mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.25: From the Classroom to the Page
 
 
Key Points: How do you take what you learned in the classroom and use it when you're writing? Take time to internalize it. Be aware that motivation shifts! External or internal, how do you keep it going? What works well for you? Build the craft through intentional practice. Make notes! Reflection soon after. Look at the aggregate, the common or repeated comments. Take a chance, try it! Audition techniques. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. From the Classroom to the Page.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Marshall] I'm Marshall.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
 
[Erin] I wanted us to have this wildcard so that we could grill Marshall a little bit, who's finished an MFA program recently...
[Marshall] I did.
[Erin] About all the things that you learned. Please repeat them to us. No. Like, actually, how do you take all the things you learned in the classroom, for people who are listening on this podcast, and actually, like, turn it into something you're doing when you're writing?
[Marshall] I think it depends on what you… For me, it depends on how I started… Why I started the program in the first place. I started the program to make myself make the time to write. Because I really wanted to do… Get as much as I could out of it. I was paying the money. I had some amazing instructors, and my goal was to figure out how to make writing a bigger part of my life amidst all of the chaos already, that's teaching full time, parenting, and all that. I'll be honest, I graduated in August of 2023, and I took a break. From writing. For a little bit. A lot of what I'm doing… What I was doing was soaking in some of that stuff that I learned and trying to figure out how to go back to a schedule and remember that I can do this, and the big part is keeping that connection with my community as well. Keeping that motivation going. Now, specifics? Also, I think, depends on the type of classroom you're taking. In the beginning, we were taking a lot of classes around different genres. So, I personally, now… This is one example… Am trying to incorporate some of the studying of mystery and romance and those components and those beats and stuff like that into my science-fiction and my fantasies that I'm writing. Because I love those genres, so much, but I may or may not be working on a mystery/sci-fi novel right now. So it's fun to kind of think about. I learned all these specific things, studied all this work, but I really want to figure out how to make it my own.
[Mary Robinette] I like something that you said, which is, I think, a piece that a lot of people miss. Which is that after you learn something, that it takes a while to internalize it. I see a lot of people who will take a workshop, and afterwards, they stop writing. But they never start again. It's not an intentional break. Some of that is that, I think, that they aren't… They aren't thinking about the action of internalizing, that that takes time and it takes energy.
[Marshall] Yeah. Part of the clarity… To clarify kind of what I was saying, why I'm taking a break to is when… At the end of the program, I ended up with a pretty decent draft of a novel. So, at this point, I am… What I'm trying to make another pass at it, and I need to… I want to start querying agents, because I really want to try to get something out there. I've been working on this for years and years and years. I finally went back to school. I'm teaching creative writing to high schoolers. I'm trying to get a job teaching at the college level. I also want to publish. So it's going to be that editing work and that revision work and putting myself out there. That's terrifying.
[Mary Robinette] So… Yeah. Yes. It does not stop being terrifying, honestly.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] But I think, like, one of the things that I find is that the motivation shifts. That when you're in class… I see this also, a lot, where I will have a student and they come and they talk about how they had written all of this while they were in their MFA, and they can't find the motivation to write afterwards. I find this, for myself, that I go to a writing workshop and after the writing workshop, it's hard to find that motivation, because it's like, well, there was a deadline, there was body modeling, there was a teacher that I didn't want to let down. So I had all of this external motivation. Then, when you're cut loose from that, you suddenly have to find an internal motivation. Which is a whole different racket.
[Erin] Or just different forms of external motivation.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like one of the things…
[Mary Robinette] Money.
[Erin] That…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Money is a big one. But also, like, I've created… I've been in groups of people. That's why people have critique groups, sometimes, is that you want to continue to have people you can disappoint.
[Laughter]
 
[Erin] It's like the disappointment of others… Such a driver in my life. Maybe just my life. But that way there's something else, there's another deadline, there's another way to make yourself do things. I think that's one good thing that you can actually take from the classroom. That's not a direct lesson that your taught. So it's not something that your teacher tells you. It's more how you learn well. What are the kinds of things that work well for you? Are there exercises you did in class when you were like, "Doing six short flash pieces really got my engine going," or "Oh, I was much better when I was able to do a back and forth on email with my professor about this particular part of my novel." Then you can say, "How can I create those same structures in my life now?" Like, what can I… Where are the people that I can reach out to who can fill that role in my life?
[Marshall] Yeah. We're all at different stages. I talked to my cohort, we're all really close. We get on zoom here and there and kind of try and bring each other out. A lot of us are all in different places in that journey. It's like are you writing? Are you working on this? Are you working on a new project? But something you said earlier, a very specific lesson. It wasn't necessarily a specific lesson for me, but it was the way they structured the thesis project that worked really well for me. I really liked just sitting down and writing. But I'd noticed that when I outline, I more productive. In the thesis process, there was multiple outline stages. It wasn't like, okay, throw this outline together, and then just start writing. I changed stuff as I went, and we had amazing advisors that supported us, but that kind of living outline and keeping up with that, and tracking my character wants and needs and arcs and relationships and that kind of thing as I wrote really changed how I plan on approaching novel writing going forward. I think without that, I'd probably get stuck pretty quickly. Because now I know I can lean back on that structural part of it that wasn't in my toolbox before.
 
[Mary Robinette] I find that… So when I started writing… I've talked about this on the podcast before, that I would write a story that had a really good beginning, a really good middle, and a really good end, to three completely different stories that happen to have the same cast of characters.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Oh those [garbled] totally [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] No, they're just not… They're just like…
[Erin] [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] It's not… No, the story ends and you're like, "That was the ending?" They just kind of stop. So, for me, the thing that I had to learn, like, the practice that I had to learn was how to… Was structure. So I had to spend a lot of time doing very intentional practice on learning structure. So I would do the thumbnail sketches, or I would just write beginning, middle, and end for things that would fit on three by five cards. Just to get the sense of, okay, making sure that all of those things were actually connected. That craft, having that craft to lean on, is very helpful to me now at a point where I have internalized structure and I just write and trust that I'm going to have that beginning, middle, and end. But when I'm having a bad brain day, having the tool, having the craft to reach for and being able to articulate what that craft is, has been incredibly useful. Did you find, when you were doing your sessions, that there was any way that… Like, are there things that you found that made it easier for you to start internalizing things or for you to identify the things that you needed to internalize?
[Marshall] What do you mean? Sorry?
[Mary Robinette] So, like…
[Marshall] Like, after the program, you mean?
[Mary Robinette] After the program or even during the program. It's like, oh, this is a really good tool that I'm having to use consciously right now, but at some point it won't be… I won't have to think about it.
[Marshall] Yeah. I mean, like, I say, I was really lucky to have some awesome instructors. So one of the classes, we actually took, was short forms. We were all… The number of short stories I have now I'm really thankful for. But short stories are really difficult to do well. So internalizing some of the feedback from my workshops and my instructors was kind of the… Not the challenge, but just making sure that as the workshop was over, I made some notes. I looked back at my work relatively soon after, just so I could, "Okay. When I go back to revise, this character was flat because of this reason." Or "The feedback on the ending was it was too abrupt and I didn't… I didn't… The promises weren't kept at the end." Things like that.
 
[Erin] One of the things that I really enjoyed doing what I did work shopping in my MFA program was to actually take all… So people would write things on the paper, like [garbled] your story, they'd right marks all over it, and then they give it back to you. I would put all of, like, the page ones together, all the page twos together, all the page threes together, and then actually just kind of, like, flip through them and look for where everyone… Like, if everyone highlighted the sentence, it was like, "Amazing," I was like, "That was a good sentence." If everyone wrote question marks on the same corner of a page, I was like, "Maybe that is confusing." It was a way to actually make… Because a workshop can be hard for people because sometimes it can feel like people are coming for you. I generally enjoy it, because I'm like, "I just forced like X number of people to read my work and talk about it."
[Laughter]
[Erin] So I'm like, "Ha ha…"
[Marshall] I wish I could think about it that way.
[Erin] "Fooled you." But even so, like, when you take it and look at it in aggregate, it's a lot easier to look at the patterns and not get stuck in one particular person's feedback, but look at, like, where those systems happen. It made it a lot easier for me to figure out when… What were the kinds of things that I was doing that I kept getting flagged for, what were the things that maybe I should internalize. Looking at my own work in aggregate, and what were the things that kept coming up over and over again.
[Mary Robinette] I love that technique. I also look for patterns and, as you were talking, I'm like, "Oh, because I use Google docs, and everyone will comment…" Like, you can easily see that everybody is commenting in the same spot. I have to go through and clear them so that people aren't commenting because other people have commented. But that's a whole [garbled other] So…
[Marshall] Well, something Erin said, to. Work shopping was always really terrifying for me, and it still is. But, throughout the course of the program, I figured out, kind of like you were saying, I would get all this feedback and depending on the story and depending on… How well I knew these people, some of the feedback, it was… To be able to take the feedback that mattered the most. Not that some people's feedback didn't matter, but it was just like, okay, this person is confused because they really aren't… They don't really like fantasy. They told me that. I get it, they don't understand this element. But everybody else really liked this element. So I put this person's feedback aside and focus on the clusters of stuff. So being able to take that and having the confidence to eventually get the writing group together and willingly go forward and workshop things together. That's what I want to… That's what I'm moving up to.
[Mary Robinette] Something that you said earlier, but I just want to circle back to that I really liked was that you would make notes about what you had learned. I find that that's one of the best ways for me to solidify things is to write them down, because I have to articulate them. One of the reasons that I love teaching and doing the podcast is because when I have to explain it to someone else, that's one of the best ways for me to start internalizing it myself, because now I'm taking words that someone else has said and I'm internalizing them. I have to, in order to be able to express it in my own language. That, for me, is one of the ways that I will try to put into practice things that I'm learning after taking a class. Speaking of after, we're going to pause here. Then, when we come back, we're going to talk about some other ways that you can go from the page… From the classroom to the page.
 
[Howard] The Fall of the House of Usher, created by Mike Flanagan from various stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, is some of the best storytelling I've ever seen on TV. It's horror, full of jump scares, dread, and… Well, horrific things. But it opens in media res to defuse the tension. Or at least to get you to let down your guard. In the first 10 minutes, we learn that all of CEO Robert Usher's children have died. So, hey, that's cool. We know who will live and who will die, so we can relax and enjoy the ride, right? That was my thinking, and, right or wrong, I'm happy to let you think that too. Yes, there are some surprises, but relax. What really carries this series is the outstanding performances upon the brilliant script. The words, they are delicious. Like lemons. So very lemon. The show carries a TV MA rating due to language, sex, smoking, substance, suicide, and violence. That rating, unfortunately, omits the fact that there's also some violence to animals. Especially in episodes three and four. The Internet has spoilers and explainers if you're concerned. I watched the entire eight episode run four times in an eight week period. Once for fun, once for more fun, and twice more so I could learn things while watching other people see it for the first time. So, I guess, all four times were for fun.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the other techniques that I am a big fan of is taking a chance. The… I don't know about you all, but I've been in classes where the teacher is talking and I'm like, "Well, this is some bull shit."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] This is…
[Marshall] As a teacher, I know for a fact that a lot of students think that about me a lot of the time.
[Mary Robinette] Yep. It's the same. Absolutely.
[Marshall] I know it's because they don't want to be there. But continue.
[Mary Robinette] What I've learned is that if I go in and think that, that I'm going to get nothing out of the class. But if I think, "Okay. Let me just try this thing that they're talking about." Even if I think it is completely absurd and not going to be useful, I will get something out of that even when it's not the thing that they intend for me to get out of it. So I think of it as auditioning a change, or auditioning a technique.
[Erin] Yeah. Also, I… One of the things I'm now remembering that they had us do in my program was to write these annotations, where we would try to, like, analyze a story for what it's doing while doing a close readings of our own. One thing they suggested was to do a few close readings of things you hate. Books and stories that you're like, "This story, I would burn it." But you don't burn books, don't do that. But…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Figure out why. I think the same is true for techniques. Like, occasionally somebody tells you to do something or asked you to do an exercise and you're just like… Who knows, maybe one of our homeworks, you're like, "Nah. Nah. Not doing it, dog." But it's nice to kind of try it and see what is it about it that you're reacting to so strongly.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Is it because, like, it goes counter to the way that you think about storytelling? Is it just because you're in a bad mood that day? What is it that's going on? If you can identify that anything you feel that strongly about, there's probably something there that you can use for yourself.
[Marshall] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… I'm just going to use a concrete example of this kind of thing. I was… I took a workshop and the instructor said to put all five senses on every page. We were doing standard manuscript format, so this is 250 words and all five senses on every page. I'm like, "Well, that's… I mean, I agree that you should use all five senses, but that's extreme, and I don't think that…" So I did it. Then, when they started critiquing, the instructor said, "I just… You know, I started reading your story and I just fell asleep."
[Marshall] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] First of all, you should never say that to a student.
[Marshall] No, that's horrible.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But, second, they were right, it was really boring and it was hard to tell what was going on. I knew as I was writing that it was a problem. But I was like they told me to do this. What I realized was that by writing all five senses on the page, I was making everything in their of equal value, and that I could use the senses to anchor things that were important. That when I put in a sense, that it was going to ground the reader and that if I reserved those for the important things, that it was significantly more powerful. So I would not have come to that understanding if I hadn't tried this technique that I hated. That is, I think, why it's worthwhile to audition… So I love this idea of doing a close read of things you hate.
[Erin] I hear, see, and smell you.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Just do not taste me, please.
[Marshall] So, one of the things they… When I heard this talk a few minutes ago, I thought about was… At the end, the tail end of the program, my program, was the thesis project. Right? They paired us up with a thesis advisor. I got really lucky to work with an awesome writer, his name is Isaiah Jonah Everett, and he rocks. But I… His style of suggesting things to me was kind of what Mary Robinette was saying, I feel like. Like, he's like, "Hey, have you thought about this thing? Have you thought about maybe this character's think… Responds this way instead?" The way he suggested things wasn't like, "you need to change X, Y, and Z because I hate this character." It was like, "Well, this character… Really interesting." Then he made suggestions about a character who doesn't have a POV in the book, but he does at the very end. He goes, "What if this is this character's story?" I said, "Okay. That's not really daunting. It really is his story. Not his story yet. It's not his POV now." That really helped me power to the end of it. Because I knew what I was leading up to. I knew that that character, at the end, was going to step into his own and then it was going to be about him. More about him.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Marshall] All about him.
[Erin] Another thing that you… Like, there are two things that you said, maybe more than that, where your… It feels like you're keeping a really open mind. Like, there you sort of were like, "No, because…" Not just like not doing that. But, like, let me consider it, and let me figure out why it is and isn't working. Way at the beginning, you were talking about using other genres…
[Marshall] Yeah.
[Erin] I think sometimes people… You get really comfortable in the genre that you know, and school is a time when often you will have to read or work with or try out genres and formats that just may not work for you. Like, some people don't like writing short fiction and may never.
[Marshall] Right.
[Erin] But the exercise of trying it, maybe you take a little bit out of that in terms of the way that you write a sentence to try to get so much you can in and make it dense, and you can use that, in a part, in your novel in which things are really emotional and heavy. So, I think that it's great that you did that as opposed to being like, "Mystery? Whatever."
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Instead, you brought it into what you were doing.
[Marshall] The result, actually, by the time I got to that thesis project was I knew I wanted to write a black space opera. Then, I'm like, "But the alienness of…" I wanted horror elements. I knew… I know it's not all the way working yet. But when I go back again, I really want to make that… I want to make it terrifying at certain parts. It's not a horror novel. But the enemy is horrifying. So I want to make sure that I want the reader to feel… Feel a certain way with the characters that we are supposed to love. I hope they do, encounter those things.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I love… I actually really hate and love at the same time that moment when you can feel that something is not right, because at that point, it has shifted from being… Into being a known unknown.
[Marshall] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It's like you know that there's a problem there. You don't know exactly what the problem is. Which is so much better than I don't know if this is any good. That's like, yeah, this is good. There is an opportunity here. Just interrogate it and try to figure out where… What that opportunity is and how you can get into it. Sometimes I will do… I have this intentional practice that I do where… It's like reverse engineering an outline, but I will… It is… I will also say, it is a thing that I discovered as a teaching technique, and then realized that it was actually incredibly useful, which is I go through and I highlight the things in the story that are, like, loadbearing and important in a scene. Then I kind of categorize them based on MICE quotient's, which, for people who are listening to this in isolation, is an organization structure, milieu, inquiry, character, and event. So I do that, and then I see, "Oh, like, actually, the bulk of this scene is this event shift, this status quo shift. But when I come into the scene, I'm not signal… I'm not doing anything about that, and there's a whole bunch of me figuring out what I'm writing." I knew it was flabby, but I couldn't figure out why it was flabby. I love… This is one… Again, one of the reasons that I love teaching is because it gives you these tools that you can use and then do some intentional practice on your own work.
[Marshall] That was one of the shifts… I feel like, as a cohort, we got to. Really, in a heightened way. Like, our instructors at some point, I feel like, were kind of sitting back and letting us discuss each other's work in such a way… We would come out it, like I said, being like him, "Well, I know something's not working." But we would tag a couple questions to a short story. I mean, like, I feel like this character's this. Or I don't feel like this part of it is working. When we come back to discuss and workshop it, the language we used, the feedback we were able to give each other, was in valuable. I mean, at that point, because we had all leveled up in such a way, we were able to look at each other's work and know each other's work well enough to be like, "Okay. I hear what you're saying, but I actually think it works. But I think what you really are missing is this." Those conversations are something I'll never forget about being in this program. Of course, we made plenty of excuses to get together before residency and stuff like that. So we got more of those conversations. But, again, that's part of that community thing.
[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of community, I think it is time for us to give you some homework.
 
