wetranscripts | Entries tagged with dialogue

Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-28-writing-conversational-dialogue

Key points: Dialogue, conversations between people. Dialogue that doesn't sound like real people talk versus verbatim transcripts? Middle ground, that isn't accurate, but feels accurate. Writers convey to a human brain that a dialogue is happening. Every line of dialogue does two jobs, the authorial intention, why the author needs that line, and the character reason, which depends on who the character is talking to. Real life, um, or bantery fun? In real life, interruptions follow the actual word, but for punch, in writing you often interrupt at the word. Think of written dialogue as compressed talk, with the small talk stripped out. Pacing, accent, and attitude. Much of conversation is nonverbal. Pause points and body language. The rules in dialogue are much less rigid. Natural dialogue changes over time.

[Season 18, Episode 28]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Conversational Dialogue.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Today we want to talk about dialogue. How to do conversations between people. One of the things that will pull me out of a story faster than almost anything else are conversations, dialogue, that don't sound like real people actually talk. The problem is if you actually do write down exactly how real people talk, it is often unreadable and also just as bad. So there's a wierd middle ground that isn't really accurate, but feels accurate. We're going to magically somehow tell you how to find it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] By way of metaphor, in my audio engineering class, they explained... They sat us in front of a pair of speakers and played music, and the right answer to, "What are you hearing?" Is, "Oh, I'm hearing a pair of paper cones move back and forth powered by magnets." As audio engineers, we were taught we're creating the illusion of these things by using other tools. As writers, you are using patterns of dots, whether it's ink on the page or pixels on the screen or whatever, to convey to the human brain that a dialogue is taking place. It is a magic trick. At some level, you gotta lie.

[DongWon] Well, it's funny. We're kind of performing a version of that magic trick right now. I mean, this podcast is intended to be very conversational and it sounds conversational. But this is also not how the five of us sound when we're sitting around the dinner table and chatting. There's all this crosstalk, over talk, interrupted thoughts, pauses. Those are things that we, as podcasters, are working to [garbled]

[Howard] Wait, hang on. Is Dan allowed to have French fries?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] No.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But we're ignoring that for the moment. I mean, exactly, that kind of interruption. Right? Like in… We do that a little bit here and there, but I think we're very deliberate about it. Unlike me, at the dinner table, I'm a huge interrupter, as everyone here has realized.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think those are kind of things to think about is how are you going to manufacture the illusion of a flowing conversation, rather than replicating the absolute chaos that is a real conversation between friends.

[Dan] When we were talking this morning, and planning out exactly how we were going to do these episodes over breakfast, we were talking about this episode specifically, and I suggested one angle on it, and Mary Robinette suggested something else. Then we had a brief exchange that was mostly, "Uh... Ch... Oh..." Like, and we knew, because we've known each other for like 13 years, exactly what we meant.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] That's how we decided the topic for this was like 13 bizarre syllables in a row…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That come to us, made perfect sense.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's one of the challenges when you're writing is that every line of dialogue is doing two jobs on the page. There's the authorial intention, the reason that you, the author, need that line to be there. Then there's the reason that the character is saying that. The reason the character is saying that is going to change depending on who the character is talking to. So it's like I could not have that multisyllabic partial utterance conversation that I had with Dan, with the majority of the listeners, because we don't have any of that shared context.

[Howard] It actually… It wasn't polysyllabic, it was multi-gruntle.

[Mary Robinette] Multi-gruntle. Thank you.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Our multi-gruntle modality is one that is very specific. So when I'm trying to create dialogue for characters, I think about two areas of intention. What am I trying to accomplish on the page, like, what scenic lift is this doing? Then, the other is, why is the character saying this? What is my character's goal? What's the [garbled]? Again, that shifts for me, depending on who they're talking to. So if I swap characters out in a scene, my dialogue has to shift as well.

[Erin] I think one of the interesting things about that is that sometimes your authorial intention can be to replicate conversation as best you can on the page. Sometimes it's more stylized. Any sort of dialogue can have a range from being almost completely fidelity to the way that we speak, with um's and pauses where you're trying to show that this feels like real life too, like, very bantery where it's completely… No one actually speaks like that, but there is a fun in it. I think about Dawson's Creek when it came out a zillion years ago, and no teenager talks the way that they do, but there was a fun in hearing teens use this like very complicated language that they wouldn't in real life. So, sometimes your intention is also in showing something with the dialogue style, in addition to the dialogue itself.

[DongWon] Or, I think about Deadwood a lot, with this… Where most of the characters spoke in a very vernacular way. Then you have Ian McShane playing Al Swearengen who talks in these elaborate Shakespearean just foul mouth paragraphs, where he'll just be talking and talking and talking. But it's one of the most delightful things to witness, and all of the other characters seem to understand him, even though I, as the audience, I'm like I barely figured out what he was trying to say there, but…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It was delightful. So you can use that to great effect to communicate things about character in ways that play with what is naturalistic. But how the other characters listen and respond to that, I think, can also be very powerful.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to talk about one mechanic, just to start us off. As an example of something that I see people doing on the page, and it was something that I would do, is that you want the character to interrupt some other character. In real life, when we're speaking, that interruption comes several words after the word that causes the character to want to interrupt. Most of the time on the page, you do the interruption right at that word. So if you want the dialogue to see more natural, then you go ahead and you let the character carry a couple of words past that interrupting thing. If you really want to put a punch underneath that word for some reason, then you would have them interrupt right at that time. So, like, if I were saying, "Uh, we're going to be going downstairs," and someone interrupted me on the page, and the downstairs was the thing that I wanted to underline, it might be, "We're going to go downstairs." "Downstairs! How dare you say downstairs!"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Whereas in real life, I might say, "We're going to go downstairs to…" "Downstairs! How dare…" And it doesn't play the same. So you can think about that. Like, why are you doing that interruption and how are you playing with it?

[Howard] I like to think of conversational dialogue, conversational moments in books, as a compression algorithm. My favorite compression algorithm is the GIF, or jif, or we're not going to have that argument, where you pick key colors and you say this color for this many pixels, this color for this many pixels. When I had a breakup conversation with a girlfriend in high school, we talked for like three hours. When you read a breakup conversation in a romance novel, when you see one in a rom-com, it is not three hours. What got compressed? What were the key colors? How many pixels did they run for until the reader knew that that was the color that they needed. I don't know what the right compression algorithm is for everything, but I know that it has to be compressed. Because real conversations take a lot longer than they take in books.

[DongWon] There's the way that nobody says goodbye on the phone in a movie unless someone is about to die. Right? Like… Because otherwise, you don't need that note of we are concluding the conversation. All of the information has been communicated, we're moving on from here.

[Mary Robinette] This is, I think, as a side note, one of the reasons that so many people in fandom have difficulty with dialogue is because they have… In real life, is because they have learned it from film, television, and books where all of the small talk has been stripped out.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Intriguing]

[Howard] Also, so many things in romance and rom-com and drama, people will say such cruel things without any sort of warm up or even any sort of justification. Because, wow, that's the punchy bit. I'm sorry, people, don't learn to talk by what you see on TV. Because those people aren't being nice to each other.

[DongWon] Well, it's also dialogue in fiction is designed to communicate the emotional state of a character. Right? You are very rawly and directly trying to get what the character's actually feeling across to the other character, but really to the audience so they understand what's happening in this conversation. When I am in conversation with somebody about how I am feeling about something, it is rare that I am directly stating it. Right? I'm talking about effects, I'm talking about consequences, I'm talking about all kinds of other things that are ways to get them to understand what my experience is. But coming out and saying it directly is actually not a very effective way to get them to understand what it is that you're experiencing.

[Erin] I'm thinking back to that idea of the compression algorithm. One of the things I like to do when thinking about dialogue is trying to read more uncompressed speaking. Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright, her style of doing plays is to actually go interview people and then turn it into a one woman show. She does some compression, because otherwise it would be endless, but her technique is trying to remain fairly faithful to the way that people talk. Like, so… Listening to her do her shows, I'm like, "Well, that's pretty true to what a mildly compressed speech is. Now what do I want to look at?" A Marvel movie might have like super compressed bantery stuff. Then, trying to figure out where do I want to fall in between. Repetition is a great example. When I listen to her work or other things that are more uncompressed, we repeat ourselves. When you broke up with your girlfriend for three hours, I'm going to guess you said the same thing 18 different ways. That's some of the stuff that happens in real life, but on the page, it gets repetitive in a bad way. Because you're not in the same moment. So you want to use… You can use repetition to make things feel more real, because that's what happens. We forget where we were, and then we come back to what we were talking about.

[Dan] Well, this goes back into some of our previous conversations about format and about different types of writing. There are things you can do, for example, in a script that don't work on the page because of all the extra um's and so things that we kind of add-in that sound very natural to us, but reading them become very onerous. Let's pause now and come back later.

[Howard] I did not know how much I needed Cunk On Earth until I watched the first episode of Cunk On Earth. This is a comedy documentary, faux documentary of human history presented by Philomena Cunk, who is a character played by the actress whose name I've now forgotten.

[Dan] Diane Morgan.

[Howard] Diane Morgan. Diane Morgan so brilliantly stays in the voice of Philomena Cunk. That's where half the comedy comes from. Her uncertainty when interviewing people, her… The self-consciousness coupled with the absolute certainty that she's right. "Oh, my mate so-and-so shared this with me on YouTube. No, really, the moon is a lie. I'll send you… You just need to see the video." I love Cunk On Earth. 30 minute episodes, which is the perfect length for this kind of comedy. Available right now on Netflix. If you've ever wanted to learn lots and lots of things about human history mostly correctly while laughing, Cunk On Earth.

[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back in, I want to talk about a couple of tools to make your character voices distinct. Because when you've got two characters speaking to each other, in an ideal world, they sound like different people. Coming out of narrating audiobooks, there are five things that make a character voice, roughly speaking. Three of which can be replicated on the page. I'll tell you the other two, because it'll annoy you that you don't know them. They are pitch and placement. But the three that can replicate on the page are pacing, accent, and attitude. So, pacing is something that you control with punctuation. It is someone speaking with very long, fluid sentences, or somebody who's talking with lots of parentheticals. I mean, sometimes they talk with parentheticals, but sometimes they don't. Like, that kind of thing. Accent is about your sentence structure. It's not about replicating someone's like phonetic distinctions on the page, it's that the sentence structure is going to vary based on where they're from. When I'm talking to my parents in Tennessee, I will… My pronunciation doesn't change that much. But I'll do things like, "I'm going to go on over to the store." I'm like I don't know what all of those extra…

[Dan] Syllables.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Mono-gruntal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I don't know what all of those extra prepositions are actually doing. On over to? Like, what are we doing there? But that is, rhythmically, that is… That's built-in part of the accent. Then, attitude is about your word choice. So the words that you pick when you're mad at someone are very different than the words that you pick when you aren't mad at them. It's kind of an all of the above scenario, too. Like, if you take, "What did you say?" And you're mad at somebody, it's like, "The actual did you say?" That changes…

[Erin] Yeah. I love that where people come from impacting the way that they speak. One of my favorite things is that there are many languages where at the end of sentences, you basically say, "Are you with me?" Some sort of phrase, like, yeah, got it. It's like different languages have different words that go at the very end, but it's basically like, "Are you still with me as I am speaking?" If you have someone who comes from a culture like that, or you've invented a culture like that, you might have more check in words at the end of sentences, because that's part of their way of speaking. That will come through. I think something that's really important and interesting to consider is that none of us just speak in a vacuum. Everyone is… One of my sort of pet peeves is everyone has culture including you. So, as opposed to thinking of changes in language as something that just other people do, it's why do you speak the way that you do? Then think about for your characters, why do they speak the way that they do, and what are they conveying about themselves that they may not even realize through the way that they speak?

[DongWon] Love that. One of the things that I've been thinking about in the course of this conversation, I actually don't have a great answer for, but so much of conversation is nonverbal. It's facial expression, it's gestures, it's eye contact, it's all of these things. I think one of the struggles that we've all had living our lives mostly mediated by Zoom these past several years is these tools got much more difficult to apply. So when you're doing just verbal dialogue… So, like, in Dark One: Forgotten, we're not getting character gestures, body language, eye placement, all of that. All we're getting is what are they actually saying. So what are some of the tips and tricks to communicate the things that would otherwise be communicated by like a tag that's like, "He sighed, he shifted, he…" Whatever that happens to be. He broke eye contact in some way. Like…

[Mary Robinette] So… The thing is that we've actually been doing nonverbal dialogue… Dialogue decoupled from body language since the invention of the telephone. So we know how to do that. We're familiar with those patterns. What I find is that when you're trying to replicate that on the page, you want to look for the natural pause points. Because anytime you put in body language, that's going to slow things down. So instead of saying he paused, then you would say he scratched his ear. What I find is that… Again, the body language is, as you say, part of the communication. So, he looked away… Well, what did he look at? What is that actually conveying? I'm very bad in my books. My characters do a lot of sighing. I have to go back in and do a search and find/replace to swap that out for other pieces of body language. Because it becomes in-specific.

[Dan] So, if you want a really great example of how important all of these kind of nonverbal cues can be, get on… Jump on YouTube and go look up what I'm going to call the mother F-r conversation from an early episode of The Wire.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Which is two characters who are doing what is essentially like a…

[Mary Robinette] It's a crime scene.

[Dan] Crime scene investigation…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Trying to figure out how a woman died, where the bullet is, all these things. The only word that they say, over the course of about five minutes, is not one we can say on this show. But because of their attitude, because of their vocal inflection, because of the way that they look at each other, you know exactly what they're saying and exactly what they mean. It is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. Flipside of that, another one of my very favorite shows is Justified. One of the things I love about that is how distinct the dialogue is. So, yes, of course, it's a show and so they're doing some visual cues. But, going back to what Mary Robinette was talking about, how do you make all of your characters sound different, watch an episode of Justified. Pay attention to, for example, the way that they threaten each other. Wynn Duffy is kind of an outsider, he's not really a Southerner, he doesn't have that kind of slow laconic way of talking that so many of them do. He's very clinical. At one point, he says, "If I see you again, I'm going to get a blow torch and make you as small as I possibly can." Which is just very direct and to the point. When Raylan Givens, who's the main character, wants to threaten somebody, he says in this very slow way, he… Actually, to Wynn Duffy, he pulls a bullet out of his gun, drops it on his chest, and says, "Next one's coming faster." Which is such a beautiful way of encapsulating his personality, the way he solves problems, his absolute economy of words, but in a way that's completely different than Wynn Duffy's.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things about threats in particular is that they often say more about the character who is making the threat than the character who is receiving the threat. Because most of the time when people are making threats, their actually signaling this is something that I would find upsetting. They are not necessarily signaling this is something that would be a problem for you.

