Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-52-end-of-year-reflections-navigating-speedbumps 

 

Key Points: Life's speedbumps! Career, body, circumstances... Slow down, and rattle and shake over it? Rent a backhoe and scrape it off before driving? Break everything into smaller pieces and celebrate any progress. Sometimes you do it to yourself! Choose to move, and... disruptive, cascading issues. Depression and panic disorder? Brain shingles! In a grocery store without a cart, just picking up items and juggling! Strategies! Self-medicating with sugar? No, talk to everyone about it and talk about how to do something more healthy. Don't go too far with ergonomics, but if something is causing you pain, is there a quick and easy way to fix it? Identify obstacles. Beware, your brain confuses happy off-balance and frustrated or sad off-balance. Having trouble with decisions? Lists! Two hand choices. Eliminate repeated options that aren't working. Pie slices! How big is it, and how many do you want? Think of yourself! Move from triage dealing with fires to sustainable, balanced approaches. Replace "you can't have it all" with "you don't actually want it all!" Focus on what you want most, and ignore the rest. Be honest with people about what you need, and can do, before you hit a crisis. Count, and give yourself time before you answer. Say not to the projects that you don't want to do, because sometimes you'll have to say not to the ones you want to do. Give yourself a restorative.

 

[Season 19, Episode 52]

 

[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 52]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps.

[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.

 

[Mary Robinette] As the year comes to a close, we've been talking about a lot of things, but one of the things we haven't really been talking about is kind of how you keep going when life has thrown you speedbumps. This can be a lot of different things. It can be a career speedbump, it can be your body, it can be circumstances around you. So we're all going to just kind of talk about some of the speedbumps that we've been encountering and some of the strategies that we've used to navigate around them.

[Howard] You know what, I… The speedbump metaphor I think may have been mine when we originally set this up, because as a younger, healthier man, speedbumps were things that I would just maybe slow down for a little and then just rattle and shake on my way over them. I'll just plow through it. I'll just muscle through this. I will just… I'll put in the extra hours. I'll put in the less sleep, whatever. Over the last couple of years, I've realized that that approach is no longer the option. The vehicle I am driving over the speedbumps is now a 72 station wagon…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That does not have… Well, 68 station wagon, if we're actually talking my model year, so it does have wood panels on the sides, with a bad suspension, and the back of the station wagon is full of poorly packed glassware.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If I decide to hit the speedbump at 30 miles an hour, I am going to break things, and it's a mess. So, my life over the last couple of years has been built around activities that look a lot like, metaphorically speaking, pulling up to the speedbump, stepping out of the car, renting somebody's backhoe, scraping the speedbump off the street, getting back in the car, and then driving forward. If it sounds like I move more slowly than I used to… Yes. Yes I do.

 

[Mary Robinette] I have been dealing with an emotional speedbump. Last year, 2023, is what my family has taken to calling the year of five deaths. Which… I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about that, because as you can tell, it's a little bit of a downer. But I kept… It was… My life is badly paced and badly plotted and maybe that… The author kept reaching for the same trick. It's like, come on. But we couldn't wait two months. My mom was one of the people who I lost last year. Each time, I kept thinking, okay, I just have to get through this, and then after that I'm going to be able… And there was never an after. So what I had to do was come up with ways to be able to keep moving while things were falling apart around me. I turned in Martian Contingency a week before mom died. I had to have my cat put down on my birthday. I mean, it was like… But it sucked. And I had deadlines. So it was… I… The renting of the backhoe, it's like that is a strategy to get around the thing. For me, because it mostly messed with my executive function, making decisions, any of that was just incredibly difficult. And I had competing priorities. I wound up having to break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to make any progress at all, and learning to celebrate making any progress was hugely important. This year, which I thought, ha ha, has been a different set of things. We had an unexpected move this year because of different family health things. And the coping skills that I learned last year have been very, very useful with these speedbumps. It's been… Yeah. So, there you go. I could keep talking…

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Howard] Breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces… Would you like to peer through the boxes of glassware…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] In the back of my station wagon?

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] It's funny, because speedbumps, in these cases that we're talking about so far, can be very hard things, very difficult things, and sometimes they can be something that you do to yourself. So, in my case, I made the bright choice to move across the country this year. I packed up my life in New York and I moved to Southern California. And it's been a really wonderful decision for me. It's been the right choice, and I'm really, really delighted by where my life is at in a lot of ways. But also, talk about a god damned speedbump.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It was so much more disruptive than I anticipated, and it definitely caused a cascade of issues in my life, some of them professional and some of them personal. There's a way in which all of this has been really joyful to do, but also, that doesn't mean it wasn't a speedbump. It doesn't mean that I didn't need to make space for myself, make space for the people around me, and adjust to certain realities of what it was going to be to go through that level of disruption. Right? So, how you plan for, and how you respond to speedbumps is, like, hugely important and I maybe learned a small lesson of I'm not in my twenties anymore, or even in my thirties anymore, and I need to maybe make more space for certain disruptions that I needed to even five years ago. So, it's been an interesting moment of reflection as I'm looking at building a new life here, building a new community here, things like that. But also, how to keep plates spinning, keep balls in the air, while doing multiple things at once.

 

[Dan] My major speedbump this year, and last year, has been a recent diagnosis of depression and panic disorder. Both of which recently upgraded… We'll use that word… To severe depression and severe panic disorder. Which is just delightful. That's… Like DongWon was saying about planning for disruptions, that's the reason you haven't really heard from me throughout the year. I was on a few episodes that we recorded very early on, but I did hit a point, actually and 22, where I realized that my choices were to either back away temporarily from this podcast or quit it all together. Which I did… Absolutely did not want to do. But that's the state that my brain was in and to some extent, continues to be in. I hope to be on, and will be on, many, many more episodes next year. But… Yeah. We call this the brain shingles. I got the brain shingles.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled]

[Howard] And it's not the good kind of shingles that keep rain off of things.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Dan] No. Not at all.