[Erin] Yes. I have the homework. Which is for you to become the teacher. So what I want you to do is find something that maybe you're struggling with in your work, something that you're not completely sure about. Maybe it's POV. Who knows? Maybe it's voice. Maybe it's one of these things. Think, how would you try to teach this concept to someone else? What homework would you assign them?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
mbarker: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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 episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 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: (Burp)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.03: Behind The Scenes with our Producer and Recording Engineer
 
 
Q&A:
Q: Is there value in a creative writing MFA if you've no plans to teach or become an editor?
A: Yes. Multiple values. A sign that you take writing seriously. Community. Consider other programs, too.
Q: If you're faced with the possibility of working on multiple projects, or moving in a few different directions in your career, is there a way or rubric that you have to decide what you actually put your time and effort into?
A: What are you most excited about? Does it feed my mind, my stomach, my soul?
Q: How do you handle success? What do you wish you knew before you made it, or made it to the next level?
A: You always have to keep going! You're screwed. The goalposts move, but you have accomplished something! Be proud of what you have done. Success comes in many different flavors.
Q: How do you ingest new craft lessons, and level up without going into overthinking?
A: Go back to your community. Make a scrapbook of your understanding. Try new things! Think about how you would teach it to someone else.
Q: How do you deal with doubt from people in your personal life about your writing?
A: Remember that people outside the writing business may not understand what you are doing. Find the joy in writing, and separately, think about publishing. Train people, explain what you are trying to do. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 03]
 
[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.
 
[Emma] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Behind the Scenes Q&A with Emma and Marshall.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Marshall] And we're not that smart.
[Emma] I'm Emma.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Marshall] And I'm Marshall.
 
[DongWon] In this episode, we decided to have Emma, our producer, and Marshall, our sound engineer, on the episode with us. We are still on the Writing Excuses cruise. We wanted to have our lovely audience ask some questions of the other podcast hosts, but also have Emma and Marshall talk a little bit about how the podcast operates behind the scenes.
 
[Emma] This is a question from the Discord. From Beth. It's actually not a question about the podcast, but it will be relevant to Marshall. Is there value in a creative writing MFA if you've no plans to teach or become an editor?
[Marshall] Yes. I would say so. I know several folks that, in my program that aren't planning on teaching. There's a lot of other things you can do with an MFA. But, for me, what I got out of the program, more than anything, was some amazing writing from some amazing instructors and professors. So I feel like that value alone… I have a novel out of it, I've got like a half dozen short stories. For me, I was having a hard time writing. Like, finding the time to write. So, starting the MFA forced me to find that time and I produced some amazing stuff.
[DongWon] Yeah. From the perspective of a literary agent, whenever I see a query come in and the person has an MFA, it does a few things. One, it tells me that they have put very serious time and energy and money into getting a degree and pursuing a career in writing. I think what Marshall is saying is exactly spot on. One of the main things you get out of that is time to write and the requirement of having to produce writing. So, for me, that just is this indicator of, like, okay, you're taking this seriously. Not that other people who don't have an MFA haven't. But it's a sure signal, at least, that you've done this thing. So it is helpful from my perspective of oh, this person has an MFA. Okay, that stands out a little bit.
[Erin] I'll also say, as somebody who has an MFA and did it actually so that I could teach, look at the MFA program and the cost of it. So there are programs in which everything you do is completely covered and basically you're just giving your time. There are programs where you're actually going to have to spend some money, and either you've got that money or you may have to take out loans. So, really think about, like, what the value is that you're putting on it and whether you'll feel good at the end of it, you think, having put that investment into it. So, if you're like, "No, I don't want to spend X amount of money, but I do want to have that dedicated time," maybe one of the shorter programs like Clarion or Clarion West or Odyssey, which are programs within speculative fiction that are more affordable might work for you. Maybe even getting all your friends and going into a cabin in the woods, which we'll be talking about in a few episodes will work for you. So, there are other ways to get there, but I had an amazing time myself in the MFA. It's a great way to build community.
 
[DongWon] Okay, great. Let's take another question from the audience.
[Question] If you're faced with the possibility of working on multiple projects, or moving in a few different directions in your career, is there a way or rubric that you have to decide what you actually put your time and effort into?
[Dan] Well, I have been in this position several times. I have made this decision based on many different criteria. What I have found works best for me, and everyone is different, is put your time into whatever you're most excited about. It is virtually impossible to predict of these 3 projects I want to write, which one is going to sell better. It's… Making those decisions based on personal investment and excitement is usually what's going to produce the best work.
[Erin] Sometimes you do know ahead of time. So, I do a lot of freelance work, and the way that I like to think about it is will it feed the following 3 things. So, will it feed my mind? In my learning something, a new craft, something I've always wanted to tackle, like, I really want to learn about game writing, so I'll do this game writing project even though it's something new. Might be a little scary. Will it feed my stomach, and by that, I mean is there some monetary value that might go towards my groceries? Which are important to me. Thirdly, will it feed my soul? Is it something that really excites me, on like a fundamental level? If you can get none of those things, maybe just don't do that project. It doesn't seem great. If it feeds only one, I always go soul first, really, a lot of the time. If you can get 2 or 3, like, that's when you really know that something is a project that you maybe want to put more of your attention towards.
 
[Emma] We have another question from the Discord. This is from [Kalamai Simmons]. How do you handle success? Is there anything you wish you knew before you had made it? I'm going to just tack on that you can say made it to the next level.
[Dan] Well, that's an important distinction, really. That's what I wanted to talk about, which is the thing I've learned about success and thinking that I've made it, is that you've never made it. Like, you never hit a point where you can just rest on your laurels and your career will take care of itself without you having to try anymore. Like, I've been on the New York Times bestseller list, and 2 years later, couldn't sell a book to save my life. It… You always have to have that in the back of the mind that this is a job and not just a privilege that you have that people will always throw money at you for everything you write.
[DongWon] There's an essay, I think, I've mentioned a few times over the years from Daniel Abraham, who's a brilliant fantasy author, half of the James S. A. Corey writing team. He wrote this essay and I can't remember exactly the phrasing of it, but the title of the essay is basically, like, You're Screwed. The refrain that comes up over the course of the essay is something along the lines of, like, "Okay, you've decided you want to be a writer. You're screwed. You've managed to publish your first short story. It's now you're screwed because now you have to figure out how to write a novel. Now you have to figure out how to get an agent. Now you have to figure out how to publish that novel. Now you've hit the New York Times bestseller list. Now you have to do it again." One of the things that it really just gets across is that every time you get to the next level, the goalposts do move forward. But, you also have done all of this cool stuff at every step of that career. So, the important thing I think, for me, that I get from that essay is both recognizing that no moment are you truly done, at no moment are there no more goals to strive for. But also, at every stage of that game, you have accomplished the thing that you were so excited to do when you were one tier down from there, looking at the next tier.
[Erin] Yeah. There's a similar essay called the Writer's Hierarchy of Doubt, I believe.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Which is done by like a series of questions, I think the most common of which is why am I not Ted Chang. But, like, it asks, like, many questions that may come up over the course of a writing career in the same way. I often like to think of it, and this is basically what DongWon just said, but it is you may not ever feel like you have fully made it, but where you are is making it to someone, including, most of the time, your past self. So I also think it's good to be gracious about where you've gotten to. A lot of times, if people come up to you and are like, "Oh, my gosh. You are so great. You succeeded in this way." The instinct can be to be like, "Oh, no, because I haven't done these other things." It's nice to say, like, "Thank you," and take that moment to appreciate, like, where you are, and to be gracious to those for whom it is a big step as opposed to undercutting it and being like, "Well, this is nothing." Because for folks, including you in the past, it is something, and it's something to be proud of.
[DongWon] My version of that essay is why do people keep asking me if I'm Ted Chang.
[Laughter]
[We know why.]
[Dan] I think it's important as well to keep your mind open to different definitions of success. When I started 15 some years ago, I always used to joke that I didn't care so much about like bestseller lists or anything, I just wanted high school kids to have to read my book in English classes. Now I've had both. I get assigned a lot in school, and I have been a bestseller. But, last night while we were standing around in the halls of this cruise ship, somebody walked up to me and said, "Are you Dan Wells? I love your books and your podcast." That was such a more satisfying level of success than any of the money I've ever gotten. Any of the other kinds of fame or prestige or whatever. So… And then, of course, there's also the I have 6 kids and I am able to feed them. So, that feels like success as well. Solidly mid-list rather than a bestseller, but my kids get to eat every day.
[DongWon] With that, let's take a quick break.
 
[Marshall] All right. I'm on thing of the week this week. My name is Marshall. I am the recording engineer for the podcast. I'm going to recommend everybody by my friend, Brent Lambert's novella from Neon Hemlock Press. It's called A Necessary Chaos. It is incredible. He has worked really hard on it and it's amazing. It's basically a queer black spy versus spy fantasy action story with magic, deep worldbuilding, and incredible, incredible writing. Basically, if you're a fan of How to Lose the Time War, with a mix of like Kate Elliott, you're gonna love it. So check out A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert.
 
[DongWon] Okay. Let's take another question from the audience.
[Question] Hi. So you've all been at this for a while. My question boils down to how do you all ingest new craft lessons? Like, at this stage in your careers, and level up yourself as an author without kind of like going into overthinking mode?
[DongWon] Yeah. Marshall, you just finished your MFA. I mean, that's a fire hose of new craft lessons. Right?
[Marshall] Oh, yeah. I've had plenty of new craft lessons. But I keep learning from my community and my friends and when I podcast and reading their stuff. So I feel like I'm always leveling up my writing when I'm talking about writing and engaging in that community. An MFA helps, of course, too, but that was more refining my work a bit more and finally work shopping some of my stuff. But, honestly, I keep going back to my community.
[DongWon] Yeah. Emma, you're newer at this, but in the last year, you've also been exposed to how we talk about writing, all the craft lessons that we talk about. How has it been sort of like jumping into this deep end of craft talk?
[Emma] Um... It's been really cool. I think it's cool to… Like our hosts are at such… Like, you're all different ages and at different stages in your careers, and the way that you are all able to dive into one of our podcast episodes and learn from each other is really cool. Like, it definitely hits home, like you're never done learning, you've never figured it out. It actually kind of reminds me of something you were talking about earlier, which is the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs and this idea… I think my mom told me this one time, where I was getting a little maybe too into astrology…
[Chuckles]
[Emma] And reading about myself. My mom was like, "The way that I think about all these personality tests and all these things about yourself is that there is definite… There's always something in them to learn. There's like a different lens that they offer to you, and also, you do not have to consume it all or take it all on." You get to kind of like create this little scrapbook of understanding of the craft of writing, the craft of yourself, and I'm really proud of myself for just saying that.
[Laughter]
[Emma] That's it.
[Dan] I'll just add, I'm a big fan of trying new things. I… Back when all of my books were first person, I realized I'd never written a third person book. Well, okay, let's try one. I'd never written a present tense book. Okay, let's try one. So that's how I kind of ingest new craft stuff. I learned new things from our… My cohosts all the time. That's how I figure out if I like them or how to do them, is just learn by doing. I'm going to play with this new toy for a while.
[Erin] I learn a lot by teaching, but you don't have to be a teacher to do this. One of the things I'll do is if something, if I don't understand something or there's something I really want to work on, I will go, "Okay. Let's say I needed to teach a lesson about this, or do a podcast about this, or even write a blog about it." All like Google a bunch of different things, and then try to distill it for myself into something I could tell someone else. That helps stop me from getting like too in the weeds, is, I'm like, "Okay, I took all this in." Now I'm going to tell my cat, who, like, knows so much about writing, you all, about what I learned and what is going on. I'll actually deliver that information to her. That helps me figure out what are the parts that are sticking with me and that I really want to take with me into my writing. You need to get a cat, it's required.
[Chuckles]
 
[DongWon] So, I think we have time for one more question.
[Scarlett] My name is Scarlett. Do you have any advice for dealing with doubt from people in your personal life, with regards to writing. As an example, when I finished a work in progress, I ran out of my room, super excited, went to my housemate, and went, "I finished a first draft." She went, "Well, it's not like it's published or anything."
[Stabbing]
[laughter]
[DongWon] Listen, I got like tarps in the back of my truck…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I got shovels. Just tell me where to show up, I can help.
[Dan] Back when I had published my first book… I think I actually had to out at this point. One of my neighbors was like, "Oh, you're an author. You have a book out." I'm like, "Yeah, I've got two published books." He said, "Where can I find them?" I'm like, "Bookstores."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] He looked so confused. He was like, "Really? You're in bookstores." I'm like, "Dude. You don't have to hurt me this bad."
[DongWon] One thing, I think, is useful to keep in mind, is people outside of the writing business have so little understanding of what this process looks like and what it means to write a book. So, one of the things that I wish people would stop telling writers or asking writers is, "So. When are you going to publish the book?" Because there's so many reasons to write. There's so many reasons to put words to page, to tell stories, that aren't just focused on the I need to turn this into money, I need to participate in the industrial process of taking a story and turning it into a book. I recognize that most of the people here want to do that, and a lot of people listening to us want to do that, but what I would encourage you to do is to find the joy in the writing first, and then, as a separate step, decide I would like to publish this. I would like this to be in the world, I would like to be paid for it. But those are 2 separate things. Writing in your journal, writing fan fiction, writing a story for your friends, all of those things are incredibly valid, beautiful forms of writing that you can celebrate. That also means writing a novel that no one will ever see is an incredible accomplishment that you should be very proud of. Now, other people will immediately jump to, "It doesn't mean anything if you haven't published it," but I think that is a very toxic point of view, and that comes from a place where they just don't understand what it is that you're doing. They don't understand what it is to try and be an artist in this world. If you find the joy in yourself first, I think that will help insulate you from some of the sting of other people not understanding where you're coming from.
[Erin] I also think you can train people a little bit. That sounds bad, but in ord… By letting them into the process, more than the product. So if you say to somebody, like, "Oh, my gosh, like I am trying to get, like, 2 chapters done, and I'm like really trying to figure out what's going on with my main romance." You don't have to tell them more than that. Then, when you come and be like, "Oh, my gosh, I figured out the romance, and I finished my chapters," they know that it's something to celebrate, because you told them that's what you were trying to do. So they're not thinking of it in a commercial sense, their thinking of it in a supporting you sense, the same way they would support any other tasks that you were trying to accomplish in your life.
[Marshall] I think what DongWon said is really important. I haven't published yet, I'm going to say. But I've been at this so long that people in my life know that I've been doing this. As soon as I finished my first book, not the one for my MFA, my mom was like, "Can I read it? I really want to read it." Because she's known my whole life that I've been wanting to be a writer. So I think maybe getting a new roommate… Besides that, surround yourself with people that are going to support you whether they understand or not. I don't think my family really understood it in the beginning. But they do now, regardless of publication and everything else.
[Dan] A good sense of perspective is to remember that writing books is especially weird for this exact reason. Right? Like, I've got a neighbor who paints, and everyone's like, "Oh, cool. Those are really neat." No one has ever asked her if she sells them, or told her she's a failure because they're not in museums. I've got several neighbors that get together and play basketball in the mornings before they go to work. No one has ever apologized to them for being failed NBA stars. Yet, with writing, especially with writing books, that's what… That's kind of the attitude that we tend to get. I think a lot of it is because it's not immediately visible. Like, I can show you the painting that I made or you can watch me play basketball. But if I say I've written a book, you just kind of have to trust me that it's real. So, keeping that perspective of well, it's because they don't see it or because they think about it differently, it's not that they undervalue it so much as they just don't understand it. So, like Erin was saying, you can use this as an opportunity to educate and to let them in.
 