[Erin] Thinking back to what we were saying about the difference between, like, when you're putting something on the page and dialogue and when it's spoken, I was thinking that sometimes it's… Think about this sentence. I don't know about that. Right? So I'm thinking if I don't know about that and I am saying it in a conversation with people who can see me, I might sort of pause, think, and then say, "I don't know about that." On the page, you might say like, "She furrowed her eyebrows," or something much better than that, but in…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In a dialogue, I'd be like, "I… Don't know about that." That's what I would do on the phone. Because what I'm doing is taking that space where you would see me do the furloughing and putting it in a vocal… Like, I'm doing it vocally, because you can't see me. That's what you do on the phone. So, something that's really interesting is just pay attention to the things we do when we're talking on the phone and figure out is there a good place to put those in text. When do you lower your tone and whisper? When do you get louder, when do you extend vowels and when do you get more clipped in the way that you speak, maybe because you're upset.

[Howard] This circles back to what I think is kind of a 101 level, but we should all be reminded of it, writing and editing rule as it might be for dialogue, which is that the rules for grammar and punctuation and spelling and whatever else for dialogue are much less rigid than for other things. Because we don't put commas where they necessarily are supposed to go when we're speaking. Play with that. There've been a lot of times when I've had to step something from a copy editor because my grammar has been egregious and I have to go back in and say, "No, that was meant to be egregious," because of the way this is supposed to read. But in checking what the copy editor has written, I am like, "Let me make sure that that reads correctly. I didn't accidentally spell a bad word, did I? No. Okay. We're cool."

[DongWon] One other thing I want to point out is that what feels like naturalistic dialogue also follows trends and evolves over time. What was naturalistic in the 1950s was the screwball comedy, which is incredibly fast-paced, had a very specific accent, and cadence. Then we entered the 70s, where there was this very like naturalistic like thing is how people really talk. As audio changes, as technology changes, as our expectations change… Right now, we're in the era of mumble core movies, where it's almost impossible to tell what anybody's saying because of the way the sound is mixed in the way dialogue is written right now. You find that in prose, too. In text, how people talk in different eras, different genres. What feels like natural language, natural conversation, those shift depending on what you're trying to inflect. So I think what really we're circling around in so many ways is conversational dialogue, natural dialogue, is highly stylized. It is approached to great effect through a real character, through a real tone, through a real genre and category, in all these really powerful ways.

[Erin] I think I love that. I love that I think it's both what you're trying to inflect and also what you're trying to reflect. Because not all folks talk the same. So I think one thing that's really exciting is to not feel like you need to force yourself into the way that the dialogue that you're used to reading or use to seeing is, if that's not the story that you're trying to tell. I really love the way that like, an author like Susan Palumbo, who's a short story writer, uses dialogue in a different way. She's from the Caribbean, and, like, there's a different style of writing that she's doing that is amazing and completely natural. But just natural to a different storytelling ethos than the one that we're use to, specifically, in the United States.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to give you some homework this week. What I want you to do, and it's a very simple exercise. I want you to take dialogue that you've already written and delete every third line. This is going to give these gaps in the conversation, that you are going to have to then bridge with the body language that you use and having the other characters make the deductive jump that we would make in natural conversation. It's not going to be a perfect thing that you need to do with everything that you write. But it's an exercise in making deliberate choices for what you're doing in your dialogue. Try deleting every third line of dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we discuss the different sounds of collaboration, and learn about two of our hosts experiences building worlds with Brandon Sanderson. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.48: Bodies, Why? (Part III)

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/11/27/17-48-bodies-why-part-iii/

Key Points: Sometimes fantasy, the dragon, robot, or other element, gives us a metaphor that let's us examine things may be too difficult to talk about directly. If people don't have the words to describe the pain they have, nobody can help. Don't tell people what the pain feels like, describe what happened and let the reader imagine the experience. Talk about how much does the pain interfere with things you are trying to do. Changes in dialogue and sounds of words can help signal pain to the reader. Talk about adaptations or compensations that a character makes, and what happens when those fail.

[Season 17, Episode 48]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies, Why? (Part III).

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] Ow!

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] All right. For this episode, what we're going to be looking at is... we're going to be talking about pain. We're going to be talking about how journeying with pain is awful, and also, some of the metaphors that we can use to kind of approach writing about pain. Let's dive into that. Fran, do you want to unpack that a little bit more for our listeners?

[Fran] Definitely. I find writing about or expressing pain to others really difficult. In part, because, one, when you do that online, quite often people want to talk to you about their pain. It becomes sort of an echo chamber of pain. Which, I really do care about other people and I wish that no one was in pain, but I also need to do my work. This can become sort of a never-ending cycle. I'm not here to educate people about pain. I have had that question asked of me, of, "Don't you want other people to understand where you're coming from?" No, I want to write stories. That's what I want to do. So talking about disability in this whole series has been kind of tough for me in that. But it's also important. So some of the time, the ways in which I do this are I create a structure within which I discuss elements of pain or the interactions with the medical community that I've been having since I was one. That was… Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand definitely did that, in a way that was for me a vehicle to, I thought, initially unpack those different rooms of experience. It turned out to be the most angry thing I have ever written in my life, which was another aspect of pain that I didn't realize was there. Fantasy, the dragon, the robot, or the spaceship element, actually gives me a metaphor to start examining things that otherwise are very direct and very real. So that I find super helpful. I know other people have very different experiences because this is not a one-size-fits-all topic. So, huge big pointy arrows around your mileage may vary. Your pain scale may vary.

[Howard] My…

[Chelsea] You don't want to get me started on the pain scale.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] No. Let us absolutely get you started on the pain scale.

[Howard] My… Arguably, the most important thing I've written is No, I'm Fine. Which I wrote for an anthology that benefits my friend, Robinson Wells. It's about 750 words of creative nonfiction, in which I, in first person, walk the reader through my brain not working correctly. Me not wanting to take a pill, even though I know the pill is going to help me. The process of writing that… I wrote it during a family vacation. Sandra took the kids off to see some rocks. We're in Utah, they're nice rocks. I stayed home and wrote. She came home and her first words to me were like, "Oh, my gosh. What happened? Are you okay?" I realized I'm not okay because in order to write this correctly… Apparently I wrote it so well I walked myself through it. It was powerful. It was a learning experience for me. I say most important thing I've written because it's the only thing I've written where people have come up to me and said, "Howard, I think you saved my life. Because I shared this with my wife, and now she understands what's happening to me." So… I'm not reflecting this at Fran, I don't want to… I'm not here to educate people. I just want to write nice stories. But every so often, I just got to lay down the education because if people don't have the words to describe the pain that they're having, then nobody can help.

[Fran] Let me reframe. This is… This particular conversation where I was asked, "Don't you want to help people understand?" was really directed more towards me answering specific questions on an individual basis. Which brings up the sort of I have expressed myself on social media, now everyone on social media wants me to interact on an individual level with them, which… Hi, social media, I love you, you're awesome, but also, I want to write. My answer to this person was I do do education. I do write about things that are important to me, but I do it in fiction. I don't necessarily want to spend the time educating individuals when Google exists. Among other things. So, yes, educating, yes, creating spaces where other people can empathize and find themselves in those stories. Yes, absolutely. Burning up my time and energy to do something that the person could easily do for themselves? Not so much.

[Howard] Yeah. I'm not going to write that essay again and again and again and again for everybody who asks me what it's like to have my brain.

[Fran] Right.

[Howard] I want to write it once.

[Enjoyed it]

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the reasons that sometimes writing about bodies as not… Literally not human can sometimes allow us to give people another way in that sometimes feels safer for the writers as much as anything else. So, just as a… On the pain scale end of that…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have… I've been a puppeteer for most of my adult life, and my pain scale is set so that I think would I perform with this? The answer is, well, yeah. I performed Little Shop and the thought that I often had when I was working this massive puppet was if I experienced this pain outside of this puppet, I would go to the emergency room. But when I do experience that level of pain outside the puppet, I don't. What I do is I keep teaching until we realize that actually the pain that I thought was just fairly normal was shingles. So, when I'm trying to put that into fiction and trying to explain these levels of pain, I often turn to other forms of talking about it. Whether it's like putting a character into a spaceship with a spaceship itself is malfunctioning and that reflects the body. What are some other things like that that either Chelsea or you, Fran, have seen done well or used as ways to create this emotional distance for yourself as a writer?

[Fran] I am happy to kick that to Chelsea first. I have some thoughts…

[Chelsea] Well, I think about… I'm trying to think about this… One of the things that really kind of limits me to somebody's story is when I read about like their experience with like a disability that they have in common with me. Is that I have… I'm kind of like pointing my fingers up my eyes and pointing these fingers at them. It's like I see you. I know a lot of people do this because when I was done writing Witchmark, I had several people come up to me and say, "Me, too. I have PTSD too and the way you wrote about it was so great because it wasn't like an after school special about PTSD, it was Miles had this experience and he's toughing it out through that." Honestly, I didn't really realize how much of that experience I had woven into the story because I was just like, "Okay, well, Miles' experience is like mine, so I'm just going to do it the way I would do it." That, again, makes me want to cycle back to the pain scale for a second, because I have years of toughing it out with pain. So if I go to a doctor, and they say, "What's your pain level?" And I say, "Oh, well, I'm pretty uncomfortable right now." I'm actually talking about an eight, but the doctor doesn't know that, because they don't know that I've been like living my life at five for literally years.

[Fran] I… Two things about the pain scale, because I've… I put things at low numbers because I'm constantly in pain, but I'm also living in kind of an orchestra of pain. I… For a long time, I knew how to draw because of where the pain in my hands was. Figuring out how to express pain on a single linear line of weird faces really doesn't match up to my experience at all. First of all, it defines pain as a one… As one thing that is happening to you instead of a multitude of things happening all at the same time on different levels. Two, it expresses it on a single unvariable situation, whereas pain's so hard to get conveyed to another person who hasn't experienced it. At one point I was… Your brain is going, say seven, say seven, say seven. But what comes out is, oh, it's a four. Then I have to say… But when I had kidney stones, that was also a four. That usually gets me an interesting reaction from people.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I imagine so.

[Fran] [garbled] a parallel that they understand, especially if they've had kidney stones. Pain is a relative experience, that is the worst thing to share with other people. We can share experiences like food, that's a universal experience. Breathing is a universal experience. Pain is an individualized experience that is so tied to all of our other ideals for ourselves and each other, and choice, and all sorts of things that we have to work through. So when I see pain or disability for that matter written about well, it is usually in terms that are relative and that are cumulative. So it's not just a single thing that is a character definition. I think this goes back to way in the beginning of this, where I mentioned that somebody on a panel had said, "Well, I'd make a hero unlikely by giving them a disability." This is not something that you just like drop on somebody as like here's your disability sticker. It's an actual layering of experiences and things and ways to maneuver around stuff and ways to get the thing you want to do done while in pain without biting somebody's head off while you're in pain. That's the other thing that I've… That I love. Like, Elizabeth bear does this really well with her… Chelsea, what's the space station series that they're navigating pain and the elements of different types of disabilities while in space, while working as security and medical systems and… I'm going to come up with the name of the book in a moment…

[Chelsea] Are you talking about White Space?

[Fran] Yes! Yes, thank you. Thank you. There are so many different aspects that are really well portrayed in layers. Aliette de Bodard does an amazing job of talking about emotional and physical pain, especially in The Tea Master And The Detective, where she's got her Holmes character is physically just… It's really incredible. So I really appreciate when writers use layers, when there is no magical fix, when you just need to get through the day in different ways. Those are really, really brilliant things. You can often… Just kind of like you can tell whether an author is a coffee drinker or a tea drinker by what their character drinks. You can often tell if somebody has been through an experience of at least empathizing with someone else's pain or their own pain, because you have to empathize with yourself, too, by how it comes across on the page. If it is just this one thing that is happening where nothing else is happening, that's a little bit harder for me to believe.

[Mary Robinette] Why don't we, since we just had two great recommendations, why don't we actually pause for our book of the week, which is neither of those two…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It is a short story, but we also recommend both of the ones previously mentioned. It's a short story by John Wiswell, called D. I. Y. You want to say why you wanted to recommend that one this week?

[Fran] I love this story. This is up at tor.com. These characters feel real, and they feel so innovative on the page as far as how they're going about solving problems, but also how they're dealing with people who are not them. John projects empathy in everything he writes. This is one of those that just really, really got to me in all the best ways.

[Mary Robinette] So that's D. I. Y. by John Wiswell, and we are linking to it in the liner notes so you can hop to it since it is available online.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I found when I was doing some research for The Spare Man, was that… This idea of pain. My character has a deep brain pain suppressor. It's one of those devices that is about to become not science-fiction. But the problem that they have is that people's pain is so specific that running clinical trials on pain suppressors is incredibly difficult because no one's pain is the same. Also because of this pain scale that were talking about. So it's one of those things that technically there is actually a way to suppress pain in the brain, but, practically speaking, there's… They are running into serious, serious problems figuring it out. Which then means that when you're trying to convey that to the reader, this pain, that actually writing it in a way that the reader feels it in their own body becomes very challenging. Something that Steven King suggested in his own writing is that if you want people to feel pain, that rather than trying to tell them what the pain feels like, that you just describe what has happened to them and let them… So, like, instead of trying to describe what it feels like to have your toenails pulled out, you just say that they pulled out the toenails. Everyone's like, "Eww!" That one works. That one makes sense, because all of us have had some damage done to fingernails or toenails. But many of the pieces of pain that someone with… Dealing with a disability or chronic pain that it is so specific to them and it's not something that people without that particular body shaping are going to experience. So, what… Like, some of the tools that I've deployed are… To give my characters almost synesthesia experience of pain, where I start describing it with colors or textures. I realized that even when I was talking with someone else that even describing sharp pain versus dull pain is a metaphor for something that is happening in your body.

[Howard] As a kid… I say as a kid. Between the ages of 16 and 30, when I described pain, when I described it to myself, it was colors and shapes. Orange triangle, gray square, gray triangle, red circle, were all different kinds of pain. This is fundamentally useless when you're trying to communicate with a physician and they're asking, "How bad is the pain?" I said, "Well, it's a big orange triangle."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Okay, where's the triangle?" In looking at the pain scales that physicians use, I quickly realized that it was a tool that was not only going to help me when I go to the doctor, increasingly as I age, but when I write, because one of these scales talks about how much the pain interferes with other things I'm trying to do. Zero is no pain. One, hardly notice, two, notice, but it doesn't interfere. Okay. A lot of us who have chronic pain, have managed to take our pain and push it down to two and tell ourselves that it doesn't interfere when in fact it probably does interfere, but that's another discussion. Then you jump up to eight. Awful, hard to do anything. Nine, can't bear the pain, unable to do anything. 10, on one of the scales, 10 was the patient shouldn't be able to report a 10 because if the patient is experiencing a 10, the patient is not able to say the word 10. On that scale, for me, I realized, "Oh, I've had a nine and a half." That was when I got a shot in my foot and it hit the nerve. Everything shut down except that sensation. Briefly.