 

[Erin] It's interesting, listening to all of this, because I feel like I… Knock on wood… I, in 2024, like, had not had as a huge, like, speedbump of that kind. Whether unanticipated, whether…

[DongWon] Self-Inflicted?

[Erin] Self-inflicted.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I… Like, so is somebody who does not drive…

[Laughter]

[Erin] I like to think about something that I do in my life where I create my own sort of speedbumps or cracks in the sidewalk to be tripped over. Like, somebody in a grocery store who doesn't get a cart and starts getting items off the shelf. Right?

[Laughter]

[Erin] It works a bit. Like, you're like, okay, I can hold this can, I can hold this soda, okay, what's… Okay, if I just rearrange this, I can put this thing on top. And you never know what will be the either item, obstacle in your path where it's a very small obstacle, but you're holding a lot of things, and it's a very delicate balance, and if something can throw it off, and now, all of a sudden, things are going everywhere and you're trying to hold on to everything and not drop any of the items and create a spill on aisle five.

[DongWon] I feel personally attacked and called out right now.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I don't think you even… [Garbled]

[Howard] It's not so much that you are your own worst enemy as it is that we are all our own that exact same worst enemy.

[Mary Robinette] Erin is, I will say, an extreme example of it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Having been in a bar with her, watching her continuing to work…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] While on a cruise ship. I'm like, no, no. Erin has a bigger capacity for stacking things and believing that she can continue to carry them then I… Than anyone I've ever met.

[Erin] Yay?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, on the plus side, there are things that you can do to, like, learn yourself. You know what I mean? Like, I know this about myself. So, thinking about what are the strategies… Like, to figure out… Like, what are the things that we need to do? I know that we are coming up on a break, so maybe the time to talk about the strategies is on the other side of it? Question mark?

[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what I was thinking. So, let's take a quick break.

 

[DongWon] So, my thing this week is I want to talk about the movie Furiosa. Which I really love. I sort of feel like there aren't enough people talking about it. I feel like it didn't get quite the love that I hoped it would. Mad Max: Fury Road, one of my favorite films, I think we can all agree that it's an absolute masterpiece of action cinema, and finally, they released the follow-up to that which is actually a prequel, but tells the story of Furiosa's childhood and early life as she sort of becomes the imperator that we meet in Fury Road. One thing that's really interesting is this movie is structured so differently from Fury Road. I think a lot of people went into it with the expectation of getting that same hit, getting that same high, and instead, it's a slower, quieter, more traditional drama in certain ways as we watch this person grow up and develop into this… Into the sort of force of nature we meet in the future. And Chris Hemsworth is also in it, playing opposite Anya Taylor Joy. Chris Hemsworth plays the villain, a character named Dementus. It's some of the best performances I've ever seen from him, that he brings a weirdness and a humor to it, but also a deep unsettling menace by the end of it. So, I highly recommend Furiosa. Remind yourself that this isn't Fury Road, it's its own thing. Manage your expectations around that. But just some absolute killer action sequences that I really love, some great character work, and great performances. George Miller is like nobody else out there and anything he does, I will show up for.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Mary Robinette] Strategies are one of the things that actually keep us going. I think all of us have strategies that are probably overlapping and some things that are wildly different. I would love to hear about some of the strategies that you've found that have kept you functional while you have been trying not to drop things in a grocery store.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the strategies that I learned accidentally was, the beginning of this year, I decided, as a New Year's resolution, that I was going to stop eating sugar. Because I was snacking on sugar constantly, especially at work. And the depression skyrocketed over the course of about two or three weeks. I realized that without knowing it, I had been self-medicating with sugar as a way of getting through the day. I'm still kind of sort of trying to do that, but sweeter. The lesson to learn from this, the way this turns from an accidental thing into an actual coping strategy, is, once I realized that that had become an important part of my process, then that became a thing to discuss more directly with my family, with my employer, with my psychiatrist, and say, well, this is what I have been doing. What can I do instead that is healthier than that? Well, what are ways that I can manage this depression without just sugaring up and muscling through it?

 

[Howard] Years ago, we, on this very podcast, we would joke about the… It may have been an April Fools episode… The excuses we make instead of writing. I think one of them was, oh, gosh, I sure need to vacuum my keyboard. I've looked at, this last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time rebuilding literally where my keyboard sits. Where my monitors sit. Where I sit. I didn't get very much writing or much work done, because I was spending so much time paying attention to a very small pain point. Oh, I have to reach for this thing, and I'm reaching further than I think I should. How do I fix that? I'm going to take the time right now to fix it. And I ended up building an entire 2C stand, two big… Three boom rig surrounding a zero gravity chair where I don't have to turn my head much, I don't have to stretch my arms much, but I can do everything I need to do from that chair. It took a long time to build, and the strategy really amounted to, Howard, if you don't make time to move that piece of speedbump now, then you're going to wear a hole in yourself reaching a little extra far or having to get up and do a thing. It's sort of like ergonomics, and I don't counsel everybody, yeah, look at your workspace and go fully ergonomic contextual inquiry. But, at the same time, if something is causing you a little bit of pain, there might be a very easy way to make it stop doing that so you can get more work done later.