[DongWon] I just want to say thank you to all of the attendees of the 2023 Writing Excuses workshop and retreat for all of your wonderful questions. It was a delight to hear your thoughts, and I hope that our answers were somewhat illuminating. Now, I believe Emma has our homework.
[Emma] Your homework is to think about what homework you would give yourself as a writer today. Then, I'm also curious what homework you would give or you would have given yourself as a writer a year ago. What are those 2 different pieces of homework, how are they different, and I'd love for you to share one of those on social media, and tag us at writing_excuses on Instagram and we'll re-post your story, or your homework. Maybe we will actually use it sometime in the future.
 
[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
 
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.37: Mandatory Failure
 
 
Key Points: Deep dive into Mandatory Failure, book 18 of the Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. Book 1 of the three-book finale! Start with an explosion, due to enemy action that continues through the last three books. This book focuses on a refugee crisis that the mercenaries are dragged into help resolve. Setting up a big galaxy event, with a logistics problem? Big problems matter when you see the effect in small places. People growing up and stepping up. How should we behave in a crisis? The world's worst apology. A comedic tool, cascading failure. Emotional for you, the writer, versus emotional for the reader? Check your alpha reader, crit partner, or reasonable facsimile. Do figure out what level of feedback you need. Authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion? Balance emotion and craft. Mandatory failure -- you are going to fail. But don't let that stop you.
 
[Season 18, Episode 37]
 
[1:30 minutes inaudible advertising Hello Fresh]
 
[1:51]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, Mandatory Failure.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Howard] We have reached that point in this eight episode miniseries where we're actually doing the deep dive part and diving into the books. Mandatory Failure is the 18th Schlock Mercenary story and is book 1 of what I structured as a sort of a three book finale to the 20 book mega-arc. So that's really the way I think of it, or the way I thought of it. Yes, it's the 18th book in a thing, but it is the first book in a trilogy that will end in a big way the fellow cast members here have just read it, and I'm sure have bazillions of questions for me. I'm anxious to not be able to answer them.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I'll just start. The question that I have actually comes from what you just said, which is knowing that this… You meant this to be its own sort of self-contained thing within the larger. How did you decide where to start? To make it a satisfying beginning for the trilogy?
[Howard] I gave it a prologue with an explosion, and the explosion in the prologue was an explosion… It was enemy action, and it is enemy action that continues throughout the trilogy. But in this case, it sets off a very specific local series of events that this book focuses on. So the fact that the enemy action… We have non-baryonic entities, the Pa'anuri in the Andromeda galaxy, and, oh, no, they have actually developed a weapon that lets them fire plasma through hyperspace and destroy targets kind of at will, and there's nothing we can do about it. That drives the next three books. That is… They have a plan, and that drives the next three books. But for this book, the first thing that they hit creates a disaster, creates a refugee crisis, and our heroes, the mercenaries, get dragged in to… It's not very mercenary-ish, they get dragged into help the refugees.
[Mary Robinette] They were voluntold, I mean, really.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] They were voluntold.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Well, I mean, they were voluntold, and the way… It was fun to create it that way. One of the mercenaries is related to someone who's there on the scene, and because of the weird and very very racist laws in place in that system, they couldn't hire outside help unless they were related to somebody who lived there. So she makes a call to her sister, and her sister talks to the CO, and off we go, as mercenaries that nobody wants to have.
 
[DongWon] It's such an interesting, almost counter-intuitive plot decision that you made because you know that you're setting up this big galaxy event. Where you start is an entire volume that's really focused on a logistics problem in a very specific area of how do we deal with all of these corpses, I guess. They're kind of corpses.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] So much of that initial section is taken up with the mechanical logistics. How do we harvest them? How do we bring them back? How do we feed them? Then, also the political problem of how do we make this… How do we not start three wars or whatever it is, by doing this thing? You know you want to get to point C. What made you decide to spend so much time in this very narrow slice? That is not a critique, I think it works beautifully, but…
[Howard] It was a lesson that I learned early on, which is big problems don't matter until you see the effect in small places. Famine? Yes, that's a disaster. Me being hungry? Is an F-ing catastrophe. So that's… I wanted to drill as far down as I could. Having refugees begin waking up before we're ready for them and wonder where their family members are. That is extremely poignant, extremely relevant to millions of people on the planet Earth right now. It was difficult for me to write because it was so raw. But by doing it that way, when I blow up more and more things later on, you can extrapolate. People have already felt it in the small space, and now they can project it on the big screen, and I make you feel even worse. As an author, that's kind of how we think. What can I do to make you feel worse than you feel right now.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You did a good job of that.
[Howard] Thank you.
 
[Mary Robinette] Really, I like that… Like, one of the things that I want to just draw attention to is that… DongWon, you mentioned a number of different things that you're doing with that, but you're also doing like you've got these character arcs that are also happening for multiple different characters. So you set up this thing with Peri where she is pretending to be in charge and is like trying to figure out the balance of where power is. What is too much, what is comfortable? That's again reflecting like this larger power struggle that's going on.
[Howard] Well, it's one of the themes, one of the quiet themes which were actually going to try and reflect in the cover art. These books aren't in print yet. Book 17 features Capt. Tagon on the front cover, front and center, there really aren't any other characters there. Books 18, 19, and 20 will feature other characters in the center positions, and Capt. Tagon's picture gets smaller with each volume. Because part of what is happening here, and maybe this is the parent in me, is that his company is… These people are growing up. These people are stepping up. Having a corporal need to take charge and actually boss people around as if she is a flag officer, that's kind of huge.
[DongWon] It really effectively set up the narrative rhyming, or the thematic rhyming we're going to see over the next three volumes of who gets to have power, who should have power, and who takes power. Right? Over and over again, we see entities, people, taking control who shouldn't, people trying to resist that, people getting control when they deserve it. I don't know. You keep asking this question from all these different angles in each of these different scenarios. What I love about this disaster and the logistics is A, it sets up sort of the moral stakes in a certain way, of like this is how people should behave, this trying to care for each other in this type of crisis, which then when things go off the rails in the future, it gives us that grounding. But also really sets up this understanding of thinking about power, thinking about authority, in these ways, because we get to see the characters thinking about it in a very explicit on page way.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the other things along these lines that I also thought was really lovely in the first book is how that question of power dynamics is playing out, not just in the hierarchical nature of the ship, but also in the marriage, the Foxworthy. Like, the scene where he realizes that he has… Where he's trying to apologize to his wife for casting a shadow, and then he's like, "No, wait. That's wrong because that's still centering me."
[DongWon] The world's worst apology.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Such a bad apology. So bad. But it's also the kind of thing that you encounter in real life, and again, it's that becoming aware that you have power, that you have been exercising in ways that you really should not have.
[Howard] When we come back from the break, I want to talk about why that apology was so important. Why that was one of the most difficult scenes I've ever written.
 
[Erin] I am so excited to talk about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Which is one of those novels that I think lots of people are talking about and I came to it late. My main question was why did I not read this sooner. So, it's a book, it's a historical fiction novel, that follows the descendents of one woman who has two children, one of whom marries the governor in Ghana, in present-day Ghana, and basically helps to oversee a slave castle, and the other one who is one of the slaves sent over to America. It basically continues to track their families. So each chapter, you go one generation down as you see what happens to the half of the family that remained in Africa and the half of the family that went through slavery all the way down to the present day. I'll warn you, it's a bit brutal at times, it does not shrink away from its subject matter. But it's beautifully written, and each individual descendents story is just this wonderful sort of short story life experience that really puts you in the mindset of the character as she tells this amazing historical fiction tale. So, again, that's Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
 
[Howard] So. I'm going to go ahead and confess, full confession here. When Kevin apologizes to Elf, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote that. I must have broken down into tears half a dozen times while doing it. Because I kept trying to tap into that relationship and into the experiences of someone who knows he has unjustly but accidentally exercised power over someone else, is preventing them from becoming what they could be, and wants to fix it, but the very act of trying to fix it is itself an exercise of power. Wading through that… It was fun to write, in that… DongWon, you said worst apology ever. Clumsiest apology ever.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] But the whole time I was writing it, I could tell that for Elf, it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever received because it was so genuine.
[DongWon] Well, that's a wonderful end to the scene, [garbled] of the scene of her tearing up. It just shows how much it landed, even though we, as the reader, have that… The comedy in the scene is him trying to explain this thing that is so… He keeps, like, apologizing for the thing he just said in the scene. Right?
[Howard] It's… That is a comedic tool, the cascading failure… The cascading failure where it's…
[DongWon] The mandatory failure.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I love that tool. But here's the thing. When I was writing it, I knew that part of what I was creating was a character moment that made this Kevin precious, and I was about to kill him, and he would never come back. Elf would forever have this memory of something her husband had done for her, and even if we are able to restore her husband from a backup, that backup doesn't include this data. As she says later in the story… Schlock says, "The doctor can bring him back." She says, "I want the one who apologized."
[DongWon] It's a heartbreaking moment.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's so… Yeah. It's like…
[Howard] I had been waiting… No lie. I had been waiting five books for the opportunity to put paid on that… This promise that, hey, just because I've introduced a form of immortality doesn't mean death is cheap.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Doesn't mean there's no cost to it. I think it was book 13 where Schlock dies and they try and bring him back from bits they can find and end up having to restore him from backup. We actually had a conversation in a Writing Excuses retreat, and I remember the cast staring at me kind of wide-eyed like, "You know what you've done?" My response then was, "I think I know what I've done. I… You're making it sound worse than I thought it really was. Maybe I should pay more attention."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Yeah, it took me five books to find the point where I could really turn the screws on the poor reader.
 
[Erin] I was thinking about what you just said about writing the apology itself and how it made you feel. I often hear people talk about I was crying… I know I wrote this, and it was working because I was crying while I was writing it. It never happens to me because I'm cold inside.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But I'm wondering…
[Howard] Yeah, just dead inside.
[Erin] Chaotic dead inside. But I'm wondering, how do you know in that situation, like, if what you are writing is emotionally landing for you versus emotionally landing for the reader? Because I think you got in the place you needed to in the end, but, like, how do you separate the you who's experiencing it from the you who's trying to craft it?
[Howard] I have a cheat that is not available to anyone else. I'd been using it for a decade by the time I got there. I would write the scripts, and then I would hand them to Sandra, and I would watch Sandra read. I could see… I mean, I learned… I mean, I already knew a lot of the body language and the things… Micro expressions and whatever else. We've been married now, as of this recording session, we are coming up on 30 years of marriage. This is someone I'm very, very close to. I would watch her read. I watched her read this scene, and she teared up and she giggled, and she teared up and she giggled. Then she handed it back to me and said, "I want pictures." I knew, okay, this one's right. This one is right. I could not have created the Schlock Mercenary that I did without Sandra as the pre-alpha feedback loop. Because many times I would hand her a script and should look at it and she'd say, "Okay. Yeah, no, I think with a picture…" I would snatch it from her and say, "Stop! Just stop talking. I can tell it's wrong because you have confusion and there should be no confusion at this point. The words should be enough." I'd storm off to my office and I'd make it better. Then I'd bring it back, and she would look at it and say, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes. Now I…" So…
[DongWon] I will say, you say this is not available to other people. But it is, maybe not in the exact form like…
[Mary Robinette] Sandra is not available.
[DongWon] [garbled a third of your marriage is not available]
[Howard] You can't have my Sandra. No.
[DongWon] But people… You can have a beta reader. You can have a crit partner. You can have a collaborator in some ways. I think having those people in your life that you can rely on to be early readers or even people just to bounce ideas off of. That… I mean, that is available to people in certain ways.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've heard it called an ideal reader, which is that you think about the person that you want, that you are writing for. So, like, I with the Lady Astronaut books in particular in writing for [Alessandra?] and I'm looking for the moment where she is like… Where I'm like, "Oh, she's going to hate this so much. She's going to be so mad at me." I'm like, "Yes!" That's what I'm writing for is a lot of times is will it provoke that? It gives me a way to kind of AB test things in my own brain even before I commit them to the page by thinking about how the person is likely to react to it.
[Howard] I actually struggle when I'm submitting things to writing groups because when I get their responses, it's already been filtered. No. I wanted to watch your eyes while you read. I wanted to watch everything happen so that I knew… So that's… It's difficult to find.
[DongWon] That is too much feedback for some people. Right? For some people that is to intensive of a process to feel that disappointment immediately in that way, to filter is necessary. So, no for yourself, as you're figuring out who your crit partner is, who to work with, what writing groups to work with, what level of feedback you need.
[Howard] But coming back to Erin's question, I could not know that I got things right until I checked it with Sandra. That one especially, because it's a relationship between a man and a woman, and he's famous and she's not, and draw whatever parallels there you care to, I really needed to make sure that it worked. Once I had her approval, I knew that it did.
[DongWon] It felt like a very personal authentic moment. I felt a realness in that scene as I read it, but I think that comes through very well.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think… A secondary question, I think, that was lurking beneath my question, is authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion. Because I think sometimes… Like, for example, when I'm not being cold and dead inside, I might cry at like a Hallmark movie when the music swells, but I don't think that's… That's just like I can feel the thing working on me. You know what I mean? It doesn't feel like it comes from a genuine place, it comes from like all the things that are happening around it that are telling me to react in a specific way. Like, when the music changes in a horror movie, it might not be scary, but the thing is telling you is scary. There's a difference between that and when the emotion is genuine and it's coming from a real place. Being able to tell the difference between when you're writing a more surface, and there's room for all levels… But when you're writing a more surface level emotion, and when you're really getting to the heart of things, I think can be really difficult because they both feel emotional.
[Mary Robinette] So the… I hear what you're saying, and the reason I'm over here making faces that if we had a video feed, the viewers would be like, "Ooo, what's going on there?" is because i think that when… I think that… For a long time, I would say, "Oh, yes, you can feel it." That there's this idea, but there are some people who don't have those reactions. Like, when I'm writing with depression, I am strictly crafting my way through that, and I know from experience that the reader cannot tell. Then, people with varying forms of autism often don't have the same kinds of reactions, so it's much like telling someone that you have to read your work aloud in order to know whether or not it flows, which is not a process that's going to work for a deaf writer.
[DongWon] It's just another tool in the set. Right?
[Mary Robinette] It's another tool.
[DongWon] Being able…
[Mary Robinette] It's a tool that can't… I understand what you're…
[Erin] Let me just… My question is actually less about the emotion and more about the craft, though. What I'm saying is you can fool yourself into thinking you are writing something because you are putting all the emotions into it on a surface level. How do you ensure that the craft under it is doing the emotional work needed so that you may be making yourself cry on a surface level, but in fact, you're not getting to something else because you are… It sounds right, if that makes sense…
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] But it is not right. So it's actually the opposite.
[DongWon] That is tricky. Especially the things that are so raw in a way that's… It's so intense of an emotional place that there's not enough craft on it to make it legible to me or connect to me. Sometimes it just feels… I'm so inside someone else's experience that I'm like, "I don't know how to take this in or respond to it." So you always need that balance. Right? You always need to… The score has to be right, the lighting has to be right, all these different things. Right? I think what's so interesting about this conversation is we're seeing that it really is finding that balance point between something that feels very true to you, and something that is rooted in however many years of craft you apply to it. You've got to that moment, Howard, not just by tapping into the emotion of it, but also you've been drawing these characters for years and years and years.
[Howard] Oh. So much, so much craft.
[DongWon] You know how to hone a joke. You know how to do this. And you edit it and reworked it and all those things.
[Howard] So much craft. There was… Gosh, eight years ago, I don't know exactly. I was asked to narrate a Christmas program. The way it had been written was very we are going to tell the congregation how they should feel. I objected to that on several levels. But the uppermost level was my writer brain. It was like, "No. No. We can do this so much better." So I asked them permission. I said, "Can I rework some of this? I think I can trim it a little bit and make it a little smoother. Do you mind?" "Okay, fine." I took all of the tell statements out of it and reframed everything in ways that encourage people to begin imagining feelings for themselves without telling them to do that. The response from the person who created it was, "Ah! Can I have this? Can this be the new edition of… Can I just use these?" I'm like, "Fine. It is my gift to you." It was all craft. It was all craft. It was very much the toolbox of I'm just going to remove all of the statements that tell you how you should feel, and include characters feelings.
 
