you're describing it, and how they speak and what they do.

[Howard] This is a microscale version of the game that I'm always playing with the macro of worldbuilding. Where I have to look at the implications of the thing that I've put in my world. If this character is someone who grew up during the Great Depression, or lived through the Great Depression, they have behaviors that don't make sense to me. Lot of hoarding of things that don't necessarily need to be hoarded is something that you'd find from that generation. So I'm always asking myself, are there implications that I need to examine of whatever this back story is. Sometimes I invert it. I have the character do a thing, and then I ask myself, this is an implication… This was implied by something in their back story that I don't know yet. What is that thing? Should I write that thing now, or should I just put a pin in it? Maybe have another character put a pin in it for me? Hey, why are you hoarding Mason jars? Why are you keeping Mason jars? And nobody answers the question. But now my readers aren't going to pester me about it. Because another character asked the question, and now we know that it's obviously justified, because someone else wondered why it was there.

[Mary Robinette] Can I offer a very specific example from something that I wrote where I had to backfill character? So, I have this whole Lady Astronaut series, and it started with a book… A novelette called The Lady Astronaut of Mars. In that, my character Elma, who in the novels is Jewish, is not Jewish. That's not a decision I had made for her. I'm not even certain that she's Southern. I think she probably is. But there's a line in that, in Lady Astronaut of Mars, in which she talks about eating crawfish as a child. Which is not something that most Jewish kids who are observant would do. So when I went back to write Calculating Stars, and I had made the decision to have Elma be Jewish for a number of different structural plot reasons, I had to come up with the back story that would have allowed her to have that experience as a child. That then informed every decision that she made going through the story. And then every subsequent thing. And it… So it is something that I have both discovered, but also that I had to shape the lens through which she was viewing the world in order to have that be a… Make sense and have a consistency for the character. That her family grew up secular, because her father was in the military and they were trying to mask the fact that they were Jewish to outsiders.

[DongWon] What I love about this story is… there's a little bit of a language we've been talking about this so far that almost makes it feel like a burden. Like, how do you keep track of it? How do you have this consistency? But what I love about it is the way in which history and identity and community are opportunities. Right? Like, you found a thing and that gave you an opportunity to make the character feel more interesting and nuanced and three-dimensional. Right? There… All of these elements of introducing aspects of the character's context, of their history, of their connection, are storytelling prompts for you to then fill out your role more, to find plot in it. Right? It's what I love about characters in role-playing games is that you don't just say a thing or introduce a thing, then it's suddenly, like, oh, the whole character's descending from this one prompt that… Or turn of phrase that he used or an attitude that they had. Erin, you and I were in a game together recently, and I introduced a character who was extremely cantankerous…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And fought with everybody. So then the question kind of became a little bit, why is she like this? Then we developed a whole relationship of, like, oh, she was sibling with your character, and, like, all of these other things. The joy for me is finding that opportunity and letting that be the seed for character, story, conflict, all the things that we want to make the story work.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that, to me, like, identity is such an important thing. It drives a lot of things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Trying to figure out, like, why a character is the way they are, and all the things that they carry with them, is a huge part of writing for me. I think it's why I love voice so much. I think that one of the… A lot of times, we think of identity as noun based. It's about the things. Like, this person carries this item or eats this food or goes to this place of worship or what have you. But I think that, Mary Robinette, you sort of alluded to this earlier, to me, the interesting thing about identity is identity as a verb. The way you make choices, the way that you, like, take action in a situation is going to be… Hoarding is like, that's the verb. Do you know what I mean? Like, the Mason jar isn't the important thing. It is the collecting, the keeping, fear of things being taken away from you. I think that really thinking about how can we take identity from feeling like a noun, which I think can sometimes make things feel more shallow, like, I added all the right nouns, how come this person doesn't feel like they embody this identity? It's because their verbs haven't been changed.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Only the nouns have.

[Howard] There's a nineties sitcom… I can't remember the name, I don't think it ran past one season. But it had Jenna Elfman in it. At one point, she is very upset that she's going to this place and she's not going to identify with anybody, she comes from lower income or something, I don't remember. And her brother says, "You'll be fine. Y'all were raised by the same TV." I remember loving that line because in the nineties, we were kind of all raised by the same TV. But that's no longer a thing. That's… There's a different set of com… We weren't all raised by the same YouTube, the same cnn.com. The disparity of pop-culture background or the diversity of it is so significant now that you can't all be raised by the same TV. So I now ask myself often, rather than what are the implications, or what is this… How is this one character different in terms of background, I ask myself how is everyone the same on any point, and why? What is it that they would all have in common? How could they possibly have all that in common?

[Erin] Which is a great time to say that something that all of our episodes have in common is a break. And we'll be right back after it.

[Erin] All right. Thinking a little more about identity and community. So we've talked a little bit about what you do with it, but how do you, and I feel like I've said this in earlier episodes, how do you actually figure out, like, what your character's identity should be? You talked about making a character Jewish for specific story reasons. Is it, like, when we're picking the identity of the community of our characters, what are the things that we should be looking out for so that we can find those opportunities to make our stories richer?

[Mary Robinette] I have talked about this in previous episodes, the wonderful book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? This introduced me to the ax… The idea of axes of power. Which is why when I needed with Elma, I made her Jewish, was that I tried to think about where my character sits in axes of power. Where do they have power, where do they not have power? I try to make sure that all of my characters have at least two areas where they do not feel like they have power, where they feel subordinate in the larger society. Because that introduces vulnerability, but it also often introduces some of their strengths, some of the ways that they defined themselves. So that was one of the reasons that I did that with Elma, was that in Lady Astronaut of Mars, she's older, she's a caretaker. Both of those are sliders on that axes of power that are farther down. But when I move all of the way back to Calculating Stars, she's young, she's beautiful, she's smart. And I didn't have enough sliders that were lower on the power structure, and it was 1952. So I made that choice. But, for me, that's what I start looking for, is where do they feel like they are lacking in power and where do they have power that they are unaware of.

[DongWon] I love axes of power as a framework here. I think kind of ties into how I think about it. Which is about stakes. Right? When you have a character… Plot derives from character in my mind, because of stakes, because of a character's… How they relate to other characters, how they feel about them, how they feel about themselves. Right? So when you're looking at what stakes do I want this character to have, what relationships are at risk by choices that they make, or what pressures are put on them by the world that puts these relationships at stake? That leads you to the point where you're now asking questions about history and community. Right? Who are they connected to, what history do they have with that person, and why is that relevant for the story I'm trying to tell? Right? You get to plot by developing these stakes. But as you're asking questions of what is this book about, why am I writing this book? I think that's when you get to that layering in these pieces of history and identity and a sense of self.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that… When we were talking about community, one of the other things that I have begun using as a shorthand since we did the space economy camp is thinking about the idioms that they grew up with. Because those shape the opinions that we have. They are parts that we don't… We often don't interrogate because it's like, well, everybody says, no such thing as a free lunch. But that's extremely different if you grew up with that as your truism, that's extremely different than somebody who grows up with their core idiom, their core truism, as a rising tide raises all boats. Like, those are two different ways of interacting with community. So I will often think about how the community defines that. Where the community sits with that. Like, if my character embraces that or if they push against it.

[Erin] One thing I really like to think about axes of power is who's aware of them. So, one of the biggest things that, like… There are many definitions of privilege, but one of the definitions is the ability to ignore the axes of power, because you're really high on it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So why do you care. Because I always think about… I know the book you're talking about, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I remember talking to friends, black friends, about it at the time, being, like, well, why isn't it called Why Do All the White Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria, because they do too. So, but it's, like, no one ever asks that question because there's a… An idea that that's a default.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, that… Why wouldn't they? That's… They're just… That's just Jimmy hanging out with Jen versus, like, if I'm hanging out with somebody, then that is… Something is wrong there, something is off. So being able to recognize the axes of power and what your relationship is to them. Do you understand where you are in the world? Like, do you understand the axes of power that you're on, or is it one that you either can ignore or that you're in denial about? Like, what is the relationship? I also think it's interesting to think about, like… I love relationships between individuals and structures.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? So it's, like, you and an axis of power, or you and community. Are you someone feeling, like, you're in the midst of your community? Well embraced by them? Do you feel on the outskirts of one community, but the in in another community that you think is very core to who you are is also one that you feel at odds with, that's a very different character than one who comes from the exact same community but who feels like they are the absolute, like… I am that community. We view things exactly the same way, we use the same idioms, we do the same things. So I think thinking about how your character relates, not just to other people, but two other structures, is a really fun way of looking at it.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One piece that I want to come back to is the idea of these lenses as a way to examine… Or a way the audience experiences the story. We're talking about who these characters are, what their history, their tradition, their influences, so on and so forth. Sometimes I'll have to ask myself whether the plot, mcguffin, action, the whatever it is that needs to happen to resolve things, could that have been done by anyone? Or can it only be done by someone who comes from this tradition? Because those are actually two very different stories. I like the story where anybody could have solved the problem, if they brought tools to bear and tried to solve the problem. But this character solved the problem in this way because of who they were. And that… For me, those are the stories that feel the most real. Those are the stories when I read them, I feel like I could have been that person. I'm experiencing the story as if I were there.

[Mary Robinette] You're making me think of something, just tying it back to something that Erin was saying, which is that you're using the tools that you have available, because of the experiences that you have. One of the things that I enjoy doing is thinking about this community, this connection. When you're looking at how to bring that to life on… For the character on the page for the reader, I often think about the pieces of the community that imply larger pieces of the community. That if you say, oh, yeah, I had to do that on my Naming Day. It's like that suddenly implies this whole… That there's a whole thing about Naming Days. That then implies this bigger ripple, especially if your character's like, oh, oh, my God, I had to do that on my Naming Day, my parents made me. It's like, okay, so there's a difference. It's implying these levels of… That there's more than one way to view the thing, there's more… That then implies that there's multiple groups within a larger group. Which I think is fun. I love that, but I also think that only works… You can't do it with something that is existing in isolation. Like, you can't just say, "Oh, yes. Oh, Naming Day, we all do this." It's gotta be tied to the emotions of the character. It's the connections.

[DongWon] I mean, this to me is like the flaw of, like, a certain type of dystopian YA. Right? Like, that was way popular, was it was so focused on just, like, the one thing that was different and existed in isolation and just didn't feel like there was other connections to that. Right? There wasn't further context. So when a character came from a place or had an identity or any of those things, it felt very reductive in a certain way. Right? Like. So without the further context and complexity, it didn't feel rich enough. Right? I think the ones that succeed very well, something like Hunger Games, does a great job of pulling in those other details, pulling in those other contexts around the central thing, and then ones that, I think, did not do as well were ones that failed to ask the further questions, failed to look at intersecting axes of power, failed to look at the ways in which this event connects to all these other events that happened in a person's life. Right?

[Erin] I think that's what makes it work when somebody uses a tool in an unexpected way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If there have been all these connections, you understand how they got there, and how something that character A sees as an oh, my gosh, an obvious tool I can use, character B would never recognize as a tool at all. Do you know what I mean? I love that type of thing where one character's like, yes, it is… The answer is so obvious, and another character is like, I don't even understand the question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And that is like such a beautiful moment of character, because even if we don't understand that culture, that identity, that context, we do understand that there are things that we know that others don't and things that we don't understand that others live in.

[Howard] When you look at these connections between characters and society and traditions and economies and po… There's this enormous network of things which as a writer, you can become very very oppressed by. Because drawing a matrix in which you have defined every point and drawn every line is nightmarishly difficult. The tool that I use… You treat that matrix as a net. Drop something onto the net. Where did it hit? You only need to define the threads where it landed. Those are what caught it. By defining those threads, those three or four threads, you have now implied the existence of the entire net, and the reader will believe in the entire net. Now you have to describe those three things well. You have to describe them in ways that make sense for the character, that imply the actual history of the character. But you only need three or four things to get us to believe that that whole web of your society, of your world, of your universe, from those three pounds of wet stuff between your ears, that whole universe you've created, we can believe it's real. You just gotta give us three threads.

[DongWon] I think about it as a GM, I think about it in terms of [paduke?] the game of go, where you are not defining all the connections between all the things. But what you will do when you're playing go is, as a strategic move, you'll put a piece out at a distant part of the board from which you are right now, and it's communicating I'm interested in that. I'm going to be making moves around that in the future. Hey, opponent, just so you know, we're going to be fighting about that in the future, so whatever's happening here, think about that, too. So, when it comes to worldbuilding a lot of times, I will just make a lot of stub documents with nothing in them, just a title of like this culture, food here, geography over there. I won't fill those in until they become relevant, and as things start becoming relevant, then I'll go and, like, okay, I need to think about this now because my characters are going over there now.

[Howard] Gotta tie this thread off.

[DongWon] Exactly. So, like the net you that you're talking about, you have this disparate web, but don't lose your mind trying to fill in all those details.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Take big swings when your character does interact with something. Define broad things. Reach for whatever their cultural contexts are and use those to keep building as they connect.

[Erin] To come back to something we talked about at the very beginning about weight, I think weight can often sound like a burden, but, to me, when you talk about building a net, it's making people feel like your worldbuilding has enough weight to catch the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] With that in mind, we're going to go to the homework. Which is to identify something from your character's life from before the story begins. Identify… Especially if it's something, a community, an identity, some way that they interact with the broader world. Write a scene in which that element of the character weighs heavily on the scene but is never explicitly mentioned.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 20.05: Lens 1 - Who

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-05-lens-1-who

Key points: You and I must have seen a different movie or read a different book? Save the world or dragon killing game? Relatability. Depth. POV. Emotionally compelling moments. Relationships. The why of a character enriches the who. What is the lie that your character believes about the world? What is the truth that your character is afraid to know? Interesting details! What makes this person tick? Specificity. I'm so happy you noticed that. Tabletop gaming gives you a world, a story, a setting reflected and refracted through the players and the characters lenses.

[Season 20, Episode 05]

[DongWon] We're excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you'll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We'll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining our writing. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you'll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 20, Episode 05]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The lens of who.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And we've got a whole bunch of episodes queued up for you talking about the lens of who. I want to introduce this tool, this lens, by asking a question of my fellow hosts, and, sure, of you, fair listener, what's the most, you and I must have seen a different movie, or, you and I must've read a different book, moment you've ever had with a friend?

[Erin] So, mine is actually a game, and it's one of my favorite examples, so I may have said it before. But when I played Dragon Age Inquisition, a friend of mine also played it, and it's a game where you save the world and magic, what have you. But my friend was like, "Oh, I love that dragon killing game." I'm… I was like, "Dragon killing game? I guess there's a side quest where you can kill dragons…" He was like, "Yeah. I killed every dragon in the game. And then I was upset because there's no achievement for that." I was like, "Yes, because that's not what the game is about at all."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The game is not… That's not the purpose. But, for him, he was playing this epic dragon killing game, and only saving the world enough to level up to kill more dragons. I thought, wow, how exciting that this game has room for both your hunting experience and my actual narrative saving the world experience.

[DongWon] This is a face of me trying to remember, there are dragons in that game?

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[DongWon] I mean, it's called Dragon Age, but like… Anyways.

[Howard] The point here is that, and I've said this before, the largest part of what you get out of a book or a movie or a game comes through what you brought with you to the book or the movie or the game. I can't count the number of times where I've come away from a film, just having loved it and talk to somebody. They're like, oh, that was cliché, it was awful, it was boring, it was whatever. And I'm like, it was exactly what I wanted. I… How are we so different? Often these conversations, jokingly, end with, well, I guess you and I can't be friends.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Our perspectives are two different for us to have had that.

[DongWon] Yeah, but I think what you bring in with your interests and your… How you engage with it does change it quite radically. Right? Like, to bring another game example, I'm a huge fan of From Soft games. Those games are this is the Dark Soul series, Eldon Ring, Blood Born, and they're most notorious for having a part of the community that we derogatorily call the Get Good part of the community who just insist that you're not… You have to play the game in the hardest way possible, never looking anything up, never asking any friends, and that… If you're not good enough to do the game, then you just shouldn't be playing it. And I think they could not be misinterpreting the intention of the design more. That, to me, the game is very much about how difficult it is to go… To do things by yourself, and that instead, what we need to do is to reach out to the people around us, to the community, and find resources, find information and find help. But also, like, how hard it is to get clear information, to get help. I think it's a really beautiful meditation on the human experience. Because of its difficulty, but also because of its community. But that's maybe just me bringing my own lens to it, or my own perspective of what it means to be a person in the world.

[Erin] What I love about that is thinking about fiction, like, if you took your get good player and you your bring your community in player, and dropped you both in the zombie apocalypse, how differently would you approach things? Like, how differently would you take the exact same urgent problem… Like, you would be like, who can I reach out to, and they'd be like… I don't know… Get good killing zombies or what have you?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that's so interesting, is that a lot of times… I think it's easy to get really attached to a character as a person, like, you're like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Embody them like, this is what Ginny would do. So you sometimes don't get a chance to think about what are all the things that make up the character that you've created, and, like, what are all those lenses that they bring from other situations that happened before they were in this plot of this story right now.

[Mary Robinette] That's also… That's one of the things that will lead a character to being mono dimensional is that the writer only brings one lens…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To the character, that… I mean, how many characters have you seen in stories that appear to not have a family or friends outside this story? Like, they don't have anything outside the story, they exist only to do this one quest, and they feel extremely flat. When you start thinking about all of the different lenses that you can apply to that character, often by looking at the lenses in your own life, that's when you can start making a character that's multidimensional.

[Howard] In talking about this, this overarching concept of the way who we are colors our perception, influences our perception of what's around us, the lens of who is how your audience will relate to what's on the page. If you don't understand how that lens works, you will put things on the page and the audience will have reactions that you did not expect. Or not just that you didn't expect, that you didn't want. Because the lens may have been distorted. When we say lens, though, there's so many pieces to this that we're going to cover in episodes that come up. Relatability. When we say that a character is relatable. When we say a character has depth. When we talk about POV tools. First person, second person, third person, omniscient, limited, so on and so forth. All of these are aspects of that lens we'll be covering in upcoming episodes.

[Mary Robinette] We've been talking about this. The last episode, we just discussed puppetry. That was a lens that I bring to the way I experience the world. Much like that, one of the things that will happen to me as a puppeteer is that when I am performing some types of puppetry, I will remember the scene later as if I am looking through the character's eyes, view, gaze. Even though it's obviously an object that is in front of me or above me. This is a thing that will happen to readers as well. If the character is having moments that are emotionally compelling. It's always, like, the really emotionally compelling things that happened to… When this happens to me in performance. If the character's having emotionally compelling moments on the page, your reader is going to remember things through the character's eyes. They're going to… How many times have you had this experience, right? Where you're like, oh, yeah, I can't remember much of that book, but I really remember being at the side of the road, I remember the rain pelting down, as if you had actually experienced it yourself.

[DongWon] It's important to remember that humans are wired to care about other humans. Right? It's why when I talk about, like, stakes, right, in a story, I'm always like, well, what relationship is at stake here? That's where tension comes from, because… But that's true of the reader to the character as well. Right? We want to know the person's emotions, interiority, and perspective, and that's how you pull people into the story. That's how you get people to understand it. Because we are always already seeing it through the lens of the character. There's… It's impossible for us not to do so. I think.

[Erin] Yeah. I think also you don't have to share… And I don't think any of us are saying this, the character's lens, in order to care about that character.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Because I think sometimes there are characters who are difficult, who challenge us in some way, who make us uncomfortable, that we don't want to be necessarily looking through that lens. But, it's still so compelling. In the same way that people look at horrible things online all the time, that they don't wish they were, but yet they keep doing. So I think it's really interesting to think about the main thing is that the lens is true to the character, not that it is necessarily both shiniest or the prettiest, just that it is actually emotionally grounded.

[DongWon] I mean, so many of my favorite characters are just absolute miserable bastards.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And, just like… But one that comes to mind is… I watched True Detective Night Country recently. Jodie Foster plays the main character in it, and is just miserable. Just like an awful person who is still trying to do good, and is still trying to do a thing, and is still the protagonist of the story. I ended up caring about her very deeply. But the joy sometimes of having a character that you don't necessarily automatically align with is it starts… It gets you to ask the questions of why is this person like this? Right? What made them this way? What are their reasons for being the way that they are? Then that gives you an excuse to dig into all the context of that character. Where did they come from? What was their childhood like? Why did they believe what they believed? What systems are they embedded in? All of those things. So the lens of a character… you don't have to do an awful character. I think that's fun and delicious. But, to each their own. But the excuse to dig into the why of a character… And I know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but like, that is the thing that enriches the who.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Howard] I've got another exciting question for my cohosts. After these messages from our sponsors.

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[Howard] So, we've talked about getting characters as lenses. It sounds to me like it would be helpful if you just wrote the character… Every character's biography before sitting down to write the story. But I'm pretty sure none of you have actually done that level of pre-writing. Where's the shortcut?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Can you please tell me where the shortcut is so I can write less? Pre-write less, and be able to write write more.

[DongWon] When playing tabletop games, there's a character generation sheet that I like to use that has a list of questions on it. Some of them are [just like what's here] character's name, blah blah blah. The one that I think is the most useful to understand where the character's coming from, and this comes from Aabria Iyengar who's an Internet professional GM [DM?]. She asked the question that blew my mind, and I use in every game now, which is, what is the lie that your character believes about the world? When you can answer that question, that automatically put you in so much deep context about the character. So if you just have that one sentence about each character in your setting, you can already have so much to play with in terms of how they're going to bounce off each other, how they're going to react, how they're going to see the world.

[Erin] That just made me think of… I love that, and it just made me think of another question that I would ask, which is, what is the truth that your character's afraid to know? Because I think those could be completely different things, or they could be related to each other. But I really do think that I wish I thought that deeply.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Honestly. Wow. I wish I knew that about my characters. I think a lot of times, I… Dan talked, in a previous episode, about details and the importance of details. A lot of times, I like to discover characters through the details. So part of that is that my own subconscious mind is doing some work somewhere. So that when I start writing, I will throw… Like, my mind will generate an interesting detail, like, she only ate grits for 10 years.

[Laughter]

[Erin] For every meal. Don't know why. Then I'll think, well, why the heck would anybody do that, subconscious brain? Then I try to take the things that are subconscious and make them conscious. That tells me a little more about the character. Maybe I've decided that she's just, like, a grits enthusiast. Okay. Interesting to know. Then, knowing that, I keep writing, and maybe another detail comes out. She likes to light kites on fire. Okay, like, that's an interesting second thing. How does that relate to the information I know? So it's a very discovery… Because I'm a discovery writer, it's a very discovery method of character. But the more details you add trying to make them all connect, it's like having a friend that you learn a really interesting fact about and you go, well, how do I make this fact work with everything else I understand about you?

[Howard] Let me come to the grits really quickly, because… No, hang on. If I were to say oh, yeah, when I was in college, I ate nothing but potatoes for four years. Okay. That's not true. Right? That might be a thing that I would say, because I was eating cheap. But if we roll back and look at my budget when I was in college, one of the things that I ate a lot of was other people's pizza. They would share a slice of pizza with me. Maybe that, and I'm now speaking as if I'm the character of grits, maybe they did eat other things, but it was food that was given to them. There was some shame in having had to rely on other people for the actual nutrition. They remember making the grits for themselves, but they don't remember the gifts of food that were keeping them alive. So we have this truth that they are telling themselves about how much they made grits, and the lie that they're afraid to face, which is that they didn't depend on other people when in fact they did. So… Yeah, when… The question that you ask about that one thing that they said explodes into so many different things.

[Mary Robinette] So, I don't use either of those approaches. I love them both. But I don't use either of them. The approach that I use varies… My shortcut varies. Sometimes it's the, well, what is the hole that the character is trying to fill. Sometimes it's the interesting telling detail. I do use that sometimes. But I don't have a particular set thing and, using a puppetry metaphor, because I've got them. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, each of my… I was embedded in the show, and there were three principal characters… Three principal performers. Each of them took time to teach me. They would all say, this is how I approach the character. One of them said, you start with the figure, and you look at what the figure can do, and then that tells you the choices that you need to make to support the figure. Another one said you start with the text, and you figure out what the text tells you, so that then you can figure out how to make the figure do what you need to do to support the text. And another one said you start with the voice, and then you figure out how you use the voice to shape the text to support what the character does. The thing is that the audience didn't know and didn't care what their process was. At the end of the day, all the audience cares about is that your character feels alive. So whatever tool it is that we offer to you over the next episodes, that tool is the tool that works for you, and it'll be a different tool for each character probably.

[DongWon] Well, this is what I love about talking about tools, not rules. Right? Because as we're giving you tools, the lens of who you are as a person influences your tool choice. Influences your lens choice. What you reach for, whether it's the interesting character detail, or, like philosophically, what makes this person tick, or a variety of different ways of reaching for things as Mary Robinette does, like, all of that are rooted in our experience and our perspective and our interests as people. Right? Like, I'm very much somebody who is, like, what does make that person tick? You know what I mean? Like… And what those things mer… Or how those things emerge will influence your writing and your process. But the goal is that the audience, you're right, doesn't know what tool you used. They're enthralled by the story, they're charmed by the character, they're connected.

[Howard] And, as I said… I said earlier, you want to have a measure of control over what it is the audience is going to come away with. Except the audience has their own lens, so there's really only so much of that that you can control. It may sound like a rule when I say, oh, you want to be a good enough writer to be able to have some control over this. And yet, the exception to that rule is so glorious. If you can be a good enough writer that what you put on the page, you have no idea how anyone else will react to it, well, that is its own…

[DongWon] This is why specificity matters. Right? Going back to what Dan said about Erin's thing earlier, the reason specificity contains the universal in it is because if you're trying to be general, you're trying to control how your audience is going to react. When you're trying to be broad, you're saying, oh, this is for all of your lenses. Right? But if instead, you focus on your own, if you lean into the specificity of your perspective, lean into the specificity of a character, that they are a person who comes from a place, who has a context, then other people will connect their own lenses to that in their own way. If you try to do that work for them, it doesn't work. Because we each bring our own things to the table so the best thing that you can do is to be as specific as you can, and accept that you can't control everybody, and that your book, in being for someone, is not for somebody else. And that's okay.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's not just okay, that's essential.

[Mary Robinette] I was just at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they have is they have a place where they have three different literal lenses looking at the sun. One of them is showing you the sun in white light, one of them is showing it to you in only infrared, and another is breaking it apart into a spectrum. So you're seeing the same literal object three completely different ways. That's one of the things that the lenses we bring to bear does, is it… The reason it's important that each of us bring our own lens is that we are looking at these universal truths in these very specific ways that allows people to understand and bring their own truths to it. But the thing is also that, again, everybody who approaches those… Somebody who is red green colorblind is going to look at that spectrum one and not see the same things that I do. They will still see something that is amazing and wonderful, but they will have a different experience. So thinking about… thinking about the experience that you want the reader to have, which lenses that you're going to bring to bear to try to help them see the things you want them to see, but also be okay if they don't see it, if they don't get it.