 

[Mary Robinette] That's been one of the strategies that has worked well for me, is identifying the obstacle. What is the thing that is causing me problems? I also want to say that, while we're talking about speedbumps, I just want to quickly put a flag in this, that the speedbump can be a happy thing, as DongWon referred to. That sometimes, like, if you just won an award or had a short story accepted for the first time, that can become an obstacle, because your brain is very bad, it will just say, you're off-balance. But it cannot always tell the difference between happy off-balance and frustrated sad off-balance. So I identify obstacles, and one of the obstacles for me, the biggest one, was executive function. That I was just having a hard time making decisions and holding things in my brain. So because of that, I started doing lists. When the lists got to be too much, I backed off of that, and started doing something that I called two hand choice. Which is actually a trick that I learned from… Through animal stuff. When you've got a nonverbal animal, you can offer them two hands, each hand represents a choice. Do you want to go inside or do you want to go outside? I learned that with my mom during her last weeks, when she became nonverbal but still quite present. I could offer her a two hand choice and she could still respond, even when she got to the point where she was only looking at the thing. But if I offered her… Like, if I said, what do you want to wear and I showed her a closet full of things, she couldn't… She had no way of letting me know. But if I held up two things, she could let me know blue dress, then, just looking at the left-hand. With that, the other piece that I learned was that if she never chose the gray dress, I stopped offering it to her. So what I started doing with myself was when I came up on a thing and I'm… I was tempted into procrastinating or having difficulty making a decision, I'm like, which of those two choices has served me before? That would be the choice that I would go with, and I would stop offering myself the choice that wasn't serving me. That got me through some times where things were very hard.

 

[Erin] Yeah, I think… I love that. I think… I'm thinking about pie, all of a sudden, and…

[Dan] That happens to me a lot.

[Laughter] [Yeah]

[Erin] And it's always…

[Howard] The food or the infinitely repeating irrational number?

[Erin] Both. No, just kidding. The food. The food pie. Because I'm thinking…

[Howard] Now I'm sad.

[Erin] Sorry. I think about a lot as like… Thinking back to the past, like, what have you been able to handle also. So, what has served you, and also, like, where… What was the one slice of pie [committed?] Like, when the pie's delicious, you want to eat all the slices. Sometimes, it takes time to figure out. Like, okay, two, and I really wish I'd had more. Like, I actually did have enough room for a third piece of pie.

[Mary Robinette] The dessert pointer.

[Erin] But, like, 10, it turns out, was not good. Was not a good idea. So, somewhere between 10 and three is, like, the right thing. I do that with projects. It's, especially, when you repeat projects, I know, like, sort of how big a slice it is. Like, this thing, if I do this one thing, I'm only going to have room for one or two other things. When I'm teaching a college class, like, that is something that takes a lot of time to prep the lessons and talk to students. So, early on when I started teaching, I was like, oh, teaching. It'll just take a minute. Then, later, I learned, no. That's big. I can only do, like, maybe one or two side projects and teach and still get sleep and still…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Drink water and still work at other things that make me happy. I think… For me, that's a second lesson, which is, like, think of yourself. Like, you are an important part of the equation. If you are not here, you cannot carry the same… True story, you cannot eat the pie. So I think that it can be easy to neglect the you in the equation, and think, like, I will just outwork it, I will out do it, I will under sleep it, I will figure it out. But ultimately, like, when you take the time for yourself, I think it gives you the strength sometimes to be able to do more by taking a pause and putting yourself first. So when I bring work to a bar, while that sounds wild, part of that is me saying if I finish this amount of work, I really like socializing with my friends, and I'm going to get to do that after I finish this. As opposed to doing it in my room and then just working and working and working and never leaving the house.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So it's a way for me to keep myself in mind if only by moving my location.

 

[DongWon] I'm completely in agreement with everything you've just said, and I've been going through a similar process, probably starting in… I'm thinking of the last two years, as whenever I think of as the triage years. Like, starting in 2020, kind of up until sometime this year, has been a real era of, like, me realizing how overbalanced I was in terms of the worklife balance, and how much I needed to keep up with the current treadmill I put myself on. Right? So a lot of it was… That's why I've been closed to submissions for a long time and things like that, of figuring out, okay, how do I rebalance in some way that moves from this triage mode of taking care of what's on fire in front of me to being able to approach my life in a more sustainable and a more balanced way. Right? So the kind of thing which is a little similar to what you're talking about in terms of like now what slices of pie can I actually handle, and how do I make space for the things in my life that are restorative to me that aren't just work focused. Right? How do I have friends who aren't just publishing people, how do I have hobbies outside of the space that I work in, and how do I have other kinds of creative projects that sustain me? Right? So, balancing all of those things has been really important. And, maybe even more importantly than all of that, being patient with myself even as I know that this has been a multiple year process, and that I can say now, coming up on the end of this year, of, like, oh, I moved out of triage, I'm doing this. That's probably not true, there's probably still going to be moments when that comes up, where that may extend further. As I build towards sustainability, that's going to require all of these different kinds of shifts in myself and checking in with myself. How do I feel about this? How does my body feel when I'm working at this level? How, emotionally, in my balancing the needs of my clients versus my own needs versus the needs of the people I care about in my life? Right? So, juggling all of these things has required a lot of therapy, no small amount of medication, and a lot of just work on myself to figure out how to approach that in a healthier way.

 

[Howard] In many cases, for me, I think it comes down to the graduation from the early wisdom, which is you can't have it all, to the later wisdom of dude, you don't actually want it all.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That second piece of wisdom is incredibly liberating. The realization that, hey, you know what, I… A lot of these things that I've been reaching for, if I stop reaching for them and just reach for the things that I want the very most, I will be happier. Because I didn't really want those things. Maybe other people told me I wanted those things. Maybe TV told me… I don't know what the psychology is behind it. I just know that by narrowing my focus a little bit and saying the thing that I want most is the thing that I'm going to keep in front of me, and the thing that I'm going to keep aiming myself at, and everything else, I'm going to let myself ignore if I need to.