[DongWon] Can we talk about the title real quick? This idea of mandatory failure. The reason it… Your comments made me think of it was, so much of learning craft, so much of learning how to do all these things, is simply like doing it over and over again. Right? You have to learn by doing. Now, the reason I love this title and I love this idea is inherently you are going to be failing, especially at the early stages, to do the thing that you're trying to do. To access that emotional state, to set the stage properly to execute on all these different emotional levels. Failure is not just part of the process. It is a mandatory piece for success. Or at least that's how I'm interpreting what you said.
[Howard] No, that's exactly right. The quote… And the quote grew out of a subversion of the NASA statement. Failure is not an option. Which is a way of saying this is too important to make any mistakes on. This is the piece we absolutely have to get right. But so many people misuse that and say failure is not an option all the time. I subverted it. Failure is not an option, it's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] That is my favorite of the 70 maxims. It is maxim 70. It's where the series ends. Putting in here nicely set up for me… I mean, it's sort of a theme in my own life. I'm going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again in order to get it right. These characters are going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again before they get it right. In this book, in the next book, and in the trilogy that wraps things up. Speaking of wrapping things up, we should homework.
 
[DongWon] Our homework this week is going to be a writing prompt for you. So what we would like you to do is imagine a major disaster has just occurred. Write a scene directly in the aftermath of this incident.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Howard] This episode was made possible by our amazing Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&A's, livestreams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator
 
 
Key Points: Different audio formats use narrators differently. Narrator, telling, and no narrator, showing, changes the pacing. Immersion versus distance! Create space for the audience to imagine. Keep in mind what you can let the audience imagine, and what you need to specify to fit your story. Do think about narrator or not as craft, but also as a business decision.
 
[Season 18, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] To Narrator or Not to Narrator.
[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.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about narrators today. We had a moment in the last episode where I said that Forgotten doesn't have a narrator, and Mary Robinette said yes it does. We're going to talk a little bit about that difference. There are a lot of audio things, as audio becomes a much bigger part of the market, people are starting to play with the form a little, we're starting to see full cast audio a lot more than we used to, we're starting to see a lot of different things. So there are full audio dramas, radio dramas, and then there are dramatized audiobooks, and they use narrators differently.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So when you're thinking about an audiobook, an audiobook is something that was written for prose, for print, not necessarily prose but written for print, and then is read aloud. A dramatized book is something that, or a full cast… Let me step first… The full cast, where you have multiple voices, instead of a single narrator. Then you have dramatized audio which is usually full cast and then sound effects. Then you move over to radio plays, which come from the stage side into the audio realm. So in those cases, you are dispensing with all of the basic conventions that come out of novels, short stories, and you're starting with more stage and cinema conventions and moving I. There's some overlap in between. But those are… That's kind of your basic range.
[Dan] Yeah. These are not necessarily very clean-cut categories. There is a lot of play in between them. But, for example, if you go and listen to I Am Not a Serial Killer, that is a narrator reading the book. He will read everything, he will read the dialogue, he will read the narration. He will change his voice now and then when he's doing a different person's part. But it is one person reading it. Listen to Zero G, and it has full cast and sound effects, and it has a narrator to say the inner parts. To describe sometimes how the main character is feeling, what a location looks like. Which is similar to that audiobook, but changed a little bit. Then, something like Dark One: Forgotten, there is nobody just saying inner thoughts out loud, there is nobody describing the setting. It is all right there on the page, much more like a classic script would be for radio or TV.
[Erin] What's interesting with Dark One: Forgotten, though, is that because it is in the style of a podcast, the narrator… Like, the characters in the world are directly addressing the audience. There's a part where it's like, "Oh, I'm not going to put this part in," or "Let me let you know what I'm going to do right here," or "I'm interviewing this person," where there letting you know what's happening from moment to moment, almost like a narrator, but within the world. Which I find like a really interesting way of like mashing things up. One of the things that I do for Zombies Run is I've both written the script part where they're just like, "Runner! You need to go over here. Somebody's attacking you. A zombie's behind you." Which is, there's no narrator really, they're just talking to you like you're somebody that they're talking to over a headset. But I also write in-world radio for Zombies Run, where somebody is actually doing a radio show within the world, and similarly, they are addressing the audience, but it is a fake audience that we've fictionalized for the sake of the Zombies Run universe. It's fun. Each one is a slightly different technique.
 
[Dan] Yeah. That's so cool. So, one of the questions that I want to get to in this episode, and I'll just throw it at you, Erin, is what do those different styles do for you? Why would you choose one over the other, aside from the constraints of the medium that you're working in? When does having a narrator really help you, and when do you prefer to dispense with the narrator altogether?
[Erin] I can't remember if we said this in a podcast or just while talking, but at some point we were talking about showing versus telling and how that changes the pace. When you have a narrator, it's a more telling media. You're being told what's going on. So it is a little bit slightly different paced than when you're… Let me rephrase. When you're… When you have a narrator, it makes you feel, I think, more like you're listening to a story. So it feels like you're around a fireside, and, weirdly, unlike in prose, that actually slows down the pace, I believe. It feels like, okay, we're just gathered around and I'm going to tell you what I am doing. When you don't have a narrator, you're within the story yourself. You feel like you are a part of the story, I think, more. For that reason, it feels faster paced in the tension is higher.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think of it as immersion versus distance. So the more present a narrator is, usually the more distant you are, because you have someone who is describing the things to you, but you are not participating in the scene. Whereas when the action is happening around you, you are in fact participating in the scene, because you are at least directly hearing what is happening. So you are a direct witness in that case. So, in puppet theater, we use show, don't tell, for very different reasons, because you are literally doing a puppet show, not a puppet tell. There, what I'm thinking about, is that immersion. It's like, the example that I use is I could say, "There's a clock on the wall." Or, I could have someone say, "Oh, looks like it's 9:05 now." One of them has you deeper into the world. So, for me, I think about it in terms of immersion versus distance on whether or not I'm going to use an active narrator. The other thing is that sometimes that narrator is the most efficient way to change a scene.
[Dan] Yes. I really like that way of thinking about it, the immersion versus distance. I found several times adapting Zero G from the prose that I wrote into more of a script format that there were so many times when I was describing how Zero felt or what he was looking at and I realized, "Oh, I'm gonna have someone reading this. I can just make this dialogue instead." That happens so often. Really, that's what was going on. There were moments when it needed to be a narrator doing it, and there are moments when it felt so much better and so much more natural to have the character themselves say it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find when I'm writing for… Erin, I don't know if you find this too, but when I'm writing for… Knowing that there's going to be an actor on the other end, is that I can have my written dialogue be more ambiguous, because I can put a note to them and then trust them to do the thing. Like, having a character on the page say, "What!" Like, I can't do that without adding a lot of context around it, extreme numbers of punctuation marks, in order to get that "what!" As opposed to "what." Those are two different things. An actor, I can trust, usually, to do that. On the other hand, if there is a possible way to misinterpret a line, an actor will find it.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I think it was Margaret Dunlap, and I apologize if I've misremembered who it was. But she was telling me about a videogame that she had been writing dialogue for. For one particular dialogue tree, she had to come up with five or six options that were all different. Basically, she used the word what, then with some script notes to say, said in this tone of voice for all five.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Yeah. That was Margaret.
[Dan] That was Margaret. Which I thought was so brilliant.
[Howard] Got paid for writing the same words six times.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] Amazing.
 
[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to point out is that just from our episode title, to narrator or not to narrator, you may be thinking of white room stories, like They're Made of Meat is the classic example. Where there is no description, is just dialogue. We call it white room because you have no description of what's going on. All of your cues come from what is in the dialogue. If you take a white room story and move it into the audio realm, suddenly the fact that there are two different actors, two different voice actors doing the voices, gives you more information. If you add sound design in the background, the sound of a café or the sound of science-fiction space, which shouldn't make any noise, but for some reason always does, you can create something that makes it no longer white room, but the energy… And, for me, as a writer of comedic pithy tight dialogue, the energy remains there. You don't need the dialogue tags that you often have to resort to to say who's speaking. So I love what an audio drama affords you, which is the ability to do that fast banter and keep all those pieces there so that the energy doesn't get slowed down by a narrator explaining to you what they're doing.
[Erin] I will say, on the other hand, the challenges that physical description when you don't have a narrator means that you need to be sometimes coming up with reasons that, in dialogue, your characters will be saying where they are when they're both there and they know that they're there.
[Laughter]
[Erin] You know what I mean? Right. We all know we're in this room, but like, wow, this chair's comfortable. It's a little bit more of those like location aware…
[DongWon] Isn't this coffee shop so nice?
[Erin] Dialogue lines. Exactly. Like, "This coffee shop? I never liked that one." Whatever it is. Like… I think that that's really fun to figure out how to make it work. It's like the same challenge people have with info dumping in that you want to make it seem like really natural to the scene that your writing without fully disrupting what's happening between the characters.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about that more when we come back from the break.
 
[Mary Robinette] Everyone, we want to introduce you to our new producer, Emma Reynolds, and Emma is going to tell you about our thing of the week.
[Emma] The thing of the week is the Earbug Podcast Collective which is a weekly newsletter that is sent out. It is coordinated by one of my friends and mentors in the audio serial area whose amazing. But it is curated by a different person each week. It's just a great way to get your hands-on, or I suppose your ears-on all of the different audio content that is out there for inspiration for you.
 
[Dan] All right. So, we're back. I want to talk more about this white room concept. In particular, I… One thing I said at the beginning of this year, because I've been doing so much audio and now getting back into more traditional novels, is that I had initially kind of fallen off the wagon and forgotten how to write scene descriptions. So the first draft of the actual Dark One novel that I turned in was basically people talking to each other as if they were in an audio drama.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No one was moving around doing actions, there was no description in between the lines of dialogue to break up what was happening. There was very little scenic description of where they were. That's because my brain had gotten so embedded into this audio space, where that kind of stuff wasn't a part of the script. That really kind of hit home for me the differences that arise when you start breaking these formats, when you start jumping from one to another. Because there are things you can do in one that work really well, but don't work at all when you do them in a different format.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy playing with is… That comes out of audio drama, is using this idea that Erin was talking about before hand, of the interaction with the world to describe what is going on through dialogue. So, in The Spare Man, I don't describe actually that much of what Gimlet, the little dog, does. Frequently, the way I am keeping her alive in the scene is through dialogue. That she's… Like… When someone is having a conversation, it's like, "Is this dog allowed to have people food?" That tells you everything that's going on. But part of what that does for me is that it creates space for the audience. I think any time that you have the narrator they're describing things in a linear way, that removes some of the audience space to imagine the world. One of the things that I think is fun is thinking about deliberately creating that space for the audience. When you're coming back to prose or when you're in the audio realm, is thinking where do I want to allow and encourage the audience to do some lift for me, because that is going to make the story more immediate for them, because it's going to be… They're going to be active participants in this story.
[DongWon] I really love that idea. Sort of pairing that with what Erin was talking about in terms of show, don't tell, one of the things about balancing the showing and the telling is about trust. Right? When you make space for the audience, what you're also doing is saying I'm trusting you to fill that space. I'm trusting you to meet me over there. Right? So making sure that that on-ramp is very easy for them, it's a very easy path for them to follow to meet you where you are, I think is really important and one of the key skills in that. So you can have that little moment of here's what Gimlet is doing and that's filled in, backfilled by us when we hear that, and we then fill in what the dog has been doing for the last like 30 seconds. It's such a delightful way for you as the creator to take a moment and say, "I see you, audience, and you are participating in this story too, and this is a thing we collaborate on." I think that's a beautiful thing that audio drama can do in a way that prose fiction can do, but it's not as natural of a fit. So I love hearing ways that you pull that in.
[Howard] There's a technical tool… Technical? A way of thinking about the absence of the narrator that I find it really useful. In the Dark One: Forgotten, when she says, "I'm recording this in my dorm room." We don't get much of a description, really, any description of the dorm room. It's assumed that all of us have in our head a picture of a dorm room. If, at any point in that story, there'd been action in the dorm room where Sophie and… The name of the main character is…
[Dan] Christina.
[Howard] Christina. Where Sophie and Christina decide to go out the back door… I've never been in a dorm that had a backdoor. But if that's a piece of blocking that you're planning on having in your story, you have to do a little more than just the shorthand when you give us that description. You have to do just a little bit more lifting so that the blocking that happens later works. I describe this as a technical tool. It's something that you have to keep in mind so that you know which pieces you can just let the audience imagine on their own and which pieces you have to specify.
[Dan] Yeah. I think it's important that we kind of draw a line on this. The title of this episode is To Narrator or Not to Narrator. I don't want you to think that that is… That that is a decision that has to be made from project to project. It can be made scene to scene, or even sentence to sentence. There are times within a completely normal traditional novel where you might decide to pull that narrator way back and let dialogue or action do the lifting rather than having the narrator. There are times even in an audio thing where you might want to have a narrator step in and do more.
[DongWon] One thing I do want to bring up, though. If you are making the decision of do I want to do this as a traditional prose project or single voice narrated audiobook versus a full cast production, from the business side, there's an important decision that you will be making there, which is that the right situation is very different for an audiobook versus a full cast production. When you start getting into the full production, you are now walking into dramatization territory, which is what film and TV producers will want if they're going to adapt your work. So, one thing to keep in mind is if somebody shows up and says, "We want to do a full cast production." That's a totally exciting cool thing to do. Be intentional about what you're doing and realizing that if you give up those rights, that may interfere with your ability to do a film or TV adaptation down the line. Now, I know, in a lot of cases, it still works, just doing the thing because the thing that's in front of you and it's exciting. But it's one of the things I want to make sure is clear as were talking about this, that these are different from audiobooks, not just in craft and practice, but in a business sense, you're making a different choice by participating in that or not. There's some blurry space in there. If you have like two or three narrators, I don't remember exactly the distinction, but there's sort of three categories in there. So there's some difference.
[Mary Robinette] It's…
[DongWon] You probably know this better than I do, actually.
[Mary Robinette] One of the big demarkers is whether or not you have changed it from the original form. So, you can have a full cast with almost… I'm not sure if there's a cap on the number of char… Of narrators that can be in there, as long as you don't change any of the words.
[DongWon] Okay.
[Dan] With Zero G, they did full cast audio, but we retained film rights. I don't know exactly how Sarah worked that out, but we worked that out.
[DongWon] It is possible to do it.
[Mary Robinette] You just have to…
 
[Howard] As an aside, this is one of those cases, fair listener, where having an agent…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Is very helpful. Because they can look up these exact questions for you so you don't have to.
[Dan] Solve the problems for you.
[DongWon] This is kind of an edge case. Right? You can tell from the way I'm talking about it I don't have this immediately to mind as… This is not something I've dealt with a bunch. It's a thing I've dealt with once or twice. So there's a conversation to be had in these gray areas. There's blurriness, there's ways to negotiate it.
[Mary Robinette] It's true, actually, that my definition on that may also be linked to whether or not it is narration versus acting.
[DongWon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] As far as the union is concerned.
[Dan] Yeah. That's a good [garbled distinction?]
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] Too.
[DongWon] Right. Then the union starts to come in, that's a whole nother set of questions that need to be answered as you do it. So, anyways…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Here's a few things that the decision of narrator or not to narrator is a craft one. It is also a business one. Make sure you're talking to your publishing team if you have one. Make sure you're being intentional about the choices that you're making, as you go into those choices.
[Erin] It can also be an experimental one. Which is to say that you can also just see what happens if you take something that you've written just as a regular narrator full prose, and what would happen if you took the narrator out or tried it in an audio format, and see what you learn. Because one thing that I think you learn a lot about in audio is which details you're going to want to have your narrator or your characters mention. Because, there, I think, is a limit, especially in a more fully acted production, to how much people want to listen to a narrator before they're like, "Get back to the drama."
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So you learn like maybe this longer passage that I might be able to put on the page is going to come off much differently, like, when I'm listening to it, especially if it's not in audiobook format listening, but more of a full cast.
[Dan] Yeah. One of the elements that gives me fits when I'm trying to write these pure audio dramas, for example, with the Moon Breaker videogame, is fight scenes. Doing those in something that has no narrator gets so hard. You can actually go and listen to the Moon Breaker episodes and see me doing these kinds of experiments that Erin's talking about, saying, "Well, what happens if I just do a straight fight scene and say, okay, Foley guy, lots of laser noises for like 20 seconds and then the story will keep going." Then other episodes are much more intentional, like, I'm going to block this entire thing out so that I know exactly what's happening, and the only things that are going to happen in the fight scene are ones that I think we can depict with clarity with pure audio and no narration. It is very hard to make a fight scene intelligible without a narrator describing what is happening and no visuals to let you see it.
[Howard] I'm just reminded of the time when Mike Magnola on a panel said, "Oh, yeah. I really trust this artist. In one of the scripts I said hell boy fights an army of skeletons for six pages."
[Laughter] [Oh, boy. Wow.]
[Erin] I think this comes back to why I think narrator or not is such a cool tool, because I was thinking about this fight scene. I'm like, if you want your audience member to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm in the middle of the battle, I don't know what is happening, attacks are coming from everywhere, then having no narrator is great because you're in that feeling of, like, I'm just hearing swords and screaming and dying. But if you want them to actually be able to figure out who stabbed who with the whatchamacallit, then maybe you need the narrator, because the point is for them to understand it, not to sort of just be absorbed by it.
[Dan] Yeah. Those are… That can become a really valuable tool if you think of it in those ways. Like, what am I gonna use this lack of narrator to produce a specific effect, rather than just, oh, boy, I don't have a narrator. This is going to suck.
[DongWon] You use that to great effect in Dark One: Forgotten. Right? So, at the end, when she is captured by the serial killer, we don't exactly know what happens to her. We know that she experiences some stuff that's pretty bad, and she has to go to the hospital afterwards. It's unclear what he has done to her, what injuries she has sustained. I think letting my brain fill that in is more horrifying then if you'd described, oh, he hit her. She fell down the stairs. Whatever it is. Right? It becomes a very upsetting sequence of events that was very tense and difficult to listen to, in a good way. I think by me having to fill in those details…
[Mary Robinette] Making space for the audience.
[Dan] I am very glad that it had that effect on you. When I wrote that scene, this was back when I was still on Twitter, and I got on and said, "I just wrote a scene so brutal, Brandon Sanderson will regret ever collaborating with me." It… We had to tone it down a little, but… Yeah. That…
[DongWon] That's how it came through. I was like, "I am in a horror movie right now." You know what I mean? But that's the intended effect, I think. That's what you were trying to produce. Forcing me to produce all the worst horror movies I've ever seen in my brain, I think, was a great shortcut for you to get the effect that you wanted.
[Erin] Almost makes you complicit in the violence itself.
[DongWon] Yes. Thanks for making me feel worse about it.
[Giggles]
[Howard] I think that Dan Wells being complicit is a note to end on. Almost.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, now it's time for your homework. I want you to do something which is actually the way I started writing prose. I want you to take something that you've already written and I want you to adapt it for audio. When I started writing, I tried going straight to script and it was a disaster. So I started writing a short story, and then converting it into audio. Because I wanted to write audio. You, my friends, are going to take something you've already written. As Erin suggested, you're going to be stripping out narration, you're going to be figuring out what sound effects are. Try to convert it for audio.
 