[Fran] I would just like to point out that pain scales are… Contain inherent bias as far as medication goes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[Fran] And getting pain relief medication, especially if you are female, especially if you are from a marginalized group, especially if you are a black woman and you express your pain according to the pain scales. They will automatically ratchet it down. It's hideous to me that that assumption is made. I think that, again, medical model, but also there's no empathy there. The lack of empathy in those things.

[Howard] Well, but, circling back to what I can write, the idea that a character is feeling the pain and it is interfering with what else they can do, that! That's a plot point. I can write that.

[Fran] That's great. One other thing for writers to think about is that the length of your sentences and the sounds of your words when a character is in pain can be impactful and useful. If you have a character who speaks in a long flowing syllablant sentences that have a lot of esses in them and suddenly everything there speaking with is stabbing or uses a lot of k's or hard sounds and t's in them, with punctuation every single word or dashes or however you… Just breaking up the lines conveys a lot more than you think it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Studying poetry will help.

[Fran] Well, I was going to use the Bukowski example. Which is that Charles Bukowski had emphysema and when… As he progressed in his writing, his lines got shorter.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's fascinating. And unsurprising. The other tool that I… Tool and challenge I find is that when you have a character that has chronic pain, it is part of their normal. So, keeping it alive on the page so that the reader remembers that, because otherwise the reader will default to their own, which is, as we've discussed, not matching, since nobody's pain matches. So it's a challenge to both keep it alive for the reader, not have the character be whiny, for the reader… Whiny!… And not have the character think about the pain more than they naturally would. One of the ways that I've found to handle that, and I'd be curious to know if either… Anyone has different techniques to highlight the adaptations that the character has to make. So… And only mention the pain when one of those adaptations fails. So, like, I have… I was talking about this previously, that I have a lower back thing that I have… That I just… I had kind of forgotten that I have it, because it's… Puppetry injury that I've had for so long that I… I manage it. But, like, when I get down, I'm very often touching something as a go down to make sure that my balance stays correct. I will crouch with a straight back. So, making sure that my character was crouching with a straight back, putting her hand on something to brace as she was getting up, mentioning those things. Then, the moments where she's… She does something that she shouldn't do, like getting up and turning at the same time. Which is one of the failure modes. So, trying to do those things was one of the ways that I found to keep my character's pain alive on the page without having it… While keeping it in proportion to the way… To her lived experience. Have you… Does anyone else have other tools that they can recommend?

[Howard] Describing the modes of compensation is a critical piece for me. We talk a lot about how a scene, you want to describe it using multiple senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, whatever. Describing a scene and describing that… I reach out with my hand to steady myself. Or, I pause for a moment to take inventory about what it is that is hurting. How does my knee feel? Am I ready for these stairs? Yeah, I'm ready for these stairs. It's just a momentary thought, and then down the stairs. Yeah. Writing those things in as… In the same way that I write multiple senses when describing a scene.

[Mary Robinette] So let's segue from that straight into our homework assignment.

[Howard] Oh, goody. That's me.

[Mary Robinette] Which is yours.

[Howard] Okay. Earlier, I mentioned the No, I'm Fine essay that I wrote. I have an assignment for you. Creative nonfiction. Describe… Describe's the wrong word. Write a story about the worst, or some of the worst, or very bad… You pick… Pain that you have experienced. Use as many senses as you can. Paint the whole picture for us. Write it in such a way that you're evoking the pain and the emotion and the setting and the context and that whole experience for the reader. Doesn't have to be long. Between 250 and a thousand words is probably enough for one really juicy pain.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext

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

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

[Season 17, Episode 34]

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're between the lines.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Dan] Awesome.

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

[Mary Robinette] In a bag.

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

[Mary Robinette] In the kitchen.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Context.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Howard] Oh, that's direct.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, that is direct.

[Chuckles]

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

[Maurice] Yeah. So I think…

[Dan] Uh… Oh, okay, go ahead Maurice.

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

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

[Howard] There's nothing to unpack.

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

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

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

[Dan] Absolutely.

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

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

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

[Dan] Thank you very much.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Very on the nose.

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.33: Building Tension

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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.31: Everyone Has an Agenda

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/31/17-31-everyone-has-an-agenda/

Key points: Characters want something. Dialogue is like a series of reveals, with each character trying to move their agenda forward. Interrogation scenes are a stark contrast, with what's at stake, and the gamesmanship of trying to get information out of you, while you are trying to hide that information. Characters may not use the right tool to accomplish their objective! People are unreliable communicators. Sometimes one character will draw another character out. Mysteries tend to slowly unveil things in dialogue, with delays, distractions, and obfuscations galore.

[Season 17, Episode 31]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Four, Everyone Has an Agenda.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] So we are going to talk about agendas today. Characters want something. That's why they are in your story. How... What does this... Maurice, what does this have to do with dialogue?

[Maurice] So I've been loving some of the analogies that we've been having during the course of this conversation. So, the whole idea of like a series of reveals has been just fascinating to me. So, when I think of each person having an agenda, I mean we… Each conversation means something. There's either something I'm trying to figure out or there's something I'm trying to hide. Now it becomes a game of us trying to move those two agendas forward. So that's a lot of ways that I tend to view dialogue. Which is why my favorite dialogue scenes to write are actually interrogation scenes. Because that's when it becomes a really stark contrast, what's at stake and how are we going to go about this sort of gamesmanship of you're trying to get information out of me, I'm trying to hide it, and yet, get information out of you, too, that you're trying to hide. So in a nutshell, that's, for me, is at the heart of everyone having agenda.

[Mary Robinette] This is that thing that I was talking about in episode one about the idea of area of intention, that there is an authorial area of intention, and then your character has their own area of intention. As Maurice says, everyone has a reason for doing something. Like, sometimes you're saying a thing because you're trying to appear smart. Sometimes you're saying it to score points. Sometimes you're saying it to convey information. Sometimes you're saying it to woo someone. Sometimes it's come out of your mouth and you're like, "Oh, I wish I had not said that out loud." So thinking about why… What your character's objective was for why they said that thing. They may not use the right tool for accomplishing that objective. Which is part of what makes dialogue fun is that it is… Its own version of a try-fail cycle.

[Dan] Yeah. I do love that idea. We talk about unreliable narrators sometimes, but I think we also need to remember that people are just unreliable communicators. We are often very bad at saying what we mean, or saying it in a way that will make people angry or that will not make people angry. What I often find myself thinking… We talked last episode about big conversations with multiple people. Those are one of my favorite things to write. From an author intent point of view, often one of the reasons that I will have a character speak is as an author I need to remind you they're in the room.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] It's important to make sure that this character says something so that you don't forget that they're there. But the character needs their own motivation to speak.

[Mary Robinette] I'm here, I'm here!

[Laughter]

[Dan] They need to say something other than just, well, the author wants to make sure you didn't forget me. So, thinking about, well, what is their agenda? Making sure they have an agenda. Why are they in the conversation? Often, and I've been in these conversations before with friend groups and things like that, often I have no agenda in a conversation. Sometimes my only purpose in speaking is just to tell a joke to make people laugh. Maybe I'm bored. Maybe someone else is having a very meaningful conversation and I'm just stuck there awkwardly. Those are still motivations, even if they are not driving the story forward.

[Howard] I call some of those "look, I'm just happy to be here." What's fun about the "I'm just happy to be here" is often during the course of a conversation, there will be a reveal and "I'm just happy to be here" becomes "Wait. We're doing what?" Those… I mean, I've described it comedically. I'm reminded of… Oh, I can't remember the class and none of it's important. A passenger and a driver in a car, they're driving down the road and there is a fast food place up ahead. The passenger says, "I'm thirsty." What the passenger means is I like the milkshakes that they serve there and I want you to read my mind and let's go get milkshakes. But they haven't said that because even for themselves they don't… They haven't unpacked their own agenda. They just "I'm thirsty." "Yeah, we'll get something to drink when we get home." Then they're upset. Well, how come you didn't pull over? Well, because we didn't complete the conversation. Because the character had an intent that they didn't fully understand and which they didn't communicate.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to push back on that slightly as an interpretation, and just say that this is an example of, and we'll talk about this later, about where conflict can come from when two people have different understandings of the conversation. There's an idea of high context culture and low context culture. High context culture is full of this kind of indirect communication. So instead of saying, "Will you pass me the salt?" you say, "Is there any salt?" The code is this means I don't need you to say, "Yes there is salt." What I need you to do is pass me the salt. So sometimes someone is saying something like that because what they're act… The encoded stuff is basically around I would like to stop for a milkshake, but I don't want to put you out if you don't also want to stop for a milkshake.

[Maurice] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So this is… This gets back into the thing we've already talked about, knowing their agenda and knowing the character.

[Dan] I have an agenda right now. Which is that we need to pause for our book of the week.

[Howard] Oh. I've got the book of the week. The book of the week is kind of a technical manual. It's by Nate Piekos. It's called The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering. Why on earth would I hand you what is a graphic designer's technical manual if you're a writer? Let me read a little blurb off the back, because they said it better than I can. "Well-crafted comic book lettering is the visual soundtrack that guides a reader's eye along the page with the mode of dialogue, intuitively placed balloons, and dynamic sound effects. But these elements are just the beginning. In this book, you'll also learn the unique grammatical traditions of mainstream comics." I'm going to stop there for just a moment. If you want to write comics and you don't know the syntax of comic book dialogue, your letterer is going to choke. Your artist is going to choke. The whole project grinds to a halt because the writer is a novelist and not a comic book writer. The book is so loaded with information. Now, as a comic book guy, I'm probably getting more out of it than non-graphic designer folks will, but if you're using, for instance, Photoshop and Illustrator to build your own book covers, there are going to be elements in here that you're going to love to have. So, it is the Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering by Nate Piekos.

[Dan] Wonderful. Okay. So, Maurice, you had something you wanted to say before the break.

[Maurice] Oh, yeah. It's just something… Something actually my therapist told me once. I will use anything for applying to writing. But she was saying if people were clear communicators, she would be out of a job. It's just we rarely say what we feel when we feel it. So my application for that is just that, as I was listening to Howard talk earlier, is the whole idea of like when I… I tend to, as a person, make you work for it. You have to ask me directly. You have to… There's a lot of intentionality when I'm in a conversation with somebody. It drives my wife absolutely insane. But I realize that's a tick of mine. It's just like, oh, no, I'm not just going to casually say things. Everything is with intentionality. Then, if not, I will disappear in the room and not blink twice about it. I'm happy to disappear in a crowd. Which I know sounds counterintuitive for those who've actually met me and interacted with me. But I will happily disappear into that crowd unless someone draws me out of it. So I think about that a lot in terms of dialogue and my character interactions. So for that person in the room who disappears or who speaks just to remind people they're in the room, well, there are some people who are like, "No, no. I'm trying to avoid detection." So now what does this mean in terms of how you write dialogue or your main character trying to ferret out information they need?

[Dan] One good trick that you can use for that sort of situation is exactly what Mary Robinette did in our previous episode where I had not spoken in a while, so she asked me to talk about my own writing. Which is a way to draw people out if they are not speaking and you need a good character-based reason, that character intention, for them to be speaking. Have another character force them to…

[Mary Robinette] Or have them do something that Dan was talking about, like derailing things slightly. I… It's… It is… You can have them tell an inappropriate joke which can then introduce tension into the scene. You can have them say, "Does anyone want some tea?" And go and putter someplace, which can reveal character about them. It's like this is someone who's nurturing. This is someone who doesn't feel comfortable being not busy. There's a number of different things that you can do that can bring that character in. One of the things that… Going back to the authorial area of intention and character area of intention, that I will think about as a person, and then I will use that tool with my characters, that I will think, "What am I actually trying to accomplish here?" So, let's use, as an example, an apology. So an apology is a part of a conversation between two people. A character wants something when they apologize. There's a number of different things that that character can want. You can tell which one they want when you read that apology. You can tell, because you've read these bad apologies. You can tell when it's not an apology, they just want you to think nice things about them. You can tell when it's an apology, when they want to actually win the argument under the guise of pretending to apologize. You can tell it's an apology where they want to fix the problem that they have created and let you know that they are no longer a problem. All of those are different like areas of intention that inform the ways that they are constructing that apology. It's exposed in the language that they use. So the idea that everybody has an agenda, the reason that we want you to think about it is because it affects not just what your character says and how they say it, but also, like, the impact of it. Because if their agenda is one thing, I want people to think good things about me, and they do the apology that is not apology, the faux-pology, it's not going to fix the thing. People are not going to think good things. They're just going to get angrier. So that agenda item is a failure. Right? So they've got an agenda and what you've got there is then a try-fail cycle. So you… There's a thing they want to accomplish, they try something, and it fails. Which is part of why like understanding what your character's goal is is so important when you're constructing dialogue.

[Dan] Maurice, I have a question. I'm very intrigued by one of the lines in the outline you gave us that says slowly unveiling a mystery. What do you mean by that? How does that refer to this agenda dialogue conversation?

[Maurice] Well, I mean if the four of us are in a murder mystery, and someone's like, "Hey, who killed them?" And I go, "Oh, oh. My bad. I did that."

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] That kind of cuts the mystery pretty short.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's a great micro fiction, though.

[Maurice] Right.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] My bad, I did that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Who killed him? My bad, it was me.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Tada! So. I mean, again, it's just the problem in microcosm, it's like, all right, so, one of you being the detective, and I'm sitting there trying to hide this information. That now charges each one of our interactions. Right? So I'm going to be as indirect, I'm going to obfuscate, I'm going to allow for distraction as much as possible during any interchange that we have in order to hide the fact that my goal is I want to get away with this murder. Right? So that's kind of what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about that question.

[Mary Robinette] That is so often my goal.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That is one of the lessons that I had to learn very early on with dialogue is, I would have two characters talking. One had information they didn't want to give up. But I, as the author, knew that this scene was the scene where they gave it up. Yeah. It just ended up being clunky. I won't tell you, I won't tell you, I won't tell you, okay, here it is. Making something like that feel natural is so difficult sometimes. You need to allow for distractions like you were saying, one character is trying to delay the conversation, the other character is asking probing questions, because you can't just say, "Hey, did you kill the guy?" You have to start asking other things. For that specific conversation, there's a really wonderful series of YouTube channels where they will actually show police interrogations. I find those to be really fascinating. In particular, there's one, and I can't remember the name of the channel, where they will do police interrogations for people who are… Who are claiming to be insane. They're clearly trying to set up an insanity plea. So there's commentary along with it, saying, well, this is what they're trying to accomplish by this sentence or by this behavior. And here's why it doesn't work.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I love that kind of stuff.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] I remember the first time I played How to Host a Murder. I was the killer, and my what's my motivation book, the first two pages were stuck together, and I didn't know that I was the killer.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I totally won that game because I lied so convincingly. At one point, they said, "Hey. You're a rock climber, you brought rope with you. Obviously, you swung to the balcony and committed the murder." I was like, "Don't be ridiculous. Yes, I'm a rock climber. I'm not Tarzan." Just making fun of what they were saying, even though, from the clues that were presented in the book, oh, he's totally the killer. I totally got away with it because I didn't know. I learned a lot from that. You want to lie convincingly, hide the facts from yourself.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right, right. I was actually just thinking… I love watching police interrogations. But there was one that was recorded… It was literally following the Indianapolis police detectives. It was a reality show, they followed them around. There was this… This was like one of my all-time favorite police interrogations. But it would almost never work on the page. Because it was basically, "Did you do it?" "No, I didn't do it." "Did you do it?" "No. I didn't do it." "Man, I know your mama." "All right, so here's what happened."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] I mean, it's like… Really, he dumped out because the detective said, "I know your mama." It's like… Oh. Okay.