[Erin] I think, as you do that… It can be really difficult.

[Howard] Yeah.

 

[Erin] Because I think we're taught that anything we let go of, A) will never come again, B) was the best thing ever, C) that our lives will never be the same without it. But I think a lot of times, like, once that decision moment is past, you move on with the life you have. That is something that's really important, and also, to remember that other people are often much kinder to you than you are to yourself. It can be hard to say, like, I need to step back from this, I can't do that. I think a lot of times you think people will judge you. But, people are kind of, like, if you tell people, hey, I need X. Like, 99 out of 100 times, they'll be like okay, great. Like, let me know what I can do to be a part of that. Let me know how I can help. The one out of 100 is somebody who you don't need in your life anyway.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think telling people that before you hit a crisis point also helps you not need more. Because you are in a healthier place. And it also places less emotional burden on them.

[Howard] The shopping cart teaches us that we are our own worst enemy.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Writing teaches us that we are our own worst critic.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned also over the past year because… That I've been applying from last year. My mom… Parkinson's slows the brain down. So it just takes longer to answer something. The temptation when you ask a question is to fill the gap, to feel that… We're so trained in conversation that there shouldn't be a silence or… So you want to help. What I realized was that I did ask mom a question, and I would have to count in order to give her time… In my head, count… To give her time to respond. I realized that I actually needed to do that with myself so that other people… My anticipation of what they wanted didn't fill the voids. So I set a rule for myself that I've been deploying for 2024 which has made things much healthier for me, that when an exciting opportunity comes up or when I'm getting… Actually, I set the… I do what Erin's talking about, is, I tell people what I need right at the beginning. I sit down to have a conversation with someone about, like, this new project, and it's very interesting, and I tell them at the front, I'm like, you're going to hear me talk about it in ways that make it sound like I want to get involved, and I do, in the moment, but I'm not allowed to give you an answer for 24 hours. Because if I do, my sense of FOMO, my sense of excitement, is going to override my sense of what I actually need. I have been doing that this year, and I have felt like, as were coming up on the end of the year, have felt much, much better.

[Erin] I would say, just the last thing on this, is like… It is, in project terms also, I have been shocked like that a lot of times, people would rather you be honest than it turn out you can't do it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, people would rather you say…

[Mary Robinette] So true.

[Erin] Somebody comes to me, they're like, come on, write 10,000 words of this game. I'm like, actually, I think I've got like 1000 words in me. So many times, they will be like, okay, that's fine. We'll find somebody else...

[Howard] Half of them are bad words right now.

[Erin] For the other 9000. Then, like… Then the next year, they'll come back and be like, oh, can you do 1000 again? Or, hey, maybe you can do more? Versus if I tried to take the 10,000, it's 10 years late, and then they are feeling like they are in a worse situation. So if you can, always be honest. But, yeah, before a crisis point, and really knowing yourself is… You said something once a long time ago, I think it was Dan, at a… On a cruise. You said, say no to the projects that you don't want to do because at some point, you'll have to say no to the ones you want to do. I love that wisdom.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with that, let me take you to your homework. I want you to use this time, the end of the calendar year, the end of the season, to think about what would be the restorative for you. Don't think about what other people think are restorative. Like, if you don't like the beach, beaches are not restorative. Think about something that would be restorative for you. And then take a step to actually doing that. Yes, I am in fact giving you a writing excuses.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Now go rest.

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/08/14/17-33-building-tension/

 

Key points: Tension supercharges dialogue. A simple breakfast order, with a bomb under the table, becomes tense, loaded with expectations. What are the stakes? Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Break stability, lose control, and then build and stretch. Every line can be a cusp/decision/choice point.

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Six, Building Tension.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And… Dun, dun, dun, dun…

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] I thought that joke would play better than it did.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Howard.

[Dan] I'm just going to pretend like it was an introduction to me, and you were actually saying, "Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan."

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Okay. So, we talked about conflict last time. Let's talk about tension this time. Dialogue in tension. Maurice, why do we want tension in our dialogue?

[Maurice] Well, tension is that thing… It both holds it together and then charges it to push it forward. So, tension in a lot of ways just sort of supercharges dialogue. One of the things I think about is there's a scene… I'm about to date myself. Alfred Hitchcock movie. I think it was called Saboteur where you have these two people having a mundane conversation. They're just sitting around in a café, and they're ordering breakfast. It's just a really mundane conversation, trying to figure out their coffee order and everything. But then the camera pans down and there's a bomb underneath the table. The bomb's on a timer. It is getting close to detonation. Then the camera pans back up. So you have these two characters that are still just trying to figure out what they're going to order for breakfast. But now suddenly this moment has been supercharged with tension and expectations and wanting to see what's happening next.

[Dan] Yeah. That's one of my favorite principles of writing. It is so important when you're doing this that you make sure to establish what those stakes are. Because prior to seeing the bomb, that was just a boring conversation about breakfast. After seeing the bomb, everything changes. I have a horror class that I teach, how to scare people, how to build suspense. I show clips of movies. I showed a clip from the beach scene from Jaws where the kids are out playing in the water, and there's like a hundred misdirections where you think there's a shark, but it's not actually a shark. I showed this to a group of kids at a teen writers conference, and I forgot to set it up. They'd never seen Jaws, they didn't know what this was about. So they didn't know there was a shark. They didn't know that everything they were watching were misdirections about why is this person screaming? Why can't they find the dog? All of these little things. So they were bored to tears watching this scene. Because they didn't have any context, they didn't know what the stakes were. So if you want to build that tension, you have to tell the reader what could go wrong. Then don't let it go wrong for a while.