[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we explore writing as an act of hospitality and reader agency. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.06: An Interview With Howard Tayler
 
 
Key points: Changing as a creator over the 20 year span of Schlock Mercenary? Three parts. First part: Better as a storyteller in terms of craft, better artist in terms of composition, and better humorist. Second part: I learned I was writing social satire. Third part: What I am doing matters. People have changed as a result of my work. Transition from joke-a-day to long form? I had an idea that I needed to lay down parts for that took longer. By working several weeks ahead, I had time to mull new ideas and mash them together. What's next? I'm working on it. Are you looking for a new tool or challenge? Yes, but chronic fatigue means I can't afford a long learning curve. I have so many stories I want to tell that I'm prioritizing using a medium and techniques that I already know so I can tell as many as possible. Low bar, but I cleared it.  
 
[Season 18, Episode 6]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview With Howard Tayler.
[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 the guy with his feet in the fire.
[Dan] Haha!
[Whoohoo!]
 
[Dan] Howard, I've been looking forward to this one, I'm going to ask you the hardest questions. So... I actually am not. I'm going to ask you some things about stuff that I assume you've been thinking about a lot, because I've been thinking about it a lot. You, as you've said several times, you've just finished your magnum opus. 20 years of daily web cartoons and all of these wonderful books and stories that have come from them. I would love, if you could condense into just a little nugget for us. How do you feel like you changed as a creator from the beginning of that to the end of that long process?
[Howard]  Ooo. Three-part answer. Part one, I very quickly got better at all of the pieces that were involved. I became a better storyteller… Just the craft. Better storyteller in terms of craft, better artist in terms of composition, better humorist… I treat that is a different skill than the other two because it's such a specific mechanic. I got better at all of that. So that's part one. Part two is I realized, and it was when we first started recording Writing Excuses… I say first started. 2009 we had an episode, or maybe it was late 2008, where the question was, "What have you learned from Writing Excuses this year?" My answer was I have learned that I'm writing social satire. Which I had been doing for eight years now but didn't know it. Once I knew it, I got a lot better at it, because I recognized which jokes didn't fit, which jokes did fit, which scenarios did fit, which scenarios didn't fit. That was actually a huge change for me. Similar types of changes have happened since then where I have realized, "Oh, this is what I doing. This is the name for the thing that I'm doing." So that's answer number two. Answer number three is the squishy one. It is I have learned that what I'm doing matters. There have been people who have emailed me and said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I would wake up every morning and just not think I could go on and was ready to end it and then realized but then I will miss tomorrow's Schlock Mercenary update." I realized, "Okay. That's way too much for me to carry. Please don't put that on me." But… I'm carrying it, and I will. Thank you for staying with us. On less life-threatening sorts of notes, people have described things that I've written that have woken them up in some way or another, that have changed the way they think about things. Even though I write silly stuff, it matters. Yeah, I mean, it's social satire, so at some level, you step back and say, "Well, of course, social satire matters. That's how we understand where society is broken. Blah blah blah." I don't go around thinking that that's my job, but… At some level, it is.
 
[Dan] That's great. So I think that there is a phenomenon that I see in web comics a lot, but I think it's more fair to say that every creator, every writer goes through this, where they decide that they have a really big idea, and they want to get it out there into the world. The reason this stands out to me in web comics is because in that particular medium and art form, you're kind of tap dancing live in front of everybody. Right? So, comics that started as joke a day kind of stuff or very small stories eventually hit this point, and I've seen this dozens and dozens of times, where they decide they want to tell a very long, very epic, very involved story. I have never seen any of them pull it off as successfully as you can. I wonder if you can point to any particular decisions or tools that helped you make that transition from joke a day into what was by the end of it an incredibly powerful and epic science fiction story time?
[Howard] Um. Pfoo, Pfah. I remember picking up my sister-in-law, Nancy Fulda, from the airport, and being in the airport, and just thinking about sci-fi and travel, and had this whole idea of what if the worm gate network, the reason they want that as a monopoly, is not because of money, but it's because of information, because they are able to gate clone people and quietly interrogate them and find out all of the stuff, and then just quietly murder the gate clones and nobody knows anything else. So that idea came to me, waiting in an airport. In order to tell that story, I knew that I needed to lay down some pieces that were going to take longer. Up until that point, I'd had this idea that I was going to do it a little bit more like Bloom County did it in the newspapers back in the 80s. 80s, early 90s, which was Berke Breathed would run a story… He was also doing social satire… He would run a story that ran for a week. Or maybe two weeks. With Opus as interludes on Sundays. So I had this idea that in terms of framework, yeah, I can keep people's attention with a story for a week or two. But, the fact is that on the Internet, people could page back. Start from comic one and could just read it straight through. I thought, "Hey, you know what, I can go for more than a week or two. I can go for maybe a month. But a month really needs to be the limit."
[Ha ha]
[Howard] Then I had this idea about the Teraport breaking the monopoly and the worm gate and the cloning and all that. By that time, I had five or 10,000 regular readers who had stuck with me, and I decided, "All right, I'll try making it a little longer." As I'm sure most of you have experienced, when you're writing something that takes several months to write, during the course of writing it… Maybe I should ask it as a question. Do you ever have ideas for other things to write?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because that is exactly how it went, is that I would ask, "But then what happens? But then what happens? Oh, wait, there's this thing out in pop culture that I want to talk about because it's so much fun…" And, "Ooo, and then what happens if I mash these things together?" Because I worked ahead… Because I typically worked three weeks, minimum of three weeks, sometimes as much is 6 to 8 weeks ahead, I had time to mull these ideas over before I started throwing them down on the page. I was never drawing comics the day before they aired. That way lies madness.
 
[Dan] We… I have a lot of questions to ask about what is next. But first, we're going to pause for our thing of the week.
[Howard] Schlock Mercenary ends with a trilogy of books, called Mandatory Failure, A Function of Firepower, and A Sergeant In Motion. The thing of the week is these three books. Because coming up with the ending for the twenty-year mega arc of Schlock Mercenary was super fun for me, but those three books online will really only take you about a day to read. If you read them, we'll do… Or even if you don't read them, we'll do a deep dive on that sometime later this year. So, three books. Mandatory Failure, A Function of Firepower, and A Sergeant In Motion, found at schlockmercenary.com, and the URL at the end of schlockmercenary.com is 2017-09-18. Because it started on September 18 of 2017.
 
[Dan] So, Howard, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about what comes next. You've finished a lifetime worth of web comic, science fiction, but you're still creating an you're still working and you're still doing new things. What comes next?
[Howard] I was going to ask you guys that.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because I… Oh, boy. Yeah, sometimes… Honestly, sometimes, I just don't know. In the tag cloud, the career and lifestyle episodes… I could talk about this for a whole 15 minutes, which is waking up in the morning and just not being sure what comes next. Because for a solid 18 years, 18 of the 20, I would lie down in bed and as I drifted off to sleep, the voices in my head were talking about what happens next. The story was unfolding for me all the time. They're quiet now. I know that sounds kind of sad. They've stopped talking. But… I left them in a good place. I hope. I've done some prose writing. It's gone well. But it got interrupted… It got interrupted by stuff. There's lots of interruptions. For the next year, we are spending most of our time getting the final Schlock Mercenary books, 18, 19, and 20, getting them into print. That's what's going to pay the bills for 2023 and most of 2024. By the end of 2023, Dan, I need to have an answer to your question and it needs to be a good answer that's already generating revenue. So, um, yeah.
[Dan] Sounds to me like you might need that answer a lot sooner than the end of 23.
[Chuckles]
[Yeah, yeah.]
[Howard] Perhaps.
 
[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I remember you talking about in a previous episode, Howard, is that when you started Schlock that you kind of didn't actually know how to draw. That you had this idea, you wanted to do it, and that you taught yourself the tools that you needed to, in order to move forward with the story. I guess when you're thinking about what is next, you're playing with prose, but that's a tool you already know. Is there a tool that you're looking at and going, "Hum, that's a really interesting tool. I would like to know more about that, please."
[Howard] Um… Short answer, yes. Longer answer, long Covid and chronic fatigue have constricted my energy envelope to the point that if the learning curve is steep enough, I can't afford to do it. I don't have… I can't put in a 12 hour workday anymore. I can barely put in a four hour workday, a six hour workday, of just sitting and getting this stuff done. It's difficult. I mean, one of the things that I've loved is when we were doing the role-playing games streams for Typecast RPG. I loved creating Twitch overlays and the idea of streaming and having video conversations that mixed… I've got all the gear, I've got all the tools to do the pushing of buttons and having pictures change. I had this great idea for a Twitch stream that's Howard and his artist friends. Dual cameras, switching between various… I'm waving my hands around, and the audio is just not going to pick that up.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Swapping the camera pictures. The whole show would be titled Everybody Draws Better Than Howard Does. I would have other artists on and we would talk about what we were each working on and I would shower them with praise and we'd plug their work and it would be silly fun. I don't have the energy for that. That's… I just don't have the energy for that. But I have had the energy for sitting down and writing. I've got so many stories I want to tell that it is fair for me, I think, to prioritize and say I would rather pick the medium, pick the techniques that I already know so that I can tell as many stories as I can. I can say as much of what I've got to say before my timeline eventually runs out, then for me to try and learn something new and slow all that down. I know that sounds kind of morbid and whatever, but… Um… Hey, maybe the CFS will get better and I'll be putting in 12 hour days when I'm 70. I'd love that.
[Mary Robinette] I really like that, though, the idea of picking… We do, I think, tend to go for a hard setting all the time. The number of writers, and I know… Hello, listener, I'm speaking directly to you, the one that listens to the homework assignment and says , "Humpf, I'm going to do something different. I'm going to make it harder." Or, "They told me that you can't possibly do a story about zombie unicorns? I'm going to do a story about zombie unicorns, and submit it to the editor who told me they don't like it."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I know that that is a temptation, that happens to a lot of people. But I think there is something really beautiful about saying I'm going to use this tool that I love, that is familiar and comfortable, and I'm going to tell the best stories I can with tools I already know how to use, and I'm just going to refine them.
[Howard] Yeah. That's… Um… I think it was 2008, 2009, about the same time the podcast started, I really got on this kick of the focused practice, the whole concept of focused practice. The idea that you practice the things that you're bad at so that you stop taking shortcuts and going around them. For me, it was I didn't know how to draw hands. So I practiced drawing hands. Ended up drawing Curtis Hickman's hands doing magic tricks in the first Xtreme Dungeon Mastery book. Curtis came back to me and said, "Howard, these are the best illustrations of these tricks that exist anywhere. Because all of the others are grainy photographs in black and white of an old man's hands and you can't tell what's going on." So, low bar, but I cleared it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] So I was on this kick. Now I look at things and I say, "Yeah. There are things that I am not good at. But there are a lot of things where I've spent years refining my skills, and, yes, I could develop the skills further. Obviously. But I'm good enough at it that maybe I can just focus on that, and now that path is the easy path, but it's not the shortcut. It's falling back on the craft that I've spent 20 years learning.
[Dan] I… This is going to sound like a joke, but I mean it sincerely. I'm going to make "low bar, but I cleared it" my mantra for goal setting for the year.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Like, simple things that I can finish and feel good about myself. That's fantastic.
[DongWon] Under promise and over deliver.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
 
[Dan] Howard? What's our homework today?
[Howard] Okay. I want you, fair listener, who you are probably heavily focused on prose. I want you to take a moment and explore some of the tools in my toolbox. Take an index card. For each key beat, each key moment, in a scene that you've written, and illustrate that beat. Just using stick figures and smiley frowny angry faces, just whatever skills you've got, so that you have a camera aimed at a very scribbley blurry version of that scene. Do that for the whole scene and see how that changes the way you eventually edit it or rewrite it or write what comes next.
[Mary Robinette] All right. You have your homework assignment. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.24: Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher
 
 
Key points: How do you keep a series fresh? Do you reinvent the story? Try to write a story that is just a little bit more than you think you can do. Force yourself to stretch. Do you focus on specific things to improve in each book, or do you tackle different styles of stories? Some of it is different styles, but the basic skeleton of each story is the same. How do you write ongoing stories about a changing character, without losing what people love about them? Start with what is going to change in this book, and work backwards from that. Craft is fundamental. How do you use different genres to keep your career fresh? Different genres offer different opportunities. It's fun to try different characters, different arrangements, different stories. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 24.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher.
[Howard] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Jim Butcher.
[Yay! Applause]
[Jim] Hello.
[Brandon] Jim Butcher, many many time best-selling author of many many awesome books. We are super happy to have you on the podcast, Jim.
[Jim] Thank you very much.
[Howard] We're recording here live at NASFIC Spikecon in Layton, Utah.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Howard] So that was the audience noise that you heard. Thank you, live audience.
[Applause]
 
[Brandon] All right. So, keeping it fresh.
[Dan] I love that this sounds like an after school special from the 80s about rapping. [wrapping?]
[Brandon] Yep.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Yep. Well, it would probably be an after school special about something important that would have rapping in it incidentally.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] Done by people who look like us.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Jim, we decided to talk about this because you have one of the longest-running series in science fiction and fantasy going right now. Some of the latest books and last books in the series are some of the best. So I consider you an expert at keeping a series fresh. It's something that's very kind of near to my heart because I am writing book 4 of a very big series right now.
[Jim] Of course.
[Brandon] That's kind of in my head. So I guess my first question to you is how do you keep the Dresden Files so fresh? How do you keep reinventing the story?
[Jim] To me, I don't think I'm reinventing… It doesn't seem to me that I'm reinventing anything. When I do a Dresden Files story… I kind of had the general shape of the whole thing in mind when I got started. So, I mean, I got to plan it all out. So I would know, well, okay, this is this. This is what's going to happen in this part of the story. This is going to be the book about necromancers. This is going to be the one about… This is going to be the personal one where he gets an apprentice, and stuff like that. So, I mean, I had the plan going from the get go. So, in a lot of ways, it doesn't seem like it's particularly fresh to me. I think the real thing that keeps the books being interesting and involving and longer and longer is that I keep trying to write the story that I'm not sure I'm skilled enough to write. When I plan the story, any time when I sit down and I get set to, where I'm here's how I'm going to do the dramatic action, here's how I'm going to do the personal tensions, and stuff like that, I always try and plan the story just a little bit more than I think I can readily do. So that when I'm going forward, I'm never sure I'm going to be able to get the story done the way I wanted to do. As a result, I think that makes you keep growing as a writer.
[Brandon] Forcing yourself to stretch.
[Jim] Sure. Sure. You keep trying to reach a little bit further than you've done before. As long as you can do that, you can keep improving. I think that's kind of the meta-strategy that sort of has the side effect of making the series more fresh and interesting as you go along.
[Howard] It's the self-contained version of the yes I can principle.
[You suffer like that, yeah]
[Howard] Mr. Taylor, can you draw an entire Munchkin deck in a month? Yes I can!
[Jim] Right, right.
[Howard] I'm going to have to figure out how to do that. I stretched from it, and I'm super glad I took on the project. But the correct answer was I don't think so, but I want to.
[Chuckles]
[Jim] Right. Yeah. Something like that.
 