[Dan] I have found the specific YouTube channel that I was thinking of that's all about criminal psychology. So, Howard, I've given you that link. You can include it in the liner notes for when we post this episode live.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Which means that we are probably at that point where we should talk about homework.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] I have your homework. I want you to identify your character's area of intention. So go through and look at a scene with dialogue, and identify, just flag next to it, what is your character trying to accomplish when they say this? You should know what their area of intention is for the overall scene and also for each line of dialogue. When I say you should know, I want to be super clear that most of the time, this is stuff that you have internalized and you're doing it instinctively. This is something that you should know for the purposes of this exercise and, if you've ever got a scene where you can't get traction or it's not working, this is a tool that you can pull out. Identify their area of intention for the whole scene and also for each line of dialogue. Bonus, when I say your character, I do mean every character that is engaged in that dialogue.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.30: Know Your Characters

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

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

[Season 17, Episode 30]

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're dumb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Because you're busy.

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

[Maurice] Correct.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

[Pause]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Meow]

[Maurice] Right?

[Mary Robinette] There's a kitty.

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

[Meow]

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

[Howard] Maurice?

[Beep… Beep… Beep]

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

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

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

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

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

[Dan] The Ballad of Perilous Graves.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Maurice] Yes.

[Dan] Fantastic.

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

[Maurice] Ferb.

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

[Maurice] As in Phineas and Ferb.

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

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

[Dan] Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes, I was.

[Dan] Okay.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Dan] Yes.

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.29: The Job of Dialogue

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/17/17-29-the-job-of-dialogue/

Key points: What is the job of dialogue? Conversation has no real purpose or direction. Dialogue, however, needs to move the story forward, provide information, and help with characterization. It also has authorial intent, the reason the author put it there, and character intent, why the character is saying these things. Another part is to be entertaining, funny, to reward the reader for reading. It conveys information, but we mask that to keep the reader from noticing. Beware the unmasked info dump! Evoke an emotional response. Transition. Questions and answers. Sometimes you need to cut dialogue, because it doesn't move the story forward.

[Season 17, Episode 29]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Episode Two of our Dialogue Masterclass, The Job of Dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And I wish I sounded as good as Maurice.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] Oh, he sounds good when he's laughing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's Howard.

[Dan] So, this week we're going to talk about the job of dialogue. So, Maurice, I'm just going to ask you, what is the job of dialogue?

[Maurice] So, first off, I mean, there's a difference between dialogue and conversation. Right? I think we touched on this last week with the whole idea of just recording a conversation between folks, between friends, family, whatever. When you listen to a conversation, I mean, a conversation is just this… Well, it's people who are in each other's presence, they're enjoying each other's company, hopefully, but it's going all over the place. There's no real purpose or direction to it, it's… It's a conversation. It's an exchange of ideas. Versus dialogue. Dialogue has a very specific purpose in writing and in telling a story. So the way I look at it is that whenever I'm coming to a scene and dialogue's involved, it's like, all right, I'm keeping in mind, I need to be moving the story forward, I need to be providing information, and I need to be honing in on characterization of the people who are engaged in this conversation or in the dialogue. All right. So I see those as the… Those three things, that's the actual job of dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Within that, there's… Something that I'm going to be talking about a couple of times throughout this course, which is the area of intention. The area of intention is, like, why the dialogue is, why the spoken line is happening. This goes for, like, actually verbal and unspoken dialogue. But whenever someone is talking, there's a reason they're saying the thing. Every piece of dialogue has two areas of intention. There's the authorial area of intention, the reason the author needs it to happen, and there's the character area of intention, which is why the character is saying the thing. So in this episode, what we're focusing on is the authorial area of intention, that's why is this here and what loadbearing thing is it doing for us.

[Howard] As often as not, when I'm writing a portion of the job of the dialogue is to be entertaining. It needs to be funny, it needs to be witty, it needs to be pithy. It's… It has to do more than just advance the story and inform us about who the characters are and what they want or don't want and where conflicts are and… I mean, that's a huge load. That's… That's… That's some seriously heavy lifting, but then, for my own part, I have to make sure that the reader feels rewarded for reading some of these lines of dialogue, that the banter is entertaining.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a lot of what you're doing is… Like, I joke, and it's not a joke, that everything that happens in a story is exposition because all of it is… It's conveying information and sometimes that information is about the tone, sometimes that information is about the characters, but it's all conveying information. Part of our job is to mask that and to use a bunch of different techniques so that the reader doesn't notice that. So, banter, keeping them entertained in whatever form, whether that's through tension or humor, all of that is to mask the fact that I'm giving you a piece of information that you need in order to understand what happens next.

[Maurice] So, yeah, cool. I keep remembering, because there's always this conversation like, oh, wow, in terms of providing that information, it's like… We see a lot of bad examples of that, because… All right, let me confess. First off, I'm a TV junkie.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Particularly of like police procedurals. I just love police procedurals. So, CSI is like one of my comfort watching things. Actually, I'm watching… What am I watching right now? Assignment Witness, which is basically a British version of CSI.

[Mary Robinette] Aha.

[Dan] That's cool.

[Maurice] But it's all… But you see all of the best… And by best, I mean worst examples of this providing information. Right? Because you have these scientists, and they are explaining these tests out loud. Right? But they're explaining it to their colleagues who hopefully took the same classes and understand the same things that is going on. That's a poor mask.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Maurice] Of providing information, that's a poor mask of info dumping. So I often get that question. It's like, "Oh, when is info dumping bad?" I'm like, "Well, bad isn't quite the word we're looking for." Right? Because we need the information as readers, as viewers. We need that information. It's how do you mask that because one of my favorite books is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is literally one big info dump. The whole book is just one big info dump. But we don't care, because, what Howard said, because it's entertaining. Right? So you don't really notice, oh, he's just… It's literally an encyclopedia giving us information all the time.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was just watching… We've been re-watching CBS Elementary. The Sherlock Holmes with Johnny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. There was a moment where Johnny Lee Miller asks a scientist on screen, says, "Tell Watson what you told me about DNA profiles." The old scientist says, "I would be happy to. But I think I need to ground you first in a bit of molecular cellular biology." At which point Holmes says, "Hold that thought a moment," and cuts the connection and turns to Watson and says, "He can get kind of long-winded." I love that moment because it tells us, yes, there's a whole bunch of science here, and we're going to hand wave it and just arrive at the conclusion. There's this tension release where the old guy starts talking and you think, "Oh, please, no. This is going to be boring, and I want to hear Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu talk." Then he disconnects…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And there's a moment of joy as the old guy gets cut off.

[Maurice] Great.

[Dan] Yeah. Those are, I think, another kind of entertaining. In addition to all of the loadbearing informational properties that dialogue has, sometimes it's funny, like Howard said. Sometimes it needs to be frightening or it needs to be triumphant or bad ass or something where we are evoking a specific emotional response. Because that's the part of the story where we want the audience to feel a certain way. We want them to be quoting a particular line because it's so good. Yeah. All of these different kinds of entertainment.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes the job is to transition us into another part of the story. So, sometimes it's like this is the line of dialogue where everything shifts. It's representing the moment when a character changes their mind. Or the moment when I need the reader to understand that this is not the story that they thought it was. Not quite a reveal, but it's a… Like, oh, no, no. Reader, just remember this looks like we're all having a good time, but you are actually in a horror story.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Which is most of [garbled]

[Dan] So, speaking of transitions, let's transition into our book of the week. Which, this week, Mary Robinette, is you. You were going to tell us about The Murder of Mr. Wickham.

[Mary Robinette] So. The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray. This is a book that was basically written for me. It is a Jane Austen murder mystery. By that I mean Claudia Gray has taken all of the Jane Austen main characters and their love interests. They're all married now, and brought them to a single house party for reasons that makes contextual sense. Then, Mr. Wickham shows up, and someone kills the guy. It's a good murder mystery, it's a good Austen pastiche, it has a romance between two new characters that are the children of some of your beloved characters. It's so good. The reason that I brought it up particularly for this is that as a murder mystery, every line of dialogue contains a potential clue. So, the authorial area of intention there, the amount of loadbearing that the dialogue is doing, is so good. They also all sound like Austenian characters, they all sound like distinct characters. Then, kind of one of the other things that I love about it is the absence of a thing that we have not yet talked about, which is maid-and-butler dialogue, or, we haven't talked about it by name, which is basically where a maid and a butler stand around and have a conversation about things that they both know about only so that the audience will also know about this thing. So… There's none of that in this, even though there are in fact maids and butlers and they do speak. It's great. It's just a good read. I really enjoyed it a lot. So that's The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray.

[Dan] That's awesome. I remember when she told me about that book, and I said, "Please make sure you send that to Mary Robinette." She said, "I already did. Don't worry." So, that's great.

[Dan] So, yeah, let's talk some more about the job of dialogue. One of the things that we have referred to, but haven't really gone into in detail is how dialogue can move the story forward. We said that's not the only thing it has to do, but that is one of the things it has to do. How do we make sure that our dialogue is actually advancing the story instead of just spinning wheels?

[Maurice] Right. So, one of the things that I think about is this whole idea of like dialogue is kind of like conversation that confronts conflict. Right? So one of the things that we do as… Actually, Mary Robinette has got me thrown off, because I'm still thinking about this whole idea of areas of intent, so let me see if I can weave these two ideas together. Right? So we have this whole idea as an author each conversation has to confront conflict that's either in that scene or in the overarching narrative. Right? But then as a character, dialogue's a tool that they used to achieve their objective. Which still serves the authorial intent, but on the character level, dialogue becomes a tool which they are trying to work out what it is they're trying to seek, to complete their arc. So I've… Yeah. Sorry, Mary Robinette, you just… I'm like, "Oh, I've got all these things going on in my head." So you talk right now while I get all this stuff untangled.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. This is why I love hearing these podcasts because every time, I also have the oh, yeah. Yeah, I had this whole unpacking thing when you were talking earlier, and wrote a ton of notes. So when we're talking about moving the story forward, basically stories… We've talked about this in other episodes, that stories are a series of questions that you're answering for the reader. Some of them are things where the reader supplies their answer based on the information you've given them, and some of them are here's the next piece of information you need. So it's this causal event chain that's happening. So, one of the things that dialogue can do as part of that moving forward is that it can either give the reader a piece of information that they need or it can raise a question for the reader that creates tension that causes them to want to keep going. There's also the entertaining aspect, which is just this is funny. Which is part of like keeping them engaged as other things are happening. But if it's just funny, eventually they will opt out. Because they'll get frustrated that there's no forward momentum. So the two things that are moving the story forward are providing information or providing a question. Raising a question.

[Maurice] Yeah. Sorry. There is a… You just reminded me of that. So I think… There's a lot of times when I'm in the act… I'm going to call it the Howard mode, where I have my two characters and their doing this rapid banter, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. There comes a point where I realize, usually in editing, that I've just fallen in love with these characters.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] And I just wanted to hear them talk.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Maurice] So then I have to ask myself, does this dialogue scene, does this actually move the story forward or have I just fallen in love with their voices and I just want to keep that going and is it actually necessary to the story?

[Howard] That's what we call Brandon mode or Mary Robinette mode which is to I step in now and cut off Howard?

[Laughter]

[Howard] I love the idea of conversation, of dialogue being inherently funny, because the compression algorithm that we used put a conversation from real life into dialogue in a book breaks some of the rules that we implicitly understand about the way that people converse. For instance, information should not flow that quickly from a conversation. But in dialogue in a book, it can flow that quickly. That's a thing, any time you are breaking a rule, whether it's throwing a crusk… Cuss word or falling into a manhole or whatever, there's the opportunity for humor. So the very fact that we compress conversations into dialogue can be a source of humor just because of the pacing. I love that, and I exploit it a lot.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You just also reminded me of a thing that I should've mentioned when we were talking about moving the story forward with the information or the questions, is that sometimes the thing that moves the story forward is achieving a goal. When you're doing that compression that you're talking about, it's… Part of it is compressing it to the point where it is serving that need. Whichever needed is that you've pegged as this is the thing that the loadbearing thing that this piece of dialogue is doing. A conversational… Like, not just a line of dialogue, but a dialogue that is ongoing, will serve multiple functions. Each individual line may serve one or more. But it is this constant pull-through and you use whatever carrot you can pull the reader through.

[Howard] Yeah. In the novella Shafter's Shifters and the Chassis of Chance, which is probably going to hit Kindle in June or July, there's an interview scene where it could have been hugely info dumpy. One of the characters, yes, this is a Howard Taylor thing. "Tell us what happened," said Judd. "Start at the beginning." "No," said Chris. "I'll start with what's important. And then you'll tell me something important, and will keep taking turns until we run out of important things to say." Everyone in the room was like, "Oh, that seems really smart." It sets up this enter pattern of reveal after reveal after reveal. The reveals include some lies, which we find out to be lies later. But it fixed a huge pacing problem that I had in the first two drafts of the scene which is, no, I can't let this guy tell the story from the beginning. That breaks everything.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. That's something I'm struggling with in a book right now, which is all about… Or one of the main functions of the magic system is memory loss. Which meant that I had three different points in the second half of the book where a character had to reexplain everything to a character who should already have known it. It just got so boring. I had to find different ways to get around that or to have it happen offscreen or to do compressions or abridgments so that we weren't bored recapping the book 4 times.

[Dan] Anyway, let's end with our homework and you can probably guess what that homework is. Mary Robinette, what is it?

[Mary Robinette] So. Your homework is about area of intention. I want you to do two things. That's right, this is a two-part homework. One is to grab a book or a movie or whatever that you really enjoy. Or, it's okay if you do it was something that you don't enjoy, because this may break it slightly. Identify the area of intention for the lines of dialogue. So what you're doing is, you're looking at how an author has… Another author has done this. Because it's often easier to identify with someone else's work. Like, why do you think each line is there. Then, the other thing that I want you to do is I want you to go back to that transcript that Maurice had us do previously. I want you to decide an authorial area of intention for yourself. Like, if I were going to have this happen, what is my intention for this scene. I want you to cut every line of dialogue that does not serve your authorial area of intention.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/10/17-28-keys-to-writing-dialog/

Key Points: Listen to how people speak. Learn to evoke that in writing. And make every character's voice distinct. Err and uh and the F-bomb. Cursing with a slingshot or a crew-served weapon? Culture, nationality, age, class, education, community, all define the character in a specific way. Pacing and attitude.