[Howard] Yeah. The… It's difficult to describe what tension is. In music, one of my instructors described it as what he called the law of the halfstep. Which was when you have a chord that is… Where one note is a halfstep off from resolving into the major key, the tonic of the piece. Everybody can hear that and everybody's like, "Okay. It's about to resolve. Go ahead and resolve." It's a musical tension. He went on to describe the works of Richard Wagner and saying he keeps using this law of the halfstep, but every time we resolve the halfstep, we introduce a new note that is a halfstep off from a new resolution. So Wagner is tiring to listen to for some people, because the tension is unrelating... er, unrelenting. It never resolves. Dean Koontz wrote a book called Intensity, which functions that way for me. There were these little resolutions at every step, but with each resolution, there was a new twist that maintains the tension. Very difficult. Very difficult to read. So, circling back around, what is tension? In fiction? What is tension in our writing? I think it's best described in terms of like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for a thing to resolve so that I can let out this breath.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's about an expectation that… As you say, waiting for the other shoe to drop. When we talk about what's at stake, the reason that that's important is because it creates one end of that tension. If you think about it as something that you are stretching a line… An elastic line between two things, you need one end of it to be the thing that's at stake, like a literal stake. You could maybe think of it that way. Then the other thing is all of the things that are drawing that out, that are pulling it away from that thing that's at stake.

 

[Dan] So, as this relates to dialogue, specifically. We know why tension's important. How do we draw out that thing, how do we draw it out, how do we stretch it when it's dialogue without it just being dull?

[Howard] Aa...

[Maurice] So…

[Howard] Oh, go ahead, Maurice.

[Maurice] Oh… Uh… Let me give you a link to this article. We'll put it in the liner notes. But it's called Toward a general psychological model of tension and suspense, which is as amazing a read as you imagine it will be. But in that… So I found that a really useful article for me personally because, so, for one, it defines tension as "a diffuse general state of anticipation." So there's that whole idea of like waiting for the shoe to drop. Then suspense as the specific anticipation between clearly opposed outcomes. Like, whether or not this bomb is going to explode. Right? So the whole article breaks down this whole idea of what does it mean to hold tension, what does it mean to hold suspense. It's sort of like lays out this process of, one, stability gets broken. Two, there's this loss of control. Then, three, which is the key thing you were just talking about, Dan, is the whole build and stretch. I think we've actually already touched upon the first two items there, the whole stability gets broken. Stability is just us setting the scene, and then it gets broken by you have these characters in collision with opposing agendas and what for. Then there's this whole idea of loss of control. That's the idea of, all right, let's show you the bomb, let's show you what's at stake. So now we have that loss of control. But the build and stretch… When I think about build and stretch, I think about the movie Inglorious Bastards. It's a Quentin Tarantino movie. There's a scene in there which I always refer back to. It's sort of like a master class on tension. A master class on that build and stretch idea. Right? Because you have your hero… It takes place in World War II and our heroes are in a German… I think a canteen. But anyway, they're surrounded by all…

[Howard] They're in like a downstairs tavern. That's the scene you're talking about, right?

[Maurice] Yeah, yeah. That's the one. So you have this German officer who is aware that there is a spy among them. He's trying to ferret out which one is the spy. So this whole scene is everybody trying to retain their cover, act like they belong, knowing that one slip up… And this whole scene ends bloodily, we'll say.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Spoilers. It ends bloodily. But the scene goes on for almost 20 minutes. Almost 20 minutes. By minute 12, you almost feel tension as a character sitting next to you. Right? Because he's done a pretty masterful job of just using dialogue, question after question, or comment after comment… Because it doesn't have to be questions, it's just… Literally each line of dialogue is a potential trap. Everybody understands one slip up and we're dead.

[Mary Robinette] So the potential trap… I want to drill into that and talk about cusp points. Because every line of dialogue can be a cusp point. For instance, we can continue talking about that now, or we could pause for the book of the week.

 

[Dan] That's a good idea. It's your book of the week this week.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So the book of the week for me this week is Meru by S. B. Divya. This is a far future science fiction novel. It's set in a point at which humans have really borked the Earth, and the next evolution of humanity, called alloys, are kind of keeping things going and preserving original humans as an important species. In much the same way they are preserving elephants. What's… What it's… Interesting is that… I mean, it's really quite compelling. But one of the things that's interesting for me about it is that the… There's parent-child conflict in it that is also not just parent and child but the parents of this child are alloys and they're raising a human child. So it's both the parental feeling, but there's also these other aspects of it, of… Where it touches on colonialization, it touches on what it means to be a dominant species, and how, in many ways, like touches on some animal rights things. But never, like, being explicitly about that, because it's also just this really fun and now we're going to go explore a new planet. So it's got so much intriguing world building, good interesting conversations, and… I'm just… I'm enjoying the heck out of it. So this is Meru by S. B. Divya.

[Dan] Cool. That sounds great.

 

[Mary Robinette] So. Okay, back to my cusp points.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that we're talking about when we're talking about these… This tension, and the scene that Maurice was describing, is that when you're in a dialogue, when you're in conversation with someone, in many ways, every line that is spoken represents a cusp point, a decision point, a choice point. When we talk about knowing your character's agenda, people come into things with more than one agenda and often a conversation can expose and open up a whole new agenda. You've had these conversations where someone says something and like five different possible responses collide in your head at once. The reason they collide is each of them could spin the conversation in a different way. So one of the things that you can do with the… To ramp that tension up is to make us aware of… The thing that's happening with the scene that Maurice describes is that each one of those innocuous questions could be the question that spins the conversation into danger. You can… That's something that you can play with as a deliberate tool is to look at what cusp points are represented by each line of dialogue. Like, what is the other thing that your character could have said that would have made things worse, and what is the thing that they could say that would make things better. What is the thing that will just change the conversation, change the topic, the tenor? These are things that can add tension if you kind of make the reader aware that this exists.