[Brandon] Do you ever take a book… I ask this, because it's something that I do… And say, "You know, in this specific book, I'm going to work on this one thing. This is something that I don't know, that I want to learn to do better." Like, I'm going to work on my humor in this book. Or I'm going to work on my interpersonal relationships or things. Do you take it that specifically, or is it more just here's a style of story I've never done before?
[Jim] A lot of it is here's a style of story that I've never done before, because I'll change it around. But, on the other hand, the Dresden Files, I mean, the basic skeleton of every story is the same. Somebody's up to something, Harry Dresden starts poking around in it, and then things go crazy. I mean, that's how you write it. But as far as the… As far as focusing specifically on areas of my writing, not so much. I mean, I just sort of figure that as long as I'm trying to cover the entire range of human experience, or at least as much of it as I can within the books that have purple haired fairies and stuff like that. That as long as I'm trying to include all that experience, it's going to force me to grow in other ways and in ways I wasn't expecting. So I'll be writing along, and occasionally I write a scene and I'm like, "Man, the humor was really good in that scene. What did I do?" I'll have to stop and go back and think about this as I was producing it, how did I get that result. Other times, I'll just write a long, going, "Wow, I did not expect this to be this soul crushingly intense emotional scene." But it worked out there. Then I have to stop and figure out, "Well, why did it work out there?" Occasionally, I can't explain it. I do a lot of writing by instinct. Once I get going and I'm actually doing it, I'll trust my instincts pretty firmly. If they start taking me in a direction, it's like, "Yeah, I'll go that way. Let's see what happens." I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that you write something that wasn't quite right, and you delete it, and you do it again.
 
[Brandon] Dan, you kind of had… Not kind of, you had to do this with the John Cleaver books, right?
[Dan] Yeah. Six books in that series.
[Brandon] How did you keep those fresh? The second third from the first third, or how were you looking at each book and trying to do something different?
[Dan] The big problem for me that I kept tackling with each new book and with each new trilogy was this is an ongoing story about a character changing. How can I show that he is different than he was, while still being recognizably the same person that everyone loves from… If you read the first book, you love the character for certain reasons. I need to advance him, but I can't throw away all the things that people love about that. So, I kind of focused on character arcs. What is he going… How is he going to change in this one? What is going to be different at the end of this book than at the start? Then, kind of work backwards from there. I'm curious to know, I wanted to ask about Harry Dresden with the same thing. How do you… Because he does change, he does grow. But he is always intrinsically himself. Do you think about that consciously, or does that just come very natural to you?
[Jim] For the most part, it comes naturally. There's some things where I'll stop and look at and I'll go, "Now wait a minute." If I've just had Dresden take some given action and I'll think, "Well, that's not necessarily in character for him. So why is he doing something different?" A lot of times, I'll be writing along and the beta readers… The way I operate is I'll write a chapter and then the chapter goes off to my beta readers while I'm working on the next one. Then I start getting feedback from them, to hear about what they thought about the previous chapter. A lot of times, I'll come across something, the beta readers will be like, "This is really out of character for that character." They'll list specific reasons why. I mean, I've got beta readers who'll be like, "Well, in this book on this page in this paragraph…"
[Chuckles]
[Jim] Then I've gotta go, "Okay. They're right. That is out of character for what I've established." So why… Do I need to change it or do I need to explain why it's different? Depending on how much room is left in the book… I love exploring why is it different. Have Dresden show up later and talk to that character and be like, "What's up?" Try and find out what's going on in their life and so on. Characters change as they go along. But at the same time, the core stuff… I don't know, I think holding onto the core character is as much about craft as it is about psychology. By the time you're… By the time you've gotten your language established of which language it's used for which character, whether you're talking about tags and traits, or just their personal dialogue. By the time you've done that, it establishes a very very firm picture in the reader's mind if you keep it consistent. The longer you go, the more firm that picture is. So in that sense, the long series is really on my side. It's much easier to manipulate you guys when you let me do it for a long time.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I want to take a moment and call our listeners attention to a couple of things you just said. On the one hand, you said, "Oh, I do a lot of this by instinct." Which feels very pantsy, very discovery writery. But what you just said about craft, when you talk about the craft of the dialogue, of a character's language… We've done probably a dozen or more episodes where we've drilled down on that. How with one line of dialogue, the reader should be able to tell which character is speaking, without any other tags. How do you make that happen? What I want to illustrate here, just by calling this out, is that when you say instinct, I think part of what you mean is that you know that craft enough that you've stopped needing to think about it when you're writing Dresden's dialogue. It is just there.
[Jim] Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, yeah. That's the whole point of craft. The whole point of craft is the wood worker at his bench who knows his tools so well he doesn't need to think about using them, he doesn't need to think about how they're going to be employed or even where they are. He just reaches out and picks up his T-square and goes to work. That's the foundation of what you've got to be if you want to be a professional writer. You've got to have your craft down well enough that your brain is free to do these other things. Like, to be able to suggest to you, hey, maybe this character needs to have this sort of revelatory scene right here, so that we know more about who they are. Then, when you go back later, once you're going back and you're brushing up the stuff after you've gotten it written, then you can go back later and go, "Well, you know what, I really need to establish this character a little bit better, more firmly, if he's going to have that big a role late in the book. I need to have him hit harder early on." Stuff like that. Which is why I've got to do that right now. I got Marcone doing big stuff at the end of this story, but his introduction is a little bit soft. Even though he's got a much larger presence in the overall series, there's going to be some people that pick up this book and it'll be the first book they've read in the series. So that means, just from… Purely from the craft standpoint, I got to go back and make sure he's got a good entrance that is going to be commensurate with his role in the story.
[Howard] He's gotta be in the establishing shot…
[Jim] Yeah.
[Howard] And he's gotta be front and center.
[Jim] Exactly. He's gotta be there. So that's one of the things I'm working on. That I've got all that to do before the manuscript goes off to the editor, but… But, yeah, the craft is indispensable. I can't think of anything… I mean, when I first started learning about writing craft, I hated the whole idea. I hated the entire concept. My teachers told me so many things that I just didn't like, and I sat there, all huffy about it. Because my teacher would say things like, "The business of writing is the business of manipulating people's emotions." It's like, "That sounds awful." But she's right.
[Chuckles]
[Jim] When you're a writer and you can write characters and you can make people laugh when you want them to laugh and you can make them cry when you want them to cry and support who you want them to support and hate who you want them to hate, that's a good story. That's the story everybody wants to read. Oh, I hate this guy. What's he doing next?
[Laughter]
[Jim] That's… To do that, that's the entire point of writing craft. That is why it exists, to help me manipulate your emotions.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and do a promo, and talk about our book of the week, which is The Aeronaut's Windlass.
[Jim] Okay.
[Brandon] Can you tell us a little bit about it?
[Jim] The Aeronaut's Windlass is a steam punk series. I told my editor I wanted to make it a… I wanted the genre name on it to be steam opera. She's like, "Well, you can't make up your own genres." I'm like, "Watch me!"
[Laughter]
[Jim] But essentially, it's a story that's set in a world that's very hostile to human life. So humanity exists inside these enormous towers called spires. The only way the spires are connected is by airships. So all trade, all military stuff, all travel, it all happens by airships because the surface is just… It's a green hell, and you don't want to go there, so we'll be there next book.
[Laughter]
[Jim] But… So, it's a really… It's a fun series, because you've got all these spires, so you've got all these human cultures that are evolving entirely separate from one another, so you can get in… You can get just all kinds of crazy nonsense, which is so much fun. I mean, it's… In a way, I'm just riffing off the Odyssey here, going from island to island, adventure to adventure. But that's what we're doing in the Cinder Spires. So the characters are… There's an air ship captain, there's a privateer so we've got a pirate, and there's an heir of one of the wealthier and more influential houses, so we've got a princess. There's a girl who can talk to cats, so… That's her big thing is she talks to cats. The cats are smart. The cats can… The cats understand, I mean, they understand humans, except when they don't want to.
[Chuckles]
[Jim] I mean…
[Howard] So, cats.
[Jim] Cats, yeah. So then we've got a cat who's a prince of his people and he's just such a jerk and everybody loves him. I don't get that. But [garbled]
[Howard] What's the series? What's the series name?
[Jim] The series is the Cinder Spires.
[Howard] The Cinder Spires.
[Jim] The spires are all made of these giant… This ancient black stone that is all but indestructible and nobody knows where it came from.
[Howard] And the genre is steam opera.
[Jim] Steam H-opera. Yeah.
[Brandon] I've read the first book and it was one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had in a while. They're just… It's a wonderful book. So you guys should all read it.
[Jim] Yes, you should. Everyone.
[Laughter, applause]
 
[Brandon] We went really long on the front of the podcast, so we are almost out of time. But I do want to touch on one other concept, which will tie into this idea of what we just talked about. You are mostly known for writing urban fantasy, even though I know that that's not where you started in your pre-writing career, your prepublication career. You've since published your epic fantasy, and you've now got steam opera.
[Jim] Right.
[Brandon] Like, how do you approach different genres in keeping your own career fresh?
[Jim] Going to the different genres is a lot of fun, because, I mean, really, you get to play with different toys, and you get to arrange them very differently, and you get to tell slightly different stories based on which… What is strong in the various genres. I just took out… I've got like half of my first science fiction done, that's been done. I did that like 10 years ago. I stopped writing that book with my poor science-fiction character… He had just ejected from his ship whose core was about to explode in a decaying orbit over the moon with a solar flare coming on. He's been there for like 10 years.
[Laughter]
[Jim] I'll have to get back to that one someday. That was sort of Men in Black meets X-Men on the moon. So that was a lot of fun, too. But, yeah, when you get to go to the different genres and you get to make the different characters and you get to build the wild new stuff that you… It's like, wow, I really wish I could do this in the Dresden Files, but really, laser beams are not really a thing there. Laser pistols are not really a thing there. Oooh, but in science fiction, I can totally do this. But the different genres, they just offer you different opportunities. I mean, at the end of the day, you're still working with humans, and humans are always the same thing. I mean, it doesn't matter at what point in history you go to, human nature remains the same. So… It's just fun to take humans and plop them into weird situations and see how they react. That… just erase this part, okay. I'm starting to sound like a psychopath at this point.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I know, drop people in, poke them with a stick, see what happens.
[Jim] Sure, sure.
[Brandon] That's storytelling, right there.
[Jim] Sticks. Yes.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience, Spikecon.
[Applause]
[Brandon] I want to thank Jim for being on the podcast. Do you by chance have a writing prompt you can throw at our audience?
[Jim] A writing prompt?
[Brandon] Yes.
[Jim] Let me think here. [Pause] Yeah. Something we didn't know was intelligent has been intelligent all along. Go.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Dan] Nice.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship
 
 
Q&A Points:
Q: What have any of you learned in the past year that has improved your craft?
A: Talk to your editor early in the process. Use an outboard brain. Do the hard thing. Take a chance, make mistakes, and do something because it might be fun. Go watch Lindsay Ellis Three Act Structure. (Maybe this one? https://youtu.be/o0QO7YuKKdI)
Q: My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?
A: Look at the problem, what is the barrier to moving the story forward? Make yourself a checklist, an inventory of things that can go wrong. Trust your instincts.
Q: As published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?
A: Committed idiot. Plan ahead, but publishing is volatile. Strategy, planning, but be ready to drop it. Be ready to jump in a different direction. Have a roadmap, and build a new one if you need to. Diversified income. Make plans for multiple scenarios, for whatever happens at cost points.
Q: How do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?
A: When you wonder if it's gone on too long.
Q: How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?
A: Learn by teaching. Externalize and explain, talk through the process.
Q: When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?
A: Identify different phases, and avoid doubling up on phases.
Q: If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?
A: Try it. See how it reads.
Q: What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?
A: The end is a frame, matching your beginning. Show who the character is now, how things have changed, and give the reader the emotional punch you've been aiming at.
Q: What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?
A: Rhythms that are linked to the character's personality, idioms, metaphors. Make the character feel specific and vivid.
Q: How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?
A: Experience and personal preference. What are you looking for in readers, how are you using them?
Q: My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?
A: Does it connect to your story? If a horse is just a horse, call it a horse.
Q: How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?
A: Agents work with people, not projects. If they believe in the person, they get lots of leeway.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Eight.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on a Ship.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Howard] I've been on this ship for several days now.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Which is a lot longer than 15 minutes. We are here at the 2019 Writing Excuses Retreat on a cruise ship in the Caribbean Sea. Actually, right now we're in the Gulf of Mexico. We have a live audience in front of us. Say hello, live audience.
[Whoo!]
[Dan] Awesome. We have asked them to ask us some questions. Our theme this whole year is the questions of the audience. We've been trying to answer them, we'll continue doing that throughout. Now, we have some live ones. So, our first question. Tell us your name and your question.
 
[Caleb] This is Caleb. I'm wondering what any of you have learned in the past year that has improved your craft?
[Mary Robinette] What any of us have learned in the past year that has improved our craft? I actually learned the value of talking to my editor really early in the process. One of the things that happened to me this year was that I had a number of events that derailed me from writing. I was working on a novel, and my usual process did not work. So… When I say editor, what I guess I mean is using an outboard brain. My usual process was not working, because I kept having life things go wrong. There were some family members at hospitals, then we were moving, and it was just a lot of things. Going to someone else and saying, "I cannot hold this story in my head. Please help me focus." was immensely valuable and actually got me back on track.
[Dongwon] That's convenient, because the lesson I learned this year was to talk to my clients early in the process.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] To make sure that everything's on track. I think one of the things that I learned that kind of lined up with that is to not be afraid to push people to do the thing that is hard. Right? In that sometimes when you're giving editorial feedback, because you're working with somebody who puts their heart and soul into a manuscript, into a book, you want to be… You want to be nice, right? You want to go easy on them in certain ways because you like this person, you work with this person. For me, one of the things I had to really learn in this past year is to get involved early and don't be afraid of saying, "Is this really the right choice? Is this the best way to get where you're going?" Sometimes, breaking it down and doing the hard work is the most important thing. Whether or not that's going to make someone upset.
[Howard] For me, it was when I joined the TypeCastRPG role-playing game and decided that, you know what, for fun, I think I'm going to try to live sketch things that happen during the game. The pressure there being I need to turn out a… What is ultimately a single panel comic strip that depends on the context of the game in a minute and a half. Then we did a live show at [FanEx] and they set up an Elmo and I… To borrow the metaphor, screwed the courage to the wall and said, "I'm going to make terrible, terrible mistakes and I'm going to do it when my arms are 10 feet long on this screen behind me…"
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "But I'm going to do it anyway because it might be fun." It unlocked a piece of my brain that allowed me to visualize more quickly and draw faster and draw things I've never drawn before.
[Dan] Fantastic. Just, really quick for me, I talked about this in one of the classes that I taught here on the retreat, the Lindsay Ellis's episode about three act structure and the way that she explained it made three act structure work for me in a way that it never has before. So everyone go watch that. It's brilliant.
 