[Howard] One of my favorite tools is one that… And this is an after-the-fact tool… Is one that Mary Robinette provided to me. Which is when someone comes up to you and describes something in your book that really affected them, and clearly it's because you did this and this and this, and the response is, "Oh, I'm so glad you noticed that."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "I didn't put that in there on purpose," is not the thing you say. The thing you say is, "I'm so happy you noticed that." Because, honestly, as a writer, and when I say honestly, I mean literally honestly, the thing that I get the most joy from is when someone notices a thing, when they feel a thing, when they have an experience with the thing that I put on the page. That is the best thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I love that I know a lot of other writers hate is I love listening to someone else read my stuff out loud. Because the way they interpret it is not the way it is in my head, and it is the closest I can come to experiencing it through someone else's lens. It's really disconcerting sometimes, but also glorious. One of the other things that I just kind of want to slip in here is when we're talking about these lenses, I also want you… The reason we're talking about let's give you all of these tools is that you, as writer, will be a different person on every day you sit down to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You're having a bad day, you're going to bring a different lens to the table. You're having a really fantastic day, different lens. It's just… This is why we want to give you as broad a toolbox as possible.

[Erin] I also just think that's a fun thing to remember about character, is that characters grow and change. Not just in the big moments, but sometimes, like, characters can have an off moment, or say the wrong thing. I think there are sometimes where it's like you love your characters so much that you don't want them to, like, slip in any way. But it is the variations within us, it's the variations in our lenses, that also make them so special.

[DongWon] And this really gets to the core of why I love tabletop gaming so much, because it's entirely about character. Right? You're always experiencing a world and a story and a setting through the individual character's perspectives. But because it's collaborative and improvisational, also, what I put out there immediately gets refracted back to me by filtering through the lens of all the other players at the table. So we are collaborating on a thing by reflecting and refracting constantly what each of us is bringing to the table, and through the character's perspective of their own lens in addition to ours. So the interplay of all that is the thing that I find so delightful and fascinating and endlessly entertaining about tabletop.

[Howard] And I think those notes lead us perfectly into the homework. Sort of an inverted Mary Robinette here. Instead of having someone else read what you wrote, I want you to write what someone else says. Interview two friends. Write down their answers, and yours, if you want to contribute, as completely as possible. Just two questions. What is the happiest memory they think of first? And, describe a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them before the age of 18.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.36: A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-36-a-close-reading-on-tension-narrative-vs-contexutal

Key points: Narrative tension is tension happening in the story, on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader brings to the story. How much do you assume your readers are bringing context with them? Language and dialect. Narrative structure, tension, all that is a pitcher, and the writer puts whatever they want in that. The audience brings you their glass, and you don't know what kind of glass they will bring. It may not match the drink, but they can still enjoy it. There's always context. Use the characters having memories to bring context onto the page. Characters always carry their context with them.

[Season 19, Episode 36]

[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 36]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual.

[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] I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm obsessed with the topic that we're going to be talking about today...

[Laughter]

[Erin] Which is narrative and contextual tension. So, just to give a this is what I mean when I say that, to me, narrative tension is the tension that's actually happening in the story. It is when your characters are tense, when your... the setting is tense, anything that's actually happening on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader is bringing to the table. The example that I always use is if you write a story called Last Dinner in Pompeii, and it's just a normal story of people having dinner, we all know that Pompeii will be buried by ash the next day, so we will bring plenty of tension to the table, even if they're just talking about how next week they're going to go shopping. We're like, "Oh, you won't."

[Laughter]

[Erin] That brings [garbled]. That's contextual, but not narrative at all. I think this, Ring Shout, is a work that obviously lives in a place of contextual tension…

[DongWon] The context that I'm bringing to this is I've been so excited for this episode because I think three years ago on the Writing Excuses Cruise at like one in the morning, you explained this idea to me after a day of hanging out, and my jaw was on the floor. Because I'd never thought about it this way. It's such an important concept, and it is so useful. So, getting to finally talk about it on mic for the podcast is a resolution of the kind of tension for me. So.

[Erin] Love it.

[Mary Robinette] That's also one of the reasons that some works don't translate, because they bring a lot of contextual tension from their home locations that the audience in the new location doesn't have. It was one of the things that happen to me when I was reading Three Body Problem, that there was a lot of context that I was just missing. With Ring Shout, I had, because I am from the American South, there was a lot of contextual tension for me that was layered onto the book where I was anticipating things. I think that P. Djèlí Clark was using that very intentionally throughout the book.

[Erin] It's an interesting question, though, which is how much do you want to assume that your audience is bringing that context with them? I also… My family… I have family from the American South, family from slavery, family who experienced racism in the South. So, for me, I'm like, "Oh, this feels very tense on a lot of levels." But if you're from another country or you've never heard of the Klan, do you think that the story still works? Or do you think that there's something that is required in the context in order to make the tension happen?

[DongWon] I remember around the launch of the TV show Lovecraft Country, there was a lot of conversation. Because the opening scene of that show is an actual historical massacre of Black Americans in the American South. It's referenced also in Ring Shout. It's mentioned. I had never heard of this event. I didn't know about it. I also grew up part of it in the South. Racial politics is a personal interest, of things that I've read about and studied. But I just didn't know this particular event. So a lot of the press coverage was about what an incredible work it is, both that it's bringing in all this contextual elements, but also educating such a broad audience about it. Right? So I think it can do sort of both and it's one of the challenges of leaning on that contextual tension is you need to work with your audiences to some extent, but it's also not your responsibility to educate them about it in the moment. But if you sort of give them enough of the context clues to understand what kind of thing we're talking about and then they can go into doing the research about it on their own.

[Howard] It's worth pointing out here that the narrative versus contextual dichotomy is enormous. Absolutely enormous. I'm sure you've all had that experience where you're talking about a film with somebody and halfway through your like, "It's like we watched two different movies." It's because, yeah, about 80 percent of what you get out of a thing has to do with what you brought into the thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I mean, there are things that I'll watch where the lead actor or one of the actors whose prominently featured is someone I just no longer like because of a me too or whatever, and that is a new context that didn't exist when it was created, but it's a real thing. Planning for it is fantastically difficult. My counsel to writers is don't assume that everybody has the same context that you do. But on your first draft, trust your context and write the story that you want to write. Then you're going to have to work with your beta readers, with your editor, to see if those narrative…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Versus contextual bits are fighting.

[DongWon] Well, one of the things I like most about this was the confidence with which P. Djèlí Clark…

[Howard] Oh, my goodness, yes.

[DongWon] Approaches the historical context.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] We're dropped into a situation, we're dropped into a scene. Nothing's explained to us, other than the fantastical elements. Those are explained to us. But the political historical context, we are assumed to either know it or pick it up from atmospheric clues around what's being discussed. I found that to be very powerful and very useful.

[Erin] I think that one of the reasons that that works so well is in that opening scene, you're dropped into that sort of primal life versus death tension. You get a group of people who obviously know each other, and are… We sympathize with, who are immediately trying to kill some horrific monster. So it tells you, okay, I understand what the stakes are. I understand who I'm rooting for, and who I'm not. Now, as I get more context, I can use that to build out the world. But I think it grabs you so immediately that you're not worried about the context, because you're like, oh, if there's a giant monster in front of you, you should probably hack it to death. I totally get that. Now that I'm in, now you can tell me about why it's important and what's going on around it.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that that particular scene… That was the first scene where I had that layer of… That extra layer of tension. Because I was… What I was fully anticipating was going to happen is that they would defeat that monster, and then they would get… Have a bunch of angry white people running after them. That's not what happens in the book. What happens is worse and different. Maybe not worse. It's different. That's one of the things that I… When I say that I think that P. Djèlí Clark is doing it very intentionally. That a lot of what he's doing is setting up, here's this… Here's the context. Here's a thing that can go wrong. But I'm not going to do that one. I'm going to do a different one. That's… That, again, is that thing for me when you're playing with… When you're using historical work and you're playing with someone's knowledge of that time, where you can put some additional tension on the story by putting those two things in opposition, by moving directions you weren't necessarily expecting. But also, if you don't know that's a possibility, it still plays… Like, you don't need the contextual tension for it to be really terrifying.

[Howard] In the… In the previous episode, we talked about how this book uses a lot of horror techniques. But it's kind of a fantasy action adventure historical. That particular tool of setting up… Having our characters be aware of what could go wrong and prepare themselves as best they can for this worst-case scenario that they're imagining, and then discovering that the worst case scenario is actually 25 degrees to the left and is way worse. That's straight out of the horror playbook. So you are not wrong in feeling like this is a horror novel, because that's done so expertly and so often.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting, and one of the reasons this is such a great example of this is the contextual tension remains contextual. It doesn't really… It never fully finds its way into the narrative and into the in text tension. He kind of makes an agreement with us in that opening scene…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And kind of sticks to that boundary in a way that I think is very savvy, but still leverages the awfulness of the actual history to increase… To add extra weight to a lot of the character [garbled], to a lot of the characters decisions and to the emotional intensity that we feel throughout.

[Erin] Yeah. I will now pause because of the context that we are on a podcast and we need to take a break.

[Howard] I write best when I got music to isolate me and my personal acoustic space from the rest of the world. Music with no words in it works best for me, and one of my very favorite playlists is Random Friday, the 2011 album from Solar Fields. It's through composed, each track flowing both thematically and seamlessly into the next. So I never get distracted by a gap telling me I might need to restart the music. Solar Fields really leaned into this, because there's an eleventh track which is a 78 minute continuous mix of the first 10 tracks. Just in case your player of choice doesn't do gap lists gaplessly. But what does it sound like? Well, it's upbeat ambience and electronic and I listened to it while I wrote this.

[Erin] And we're back. I want to take this moment to talk a little bit about in detail, because we love to get into the text in these close readings, and talk about the use of language in this. Because I think that some of that what do you have from context and what do you have on the page is really evident in the way that the text uses Gullah. Now Gullah is a real language, and it's used here occasionally, mostly in the Nana Jean character uses it, and that's the way that she speaks, and if you have the context to be able to understand Gullah, you'll understand what she's saying more readily. But what I love is that she actually, in text, warns, very drastically, that bad things are coming. So it's an important narrative tension moment, but it still lives within the context of being in Gullah. If you give up and sort of don't read that part or skim past it, you could, theoretically, miss that moment of tension. What I think that Clark does so well here is that it's repeated. So she says, "Bad weather's coming," essentially, and then it comes in at the end of the chapter in italics. So it's like, did you miss all of this? Because the context held you back? I'm going to bring it back on the page in a narrative way so that there's no way you can miss that bad things are coming. The word bad is there, even if you don't understand anything else. I just really love that. So I wanted to throw it out…

[Mary Robinette] It is one of the things that I enjoyed so much about this book, and why I wanted to listen to it in audio, because in audio, you get all… Because that's not the only language that's showing up in there, that's not the only dialect. So you… Getting all of that interplay is so much fun. The other thing that it does, besides that is that it brings in the contextual thing about different class perceptions that people have. That frequently when people hear someone… People will think Gullah is a dialect as opposed to a language. They will hear it and think that the person in modern day is like low class, uneducated. Whereas Nana Jean is a very powerful woman. I love the fact that he is using that, he is subverting some of the expectations that we often have from modern day, some of the contextual expectations. He's subverting those in the narrative tension that he's using. I think it's so much fun.

[Howard] Even without the Gullah, the narrator speaks and often omits definite or indefinite articles or conjunctions of to be. We up on the tower. Or no… Yeah. We up on the tower, rather than we are up on the tower. It took me five or six pages to realize, oop, no, this is just the voice of my POV character, and I'm all in. Had I… I'm not sure if there was a context that was expected of me or if the narrative taught me that. But it was definitely there, and it was a little while before I stopped noticing it is a linguistic thing in the book.

[DongWon] Well, I think the language does a really good job, I mean, both in the use of Gullah, and the use of [garbled] dialect things, and then overall, the general use of a particular voice of the narrator. I think this is such an important thing when it comes to a lot of fiction of communicating who this book is for. Right? It's being written for a specific audience, while still being accessible to everybody. Right? Like most of us here are not of the culture that this was written in the perspective of, but I got a ton out of it. I had a great time reading it, and I learned a lot reading it and all of that. But the idea of it is written for an in community reader, that is still accessible from a broader perspective, I think is really powerful.

[Mary Robinette] There's an analogy that I use sometimes when I'm talking about this, which is that you can think of narrative structure, tension, all of this, you can think of it as a pitcher. You can put anything you want to in that. Then, your audience comes to you with their glass. You don't know what glass they're coming to you with. So if I am… Say, if I've got a fine Pinot Noir in a beautiful crystal whatever, and I pour it into a Riedel glass, a Riedel wineglass which is the glass that it's intended for, it's like,, this is a perfect match. But if you come to me with a red Solo cup, you're still going to enjoy the wine, just maybe not the way I intended it. On the other hand, if that pitcher is filled with hot apple cider and you come to me with a wineglass, it's going to shatter. So, one of the things that… When you're talking about this in audience, writing it for a specific audience, you're writing it knowing some of the context they're going to bring to it, knowing that that's who you want to write it for, and that… Everybody else can enjoy it, but that's not the intended audience.

[Erin] Yet, sometimes…

[Howard] If I'm pouring whiskey and you're coming to me with a sippy cup…

[Mary Robinette] If you're pouring whiskey, I'm…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You're coming to me with a sippy cup and a baby bottle? No! Stop that right now!

[Mary Robinette] No. That was when my parents actually dealt with…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Colds with me. But anyway…

[Laughter]

[Erin] I was going to say, also, sometimes you gotta shatter people's glasses.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.

[Erin] Sometimes, that's okay. I think that's one of the things that I love about what publishing I think is doing these days, though probably not as much as it could be, is letting people tell a story…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Where they don't have to have the right context.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Because the narrative tension is strong enough in this piece that if you have no idea what's going on, it is still a story of people killing monsters that are horrible and have…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Mouth eyes and just things that are not going to work for you. Like, no one's going to be like, oh, yeah, love those mouth eyes.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So even if you don't understand what is happening and the context, you'll still get a great read out of it. I think that what has happened in the past is that sometimes people will see the context and shy away from it, and not see what's going on in the narrative beneath it, or how the two intersect. So that if you have both, I think you get the perfect glass...

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] For the perfect drink. But, if not, you still enjoy it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. With me, I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to go need to get an insulated thermos...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When I'm reading this right now.

[DongWon] To slip into the publishing conversation a little bit, one of my very favorite reads in the last several years is Torrey Peters Detransition Baby which is a novel about the trans experience. A very complicated aspect of the trans experience. But when Torrey Peters had that book published, she was very insistent to her publishers that it not be pitched and marketed as a quote unquote trans book or even a queer book, but as an upmarket women's fiction book. At every point, she was very insistent that, nope, you market this how you would market any book for the broadest female audience you would normally publish for in terms of, like, contemporary fiction. I think that was an incredibly effective way to get a book that was very much written for a specific in community audience… So much of that book was for me and other folks like me who live in New York and are trans and are queer and all of that, and that was a very powerful, but it was read and was so accessible to such a broad audience that I think it really reached hundreds of thousands of people.

[Mary Robinette] I think the same thing is very clearly true with Ring Shout when you look at the fact that in the year that it came out, it was nominated for all the big awards. It won the British Fantasy, it won the Locus Award, it won the Nebula Award. So this is a book that was written for a specific audience, but clearly resonates…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because of its use of all sorts of narrative devices with a much larger audience. So…

[DongWon] I think we did a great job of packaging it to make it clear what the book is, but then it didn't feel tracked in a particular subcategory or only for a certain readership, which [garbled]

[Howard] Now when we talk about narrative versus contextual as a source of tension, there's a part of me that can't help but think that the greatest experience of that tension is on the part of the publisher, who's like, "Boy. I hope we split the difference between the narrative and the contextual correctly in how we positioned this book, because what shelf does it go on? Does it go in sci-fi/fantasy, does it go in horror, does it… Where does it go?" Maybe that's a little too meta-. But…

[DongWon] No. It's…

[Howard] I can't not think that.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I will say that I think for our listeners, who are like, "I'm not planning to write in a fraught historical era." There are still things to take away from it, even… Because there's always context.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Readers always bring context, even if it is the smallest. Even if it is I'm reading a romance, and I expect the characters to end up together, even though it hasn't happened on the page yet, this is the type of experience that I'm bringing to the table. If it's the pattern recognition that you, DongWon, that you were talking about in a previous episode, where it's like, okay, things are happening and I know this tends to end this creepy way, so that's what I think is going to happen next. So, thinking a lot about what is your audience bringing to the table at that moment, both in terms of their life experiences and their belief about narrative, what are they used to, what are the patterns that you think they've walked through, so you can figure out how do I want to either stay with that and reinforce it, or how do I want to subvert it? When do I want to use it for good or ill? But if you're not thinking about it at all, then you can't be intentional about it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think it's something that we often forget, because we bring our own context as writers, and we sometimes forget that readers will come from a completely different place.

[DongWon] I think this taps into Mary Robinette's metaphor in a certain way of you don't know what cup your audience is bringing to this particular fountain. Right? It… You can't control your reader. You have to make space for them in certain ways, but also be really true and honest to the story that you're trying to tell and what you're trying to accomplish with it. One thing that is very interesting about this book is it is in part about arts in the audience and reception of that art and the impact that art can have on how people think and behave in the world. Right? Because Birth of a Nation is such an important piece of how this story is told, and it's about how you can use art as propaganda to manipulate people in really extreme ways. So, I think it's really interesting that as we are talking about the contextual history of this story and the way that creates tension, it is itself engaging… I said earlier it doesn't really engage with like the contextual tension. It does in this one specific way, which is what was the role of that film in American history, what were the consequences of it, and it… Go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] To that point, because that's so important, not only is that a contextual thing, that's something that is brought into the narrative of the tension. In order to make sure that the audience has the right context to understand this, we get a lot of information about Birth of a Nation and how it's being used, both for the magical purposes of the book, but also the historical context of it. There is a… That's, I think, an important thing for you to understand and also that if you are… If you want the book that you are writing to survive outside of the context, even just to survive down history, two… Then you have to… You have to make sure that it's on the page.

[Erin] A great example of this is… I don't know exactly where it is in the text, but I think there is a reference where it says, "1919 was a bad year…"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] "For all of us." For me, I know that that was in the red summer era of Klan rides and horrible numbers of lynchings in the South. But the fact that they all agreed, and then I think everybody had like a slight him bit of memory about why it was bad or what had happened brought it on the page in a way that.. I brought a lot more context to it probably as somebody who knows a lot about that era, but there was enough there that you understood that they all had this common experience in a little bit about what it was. It was on the page, but also, I was able to bring what was off the page onto it.

[Mary Robinette] I will also say that if you're writing secondary world fantasy, this is a tool that you can use, because your characters will have context that the readers will never have because they're living in a fantasy world. So this kind of tool is something that you can use to give context to something without having to have like, "And now, I shall tell you about the battle of the five red armies…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "I'm going to pause this tavern brawl so that we all…" It's like you don't have to do that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You can just have these moments where the characters are all living memories and bringing it onto the page that way.

[DongWon] I think that's also why there is so many prologues in secondary world fantasy and epic fantasy in particular is they're trying to give you context so that you can have some of that contextual tension as you roll into the thing itself, but also, again, think about genre expectations. We read Lord of the Rings, so somebody's going on a journey. We're going to have some context and some expectations about what that means.

[Erin] I also think, and then we will give you homework and wrap up for the week. But I think it's also important that characters carry their context with them.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I think that when you do historical, it's easier to see how that has happened, because we understand how it happened in history. But one thing that I do not like is when you have a prologue that will give you all the context, but it doesn't feel like it actually like it's being carried. If there was a war of the five red armies, and, like, everyone involved was part of it, how does that war shape them? How does it change the way they see things? When do they recognize somebody from one of the other armies and it changes the way that they deal with that character? So, thinking of the context that your own characters are bringing with them is a great way to add more tension to the page.

[Erin] With that, I have your homework, which is to take a scene that you're working on, one that has tension or could use more of it, and put a piece of information at the start that is only meant for the reader. Some piece of context. Could be historical, could be that you know that this is going to end in the death of a character. Anything that is extra context. Then think about revising the scene, believing that the reader has that information. How does it change the way that you actually write the scene and deliver the tension within that context?

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.23: Tying It All Together (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-23-tying-it-all-together-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding

Key Points: Recapping! Scale. Juxtaposition and recontextualization. Compression and expansion. Familiar details. Multiple scales, size, wealth, experience. Use multiple ways to convey it. Language! Constructed languages, names, how it ties to culture. Don't forget the everyday things! Look at the original meanings of names of people you know. Consider multiple languages, also slang, class, etc. Technology and identity. Make it relatable, tie it to familiar experiences. Big questions, and looking at them from several angles. What's normal and what's technology? Self and tools? Double down, ask the question and dig deeper. Mix it up! Weave several tools together.

[Season 19, Episode 23]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding. Tying It All Together.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] 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 have no idea how we can talk about A Memory Called Empire in 15 minutes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] There are so many things that I learned just from reading this book, let alone putting together these episodes. Just from reading this book. So many things that I learned.

[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what this episode is. This episode is us going back and recapping the tools that we learned, so that you'll have like this one spot that you can return to to refresh your memory. We're going to start by kind of recapping the idea of scale. Like, how to use scale and what some of the concrete tools that we can use to indicate scale to a reader. We gave you a lot of really good examples during that episode, but some of the actual tools that we are using are things like juxtaposition between two elements. We saw that in A Memory Called Empire with the discussion of the vastness of the Empire compared to the smallness of Lsel. So juxtaposition is a really useful tool for indicating scale.

[Howard] I like juxtaposition and recontextualization. One of the first times I ever saw 3D used well in a movie was the animated Monsters Versus Aliens. There is a scene in which we look at the little monster, and we zoom in on each person, and then open the camera and look back and there's this giant robot marching across the back. It communicated scale so brilliantly.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because as the camera moves, the context changes. And changes again, and changes again, and everything gets bigger.

[DongWon] That's the thing I talked about earlier about compression and expansion. Right? It's this architectural concept of going in through a big space, if you compress people into a small space, and let them come back out into the big space. Right? We see that over and over again. We start broad, we condense down to Lsel Station, we condense down to Mahit,, and then we expand back out into space, and then we go back into the spaceport. Right? So, when you have somebody coming from this galactic scale and then disembarking into the gray featureless airport lobby, right, that she ends up in, that, I think, is a thing that communicates the scale of this Empire so effectively, because we're going from that huge, broad thing to something very, very familiar. Right? So when you're trying to communicate also very wild new concepts, giving us the familiar detail is going to help a lot, too.

[Mary Robinette] Scale is a tool that you can use, not only to indicate, like, the vastness of an empire. When you're talking about worldbuilding, there's a bunch of different places that you wind up using scale. Some of those are scale of wealth, and having a juxtaposition of those two things, someone who is very wealthy against someone… The poorest member of society. Those are ways to indicate kind of who some of the outer edges of the world that you've created are. Those are things that I think can be a lot of fun. You can also demonstrate that with the magic. You got a brand-new magic user versus the scale of someone who's very experienced.

[Howard] The old joke about Europeans in America saying, "Oh, that's a long drive," and Americans in Europe saying, "Oh, wow, that's an old castle."

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Yep. Exactly. One other thing about that is even when you're staying within one topic within one region, talking about wealth or scale of an empire, whatever it is, is think about multiple ways to get that across. Right? Not just physical description, but the way… We talked about the opening line of the book, the way she uses disembarkation there to remind us that there is a massive amount of bureaucracy here too. Right? So when you layer in these other details, and other vectors of scale, I think that can give us a lot of extra context. So, like, in something like wealth, it's not just contrasting the two people, but also what are the things that the wealthy person takes for granted that will indicate that in different ways.

[Erin] Exactly. You sort of took the words right out of my mouth, because I was just thinking, a lot of times, when you think about wealth, people think that it's all about money and stuff. Which part of it is. But some of it's about the… What you believe you can do. What you think can happen in a day? The scope of the world that it opens up for you, if you have unlimited resources, versus if you have little tiny ones. What are the ones that… What is the thing that your character is worrying about? Both people worry. Rich people worry, poor people worry, but their worries are different.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that we saw in A Memory Called Empire, the scale of power, the difference between Mahit and her one assistant, and the Emperor and all of the people that are surrounding him, and the number… The layers of people that you had to go through, just to get an aud… To talk to him. That, again, is like scale of power can be demonstrated by multiple different means.

[Mary Robinette] So, let's also then talk about the use of language. I suspect that will wind up talking about this a lot, because we, strangely, like language.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Strange, that. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, this is a tool that you can use, and we talked about a number of different aspects of that tool. We talked about some of the specific language choices that she was picking.

[Howard] Some of the con lang stuff.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The long words that force us… The long unfamiliarly polysyllabic words that force us to slow down and absorb the paragraph at a different pace.

[DongWon] Taking the opportunity for something like the naming scheme, to introduce ways of developing the character. Right? The thing that is so interesting to me about how the language works is it builds the world in terms of, yes, they have these weird names in this culture, the numbers and the noun, but also some opportunity to show here's how Mahit, an outsider, relates to the naming scheme in this world, because we have this example of the, I believe it's 36 All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle. I always… I never quite remember the number. I hope that's correct. But that way in assimilation works and the way cultures collide is written very clearly in how that works out.

[Erin] I also think that language, one of the great things about using names is, they're everywhere and we use them all the time. I think something that… A trap that I've fallen into in the past is that you name the unusual, you name the thing in your world that is like the big weird thing, but you forget that, like, people eat every day.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And sit every day. These are the words that actually make up most of our lives. Making changes there actually can make a greater impact on your reader then what the big thing in the sky is called.

[DongWon] Well, that's done so effectively when she learned the word for bomb. Right? Because suddenly, this thing that wasn't in her imagination, wasn't in her possibility space, is a thing that she has to directly confront, and she's laying on the ground, listening to people scream for help and then scream this other word, which she learns is bomb. Right? So, the way language also communicates what is and isn't possible within the Empire and within Mahit's experience of the Empire. It's just this masterful way of gesturing at the entire scope of the world and what the stakes are in this world.

[Howard] One of the most useful tools I've found for opening my head to naming conventions and possibilities is looking at interpretations for original meanings of names of people I know. Then, writing them down and trying to narrate a scene with them called that. My name, Guardian Clothesmaker…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, that's a much more heroic name than Howard Tayler.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But, still, it's… It makes me rethink it. As you start doing this with names you're familiar with, you'll twig to all kinds of new possibilities for whatever it is you're working on.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about that that I just want to point out is that you are, basically taking your name as we know it, the sounds… Then putting it back to original meaning. What that implies is, of course, there are two languages. One of the things that I will often see people do when they're creating worlds is that they have only one language system. Or that there is, even in that language system, that there's only one way of speaking it. There's no slang, there's no class variation in it. That's something that she hinted at, we didn't talk much about it in the episode. But that's something that… A tool that you can use to make your world feel more expansive is to think about the different languages that are in use, and also the power structure related to those languages.

[DongWon] Explicitly, Mahit is a foreigner to this language. This is a second language for her. Right? She's had to learn this, and we are learning it alongside of her. One technique to really think about is when you want to do this big expansive world, this unique culture, having that audience surrogate perspective is so, so useful. Right? This is a way that she's found to add a lot of depth to what can sometimes feel a little boring, because the audience surrogate sometimes doesn't have enough texture to themselves. But she gives this relationship that Mahit has to the language and learning the language and the culture of this world that we can feel her presence as a full person, while still getting all of the benefits of having that outsider perspective. So that she can just sometimes stop and explain, "Hey, here's what's going on with the names. Hey, here's how the language works. Hey, here's how the culture works."