[Dan] That's really cool. I don't have a follow-up, sorry. I'm just [garbled]

[laughter]

[Dan] Wow. That's actually really fascinating.

 

[Howard] Well, one of the things that's… A common trope, we see it a lot. When the tension can be resolved by one person telling the other person the thing that they're planning to tell them, and the two people are together, and instead of telling them, they say, "We don't have time for that right now. Follow me!" Eee, no! You actually could have just said, "I committed the murder. Sorry. My bad."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Now, follow me, we're running from the cops." Or whatever. The artificial maintenance of tension really bugs me. If you need to do something like that, if you've reached a point where the energy state of the conversation is just going to collapse now. It's just going to happen. You either need to backup and write these characters apart so they're not having the conversation yet, or you need to interrupt them with something that neither of them get a say in in order to prevent the conversation from continuing.

[Dan] I would caution you as a rider on that principle that if you find yourself doing this type of thing frequently, mix it up. Don't have someone kick down the door and interrupt the conversation every single time. Use different methods of delaying that resolution and of drawing out the tension. Because otherwise it just becomes a parody of itself.

[Howard] Well, the master class version of this is the person who has the information needs to not be motivated to share it yet for a really good reason.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. That can't just be the authorial intention of I need them to not share this yet.

[Howard] Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] Frequently, when characters do share information, it can lead to much more interesting conversations that are still filled with tension. Like one of the things that I'm super enjoying right now is on TicTac… Tiktok, Natalie Hernandez… Natalie Hernandez author is the Tiktok handle, has been doing romance tropes in real life. Where the… She does both sides of a dialogue in which one side is like, "Stay calm. Don't…" "You just kidnapped me." "No no no no no. But stay calm." Why would… Like, shatters every piece of the way these conversations normally go. Because one side is trying to have the standard romance trope conversation, and the other is like, no, this is the kind of communication that you would have if you were a healthy adult, and I will absolutely not have anything to do with you because you are not a healthy adult. And you…

[Dan] So…

[Mary Robinette] I just… I love it because part of the… And the reason it… I think it… I brought it up here is because part of the tension describes from the thwarted expectations.

 

[Dan] Yes. Let's take this to our homework for the week, which is kind of a version of this. I want you to write a difficult conversation. Someone, as Howard said, has information they are motivated not to share. An example could be that they have made an incredibly questionable choice, some kind of deep moral compromise, and they don't want to tell what they've done. But I want you to write for versions of this. They have this conversation with a child. They have this conversation with one of their own parents. They have this conversation with a police officer. And they have this conversation with an old, good friend. See how that changes the tension and the ways that you build that tension in the scene. This is Writing Excuses, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/27/14-43-sequencing-your-career-genome/

 

Key points: What do you do after you sell the first book? Or what do you do when the series did well, but... then there's a slump? You can't predict exactly what will happen. Look for decision points. At least have a sense of if this happens, I'll do this. Good or bad things! Know when to change approaches. You can stop and take time to plan! Think about multiple exit routes. You may want to balance several things, not just do one thing full-time. Think about careers you might like to emulate. Take a look at self-publishing, freelancing, write-for-hire. There are many outlets. Think about income streams. Know your bandwidth! What are your limits, both up and down. Don't get locked into one genre. Think about production schedules, think about lifestyle. What is your creative throughput, and how do you want to use it?

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 43.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Sequencing Your Career Genome.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

 

[Howard] We're going to talk about the sequence in which you do things to plan your career, based on the kind of career that you want your career to grow up to be. I shortened that into something that sounds all science-y, but we're not going to break out the CRISPR in order to… 

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Bacterially inject your career with pieces of my [immune?].

[Dan] Oh, man. I wish you would, though. That would help me so much.

[Mary Robinette] That would be so much easier than actually trying to think about what I wanted to do.

[Dan] Yeah, genetically engineering a career instead of raising one from birth.

[Howard] I think Dongwon's headband… We wear headbands to keep these microphones on our head. Dongwon's headband actually has some of Brandon's DNA in it.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, no. I'm wearing Brandon's.

[Howard] Oh, are you wearing Brandon's headband?

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Dongwon] We're really just going to Frankenstein into one large monster by the end of this.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] So, Dongwon, this is an episode you pitched to us. How does an author, new or established or even old, make these kinds of career plans? 

[Dongwon] Well, career planning is not a thing that we talk a lot… Talk about a lot in the industry. Especially, I don't hear it being discussed at writing conferences, and especially for new writers. In part, because you're so focused on how do I find an agent, how do I sell this first project? But the thing that I always see happen is once you sell that first book, then there's immediate pressure to have a second book. Since you spent the first 10 years of your life… Writing life, writing that first novel, now suddenly you have to produce a second book in a year. Everyone panics and runs into a very common problem, which is the second book in a series or sequel is not as good or is a much more painful process than writers really want it to be. So one thing I really like is if authors can start thinking about what they want their career to look like in the early stages. Then you can start planning for not only this book but what's next, and then what's going to come after that.

[Dan] Career planning is something that I wish I had known more about when I got started in this process. Because I feel like I did a pretty good job of the first one. I had a series. My second series actually hit the New York Times list. I thought I was doing pretty well, and then hit a slump. I had not planned ahead for it, I had not planned for it, creatively, emotionally, or financially. If I had had… If I had known then what I know now about how to plan ahead and look further into the future, it would have been so much easier to avoid that, to avoid kind of just relying on the publishing industry to stay consistent, which it never does. I know now that, okay, if I have more irons in more fires, and branching out into a… More forms, more mediums, more outlets for my fiction, then it would have been so much easier at that time to kind of navigate that when it happened.

 

[Dongwon] One thing I want to sort of reinforce as we talk about this is this isn't about having perfect predictive abilities, right? It's not about clarity about what exactly is going to happen when you publish your second book or your second series or your fifth series or whatever it is. It's the fact that the publishing industry, like many businesses, but especially media businesses, is extremely random. What happens from one book to the next book could be affected by anything from… I think Mary's talked about this in the past. Your book coming out the week of a disastrous election result, or there could be natural disasters, or I had a recent issue where one of the publishers ran out of paper, which I didn't know was a thing that could happen.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What?

[Dongwon] These are apparently things that could happen. I mean, this has been resolved, it's fine.

[Howard] That's the last time he prints a book on the skins of small children, but… 

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] But that's how you summoned the demons, Howard, and the demons are how you make mon… Anyway, sorry.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Alex, we're [templating] this.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So, keep in mind, career planning isn't necessarily about here's I'm going to do A, then I'm going to do B, then I'm going to do C. Career planning is looking at decision points. In two books, I'm going to have to make a decision. Do I stay with this publisher or do I go to a different publisher? Do I stay in this genre, do I go to a different genre? Do I write a sequel to this series or do I come up with something new? What you want to do is have some sense at least… You don't have to have a super concrete plan, but some sense of okay, if this happens, if the good outcome happens, here's what I'm going to do. If this book tanks and nobody ever buys it, here's what I'm going to do. In part, having a plan in place when you hit the wall, when the bottom falls out of something, means that you're not also going to collapse with it. You're going to have a plan in place, or at least an outline of a plan, and be able to recover and continue to build to something new. Or, on the flipside, when your thing blows up and there suddenly 10,000 people clamoring for your attention, you're not going to panic and die, because you'll have a plan. You'll have already started that next book in the series that suddenly has a huge demand and a huge audience for it.

[Howard] I have two examples here, both from my own life. One when we first started going full-time with Schlock Mercenary. We established a trigger point at which Howard was going to go look for a day job. The trigger point was when we have paid the bills for two months using credit cards. Because that is the point at which we are no longer realistically financially planning things. We are living on the blind hope that some payday is coming down the road, and we have failed to bring the money in the way we meant to, and we must now do something else. I can't… I cannot overemphasize that to you. Knowing when… Quit is the wrong word, but knowing when to get off this bus…

[Mary Robinette] To change gears.

[Howard] To change gears, to take a different route. That is… It saves lives. The second… When we did the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter. It funded in like a minute and a half, and overfunded through the first two stretch goals within 15 minutes. What I posted was, "Wow. Thank you for your enthusiasm. We are flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Sandra and I are now going to take 24 hours in which to reconsider our plans for the rest of this project, because you want it more than we expected you to. Forgive us for being silent during that time. We don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but we also don't want to fail to deliver after having funded." That's the mistake that most commonly gets made. That thing that I said got quoted dozens of times through the Kickstarter marketplace as people realized, oh, my gosh, they ran up against something they didn't know how to plan for, and they told us that they were going to go plan. That is so smart.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] There's the old saying that when a door closes, a window opens, or something along those lines. It… In my experience, it really helps if you go and make sure that the window's unlocked and maybe put a stick under it so that it's propped open.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So when that door slams shut, you have another exit route. Right? Like those… So, belt and suspenders is a really useful thing. If you start thinking about what are your exits from this room, then you won't end up trapped in it forever.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that a lot of writers think, "Oh, someday I want to write full-time." This is when we're talking about career planning. Is that something you want to do? Because writing full-time means being a freelancer. So that exit strategy thing… That's something that I've had to do for my entire adult career. My goal has been to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. That is… When I reach those cusp points, it's like, well, I can write this. But it's a project I don't want to do. Is that going to push me down a path where I'm going to have to keep doing that kind of project, because I am now reliant on that income stream? Or do I pick this other path which will allow me to find different income stream sources? So I feel like… That's when you're talking about not just the door shutting, but it's like, do you want to go out the window? What are the choices you want to be making to get closer to the career you want to have? Like, I don't actually want to write full-time. I want a career where I'm balancing puppetry and audiobooks and writing. Because I enjoy all three of those. But I want to do the audiobooks I want to do. I want to write the books I want to write. I don't want to have to go do ghostwriting just because I want to be a full-time writer.

[Dan] Well, we've actually had that conversation about Writing Excuses as well. The four core podcasters sitting down to say, "How big do we want to let this thing get?" We've actually made some decisions where we turned down opportunities because it would have taken up too much of our time, and therefore too much of our lives, and kind of locked us into a path that took away some of our freedom to do other things.

[Howard] I will make very, very different decisions if I'm trying to be a full-time podcaster versus if I'm willing to let Dongwon be the smart one. Not that that was a choice that I was making.

 

[Howard] On that subject, we're talking about, in part, scheduling and time. Dongwon, I think you have a book to pitch for us that has time right in the title?

[Dongwon] I would, and it does have time in the title. I would like to pitch This is How You Lose the Time War, which is a book that is co-written by Amal el Mohtar, which you guys know from the podcast, and Max Gladstone. They wrote this book together as a… As an epistolary novel, so it is letters exchanged from one character to the other character. The two characters are rival agents in a war that is fought through time as the title implies, and they both represent two possible futures. They are trying to affect things that happened down the threads to make sure that their future is the one that wins. It is slightly possible that these two characters, as they engage in this brutal, bloody battle that sets civilizations on fire and conducts massive battles in space, that they might start to have some feelings for one another, and maybe that will go somewhere. I'm just saying it's a possibility.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

 

[Howard] So. What are some careers that we've seen that we would like to emulate? I think… Well, one of the ones I think of is… I panned one of his books because it wasn't actually one of his books. James Patterson, who writes everything. But I haven't actually done any research to find out how he made that work. My kids love the Maximum Ride books. But that isn't all that he does. Are there authors whose careers you've looked at that you love?