[Dan] All right. We have another question.
[Allison] Hi. My name is Allison. My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?
[Mary Robinette] I wish I knew the answer to that one.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's a really super common problem. The way I evaluate it is whether or not… Is to interrogate the quest… The problem that I'm having. I look at the problem and I'm like, "Okay. What is the barrier between me and moving this story forward?" If it's… If I can't identify a barrier, that means that it's probably me, it is not actually the story. If it is… Sometimes it is… There is actually a problem with the story that is really difficult to diagnose. That's when handing it to someone else to look at becomes useful. But most of the time, if I ask just what is the barrier that is between me and moving forward, or the character and moving forward, that will unlock what the problem is.
[Howard] I've found that, for a lot of people, by the time you reach a point in your writing career where you're comfortable answering this question, you may have moved beyond actually writing down the equivalent of a preflight checklist. But having a preflight checklist, having a way to take inventory of the things that can be wrong… They might be diagnostic tools like pacing, three act structure, character arc, conflict, seven point whatever… The sorts of things that we talk about here on Writing Excuses all the time. When I'm writing jokes, I have this sort of checklist. I've internalized it. But what I found is that when I'm stuck, I have to take inventory. A lot of the times, it's me. I haven't had enough sleep. I haven't eaten correctly. I'm exhausted because of an emotional thing. The temperature in the room is wrong and it's making me grouchy. This character is at the wrong point in their character arc for me to write the scene that I want to write, therefore, I don't feel justified in writing it. By the time I'm able to articulate these things, the unlocking starts moving really quickly. I can see where the problems are, and where the problems aren't.
[Dongwon] I think it's probably the most frustrating advice I give, and also the most important advice that I like to give, is that you need to learn to trust your instincts. Right? But this is a case where it's very hard to tell where the line between your conscious thought and your instinct is. So, the thing I think about a lot is what Howard was just talking about is the ways in which your conscious and subconscious mind are connected to your embodiment, right? So, a lot of things that can help you are really core mental health and mindfulness techniques, right? Meditation, yoga, go for a run, go take a shower, go take a break. Find something that uses up part of your brain so that your subconscious can chew on it. Then come back to it when you're feeling calm and relaxed and centered, and try and get in touch with what is your core emotion here? What is your instinct telling you, versus what is your fear telling you? Right? If that instinct is saying, "Actually, it's a structural problem here," then focus on that, and do that hard work. On average, if you're having that question, you're probably right, that the problem is bigger than I don't feel like writing right now. On average.
[Mary Robinette] I forgot that I have an entire blog post on this that we'll put in the liner notes. Which is… For those people who never go to look at the liner notes, you can search for it. It's called Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. I talk about how to diagnose the kind of delays that you are having and the kind of… Like, if your drowsy, it's probably that your story is boring. If you are restless, it's probably that you don't actually know the next thing that's going to happen or you don't believe it actually, I think. But, anyway, Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. It includes how to diagnose it, and then a long list of tools for when it is… The problem is not with the manuscript, but external to the manuscript, to your own life. Some things to help you move forward.
 
[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Next question.
[Matt] Hello, my name is Matt Chambers. My question is as published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?
[Howard] 10 years ago…
[Dan] Now I'm just depressed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] 10 years ago, I could have told you that 10 years from now, I would definitely still be doing Schlock Mercenary. Five years ago, I could have told you when the major Schlock Mercenary mega arc was going to end. Two years ago, I could have, but wouldn't have, told you how it was going to end and what all the book plans and plot plans were around that. This year, I am re-thinking all of that, because I was probably an idiot, but I'm committed, so I'm sticking to it in a blind panic.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Committed idiot is actually a great thing to put on my business cards. Six years ago, I had the very best year of my career up to that point, and since.
[Howard] Oh, dear.
[Dan] I thought at the time that I knew I would be doing six years later, and had no idea that one of my publishers was going to dry up completely, that one of my series was going to tank abysmally. So, kind of my answer to this is that it is very smart to plan ahead, but that this industry is very volatile. A lesson I did not learn early enough is how to plan around that volatility. The good news is we're going to have one, and possibly two, episodes on this exact topic later in the year with Dongwon about how to plan out your career and how that career can change and how to reboot it when it falls apart.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I love talking to my clients about strategy. A lot of times, what most of them are planning three, four… Not even books, like 3 to 4 contracts out, right? And a contract can be 2 to 3 books. So it's what are we doing here, what's coming after that, what's coming after that? The important thing, as Dan kind of touched on, is that you have to be sort of ready to throw all of that out at the drop of a hat, right? Publishing is extremely volatile, you have no idea what's going to happen when that book hits the market. So you have to be kind of ready to jump in a different direction. Sometimes you have backup plans, and sometimes you don't. But always have something… Some roadmap of where you want to go. Then be ready to build a new one when you need to.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I… Much like everyone else, my plans change. The things that… For me, the metrics that have been working is that I have… I have kept my income stream diversified, so that's why I have three different careers running simultaneously. So that when one of them is not doing well, I can fill in the gaps with one of the others. I also think about the shape that I want my career to take. That, generally, is that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. Which means that if a really lucrative contract comes in, and I'm like, "That looks… I mean, the money looks really great, but I don't want to be pigeonholed into doing that kind of work," that's not… That is something that I can think about turning down, and that I can decide in the moment. I have a giant list of novels that I want to write. I won't get to write them all, probably. But I keep them. Then, I think, the last piece of advice that I was just given this past year… I was in an enviable position, which is that I had just won the Nebula and the Locus, and we were looking at the Hugo. I was like… People kept saying, "Well, you're going to win it." I'm like, "You can't think that. That's not healthy. Certainly not healthy for me." Then my agent, Seth Fishman, said I should think about it like applying to college. That you don't know whether or not you're going to get into college, but you make plans for both scenarios. You make plans for well, if I get into college, I'm going to need to be able to put these things into place. If I don't get into college, then these are the backup plans that I have and this is how I'm going to occupy my life. So I think that that's one of the things that is very useful, is to think about the possible cusp points in your career, and to think about positive outcomes for either cusp point. So that's… That has been very helpful for me. Fortunately, I did get into college, in this particular scenario.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it was also… Even the positive things can rock you if you are not prepared for them.
 
[Dan] Awesome. I want to pause right now for our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about a book called Jade War, which is the sequel to Fonda Lee's… Wait. Yes. The sequel to Fonda Lee's Jade City. I just had this moment of thinking that I had them backwards. So, I blurbed the first book, and the second book is every bit as fantastic. It is the Godfather meets like a Kung Fu wire film. It's secondary world fantasy, but it feels like 1960s or 70s Earth. But there are people who can use jade and they can do magic, except they don't think of it as magic, it's just part of an… It's just completely woven into the world. It feels so real that I am surprised that it is not. The relationships are compelling. If you are someone who likes a well-written sex scene, it is not the entirety of the book, but there are a couple in there that are some of the hottest and… Like, really beautifully drawn consensual sex scenes. The consensual parts is the part that I find appealing. But the…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Just the entire thing, it's great. It's Jade War by Fonda Lee.
[Dan] Cool. Thank you very much.
 
[Dan] Now, we still have several questions to get… Left. We want to try to get to them all. We're going to let this episode run a little long. But we're going to call this the lightning round, okay? So ask your question, and then one of us will answer it instead of all four. So, go.
[Cameron] Okay. Hey, guys, my name is Cameron. I was wondering how do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?
[Dongwon] When you wonder if it's gone on too long.
[Laughter]
[Dan] [Haha!] Excellent answer. Next?
[Chuckles]
 
[Caitlin] Hi, I'm Caitlin. How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?
[Mary Robinette] I learn by teaching. When I was a pup… Getting trained in puppetry, what my instructor had me do is he would have me learn everything with my right hand, he would teach me with my right hand, then he would have me teach my left hand how to do it. What he said was any time you have to externalize and explain what you're doing, even if it's to yourself, that it causes you to hone your craft and to get rid of the parts that aren't important. I find that when I am teaching students, even if it's someone that is a peer and just saying, "Hey, this is the thing that I've learned today." Even if they don't necessarily need to know it, but I'm talking through the process, that it makes me better at my craft.
 
[Jessica] Hi, I'm Jessica. When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?
[Dan] My answer to that has always been that I will identify the different phases that each project has to go through, and then make sure that I'm not doubling them up. So I'm never writing two things at a time, but I could be writing one while revising another or outlining another or editing or proofing or whatever it is. That way, it makes it much easier for me to keep them in my brain, because they're all in different parts of my brain.
 
[Kevin] Hi. I'm Kevin. If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?
[Howard] I love the way POV use changes in our culture over time. I think that that could work. I don't know that I've seen it done, but I've thought about doing it myself. I think that 20 years from now, that could end up being the rule rather than an exception, because these sorts of things are cultural. If it's what you want to do, go for it.
[Dongwon] I just want to jump in with one little note, is the thing I run into a lot from writers and in the writing community, is people think about POV really, really rigidly. So, like, if I start in third person limited, I have to stay that way all throughout. Whereas, I think, we're seeing a lot of things that are really pushing back against that. N. K. Jemisin's Fifth Season is a really great example. Even Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside, you'll see POV jump around from first person to third person, you'll see tense shifts, things like that. So feel free to really sort of experiment with the different perspectives and the different POV's that you have. You can drop into one just for a chapter or a scene, and then they can never reappear again. So, feel free to try different things and experiment and see how it reads. I think writers and crit groups are very focused on consistent POV. I don't think readers even notice.
 
[Emma] Hi. I'm Emma. What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?
[Oooo]
[Howard] Your Patreon.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] So, what I think about when I get to the end is it is a frame. I am framing something that I set up at the beginning. At the beginning, I made promises to the reader. One of the things that I promised them is that they would feel a certain way when they get to the end. So when I look at that last paragraph, I think about it as the beginning in reverse, the inverse of that. I try to make sure that I'm showing who my character is now, where they are now, and the ways in which things have shifted. Doing that in a way that makes the reader have that emotional punch that I had been going for through the whole thing. Like, if I had been wanting them to have a sense of dread all the way through, and then the catharsis of relief, then that last thing needs to contain relief. If I want them to still feel dread, then that last thing still needs to have dread in it. So it's a… For me, it's the frame, it's the button, and that's what I look for at the end.
 
[Jess] Hi. I'm Jess. What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?
[Mary Robinette] I can take that one.
[Dan] Do it.
[Mary Robinette] So. Coming from theater and audiobook, the thing about third person and the way… Is that it is actually still very much first-person in this real simple way. The narrator is telling a story to the audience. The narrator is sometimes very closely linked to a third person character, but even so, there is a storyteller who is speaking to the audience. What you're looking for with the voice are rhythms that are linked to the character's personality. If it is a tight limited third person, you want to use everything… You want to make sure that the idioms that you're using, the metaphors that they're using, that these are all linked to how they self define themselves. All of that is going to make the character feel specific and vivid in ways that aiming for the so-called transparent prose will not.
 
[Morgan] Hi, I'm Morgan. How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?
[Howard] Sad, sorry experience.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah. I mean, that really is the answer. I know Mary Robinette and I, for example, have very different criteria as to who we count as an alpha and who we count as a beta reader. That… It all comes down to experience and personal preference, I think.
[Howard] For my own part, an alpha reader… When I've handed it to an alpha reader and gotten it back, I want to feel energized about doing the things that need to be done to fix it. I want my offer readers to energize me. My beta readers I want to be a little more critical and help me fine-tune things. But I'm fragile that way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm… Just to demonstrate that we are sometimes counter. The thing that I'm looking for in a beta… In an alpha reader is someone who is asking me the right questions to help me unpack it a little bit further so that the beta readers are getting something that is closer to the story that I'm trying to tell. The beta readers, I am using them as a general, but the alpha reader… For me, the alpha reader in this case is Alessandra Meechum [sp?], most of the time, and she is… She's what is sometimes called the ideal reader, which is that she represents the core audience that I am writing for. So when I'm writing, I am specifically writing to see whether or not I make her go, "Oh, I love this," or "I hate this so much."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That often pleases me a great deal.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] So it depends how you're using them. I'm using her to shape the story. I've spotted… Sometimes I'll spot someone in beta and go, "Oh. You also sit in that ideal reader category." There are some stories that I'm going to write at some point that she will not be the ideal reader for, and I'll switch out alphas for that story. But that's what I look for.
[Dan] It's worth pointing out that Alessandra is in the room, and beaming like the sun to be referred to as an ideal reader. So.
 
[Nick] Hello. I'm Nick. My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?
[Oooo]
[Dongwon] I would say only rename things if there's a big sort of… If it connects to the core of your story, right? If the question you're asking is about, I don't know, national identity, for example, then it can be very complicated to use an existing country or an existing sort of language structure. So… If… Unless you're asking the question of what is the meaning of horse, then I wouldn't rename it, right? But if you're trying to disrupt ideas of like what do we consider animals, what do we consider our relationship to them, what are beasts of burden, then that's a case where maybe playing with it would give you an opportunity to really do a lot more there. But, in general, if it's a horse, call it a horse.
 
[Matthew] Hello, my name is Matthew. How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?
[Dongwon] I wonder who's going to answer this one?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I don't know. Well, I'll take… No.
[Dongwon] The thing that I talk about a lot is that I work with people, not projects. Right? I sign a client, I don't sign a single book. So, the answer is if I believe in the person, then all the leeway in the world, right? That's something that we'll work together to make it right. What goes into that decision is hard to articulate in a lot of ways. But I have to be excited about this person's potential to do something really interesting… Even if they're not quite there yet. So there are clients I've worked with for years and years and years, and we haven't gotten out with anything. But we're still working together, we're still honing in on what the right project is… Or how to do X, Y, or Z. So, the answer is, it depends a lot on the person. The right circumstances, it's okay if that book isn't quite there, so long as I can see you're doing something interesting and I can see that you are someone who has all the chops, all the drive, all the ambition to get to where you need to get to.
 
[Dan] Great. So, that is all our questions that we have. I'm sure that there are many more burning in your hearts right now, but… Thank you for listening. We have a piece of homework for you. So, once again, we're throwing this to Dongwon.
[Dongwon] So, I think that the openings of novels are really, really important. It's a great opportunity to hook your reader. More than that, it's an opportunity to get someone to say, "Yes, I'm going to spend $20 or whatever it is to buy this book." So what I would like each of you to do is take the first line of your work in progress or something that you've finished and rewrite it three separate times. Make sure that when you write each one, it's not three variations on the same sentence. Try and shake those up as much as possible, right? Try a different voice. Try a different style. Try different… Even like points to start the scene and see what jumps out at you. What is the most exciting, what grabs you, what are you excited about to keep going with. I think that will tell you a lot about how your opening scenes should work so that your pulling the reader into your story as forcefully as possible.
[Dan] Perfect. Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing
 
 
Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun! 
 
[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.
[Nandi] 15 minutes long.
[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.
[Tamie] And we're not that smart.
[Bridget] But we are all self published.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]
[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]
[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]
[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]
[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.
[Whoo! Applause!]
 
[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?
[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.
[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.
[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.
[Howard] That's a solid number.
[Bridget] For my first year.
[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?
[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.
[Howard] Tamie?
[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.
[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?
 
[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.
[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.
[Nandi] Yes.
[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?
[Nandi] Yes.
[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?
[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.
 
[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?
[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.
[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?
[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.
[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.
[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.
 
[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?
[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.
[Howard] Okay.
[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels
 
[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.
[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.
 
[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.
[Victorine] Yep. Yup.
[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…
[Howard] When you say three of us…
[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…
[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.
[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.
[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.
 
[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?
[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.
 
[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?
[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.
[Chuckles]
[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.
[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.
[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?
[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.
 
[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?
[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.
[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.
[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.
[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.
 
[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?
[Nandi?] Absolutely.
[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.
[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…
[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.
[Garble]
[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.
[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."
[Cheers]
[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…
[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.
 
[Howard] Who's got our homework?
[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.
[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.50: What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova
 
 
Key points: We don't need just one of something, we need multitudes. Seeing yourself as a caricature all the time hurts at a very basic level. Don't just throw in random Spanish words, like Abuela. Different Latin countries, different families, have different nicknames for things. Subvert stereotypes, think about how you are going to make your character different. Read 100 books about a culture. Be aware that Hispanic and Latino has a lot of variations and range. The Dominican Republic and Ecuador are very different. Representation in what we create is important, both for the people who have stories about them, and the rest of us to have empathy with them. "Good representation is good craft."
 
[Brandon] Hey, guys. Just breaking in here before we start the podcast. This is Brandon, and I have a new story out that I think you might like. Little while ago, Wizards of the Coast came to me and said, "Will you write us something? You can write anything you want in any world that we've ever designed." So I was excited. I sat down and wrote a story called Children of the Nameless which is kind of a horror story-esque thing. It starts off with a blind young woman in a town listening as everyone in her town is murdered by something she can't see. So, you can find links to that on my website. It's called Children of the Nameless. Or you can go to Wizards of the Coast.com, wizards.com.
 
[Mary] Season 13, Episode 50.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova.
[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] And I'm usually getting it wrong.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] We are live at ComicCon Salt Lake City.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Brandon] We have special guest star, Zoraida Córdova.
[Zoraida] Hi, guys. 
[laughter]
[Brandon] Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[Zoraida] Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited.
[Mary] So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Because one of the things were trying to do is make sure that people know that culture is not a monolith. So what's your background?
[Zoraida] So I am originally from Ecuador. I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I came here, I came to the United… Not here. We moved to New York when I was five. So I'm… I consider myself a… New York made. I am a writer, I write urban fantasy. I love painting, I love Star Wars, I love food. I do speak Spanish, but I don't… I no longer think in Spanish. That's a little bit about me.
 