[Howard] On the subject of outsider perspectives, I've got a question that I'm going to ask after our break.

[Dan] Hello. This week, are thing of the week is a role-playing game called Pasion de las Pasiones, which is based on Mexican tele-novelles. This is such a great example of how the mechanics of a role-playing game can tell a certain style of story that couldn't be told in any other way. I… This one has such a tight focus on that soap opera style of storytelling. So, instead of having attacks you can make poor spells that you can cast, this thing has special moves like express your feelings out loud, demand what you are owed, things like that that just helps sell that idea. It's a really great game. It's a lot of fun. So. Once again, that is called Pasion de las Pasiones.

[Howard] So, Mahit is giving us… She's our every person. She's grounding us, so that we can ask questions about Teixcalaanli culture. But Mahit herself has imago technology embedded in her head. That's weird.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's weird stuff. It… On the surface, to me, it feels like, "Oh, no, you're breaking that rule. You're taking the audience surrogate and you're making the audience surrogate weird." Why, how did Arkady get away with this?

[Mary Robinette] I think by making it relatable. Because one of the things that she does, right at the beginning, is tie it to experiences that are common. The feelings of being an outsider and being grateful that she had this guide with her. So, tying that to a relatable experience, it's like the times when I have been in another country and I have been solo versus when I have had someone with me. How much easier it is to navigate when I have someone with me. If… The idea that I could have someone with me who was supplementing my knowledge so that I didn't look like a bumbling barbarian. Like, that would have been… Like, I would have liked that. I would still like that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's like every other spy movie, where there's a person making their way through a cocktail party, and then there's the voice in the earpiece telling them, "Oh, that's so and so, and this is so and so. And uh… Oh, adjust your glasses, the camera's off." Except the imago doesn't need to do that part.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But this does bring us around to talking about what we talked about in our third episode, which was technology and identity, and the different ways that you can use those to make your world building feel expansive and to ground the reader in different things. So, some of it is what we're talking about is tying it to the familiar experience. But then there's also this id… This idea of identity and where a character sits within the world that they are in.

[Howard] The asking of a big question.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One of the things that I love about genre fiction is that it asks questions that are difficult to ask outside of the genre. You still can. But, for me, one of the things that A Memory Called Empire asks is what is the line between human and nonhuman, if we're not talking about genetics, we are talking about what's in your head. Where is that line?

[DongWon] What is too much technology? Right?

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] And what is the role of… This is a very relevant question for us these days, of what is the role of AI in our lives? Right? We all are using assistive devices in terms of our phones, in terms of our computers, to learn more, experience more, and enhance our natural knowledge of the world. How is that different from an imago, and how is that different from a cloud hook, and what's the difference between those two things? Right? So one of the things that I love is that she's using repetition to deepen the idea. Right? Every time she hits on this same subject, she's coming at it from a different angle with different nuances. I kind of think of it as, Mary Robinette, your yes-but/no-and, but at a meta level. Right? She's using that thing where she's returning to this concept of where's the line between what is technology and what is self. Then, every time she hits it, she's asking a slightly different version of it, and pushing past where she took us last time. That is so cool.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even if you don't have something in your world that fits into this category, I think that line between what is technology and what is not technology is so interesting. Like, we're all wearing clothes. Clothing is technology, but nobody thinks about it as technology. I have glasses. My glasses are in assistive device. Nobody thinks about them as assistive devices anymore.

[DongWon] Put a camera on it. Suddenly you're wearing technology.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, like, what does your character think of as technology versus what does your character think of as just normal. Like, you don't think about your faucet as technology. Your faucet is just part of your life.

[Erin] Yeah. What is the distinction… I would say, between, like, self and tool? Where does your identity and where do the things that you use to express your identity, to move through the world, begin? That can work for both technology and for magic. So, either way, they're something that you're using in order to make your way through the world. What I like is that, sort of as we've been saying, there's a slightly different relationship each time.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Sometimes it's because it's a different person, so it's a different identity using the same tool. Sometimes it's because it is a different tool being used by the same person. By looking at those differences, each one gives you a different facet of understanding both the tool and the person using it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, that person's… Because of that person's lens looking at that tool, like, you learn so much about them. Like, one of the scenes that I remember in Arkady's book is when they go to the neurosurgeon and there's a drawing of a prosthetic hand. There's this moment where Mahit thinks, "Why is that contraband?" Because in her world, it's not. So I think that part of the thing that you can also play with is what are the things that your character finds abhorrent about a potential technology and what are the things that they're like, "Why is anyone surprised that we have this?"

[Howard] When you ask these questions, there's a technique that I talk about in humor all the time that shares a name with something that you should never do on social media. Doubling down. Take the question, and keep asking it deeper and deeper and deeper. Keep digging that hole. Because… A Memory Called Empire is not the first science fiction book to talk about world cities, it's not the first science fiction book to question humanity or our role with technology. And yet, when Arkady breaches subjects with us… Broaches those subjects with us… I don't know which word is correct there, and I'm going to let it slide, because the salient point is, it feels fresh. She asks the questions well, and you don't have to be conversant with all of the science fiction out there in order to do this. It helps. But you have to double down and keep asking.

[DongWon] Well, I think the magic is in the connections. Right? We've talked about these techniques in isolation, but she's not just doing one of these at a time. She's doing all of them at once. Right? That sense of compression and expansion, she's doing as we're also learning about the imago technology, as were also learning the language and the culture. Then we start to see how the technology intersects with our understanding of the culture through the epigraphs, through the poems, through people's reactions to things. Right? So, language, identity, culture, physical spaces, bureaucratic spaces, all of these things, she's interweaving in such a beautiful way. Right? So, Howard makes a great point, which is all of the things are pulled from other sources. It's easy for me to go through and say, "Oh, this is like Anne Lackey. Oh, this is like Star Wars. Oh, this is like this or that." You can do that with any work of fiction. The beauty of fiction is how you we've those things together to be their own distinct portrait. As were talking about here, being able to tie these different techniques together and switch it out from beat to beat to beat is going to be the thing that makes your fiction feel rich and exciting and fresh.

[Mary Robinette] It's also not something that's limited to science fiction…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Or fantasy. These kinds of things are things that you can do with a modern day thing. Someone and their relationship to their cell phone versus someone else who's like, "Why are you attached to that device at all times?" So looking at those ways that they reveal the character, and reveal the character's relationship to society, is something that you can do, I think, and should be doing, kind of as a tool to make things feel more expansive and grounded. I'm going to question a real quick thing that occurred to me as you were talking. Again, when you think about technology, it doesn't have to be complicated. I was recently talking to a medievalist who talked about the introduction of the fork.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Up to that point, everybody was like knife and spoon. When the fork got introduced, people were like, "What is this?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "You're being so hoity-toity, and this is…" There's a woman who had her forks and she was very proud of them and she died of plague, and everybody was like, "Well, it's because she had forks."

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Well, also, the difference between one culture having forks and one culture having chopsticks.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? The difference in how you eat, what you eat, how polite society operates, all of that is rooted in this technological device in this difference.

[Erin] I also think it's so funny how technology, like, comes around again.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] We talked about… I mean, I think we're not going to get rid of forks, although you never know. But, thinking about…

[DongWon] The day of the fork is coming.

[Laughter]

[Erin] All rise. But I think it would be… I'm thinking about letters. Like, I'm thinking about the way that, like, letters to emails, that there was a period of time in which people would be like, "Why would you write, when you could call?" Now people say, "Why are you calling me? This could have been an email."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The fact that the technology has changed, but the question between whether or not I want to read your words or hear them continues to go… Maybe it will take another iteration in another generation [garbled]

[Harward] Why are you replying to my post when all you really needed to do was click on the 100 and the thumbs up emoji.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because that's all you said.

[DongWon] Well, this circles back to A Memory Called Empire, because she's imagined a world where emails are physical objects that are sealed with wax and sent around. Right? There's such a deliberateness to that choice of… And that tells me so much about this culture, that they have email. They just think it's crass to use. So they send each other physical memory sticks instead.

[Mary Robinette] Physical memory sticks that are encoded with poetry.

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness. So, speaking of encoding. We're going to encode a little bit of homework for you. The homework is, find a piece of worldbuilding that you love, and come up with a different way to use it in another part of your work in progress.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.10: Introducing Our Close Reading Series

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-10-introducing-our-close-reading-series

Key Points: Close reading, so you have concrete examples of how these techniques work. There will be spoilers! Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure (see the liner notes for the novels, novellas, and short stories). Close reading gives us a shared language and shared examples to talk about craft. Close reading? Open the book with a question in mind. Read it for fun, then go back and look for examples of a specific technique, and look at the context. Reconnect with the joy of writing, reading, and great fiction. Find your own examples, too!

[Season 19, Episode 10]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Introducing our close reading series.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I have a confession. Which is that we are actually recording the introduction to our close reading series after we've recorded most of the close reading series…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because, honestly, we wanted to get a sense of what this was going to be like. It's our first time doing this, and, I'll be honest, even as a teacher, when I hear the words close reading sometimes I think boring class, it's going to feel like going to a bad college class all over again. But I think it's been really fun.

[Mary Robinette] This is been some of the most fun that I've had doing episodes. One of the things that people talk about in our previous episodes when we been trying to give examples of things is that we often reach for film and television because we feel like there's a higher likelihood that you will have seen the thing and that you'll have read a particular work. With this, because what we've done is we've picked 5 books… Actually, 2 books, 2 novellas, and a collect… A bunch of short stories, so that you can read along with it. But we're doing all the heavy lifting. We've done the close reading and we're using these to tell you kind of how these techniques work, with very concrete examples.

[Howard] We're also leaning all the way into this and reading directly from the text during the episodes. Which is, to my mind, critical for helping you understand what it is that we love and what we see in the words that we read.

[DongWon] Because, as Howard said, we're going to be quoting from the text, you don't necessarily have to have read all of it before hopping in with us, but do be aware that we are not holding back on spoilers. Because we want to talk about the structure, we want to talk about how certain things unfold, so we will be referencing elements of the plot and the story from throughout the entire book. So if you hate spoilers, then read along with us. If you don't have time, don't stress about it, we're going to walk you through it.

[Dan] Well, also, not for nothing, we picked really great works that we love. You're going to want to read these anyway. So if you can, definitely read at least part of them. I think you should read all of them. You'll get a lot out of it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That thing where people will say, "Okay, spoiler alert," and you know to plug your ears or whatever stuff… We didn't even bother with that. We just sort of… The spoilers are scattered, like.

[Dan] It's all spoilers all the time.

[DongWon] We tend to focus on the first half of the book just naturally and how we're talking about it. But, yeah, absolutely, be prepared.

[Erin] Okay, so we should probably talk a little bit about how we got here in the first place. It started with, I think, DongWon, it was you and I and maybe even Mary Robinette, we were all scheming on the cruise…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] We had nothing to do during a lunch, and we said, "Let's start scheming and plotting, and figure out how we can bring like these really interesting close readings in a really cool way to the listeners." Is that… Do you remember it that way?

[DongWon] I remember it being not so much nothing to do during lunch, rather than season 19 curriculum meeting…

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] It was a nice lunch, too.

[Dan] It was a great lunch. Halfway through the curriculum meeting, you remembered that it was supposed to be a curriculum meeting.

[DongWon] Yeah. You were eavesdropping on us, clearly.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But the thing that really is like so often when I'm talking about a technique, it would be easier if I had a sentence that I could show it to you with and we've got those. What we wanted to do was not just pick books, but pick topics that were going to be useful to you. So, we've got the season broken down into 5 topics, each of which has a representative work that is tied to it. So we're going to be starting the season with voice…

[DongWon] Starting with voice, yes.

[Erin] That makes sense for a podcast.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] We recorded these out of sequence, which is part of why I was like, it was voice, right? Voice, interestingly enough, was How to Lose the Time War, which is just ironic, considering the out of sequence nature of our recording schedule.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I think we're winning the time war.

[Dan] That's true. We organized the time war joke that we made.

[Mary Robinette] There we go.

[Dan] We set this up in advance where, like, someone's going to make a time war joke. That was it, folks.

[Mary Robinette] There we go. That's the only time war joke you're going to get.

[Dan] That's all you get.

[Mary Robinette] We will have done this several times.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] So, we're starting with voice, and then we're going into worldbuilding after that, reading Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Then we're going to do character, using C. L. Clark's short stories. There'll be a list of these in the liner notes. Then we are going to do tension with P. Djeli Clark's Ring Shout. Then, finally, we're going to talk about structure using N. K. Jemison's The Fifth Season.

[Mary Robinette] We've tried to set this up so that you've got novellas, you have plenty of time to read it, because it's a shorter thing. Then we go to a novel, so you've got a little more time. Then you get a breather, because we do some short stories. Then novella, and you have a lot of time before you have to read N. K. Jemison's Fifth Season. So we're thinking about 2 things. One is your actual reading time. The other thing that we're thinking about is a little bit of the arc of how you think about a story. Thinking about a story as driven by voice versus thinking about a story as driven by structure. You can start either place, but often the structure is something that you refine at the end during the editing process. So we're hoping that you'll be able to use these tools all the way through the year on the works that you're writing yourself.

[Howard] Just to be perfectly clear, Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire does a bazillion things well, including worldbuilding. We're focusing on the worldbuilding. Don't go thinking that it doesn't have amazing voice, or amazing characterization, or brilliantly executed tension. All of the stories that we picked could have served as examples for any of the topics that we covered. We just picked the ones that we did because, to us, that's what seems to fit.

[DongWon] Trying to pick titles that fit the topics was incredibly difficult.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Right? Like…

[Erin] I was going to say, one of my favorite things was our little [tetra see] trying to figure out…

[DongWon] Oh, my God.

[Erin] Well, this could be this, but also that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Howard's exactly right, some of these move from category to category. Right? Where we were, like, okay. Maybe we should do Fifth Season for voice or tension or all these different things, and ended up settling on structure and sort of why we picked one versus another is maybe slightly arbitrary. There are certain focuses. Time War is a very voice-y book, so it felt like it fit really well there, even though the structure of it is also really fascinating, the character work is fascinating. So, don't take any of these as being completely silo, but it was what have we really loved, what's in the genre that's exciting right now, that does at least address in a core way one of these topics.

[Dan] So, it's worth pointing out as well that these kind of close reading series are very specific. Talking about worldbuilding with A Memory Called Empire, it is not a broad and generic talk about worldbuilding in general, it is how did Arkady Martine use worldbuilding in this book for this purpose. The same thing with voice in Time War, and all of the other series that we're doing. I think that that actually ended up, at least for me, being a lot more interesting than trying to cover all of worldbuilding in 6 episodes.

[DongWon] One thing I really loved about this project was… You heard us do deep dives before. We've gone in depth on projects, but those have always been our own projects. Those tend to be from a holistic angle of talking about one of Mary Robinette's books, or, all last year, you heard us go through Erin's short stories, Howard's last couple volumes, all these different things. So, being able to focus in a really laserlike way on a single topic on a single book, using a handful of lines or quotes from passages, really let us dig into the topic in a really mechanical way that, for me, at least, was one of the most fun I've ever had on this show.

[Howard] You say dig. 30 years ago… The math gets fuzzy… When I was studying music history and form and analysis, one of the things that are professor said was, "Imagine yourself as a… You want to find out what's under the ground. Do you want to dig a thousand one foot holes or one thousand foot hole?" Then he said, "For our purposes in this class, we're going to dig only ten 10 foot holes and then one 900 foot hole. We're going to do a little survey work, and then we're going to drill way down on one thing. In the past here with Writing Excuses, a lot of times, we've taken the… A 100 ten foot hole approach. Now we're going mining.

[Erin] Actually, I think this is… We're about to go to a break. When we come back, I want to talk about how do you do close reading well. Because we've been talking about it, I want to make sure that you're prepped for what you need to do or what you might want to do when we start this series.

[Dan] Hi. This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Shinobigami. This is a role-playing game written and published in Japan, translated into English. One of the reasons I love it and the reason I'm recommending it is because it is so interesting to see a role-playing game from a completely different culture. One of the things that stands out as different, in Western role-playing games, we tend to avoid any kind of player versus player conflict or combat. This game is entirely about player versus player combat. As the name implies, Shinobigami, everyone is a ninja of some kind in modern Japan, and you are fighting each other. Trying to accomplish secret quests or secret missions at the expense of the other players. It's a lot of fun, it's way different from what you may have ever played before. It's great. Check it out. That again is called Shinobigami.

[Erin] So, how do you close read? What does this mean?

[DongWon] I wanted to toss this one to you, actually, because…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You're the one who, among all of us, is the one who's actively teaching in a classroom environment. Right? You're teaching writing to students. Do you use these techniques? Do you do close reading examples in class, or… How does that structure work for you?

[Erin] Just when I thought I'd gotten away with it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, I do use… A lot of what we do, what I do when I teach is to give the students let's all read this story, let's all read this book. So that we all have a common thing we're talking about. I find it to be very helpful because when you want to give an example later, when you're reading somebody else's story and you're like, "Oh. Oh. I really like the way you built tension like…" And you reach for an example, if everyone is speaking the same language and everyone has read the same story, we can make those references really quickly. It basically creates a little environment, a little community for the classroom, which we're going to kind of replicate here where everyone's speaking the same language, everyone knows what we're talking about, and therefore it makes it just so much easier to reference things and talk about craft.

[Dan] Well, not just easier. But it allows us to go, as Howard's metaphor was saying, much deeper than we normally would because we don't have to cover a lot of the basic stuff. We don't have to start each sentence by saying, "Well. In How to Lose the Time War, we…" Because that's understood. We have more time to get into the real meat of each of the stories.

[Howard] For me, the secret to close reading was opening the book with the question already in mind for me. The question might have been when do… When does the… It's a very specific, very detailed very 400 level question. When does the likability slider for characters move in this book? I would just ask myself that question before I started reading. I would find phrases and it would resonate with me and I'd realize, "Oh, that's where that thing happens."

[Mary Robinette] So, the way I often approach it, because I will often do close readings when I'm trying to learn a new technique. So I brought some of that to this, when we were working on this project, that I will… I'll go ahead and just read it for funsies. With a question in mind. But then I go back and I kind of open it a little at random or 2 things that I remember, but I think, "Okay. I want to go through and I want to look for…" Say, with Time War. I want to go through it and look for places where they're using cadence, where they're using the rhythm of the language. So I'll skim through the book, looking for an example of that. Then, this part is for me really important, I will read the whole page, I will look at the context of how that thing is being used. Because none of these examples, you're going to hear us read an isolated sentence, but none of these sentences exist in isolation and the connective tissue is the part that's really, really fun. So it's quite possible for you to just read the book for funsies. Then, you'll hear us say a sentence, and you go find that sentence in the book, and just read the stuff around it. It's also possible for you to not read the book, wait for us to say something, and just go read it and be like, "Well, I don't have anything else, but I can see how even on this page, this technique is working." It'll be techniques like pitch… No, not pitch. It'll be techniques like cadence, or something like sentence structure, word choice…

[DongWon] Punctuation.

[Mary Robinette] Punctuation. Or, when we get into talking about character, we're talking about things like ability or role and really unpacking those that you can look at in context, to see how they work, and how they work over a span of pages.

[DongWon] One thing for me, there's a hazard of my job where I spend so much time reading manuscripts. Right? Reading client work, going over drafts, editing, that sometimes it can get a little mechanical for me. Where I end up so in the weeds, and kind of like, "Oh, I've got to get through X number of manuscripts by the end of this month, to stay on top of things." So, being able to do this, where we got to dig into these books and dig into certain passages in a very specific way, kind of really reminded me how much I love writing. Like, there was such a joyful conversation to be like, "Oh, it is so cool that in this paragraph they did this. Look how they did this thing, and how that's going to have consequences later," and, I hope that that also works for some of our audience, too, that sometimes when you're writing, it can be easy to lose sight of what matters. This is a way to sort of reconnect with the joy of writing and reading and experiencing great fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We didn't want to call this book club, but in some ways…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's kind of like…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Being in a book club with the entire Writing Excuses audience. In fact, this is also a good time to let you know that our Patreon has a Discord attached to it. If you want to come in, the Discord is brand-new. But, if you want to come in and yell about these books with people who have also read them, we have a space for you to do that.

[Howard] I'd just like to put a pin in the fact that coming up with the term close reading…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] As opposed to book club was way more painful for me than picking the books.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Picking the books is easy. But coming up with a 2 word name, that's misery.

[Erin] Yes. I would say, going back to the idea of the joy of the reading, like, I love the idea of like reading with a question in mind or really being very intentional about it. But I'll be honest, like when I give my students things to read, I'm not asking them to do much other than read it. Then, when we come back in class, we ask questions that get to why it's working. So, something I like to do sometimes when I'm reading a book is read it, and then think, what are the 3 things I would tell someone about this book that I either loved or hated. Because, look, you may be like these are the worst 5 books that we have… I have ever read. I hate them all. I hope not, because we enjoy them. But you learn something either way. You learn something… It's like you learn something from the people you dislike, just like you learn something from the people you like.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Erin] About the way you relate.

[DongWon] More from a book that you hate then you will from a book that you love. Because you can sort of see in contrast the things that they are doing that you don't like, but you can start to understand the techniques as a result.

[Erin] Exactly. You can ask yourself why. So, if it's the 3 things you love or hate, it's, well, I hated the character. Well, why did I hate that character? Usually, it's like something they did, or something that happened in the text. Then you can say, "When did I know that happened?" Like, if I hated them because of the fact that they stabbed 6 kittens, when did that happen? What was it about that kitten stabbing that like, really made it horrible. Sorry, kittens.

[Dan] Made it so different from my other kitten stabbings that I loved in the past?

[Mary Robinette] A John Cleaver book.

[Howard] Being able to ask yourself and come up with an answer why you don't like something is… That's an exciting ride. I well remember the movie Legion which a lot of other people thought I would love. But the loser guy who gets everybody killed is named Howard…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And his wife is named Sandra. That's a dumb movie, I hate it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Another really valuable thing on this topic is if you hate one of these books, this gives you the opportunity to see what other people saw in it that you didn't. It's okay to hate books. I hate so many books. But, as an author, especially as a working author who wants to make this a career, it's important to understand what the market likes, what people who are not me are looking for in a book.

[Erin] It's also great to see the variety of opinions. Because some people will love it, some people hate it, some people will be in different. I think sometimes as writers we think there's some objective measure that this book is good and everyone loves it and this book is bad and everybody hates it. But any book, like the book that you love the most, is somebody else's least favorite. The book that your least favorite is somebody's most loved book. I think seeing that variety of opinion helps you realize that, like, in your own work, you don't have to meet some mythical standard. You just have to try to use these techniques that were talking about as best you can, and put it out there, and find the audience of people who will love your work.

[DongWon] All that said, we hope you love these books. Because we love these books.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It's okay if you don't. We get it.

[Dan] I doubt they hate them.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] But one of the reasons we hope you love it is we're going to also be talking to some of the creators behind these books and doing interview episodes at the end of each series where we get to interrogate them. Hey, how did you do this thing? How did you think about these things? I am so looking forward to those conversations, because I think it's going to be really fun to pick the brains of some of the most talented people in this space and talk about these big ideas.

[Howard] These authors will be more excited about those episodes if we use the word interview instead of interrogate.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] No. Interrogate the writers.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] What I'm looking forward to with those is where we say, "Oh, I really love it when you did XYZ," and they're like, "Hmm, I'm glad you noticed that."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I am so happy that work for you.

[Erin] Why did you… Why do you think I did…

[DongWon] I think it's something you might have been on the other end of once or twice.

[Mary Robinette] One thing that I'm going to say, this is not your homework, but just something I want you to think about as you are listening to these episodes all year is that we're going to be citing examples. But the examples that we cite are not the only examples of each technique in the book. So, one of the ways that you can enhance your own understanding is go and find your own examples. Then, find someone to share that example with. Because that's going to really help you cement the techniques that we're talking about in your own brain. Then you can take it to your work and see if you can use it there. Which is what we're really hoping. That's the reason we're doing these close reads is we're hoping it will help you level up your own writing.

[Erin] That sounded like the homework. But it wasn't!

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was not. I know. That's why I said this is not the homework, but…

[Erin] That was great. I wish I'd come up with that.

[Erin] This homework is, like, super complicated, too. So… One thing, we talked about these 5 things that we're going to be thinking about. Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure. So, I want you to take a scene from a work that you love or from your own work and create… Pick a different crayon color or colored pencil for each of those things and underline where you think it's happening within the scene. So, underline all the cool voice places, underline all the different worldbuilding in a different color, and just take a look at the pallette that you've created for yourself. Because we're going to be talking about all of these things, and they can be found in all of these works. It's a good way to remind yourself of all the ways that these techniques come together on the page.

[DongWon] I love that so much.

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

[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad-free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk to your fellow writers.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-33-deep-dive-the-schlock-mercenary-finale

Key points: Schlock Mercenary, a daily webcomic from June 2000 to July 2020. Why a daily web comic? Because Howard imagined it as a newspaper comic. Buck Rogers and Bloom County! Big save the universe plots and characters that we love with their own arcs. How do you balance those? Like a bumblebee, keep flapping! The guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. Worldbuilding, character work, and the punchline. An outline to hit the ending? If you find yourself diverging, you may need to redo the outline. The drumbeat of the daily strip versus the graphic novel format. Humor and context.

[Season 18, Episode 33]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive Prep: The Schlock Mercenary Finale.

[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 on the spot for this episode. Also, I think, for the seven episodes that follow.

[Howard] We're going to talk about... We're going to talk about finishing big things. And building big things. And... Um... Oh, boy, Schlock Mercenary ran from June of 2000 to July of 2020. Daily webcomic. Wrapping it up was one of the most difficult and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I feel like a discussion of how I did it and why I did the things that I did could lead us into all sorts of interesting and wonderful places with regards to the things that we've worked on, the things that you might be working on, things we love, things that maybe weren't done so well. There's so much to cover, so much to cover when we talk about wrapping up big things.

[DongWon] Before we dive into the end, I'd love to rewind a little bit and talk about the beginning. So, I think to understand how you wrap this up, I would love to understand first, why did you make it a daily web comic? Like, what were the things that drew you to that format? And, like, what was… What did that… How did that wire your brain in a certain way to think about how to structure things when you're putting content out on such a regular cadence?

[Howard] The enormous power of the default. When I began writing Schlock Mercenary, I imagined it as a newspaper comic. I submitted it to a couple of syndicates and was told in both cases, "This is not what we're looking for." I don't blame them. I'm actually quite happy that it didn't get picked up. But I… Up until that point, I really only imagined a comic strip as being a daily thing in newspaper format. I mean, the default was so powerful that I literally didn't imagine other things. Why does Schlock Mercenary look the way it does? Because in 2000, Howard really didn't know very much about what was possible with the web.