[Season 17, Episode 28]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialog Masterclass, Episode One, Keys to Writing Dialog.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are very excited to have with us for this brand-new class Maurice Broaddus. You've recorded with us in the past. You were one of our instructors on our retreat. We are so happy to have you back. Maurice, tell our listeners about yourself.

[Maurice] Well, A, glad to be back. I like to say I have three jobs. I am the resident Afrofuturist at a community organization called the Khewprw Institute. I'm a science fiction and fantasy author. I have… Man, I have two books that just came out this year. Then I'm also a middle school teacher. So, keeping it busy.

[Dan] Man. No kidding. That is a lot of stuff. Well, we're going to talk about one of those books that just came out earlier this year later on as our book of the week. But for right now, let's jump into this class. The next eight episodes we're going to have Maurice teaching us about dialog. So this is where we're starting. Maurice, where do we start?

[Maurice] So, it's one of those things. So, dialog comes easily to some people. It's like a chore for other people. I definitely fell into the chore category when I was first starting out. So I was kind of thinking of like different ways that I could use to just improve my dialog writing. So for me it came down to like three different things. Like, pay attention to how people speak. Then when I'm writing, only evoke how people really speak. Then, after that, it's like how do I concentrate on making each character's voice distinct. So those are the ways I tend to come at dialog.

[Dan] That is really fascinating to me. What do you mean… What's the difference there between paying attention to how people speak, then only evoking how they speak?

[Maurice] Okay. So one of the most helpful exercises I've ever done, so pay attention, this may be homework for you all later on.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Is I was assigned… This was back in college, and I was assigned, hey, record a family dinner. So it was… Yeah, exactly. So I was in college and it was the assignment was record a family dinner and then transcribe it. Just to see what happens. So my family dinner… This like… This was… I was much younger person at the time, so I was still living at home. But it was me, my sister, my brother, my mother, my father. My mother's from Jamaica. My dad is from here in the States. I was born in London. There's a nine year age difference between me and my sister. So I'd never really thought about it before, but when I recorded that family conversation, and, believe me, people forget about the microphone five minutes in, because my mom went from trying to be all proper, blah blah blah, to "all right, so why are you guys throwing food at the dinner table?" That sort of thing. But it was really interesting to just sit there and then analyze that conversation, because all of a sudden, you can dissect people… Well, no, that sounded awful. But you get a feeling, for instance, oh, with my parents, there's different kinds of slang that's being used. Generationally, between my dad and then my sister. There's different word jargon that gets used because my mom is a nurse and I was in college. So there's… And I was a scientist at the time. So, now there's different sorts of jargon that's being used. Then who is driving the conversation? Because people interrupt, and different people drive the conversation. So it was just a fascinating exercise just to see the dynamics of just conversation. But that's different from evoking… Because I have another friend whose name's Gerald. He's a mechanic. Me and Gerald, we go back decades. We're in the same gaming group. But Gerald can't describe the weather without using the F-bomb. I mean, there is no sentence he can't work that into. I love how he speaks, though, because he's one of the cleverest people I know. But I love his use of language. But I can't use the way he actually speaks as dialog because that is a lot. So now it's like how do I evoke how Gerald speaks versus transcribing how Gerald speaks. Does that make sense?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That absolutely does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because one of the things also is that when you are having a conversation with someone in real life so much of it is also happening with nonverbal and with tone. And also there's all of the places where you're like, "Um. Err..." And the sentences are incomplete sentences. We can string it together when we're listening to the conversation in person because we're used to editing that out and adding in all of the nuances that are coming from things other than words. But when you put that stuff down on the page, people just sound incoherent. So you want to get that sense of… As you say, the evoking, the sense of the rhythm and background from the uh, err, uh.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I tried that once in a scene in a book. It was… I can't remember which, it was one of the John Cleaver books where I had just done jury duty.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my.

[Dan] One of the lawyers that was in the case, he said "Uh" between almost every word. It was crazy and all of the jurors were talking about it and how funny it was. So, later, I decided to try to put this into a book. It was the most miserable experience trying to read it. It was as accurate a reproduction of human dialog as I could produce, and it was abysmal to try to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, to be fair, when you put that much uh into uh your uh dialog, it's abysmal to listen to.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's why we're all talking about it.

[Howard] That's why it caught your attention.

[Mary Robinette] But you can evoke that by having the uh appear at significantly less frequently in dialog, and that will give the reader the sense. Like I will have occasionally my characters repeat a word. In… In the way that we do. Like that one was deliberate, but it is a thing that we do. So I'll occasionally have them do that to give a sense of someone who's like reaching for a word, trying to figure out what they're saying next. But I would never do it to the degree that I do it naturally in real life.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Maurice] The same thing with profanity. Because it's… Admittedly, I've been known to use the occasional curse word.

[Mary Robinette] What! You're kidding.

[Maurice] I know. Just in case any of my middle school students are listening to this. It's been known to happen. But in the case of like my friend Gerald, it's just like… Hey, one or two sprinkled in the in the course of a passage is one thing. One or two sprinkled in every clause…

[Giggles]

[Maurice] Is another.

[Dan] An entirely different experience.

[Mary Robinette] So it sounds like he's using the F-bomb as a uh.

[Maurice] Right. Well, as a uh, and a noun and a verb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled adjective]

[Howard] Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, exclamation, introjection.

[Mary Robinette] Very flexible word.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It is quite a flexible word.

[Howard] Quite the word. It's funny because I think of Maurice cursing… I think… I often think of curse words as weaponized language because sometimes that's what they're there for, they're there to sting somebody. When I curse, it's like a kid with a slingshot. I'm imagining Maurice cursing with that basso profundo…

[Laughter]

[Howard] That amazing baritone and that's a crew served weapon.

[Maurice] Right. Right. It'll stop a conversation.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of stopping a conversation…

[Dan] Speaking of stopping conversation…

[Maurice] Both of you. You're all in there on that one. All right, go.

[Dan] Let me stop this one and let's do our book of the week, which this week is your's, Maurice. Sweep of Stars. Tell us about that.

[Maurice] So, Sweep of Stars is book one in my Astra Black trilogy. It's my first foray into the space opera. It's about this intergalactic pan-African led community known as Muungano, and just their explorations in the universe. So we have Muungano proper that they're navigating, some of the internal political issues. We have a starship powered by jazz music exploring the universe. We have an elite military unit who is exploring on the other side of a wormhole. Then how all of these things are interconnected.

[Dan] Sounds fantastic. That is Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus available right now. Go and buy it with your hard-earned money and read it and love it.

[Dan] Now let me get back to one of the other things you said at the beginning. One of these key tricks or tools that you use you said is making sure that the different people have different types of dialog, that they sound different from each other.

[Maurice] Right.

[Dan] Which is, I find, also a tool that I use in something that I think is very important. To make sure that everyone sounds like a different person. How do you do that? What are some of the tools that you use to accomplish that?

[Maurice] So, this is where diagramming out that conversation was really helpful for me. Because I'm keying in on what makes each of us… Which sounds weird, but each of my family members as characters, what makes us work. Right? So my mother is from Jamaica and her patois increases or decreases… Decreases when she's in a casual setting, but increases when she's either excited or angry or surrounded by other relatives. Then all of a sudden, the patois thickens. But, also, the other quirk about her dialog is she can't cuss right. So she… Despite being here many decades, she can never get cussing right. Which is hysterical. Because then we try to provoke her to cuss at us, and just watch her butcher cussing. But, so, you have those things. Already we have culture, we have nationality, we have… Culture, nationality, and age all factoring in to help define her as a character.

[Mary Robinette] And class.

[Maurice] And class. Exactly. And class. Then… So you just apply those same things to each of the characters. How are they working in terms of their cultural origin, their level of education, their vocation, their age, their use of slang, all these different things, and the community they hang around with. Because people tend to conform to the community they're in in a lot of cases. Then when you take them out of that community… So, sometimes they sound like that community and then sometimes when you pull them out, oh, now, how do they sound? So it's all those little things which all boils down to defining those characters in a very specific way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'll talk about this more when we get… There's a point when we get to talking about the nuances of this, which… Like, just to add on to what Maurice is saying, I just want to hit very quickly that one of the things that he's talking about when he's talking about culture and nationality and class and age and all of that, all of that goes into making up what we think of as accent. It's very easy to think of accent is just this single flat thing that has to do with how you pronounce words. That's the least important part of accent. There's also the other thing… Two major things that affect the voice of the character are the pacing or rhythm of the character and also the attitude. So, like, you can have two Southerners from the same place, one of whom speaks very, very slowly, and one speaks with a clipped, rapid pace. Even though their accents are the same. Just because of their differences in personalities.

[Howard] One of the things that I've… I come back to this a lot when I'm looking at dialog. Back in the long, long ago times when I was dating, there was this terminology… There was this term for the conversation you have with your potential significant other, this person you've been dating. The term was DTR. It meant define the relationship. It's this conversation where the two of you are sitting down and talking about us. A DTR can run for hours. But in, for instance, a romance novel, you get a page and a half. How do you compress the enormous emotional romantic angry whatever explorations of a DTR in a page and a half? The answer is, well, you have to listen to a lot of dialog, you have to read a lot of dialog, and you have to learn a lot of shortcuts. You have to identify what the key moments are and you have to be willing to compress. It's kind of a lossy compression algorithm. But you gotta compress it.

[Dan] I find myself suddenly very curious as to what different patterns of speech you would find if somebody did that analysis Maurice is talking about with one of our episodes. That would be fun.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Although, again, that would also be interesting just because this is not a standard conversation. We are performing. We are teaching. There's the way we speak now is gonna be different than the way we would speak in a non-podcast scenario. But that is…

[Mary Robinette] Forsooth, what are you saying? Verily.

[Laughter]

[Dan] This is going to be our homework. Maurice, you want to send them home with some homework this week?

[Maurice] Yeah. So… I love the idea of people just taking some time and just recording a conversation… With everybody's permission, let's get that out… Make sure everybody's aware that there's a recording in progress. But, yeah, record a conversation, you and your friends, you and your family, whatever. 15 minutes of conversation. Then go through and either transcribe it or just listen to it with the ear of, ooh, how did we sound as characters? How would this work as a dialog exchange?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to ask people to actually transcribe it, because I am going to ask you to use that transcription later in this series for a piece of homework assignment. For those of you for whom transcription is difficult, for… There's a software out there called Descript which will transcribe things for you. But if you are able to transcribe it yourself, I encourage you to do that, because it causes you to pay attention to the way the dialog happens in different ways.

[Dan] Sounds great. So there's your homework and there's a little sneak preview of what will be happening later on in this series. Join us next week, we're going to talk more and more and dig into some nitty-gritty details on dialogue. So. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/07/11/16-28-common-first-page-mistakes/

Key Points: Don't start with a character waking up. These little moments of life don't really tell us what the book is about, or even much about the character. Your opening should ground the reader and orient them. Don't start with dialogue. We don't know who the person is or where they are. Be aware, readers take your beginning literally, so avoid wild metaphors. Keep our readers going forward as fast as possible. Make your opening a trail of breadcrumbs. What kind of questions do you want the reader asking? Don't start with a fight. We don't know what the stakes are, or what's going on. We don't care about the character yet. Action is only exciting if there is real tension to it, a real threat to it.

[Season 16, Episode 28]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Common First-Page Mistakes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] Okay. This week, we are talking about some of the most common mistakes that we all see in first pages of books. So, there's a few things that are sort of talked about a lot in workshops, among agents, among a lot of the writing advisors. But we wanted to break down a little bit why these are… Why these don't work as places to start your book, even though they are sort of natural places that you think might be a good way to open. So, I think the first one is a really classic comment that you hear a lot, which is, "Don't start your story with a character waking up." We see this a lot of a character coming out of sleep, waking up in bed, and again, it's this thing of starting the story at the beginning because you think, "Oh. My character's going to have a big, exciting day. I should start where the day starts." Which is them getting out of bed, seeing themselves in the mirror, so that they can describe themselves, get a cup of coffee, drive to work. These are all natural things, because it's what we think about as a person's life. Because a lot of a person's life is these little moments. The problem is, as a reader, you don't know anything about what the story is. By the time you're done with that scene, you have no information about the book. You may know a little bit about the character. But these also aren't moments that are really defining who a character is and what they care about under pressure.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Because one of the things that you're dealing with in the morning is that you're disoriented. Right? Part of your goal in that opening is to ground your reader and to help them feel oriented. But a character's natural state… I mean, your natural state in the morning is disoriented. The things that you're thinking about are not the things that are most important to you through the day. They're just like, "Where are my pants?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's not… I mean, I'm sure that there is out there somewhere someone who will write a really compelling story about where are my pants…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But that's…

[Dan] But it's not you.

[Mary Robinette] It's not…

[Dan] I mean, I do so many chapter critiques, and I teach so many classes, I am astonished at the sheer number of people who will tell me to my face, "Yes, I know that we're not supposed to do this. But I'm doing it differently." No, you're not. Like, that's why we tell people not to do this. The odds of you, on your very first novel, being the one who cracks the code and is able to do this cliché in a brilliant and innovative way… It's just safer to stay away from these kinds of things.

[Dongwon] Of course, the problem with any kind of writing advice is there is someone out there…

[Dan] Yes.

[Dongwon] Who did do it and it's great.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Odds are, it's not you. Maybe it is. You can try. But then don't be frustrated when it doesn't work.

[Mary Robinette] So, like, for instance, there's a book that's just come out, which is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. His character literally… It starts with his character waking up in a literal white room. But he has reasons for doing that. Like, this is one of the things, it's like when you do something like that, you are buying a thing. He's buying something very specific with that. He is buying a character who has been in a medically induced coma in spaceflight. Most of the fun of the book is figuring out… Like, all of the book, really, the fun of it is him figuring out what's going on. So, he's buying a specific thing. However, I'm also pretty darned convinced that if that manuscript landed on an average agent's desk, that they would bounce off of that. You have to buy trust from the reader in some way. Starting with something that… Something like that on your first go round is just not safe. Like, Andy Weir has bought trust because he's Andy Weir. Not because of the actual writing on the page. Which is not fair, but it's true.

[Howard] The first lines, the first page of The Martian were outstanding. They grabbed me straight out of the gate. The book convinced me that I am… I am willing to pick up more Andy Weir books and read well beyond the first page before making decisions.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That is a luxury that debut authors simply don't have.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that he's using all of the other tool. He's using voice and he's created an unusual setting that the character is waking up in.

[Mary Robinette] But there are other mistakes, too. It's not just waking up. There's starting with dialogue. This is another example of a thing that I see a lot of people do. You can do it. Like, the book that I started… I mentioned last week starts with a line of dialogue. The problem with starting with a line of dialogue is that we do not hear a voice without attaching things to it in the real world. It's incredibly rare to hear a voice and have no sense of who the person is. But when you start with a line of unattributed dialogue, you have no sense of who that person is, you don't know where you are. So…

[Dongwon] The thing that I… Oh, I'm sorry.