[Mary] So, out of that stuff, are we gonna talk about Star Wars, are we going to talk about writing? What are we going to talk about?
[Zoraida] A little bit of everything, I guess. Whatever you want.
[Laughter]
[Mary] We're going to talk about being Latina in America?
[Zoraida] Yeah, let's talk about being Latina in America. I think that, especially right now, it's a little complicated because I grew up in a very, very diverse neighborhood in Queens, New York. I'm from Hollis. You recognize the song, It's Christmas Time in Hollis, Queens. I never felt like an outsider really. Because I… Everyone around me was a person of color or… Even if we had like white kids in school, they were like neighborhood kids, right? So I didn't… I was never aware of my otherness until I got into publishing. Because publishing liked to segregate books and genres for a little while. Like, my first novel went out on submission when I was 18…
[Mary] Oh, wow.
[Zoraida] Actually, 19. It was a quinceañera story, which… quinceañera are 16s, but with more pink and more cake and more family…
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] And heels. But we got… It was the same time that Jennifer Lopez was published, like, had published a quinceañera collection, and there were a couple of other quinceañera novels. So our rejections were, "This is really funny, but we already have a Latina book for the season." I feel like… Nobody says that anymore. They say it… They use more coded language, but it's almost like… It's like the Highlander, right? There can only be one of something. Because I as the Latina, in publishing, represent all other Latinos in publishing. That's wrong. It shouldn't be that way. We should have multitudes. So that's… Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I never… I mean, I get some rejections, and they're never, "We've already taken books from bald dudes."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Right.
[Howard] Never comes up.
[Dan] We filled our white guy quota for the season.
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] Yes. Yeah. So I don't… I think that things are changing a little bit, and I think that that has to do a lot with We Need Diverse Books, the organization that came out in 2014, I believe, May 2014. It started out as a hashtag. I feel like it's not to say let's replace white authors with people of color. It's just let's make the table bigger so that we can all have a seat. I think that that inclusive… Like that inclusive mentality is what's desperately missing from publishing. My book, Labyrinth Lost, is about a girl who is… She doesn't want power, so she casts a curse to get rid of it. Instead, she gets rid of her family, and sends them to another dimension. Oops.
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] Now she has to go in get them back. But, above that, it's also about a Latina family, and how witchcraft is different from this culture. Right? Because they're brujas, which is the Spanish word for witch. At the end of the day, it's still a universal story, it's about family and sisters and having something bigger than yourself. But, it's still one Latina character.
 
[Dan] So, one of the things that… One of the side effects of this is that often when you see Latino characters being presented in media, they're not being written by people who actually are Latino. I'm guilty of this. I don't know if guilty is the right word. I've got an entire series where the main character is Latina. But. What do you see when you watch TV or you read books, and you're like, "Oh. That guy's never met a Mexican in his whole life." Like… What do people get wrong?
[Zoraida] People get the accents… In TV, people get the accents wrong, right? Like what is an accent… Ecuadorian speaking Spanish sound like? You've probably never heard it. But you've heard like Mexican accents or Colombian accents. If you watch Narcos, some Colombian people are upset because all the accents are wrong. But then again, you have a show, like Narcos, where like… They're drug dealers. Yay.
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] So that portrayal, the drug dealer, the… A book recently came out where a girl goes to Ecuador, and I'm like, "Yes! Ecuador's in a book. Finally. That I didn't write." She gets kidnapped, right? By these drug lords. I was like… It makes me… Like, it hurts. Right? On a very basic level. Because, like, seeing yourself as a caricature all the time… Latinos… Like, every time you watch a TV show, here comes the maid, and her name is Maria, and she gives you some wisdom. So it's the same problem with African-American people who have like the magical Negro who all of a sudden gives you a bunch of wisdom. Now you know, like, "Oh, I can finish my quest." That goes for all different cultures, right? We have these stereotypes. For me, and YA, it's always like the sassy best friend, or the super like curvaceous Sophia Vergara look-alike. Like, I'm sorry, I don't look like Sophia Vergara, like… If anyone's disappointed, like when you meet a Latina author. So, those are some stereotypes. I think that other ones that really bother me are when you can't establish a character… Your character's ethnicity, so you just throw in random Spanish words, right?
[Laughter]
[Zoraida] I recently read this sci-fi book, and the only way that you know that this character is Latina is because she randomly says the word Abuela. I have never used the word Abuela in my book. Because I don't call my grandmother that. I call her mommy. Because she's like my second mother. So that just shows like not doing research. Because different Latin countries use different nicknames for things. Like, different families use different nicknames for things. So that's really frustrating.
[Dan] My Latina character totally calls her grandma Abuela.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's the one she was talking about.
[Howard] That's a Puerto Rican or a Cubano…
[Zoraida] It just means grandmother.
[Dan] It's different in every culture.
[Howard] I know, but if there's a cultural thing… I saw this in a comic book recently. I wish I could reference it directly. Where a Latino writer put a very, very Latino Abuela in the book, and it is a beautiful, beautiful moment. I think it might actually be in a Hulk comic.
[Zoraida] Really? Well, the new Groot… Groot's grandmother is Puerto Rican. He comes from like the Ceiba trees, and… You know…
[Howard] I think that might be it.
[Zoraida] Are you thinking that?
[Howard] I think Hulk was in the book.
[Zoraida] Oh, okay.
[Dan] Oh, that's super cool.
[Zoraida] Yeah. I think that's really beautiful. There are ways to do it. But that's just craft, right? Like, as writers, we want to subvert stereotypes and we want to be like, "yes, maybe I do want to write about a sexy Latina and… But how am I gonna make her different?" One of my favorite stories is Selma Hayek, when she was in Dogma, she almost didn't get cast because Kevin Smith just saw her as like, "Oh, she's just like a pretty body and face." Then he actually talked to her and was like, "Oh, maybe there's more to you than this outer shell of what you're supposed to be in Hollywood."
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, although you've already kind of pitched it to us. Do it again. Labyrinth Lost.
[Zoraida] Labyrinth Lost is about a girl who sends her family to another dimension and then has to go and get them back.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Excellent. And… Um…
 
[Mary] So I had a question that I wanted to ask. As you were talking about some of these things that… They hurt and… I was wondering if you wouldn't mind… And the Selma Hayek story made me think of this. Can we dig into some of your own personal pain there a little bit? So you've… I'm going to extrapolate from a friend of mine who had grown up in San Francisco… Actually, no. She had grown up in Texas, as a Japanese-American in Texas. She had friends from San Francisco who were Japanese-Americans. They all went to Seattle to this very small island. The San Francisco women were going, "Why do these people keep staring at us?" She's like, "What? Are they staring?" Because she was so used to being stared at that she had just stopped noticing. So, growing up in a very diverse community, when you leave New York, what are the things that you experience that you think are probably media-based? That the… Experiences where it's like, "Oh. Oh, you've just explored…"
[Zoraida] So, I think… I haven't… I've been traveling for… I haven't been home in two months. I went home for a day last week, and then I came here. So traveling in different cities has been strange. I was in Atlanta, and I think that… Like, I don't know the Latino communities in Atlanta, but it's… People do look at you. Most of the time, I'm on my phone talking to… On my headset, so maybe that's one of the reasons. This girl's talking to herself.
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] But sometimes it's just like maybe somebody has never seen somebody that looks like me walking in their neighborhood. I won't really go to Arizona, because I'm afraid of like somebody asking… Racially profiling me or something like that. Like, I just won't go there. So when I leave New York, I… I don't always feel unsafe, I don't… It's not that I'm afraid of being around other people. Like, I'm literally surrounded by you guys right now…
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] But you're great. So I think that the problem is the language in our media right now about Latinos and about Mexicans and about like Puerto Rico and things like that. I think that has caused me to feel more guarded than I would have two years ago, right? Like, I'm always on the edge, and sort of like standing near somebody, like, "Are they going to say something inappropriate? Are they going to like…" If I'm on the phone with my mom, should I talk to her in English or should I talk to her in Spanish? Because like, if I'm talking in Spanish… You see these videos that go viral where somebody's like, "It's America. Speak English." I'm like, "Well, go back to England and speak English."
[Laughter]
[Zoraida] So like, it's just being afraid to do things that were normal to me two years ago.
[Mary] Right.
[Zoraida] That are a little frightening. If you look at the things from the earthquake right now in Mexico, there are these people… There's a photo of a 90-year-old man carrying boxes to help his neighbors. So, like, these are the people that our leader calls like rapists and murderers? Meanwhile, there are some of the most helpful people like coming together for a tragedy. Where do I fit in that? Because I'm not Mexican, but if you… I don't know what people see when they look at me. Because I only know what I see when I look at me. Hopefully, it's like good things right now.
[Mary] Your hair is fantastic.
[Zoraida] Thank you.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Sorry we had to put the bandanna on it.
[Mary] Yeah.
[Zoraida] I like it. I feel like I'm at Woodstock.
 
[Brandon] So, say we've got a listener who says, "I really wanted to add some Latino/Latina characters to my book." Where would you say they begin? How do they go about that, doing it the right way?
[Zoraida] So… Just with writing, there is no one right way to do things. Right? I think that Cynthia Leitich Smith, who… She's a native American author. She says if you want to write about somebody, read 100 books about that person, about that person's culture. If you can't find 100 books, then are you the person to add to this? Right? That's one way. I think that with Latinos, you have to figure out… Don't say… Like, I'm not telling you how to write, how to say Latino, how to say Hispanic, but there are very, very different connotations. Like, I am Hispanic and Latina, because part of me is from Spain. But there are some Latinos who have no Spanish blood, they're still indigenous, or they're Afro-Latino. So, like, figure out what those things mean. Figure out what country they're from. Because even though we speak a similar language, although our accents are completely different, we have completely different histories. The history of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean is going to be different than the history of Ecuador in South America. So figuring out that there is no way to look Latino… That's one of the things that really bothers me, because when people think Latino, they think light skin or tan or… They don't think Afro-Latino. They don't think of somebody like Rosario Dawson or Zoe Saldana. They think of Sophia Vergara. I'm sorry for using her over and over again, but I'm blanking out.
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] On my Latina actresses. So, I think it's doing a research that doesn't feel like anthropology, because anthropology also is about studying a culture to then destroy it, right?
[Mary] Yeah, we can… If you're not clear on that, go back and listen to our colonialism episode, and that'll help clear that up a little bit.
[Zoraida] Colonization, yay!
 
[Howard] One of the things that is… Doesn't get said enough is the importance of representation in the things that we create. My oldest son is autistic. We were watching an episode of Elementary in which Sherlock Holmes is talking to the woman who becomes his girlfriend, who is portrayed as autistic. It's different from how my son's autism manifests. He stood behind the couch watching the episode for about 15 minutes. For the first time ever… Ever! Watching TV, he said, "They're kind of like me." That moment! There are kids who are Latino, who are black, who are female, who are all kinds of ways, who never get to say that. We need to hear… We need to hear your voice. We need to hear diverse voices so that these people have stories about them.
[Mary] Well, it… Just to use a… Not… A non-loaded example, the… Oh, shoot. I've just forgotten her name. Astronaut. Um. She just did…
[Howard] Mae Jemi…
[Mary] No. No, no, no. She's white. Which is why it's a non-loaded example, because white is the American default. Sorry. But she just got the record for the most number of days in space. And said that being an astronaut had never been on her radar at all, until NASA picked… When she was in late high school, NASA picked the first class of female astronauts. She was like, "Oh, I want to do that." If she had not seen that role model, she wouldn't have pursued that. For a lot of people, the role model comes from fiction. Learning through fiction that, "Oh, that could be me," or "I could do that." Or just "I am not alone. This experience that I'm having is not alone." There's… While you were surrounded, there are also… When I was going to elementary schools, I would go into elementary schools in Idaho and it would be a sea of white kids and one little brown kid. One child. So that child was getting everything through books.
[Zoraida] Right. I think it's a… It's not just important for us, for like diverse people to see themselves in books, it's also important for like white kids to see other people in books.
[Dan] Absolutely.
[Zoraida] Because that creates empathy. Like, as writers, our biggest thing is to create empathy through our works. When I lived in Montana for a brief period of time when I was in college, I'd never seen so many blonde people in my life.
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] So, I would… But the people who would come up to me were native people who were like, "What tribe are you from?" Because I was confusing to them. I'm like, "I'm from the Ecuadorian tribe."
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] So…
[Laughter]
[Zoraida] So, it's… We confound each other as people, but I think that as long as we create inclusive stories… You don't have to make it a point to say like… You don't have to make a checklist of I have a disabled character and I have a character who's queer and Latino. You… It has to be organic to your story, too, right? You don't want to create two-dimensional characters. But that's just craft. So good representation is good craft.
 
[Mary] Can you give some examples of some good craft? Some books or media where you've been like, "Ah, yes. Thank you. Thank you for using your craft to do this well?"
[Zoraida] I'm a really big fan of Leigh Bardugo and Six of Crows. I think that that is an example of a really diverse cast of con artists…
[Chuckles]
[Zoraida] I'm trying to think of lately… Benjamin Alire Saenz, who writes queer Latino boys. And Adam Silvera, who also writes queer Latino boys. But they're completely different from each other. Part of that has to do with one is in the Southwest and one is from the Bronx.
 
[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at ComicCon.
[Whoo! Whistles!]
[Brandon] And I want to thank Zoraida for coming on the podcast with us. Thank you very much.
[Zoraida] Thank you.
 
[Brandon] Mary? You've got a writing prompt for us.
[Mary] Yeah. What I want you to do is I want you to go and… This echoes something that you've done previously, which is reading outside of the box. I want you to go and find books written by authors in, let's say… See if you can find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Read them. Then… You've got a suggestion?
[Zoraida] No, I was going to say, challenge accepted.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Try and find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Then, make one of your secondary characters… Not your main character. Make one of your secondary characters from Ecuador.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.8: Short Stories As Exploration, with Tananarive Due

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/19/12-8-short-stories-as-exploration-with-tananarive-due/

Key points: Try using short fiction to explore something you want to practice. Point of view, characterization, balancing dialogue and exposition -- quick, no big investment if it fails. Use short fiction to "discover who you are as a writer without getting lost wandering in the woods." Think of short fiction as your sketchbook, a place to experiment and push the limits. Don't worry about writing salable short fiction. Use short fiction to practice technique in isolation. Like doing sprints for a football player. Use monologues to meet your characters, short stories to describe a setting or try out a style. Pick an aspect of craft and focus on that single aspect. Start by reading short stories, anthologies, collections, and see what the possibilities are. Short fiction tends to be tightly focused, with a small cast and fewer plot threads. Use short fiction to get extra ideas out of your system, as a quick refresher. Find the turning point in your novel, and write a short story about it.

Wind sprints and footballs... )

[Brandon] That's… That's going to be our homework for this episode. I want you to do that. Take a story you've written and find a short story in it. Or the story you're planning and find a short story in it. Because we are, actually, out of time. I really want to thank Tananarive for being on… I said it right, though.
[Howard] It's Tananarive.
[Brandon] It's Tahnahnah, not Tanana. You told me don't say Tanana.
[Tananarive] I said it would be okay.
[Brandon] Okay. You were very gracious. But we want to thank Tananarive very much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much.
[Tananarive] My pleasure. Thank you all.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.44: Project in Depth, GHOST TALKERS, by Mary Robinette Kowal

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/10/30/11-44-project-in-depth-ghost-talkers-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Key Points: Catalog pitch and sales pitch are often different. Catalog pitch is to get readers, sales pitch is the emotional core of the story, with spoilers. Even though you know an event is coming, when it happens can still be a surprise. Changing viewpoints, letting a character explain why he's a slimeball, can make them more real. Watch for the tension between who a character wants to be and who they are. Sometimes you can split a conflict into parts and play them at different points in time to misdirect the reader. Just because a story deals with horrific things does not mean it has to be a horror story. It depends on how the main character views things. Pay attention to what matters to the character. Emotionally powerful moments often combine two conflicting emotions at the same time. Also, telegraph that this moment, this goal is coming well ahead of time. Writing combines craft and internalized practice, and working on specific things at specific points. Use your revision to find and fix overused stuff, or places you left vague. If you know you overdo something, replace it with a different piece. You can keep a style book to help you with the colors of emotions, or other fine points! Don't be afraid to use friends and 7 point plot structures and other tools to help with outlining, and to help fix places with problems. Remember, your reader only sees the final version, they don't see the drafts and drafts. Don't judge your first draft by anyone's final version, even your own.

A whole lot of words... )

Profile

Writing Excuses Transcripts

June 2025

S M T W T F S
12 34567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 11th, 2025 06:56 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios