Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 10]

 

[Mary Robinette] This 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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/23/15-08-qa-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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/16/13-50-what-writers-get-wrong-with-zoraida-cordova/

 

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.