[DongWon] I mean, you were starting in an era when I think a lot of web comics were like that. Right? They were all coming out of this model of newspaper strips. They all were very episodic, very serialized. Then, over time, I think we saw a lot of these like daily gag comics suddenly start to develop meta-plot and structure and like these huge events that sort of overtaking them. Was that something you knew that you wanted to do when you started Schlock or were you starting with more of a gag of the week structure? And then, suddenly realized, oh, there's plot here. There's story here. There's worldbuilding in a bigger, more complex way.

[Howard] My two biggest influences going in on this were a great big book of collected Buck Rogers comics I had from the… I want to say 1940s. It might have been the 1930s. Newspaper comics. Where it was definitely long form, and there was some Monday reminder of what we were doing Saturday, cliffhanger. There was some of that going on. But I got the feeling that back then the newspapers just assumed, no, everybody's onboard. They're just picking up this paper and Buck Rogers is what they're reading. We own this audience. It was very streamlined storytelling. And Bloom County. Which did gag of the day sorts of things, but they would string together themes. There was one where, during the Iran-Contra scandal, the Oliver North stand in was an alien puppy dog that was just big eyes and cute and he's there on trial and no one can prosecute, no one can come down on him, because he's a cute puppy, look at him. Look, oh, look at what his antenna do. So we got a week of those gags, and then we move on. I thought, "Well, I could tell a longform story that does this thematic sort of thing on a weekly basis, and plot arcs will probably last about a month." I was wrong. Plot arcs, I found, lasted about a year to a year and a half. It wasn't until about two years in that I realized I had sort of the makings of a mega arc. I did not know where it was going to go. But I knew where it was going to start. It was going to start with some of the injustices that were created by monopolies and by top-heavy power structures and whatever else. Because those are great things to make fun of, but the more I made fun of them, the more I thought, "Man. I want to topple these. What happens if I topple all of them at once?"

[Mary Robinette] At what point in the process did you know the end that you were writing towards?

[Howard] That wasn't until around book 10. That wasn't until around book 10.

[Mary Robinette] For the listeners who have not experienced it, how many books are there?

[Howard] 20. Yeah, right about the time… Right around book 10, I thought, "Yeah. I could finish this in five more books."

[Ha ha ha!]

[Howard] I could wrap this up in five more books.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] And then I started noodling… I was just having so much fun with… I would

the thing and realize, "No, I haven't finished exploring this. There are more jokes to be told, there's more character development, there's… Oh. It's now been another 18 months. I'm on book 12 and I'm literally no closer to the conclusion I've envisioned than I was 18 months ago." But, yeah, right around book 10, I think it was book 3… The first book's called The Tub of Happiness. The second book, The Teraport Wars. Teraport wars is the one where we start seeing the grand Galactic whatever. Then, book 3 was Under New Management. Book 4, the Blackness Between was where I introduced dark matter as something that could have complex structures and life with desires that conflict with ours. Goals that bring us into conflict. Spoiler alert everyone. That's the piece right there which I think aired in 05, 06… That was the piece that ultimately needed to be resolved by book 20.

[Mary Robinette] Since you said the word spoiler, I do just want to let new listeners know that when we do these deep dives, that we go full spoiler. So we encourage you to read the material that has been linked to in the liner notes. Because later you're going to get all the spoilers.

[Howard] The good news is even if we spoil the big ending for you, there are so many beautiful moments… Yeah, I'm blowing my own horn here a little bit…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But as I read in preparation for this, I wrote this. Obviously, I know how it goes. I loved rereading it. I just had so much fun with the characters and with their individual plot resolutions. That was something that I learned fairly early on, which is, yeah, you can have a save the universe plot. But if we don't have characters that we love who have their own desires and their own plot arcs and their own disasters and their own recoveries from those disasters, the end of the universe doesn't really feel like it matters.

[Erin] You've mentioned a couple of elements, like the characters and all these things that go into it. How did you sort of decide in day-to-day when to devote time to the larger arc, when to devote time to an individual character moment or a great line? How did you balance that out over the course of one day going into the next?

[Howard] That. Feels. Like. The. That feels like the bumblebee and the laws of aerodynamics question. Because, very often I would stare at what was happening on the page and I would say I feel like I planned this. I feel like I did all of this on purpose. But I don't know how I'm doing it. Sandra is standing there next to me and saying, "Yeah. It's the bumblebee and the law of aerodynamics." Law of aerodynamics does not explain how a bumblebee flies. Bumblebee's job, keep flapping. So she would, right there, she said, "That's fine, honey. Keep flapping."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Since then, I have learned, one, the laws of turbulence in gases and liquids very nicely explain how a bumblebee stays aloft. It amounts to keep flapping. Two, I have become much more conversant with the sorts of tools I was unconsciously using. One of those tools was a prioritization of what is important… What is most important to have happen. For me, the most important, the guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. People have to be getting a reward for reading the strip today. So I would often begin with do I have a structure that is going to have a punchline at the end? There's a question that often gets asked, how do you know whose point of view to follow? The answer is I follow the character who is in the most pain. Because that's often going to be the most interesting. For me, it was, yeah, the character who's in the most pain is the most likely to be the one where there's going to be a good joke. But that's also… I'd rephrase the question. Who's going to be able to tell the best joke? We should pause for a thing of the week, and we'll come back in a moment.

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week, when we talk about very long-running series that have come to a conclusion, is a series of books by James S. A. Corey that is collectively known as The Expanse. Several of the books were adapted into a TV show as well. But the entire book series runs nine volumes, and wrapped up a couple years ago. It covers an enormous amount of territory, both in terms of story, character, and world. It starts very focused in our solar system, it's a big space opera. Then it continues to expand and grow in these leaps and starts that are endlessly fascinating and have endless complications with the characters. It jumps around in time as well as in space. I personally think that those two authors who cowrote the series stick the landing beautifully. It is worth going through the journey for all nine volumes that does a beautiful job of managing to balance the big ideas, the politics, and the individual character journeys. I adore these books. I'm very biased. I got the opportunity to work on the first couple of them. But watching where they ran with the thing from there all the way to the finish line was a thing of beauty, and I highly recommend everybody check out The Expanse books.

[Howard] I would like to return to the question Erin asked.

[DongWon] I have a thought on that actually.

[Howard] Oh. Go ahead.

[DongWon] If you don't mind me jumping in. It's more of a compliment than a thought, actually. One of the things that I thought that you do beautifully in this is really balancing three different toolkits you're using. I could see how you do that in a daily way. Right? I was reading these as a big block, not as a daily strip, but you have… The three tools I'm seeing in your kit here is, one, you have the world building, which gives you all this like big ideas stuff. Right? Whether that's dark matter being sent in, whether that's a civilization structured around this idea, whether it's like these digital heavens spaces that people get teleported into. You have all these high concepts that are sort of driving the metanarrative that's thematic. Then you have deep character work and relationship work that is driving the minute to minute plot of the story that keeps things flowing in such interesting ways and interesting dynamics and people are making choices rooted in who they are. But then you have the third tool in your kit, and this is what a lot of people don't have, which is, as you were talking about, the need for the punchline. So, on a daily basis, you have a structure of we need to get to that joke. So you're able to rely on the motivation of the joke, the guiding rails that you're on because of the character work you've done, and then the overall target, which is these huge intellectual world building structures. I think those three things operating in sync, almost in tension with each other a little bit, just… I can see it like laser targeting you towards that finale that you're getting towards. It was really fun to watch that unfold.

[Howard] Thank you. That's… It took me a long time to figure out that was kind of how I was doing it. One of the things I found out… And this is returning to Erin's question of how did you select which pieces you were working on. I realized that the way I had been creating individual strips and individual story arcs was not going to work for creating the ending. I needed to outline my way all the way to the very end with some big structures so that I could start aiming things. Otherwise I was going to ramble. I mean, the ramble was fun. We'll talk a little bit about in a future episode about that. But…

[DongWon] When did you realize you needed to do those outlines?

[Howard] Putting a year on it, that would have been 2015, 2016. I knew that I needed it and I wanted each of the last books to be about a year of comics. So it was…

[DongWon] So you're like two or three volumes before…

[Howard] Late 2017 is when I'd… When I was committed… When I actually started the last of the three books. That was… The way I structured it was I wanted to treat the ending as a trilogy. I want the first book of the trilogy to set up the final conflict and to bring all of the characters and put them in good… Get all the pieces on the chessboard and end us in a way… End that book in a way that feels triumphant but also propagates a disaster into the next book. That structure served me really well. If I'd tried to do it in five books, if I'd tried to do it in one book, I don't think I could have pulled it off.

[Erin] I feel like I hear people a lot coming to this realization, who are writing longer works, where they're like, "I started out, and I was just doing a thing. Then, outlines came upon me, and it turned out I needed them." I'm curious, how did that change… Did it change your process at all? Did it make it easier? Was there anything that was more difficult once you realized that you had to do that for the ending?

[Howard] For my own part, and I begin with that phrase because I don't want to force discovery writers into the same path that I was in. For my own fart…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fart.

[That's it for… Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I mean, you were talking about the gaseous nature…

[Howard] For my own part, I felt very… It felt very precarious to me. I was very worried that by outlining these things, I was going to break a portion of my process and wasn't going to be able to follow through. Fortunately, I was, at the time, hanging out with some really strong writers of outline and fiction in short form and longform and whatever else. I count their friendship and their examples and their instruction is critical pieces of getting me passed the fear of the precarious and into the understanding of Howard, you've got the toolbox. You've figured out that it's turbulence that makes the bumblebee fly. Now flap that direction, and it's going to work.

[DongWon] How much did you stick to the outline?

[Howard] The bigger part… The biggest part of the outline, I stuck to it. Five nines as accuracy. I know this book will feature this cast, this book will feature that cast, last book will have people split up and they come back together. So, at that level, yeah, very, very accurately. At a lower level, there was a place in the second book where I realized I had diverged wildly from what I'd originally imagined, but I really loved where it was going. So I sat down and re-outlined things and was pleased by with what… Where that went.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've definitely done that too. I'm partway through a book and I'm like, "Oh. I'm going to do a different thing than I'd outlined." One of the things that I was struck by was the difference between the way it reads when you're reading it as a single strip versus the way you're reading it on… When you're reading it in graphic novel format. I wond… I've heard you talk a little bit about this in the past, about the way you think about it. I was wondering if you could unpack that for us now, the way you're thinking about…

[Howard] Sure. It's… The way I think about it is it was a horrible, horrible compromise. I worry still about people who read it in the longform. That's because the pacing of reading one strip a week… The pacing of panel panel panel punchline panel is very, very… It's like a drumbeat. When you read the whole thing as a graphic novel, it's the cognitive equivalent of just a constant pounding that I'll admit was not necessarily pleasant for me. But the pacing here is weird. I keep pausing for punchlines. Why am I doing that? Oh, because that's how this was constructed. That's just what it is.

[Mary Robinette] So what's interesting for me is I have a different experience. So when I read it… When I'm clicking through and read it strip, strip, strip, I get the beat, beat, punchline, beat, beat, punchline. But when I'm reading it as a full-page, as a graphic novel, the size of the jokes vary, and the other thing that happens is that I start to have… I start to carry context with me across the things. One of the things, like, that is so difficult about humor is that so much of it is contextually based. When you're writing something where you need to land a punchline, you've only got the context for those two or three previous panels. But when you're doing it longform, a lot of the… You're able to have a lot of the jokes that are landing for me bigger, because I'm carrying context through the whole thing, than when I'm doing it in an individual beat. For me, that was an instructive thing when I'm going back to my own stuff, which is in a completely different form that I can… To think about the way context is carrying across and having the jokes that are… Where the context only needs to be like one line before, but then also the ones where there's like a page off, that you've been setting up for pages and pages.

[Howard] Yeah. That was always difficult for me because, I knew, on any given day, the way the Schlock Mercenary website was built is when you arrive at the website, the most current strip is there. So I always wanted the most current strip to give you enough context that when you got to the last panel, there was a reward. Maybe you didn't need the whole joke, but you needed some of it. But if you went back and read more, then obviously there would be more.

[DongWon] Well, that's what I really love about using humor in this way, in the rhythm of that humor being at the end of every strip. Then you have the longer Sunday strips or whatever it is. But that rhythm… Because humor is fundamentally… Or not maybe fundamentally, but often about changing the context of information you have. Right? You're given information, the punchline is the abrupt recontextualization of the information you have to see it from another angle. Which, when you're trying to get your readers to absorb an enormous amount of complex worldbuilding it's such a useful tool. So the end of every four or five panels, I was getting not just the information that was given to me in a complex way, but then you would have an opportunity to tell me, "Here's the important thing you need to take away from this." It was like gathering the executive summary at the end of every strip in the form of a punchline, which really helped me absorb all the stuff that I was looking at. Because it's quite dense. Right? But it's... 20 volumes of complex military science fiction worldbuilding means there's a lot of information that you need to be having in your brain as context for why is this character making this choice, why is this civilization invading X, Y, Z. So the humor and that rhythm of the daily joke, I think, was an enormously beneficial tool for you in being able to deliver that in a way that if you had just done a straight graphic novel may have been incredibly dense, like Alan Moore style, like what am I looking at at this point? So I think that structure actually was… Ended up being a really beautiful tool in your kit

[Howard] Well, thank you. I… I'm admittedly self-conscious about it. The very first Schlock Mercenary book, Tub of Happiness, the only reason it got printed was that Sandra said, "Honey, people want to give us money for it. We can just put it in print." I'm like, "I can't even look at those strips and lay them out. They're so awful. I want to redraw them." She said, "Then don't look at them. I will lay out the book and we will sell it. Because I would like to eat." So there is a huge measure in my heart, there's this huge measure of it is what it is. Compromises were made. Which of the words between Schlock and Mercenary says that I won't sell out my art in order to feed my family?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Howard, if you didn't grow between volume 1 and volume 20, I think I'd be more concerned than you looking back at volume 1 and being concerned.

[Howard] Yeah. But, yeah, I love the perspectives that y'all are bringing to how you're reading it. One of the things that we're going to cover in a later episode is writing endings and how, from about book 10, I was laying the groundwork for what I knew was going to be the resolution to the conflict. I kept that piece. But I ended up being wrong about what the real satisfying piece of the resolution was. That, to me, feels like a great place to end the episode.

[Mary Robinette] Maybe we should actually do homework before we end.

[Howard] You know what? Let's do some homework about ending things. You may have seen on YouTube there's a little series called How It Should Have Ended. Where they take a movie and then they give you an ending that actually makes more sense. The one that leaps to mind immediately is using the eagles to fly the ring to Mordor. Take a thing that you love. Something that you've really enjoyed. Try to write a new ending for it. Something maybe that makes more sense to you, or that maybe it fits your head canon better, or you would just be happier with. But outline a new ending for somebody else's thing that you love.

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

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or 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 the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

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Writing Excuses 18.31: Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-31-getting-personal-mining-your-life-for-themes

Key points: How do you take personal stuff and mine it for fiction and storytelling? Sometimes it's just things you love day-to-day. The things we carry! Sometimes it's small details. Try putting the polar opposite, or at least different approaches, into your story. Turn it up to 11, and then back it down and play with it. Take care of yourself, too. Give yourself time and space for tough stories. Life is more than just trauma, you can mine happy stuff and good memories, too. Make sure the reader knows what is going on, too. Give them the signposts, breadcrumbs, context to make sense of the inside joke, the emotional tug.

[Season 18, Episode 31]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I have opinions... That don't always make it into my stuff.

[Dan] Keep them to yourself.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] No, this is an opinion episode. So, this is our last episode where we're kind of digging into Dark One: Forgotten and how and why it was written. One thing that is very personal for me is the concept of memory. I, when I was first married, spent eight months living with my grandfather who has Alzheimer's. This is one of my favorite people in the world, he practically raised me for a huge chunk of my childhood. Then I… The situation was reversed, and I became his caretaker and helped kind of guide him through this disease that eventually killed him a few years later. I had not realized how much un-dealt with trauma there was until I wrote a John Cleaver novella called Next of Kin, which is specifically about a monster who consumes other people's memories and then relives them. All of this stuff just came gushing out. I have since written several books that deal very closely with memory and what it is to have or lose memories. Dark One: Forgotten is one of them. That becomes a major part of the story, especially at the end when all of the supernatural stuff is revealed. So, I thought it would be really interesting to talk about this specifically. Not memory, but the broader category of how do you take something that is so personal, that means so much to you, and then mine it for fiction and storytelling?

[DongWon] I get the question all the time of, like, "What are you looking for in a project? What makes something stand out to you? What makes you pluck something from the unsolicited submission pile?" Not every book has to be this way. Obviously, there's lots of reasons to write, there's lots of fiction that works. But, for me, the thing that I'm looking for is always where do I see the author in this story? When I read a pitch, when I read a piece of fiction, I want to know that a person who is in a place in a situation felt that they had to tell me this story. Why were they the only person who could do this? That comes from really personal places. That comes from stories that are rooted in people's childhoods and their experiences and their hopes and dreams and fears. I think that, for me, is always the thing that makes me really just like sit up and pay attention and get so excited to work on a story.

[Howard] Sometimes it's as simple as the things that you love day-to-day. Like… I mean, the foods that you eat, the things that you listen to. As somebody who studied music and sound recording technology, I listen a lot. So, describing sounds in the things that I write is fun for me. I like to do that. That's… Now, it has to be the right character in order to be noticing something. Some character will say, "Well, what's that booming noise?" Another might say, "There's a 30 Hz rumble and it's increasing…" Whatever. But the foods that I love to eat and the smells associated with those foods, these are things that bring characters to life. That absolutely make the page into something that lives for us. Because the things that we love, the things that we sense, the things that we are passionate about, we infuse into our characters in small ways. It doesn't need to be a book about food, or a book about pipe organs, or whatever, it can just be a book about people who experience things the way you experience them.

[Erin] When I think about sort of personal issues and the personal things, I think about the things we carry. Which is, a lot of times, the way that I think about like the issues that we're going through in our lives and the things that we're processing. There are some things that we carry for a long time that may show up in all of our fiction. Memory may always be a component of what you're talking about, Dan. I'm also fascinated with memory for different reasons, because I don't have a very good one. So I'm very fascinated with how much memory makes up who we are. But then there are things that you pick up along the way. Some of them are things like foods, smaller things that bring you joy. Some of them are issues that you're working through for a specific period of time in your life, and then set down. What I think is really exciting is that fiction gives you an opportunity to, number one, find out what things you're carrying. Like, you didn't realize, Dan, like, how much that was a part of you until you put it on the page. So, sometimes when you're writing, you can go back and find out, "This is something I've been carrying, and I been carrying it so long that little bits of it are like sprinkling out on the pages that I'm writing in the things that I'm doing." But what can be kind of difficult is that over time, the things that you carry change. One thing that I found really interesting, I think I've talked about it before on the podcast, is during the early pandemic, like, so much of what we were carrying was changing. As writers, you're trying to catch up to the issues in your life that are changing, and it's changing the way that you do fiction, and it's changing the stories that you're trying to tell. There's something really amazing and beautiful in that. But I think it also can be difficult to know how to catch up to the issues that are now the things that you're carrying.

[Dan] Yeah. I love that metaphor for what you're carrying, because so much of carrying something comes down to how you're carrying it. Carrying a rock might be very easy, or very hard, depending on the size of it. But also, if I'm carrying it in a backpack versus carrying it in my shoe, that is going to totally change the way that I am interacting with it and the kind of the amount of pain that something relatively small might cause. If it's just something that I'm not aware of or that I'm not dealing with. That can spill out sometimes problematically into fiction. With that first draft of Next of Kin, I had to tone it back and say, "Okay, wait a minute. This needs to be a story about John Cleaver, not a journaling entry about Dan Wells."

[Mary Robinette] I think that that… To get to some more practical nuts and bolts of how to do this, that when you're looking at stuff from your life, when you're mining it, you don't have to say this is a thing that is happening in my life and then put it in as a major plot point in the book that you're writing. It can just be something that you're holding in your head and it will inflect it. Or it can be showing up in small details. Like, one of the things that I talk about all the time is that I will gift my characters with the things from the real… From my real world that are just nagging at me. Like, when you look at Lady Astronaut of Mars, there's a scene in which Nathaniel cannot make it to the toilet in time. I had spent time with my grandmother who at the time was 105 years old, and we had that moment together. She has no relationship to him. Like, I didn't write a story about my grandmother. I didn't write a story about that. But I explored the feelings and the moments and the viscerality of that, and transplanted it into another time and place and with another character. You can do that with large thematic things or you can do that with just small pieces of it.

[Dan] Doing that can add so much flavor and emotion to a story. Because it is something, like DongWon said at the beginning, that is intrinsic to you. We can read that scene and go, "Oh, this author has gone through this. This author knows what they're talking about and has helped put me into a position to experience some of those same emotions." Which, for me, is a huge part of why I read in the first place.

[Howard] One of the most challenging, and I would argue, the most likely to make your story robust, techniques is to take whatever this is and find the polar opposite and be able to put both in the story. If you have a particular hobbyhorse… I mean, it might be a sensory thing, like foods or music, it might be a political stance. If you can take the polar opposite and represent that well, then not only will you succeed as a human in more deeply exploring that thing you're passionate about, you will also make your story more robust, and it won't feel like… It won't feel didactic. It won't feel like you're just preaching to us.

[Erin] The polar opposite may not be like the obvious like political difference. The reason I say this is one of the things I was working through in my own writing is a lot of my published short stories are about somebody who is facing a culture that is the enemy. Like, the antagonist of the story is the cultural norms that don't support this person's life, and figuring out a way to kind of get past that. Often by lashing out at that culture. I felt like a lot of what I was exploring in retrospect was the idea, like, the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house. But during Covid and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, part of what I started thinking is, well, what am I saying does dismantle the master's house? Am I saying that it gets to remain standing? That isn't what I necessarily want to be saying. I want to be looking at different ways around this issue that are separate. So, some of the stories that I'm working on now are more about people having differing opinions about how to accomplish the same goal. They all agree that the master's house should be dismantled, but some people want to blow it up, some people want to burn it down, some people want to use the tools. Figuring that out has made the stories richer because I'm experiencing this issue on a deeper level and therefore so are my characters.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about that is sometimes that can be really direct in terms of like the metaphor and… When I say I want to be able to see the author in the piece, sometimes that is very obvious in terms of like I have a book that will have come out just this last spring called Chlorine that's by a young woman who is a child of immigrants, used to be a high school swimmer, and the book is about a child of immigrants who is a high school swimmer. Right. There's like a very much one-to-one, like, I can see, oh, yeah, you are in this story. But other times, it's like layered through many, many filters of metaphor. Right? So I think about N. K. Jemison's Broken Earth books, which are just a searing portrait about… Of marginalization, of oppression, of colonialism and all these things, that feels like she wrote a book about living in America. But there's nothing in that book that I can one-to-one map to this is that ethnic group, this is that cultural group, this is that… She is writing a book about magic schools and wizards and magic rocks. But still managed to make something that felt very politically trenchant to me as a reader in 2020 or whenever I was reading that. 2019. It was very transformative for me of understanding how an author's experience can completely inform a text without it necessarily being legible about what specific thing maps to what.

[Howard] After the break, I'm going to talk about turning the knob to 11 first. But we're going to take a break.

[DongWon] So, the thing of the week this week is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. As we are talking about how stories can be very personal for us, sometimes the audience's relationship to that is also very personal. Right? So, this is a movie. It just swept the Oscars a little while ago. It's made by a directing pair named the Daniels who wrote and directed it. So it is very much a story of Asian immigrants to the United States and their children's relationship to them. For me, as a queer Asian American child of immigrants, it hit very, very close to home for me. There's so many different aspects of that story that I identify with, and there's so many things that feel so specifically grounded in someone's experience and their perspective and then, the specific experiences of the actors themselves and what they brought to those roles, that it, I think, really resonated with the audiences because it did have a very deep personal connection. It felt like everyone was bringing their own selves to that set, to that production. That is so touchable and it's so tangible and legible in the end product in a way that meant… Means it was hugely impactful for me when I saw it, and for a lot of my peers and for a lot of people in the world generally. So, if you haven't seen it yet, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a magnificent movie. I love it almost on every level. It is absurdist, it is strange, it is charming and romantic and funny and exciting. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

[Howard] So, in This Is Spinal Tap, there's this joke about how the guitar amp has a knob that goes to 11. Well, how does that make it louder? This one goes to 11. Ha ha, very funny. As a sound engineer, there's this technique that I learned that works great in audio engineering, it works great in applying filters in Photoshop. It is terrible to try and work with in cooking. The principle is this. Start by turning the knob to 11. Somebody [garbled] "Does this need more bass?" I don't know. Let's see what more bass sounds like. All the way to 11, and then pull it back. When I said earlier, find the polar opposite, I didn't mean start with 11 and keep it there. I met start with 11, and then… And then nuance it and play with it. Because until you know how loud it goes, you might not really feel the shape of it. The same thing in Photoshop. You're applying a filter, throw the filter all the way down, crank it all the way up. Then pull it back and start to massage it. This doesn't work well in cooking, when you're, say, trying to see how much cummin is enough and you begin with the whole jar. That's hard to undo. But I love this principle. This is kind of a multilayered sort of approach to the approach, because audio engineering and visual stuff and cooking are things that I've already talked about, and they colored, not just what I write about, but how I talk about what I write.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to bring up is that… It occurred to me while you were talking about this in terms of turning it to 11, is also remember as a writer that you are also a person. I would encourage you to take care of yourself first and foremost, and to be gentle with yourself. A lot of what we're talking about when we're talking about mining your own life for themes is digging into your own traumas, into some of the worst things that happened to you, into oppressions that you experienced on a daily basis. I once made a joke to my own therapist that [garbled] Of my job is sticking a crowbar into a writer's trauma and then pulling until a novel pops out…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I don't actually do that to my writers. I don't actually mine their traumas in that way and don't try to re-traumatize them.

[Mary Robinette] The writers say other things.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I'm sure that they do. I do want to encourage people though to remember that this is dealing with very difficult material and that you should be taking care of yourself first. You should be paying attention to what your limits are, and I would encourage you, if you're doing this work, to make sure that you are working with people who can support you in that, whether that's professional mental health or a support network, whatever it is. Make sure that you are checking in and seeing how you're doing as you're going through this process.

[Erin] That also may mean giving yourself more time and space for stories that hew closer to your heart, closer to the bone. So, whereas you might be, like, "I finished the story and I'm going to send it to my critique group the next day," if this is something that is very personal for you, you may come more personally… More of yourself may be exposed when you're getting feedback, when you're talking about it. So it's wise to give yourself a break and make sure that you're sort of ready for that experience so that you're not sort of out there, like raw, and then people are trying to give you feedback and it's hard for you to take it, because it feels like it's feedback to who you are and not what you wrote.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] But also bear in mind that when we talk about mining your… Getting personal and mining your own life, your own life is made up of more than trauma.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] You can mine the happy stuff. You can mine the good memories. You can mine those good sensory details, the good relationships. Like, every romantic relationship that I write is in some aspect based on my relationship with my husband. My picture book, Molly on the Moon,… Actually, I guess this is a trauma, but it is based on a real life thing that happened with me and my brother, where he took my stuffed lamb and I was like five. But it's also based on this other happy memory of me making a toy for him. You can look for those, those are gems. There's a thing that I think we do when we discount our own life and experiences as being like normal. But there only normal for, like, you. They're not an experience that anyone else has had.