[Dongwon] One of the first questions I ask, whenever I'm looking at signing a client… I like to have a phone call with that writer. The question that I asked them, and it stymies them about half of the time. But it's always an interesting conversation, is, if you could have the career of any author in the marketplace, whose career would you want? I'm not asking what do your books… What kind of books do you want to write, in terms of the craft or the style. But, in terms of the publishing cycle, how many series they do, who their books are bought by like who their audience is? That answer's going to be really different if that person is Neil Gaiman or Seanan McGuire, even though they write in some ways very similar things about magic in our contemporary world. But their careers look extremely different.

[Dan] I want whichever career means I don't have to work. But still get paid for it. Whose career is that?

[Dongwon] I mean, that's a really important question. Mary was talking… Mary Robinette was talking about this a little bit earlier, in terms of do you want to write so that you don't have to have a day job? If you're not going to have a day job, that usually means you're going to have to publish more frequently or publish… Or get bigger book deals than you would in another situation. So, the way you get bigger book deals involves a slightly different strategy that if you want to publish once a year in a sort of a series-oriented format. Right? There's different ways you can optimize. You take bigger bets. You take wider shots, or longer shots, than you would if you had a reliable income and you wanted to be doing something that had a reasonable readership, but not necessarily needing to shoot the moon on every book.

[Dan] As you're thinking about what kind of career you want as well, almost everything we've been talking about in this episode is traditional publishing. There's so many more options than that outside of it. There's so much self-publishing stuff. There's so much… And we have talked about freelancing, and write for hire. There's so many outlets for you to find work in. Choosing which one of those you want to use, and if you are saying no to an income stream, can you afford to say no to it? Are you willing to put in the work to rely on the other income streams? Making these decisions ahead of time so that you know what you're getting yourself into and how to make it work.

[Howard] There's a…

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, that's one of the reasons that I don't self publish. Because I don't want to be a publisher, which is me turning down a gig I don't want to do. That's not anything about whether or not it's a… That's a personal choice about where I want to be spending my time and energy.

[Howard] There's a writer, illustrator, teacher who I… Whose career I admire. Jim Zub. He studied animation, went into like project management and sales for a company that was selling art cycles to the big three comic publishers to say we can take over on this issue for this title so you don't slip your dates. Then they kind of became their own publisher. He went from that… He did a web comic for a while. He went goo goo over… Or gaga, I guess, over Neil Gaiman when he accidentally met him at a party and Neil said, "Hi. My name's Neil. I'm a writer." Jim was like, "Oh. That's what I want to be. That's… I want that level of humility that is absolutely not required because I'm that guy." He now writes, I think, half a dozen titles per month for Marvel plus some of his old work, and is regarded by many people as one of the hardest working writers in comics. When I met him as a web cartoonist, that is not the career plan I envisioned for him. That's not my job. I don't know how much of this he planned, but he kept his job as an instructor at Seneca University, because, like Mary, he wants to have more than just the one thing.

[Dongwon] One thing that's really important, though, is you need to have a really clear self-assessment of what your bandwidth is. Right? What I see so many times, and you're describing someone who is very hard-working, but he also has the capacity to do that. A lot of people simply don't. It's okay if you only write 30,000 words a year. Right? It's okay to write a novel every two years, three years. You can still build a career out of that. What you can't do is build a career of somebody who writes a book a year when that something you're not going to be able to do. The more you can be aware of what your limits are, in both directions. I've also seen writers take on writing 500-600,000 words a year, and really skirt that line of burnout and risk not being able to deliver on a number of deadlines, which would be disastrous for their career. So, what you need to do is have a really clear-eyed sense of what can I actually do, and then experiment within that to make sure that those are your limits, or maybe you actually can write more than you think you can. Or, oh, this feels like too much, the quality is starting to slip. I need to back off of that little bit. Those are all really important questions you need to ask yourself, and have a really clear sense of what your process is. Then you can build a career around it. There's no wrong answers to that question. Some might be easier than others, but the most important part is you are realistic about what your goals and what your bandwidth actually is.

[Mary Robinette] The time to do this is when you are early in your career. Like, a very deliberate choice that I did make with my career was that I wrote in a bunch of different genres. Because I had seen often enough a friend sell a book and then get locked into that genre. It just happened to be the first book that they sold. Like, the book that I wrote before Shades of Milk and Honey was a science-fiction murder mystery. The book that I wrote after Shades of Milk and Honey was an urban fantasy. But Shades is the one that sold. After that… We finished that series, the decision that Tor made was we wanted to have me try a bunch of standalone to see what hit. So when you're thinking about what kind of a career do you want to have and who do you want to emulate, you're not thinking about the genre that they're writing in. What you're thinking about is their production schedule, you're thinking about the lifestyle that they live. That's the kind of thing you're thinking about, not the genre.

[Dongwon] Often, how many careers are they maintaining at once? Are they a comics writer, a YA novelist, an adult novelist, and a screenwriter all at the same time? I know people who do that, and they do it very well. That may not be you, if you have a really demanding full-time job, or you just don't have that much creative throughput in any given day.

 

[Howard] That brings us around beautifully to the homework. Identify an author whose career you would like to emulate. Research their career timeline, including the release dates of their books. That's pretty easy. Possibly, the order in which these things were written, and maybe actually the things, the order in which these things were actually sold. Who were their editors? Who is their agent? Look at all of this, and try and give yourself an accurate picture of what goes into that thing that you want to be or have. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.