[DongWon] This goes back to what Howard was saying of put sounds, put foods, put tastes, put sensory things that you experience in there. You're mining more than just like the big heavy dark stuff. I completely agree that I would also encourage you to find the joyful things in your life and put those in your text. Find the friendships, the relationships, the experiences. Plenty of people have great relationships with their parents and their family. It is just as important to see good parents in the young adult section as it is to see neglectful parents. Right? So I think finding that balance is so important to building a really important, well-rounded presence in your book.

[Dan] I loved what you said about kind of being careful, making sure that when you get feedback on this type of very personal storytelling, that you're in the right place to receive it. I also… I want to add to that, that I find the need for revision to be even stronger when I'm dealing with something that I care about this deeply. Because often the first thing I've put down does not work for the story. There's a thing I say all the time, which is that your first draft is for what you want to say, and your final draft is for how you want to say it. When it's dealing with something that relates specifically to a pain or a trauma that I am processing, the first draft isn't even what I want to say yet. It's just this kind of blurp of feelings that come out. Then I need to go back and work it into a form and say, "Yes, the story does want this emotion here, and it does want this rawness, but maybe not… Maybe it needs to be shaped a little better. Maybe I need to turn this more into what the character is going to do rather than just me."

[Erin] I think that's true for joyful fun things as well. I mean, think about when you have a shared joke with someone and somebody else walks in and you're trying to like explain it. There's 18 amazing like things about your friendship with that person that are like all boiled down to this sentence, that you have no… It's really difficult to explain. That can happen in your own relationship to your happy memories. Like, you have a very deep relationship with why this particular thing that happened is so meaningful for you, this food, this sound, and you have to make sure to bring the reader along and give them enough of it that they can understand it, so that they don't feel like they're eavesdropping on a joke that they will never get.

[Dan] Absolutely. I remember… There was an episode of Babylon 5 where the captain had been given a teddy bear. It was so weird, the way he interacted with this teddy bear in the way he kind of growled at it all the time. I was convinced that this was part of some plot centric supernatural or science fictional something that was going on. No, I found out afterwards, that it's just that the guy writing that episode really hated toys and really hated funny cute things, and assumed that every member of the audience would share that exact relationship…

[Laughter]

[Dan] And… So all of… None of the jokes landed, none of the stuff he was trying to do made sense without the context that was inside of his brain. So making sure that you give her the reader all of these…

[Howard] The director pranked him...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] By filming the whole thing and giving it to us.

[Ha Ha!]

[Dan] No, but you have to provide the audience with the right signposts, the right breadcrumbs, the right context so that this emotion, whether it is good or bad, whether it is painful or whatever, this inside joke makes sense to them as much as it makes sense to you.

[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.

[Howard] Well, fair listener. As you may suspect, the homework is going to feel pretty obvious here. I'm going to make this a three-part assignment. Take something that is joyful for you, that you think about and that brings you joy. Take something that is painful for you, that you think about it, it brings you pain. Take something that is vivid for you, that when you think about it, there are sensory associations. Those three things, give those things, either individually or altogether, to a character or characters in whatever you are writing and see if you can express those things in ways that feel real to you.

[Mary Robinette] Our next episode will feature a special guest. It's Kirsten Vangsness, who is best known for her role as Penelope Garcia in Criminal Minds. Kirsten is also an incredible writer, and we loved talking with her about imposter syndrome and using tools from your non-writing life to fuel your writing.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-11-turning-up-the-contrast-with-juxtaposition/

Key points: Juxtaposition adds tension from the contrast between two things. Good news, bad news framing. Hallelujah moments in movies, with something horrible happening and beautiful music playing. Juxtaposition works with mood and emotion, instead of conflict. Horror often juxtaposes monsters and pastoral settings. Juxtaposition can add depth and context. It can add tension to a character. You can use it to show the reader how the character doesn't fit, or that this person has hidden depths. Cozies juxtapose cozy elements with murder.

[Season 18, Episode 11]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are going to be talking about juxtaposition this week, and how to use it. I'm actually going to tell a personal story to kick us off, because the first time I taught this as a topic, I was at a conference and my phone rings and it is my husband. I'm like, "What's going on?" He's like, "Well, there's been a family medical thing at home." I'm like, "Oh. Okay." He's just updating me. Everything does turn out fine. It does have a happy ending. But I then had to go back into the room and teach. The thing is that this added a certain amount of tension to this thing. Because there was nothing that I could solve. I was in a different country. There was nothing that anyone in the room could solve, because they didn't even know about it. But there was this juxtaposition between hello, I have to teach this class, and there's this thing that's going on at home. They're two unrelated things. The tension comes from the contrast between those two things.

[Howard] A common example of this is the good news, bad news framing of things. Again, a real-life story. Sandra and I were at Gen Con, and we get a call from one of the kids who's holding down the house. He says, "So, good news and bad news. Good news is I learned how to defrost the freezer."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "The bad news is I didn't do it on purpose."

[Laughter]

[Howard] That juxtaposition right there has told us an entire story that we're going to have fun unraveling. So I often think of juxtaposition first in terms of the good news, bad news. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the juxtaposition of the Steward of Gondor eating while the soldiers are going to war is completely different. That's just bad news, bad news.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I often think of the hallelujah moment, which is where something horrible is happening and a cover of Hallelujah plays in a movie.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Erin] If you ever hear Hallelujah playing, run. You know what I mean? Something bad is happening. But it's something about the beauty of that song, or any sort of piece of music that is very beautiful, with something horrible happening underneath that's [garbled]

[Howard] Ave Maria in Hitman.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The first time I saw that was in Good Morning Vietnam with It's a Wonderful World… Or It's a Beautiful World… Trees of green and like bombings are happening in the background. It can be overplayed. Because in… They tried to do that in Downtown Abbey, where it's like, "Oh, look, the new baby…" This beautiful music is playing, and someone is having a car crash in the background. It fundamentally didn't work because it was so clear that that was what they were trying to do.

[Dan] Yeah. Music is such a great way to do this. One of my very favorites is actually the finale of the first act of the Steven Sondheim musical Gypsy in which everything has gone wrong. The little sister has run away, and now the family isn't going to travel around anymore. The older sister, she's the main character, she thinks, "Oh, great. This is perfect. This is exactly what I want. Now I get to have a normal life with a normal mom and a normal dad." Then the mom sings Everything's Coming up Roses which is this huge triumphant don't worry, we're going to make this work, I'm going to make you a star. Which is 100% not what the main character wants out of her life. It is a triumphant and wonderful song juxtaposed against the absolute world crushing tragedy of what it means for this girl. It's horrible and delicious and I love it when a story is able to do that.

[Mary Robinette] I think… You just reminded me of something that Erin had talked about previously, which is that the tension is coming from the emotion. I think that one of the things about juxtaposition is that it is so much about mood and emotion. Very specifically those things, rather than the conflict. An example that Howard gave previously was the eating of the food during the… Juxtaposed with the battle. That those two things spoke to each other, but that they were a contrast as well.

[Howard] When I teach my humor class, I talk about juxtaposition, but the sort… The kind that I use is what I call forced congruence. Which is when you juxtapose two things in such a way as to force them into congruence one with another. The example I use is from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "the Vogon ships hovered in the air in much the same way that bricks don't." Which is hilarious and it forces bricks hovering to be the same as the Vogon ships. Paints a very clear picture, and, for me, manages to be hilarious.

[DongWon] You also see this used to extremely great effect in horror. Again, I think horror and comedy are sort of two sides of the same coin. I'm really thinking about Bong Joon-ho's movie The Host, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. The first time we see the monster is running along the banks of the Han River through this park area where people are picnicking, having a lovely time, it's a lovely day. The grass is green. Then this monster comes bursting out of the Han River, causing chaos and mayhem. It's a very visceral terrifying scene with this intruding thing into this very pastoral imaging. Throughout the entire thing, the visual thing that drives all of that is the juxtaposition of horror and this family pastoral thing, which ties into the theme of the whole movie as it is very much a family drama of a family trying to figure out how to come together in the face of tragedy in the middle of this apocalyptic thing happening in this major metropolitan area. He uses just… Bong Joon-ho, in particular, is so masterful at using juxtaposition to drive narrative throughout all of his movies.

[Erin] I think one of the things… Because sort of a lot of our examples are movies and our visual media because they have… There's so many great tools of juxtaposition in terms of showing two images together or using music. I was thinking about what is a good textual… Another textual example. I recently reread The Ones Who Walked Away from Omalas. It starts with like the equivalent of a beautiful musical piece in describing this utopia in such lyrical… In such a lyrical way that it almost feels like you're listening to music, which makes the juxtaposition with the reality of Omalas hit so hard. So it's something you can do, like with text, as well as in a visual and sort of a medium that has sound besides.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] I used it in Spare Man in what I will call the singing toilet scene. In which I have a conflict, straight up conflict, but it is happening in a bathroom that has singing toilets. It is one of my favorite things that I've ever written.

[DongWon] Well, I would argue that one of the driving impulses of the… Or one of the driving things about the book in general is that juxtaposition of the humorous surreality that is a cruise ship or a space liner in this one against this serious drama and murder and interpersonal drama. It… That tension between those two things, the discordance between the ridiculousness that is a cruise ship that all of us know very well versus a very serious thing happening, which… That is so much this like generative engine in the book. It's like… It almost feels like a gear slipping, but you're doing it on purpose. So we keep like running into it, and having to be like, "Wait. How does this work? Why is this like this? Oh, that is so weird that this murder is happening here, but also it's so weird that this service person is talking to them in this way right now."

[Howard] It calls back to anticipation, because if you are juxtaposing, especially if you are juxtaposing where there is a forced congruence happening. If one of the elements is one with which we're familiar and we know how it unfolds, the juxtaposition forces us to anticipate what is going to happen with the second element. I don't have a good example off the top of my head, but if you think of Beethoven's… Is it the ninth that ends with the da da da da da da dat dah dah? And then the cannons?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] I think that's… Is it the ninth or is that the third?

[Dan] The beginning, the 1812 overture.

[Howard] 1812 overture! It's the overture. Okay. Thank you. Gah. Music major. They can have their degree back. Find.

[Mary Robinette] Juxtaposition is…

[Howard] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Happening in your brain right now.

[Howard] When you hear that ba ba ba... The next thing that's going to happen is an explosion. If you're watching a movie, something's about to blow up. Because the forced congruence and the anticipation has told us what's coming next.

[Mary Robinette] Well, what's coming next right now is our thing of the week. Our thing of the week is When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins. I loved this book a lot. It is set immediately or shortly after the end of World War II. It's in the 1950s. Franny is a young Jewish woman and she wants to do stand up comedy. If you think that's Marvelous Mrs. Mazel, this is not Marvelous Mrs. Mazel with magic. That's not what this is. The only thing it has in common are the words that I have said thus far. It is a story about intergenerational trauma. It is a story about the search for comedy. It is also with… Has this wonderful magical element. It's at the juxtaposition between stand up comedy and the very real PTSD that Franny's brother is dealing with, that she herself is dealing with. Those two things play off each other so beautifully. It's funny and it's moving. I highly recommend When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins.

[Dan] So can I talk about another example of juxtaposition? We have in our notes beautiful music playing over a fight scene. One of the ones that I love is in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The opening stunt, the opening fight scene, they have the music Ain't That a Kick in the Head, which I believe is a Dean Martin song. It's very funny, ha ha, fight scene with this, but you realize very quickly that that music is diegetic, that music is happening inside of the story and all of the characters can hear it. It's being broadcast over the PA during a prison break. So there is the juxtaposition of tone, but also we realize that the characters are using it as a countdown. So it becomes this form of creating tension in the story. What's going to happen when we get to the end of that song? So it's kind of adding two or three things at once, and doing them very effectively.

[Howard] The fourth thing that it's doing is finally doing right what Hudson Hawk tried to do for the entire movie where the two of them are singing the same song in order to try and time their heist. But it was never as cool as it was in Mission Impossible 4.

[DongWon] One more thing I want to bring up in terms of juxtaposition is it is incredibly useful as a technique to add depth and context to a scene. I often talk about fiction and particularly novels as a layer cake. You want to add as many layers as you can to make sure that the reader's getting the most amount of information as possible in a given moment. Right? So, going back to examples Erin used last time in terms of making sure there is tension rather than conflict, a way to add tension into opening with a fight scene, opening with an action scene, is you're giving us flashbacks, you're giving us different POVs, to tell us about the character and what they care about. If you start with a gun fight, and halfway through, you do a flashback to realizing that the main… The protagonist's sister has been kidnapped and that's what they're trying to do, then that adds tension in a way that wouldn't be there initially. So, using juxtaposition can add so much more meaning or depth. Also, like the Aldhani… Climactic Aldhani scenes in Andor is a great example because they're cutting between this religious ceremony that's happening by these colonized people and this heist for the revolution that is going to eventually free them. The tension between those two images is adding all this thematic and narrative depth that elevates what's happening on the screen to a different level versus what we would have seen if it was just a heist happening in a vault.

[Dan] Well, if I add to that… I know, Erin, you want to say something. But, just before we leave Andor, one of the things I loved about the tension created in that juxtaposition at the end is that we know that all of the fallout and all of the consequences of this heist are going to fall on those indigenous people and not on our main characters. They're the ones that the Empire is going to crack down on, they're the ones that are going to have horrible consequences. So it adds this extra layer of really bitter tension to what's going on. It drains all of the joy that we normally expect from a heist, and all of the triumph is completely gone, because we know that those people are going to suffer for it.

[Mary Robinette] Erin, what were you going to say?

[DongWon] But we also know that… Oh, sorry.

[Erin] No, no. Keep going. That's fine.

[DongWon] But we also know though that this is the thing that is going to lead to their eventual liberation. This single act leads directly in a chain of events to the destruction of the Death Star and the fall of the Empire. Which is anticipation coming… Juxtaposition, anticipation, all these things are layered in there in this beautiful example. Anyways, we'll stop talking about Andor now because we would do that for six hours.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I was just going to say that in addition to adding tension to a scene, that juxtaposition can also add tension to a character. It's a great way of signaling an unreliable narrator or a character that makes you feel weird in a bad way.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Which is that, if someone, for example… If something really horrible is happening, but a character… Their interior thoughts about it are way off from what we think… They're like, "Kicking puppies? Eh, fine." That juxtaposition of our… What we believe would be the normal, or, like, within a set of reactions to a situation and what the character is experiencing, it can show things that are bad, things that are good, but I think it really adds some tension, because the next time you see this character, you're not sure how they're going to react to something, because they didn't react in the way that you were anticipating that they might.

[DongWon] This is Javier Bardon calling people friendo in No Country for Old Men. Terrifying.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The episode that kind of kicked all this off, we were talking about building a mystery, and then we're talking about the tools of tension. Using juxtaposition late in a mystery where a small thing has the same shape as the solution to the puzzle. You juxtapose those things and the detective looks at the small thing and suddenly realizes, "[gasp] Aha! That's the last piece that I need." Even if those pieces aren't related. That is a very common use of juxtaposition in mysteries.

[Dan] So, one way that I have used this, for example, in the John Cleaver books. In the first one, I Am Not a Serial Killer, I used this as a way of showing you how messed up John Cleaver is. This is a lot of what Erin was talking about, is, if we're seeing somebody's reactions are off. I went out of my way to include a lot of slice of life kind of moments. We get to see this kid on the first day of school. We get to see him at Halloween. We get to see him at Christmas. Every time, he is not reacting the way that we expect, and the kind of excitement that we would want to feel at those different moments. The cool high school dance that he gets to go to is this kind of nightmare for him. The Christmas party is just absolutely, kind of unbearably sad, because of the way that no one in the family gets along with each other. So providing those moments of resonance where we recognize what the character is going through, and it should feel one way, but it feels a different way, adds a lot of tension to a character.

[Mary Robinette] You can have that also in the positive, as well. If there's a character who is slightly terrifying, but you actually want the reader to feel sympathy for them or to enjoy… To ultimately think of them as a good guy. Giving them something that they care about, like a Yorky or a teacup poodle, is a way to humanize them by providing that juxtaposition. It remind you that people are not mono-dimensional. The other thing that has occurred to me as we been talking is that this tool of juxtaposition is a key tool in cozy mysteries. That that's one of the reasons that cozies work is because they are juxtaposing a British beautiful little country house with murder. Or baking with murder. That juxtaposition is, in fact, a key element of the cozies.

[Mary Robinette] Now, I'm afraid, we're going to juxtapose your homework.

[Erin] Homework.

[Howard] They've been anticipating it.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] All right. For the homework this week, look at your work in progress and find a scene where you may want to add more tension, and add an element of juxtaposition to do that. Any sort of… Any of the ones that we've been talking about, but add some juxtaposition into your work in progress and ramp up that tension.

[Mary Robinette] You are out of excuses. Now go write.

[Behind you!]

[Murder!]

[Laughter]

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.39: Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with K. M. Szpara

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/09/25/17-39-writing-bodies-and-intimacy-with-k-m-szpara/

Key points: Content warning. Bodies and intimacy, without euphemisms. The intimacy of what you and your partner call body parts is rich with knowing yourself and/or character growth. Communication is key, and the growth of trust. Think about how the context of the scene changes the action. Think of intimate scenes as fight scenes or conversations. Or as dances? Metaphoric language, fade to black, or simple direct descriptions?

[Season 17, Episode 39]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with special guest, K. M. Szpara.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon Song.

[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.

[Howard] I'm Howard Tayler.

[Mary Robinette] We are here live on the Writing Excuses cruise with a live audience of writers.

[Applause]

[Mary Robinette] Also, our special guest, K. M. Szpara. Kellan, say hello.

[Kellan] Hi. This is my first Writing Excuses cruise. I am the author of books such as Docile as K. M. Szpara, and I write a lot about like sex and vampires and blood.

[Mary Robinette] So, we are going to actually give you a content warning for this particular episode. We're going to be talking about bodies and intimacy, and we're not going to be using euphemisms. We're going to be talking about adult acts that adults do with actual adult bodies. Adult bodies run in a full range.

[Kellan] Yes. Which is to say that as somebody who writes queer and trans bodies a lot, if this episode might trigger you on any of those axes, please take care of yourself.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So with that, let's dive into the actual content. So you pitched this episode to us, Kellan. What are some of the things that you think about when you're thinking about like writing bodies and intimacy? What are some important aspects of that?

[Kellan] Sure. I mean, for me, it's so important to show especially queer and trans bodies. There's such a mystery sort of around us, even to our own selves sometimes. We do a lot of manifesting of our own bodies when we are alone with others. I have sat down and struggled with what do I call these character's genitals that makes me feel okay and makes the character feel okay and makes the character's partner feel okay. Or what conflict does that bring up. So, for me, like settling on that intimacy between one or more people and being alone or with others with your body is so rich with your inner external conflict tension, but also a sense of knowing yourself and/or character growth.

[Piper] I love that. Because communication is so key. You can really see that in the development of the relationships through the course of the book, because you can find during different moments through the story that they're more likely to trust, and there is a building of trust over time as they feel more comfortable communicating with each other and also being self-aware. Like you said. Just aware of themselves and what they need.

[Kellan] Yeah. It's funny because I was talking earlier on this retreat with my agent, actually, and I brought up how when I first started writing, I learned to sort of like the meat and then there's unresolved sexual tension for the entire book and they kiss at the end and that's the prize for the reader and the characters. That was real bad for me. I've instead fallen into the thing which I think is very queer, which is very queer not applicable to everyone all the time, but, for me and many other people, which is that there's sex first. Intimate moments first. Then, sort of like dealing with the emotional and/or communications that lead right up to it. Also the falling out, and how that manifests over the course of the rest of the novel or story.

[Piper] Oh, yeah. Definitely. Because I know that we think of romance in particular as being rather structured in the order, and I have even taught how there is often a progression of intimacy that happens. But once you know what that progression kind of is expected, you can also explore how it happens not quite in that order, and what that does to the character, that reaction time, and that thinking about it and exploring what works for them. I love that.

[Kellan] For me, in real life, there is no order. Right? So we do different things with different people at different times. It's really important to me that characters feel like emotionally true. So, yeah. I mean, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that as you're talking about this, as emotional truth, I'm thinking about some of the scenes in Docile and the way the context of the scene changes the action. You want to talk a little bit about how you communicate context and safety or not safety?

[Kellan] Sure. The context is interesting because my first thought was like where is the sex happening.

[Chuckles]

[Kellan] Sometimes it happens in your like executive office at work, which I guess you're allowed to do if you're the CEO. But I think the actual context is who are you having sex with, what kind of sex you're having, what are the power dynamics between you. So, for example, even though there are many sex scenes in Docile, there's the blow job scene, there's, as my editor has once said, one ass-eating scene per book as mandated by God.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Only one? Are we like limited to one or is it at least one?

[Kellan] No, it just happens that way.

[Piper] Okay.

[Kellan] So. But the point of that is the sort of context is… It is, for Elijah, the protagonist, it is I am being asked to do something versus something is being done to me, and, do you feel like more of a willing participant if you are doing the thing, which presents a whole different struggle emotionally than lying back and having something happen to you. Then, later on in the novel, he gets to have his first like real consensual sexual experience and navigates that with a totally different context using language she'd never had access to before, feeling emotions he's never felt, trying to deal with how to go about having some of the same experiences physically that you had the first time, but with somebody who is being very respectful about it.

[Mary Robinette] Can we talk about some tools that we can use to do this well? Like, one of the most useful frameworks that I was given when I was first writing the kind of intimate scenes that I do, which frequently resolve into fade to black, but was to think of them as either a conversation or a fight scene. That with a fight scene, I have to think about the geography and things that human bodies will actually do. And that with a conversation, that there is something that each person is trying to communicate to the other through the physical actions of their body.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think a lot about fight scenes when it sort of comes to these kinds of moments in books. In part because we live in a society that can be very prudent… Not prudent, prudish and prurient about bodies and about sex and about intimacy. But we're a society that also glorifies violence. We have lots of scenes in movies that have very extreme explicit details about what happens to a body when violence happens to it. So, so much of fiction is already engaging with the collision of bodies in these high intensity emotional moments. We're just only allowed to talk about certain kinds of that versus what is a scene of intimacy versus a scene of violence. Functionally, in the narrative, they often perform a similar thing where two characters enter a scene with different goals, different emotional states, and they exit that scene having resolved some aspects of that, or evolved into a different emotional state. So there's a way in which I think of these functionally as performing the same thing in the narrative, hopefully with different outcomes, hopefully one of them's not dead by the end of it. But I think there is a way in which that, from a high level, mechanically they can be very, very similar. It really comes down to how we, as a society, can think about and interact with bodies in that way.

[Piper] Actually, I want to provide a contrasting approach. Because I'm really well known for fight scenes, especially in my romantic suspense, and body count, especially a lot of my other work. But I write romance. One of the things is while I have combat scenes and fight scenes in my stories, I often think about moments of intimacy as dance. It's one of those things that I didn't do on purpose, but because I was a dancer, and I was in dance from age 3 to 28 actively, and also, it's a part of my meet cute with my partner, Matthew J. Drake, that we danced together and we both enjoyed West Coast swing and blues fusion, that I often think of intimacy scenes and how I choreograph them as dance. Whether that's horizontal or standing up…

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Or a little bit of both and also the logistics of lifts. Right? Like it actually translates better for me. If it involves more than two partners, also, choreography helps a lot for that because what bodies can do. Right? Like, one person may be very bendy and one person may not be very bendy, and also, like, what are the logistics of actually being able to lift two people. Like a lot more of that actually translates better in my head to dance choreography. So that's another alternative.

[Dongwon] I think of fight scenes is also being about dance, right? It's about that movement and control and… In part, I love martial arts movies. I know we're wondering further off-topic at this point.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But I do think dance is a really useful thing to think about in terms of that interaction and that give-and-take in that interplay of power and connection and emotion are all things that flow back and forth in this.

[Howard] Let me circle this back real quick. One of my favorite MCU fight scenes is the one in Civil War where Falcon says to Spidey, "Have you ever been in a fight before? Usually there's not this much talking." Conversation during intimacy to me is one of the most wonderful things to read. I don't just want the choreography, I want dialogue. I want… It's a conversation. It's much more than just blocking. Much more than that.

[Kellan] I am also somebody who's deeply in love with a first-person present point of view. I can get away with it as much as I can. But I feel like not everyone chooses it and uses it to their full advantage. So, for me, like being in a different first-person point of view for a sex scene, and then flopping the points of view for the next sex scene, like, you are not just getting the… You, the reader, gets to see the conversation between the two people, but then you get to see later how the other character might have experienced that sex or contact totally different from the other character. I had a story out with two trends boyfriends. They both had different physical needs when it came to sex. So you really got to live in their heads and in the dialogue.

[Piper] Yeah. I think the progression is also important through the course of the story, because, again, we're also seeing the progression of how they work together. To come back to the point about communication as well, and dialogue, I think it's amazing and awesome, and I love it. I'm so into it. It's also really hot, I think, in romance that there is consent not just upfront, but repeatedly through each step of that interaction, and, if there's not, what are the reactions to it.

[Mary Robinette] These are, I think, wonderful points. Let's take a moment to pause for our book of the week, which is actually by Kellan.

[Kellan] Wow, what a surprise.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] That book would be First Become Ashes. It is a novel whose pitch I did not practice before this. It takes place in a cult. In the first chapter, they are all liberated from the cold against their wills. They were raised to believe that you could do magic. So when the FBI says you cannot do magic, and also, everything you believe is fake, one of them, Lark, spends the rest of the novel sort of unraveling what that means for him as a person, grappling with beliefs and his own body, especially since he took sort of like a sacred chastity vow with a literal chastity device. So, there's some really interesting sex that comes out on the other end of that.

[Mary Robinette] That sounds very exciting. It's called First Become Ashes by K. M. Szpara.

[Mary Robinette] So, let's move on to one of my favorite things, which is talking about how things can go terribly wrong. So let's talk about some tropes and euphemisms and ways of discussing this that are maybe not the most intimate. For instance, I had to narrate a book that literally had the line, "She released his love snake from its denim prison."

[Laughter]

[Piper] Purple prose.

[Kellan] I mean, if you say that during sex and the other person doesn't laugh and then you will have a great time… That would be a cool scene.

[Piper] I mean, yeah. Or is it monster f-ing? I would drop in f-bombs. We are going adult. All right. So, monster fucking is a thing. It is a very… It's rising in popularity right now. I know of at least two books with a prehensile penis going on. So, love snake would be applicable.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Yeah. I mean, people ask me this a lot, like, how do you keep writing so many sex scenes? Does the language get stale? How do you… Like, I name this very bluntly. I usually use cock in sexual situations, but then you'll see that I use dick when someone's just like alone thinking about their bodies. I… One ass eating per book. It's like does butt sound sexy enough? Like, I do want it to be hot, right? So, like, sex is both about characters and tension and intimacy, but also butts. So, like, for me, it's picking these words that titillate not just for the reader but for you as the author. I mean, I am…

[Garbled]

[Kellan] Be turned on by what you write, is, like, sort of a mantra that I think.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I think that's true with any emotion that you're trying to provoke in a reader, that you are your own first reader. So I think that's a very natural thing. Not something that people should be ashamed of even though we are constantly told by different forms of media, especially anything that is remotely off of mainstream, that you shouldn't do that thing and should somehow be ashamed of it.

[Kellan] I actually thought I was a little bit odd because I have… I don't like to write the word butt because it's not pretty to me. So I like bum or behind or ass better as like a hotter thing when I'm writing. I'll actually have an editor call me up, and be like, "Do you have a problem with butt?" I'm like, "No. It just… I don't like the way the word looks."

[Mary Robinette] It is not a pretty word on the page. Like with the Regency, I get a lot… It's buttocks.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Yeah, buttocks is almost hotter to me. Or bum is more hot, hotter to me. Behind can be really hot, but then it gets confusing.

[Howard] I've found great uses for it, but they haven't been intimate uses.

[Laughter]

[Kellan] Well, the words I struggle with are always like what do we call testicles. Balls, which is also not like a super sexy word. Then, like, apple, which makes me sound like you're saying you're an apple.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Weird side note. In Icelandic, a euphemism, or a term of endearment, for like when you're looking at a little baby and it's like, "Oh, how cute you are. Aren't you a little ass hole? What a cute little ass hole you are. What a little raisin ass hole."

[Wow]

[Piper] Yeah. The visual that I just had.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, yeah.

[Kellan] Quite…

[Mary Robinette] My gift to you. My gift.

[Dongwon] One thing I was thinking about is something you touched on very briefly before, Kellan. I think there's a way in which… There's a demand and hunger for queer stories, but a lot of times, those queer stories elide over queer bodies. Right? I am also trans and queer myself, and one of the things that I become frustrated with is somehow… Sometimes that metaphoric language, sometimes that fade to black, sometimes being a little bit more clever about how you're describing certain body parts can kind of unintentionally erase the bodies of the people who are being presented on the page. Right? So, how much do you find that that directness is useful or not? I mean, because there's also kind of things where sometimes there are inevitably gender valences attached to certain body parts. That's become complicated.

[Kellan] I got you. I mean, one of the reasons I keep writing very explicit sex scenes, especially for my trans characters and my queer characters, there is this air of like are you exploiting bodies that are already exploited a lot. Like, us trans people, it's very much like the what's in your pants question. I answer that repeatedly because I want these characters to have agency over their bodies. Like, for example, in the novelette I wrote, Small Changes over Long Periods of Time, we have a trans character who… He's a trans man, he calls his clit a clit, he calls it… At one point, like, engorged like a swollen tick. Which is, like, not necessarily something that's like superhot, but, like, is the vibe for him right now. It's like sometimes our bodies, like, do feel like hot, but also kind of weird and gross at the same time. I have this agenda, which is not simply to write sex scenes because I think they're hot, but also because I want other people to think that I'm hot. I want other people to think that people like me are hot, and know that we are having good sex. Like, queer and trans sex is experimental in that we don't learn about it growing up necessarily. We are putting ourselves on the map as we go. I feel so honored to be part of that conversation.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's wonderful. I also think that that segues us really nicely into our homework assignment.

[Kellan] Yes. So, for homework, I would like you to write a character undressing, either alone or with others.

[Mary Robinette] So, you're going to do a little bit of exploration.

[Wolf whistle]

[Whee!]

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/08/21/17-34-developing-subtext/

Key points: Text, subtext, and context. The words on the page, the layer of meaning underneath that, and what's going on around the words. How do you provide the clues to let the reader get the subtext? Body language, character interpretation. The emotional charge in what's being said. On the nose!

[Season 17, Episode 34]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Seven, Developing Subtext.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're between the lines.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. So. We are going to talk about subtext today. I think the very first question I want to ask you, Maurice, is what is subtext?

[Maurice] So, subtext. So, when I think about subtext, so… I'm going to try a math analogy here, so bear with me. So dialogue operates in three dimensions. There is text, subtext, and context. So the way I think about it is text is like the words on the page, subtext is the layer of meaning underneath the words on the page, and context is what's going on around those words. So when I think about subtext… I mean, we all intuitively understand subtext, because if I come home and my wife is on the couch watching TV and I go, "Hey. Is anything wrong?" And she says, "No! Everything's fine!" Like, my Spidey senses are going to go off. Just on an intuitive level. I know something's going on, but the words on the page were "No, everything's fine." Yet I know, because of context and subtext, yeah, maybe everything is not fine. So that's what I think about… That's one way I think about subtext.

[Dan] Yeah. Subtext is very useful in a lot of different ways. There's a lot of things that you can accomplish with it. You can say things without coming right out and saying them. You can have the characters inferring and implying things. You can even get around various censors, is some of the ways that I've used subtext in the past as well. So it's a useful dialogue tool because if you can pack something with a subtext, you can… It becomes very information rich. Right? The same things are being said, but we understand much more than just the words that are being said. So I guess the question is how do you do that? How do you imbue something with this extra hidden meaning?

[Mary Robinette] So I want to use what… The framework that Maurice has already set up, which is that there is the text, subtext, and context. Subtext, and this is important, exists between the text and the context. You cannot have subtext without having context to compare it to. So here's an example which I think I have used before. So I come from the American South, which is what is called a high context region. So high context culturally means that in order to participate in the conversation, you have to have a lot of context, because so much of it happens subtextually. So these are examples like the American South, large parts of Asia, Brazil as I understand it, will have big parts of the conversation that everybody understands, but is not actually said out loud. So, my husband, by contrast, comes from a low context culture which is you just say things directly without much subtext. So here's the actual conversation. My mom says, "There's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." I reply, "Oh, okay, I can have a pie made for dinner tomorrow night." My husband's like, "Wait a minute. Where did the pie come from?" I'm like, "Well, she just said that there's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." Because to me, contextually, this is very clear based on the relationship my mom and I have. All of the subtext in there is "I bought a bag of apples. If you have time to make a pie, it would be really great, but I don't want to put you out." I'm like, "Oh, making a pie sounds awesome. I don't have time or energy tonight, but I could do it tomorrow night." But you only get the pieces of dialogue on either end of that. "There's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen." "Great, I can have a pie for tomorrow night." My husband is like, "Wouldn't… Don't you think she was just offering you an apple?" I'm like, "No. Because then she would have said do you want an apple, or, more likely because high context society, she would have just brought me apples to avoid the other conversation which is would you like an apple? No, thank you, I couldn't. Really, they're very fresh. No, seriously, I just can't take an apple. But these are apples that were picked at my grandmother's farm. Oh, well, in that case, of course I'd love to try an apple." So when you're thinking about this, this subtext, you have to think about the context that goes around it. Because… This is the other fun thing, people will read the subtext based on their cultural understanding of how subtext works. They will bring their own context to the conversation. So if I said to my husband there's a bag of apples on the counter in the kitchen, and he didn't… Well, actually, I would never say that to him because I know that he… Let's be clear, I know that he does not have the context. But, if I were writing a novel and I wanted to make things awkward, then my character would just say that, and then my character would get mad because he didn't read the subtext. Which would be very clear to everyone there. So, thinking about the subtext as the unspoken part that is kind of held in suspension between text and context.

[Dan] Okay. So let me follow this up. Let's say that you were going to put into a book that conversation with your mother. How would you provide the right contextual clues to let a non-Southern audience understand what was really going on?

[Mary Robinette] So this is where you have to use the non-spoken… The other pieces of dialogue. So we've been talking about dialogue as the lines that are said out loud. But there's also all of the other pieces. There's body language, and then there's the character's interpretation of the line that is said. So this is where you would deploy something like free indirect speech where the character interprets it as part of the narrative or… So that my character might think, "Oh, I know that mom really wants a pie. So that's why she's mentioning the apples." Or, actually, if it's free indirect, "She knew that her mother really wanted a pie. She didn't have the energy to do it that night. So she made a counter offer. I could have a pie ready tomorrow night."

[Dan] Awesome.

[Howard] Yeah. In thinking about the pie thing, it occurred to me that the way the apples are described tells you whether or not they are pie apples or eating apples.

[Mary Robinette] In a bag.

[Howard] There's a bag of apples on the counter is pie apples.

[Mary Robinette] In the kitchen.

[Howard] I've… In the kitchen on the counter. Yeah, I've… Bag of apples in the kitchen. I put apples and the fruit basket on the counter is I found some apples that I think you will love and I have set them in this basket and I would love for you to try one because we have this thing about artisanal apples and eating them and whatever. It's the difference between the bag in the basket.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Context.

[Dan] Okay. Let's pause for the book of the week, which, Maurice, this is you this time.

[Maurice] Yeah. So, it's a book… It's not out yet. I believe it comes out early 2023. It's called The Lies of the Ajungo. It's by Moses Ose Utomi. So, it's a novella. I've read this novella twice already. I really love it. I'm just going to read the back cover copy for you real quick. "In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn 13 to appease the terrifying Ajungo empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be 13 in three days, but his parched mother won't last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal. She provides water for his mother, and in exchange, he'll travel out to the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus he begins his quest for salvation for his mother, his city, and himself." The great thing I love about this book is this book moves at the speed of fable. If that makes sense. Moses has a way of just weaving magic into his… All the lines in this book. So, like everything has a certain weight to it, on top of just the lush language that he uses. So I've really enjoyed this book, obviously, twice. It's just I love the magic that it just… This book is just imbued with.

[Dan] Cool. That is The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi. That'll be out next year, in 2023. So look for it then.

[Dan] Okay. So, let's talk some more about subtext. Howard, how are you able to put subtext into the work that you do?

[Howard] In comics, it's actually pretty easy. Because you can have a dialogue bubble whose words disagree with, at least on the surface, the facial expression, the body language, of the character. I didn't have to use words to describe how the character was standing. I can just communicate all of the body language with the dialogue, and the subtext is right there. In prose, it's something that I've had to learn, and it's something that I've actually had to back off of a little bit because I can see… When I'm writing, I can see the way people are talking, the way they're… The things their faces are doing, the things they're doing with their hands, and I have to decide which of it is important and which of it is not. Because I'm capable of describing all of it, but it really slows down a scene when I do that. So, for me, subtext is an exercise in… It's like an exercise in risk reward management. Which of these little bits of body language can I describe for the most impact, and which do I just need to let slide because there isn't enough page.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that you just said that I want to keep up to this is body language and seeing them interact. But sometimes what the subtext is is not a specific line that I just didn't say out loud. Sometimes the subtext is just a mood. That the subtext is this character is annoyed all the way through this scene. Because there's what's called direct versus indirect communication. I referred to this earlier, direct is, "Will you pass the salt?," indirect is, "Is there salt?". Even more indirect is, "Oh, this soup is a little bland." Although…

[Howard] Oh, that's direct.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, that is direct.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Actually, that's… Scratch that. Those are fighting words. Unless you're [garbled]. But thinking about, when you're crafting that subtext, thinking about your character's emotional state is also going to really express… Really help you guide how that happens.

[Maurice] Yeah. So I think…

[Dan] Uh… Oh, okay, go ahead Maurice.

[Maurice] One of the ways I think about subtext is, just like Mary Robinette said, it's like subtext is the emotional charge underneath what's being said. Right? A lot of times, as you're seeing the scene, the characters, they're going to betray what they're really feeling in some subtly different ways. Right? What… Again, I'm a TV junkie, but one of the shows I watch, one of the police procedural's I watch which really helped me out a lot in this was a show called… It only lasted like three seasons… Called Lie to Me. It was based on a book by Paul Ekman. I think he wrote a book called Telling Lies. But it's all about micro-expressions. Right? So, just watching how they would explain how micro-expressions work, all of a sudden I'm just like, "Oh. Hang on." So now I am getting to see just the direct correlation between what the body betrays about what a person's really feeling and now I'm able to convey that in the text. So for us as writers, it's like oh, I don't need as many dialogue tags if I'm writing their physical reaction to something. What was their physical reaction? What was their facial expression? What other kind of body language are they betraying with what's being said in the moment? So that's one of the things that helped a lot.

[Mary Robinette] So, while we're talking about this, I actually want to talk about the opposite of subtext, which is on the nose. Because one of the flaws that you'll see sometimes with early career writers or published writers to is that you'll read something and be like, "Wow, that's really on the nose dialogue." What that means is that the character is saying exactly what they're thinking in the moment without any subtext at all. It is exactly serving the plot in that moment. There's no tension, there is no… It's just statements…

[Howard] There's nothing to unpack.

[Mary Robinette] That are not… There's nothing to unpack at all. It's fine for a character to do that occasionally. But if you have a string of it, where everyone is doing that, that's where you wind up with on the nose dialogue.

[Dan] Yeah. The… Both on the nose dialogue and subtext can be very useful tools culturally. So for… A good example of on the nose being very good, I just watched a movie from India called RRR. It's about two guys, two revolutionaries in the early 1900s in India who end up meeting each other. Then there's a song, because it's an Indian movie and they have songs. They have a whole song where the lyrics are as on the nose as it could be. These two guys just met each other, now they're best friends. Even though one of them is secretly working against the other one and doesn't realize it. Like it's… The whole plot of the movie just described to you by a guy singing a song. Culturally, that's really valuable, because I don't… I'm not a part of that culture. There are nuances to their interaction into their relationship that I would have missed without that song to say, "Hey. Gringo who's watching this, let me explain some stuff to you." At the same time, subtext can be really useful for cultural reasons as well. Some of the write-for-hire stuff that I have written… In one, for example, I wanted to make two of the characters gay and they did not let me for corporate reasons. They're like, "No. We will not allow that. We're not going to have gay characters." So I was able to make them clearly gay in subtext so that someone looking for it will be able to see it and someone who doesn't want that in their fiction doesn't have it. That kind of stuff is so useful as a way of giving your audience the kind of stuff that they need. The ability to see yourself in fiction, especially for marginalized groups, often comes through subtext because we can't say it out loud.

[Mary Robinette] Just, again, to underline what Dan is talking about, the thing is that those clues are there for someone who has the right context, and is looking for it.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] But for someone who does not live in that context, they aren't there. Also, I think that we should all acknowledge that the corporate overlords are in the wrong in that particular case.

[Dan] Absolutely. That was the subtext of my statement. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I was saying the quiet part out loud for you.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Very on the nose.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So. Let's slide into our homework. I want you to… We're going to force you to develop subtext. I want you to take a work in progress… If you want to grab that transcript that we had earlier, that's also fine. But grab a scene with dialogue where you understand what's going on in that scene. As a writing exercise, I want you to just delete every third line, regardless of who's saying it, regardless of how important it is. I just want you to delete every third line. Then go back and try to use nonverbal cues to make the dialogue still make sense.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.30: Know Your Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/24/17-30-know-your-characters/

Key points: How do you know your characters? Exterior, physical characteristics, versus interior, how do they think or feel, what internal forces guide them. Dialogue is an outward expression of attitudes and thoughts. Watch for the collision between character and authorial intent. What questions do you ask your characters to help you separate their speaking? Quirks, speech patterns, ways of seeing the world. Background and attitude or emotional state. Be aware of the context that you need to provide to make prose dialogue clear.

[Season 17, Episode 30]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Two, Know Your Characters.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're dumb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

[Dan] Okay, this is about knowing your characters, not your tagline.

[Maurice] Correct.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] And you are both busy and in a hurry, so let's get right into this. We want to talk about knowing your characters. If you want to write good dialogue, you gotta know who's speaking. So, how do we get to know our characters, Maurice?

[Maurice] Well, I tend to think of it in terms of sort of mining out the exterior versus mining out their interior. So, it's like when I think of exterior, I think of like physical things about them, in terms of like their age, or… Let's see. Oh, yeah. Just age and physical characteristics, things like that. The [garbled]… And, in fact, like nationality, origins, culture, those I consider sort of external elements to the character. As opposed to their interiority, which is how do they think, how do they feel, what are their philosophies, what are the internal forces that guide them. I'm fascinated with this whole idea of what Howard talked about earlier about the DTR. [Define The Relationship, Episode 28] So I was hoping he'd jump right in right about now.

[Howard] Well, let me say this. If you were going to define… If you were going to try to write dialogue that sounds like Howard, a couple of the character attributes that I consciously try to apply to myself are I am more inclined to make fun of myself than to make fun of other people and I never make fun of other people unless I know them and know that they can tell that I am joking. So if you were to write Howard dialogue where Howard says something really mean-spirited to someone he just met, that would sound out of character. So that's the sort of thing… It doesn't matter that I'm 54 years old or way 230 pounds and I'm happy with weighing… None of that matters with the dialogue. What matters is how am I going to speak to other people in a way that sounds true to who I am.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing in the Regency which longtime listeners will have heard me say before that manners are an outward expression of your opinion of others. One of the things about dialogue is that it is an outward expression. So when you are having two characters speaking to each other, when your character is speaking, what they are revealing is their own attitudes and thoughts. It's not just… It's a way of exposing how they are perceiving those around them. Not just by what they're saying but by the way they are saying it.

[Pause]

[Mary Robinette] And I've stopped the conversation completely. Perfect.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] I was just thinking… I'm processing all that. So it's one of those things where it's like all right, so. I'm trying… Start off with the Howard thing, because I'm like, "What would it be like to write Maurice as a character?" So that's been like a weird mental exercise, because it's like, all right. So I am black. Spoilers for anyone who didn't know that, by the way. So that is going to affect how I operate in certain contexts. It shouldn't, but it does in a lot of ways. Because I'm going to… I mean, even right now, there's a light version of that going on right now, even though I'm friends with all of you. I'm also in podcast performance mode, as opposed to oh, I'm hanging out with my boys mode. Right? So there's that aspect, which is feeding into how I'm coming across in terms of what I'm saying. But then there's the internal stuff that's going on too, the stuff that informs me in terms of what are my aspirations, what are my insecurities. That's going to weigh in how I frame certain things, in how I want to come across versus how I do come across. Right? So that's that balance of the interior and exterior that I was talking about.

[Howard] There's the collision between that information and what Mary Robinette has described as authorial intent. In the Shafter's Shifters cozy mysteries I'm writing, I have five mean characters. It's an ensemble. Often, all five of them are in the room with someone else. I have to remember that authorial intent, I want to move the story forward here, intersects the fact that each one of these characters may have a question that… There's information that they need or there's an objective that they're after, and they will interrupt. They will participate in the conversation, they will turn it from a dialogue into a trialogue or a quadalogue or whatever. I'm breaking the word dialogue, I'm sorry. I shouldn't do that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But it gets very confusing because when you have that many voices, if they're not distinct, you have to start using dialogue tags. Now the page gets cluttered. Now it starts to slow down. And now I flip back to authorial intent and ask myself, "Do I get to override what I know those characters want in order to make this scene function the way I want it to function?" It's challenging.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Maurice] So I think… Oh, go ahead, Mary.

[Mary Robinette] No, no, no, you go ahead.

[Maurice] Well, so one of the things I… So along those lines then, so I think there's one part where we're figuring out… Each individual character, what they want, in terms of what they want to accomplish in the story, what they're trying to figure out, that sort of thing. But there's also that… That kind… You have to sort of like figure out what is their relationship to each other character, also. It's almost like a separate column.

[Meow]

[Maurice] Right?

[Mary Robinette] There's a kitty.

[Maurice] There is one. She can always sense when I'm on a podcast.

[Meow]

[Mary Robinette] It's purrfect. So, this is another great example of dialogue, and how when you're trying to get to know a character, sometimes having them interrupted by something unexpected is a way to expose stuff about a character. Dialogue is rarely totally linear. So sometimes having something happen like a random cat walking through, having a waiter interrupt a conversation, can help shift the conversation. It can also help you understand more about that character. The… Going back to something that…

[Howard] Maurice?

[Beep… Beep… Beep]

[Mary Robinette] So, for instance, Maurice, when confronted by a cat, reaches down and pets the cat. Howard, when confronted with a beeping alarm, has walked away from his microphone and into another room. Both of these things expose different things not only about the interruption, but about the way the character reacts to that. So…

[Dan] Now I am going to interrupt all of you.

[Mary Robinette] Fine. Fine. I mean… Oh, of course, Dan. Please do what you must.

[Dan] Maurice, what's our book of the week?

[Maurice] Our book of the week is… What is it? Oh, shoot. The Ballad of…uhm... Let me think. I'm sorry.

[Dan] The Ballad of Perilous Graves.

[Maurice] Thank you. This cat is all over the place right now.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] It's by Alex Jennings, and I just started this book, but I'm falling in love with this book. It's New Orleans, it's music, it's magic. Alex really put his foot in it. Which… Oh, yeah, which is a good thing. Trust me on that. But it's just… You have this world of magic that's going on and… Uh. I'm sorry, this cat is killing me right now. But I've just started this book. I'm falling in love with what Alex has done in terms of creating the magic and tying it in with music in this world.

[Howard] That's The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings.

[Maurice] Yes.

[Dan] Fantastic.

[Howard] And what's the name of the cat?

[Maurice] Ferb.

[Mary Robinette] Ferb. Oh, that's great.

[Maurice] As in Phineas and Ferb.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Yes. At some point during this, we will be visited by Elsie as well.

[Mary Robinette] So I want to tie us back into some concrete tools based on something that Maurice talked about in the first episode, which is thinking about questions to ask about your character. I talked about the interiority of the character, the… What the… Their manner exposing what they think about other people. But the way they express themselves is not just that attitude. It is also about their culture, their nationality, their class, their age, what their home language is… Language or languages. So if you think about these things when you are sitting down to approach that dialogue… Patrick Stewart is going to say things in a very, very different way than Woody Harrelson. Well, did I just get the actor's name right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, good. Good job, me.

[Dan] You did, assuming you were talking about Woody Harrelson.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, I was.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] But they have enormously different approaches to the way they would say something. Dan, one of the things that I love about the way you handle dialogue and characterization in the John Cleaver books is with Marcy and the way we can tell who is kind of present at any given moment. Do you want to talk about some of the tools you use for doing that?

[Dan] Oh, boy. First of all, thank you. Yeah, so I assume you're referring most specifically to books four and five?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] In which Brooke is essentially possessed not by an actual spirit or person, but by a vast backlog of memories that have been downloaded and different ones will take over her personality at different times. I gave her, first of all, a set number of people who would be in charge. Typically we will get Brooke, we will get Nobody who is a demon, we will get… I can't remember the name, but there was a medieval woman who appears a few times, and then eventually Marcy shows up. So, knowing first of all, knowing your characters, knowing who the main personalities were going to be, me to give them specific quirks. Different speech patterns. We have the two modern girls, Brooke and Marcy, who I had already written several books about and I knew them well and they were very different people. Then we had the medieval one, who of course spoke in a different way. She had a child, she had very different life experiences than the others, that allowed her to speak in… Use different words, notice different things about the world, ask questions about the world because she came from a different time, things like that. Then, of course, the demon, Nobody, who is again someone that I had known fairly well. She is very acerbic, very biting, very aggressive, but also incredibly and deeply broken, and kind of flawed as a person. She hates yourself, and that's kind of the root of the whole problem that drives the book for about… Or drives the whole series for about three books in a row. So making sure that they all had these very distinctly different ways of viewing the world meant that as soon as one of them popped up, they had a different relationship with John, so that they would refer to him by different names or they would use different tags, different vocabulary, when they were talking to him, when they were talking about him. They would ask different kinds of questions. That made it relatively easy, after the giant amount of work that you've put in.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then it's relatively easy to use those tools once you've built them and put them on the wall. To say, "Oh, well, this is clearly Marcy who's talking right now."

[Mary Robinette] So, just to recap, what we're talking about there is knowing the background of your character and also generally speaking their attitude or I guess emotional state at any given moment.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Which is why when I'm building characters, I'm always trying to focus in on… Well, not always, but there's like a series of questions I tend ask each of my characters. Like, what is your dream, what's a traumatic experience, what is… What's your greatest fear. These sort of questions. So I can just get a feel for who they are. Then, in essence, writing dialogue boils down to knowing your characters so well that you can drop them into any situation and you're just going to know how they're going to respond. You know how they're going to speak in that given situation.

[Dan] Yeah. I have found lately, and there's actually… We could talk about this for an hour, so I will give you the truncated version. Most of what I have written over the past several years, and everything that I have published over the last several years, has been audio drama scripts rather than prose novels. That has caused me to think about dialogue differently. Not that I have learned new things that are… That make my novels different or better. In fact, it often is more difficult. When you're writing an audio drama, there are no dialogue tags. You are relying on different voice actors to convey the idea that this is a different person. So there's no tags, there's no narrative… No editorializing, he said, suspiciously. Things like that. Some of the little tricks that we use when we're writing prose I absolutely can't do when I'm writing scripts. So, being forced to strip the dialogue down, removing all context from it, removing all commentary from it, so it is just words and voices and nothing else actually made it hard to come back to novels because I'd forgotten how to do some of that stuff. But also really forced me to get into their heads and make sure that when you heard somebody speak, it was different words. I had to find other identifiers aside from dialogue tags and adverbs and so on and so on.

[Mary Robinette] This is a really great thing to underline here. Prose dialogue and scripted dialogue, anything with an actor, are not the same thing. It's two different toolsets. It's not just that you can't use the things in prose to go into scripts, it's that when you are writing for an actor, they're going to do some of the lifting for you. You can give them a line that is… Would be ambiguous on the page and trust that they will have done their character homework and come to it and give it a spin. Like, you can just say, "What?" And they can find five different ways to say it, one of which is going to be completely appropriate for the character. But if you just put the word what on the page, there's so much ambiguity there that it's not… It's the kind of thing that you maybe due deeper into a novel when the reader is doing that lifting for you. But it's not something that you can get away with in a short story or the beginning of a book where the reader doesn't yet know that character. So learning… I've seen a number of things that I've gotten from an early career writer where it's clear that they have learned their dialogue from watching media. Because of all of the ambiguity that's inherent in it. Because it doesn't… Because it's dialogue that would work great for an actor because you left space for the actor to do their job, but it doesn't work on the page. Because there's no one there to provide that context for you.

[Dan] With that, we're going to go into our homework. Our homework is me today. This is something that I have talked about before, but it is something that I still do all the time. When you're trying to figure out who a character is, write a monologue. Pick one of the characters that you're working on in a work in progress or something like that, and write something. I have done job interviews, I have done just straight let me tell you who I am. Let that character talk for a page or two and just tell you about themselves. This doesn't have to be part of the story. It can just be the character speaking, breaking the fourth wall, telling you what kind of character they are. Whatever it is, write a monologue in which a character talks about themselves. Let that kind of… Use that to discover the character and get to know them better. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/22/16-34-novels-are-layer-cakes/

Key Points: A novel is like a layer cake? Well, layers of information. Revision helps! Also pre-work can help. Spontaneity is not creativity. Structure also helps. Make sure you are starting the story in the right place, but also make sure we have context. Use tiny flashbacks. Manipulate the POV. Use free indirect speech. Mostly, think about how you want to layer the information, what's important, what order to present it in, and how to slide it in there.

[Season 16, Episode 34]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Novels Are Layer Cakes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] Okay. So, we're talking about novels as layer cakes. Which may initially sound a little confusing. But, this is one of the central metaphors I think about when I think about what makes a novel a novel that's distinct from a short story or a novella or a novelette. The thing about a novel is it requires more complexity, because you're sustaining a narrative over so long, there need to be so many more different aspects going. So you want layers to be present at almost every point. Especially in an opening scene. I'm not just talking about like two layers of a birthday cake. Ideally, you want like a Mille-Feuille, one of those crêpe cakes that's like layer after layer after layer…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] That gives you that kind of information density in that kind of character and world building and all those elements. We've talked about individual pieces of how to do that so far. But this is really how do you weave all of that into one coherent whole, while still maintaining the distinction of that lamination. We're turning into the great British Bake-Off here. I'm sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I've gotta tell y'a, when I think of layer cakes, I… Sandra makes cakes from time to time. You take the cake pan and you make a bunch of different layers. You saw the tops off of them to make them stack flat. Then I think of the episode of British baking show where they were trying to make dobos tortes with bazillions of little layers. I look at that and think, "No, I'm sorry. That has to be done by a machine and a computer. That is not possible for a human being to make that cake." I know there are many people who look at the way novels are constructed and to step back and see all of that layering and all of that construction and have that same reaction. "I'm sorry. That had to be done by a computer and a machine. No human being can hold all that in their head."

[Dongwon] Yeah. With… We were talking about tell don't show, we kind of touched on this a little bit, but I think this is a case where thinking about movies and TV and visual media is really useful to think about how to layer all this different kinds of information. You're absorbing worldbuilding, you're absorbing character, you're absorbing some of the thematic elements, right? If it… If a scene is lit in a menacing way, it's like, okay, we're in a thriller. If they're wearing Regency dresses, we know the time period and we know the class of the person we are looking at. If the background behind them is an office, then we know what kind of story we're in. So there's automatically many, many more layers in a single shot of film than there is in a book by… As a default. So what you need to think about is how do I start working all that other information that I would get if this were a movie into the text. You have a laser like control over the focus of the reader, so you can show us bit by bit. The downside is you have to do that deliberately. You can't just rely on us passively absorbing that information.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of this will come down to word choice, specificity, I mean, all of the different things that we've been talking about for the past several weeks. You're trying to manipulate all of those at the same time. It's what is the character noticing, what order do you feed that information to the reader, which pieces are you telling versus which pieces are you showing. Is this sentence a long sentence or a short sentence? What is my word choice here? Am I going to say, "Pulled out of a chair," or "jerked out of a chair"? Because those are two different things. This is… This is complicated. I will disagree slightly with Dongwon because this is also something that you do with short stories, and in many cases, it is more vital because you have less space. But I understand… But the layers of plot that you have to deal with in a short story are not as many as you have to deal with in a novel. This is, for me, one of the biggest differences and the thing to think about regardless in some ways if you are writing a short story or novel. That first page is framing the thing that you're getting into. In a short story, you're framing a small thing, and it's like, this is the emotional punch that you're going to get. But in a novel, you're framing something that has multiple different emotional punches that you're going to get. You're going to have multiple plot threads. How do you tell the reader, kind of, which of these is the thing that… Like, which one do you introduce as, "Here. This is the thing I'm drawing a line under. This is the story that you're going to be in on." Because you have to make that choice. Is this a coming-of-age? Yes. Is this also an epic adventure? Yes. Where do you start?

[Dongwon] Yeah. I'm going to say, actually, I'm in complete agreement with Mary Robinette. When I say that a short story has fewer layers, I purely mean in terms of character arcs and plot lines. When that information density, I don't care what you're writing, you're going to need to make sure each word, each sentence, is doing as much work as it can, while maintaining crystal clarity for the reader.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to emphasize the importance of revision.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] For this. Because, like Howard was talking about, if you're making a layer cake, most of the time you're making several different cakes in several different batches and then you're combining them together later on. I'm… I don't think that you have to do that with writing. I'm not going to say that you can't, because I'm sure that there are people who do. But what I do do is I will write out… The first draft is often just focused entirely on plot or on character. Then I have to go back through multiple revisions and say now I'm going to add in the other parts.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now I'm going to emphasize more of the description… Now I'm going to do another revision pass to really drill into internal monologue and emotion. It does take… You're going to have to get a lot of cake pans dirty by the end of this revision process.

[Dongwon] Your first draft is going to look more like Nailed It! than British Bake-Off, and that's okay.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Well, so… Continuing our cake metaphor. So, first of all, I do the same thing that Dan does. I do multiple passes. The second thing is, right now I am reading… And this is not our book of the week. I'm reading Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage, which is about making. In the entire time I'm reading it, I'm like, "Oh, dear Lord, this is about writing a novel… Or this is about writing." In the midst of it, he talks about making a cake, and that one of the things that, in general, you want to do while making is to set yourself up for success with your pre-work, and that chefs go in and they lay out all of… Here's the bowls that I'm going to need. Here are the ingredients that I'm going to need. They measure things. It feels like it's so much more work, but it in many ways will go faster. It can often feel like, "Oh! But my creativity!"

[Whem]

[Mary Robinette] But what we're talking about here is, with this idea of a layer cake, and especially when you're learning the tools, it's okay to learn, like, one tool at a time. When you… When we're talking about pre-work, that doesn't necessarily have to mean, oh, you're going to outline everything. Oh, you're going to do all your world building ahead of time. What we're talking about is the number of iterations it takes you to get to a product that you're happy with. So sometimes you have fewer drafts, because you've done a lot of pre-work. Sometimes you have multiple drafts, because that is the process that you particularly enjoy going through in order to get to that layer cake. You may only have one bowl in your kitchen. So you have to mix that bowl and then clean it, and then mix the next bowl and then clean it. You may have a ton of bowls, so you can lay it all out. Everybody's kitchen is different, everybody's brain is different. Every cake that you bake, every book that you write, every short story… All of these are different. But the point of it is to remember that there are layers, that there are multiple ingredients that you have to be managing.

[Howard] If there's one thing that has stuck with me after 20 years of Schlock Mercenary, from beginning to finally ending the whole thing, it's that I cannot afford to conflate spontaneity with creativity. Those are not the same thing. Spontaneity is fine, and it has its place. But creativity is never being throttled by me imposing a structure. It's being funneled, it's being channeled, it's being directed. It's… I love having a structure, and so the layering of things in a novel is incredibly helpful. The current work in progress… I had about a 4000 word scene which I couldn't make work all at once because the voice had to be consistent, but the voice is kind of tiring. It's that noir detective sort of lots of humorous metaphors, lots of weird extensions. Can't be maintained well by the reader. I realized that, "Oh, wait. This is… I wanted to use this to frame some of the other characters. What happens if I carve it into chunks?" What happens if I make separate cake pans and saw the tops off of it and then use… I call it a common tone modulation, where the theme of one scene kind of introduces the theme of the next one, even though something has changed. As I began assembling that, yeah, there's no spontaneity anymore, but the creative fire is raging, because now I can see how it needs to be built.

[Mary Robinette] Let's pause for our book of the week. When we come back, what I'd love for us to do is… We've talked now about the importance, and I'd love for us when we come back to talk about some of the hows, of how to do that. So, Dan, I think you have the book of the week this time.

[Dan] Yes. So, our book of the week is Legend by Marie Lu. Marie Lu is an absolutely incredible science fiction writer. This book is a kind of a YA dystopia. It's about 10-ish years old from back when YA dystopias were all the rage. This one has stood the time better than most, I think. It's called Legend, like I said. I wish I had the time to read you like the entire first page. But I'm just going to read you the first two sentences.

My mother thinks I'm dead. Obviously, I'm not dead, but it's safer for her to think so.

[Wow]

[Dan] That says… Tells you so much. It is asking you compelling questions. It's introducing elements of the character. It goes on in the next paragraph, if I had time to read that, just lays out incredible detail about the world that this takes place in. There is so much density of information, while also being incredibly compelling and readable. It's a wonderful book. It's called Legend by Marie Lu.

[Dongwon] So, as Mary Robinette mentioned, I do want to talk about some of the mechanics, about how you make this work. I think when I'm in writing workshops the thing that I see most commonly, like the feedback I'm giving like 60 or 70% of the time is I think you're starting the story in the wrong place. This kind of goes back to what we were saying about the earlier mistakes is often… Or the common mistakes is I often see that the story's starting too early. It's starting before interesting things are happening. Now the problem is if you jump into when interesting things are happening, we don't have context. Which leads to the common mistake of the gunfight problem where then you're like, "What's going on? Why do I care about all this?" The solution, for me, is that layer cake. Right? So you can start when things are kicking off, you can start in the heart of the inciting incident, and then you manipulate the timeline. You don't have to go straight A, B, C, D. You can start at C, and then tell us about A, right? You can layer in those tiny flashbacks. They don't have to be big scenes. They can be a sentence. It's like, "Oh. Yeah. When I woke up today, I wasn't expecting this." Right? You can layer those things in to give us the context of where this character comes from, what do they care about, and then introduce stakes that may not be immediate to this scene. Like, the stakes of the scene is I need to get out of this gunfight because my sister needs to go to school today. Right? I don't know what book I've just written here…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But it's something, right?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, that sounds like Jade City, actually.

[Dongwon] Kind of. Actually. Right? Like, if the character cares about something, then suddenly I, the reader, care about this gunfight. I think when you think about how do I change the timeline, I think you can get a lot more of that density in and start layering those elements in from sentence to sentence, from clause to clause, and really get all of that information into my brain much faster than if you did it sequentially.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other piece of that when you're dealing with that kind of thing, one of your best tools for stacking that information is the manipulation of POV. So, we have talked a lot about all of the things that make… In previous episodes, about all of the things that make a point of view. If you go back to the very first episode that I appear on, which is episode… What was it?

[Howard] Three, 14.

[Mary Robinette] Three, 14. Right. Because it's pi. In which I talk about puppetry and focus and breath and internal motivation and all of those things. All of those pieces are the things that make up POV. But the other piece of POV that you have to manipulate is the showing versus telling, the describing versus demonstrating. It's basically are you… You can pull back and go a little omniscient for a moment. You can go deep in. Those moments, those choices that you make, allow you to layer information in. Within that, one of my favorite tools is free indirect speech. Where you can have the narrator basically just say something to the reader, even if it's in third person. So, this example is from Wikipedia, which actually has a great explanation of what free indirect speech is. So, quoted or direct speech would be:

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And what pleasure have I found since I came into this world," he asked.

Whereas free indirect speech is something more like:

"He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found since he came into this world?

So, that thought just goes straight into the text. You can do so much with that to layer in information. She picked up the knife. Her grandfather had given it to her. That's just like, "Ah, I picked up the knife. Ah, my grandfather gave this to me." That slows us down. It's popping in and out. So, these are the kinds of things that you can be thinking about and manipulating when you're playing with that opening.

[Dongwon] I'm going to give another very highfalutin literary example here, but if you ever have the chance, go take a look at Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. There's a very famous scene of Clarissa walking down a street. There's like somebody's doing sky writing and she uses that to slide from POV to POV to POV in this scene as you move through the crowd. You really jump… Like, someone will make eye contact, and then suddenly you'll be in that character's head. It's a master class in how you can use POV to build out a complete scene, and the balance between telling and showing. Of telling us a piece of information about another person, dropping into their mind to see how they see the world, and then sliding back out into someone else's POV. If you want to think about how powerful shifting that perspective can be in building out a narrative, both in terms of using free indirect speech in terms of subjective experience and seeing things from different angles in that Rashomon style, even that one scene, if you don't read the whole book, I think is an enormously instructive thing to take a look at.

[Mary Robinette] So, we are now at the point where we are at our final homework. Dongwon has this for us. But I'm actually going to tag on at the end of it with a trick. So this is going to be a tagteam homework, and he has no idea that I'm doing this. This is information that I probably should have layered in earlier.

[Dongwon] Well, I'm also calling an audible and I'm going to shift what the homework is. So we're going to see if our two plans line up right here.

[Mary Robinette] Okay, then.

[Dan] [Oooo]

[Dongwon] So, I think the thing I want you to do is actually to delete your entire first scene from your draft. I mean, save it somewhere else. Put it under a different name, don't throw out your draft. But I want you to start from word one for that first scene and rewrite it using all of the tools that we've talked about here. I want you to think about the exercises you've done up to this point rewriting that scene using all those different tools, characters' interiority, that sort of narrative description, describing the world building and setting. Then redo it and try and think about how am I go to layer all these techniques into a single whole? How do you make that cake feel more complete using these tools?

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. I am going to tag onto that, that once you've done that, but I want you to do is I want you to revise it. I want you to tighten it. The way I want you to do that is I want you to go through and highlight which things you really need the reader to know and make sure that they are in the right order. Then I'm going to see if you can fit them into a single paragraph. So what you're going to do is… This is an editing technique that I call one phrase per concept or one sentence per concept. So each concept, you're like, "Okay. They absolutely have to know that there are dragons and the dragons can talk. They absolutely have to know that this is 1950s. They absolutely have to know that I'm at a girls' boarding school." Okay, so that gives me four sentences. Then you get one more sentence for tone. Because tone is incredibly important. That is also a piece of information that the reader has. This is just an editing exercise. Then your final thing is probably going to be somewhere in between those two. But that is a way to start really, really thinking about which layer is important to you as you start your novel.

[Dongwon] I think these two homeworks dovetail beautifully. I think, by the time you're done with it, you'll have a killer first page that's going to work great for you.

[Mary Robinette] So, now you are really and truly out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.33: Tell, Don't Show

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/15/16-33-tell-dont-show/

Key points: Show, don't tell originated in silent films, where the choice was between showing you a visual image or letting you read a title card. However, storytelling inherently has a certain amount of telling. It's a balance between telling and showing. Especially in the opening pages of a book, the writer needs to tell the reader a lot of information for context. Consider it as describing and demonstrating. Or consider it as controlling pacing and emotional distance. You can interweave telling and showing. Show us the good parts, and tell us the other parts. Some of this is the order of information being presented.

[Season 16, Episode 33]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Tell, Don't Show.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're going to tell you stuff.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm not going to show you that I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Well, fine then. As we start off this…

[Dan] Thank goodness.

[Mary Robinette] I want to actually talk about where the advice tell… Or show, don't tell comes from. This actually comes from silent films.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, this is important to understand…

[Dan] A slightly outmoded art form.

[Mary Robinette] As a writer. What this advice originated from is what the reader wants to see is characters doing stuff and action happening. What they don't want is to have to read a bunch of title cards. So, if you can give us information embedded in the scene, that is significantly better than having a title card or having a whole bunch of things at the beginning that your character has… Your reader has to wade through before they get to the meat of the thing. So that's where show, don't tell comes from. But in fact, we are storytellers, so… A certain amount of telling is kind of baked into our process.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah, the thing I always think about is that a novel is mostly the writer just telling you stuff. Because there's too much thing… Stuff, there's too many things that happen in a novel or you to show every single component of it. Right? So I think show, don't tell is really useful advice, but for a 101 level writer. For an introductory writer. When you're just getting started, you need to learn how to make sure that things are seen on the page that reinforce the stuff that you're telling us. But the reality is, it's a balance. There's a lot of telling and a lot of showing. I think when you're in the opening pages of a book, there's so much information that I as a reader need to understand anything. This kind of goes back to our start it with dialogue thing, that if you tell me some stuff first, then I have the context to engage with the dialogue that you're putting up on the page. So I think there are ways in which you can tell us a lot of information. Think about Hill House. That whole first paragraph is just Shirley Jackson telling us about this house. I think that informs everything that's going to come after that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… This has been true for all of the things that we're doing. But frequently what they're doing is that everything is doing double duty. It is both just flat out telling you. I was arrested. That's just flat out telling you. I was arrested. He then proceeds to show the arrest. Yes. But he's not playing coy with the information. It's like this is the important thing, this is the thing that I want you to understand. A lot of times, I think that we internalize this show don't tell so thoroughly that a writer feels like if they just come out and tell the reader something, that they have in some way diminished the surprise, the anticipation of whatever it is.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Using my own novel as an example, the opening of Calculating Stars is, "Do you remember where you were when the meteor hit?" I'm like flat out telling you a meteor is going to hit. A meteorite is going to hit. Before we get into the rest of what's going on. So it's totally okay to just tell people things. He said, she said. That's just telling people stuff.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] The best example I've found for… In support of show don't tell in novel form was a draft I read in which a conversation, a big, detailed conversation between two characters, we are told the summary of the conversation. It is bookended by very specific dialogue, meaningless dialogue, from the pilot about bringing the spaceship into dock. I remember reading that and thinking, "You showed me the completely uninteresting bits, and you told me what happened in the part that I wanted to see." So that felt upside down. But yeah, for the most part, we are tellers, and we tell a lot.

[Dan] I like to use different words for these. Telling and showing, because we are primarily a nonvisual medium, don't have as much meaning as they would in, for example, silent film. So, I like to talk about instead describing and demonstrating. Like Dongwon said, there's a big balance between them. That you need to do both of them. Some things need to be described, and some things need to be demonstrated on the page so that we can see them in action and understand why we should care about them. But using… How to use those two tools is really valuable.

[Mary Robinette] I also use different words when I'm talking about it. Because for me, the decision about showing or telling is about controlling two specific things, the pacing and my emotional distance from the character. So the more I unpack something and take time with it and dwell on it, the kind of closer I am to the character's head. That doesn't mean that my sentences have to get long. Like in the Tom Reacher, that's… We are very deeply in the character's head, but everything's short and punchy. So for me, it's about immediacy versus distance from the character, or unpacking or compressing something. If time passes, frequently, I'm just going to tell you, a lot of time passed. I'm not going to make you, like, live through that.

[Dongwon] I think also one block that people have is they think right here, this paragraph, I'm telling somebody something. This next scene, I'm showing. Then I'm going to tell, then I'm going to show. I think that is… I think the Dan thing really helps disrupt that, because what you're really doing is sliding from showing and telling sentence to sentence, even, like, clause to clause in a sentence. When you have dialogue, Howard kind of hinted at this a little bit, but you can have one person say something and then tell us, "And they said that their day was great." You know what I mean? Or tell, "And then she told me about her day and her morning, and some interesting stuff happened, but mostly it was boring." Right? Like, you can skip over the boring parts of it, but then show us the interactions that matter. Right? So, think of these as tools to be used in a very interwoven, very integrated way. Not one block of that and then one big block of that.

[Howard] It's also useful to think about this kind of the way the MPAA handles content ratings. If you show the splash of blood and gibbets and gore, you've got an R rating. If you show the moment leading up to that, and then the camera pulls away and someone talks about what happened, you have a different rating and the viewer has a different experience. So you, as the writer, by controlling the position of the camera can do some things with content that might otherwise be extremely triggery, extremely graphic, whatever, and handle it in a different way, because it's your book. You show us what you want to show us, and tell us the parts that you don't want us to stare at.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that, may we tell you about our book of the week?

[Dan] That is my opportunity this week to talk about Jade City by Fonda Lee. This is the first in a series, a fantasy series, that I didn't quite know what to expect going into it. It is kind of an epic fantasy about two crime families, basically, in an Asian inspired fantasy world. But in… It's a modern version of that. It is… It's set in like a modern-day style city. The very first paragraph has ceiling fans that took me completely by surprise because I was expecting something more traditional fantasy. The language in the book is incredible. The characters are enormously compelling. The setting is really well drawn and fascinating. It's absolutely wonderful. There's a whole series attached to it, so please go read Jade City by Fonda Lee.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to second that, because I blurbed it. I think I described it as the Godfather meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Because it's all of those things, plus all of the stuff that you love from martial arts wireworks as a magic system. It's so good.

[Dongwon] Fonda herself talks about that book as the Godfather with kung fu, right? That's absolutely the premise. I will also point out that Jade Legacy, book 3 in the series, is out this November and I cannot wait.

[Dan] Well, let me use this as an example of what we're talking about with tell, don't show. Because it is entirely about kind of two warring crime families. There's No Peak and there's Mountain, and they're fighting for control over the city. In order to understand that battle, we need to understand how the city functions and how the magic works and all of that. So it begins with what I suppose is technically a prologue, but feels just like chapter 1 of two thieves who are trying to steal a bunch of Jade from a kind of low level criminal. Because they are outside of the system, we're not getting all of the high level ramifications of what's going on. We're getting the very low level jade is important, this is why, this is what it can do, this is why we want it. So it's just really kind of telling us… It's describing to us what is important and why. Then it is demonstrating to us what the magic can do and what it is like to live in the city, all at the same time. It's a brilliant opening.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I mean, she tells us that Jade is important, that the clans are important, how the jade magic works, and how the culture in the city works. She's telling us all those things. Then, immediately reinforces it by showing us the moment of these two petty criminals walking to this restaurant to try and rip off this like mid-level boss, and just everything is a disaster, as you can expect, in a totally delightful, like, very Breaking Bad style way of, like, all these dominoes falling. But it's such an opportunity to set up the thing by telling you, reinforce it by showing you, and then telling you the next thing, when you see the consequences of the first thing happening, right? This is a try fail cycle used to demonstrate worldbuilding. It's a master class in my opinion. The other thing I wanted… I'm sorry, go on.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, we should probably talk about other things besides the book, even though I will… I was… Because I was just about to say, "And also…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, and then in this part…

[Dongwon] We could go on forever about this book. The other thing I want to talk about though, is… I think it's so interesting that Mary Robinette pointed out that the origins of show, don't tell are rooted in silent film. Because I think the way in which… The amount of visual media that we all consume today I think has made show, don't tell really run off the rails in terms of writing fiction, which is a nonvisual medium. Right, as Dan said. The problem with show and tell is we think of it as here's a scene of two characters talking and then here's a voiceover, and that's the telling. We think of telling as the artificial voiceover. In film, that's often a cheap trick. In film, that is a shortcut to giving us information for a variety of reasons. So what we instead need to remember is that when we are looking at a visual image, we are absorbing enormous amounts of information that aren't on the page. We can see the characters' faces, we can see their expressions, we can see what they're wearing, we can see the furniture behind them. Right? You don't need to describe that ceiling fan. If I just saw the opening shot of a movie version of Jade City, I would know, yeah, this is the 1970s. Yeah, there's technology. Yeah, there's cars. Right? I don't need to be told those things. So the thing to remember is that when you're writing a book, the reader will only see what you put a laser focus on. The mechanic by which you often put that laser focus on the stage setting is through telling us stuff.

[Mary Robinette] The example that I use when I am attempting to explain this, to tell people about this, is that a lot of what we're talking about here is the order of information. That the order of information that you're presenting to people on that first page is incredibly important because you're setting up context. So what I use is the example of imagine that you're in a dark theater. That's laser focus, and that you have a single spotlight. The single spotlight rests… Opens up on a pool of red liquid on a linoleum floor. You think, "Oh. Someone's been stabbed. There's blood on the floor." Then it pans over and you see a can of Kool-Aid. You're like, "Oh. Okay. No no no no. I was wrong. I misunderstood what was going on. This is a kitchen drama and someone's just dropped a can of Kool-Aid and that's what the red liquid is." You pan a little bit farther. Now you see a hand and a bloody knife. You're like, "Oh. No, I was right the first time. Someone was stabbed." But, if you do it the other way around, if you provide context for your reader, if you start with the hand on the floor with the knife, and then you go to the can of Kool-Aid, and then you go to the red liquid, the reader can build this very clear picture in their head. So when you're deciding at the beginning kind of what to tell, you're not just deciding what to tell, but you're also deciding when to tell it. You're trying to make sure that you're presenting this information in a way that the reader is building that… The picture that you want them to build in their head. Because storytelling is linear, whereas film, even though we are experiencing time passing, you don't have control. You have some control over where an audience looks on a screen, but, like, if I am watching something and there is a typewriter in a scene, that is always the first thing I will look at. The filmmaker has absolutely no control over that. But on a page, you do have that control. Howard, it looked like you had a thing?

[Howard] I did. A short paragraph of character description from a work in progress, which… I talked about metaphor and simile and whatnot in an earlier episode. How Lee Childs didn't use it in the Jack Reacher thing. Metaphors and comparisons are a form of telling, a form of description, that give us a shortcut. This is short.

Darren laughs. It's a big, friendly, old man sort of belly laugh. Not quite ho ho ho, but if Darren ever decided to grow a beard to go with his massive handlebar mustache, he'd have steady holiday work as a shopping mall Santa.

How much of that is actual description, how much of that is comparison to a picture you already have in your head and I'm telling you to make a connection between these two things, that is something that absolutely… The… A movie can't do that with one of the characters saying, "Your laugh sounds like Santa Claus. Have you looked at…" Which would derail the film.

[Dan] Well, to keep this… My own little terminology going. That paragraph you read us is telling us how to think about this person. It's describing the person. But at the same time, it is demonstrating the characterization of the speaker. We're learning so much about the person who is giving us that information because of the way they choose to give it.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that in mind, I think, let's talk about your homework for this week.

[Dongwon] So, your homework for this week is, again, maybe taking that scene or taking another opening scene, and what I want you to do is to rewrite the whole first scene purely as narration. Right? Take out any dialogue, take out any of that scene setting, and just give it to us as a narrator describing what's happening. Now, I'm not recommending this be the final version of your opening. I think this is a really instructive exercise though to show you what does and doesn't work about this approach. Hopefully, from this you can take sentences, you can take paragraphs, and then work that into your draft. But I want you to really step back and force yourself to get rid of all the tools of showing and only do a telling version of it. See where that gets you.

[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/11/04/13-44-alien-characters/

Key points: Don't just model your aliens on a human civilization, because context matters! Start with landscape and geography, and create characters from that, or start with characters and figure out what kind of environment would create them. How does the medium you use to portray your alien portray this? How does being alien affect their point of view, their communications? How does their communications affect their lives? Completely alien motivations? Shelter, reproduction, and food drive humans and aliens. But which side of the road do you drive on? Often, even very alien things can be related to something in our society, to make it understandable. What is their motivation? Don't use the sense of wonder as a bludgeon! If you throw in something confusing, that is a promise to the reader that you will use it, and fulfill the promise. Look for the moment when the alien and the human reach understanding, and let the reader get it, too. After your metamorphosis, you may not even remember your own name!

( In the liner notes... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alien Characters.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And…

[Howard] Everybody was expecting me to be an alien.

[Brandon] Yeah, we all thought you'd say, "I'm Howard," in Klingon.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Alien characters. So. One of the nice things about kind of having a science fiction/fantasy themed podcast, even if not all of our topics are specifically about that, is we can occasionally dig into something like this. How do you write from the viewpoint of a race who has never existed and is supposed to seem very, very strange to the person experiencing the narrative?

[Mary] So, first of all, let me suggest that you do not base them on a human civilization. Because human civilizations exist with context that is specific to the world around them. The aliens would have grown up in a completely different context. You can certainly take patterns that people go through, but just taking and saying, "These are my…" Like Dune. I mean, Dune are humans. But still, these are my pseudo-Arabic kind of desert people…

[Howard] Yeah, these are my bug people who are all like Roman Centurions.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to say that's very natural for us to do, because human creativity is recombining things we haven't seen. We're going to suggest that you push a different direction and combine different things.

[Mary] Well, the problem is that if you aren't thinking about the context, you can go terribly sideways. So what I do say… Suggest is that you first look at… I mean, you can go a couple of different ways. I say first… You can either begin with the kind of landscape and geography, and create the characters from that, or, you can begin with the kind of character that you want and then backfill to the environment that created that.

[Brandon] Okay. So.

[Howard] Ultimately the question that needs to be asked first is how is this alien… What is the medium by which you are going to portray this alien to the person consuming your medium? I get to draw pictures. So I can do things that people who are writing prose can't do. If all you have is words, then one of the tools that you are going to have to look very closely at is, how does being this kind of alien affect the way their point of view would be described? How does it affect the way they speak, if they are able to speak in the language that your other characters speak? Because as a writer, words of the tool that you have to describe that.

[Dan] That's where I wanted to go, because that's how I always start, is with the form of communications specifically. How is this… Because that's what the character's going to be doing throughout the story, is communicating in some form. How are they going to do that? So as an example, in the Partials series, the Partials themselves, I gave them a pheromonal communications system. They can speak, but they can also communicate through scents and these other things. That changed absolutely everything about their society, the more I followed the ramifications of that. Of how they would interact with each other, of how the humans would perceive them, of how they would perceive the humans, of all of the problems that would arise when they try to talk to each other and are obviously missing obvious cues. So, starting with that form of communication, for me, is incredibly helpful.

[Brandon] So, let me ask you guys this. How do you write a character whose motivations are completely alien?

[Mary] There are, I think, some motivations that are consistent that you can actually pull into the aliens. That are consistent with humans. I think most creatures will have a priority on shelter, reproduction, and food. And, at a very base level, that is what drives all of us. So you can look at how that then affects the aliens. So I had… I wrote a story called The Bride Replete which was all aliens all the time. I did not have a human viewpoint character, humans just don't exist. For that, looking at, okay, so if reproduction is important, then how does the… What is this society reproductive structure look like? What does the family unit look like for this? Once you get that, then it becomes much easier to extrapolate based on… Or to convey it in a way that will make sense to a human reader.

[Brandon] Okay. So, but…

[Howard] That's…

[Brandon] My question. That's great. My question, though, is how would you write one that didn't have one of those motivations? Completely alien motivations?

[Howard] Coming up with the motivation is often difficult. Let me describe the motivation that we don't think of as alien, but which probably looks pretty alien if you pull away all of the indicators. That is, I want to be on the left-hand side on the freeway. So I can go faster. There is this tendency that we want to be on the left. Why? Because there's these rules of the road that have nothing to do with our biology. If you have an alien, who as part of their socialization, they want their eye line to be lower than yours. The way that this interaction is going to take place… Why do they keep getting on the ground? Why are they lying down? Why does… Why do these things keep happening? Why is the physical positioning changing in ways that… If there are human characters, they don't understand.

[Mary] But see… The wanting to be on the left side absolutely does have to do with our biology, because it's a holdover from that's the side that your sword was on. Because most people were right-handed.

[Howard] Well, except in England and South Africa, it's exactly reversed.

[Brandon] I'm going to cap this one. I think the point that perhaps is salient here is even in your description of that, you can find something to relate in our society that you can tie it to. Is that the idea? Take something that seems completely un-relatable at the beginning, but over time, kind of relate it to something that the reader's going to understand?

[Mary] I guess… What I… My point was… Is that if you're talking about an alien that has a completely alien motivation, that, for me, that motivation is still going to be rooted in one of those three things at some point going back to it. You can use that as the line with which to communicate it to the reader. So, if my alien motivation is needing to be on the… Needing to have the lower eye level, well, why does that exist? Is it… Is that a shelter strategy? Is that a reproduction strategy? Is that a food strategy? Where does that come from? Then, that informs a lot of the… Why they make those choices, even if it's a holdover.

[Brandon] I think that's very cool. Of course, it makes me, as a writer, want to say, I want to find something that's not related to…

[Garbled]

[Mary] Absolutely.

[Brandon] A challenge. When we hear that. All right. I think that's where I'm going. But I want to… But, yeah. I think that this is one way…

[Howard] I'm interested… Oh, go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] So, I'm thinking of two example specifically, and both of them hinge around the idea of how that motivation is presented. The first one is kind of a cheat. In the movie Arrival, because you're not actually getting a viewpoint from the aliens, the entire story really hinges around, "Well, what is their motivation in the first place?" So they can have something that is incredibly alien, and the humans are all just trying to figure it out. Are they benevolent? Well, why would aliens be benevolent? It's hard for some people to even conceive of that. One of the other examples I'm thinking of was actually a piece of War Machine fiction written from the point of view of an incredibly basically evil race of people. What made it so well done is that the entire story was written from within that moral framework. So, when all the viewpoints you were getting took as granted that these are the principles by which obviously we should all be living our lives, then it started to make an incredible kind of internal sense.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] One of the examples that I like to look at is from the second of James P. Hogan's Giants novels. There's a… The planetary ecology… They evolved in such a way that nothing could eat anything else except plants. All of the animals developed the we are toxic strategy to where evolutionarily, it becomes so expensive to try and be something that ate other animals that it was a planet full of vegetarians. The artwork that they created… I say the artwork. Actual pictures of the world made no sense to us because it looked like a children's book because it was so brightly colored. So this is one of those cases where something that we would expect as a given… I mean, whether or not that's actually practical. Something that we would expect as a given had been ripped out and all of these aliens were now suddenly very, very alien. War? Eating meat? Completely… Completely not part of their psychology.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about Blood Rose Rebellion?

[Dan] Blood Rose Rebellion. Which, for the most part, does not actually have any real alien characters in it. It's by Rosalind Eaves. It's historical fantasy. It starts in a version of 1800s London where magic is real, and is purely the domain of the upper class. Our main character is a teenage debutante who's ready to come out into society and can't because she does not have magic. So the parents are embarrassed and they end up shipping her off to Budapest to live with Grandma, where polite society won't know that they have this non-magical daughter. Then she gets involved with one of Hungary's many rebellions. It is one of the most beautifully written YA anythings that I have ever read.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] Incredibly cool. For… To hit our topic a little bit, there are some weird magical creatures that keep kind of slipping into our world. Although we don't get to know them well, they're really just fascinating and gorgeously described.

[Brandon] Now we also… When we were brainstorming for this, we wanted to promote this book because we love it. Because we thought it was awesome. But we… Mary came up with a story that the rest of us hadn't heard of that…

[Mary] Yes.

[Brandon] If you want to read something really alien.

[Mary] This is Love Is Never Still by Rachel Swirsky. It's available at Uncanny Magazine. So if you just go there and type in Love Is Never Still, it'll pop right up. This is the Pygmalion story. So the sculptor who creates Galatea, the sculpture, and comes to life. It's told from like 20 different viewpoints, including Summer the season.

[Brandon] The season has a viewpoint?

[Mary] Yeah. The pedestal that she stands on has a viewpoint. She has a viewpoint while she's still a piece of marble. The hearth god's hammer has a viewpoint. It's just… It's amazingly complex and varied and just a great example of this alien viewpoint thing.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] And where can people find that?

[Mary] Uncanny Magazine.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Mary] Dot com.

[Brandon] So, one of the things that I see happening when using alien characters is the writer's specifically choosing one aspect of their culture that is just going to confuse the reader intentionally. I kind of thought of this as using a sense of wonder as a bludgeon.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Something that you're not even going to make your story about or explain. It's just look at how bizarre this is. Have you ever done that? Is… Like what are the advantages of that? As a writer, I would think… Because everyone's just staring at me as they think… I think the danger would be when you put something like that in a story, you're going to assume that it's going to take like a Left Hand of Darkness turn or something like that. The thing that is at first confusing or different is eventually going to become a major story point or character motive or things like this.

[Howard] It's a promise. It's a promise to the reader when you open with that. You gotta have a reason for it. I don't know what promise necessarily you're making, but if your story's going to be a success, the reader at the end has to feel like you've fulfilled on that promise. I don't like doing it that way. I think I've done it before. Where I've just drawn something weird because I thought weird would be fun. Mostly it was annoying, and I realized I haven't justified this in a way that's entertaining me.

[Mary] I think it does depend on how it's positioned in the story. If it's positioned in a way that you're making the reader go, "Why is that?" And then you bring it up again, and they're still going, "Why is that?" They're going to feel like that's a promise. If you just bring it up once and it's a piece of tonal color and it's like in mid-paragraph, so in a position of non-importance, they're probably just going to accept it and move on. So I do think it depends on a little bit of that.

[Howard] One of my favorite alien cultures of my own is the Oafa, who are the hydrogen bag… That look like blimps. Their language, once they've learned Gal-Standard, their language is full of wind metaphors and flavor metaphors. Boy, did I have to go to the thesaurus to pull this stuff up. But, as I was writing dialogue between the cultural liaison and the multi-million-year-old librarian, at one point the Oafa librarian says to the liaison, "You've been breathing the air of the poets," because she has made a wind metaphor that works. That moment, when you have a character moment like that, where the alien and the human have come to an understanding, and the reader gets it, the reader feels awesome. That's what I was aiming for. Not sense of wonder, but just sense of being included, sense of being part of that relationship.

[Mary] I had a story in which my characters… The species was based on kind of like the lifecycle of a butterfly. So they spend an incredibly long time as a caterpillar, and then they transform, and then they're this beautiful, beautiful creature. So in this society, the young, the larva state, is the state that gets all the work done. Because when they go through the transformation, metamorphosis, when they come out on the other side, their memories are totally scrambled. So the adult state is your retirement. Because of that, they have built this whole system around memory and have hired documentarians to come in and document their life so when they come out of the cocoon, they can try to remember things. So one of the things that I was playing with in the beginning of the story is that question of why are you documenting things? Then realizing, "Oh, this is what's at stake." That you will come out and not know your own family.

[Brandon] Wow. Sounds cool. What's the name of this story?

[Mary] I can't remember the name of my own story.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's funny, because [garbled]

[Dan] So go out, readers…

[Mary]'s Well, I wrote down the name of the other one, The Bride Replete. But I forgot I had… I forgot about this one. Yeah, the Bride Replete was basically what happened… I know…

[Brandon] We'll put it in the liner notes.

[Mary] I'll put it in.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our homework. Howard, you had homework for us?

[Howard] Yes. As I said at the beginning of the episode, the tool that you have is a writer in order to convey alienness is words. Most frequently, that is going to come up in the way someone speaks. If you are familiar with doge-speak, which is the Shiba Inu meme…

[Dan] Which you might know as doggy speak…

[Howard] Doggy speak.

[Dan] Because there are competing pronunciations.

[Howard] Take that language. You can look up grammar rules for that language. It's recognizable, even without a picture of a dog under it. Take the rules of that language, and take dialogue from one of your characters and turn it into that. An example here, and I'm just going to read two lines of it, of someone having done this to Shakespeare. What light? So breaks. Such East! Very sun. Wow, Juliet.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.33: Reading Outside the Box

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/19/13-33-reading-outside-the-box/

Key points: To understand what you are reading about another culture, start by understanding the culture. Ground yourself with a good spread of writing by people from inside the culture. Try reading nonfiction. Culture is not a monolith, it varies from place to place, even within a single family unit. Think about how many things your neighbor gets wrong. Read things produced for the culture by people from that culture. Read advertisements! Be aware of subtext and context. Be cautious about what you think you already know about a culture. Watch for evolution and time.

( Plenty of discussion to follow... )

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Reading Outside the Box.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Aliette] I'm Aliette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] And we are currently trapped in a floating box in the Baltic Sea, but it is okay because we are here with wonderful special guest Kristie Claxton.

[Kristie] Hello.

[Dan] Awesome. Kristie, tell us very briefly about yourself.

[Kristie] I am a POC writer. I… In my typical day job, I am a mom to about nine people…

[Chuckles]

[Kristie] During the day, then I go home and I'm a boss to four people.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Very well put. Awesome. You're also a writer as well.

[Kristie] I do write. I typically… I typically submit to a lot of contests and pray that someone will notice how great I am. It doesn't typically happen, but sometimes I do. Right now, I'm writing a thriller about a con woman who comes to meet her… The fiancé of her deceased daughter, and she is picking up the con that her daughter had started.

[Dan] That sounds awesome, and I'm excited to read it. Cool. Well, we are happy to have you here, Kristie.

[Dan] We want to talk today about a question… We're currently on the Writing Excuses cruise… The retreat… And in one of the classes that Aliette taught yesterday, a really good question came up and we said, "We are totally going to answer that in an episode, because everyone needs to hear this." The question was, basically, if I remember correctly, "How can I know when I'm reading about a different culture, that what I'm reading is accurate and respectful and well done?" So, Aliette, what would you like to… Where would you like to start us on that answer?

[Aliette] Well, I think the… If you really want to have an idea of whether something is respectful or not to a given culture, then you need to actually understand what the culture is. To get a good grounding on what that culture is, then you need to read as much as possible that comes from people inside the culture, so that you have a good reference for okay, this is what's happening. You also want to get a good spread, because cultures are going to be… Like, no culture is a monolith. You're going to get very different perspectives. Like, for instance, in Vietnam, if you go… It's still happening to some extent, North Vietnam, south-central Vietnam, and South Vietnam are going to be very different entities, and of course, you know, every province have their own. So you have to get a sense of, like, every author is going to have their different biases. It's really hard. I mean, especially if you're coming from outside, it feels very much like you're staring at a wall of everything that feels similar, but as you read more and more, you become more aware of how things are playing out, and how someone's… Someone may have prejudices against their neighbor, and the neighbors might give it back to them. Then, when you have… I think when you have that sort of grounding, then you can start getting a sense of whether the story that you're… The one that you're actually reading actually makes sense from that culture's perspective.

[Howard] The thing that I've found, and I think I first discovered it when I was reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a Syrian Christian. In his descriptions of… The book is about how we tell ourselves stories in order to make the world make sense, but our stories are wrong. Our stories create a narrative, and then reality will deny that narrative with the introduction of an element that he would call the black swan. But in reading it, he told… He shared anecdotes from his life. It's a nonfiction book. I learned things about the Syrian Christian community, which was a thing that I didn't even know existed until I picked up that book. In picking up that book, I recognized that the void in my own life was, one, I'm not reading enough nonfiction, and, two, I'm not reading enough anything written by people who aren't me. So the filter that I see on fiction, whether or not the people are from my culture, is that fiction is when we make stuff up, and if I'm from outside the culture, I can't tell if they're making up things or if they're reporting things correctly. So I start… Boy, I hate to lay this at everybody else's feet, because I haven't done it well yet, but if you read nonfiction from people who aren't you, you are more likely to get the straight story that will then help you judge the fiction that you read.

[Aliette] Why do… I don't know if we really get the straight story, because… I mean, we all tell stories, that's how… I mean, one of the things that I was talking about in the course is that when you have family histories and family stories, for instance, no two people are going to give you the same explanation of what went down on Aunt Bea's wedding, right?

[Laughter]

[Aliette] So, whenever you tell a story that's a bit the same, you're telling it from your perspective. But I agree that with nonfiction, you don't have the filter of I have to make up this to be entertaining, to follow certain conventions, so memoirs are fine. Like, one of the memoirs that I always recommend very heavily is Andrew Pham's Under the Eaves of Heaven, which is about his father's life in Vietnam from around the 1950s to when they settled in America, after the Vietnam War. It's a really interesting piece about, like, that section of Vietnamese history seen through the eyes of his father, and seen through the eyes of the sun as well, so you really get that sense. I think it's a really interesting thing for getting the sense of the life of both the father and the son.

[Mary] I think that's a really good point that you make about the fact that… We always say culture is not a monolith, but it's not just, "Oh, people who are coming from here have a slightly different…" Like, I'm from the American South, and my family is East Tennessee. I grew up in North Carolina. There are cultural differences between the two places. But it's not just that, it's even within a single family unit, you will have these differences. Kristie, you and I were talking yesterday a little bit, and you had some… Right after Aliette's class, and you had some things to say.

[Kristie] Well, I think it's very important not to just take one point of view or read just one thing. I'm from the American South. My family is from Tennessee. Southern Tennessee.

[Mary] Whereabouts?

[Kristie] Right before the border of Georgia.

[Mary] I'm from Chattanooga.

[Kristie] I do not… Okay. Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] We are…

[Kristie] Kissing cousins. I didn't grow up in Tennessee. My father was in the military. I've lived all over the place. I do not have the same experiences as someone from the… Someone who's lived in the South for any long period of time. Because I've lived in the North, we've lived in Germany, we've lived out West, I've lived… I've spent the majority of my time in Rhode Island. However, I've lived a completely different life than someone who has spent all of their time in Tennessee. So you can't just take one point of view or one story or one… You can't just interview one person and think, "Oh, I just know everything there is to know." That's… No.

[Chuckles]

[Kristie] Next to impossible.

[Mary] I mean, just think about how many things your neighbor gets wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. Let's pause right now for our book of the week, which Kristie is going to tell us.

[Kristie] I recently read Warlock Holmes: A Study in Brimstone. It is a retelling…

[Laughter]

[That is so fabulous]

[Dan] Which is too perfect to not have already existed. That's amazing that… Okay. So tell us about it.

[Kristie] It is a retelling of Sherlock Holmes and he has taken the majority of Sherlock Holmes' stories and just made them supernatural. Where Watson is the logical deductive reasoner, and Warlock Holmes is the one who is using magic to solve the mysteries.

[That's great.]

[Kristie] There is also a sequel as well.

[Dan] That's fantastic.

[Kristie] The Hell Hounds of Baskerville.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Who… Who's it by?

[Kristie] You… No.

[Mary] That is something that we will Google and include in the liner notes.

[Dan] Excellent.

[Mary] We're on a ship…

[Howard] If you can remember Warlock Holmes, you've got it. If you can't remember Warlock Holmes…

[Aliette] Maybe it's not the book for you, right?

[Laughter]

[Mary] But since we are talking about books, one thing that I want to say is that when you're looking for… Since this prompt is for… This began from the what should I be reading. One of the things that I would say… Encourage people to do is read not just fiction and not just nonfiction, but making sure that you're reading things that are produced for that culture by people from that culture. So magazines are actually really useful, and not just I'm going to read an article here or there, but actually read the entire magazine, cover to cover, including the advertisements. Because what people are trying to sell to other people within their community is really telling. Like, what do we sell on this podcast? We sell books that are science fiction and fantasy, predominantly, because that is who our community is. We also try to sell you that we know what we're talking about.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Jonathan Coulton's song SkyMall, where he deconstructs the SkyMall magazine on airplanes and sings from the point of view of a SkyMall shopper… I wept when I listened to it, because he turned that high-end consumer life into something just so empty, and yet so full of wonder. Yeah, you read SkyMall and you think, "Who are these people?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "These people are not me. Who are these people?" SkyMall's not a great example, because it's trying to advertise to a cross-section of people with more money than sense, but any magazine will fulfill this in different ways because of... With the advertisers, because of that desire to feel a need they have.

[Aliette] I do want to caution this… That's why I was talking about grounding, which is a lot of these things are going to have subtext that you're just not going to see. The example I always take for this is there's a series of short stories that are set during the Ming dynasty, and for the life of me, I can't… It's Stories to Warn the World [Stories to Caution the World?], and then i can't actually remember the name of the author. But I remember being very struck because at one point, a woman crosses the street, very slowly, very daintily, and there's a lot of description… It's like two sentences of description or something. The subtext is she would have had bound feet, and that's why she was crossing the street so slowly. If you don't know this, then you'll just miss it. It's the same with like, a lot of… For instance, the Vietnamese magazines are going to have… I saw one that was for a shampoo brand, because there is a tem… [Garbled] it was based on a Vietnamese fairytale, where one of the characters actually gets the other out of the house under the pretext of washing her hair. If you don't know that this is a reference to this particular fairytale, then you're like, "Oh, this is nice, but…" You kind of… You don't have the vocabulary. It's like when you're learning a foreign language, and all those proverbs are like, "I'm sorry, what does that mean exactly?"

[Dan] That's a really good point, that sometimes without context, you can miss a lot of those clues. One of the cultures that I love to read and to read about is South American literature. One of my all-time favorite authors is Isabel Allende. If you have the chance, for example, Allende writes for both a Chilean audience and for an English-speaking audience in different books. It's fascinating to read both of them and compare what is she emphasizing when she's writing House of the Spirits versus some of her stuff that's written in Spanish. So if you have the chance to compare two works like that, and see what gets emphasized or what gets left out, that can tell you a lot about those contextual clues.

[Kristie] I just wanted to mention using vernacular because I think a lot of… I… Like I said, I spent a majority of my time in Rhode Island. There are a lot of things that are specific to New England that I know about, that someone may not pick up if they're from, say, the South or the Northwest or even from another country. I think that's one of the biggest things around here that, with Writing Excuses, is that we're trying to be everything to all people. Sometimes you can get that. And sometimes you can't. You have to be very careful about how you put it when you're doing it.

[Howard] I've found that the best I can hope for personally is to be honest about myself to all people, and to be honest about what I don't know when I'm trying to tell stories that involve other people. Because the older I get, the stupider I get.

[Choked laughter]

[Howard] The less I know that I know. Does that make sense?

[Mary] I want to say, on that note, that one of the things that you have to be most cautious of, the thing that I would encourage you to do is that… The things that you think you know about another culture are the things that are all… Those are the things where you are at the biggest risk of getting it wrong. Completely and totally wrong. I was writing a novel that was set in theater in 1907, and I'm like… I was researching the clothes, the hats, streetcar timetables. Didn't do any research on the theater, because I've spent 25 years in the theater. Dress rehearsal. Not a thing. Tech rehearsal. Not a thing. There were all of these historical mistakes that I was just making right and left. So, also, when you are… Along with that, remember that cultures evolve over time. So it's not enough to just be like, "This is the way it is now." How was it 10 years ago, 15, 50 years ago? Because that evolution is also going to tell you a lot about conflict points between characters. So when you're trying to write another culture, it's not fast research.

[Kristie] No. It definitely is not fast research, and you have to pay attention. Because my mother will say something that does not translate to what I think at all.

[Chuckles]

[Kristie] When my mother goes into a store, they're following her because she's black. When I go into a store, they're following me because they want to sell me something.

[Laughter]

[Kristie] So you've got to be… You've got to take all stories as much as possible. Unless you're truly trying to say something just from one person's point of view, from the South. You can tell that story.

[Howard] A couple of things that I think are worth watching. One of them hasn't come out… One of them hasn't come out yet, and that's Marvel's new Black Panther movie. Which has a black director and a largely black cast. They are… They appear to be trying to do justice to a lot of these cultural things. The original Black Panther comic book did not do any of that. So it'll be fascinating to see what they come up with. The other was the Netflix Luke Cage, which I, as a white dude, watched and I could tell I am missing inner-city cultural note…

[Laughter]

[Howard] After inner-city cultural note. I know there is context I don't have, but I was… There were tears in my eyes as I realized there is a huge library of knowledge here I don't have, but other people are getting it and they didn't used to get this from TV. They didn't used to get this. I've watched it a couple of times now. I still don't understand it. So the trend of native voices producing things, there's no substitute for that. There's no substitute for that. Consuming that is the only way I'm going to approach any sort of knowledge.

[Dan] All right. This has been a really good discussion. Mary, you have our writing exercise, our thing for the end of the episode.

[Mary] Right. I'm going to give you homework that I actually did. This is a year-long project. Because, as we've said, this is not simple. This thing of learning to write outside of your box. What I want you to do is I first want you to identify your box. This is tricky. There are two ways you can do it. One is you can categorize yourself by census records. So, like, I'm a white woman, American white woman. The other thing you can do is walk over to your bookshelf and look at your bookshelf and categorize the patterns that you normally read in, specifically, since we're talking about life experience and lenses, specifically the kinds of authors. Their background. So I did this and discovered that despite all of my feminist rhetoric, I was tending to read mostly men. And tending to read mostly white American men. So I spent a year in which I said, "Okay. I'm not going to read white American men." Specifically, I'm not going to read white Americans. I'm not going to read American fiction for a year. That was the box. Because I had already experimented with not reading… Not reading white people. Some of my best friends are white people, but…

[Laughter]

[Mary] I still identified that pattern and spent a year reading fiction from people who were from Europe, from Asia, from Africa, from Australia, and people who were not white. The things that I discovered about my own defaults have made me a significantly better writer. Because you don't realize the defaults that you have until you start reading fiction by people who do not come with the same set of defaults. So it's a long project. You're still allowed to buy books by other people, but I just want you to put off reading them for a year. Part of the reason is the first month that you're doing this is about deprogramming your brain, and learning to read outside of that box.

[Howard] The first book will be a real hurdle and be really tricky. But this doesn't start to pay off until book three.

[Mary] Three, six… Three or four was when I started to realize what was happening to my brain. It's very useful. No matter which box you find yourself in.

[Dan] Awesome. This has been Neurological Hacking Excuses.

[Laughter]

[Dan] You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/14/11-33-crossover-fiction-with-victoria-schwab/

Key points: Crossover fiction is fiction that has a primary audience and a much larger appeal. E.g. young adult fiction being read by adults, or vice versa. Crossover authors often write multiple genres. Write for a specific person, perhaps in a border zone. Include things that will work for multiple audiences. Some breaks are larger than others, e.g. between middle grade and YA. Part of it is what the reader is interested in. What's different? How much context or explanation is needed. What do the readers resonate with, usually emotional? Levels of reading intelligence and levels of subject material are independent. You can use different pen names for different genres. Diversify for safety. Try lots of different things. Watch for pivot points where you can move into a different arena.

( Where's the bridge? )

[Howard] Is this a time travel writing prompt?
[Mary] I think it is now.
[Brandon] All right. I guess that's our writing prompt. You gotta write a story about a book that can't be read until you are dead.
[Wow… That's bleak… Garbled]
[Brandon] Someone just did… Wrote a book to not be read until they die. I'm trying to remember. There… It was something in the news item.
[Mary] Well, Mark Twain's memoirs. He… They couldn't be read until 100 years after.
[Brandon] So either it's a story that you're going to write that someone can't read until a certain date or you can write about somebody who's dealing with that, if that's too morbid for you.
[Mary] I thought you meant that they couldn't read it… That the reader could not read it until the reader was dead.
[Howard] See, that's what I was thinking. The reader cannot read this book until they have died.
[Dan] That's how I interpreted it.
[Brandon] Okay. All right. All right.
[Mary] So what do you want to do, audience?
[Brandon] Whatever you want. We've got like seven in there for you. Thank you, Phoenix ComicCon audience.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

September 2026

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 21.36: Twists: How to Make the Unexpected Feel Inevitable
mbarker - Writing Excuses 21.34: Knowing The Distance
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.35: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Where
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.05: Lens 1 - Who
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.36: A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.23: Tying It All Together (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.10: Introducing Our Close Reading Series
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.31: Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.39: Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with K. M. Szpara
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.30: Know Your Characters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.33: Tell, Don't Show
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters
mbarker - (no subject)
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 21.36: Twists: How to Make the Unexpected Feel Inevitable

Writing Excuses 21.34: Knowing The Distance

Writing Excuses 20.35: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Where

Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context

Writing Excuses 20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community

Writing Excuses 20.05: Lens 1 - Who

Writing Excuses 19.36: A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual

Writing Excuses 19.23: Tying It All Together (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

Writing Excuses 19.10: Introducing Our Close Reading Series

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

Writing Excuses 18.31: Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes

Writing Excuses 18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition

Writing Excuses 17.39: Writing Bodies and Intimacy, with K. M. Szpara

Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext

Writing Excuses 17.30: Know Your Characters

Writing Excuses 16.34: Novels Are Layer Cakes

Writing Excuses 16.33: Tell, Don't Show

Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters

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Writing Excuses 11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab

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