[Mary Robinette] Go on. Oh. What I was going to say was that the reason that it works in The Last Watch and then also Ender's Game begins with just straight dialogue. No dialogue tags at all. Very, very short. But what it is telling you is that these characters are not important. The subject of the conversation is the thing that is important. In J. S. Dewes's, the subject of the conversation was the main character. In Ender's Game, the subject of the conversation was Ender. It's very, very fast and it gets you on and it launches you. What were you going to say, Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Oh, the thing that I notice most of the time is that when it does start with that line of dialogue, I immediately forget what that line was. It's almost invisible to me. Nine times out of 10, because I have… There's nothing for me to attach it to. Right? The important thing to remember is you have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours thinking about those characters, this world, your plot, all these elements. I, as reader, coming to your story for the first time, know exactly zero things about the book that you're giving me. I have nothing to attach anything to. So anything you present to me, A, I'm going to take it very literally, so be careful of wild metaphors in your first paragraph, because I will take them as real actual things that you are saying. Like, if you say this person is a duck, I'm going to think that person is a dock, even if what you meant was metaphorically, this person walks and talks like a duck. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For instance, Gregor Samsa? Not actually a cockroach.

[Dongwon] Debatable.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Dongwon] But, yeah, so starting with a line of dialogue with nothing to attach it to in terms of character or setting or story… It just vanishes. It disappears into some recess of my brain, never to be seen again. So I have to go back to that later to get context for wait, why are they talking about this? Oh, right. Somebody said something before. The last thing you ever want your reader doing on the first page is having to go back to the top again.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] You want them going forward as fast as you can make them.

[Dan] Let me give an example of this. Sometimes… So, like in the example that Mary Robinette gave last time, I think the first line of dialogue was "Spread your legs and bend over." Right? Which by itself is very eye-catching, it is very compelling, because it's shocking. That kind of gives it a pass and makes it work, because it makes it more memorable. But… So, consider one of my very favorite first lines of all time, which is Paradise by Toni Morrison. It's narration. The narrator says, "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." It's incredibly shocking. It's compelling. But because it's narration, it's easy to understand. If you take that exact same line, they shoot the white girl first, and you put it in quotation marks, what you're doing is adding a bunch of extra layers on top of it that the reader doesn't understand. We don't know who's saying it. We don't know why they're saying it. We don't know who they're saying it to or in what situation. Which means we understand it far less then if it was just the exact same words, but as narration.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great example. Speaking of first lines, let me use this to segue to our book of the week, which is something I'm going to talk about. This is a literary magazine that I think you all should pick up a copy of. This is the place that I made my first couple of sales. It is called, literally, The First-Line. thefirstline.com The premise of the magazine, it's a quarterly. They… Each issue of the magazine, every story in that issue has the exact same first-line. Because their premise is that if you hand call me Ishmael to Mark Twain, you do not get Moby Dick. You get something totally, totally different. So it's a really good example of what a first-line… Like, how important a first-line is, but also how much the rest of the story comes from the specific author. Like, the first-line is incredibly important, and also, not important at all.

[Mary Robinette] To segue us out of that, I'm going to talk about a literary horror story, which is that my second novel, Glamour in Glass, when it came out, they accidentally omitted the opening line of the novel.

[Ooo]

[Mary Robinette] So, this is a thing that we… I had done all of the things. I had gone back… I labored. I am not kidding. There is a handwritten page that is just me rewriting that first-line over and over again to get exactly all of the beats that I wanted. They left it out. For reasons, not on purpose, it was a… For reasons. We'll just leave it at that.

[Dan] Where did you bury the bodies?

[Mary Robinette] You know, we have 12 acres.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And there's a gully. So…

[Dongwon] I feel that story in my bones every time I hear it. Goof.

[Mary Robinette] But the thing is, if you don't know that first line is missing, the book actually plays just fine. It breaks me inside, because I labored over it, and also because my closing line is an intentional mirror of the opening line. But one of the things that I did as kind of part of that how do we deal with this was that I posted a thing on my website of the second line to books and asked people to guess which book this came from. People were able to guess. So the thing to understand, I think, about openings is that it is a series of breadcrumbs. The mistake that a lot of authors will make is that that first thing that they put down on the page isn't a breadcrumb leading to the next thing. There's no logical causal progression. They're just trying for I'm going to try to catch… I'm going to hook the reader with the shocking thing, and then we don't go on from there.

[Dongwon] I think that's really the argument with dialogue is it doesn't give you a base to build off of. It will connect at some point, but in the example were talking about, in terms of The Last Watch, it connects so cleanly to the next line that you do get that breadcrumb effect. The way I think about it is you have a first-line that leads to the first paragraph which leads to the first page which leads to the first scene. If you can get them past that threshold, you have them, at least for the first chunk of your book. You've got them into your book at that point. So if you think about that progression as sort of a clean step up into where you want to get to, I think that can be really helpful.

[Howard] I also like thinking about it in terms of the kinds of questions I want the reader to be asking themselves. Even if they're not consciously articulating those questions. And how swiftly and satisfactorily I can answer those questions. If the first line of the book is dialogue, the reader's question to my mind should be something along the lines of, "Why would someone say that?" Then I immediately am told why that is being said, and it is an answer that raises another question. "Oh, that makes perfect sense. But what's going to happen to…" And now I'm hooked. So the first line of dialogue can work that way. But, yeah, if the first line of dialogue, if the question I'm asking is "Uh. Who is talking? What's even going on?" That is way too broad a question. I want that first line to ask me a narrower question, ask the reader a narrower question, so that I can answer it specifically.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm going to talk about, just to segue us a little bit away from verbal dialogue, is also physical dialogue. Wesley Chu talks about combat as being nonverbal dialogue, that it is a conversation. So when you start with a fight scene without telling us why we are in the fight scene, it's like coming in on two people having a conversation without understanding what any of the stakes are. So another very common mistake that you will see is, again, you want to start… You want to start with the action, so you start with people having a fight. The reason that James Bond films can start with a cold open of Bond doing the things is because we know that we're in a James Bond film. Bond is already an established character.

[Howard] And the cold open is the… dun dada dun dun... dun dun dun... The music that tells us why we are here. It's…

[Mary Robinette] Yes…

[Howard] That opening romp isn't quite that cold.

[Dongwon] I think one of the challenges of starting with a fight scene… People think, "Oh, I need to start in media res, and that's going to be exciting." But we don't know the character yet, we don't care about the character yet, so if this character dies, I genuinely don't care. Or if they get shot, I'm like, "Okay. Cool. What's this book about?" Right? So, I think you need to give us something that we really care about in some way to attach to the character and really pull us into the story that way. So I think people think action is a great way to start because it's exciting, but action's only exciting if there's real tension to it, if there's real threat to it. There's no threat if there is no character that we know yet. So I think it can be a really tricky place to do it I think with all three of these examples, as we're talking about it, it's sort of become clear as we talk about it and when we get in-depth with it, is that these aren't fatal errors, but they are starting a book on hard [mode]. Right? It is possible to do these things, but you've set yourself a very high threshold that you need to clear in terms of your need to communicate to the reader knowingly… You kind of need that wink, wink, nudge, nudge, in those opening pages of I know I'm not supposed to do this, but I'm doing it anyways, and you're going to trust me, because I'm so competent at doing this thing. So it's all about building that trust in the reader in that opening scene.

[Mary Robinette]

[Dongwon] Go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, building trust is what we're going to be talking about next week. So, before we… Because I can feel myself wanting to talk about how to do that, right now. But why don't we give them homework, which is a very simple assignment this time.

[Dongwon] Your homework is make sure you haven't done these. Go back to your first page and consider where you're opening. Go back to that first scene and consider am I doing these mistakes. Maybe not necessarily one of these specific things. But think about the principles we started to talk about here in terms of making sure we have a character we can attach to. Making sure we have context, and that we're not coming into the story disoriented and confused. Really examine that first page and see am I making these mistakes. If not, then how do I make sure that we're moving forward from here?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It really is my character… Have I given the audience something to orient? Have I given them a breadcrumb about what the future story is going to be like? We'll talk next week about how to build trust with your reader. But right now… You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.21: Player Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/23/16-21-player-characters/

Key points: Games give players choices between characters and choices in how the character develops. Focus is important, one or two abilities per character type, so characters are unique and different. This also lets players replay the game with different characters, to get a different experience. Be aware that while some power gamers love lots of stats, others like a simple way to establish their characters. Remember that the character creation system creates an experience for the players. Constraining the character's abilities also gives the writer more freedom to create challenges. Remember the three pillars, when characters confront a challenge, they can solve it by fighting it, talking to it, or sneaking past it. Limiting or changing attributes can change the style of play completely. Make sure you think about both where characters start and how they change or advance over time. If players know they are advancing, unlocking new things, they will keep playing.

[Season 16, Episode 21]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Player Characters.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And I'm an NPC.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] Somebody should give me a name.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] No. You're a nameless NPC. So…

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to call you Bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] If we name the NPC Bunny, the players will adopt him.

[James] True.

[Mary Robinette] Who doesn't want to adopt Bunny?

[Dan] So, when we're talking about interactive fiction, one of the core concepts of that in most cases is that the player is a story. The reader or the audience is a part of the story. That's where we get to player characters. So, Cass, what do we need to know about player characters in order to write for them?

[Cassandra] I think James is opening this one.

[James] Sure. Yeah. I'll jump in on it. So, yeah, player characters really applies to games where you have a choice between characters or a choice in how your character develops. That can mean picking a particular character at the start. You don't have a choice in Super Mario Brothers, the original one, because you're Mario. But in later ones, you can be Mario, you can be Luigi, you can be Princess Peach, etc. Or it can be a game like something like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons where you are literally building a character from the ground up and choosing how they develop over time. So, for me, when I'm thinking about how I want a character to develop in a game or how to build a player character development option, I feel like focus is really important. I think it's important to find one or two cool abilities per character type and really lean into them. That's for a couple of reasons. One, it makes each character unique. You want to have your wizard character be different than your fighter character. It also gives players a reason to replay the game with a different character, because they can have a different experience in the story by having a different character. It lets… different characters can occupy different roles in a group. It can make it easier, that focus, to choose what you're going to do each turn. If every character can do everything, it can be really intimidating to a new player. Whereas if they know that the thief's go-to move is to stab somebody in the back, then they have a sense of how to play that character. You can strengthen the character's theme. But, I'm curious, Cass, how do you think about developing a character?

[Cassandra] It's very similar to what he said. There, I think, needs to be a very strong sense of narrative resonance. What you do should also reflect a list of player archetypes that might pick the characters. So, if, let's say, you have a rogue, he should also have like stealth and deception skills, things that allow them to do things that are not necessarily combat related, but are kind of fun and thematically in line with the character. I, personally, write games where there are a million little stats for you to kind of tweak and turn and poke around. Then, next, my favorite thing in the world to do is to make a game master incredibly unhappy with me, he has to spend 20 minutes stacking seemingly nonrelated skills together to create a ridiculous power boost. Yes, I am quaint. But while…

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] Some players really want those millions of choices, I don't think that is true for everyone. Even if you want to present that option to terrible power gamers like me. But there should still be a number of clear competitive default choices. Sometimes you play a game, it should be a preset way of establishing stats or just general guidance.

[Dan] Yeah. I recently had the experience with a role-playing game on computer that I was so excited to get it, I downloaded it on Steam and I opened it up and for whatever reason, having to choose my attributes, put actual number points into the different attributes, completely turned me off. Which is weird, because I have played games like this before, but in that instance, something about it was kind of an overwhelming choice. I thought I am not ready to deal with this right now. Having the option of auto creation or random creation or even just removing the need for it all together can be really valuable for a lot of players.

[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that Alan and I did with Planet Mercenary, we scrapped the game engine twice in the building process because we realized each time that the stuff we'd been building at the lower level was being abstracted up to the next level in a way that the players were making all of their decisions a level up and didn't need those lower-level numbers at all. We actually abstracted clear up to the skill and proficiency level where everything you do is about, well, you choose. Do you want to be good at stealing things? Do you want to be good at shooting things? Do you want to be good at talking to people? Well, that's fine. We have character backgrounds and proficiencies and whatever else, but at no point did you have to look under the covers and see, well, what is my strength? What is my intelligence? What are these numbers? Now I get that there are people and there are game systems where those numbers are critically important, because you can change them later on. That's not the way we built it, because we wanted to focus on what the different player types were rather than the physics simulation.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the games that I play on a daily basis is Habitica, which turns your to do list into a role-playing game. I love it very much. One of the things that I deeply, deeply appreciate about the way they have it structured is that you do not have the option to adjust your player attributes until you're a couple of levels in. So that you have a chance to understand how the game works, so that you can make good decisions. Then you have two choices. You can either go in and tweak them individually, or you can just hit a button that will assign it for you. I love that they have thought about the fact that there are two types of players, essentially. There are players who really enjoy sitting there and fiddling with the numbers, and there are people who are like, "This is going to stop me from using the thing."

[Dan] Yeah. On top of that, I would layer the idea that there is different kinds of games. Howard kind of hit on this a little bit, that the character creation system you're dealing with, it creates an experience. You can choose what experience you want to give your players. So, for example, one of the player character systems that I immensely love is Stardew Valley. Every choice you make in character creation is purely cosmetic. There are no numbers, there are no stats, there's no attributes. It's just what color do you want your hair to be, do you like cats or dogs, like all of these kind of meaningless things. But because those are the choices you make, they become meaningful. So as you're replaying the game, it's not which powers am I going to have this time. It's well, which of the townspeople do I want to romance, what kind of person do I want to be romancing them this time? It becomes all about relationships rather than about stats. It creates a different experience. So you kind of choose what you want to give to your players.

[James] Well, I think that ties into like one of the reasons why I really like narrowly themed characters is that I feel like it gives you a chance to really play with that character in a different way. Right? Where, think about in Portal, the character only really has one ability. Or, like, think about the X-Men. The X-Men are not nearly as interesting if Cyclops also has Wolverine's claws and Storm's weather abilities. What makes those characters interesting is their limitations and the fact that, then if you're telling a Cyclops story, you can explore all the different ways that Cyclops could use his powers. Right? Like, oh, he could use his eyes to blast open that door and to make toast and to do a bat signal into the sky…

[Chuckles]

[James] To some of the others. So you want to give yourself a narrow enough set of abilities that you actually let the players figure out all the interesting uses of that ability.

[Dan] Let's pause here for our game of the week, which is coming from Cass.

[Cassandra] The game of the week is A Dark Room. It is an [inaudible idle, older] game and it opens on a white screen with just one option. It asks you to light a fire. Slowly, as time progresses and the fire begins to dwindle, you can stoke the fire. It sounds very minimalist, but [garbled as it?] progresses, it just builds and builds and builds. It's an old game, but I'm not willing to spoil it, because it is an amazing experience to discover on your own.

[James] All right. I also want to throw out really quick that the reason to constrain your character's abilities aren't just for the players enjoyment. It's also for you as the writer.

[Chuckles]

[James] By constraining a character's abilities, you leave yourself a lot more freedom to create challenges. One of the first… When I first started working on Dungeons & Dragons back when I was editing Dungeon Magazine, the first rule they taught me is that as soon as it's possible for any character in the party to fly magically or otherwise, you have to design your dungeons totally differently. Because suddenly every trap that relies on gravity is potentially broken. The thing about tabletop is you don't get to select what characters people are going to play. So you don't know if the group is going to run that with a wizard who has levitate or a fighter who doesn't. So you need to plan for every possibility that any character could have when designing an adventure. So by limiting what powers people have options… The option to choose, you give yourself a lot more freedom to create interesting challenges.

[Dan] Yeah. When I write RPG adventures and scenarios, I try to remember what I call the three pillars. This is something I learned from a writer named Lou Agresta who works in role-playing games. The three pillars of game writing are when characters confront a challenge, they should be able to solve it by fighting it, by talking to it, or by sneaking past it. If I just keep those three simple things in mind, and it helps me remember, oh, we're going to have a lot of different kinds of players, different kinds of characters. I don't know who is going to be going through this dungeon or talking to this shopkeeper or whoever. So as long as I have presented entertaining options for all three of those pillars, then every player has something that they love that they can do that will be effective.

[Howard] In the TypeCast RPG games, the sessions that Dan runs, I'm one of the players. The previous campaign, I played a bard cleric with high wisdom and high charisma. In many situations, we ended up with me being the person who knows what probably the wisest course of action is and me being the person who has to communicate that to NPC's. Because I'm the one who's most likely to succeed in the charisma check. The new game, I have an even higher wisdom. I'm playing a flying magical karate bird…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because [garbled]

[Love it]

[Howard] And hates flying characters, and I'm a bad person. I have a high wisdom and a really low charisma. What's changed for me as a player is the realization that, well, I have great ideas, and I know perhaps what the wisest course of action is, but now I have to convince the other players, some of whom are dumb, to communicate that to the NPC's. I've gone from being the face man to being that advisor who sits in the background. It's all about the limitations of attributes. It changes the play style completely.

[Mary Robinette] You've just reminded me of this game… It was a D&D one shot. This is David Seers again. He set it all up as… It was a Snow White retelling. We had all been assigned characters, but he didn't tell us that we were doing a Snow White retelling. We just all knew that there were seven of us and that we were all playing dwarves.

[Ha ha]

[Mary Robinette] Each of us had a tic. So you knew what your tic was and you knew what your trigger was. If the trigger happened, you had to roll… To save against it. Mine was that I would attempt to make friends with any sentient creature.

[Nice]

[Mary Robinette] So… He knew that, going in. But what he didn't know was how it was going to manifest, right? So I… We roll in and there are these giant apple trolls. I roll a natural one. I'm just like, "Hello, friends!" and run towards them. He's like, "Didn't see that coming,"…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And had to completely change everything on the spot, because I'm attempting to make friends. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not, very badly.

[James] I love that.

[Mary Robinette] It was so much fun. Somebody else had narcolepsy. It was ridiculous. I was happy. It was great. But by giving this very specific constraint, the entire game was so much fun.

[James] One other thing that I want to throw out is to think about not just where characters start, but how they're going to advance. If you're running… One of the great things about role-playing games is that characters can develop over time. That can mean both in terms of their personality, but also in terms of their mechanics, their attributes, what they're able to do. So one thing you can do to make your game a lot more addictive is to make sure that players always feel themselves advancing, feel themselves on the cusp of unlocking something new. So maybe as they go on, they get new gear or new abilities as they gain experience. That idea of, oh, I'm almost to the next level, will keep people playing and give them something to look forward to.

[Dan] The Diablo series is absolutely intravenous crack for this kind of carrot method of getting you to stick with something because you're constantly on the verge of a new level that will give you new power. Or you know that you're going to find a new piece of equipment that will give you a new power.

[Cassandra] It reminds me of my experience with Baldur's Gate 3. I was going to play it with my cousin, we went through one of the earlier builds, and we were like, "Okay, we're going to leave this alone and not touch it until the game releases." But then the developers released the Druids. I think it was at level five, you could turn into a bear. We basically just spent a weekend just rushing to be a bear. The sheer joy of knowing what was waiting for us. Of course, I then spent the entire time as a cat, because my friends [let me]

[chuckles]

[Dan] I love it. Well, I think that it is time for us to end our episode. But, James, you have some homework for us.

[James] Yeah. So I want you to go through the character creation process of a role-playing game. Any role-playing game, on your computer, on your phone, and a tabletop version. But pay attention to which parts of character creation are fun, and also what attracts you to the different classes, creature types, etc. Look at your options and the ones that you get excited about, identify why you're excited about that. What makes the different character builds unique and appealing?

[Dan] Cool. That sounds like fun. I am notorious for creating endless characters in role-playing games that I will never play. So this is a really fun thing. Anyway, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/27/15-52-economy-of-phrase-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: Be brief. Expanded version: Let the art or other medium do the heavy lifting. Treat each sentence as its own dialogue bubble.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 52.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 or so minutes long, give or take.

[Dan] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.

[Pat] And we are…

[Laughter]

[Pat] Not that smart.

[Howard] I'm no longer allowed to write the titles for episodes.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Pat] And I'm Pat in a small box.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] All right.

[Laughter]

[Howard] We recorded… I'm just going to give you the back story on this episode. We recorded Pros and Cons with Pat, and at the end of the episode, he turned to me and said, "I really wanted to talk to you about writing comics and fitting all of those ideas into tiny panels." As we discussed this, we realized that that level of compression of information is something that all of us have done. Mary Robinette, you've done it writing a children's book.

[Mary Robinette] Picture book, radio, and also flash fiction.

[Howard] Flash fiction. Dan…

[Dan] I've written three audiobooks at this point, intended as audio dramas.

[Howard] Yup. And Patrick, you wrote… It's one of the… What was it, Rick and Morty?

[Pat] Yeah. The Rick and Morty D&D crossover comic, which was an interesting exercise in editorial control for me. Two IP's that I did not control, but also writing… Only getting 21… 20 pages. 20 pages and only so many words in a box. I'm also doing a comic, another comic with Nate Taylor. So, like, how… Brevity is the soul of wit and that is not necessarily my jam.

[Howard] My very first convention panel was called Crispy Crunchy Writing, and we were asked to introduce ourselves. I was last in line. One of the guys on the panel was Jerry Pournelle. We got… They introduced themselves and I said, "My name's Howard Tayler and I'm on this panel because I write comics, and I have to fit all the words in little bubbles." Jerry pounded on the table and said, "Son, you're the only one here who's qualified to speak. I get paid by the word."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which is one of the best moments of my life. But in looking at what I have to do in order to… In order to fit everything into dialogue bubbles. We've had discussions about revision, we've had discussions about editing. There are two key pieces for me that I want to lead with and get your ideas on. The first is that when I'm writing for comics, I am allowing the art, I am allowing the sequential illustrations to do a whole bunch of the heavy lifting. Whether it's facial expression on a character that's going to convey emotion or background that's going to tell me whether or not the room's on fire. That's the first piece. The second piece is arguably the harder part, which is the pith, which is the compression. For my own part, I've found that some of my most interesting experiences have come when I was writing for a different artist, and I would write some descriptions and the panels came back and I realized that 75% of the dialogue that I'd delivered was already now being told in the story. So I pulled all of those words out and put in new dialogue and had way more story to work with. It's a fascinating experience. With Rick and Morty…

[Pat] Rick and Morty was interesting. I should say, while I have… I was forced to like deal with short dialogue, short spaces… Jim Zub, who helped me script, we were a writing team there. He, in a couple of different interviews, you can find them online, has gotten very salty. Because Jim has written a bunch of stuff. He's an absolute consummate professional, gets the job done. I am Patrick Rothfuss. Who has kind of never done a comic before in a professional way. But… And he tells the story, like, he's written for The Avengers. At one point, he said that he had… He goes, "I write for this little comic called The Avengers. One of the issues, I had to write off 24 different characters in 20 pages. Because it's a 20 page comic. Comics are 20 pages." He goes, "And then I worked on this comic with Patrick Rothfuss, and…"

[Laughter]

[Pat] He goes, "I had to argue… I begged them for another page, so I had 21 pages to write off these 24." He goes, "Rothfuss turns in his third script, and here we are with 25 pages. Approved by the editors."

[Laughter]

[Pat] So, I didn't necessarily have the knee on my neck that would have taught me as much as it could have. But also, I really am thankful for the editor, because one of the things you learn with the compression is that sometimes to tell the story you want to tell… I'm curious about your experience here, because again, with this sequential medium, you can't just add another panel. That's like one of the first lessons I learned working with Nate Taylor, because we did a comic together years ago for the Numenera game, to introduce the character and the world. And he says, "Okay. Here's the thing. We're going to do a script, and then I'm going to do some blue lines, and I'm going to lay things out. I'm going to do some panels. You're going to approve those. Then we're done, because you can't just stick something in. You can't just add another panel." I'm like, "Oh, no, I get it. I get it.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Then the realization sinks in. A bit of fun back story. Jim Zub and I are good friends. When Zub said, "So I'm working on Rick and Morty and D&D with Patrick Rothfuss," I may have snerked so hard I hurt myself.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because this conflict that you have described is one that I saw coming a mile away, because Jim… I studied Jim's scripts to try and find out how to write for other artists. Jim's got a Patreon where you can look at the scripts that he does. It's a brilliant resource. I struggle all the time with being too wordy. What I've found is that sometimes… We talk about killing our darlings. I will turn a phrase… I just had to do this today. I will turn a phrase and love it and think it is key to the story. Then I take a step back and realize that I need that panel for a reaction shot.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I need that panel for a character to say nothing, but to react to someone else's dialogue. Which means that line's got to go. Because I can't make the book longer. I've got a hard page count. So I have to remove something. The boneyard is full of that kind of thing. I'm interested to know how these sorts of things play out in children's books.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's very similar for me. That… One of the things that you're looking at which is where the page turn is…

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Because you want them to… You want to make a promise so that they want to turn that page. You want to make sure that that hits in the right spot. So then when you're trying to get in more information, and like I have written a science fiction… A hard science-fiction children's book, which is set on the moon, which means that I have to explain lunar gravity two small children while still moving a plot forward, and I have a specific page number. I still need to make all of the things hit the right point. So it was very much about trying to compress and having things do double duty in making sure that anything I put on the page was an ambiguous, so that I didn't have to have a second phrase to explain it. Making sure that those pieces of language were really, really clear.

[Dan] Yeah. That was the same thing I was going to say. My audio dramas that I wrote were hard science-fiction middle grade.

[Mary Robinette] I love them, by the way.

[Dan] Thank you very much. The second one comes out… Will actually have already been out by the time this airs. But having to explain how zero gravity and microgravity works in a fast-paced children's story means that it does have to do double duty like you're talking about. You can't just sit there and explain cryogenics or zero gravity or the Kuiper belt or any other thing. So my solution was, well, this is going to be fun. If I'm explaining zero gravity while my main character is screwing around with it and doing some mean thing to his brothers, then I… Then it's still exciting, while also explaining what I need. So that making sure that it's always doing extra multiple things is something we’re all supposed to be doing anyway…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] But I feel like I learned that lesson even harder when I had to reduce everything down.

[Howard] I want to take a quick break for a book of the week which is not a book of the week. I want to break for it before we moved too far away from his name. JimZub.com, he's written… He's got some tutorials on the sidebar of his website. Comic writing number one, brainstorming to, pacing, page planning, scripting dialogue, action, and analysis. It's seven parts. We'll link to it in the liner notes. These are little older, but I would encourage you to go out and read this. Yes, it sounds a little bit like homework, but there are going to be pages from his comics in there, so it's also fun to read. I can't emphasize strongly enough the importance of reading the things that the experts decide to write about this subject. I still learn from Jim when we talk about these things. So that's JimZub.com, sidebar on comic writing.

[Pat] Can I also just throw out, since we have talked about comics, reading… And I wouldn't be surprised if you guys have already recommended over the years, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Now, I imagine people who work in comics could have different feelings about it. I read it before I really read comics, and it changed the way that I thought about a lot of elements of storytelling. Just pacing and like where action happens. It was an absolute narrative game changer for me in sort of developing my writing philosophy.

[Howard] Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. That is also an excellent book of the week. We'll link to that, too.

[Mary Robinette] One thing that I want to flag that is allowing for this compression with words when we're looking at comic books or audio is that there is another medium that is carrying part of the story. Whether that is the voice of the actor or the visuals on the page. That's part of what you're looking for when you're trying to trim is everything where that other medium is carrying the story. This is a thing that you see a lot in puppet theater where the characters will… In an early draft, people will feel the urge to have the characters… You'll have the character say something and then you get it up on its feet on the stage and the puppets are moving and you're like, "The characters don't need to say that, they're expressing it with their body," and so you cut the line. Because that physicality does the job more for you. So, what I find when I'm working in one of these other mediums is that it forces me to really consider what pieces are important. Then, when I return to prose, with straight prose, where I'm just dealing with words on the page, a lot of that economy of language comes back with me and allows me… I know, this is a very long-winded description, but it allows me to be more focused in what I'm doing, because I've learned to be unambiguous, because I've learned which pieces you actually have to have.

[Howard] It's difficult perhaps to understand the importance of audio as an additional medium without an example. My favorite is, "I can't believe you did that. I can't believe YOU did that. I can't believe you did THAT." Those are three completely different sentences. All exactly the same length.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] All exactly the same length. That's the kind of thing… Now, when you're writing for comics, when you're writing for prose, often you will have to put text emphasis in, in order to ensure that those things are there.

[Pat] What you mentioned there, I realize, now, actually this is true of some of the script notes I've been giving for the Kingkiller TV show, which, when this airs, will probably be dead. But a lot of times, I'm like, "Hey. This isn't really perfectly clear, or this or this." They would say, "You know, we're going to worry about that after we have an actor."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] Because… Which again is such an alien concept to me. I've gotten to thinking about picture books. Because like, I'm going to show a picture, and there will be a picture and text. Then it's like comics is sequential art, depending on how you want to argue that, but like a series of picture and text. Then they're like, "Well, no. The actor will sell this."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] "You don't need to explain the emotional beats. You will see the actor's face. You will…" I'm like, "Oh, gah." It's so hard for me to trust, but also, it's really hard for me to give up control.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That is one of the things that I love about writing for an actor. Like, I wrote for Defense Grid 2…

[Pat] Yeah!

[Mary Robinette] And also for Brass Tactics. What I had to do was… Because it's a game, I had to create a spreadsheet of lines of dialogue that could be delivered by the AI at a point, theoretically, in a way that follows narratively. But I had to write lines that actually did have some ambiguity to them, but that gave… That the actor could make… Give a consistency to. One of the things that, the first time I worked with them, they wanted me to make the lines in my mind a little more purple. We had this conversation about trust the actor. When they get into the booth, when the actors get in there, the lines play. Because I've given them space. I've given them space to bring this character in.

[Dan] Yeah. I remember talking to a videogame writer at Gen Con. She was telling me that she had to write a bunch of different dialogue options that had specifically different emotions. Here's the happy response, the angry response, and all of those. She realized that she could cover all five of them with just the word hey.

[Mary Robinette] Yup.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And just have them delivered differently. She convinced them to pay her separately for all five instances of the word hey. Because the actor was going to sell them.

[Pat] That's great.

[Mary Robinette] I have done the same thing.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Not with hey, but with what?

[Dan] Oh, yeah. That's another good one.

[Pat] When I wrote for the Numenera game, similarly, like, you only have… You have a very small box. Numenera was amazing, in my opinion, because they were doing a return to this older style of game where you had legitimate narrative options which could impact your relationships in the game. Like the old Planescape. This was sort of the spiritual successor to Planescape. For some of the old Fallout games, or the more character driven RPG's as they use to exist. Before graphics sort of ate up all the… Read up all the air in the room. It was like… They honestly went crazy. You could have nine different dialogue options to choose from, and go in any direction. They really leaned into it. But thinking of that sort of economy, where you want it to be clear to the player, like, the person actively engaging in the narrative… There it was, without an actor. But you're still on the screen.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Pat] And you're sort of… You are the character. You're the character that's speaking. In this theory… How to do that in 12 words. 12 words is a lot if you're going to do five different dialogue… It's like you've overfilled the box, you've got to have a little scrollbar, that's not elegant. So, yeah, it's… This is a remarkably transferable and universally useful skill.

[Howard] One of my least favorite forms within comics is the fact that the fontography for comics is sans serif, all caps. There's a huge amount of information that is lost when you're text is like that. I've found that the tools… And I'm saying this for people who specifically want to write comics. The tools that I use to work around this, first and foremost, you know the whole hit the spacebar twice for the period. Instead of hitting the spacebar twice after the period, hit the return key a few times and treat each sentence as its own dialogue bubble. Because the period can get lost and you will find yourself reading a wall of all-caps comic text, and you haven't read it correctly. If you lose the reader in that way, you've got a problem. The second is use bold and italics. These things, they have to be there…

[Pat] I hate the use of bold in comics. I'm sorry. I hate…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I mean, it's… This would be fine if it was William Shatner reading this in my head all the time. But it's a convention in comics that started like way back… Like, these days… I really want to hear how you feel. But I feel like we have the narrative technology these days… Not even like to script, like, we are better storytellers now. We… And like Zub really leaned into it, and, honestly, the editors wanted it. There like, "You're doing a comic." So he would always bold these words, and I would kind of… In my editorial pass, I would go through and unbold as many as I thought I could get away with.

[Howard] That's not going to stick.

[Pat] I got away with a few. But, like, if it's a well written sentence, you don't need nearly as much of that. Do you? I mean…

[Howard] That's… That is one of the tools that I use. If I find, wow, I've got to bold half a dozen words in here in order to get the emphasis in the right place, it's time to rewrite the sentence. It's time to rewrite the sentence.

[Howard] We are out of time. So ironic that we could…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Talk about economy of phrase being the concentrated… I'm not going to do that again.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That we could talk about economy of phrase and just keep going and going and going. Homework. Take a scene that you've written of prose. Remove all of the blocking. Just space out the dialogue. Draw stick figures and smiley faces, and attempt to convey with a different medium all of the things that you were conveying with those other words.

[Pat] That's a great one.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Pat] That's really great.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write. But short.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.26: Taking the Chance, with David Weber

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/06/28/15-26-taking-the-chance-with-david-weber/

Key points: Taking the chance, taking risks, is the only way to be successful. "He who will not risk cannot win." To succeed, take the risk of failing. If you don't submit, you can't make a sale. Be a storyteller. At some point, it will turn into work. Keep going. When you can't get the platonic ideal book on the page, what do you do? Write the damn book. Learn from it. Characterization is critical. You have to be you. Write the story that interests you. Choose your verbs wisely. Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. Sentences are what you build books out of. Characters are what stories are about, sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, episode 26.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Taking the Chance, with David Weber.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, David Weber. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us.

[David] Thank you for inviting me.

[Brandon] David Weber is one of the best-selling science fiction writers of all time, so we are super excited to have him. We are alive again at SpikeCon.

[Whoo! Applause!]

[Brandon] So, this topic was one that you suggested, David. The idea of taking the chance, meaning taking risks with your writing. What made you want to do this topic?

[David] Well, it's not just taking risks with your writing once you're an established writer. I cannot tell you how many people I've encountered who I think could have been successful writers, except that they were afraid to take the chance of failing at something that they had dreamed about. I could have been published easily 10 years earlier than I was if I hadn't kept finding excuses to do other things instead. That means I've been publishing for 30 years and I've lost a third of the time that I could have been published at this point. I mentioned in the preshow when I was talking to our hosts that there's a quote from John Paul Jones which has become increasingly important to me over the years, and it has nothing to do with not giving up the ship. But Jones said that, "It seems to be a law inflexible unto itself that he who will not risk cannot win." So if you don't take the risk of failing as a writer, you can never succeed as a writer. So you're sitting there, and you have this dream that says I could be a writer. Perhaps you could. But if you keep saying I could be a writer long enough, one day you wake up and it's turned into I could have been a writer, but the opportunity is gone now. Okay? So if you want to write, you have got to take the chance of being rejected, and possibly being rejected over and over again, until you find the right first reader, the right publisher that says, "Oh. I could do this." Okay? You have to remember while you're doing this, you control, or writers in general control a resource that publishers have to have. Publishers exist to publish. That means they need things to publish. Which means that they are constantly on the lookout for things to publish. Yes, they get a lot of dreck and there's… the first readers pile is the slush pile, and people read it and they go, "Oh, my God." I actually know of one book that was submitted on brown paper written in purple crayon. Okay? You don't get read when you do that kind of submission. But if you don't submit, you cannot possibly make a sale. I cannot emphasize… Over emphasize how important it is to be willing to do that. The other thing that I think you need to bear in mind is you can learn to write better with editorial support and with the practice. You can learn to write better. But what you have to be to make it work in this business is a storyteller. You have to have that bug. You can increase the skill with which you exercise that need to be a storyteller. But that's a critical element. If you don't feel that inside, if you don't feel the story that needs… That's growing that needs to come out, then you don't need to try and be an author. Because you're going to be fighting your own nature the entire time that you're trying to write a story. Unless that is what it is your nature to be. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, storytellers have to tell stories. That's certainly true in my case.

[Brandon] Howard, you had something you wanted to say?

[Howard] Yeah. I was just going to… I like the John Paul Jones quote. We've had the opportunity to visit NASA a couple of times. They have that famous slogan, failure is not an option. Because there are times at which, boy, you just… You can't allow yourself to fail. I created a maxim within my own universe, which is "Failure is not an option. It's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."

[David] Yeah.

[Howard] The idea there… I mean, that doesn't get you past the John Paul Jones quote, which is that you have to take that chance in the first place. But I am always reminding myself that I am going to fail. It's just gonna happen. All I get to choose is whether or not I learn from it and whether I let myself quit.

[David] Well, NASA's failure is not an option stands on the shoulders of every single thing they did that failed as they were doing the engineering, when they were developing…

[Howard] They blew up so many rockets.

[Laughter]

[David] Absolutely. Okay? Failure is not an option means that ultimately we must succeed. It doesn't mean that we won't have the occasional catastrophe along the way. That we won't have Columbia. That we won't have…

[Dan] But, to your point about the whole premise of this episode, if NASA had never done anything that could have failed, they never would have gotten into orbit, they never would have gotten on the moon.

[David] Exactly.

[Dan] They had to be willing to take those risks and screw up horribly in order to achieve what they eventually have achieved.

[David] That's absolutely true. It's… Okay. No task worth doing springs fully blown and fully performed from the brow of Zeus. Okay? You have to go out there and make it work. All right? Now, most of the successful writers that I know would write whether anyone was buying their work or not. We have to do it. That's part of that storytelling bug that I was talking about. Okay? Whether we're writing for our own entertainment, our family's entertainment, or just because, my God, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep, I gotta do some more writing, we write. If you don't have that kind of… Robert Asprin once said, and Robert and I did not necessarily see together on all things…

[Laughter]

[David] But he said, "Successful authors are like rats. If we don't wear our fingers down on the keyboard every day, our fangs grow through our brains and kill us.

[Laughter]

[David] Okay? It's still a valid metaphor, even though I use voice recognition software when I write now. But it's true. If you… I have this need to be crafting stories. Okay? Now, for the last year or so, I haven't been, and that's because I face planted into a cement floor in Atlanta the day before Dragon Con and gave myself a concussion, broke my nose into places, stitches inside my mouth, the whole 9 yards. It has taken me effectively a year to recover from the concussion status to where I am once again really writing. Okay? It's been a real trial for me and for people who were expecting books from me and everything else, but sometimes, the need to tell stories is sort of temporarily stymied by the fact that, you know what, my brain's not working.

[Howard] One of the first things that I learned about… I'm a web cartoonist, and one of the first things I learned in this regard was when I still had a day job, early 2000's, we would take… I was in the software industry. We'd take two weeks off around Christmas, because kind of the whole industry wound down. For that two weeks, I told myself my Christmas present to me is that I'm going to pretend I'm a cartoonist full-time. I'm just going to do this. I would tell my plan to people. They're like, "You're going to pretend to have a job over Christmas?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Okay, one, you're a broken human, and, two, what does your family think?" What I found is those are some of my fondest memories of this. Yeah. Storyteller gotta stug… Gotta story tell."

[David] There comes a time, in a given project or whatever, where it turns into work. Where you have to drive yourself to it. You have to do that. I have, in every book, I have what I call the chapter. That's the point at which I say, "This entire book is dreck. What was I thinking? Oh, my God, I can't get this to come together." The only thing that I can do is just keep grinding it out and saying, "Boy, this is sucky." Okay, that kind of thing? Then, when I get to the final edit, I can't identify the chapter.

[Howard] I was going to say, you've refined your process to the point that only happens for one chapter doing a project?

[Laughter]

[David] No, that's… Pretty much, yeah. You know. It's this kind of thing.

[Howard] Winning.

[David] Yeah.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and… Let's stop for a book of the week, then we'll get back to it.

[David] Okay.

[Brandon] You have our book, or books of the week, this week.

[David] I have two. One is The Gordian Protocol, which came out in May, with Jacob Holo. Who is a BMW engineer in an alternate universe. I think that our backgrounds, the synergy was really, really good. He's got three or four self published novels out. This will be his first traditionally published novel. Is his first traditionally published novel. This was not one of the two I was thinking about, but he has just handed me the draft of the Valkyrie Protocol, which is the sequel. It's pretty much ready to go. We have to wait for him to get a hiatus in that real-life job to do a little tweaking that I pointed out to him. The other book that I've just handed in is the sequel to Out Of the Dark, which, yes, is the one with vampires in it. This one is rather cleverly titled Into the Light. I did it with Chris Kennedy, of the Four Horsemen universe and whatnot. He was my co-author on it. I'm really pleased with the way that it worked out. The vampires are a little flamboozled when they begin finding out some things about their own past and their own existence that neither they nor the earlier writers who didn't like the vampires didn't know. Okay? For… I won't go any deeper into it than that. But suffice it to say, that Vlad Tepes was a tiny bit mistaken about exactly how and what he became when he became it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Brandon] This topic's very interesting to me, because I work with a lot of aspiring writers. I teach at the University, and of course the podcast, and things like this. Looking back at myself when I was first making the choice to start writing, one of the things that I think holds back new writers, and I've kind of found some language that I can describe this more recently, is that, for me, there was this beautiful book I imagine somewhere out in the aether, right? It was like the Platonic ideal of a book. As, having read for many years, and sitting down to write the first time, it was like I knew this book was out there, but then my crude fingers could not get that book on the page. It was really frustrating to me. Because it felt like… It wasn't fear that I think stopped me, it was this sense that I was taking something beautiful and I was making it something flawed and terrible, because my skill wasn't good enough. I've found multiple other aspiring writers that kind of have this same attitude that… Less fear, more like, I guess I must not have done enough worldbuilding or I must not have thought it through enough, because this beautiful story, I just can't make it come out on the page.

[David] Well, that's…

[Brandon] So, I guess my question to you is strategies for writers who are having trouble making that transition, taking that chance, giving themselves permission to fail. What are some strategies that people could use to do that?

[David] Write the damn book.

[Laughter]

[David] And when you're done, if it's not what you thought you were going to come up with, file it under this was a learning experience, these are the things that I can see that I did wrong. Do those right in the next book. I have an entire file cabinet at home that has probably 300 short stories in it, that were written solely because they were things that I wanted to play with as a writer. How was I going to describe this? How was I going to handle this bit of characterization? You… Basically, this is one of the crafts that the only way you can learn to do it is to do it. There's not a credential program somewhere that is going to say, "Okay. Now you have a diploma. You'll go out there and be a successful writer." Okay? There are all kinds of courses that you can take and training that you can seek that will help you, give you tools that you might not have otherwise. But there's nobody out there who can teach you how to be a writer. Anybody who says we will teach you how to be a writer is taking your money. Okay? Because what they can do is they can teach you how they are a writer. They can teach you how these three guys over here are writers. They can't teach you how you're a writer. Okay? Characterization. Characterization is a critical component of any story you're going to tell. How do you build a character? Okay? One of the things that I do when I'm doing writing workshops is I rollup a character from one of the role-playing game series. I tell my students, I say, "Okay, this is the character that you have. This is the age, this is the gender, everything else. Go home, and between now and the next session, write me an explanation for why this character exists with these skills, these abilities, these disabilities." They frequently turn it into what is actually a very good short story. Okay? In getting out who this character is. That's the kind of thing that you have to be able to build on your own. I can give you that assignment, and tell you to go home and do it. But I can't say to you, the first way that you should do it is by doing thus and so, because the best that you could learn from that is how I do it. What makes a writer succeed is that writer's voice. You can take exactly the same story, the exact same plot, even the exact same characters by name. Okay? And have two different writers do the story. You have two totally different stories. Okay?

[Brandon] Absolutely.

[David] One of them is going to be the way that you tell the story, and one of them is going to be the way that somebody else tells the story. What makes you a successful writer is your voice finding its audience. You cannot do that trying to be someone else. You have to be you.

[Dan] Yeah. I… Finding that voice of your own is critical and it is difficult. I like to think about this in terms of Ender's Game. Because they had the kids in the Battle School, and they would fight against each other. Then there's this really critical scene towards the end of it, where Bean stands up in the lunch room and says, "Guys. We are doing the same strategies over and over and over. We will never learn anything new until we give ourselves the freedom to fail." That's when they kind of throw out the whole competition system and they say, "Okay. We're going to try this, and it probably will be awful, but we'll learn something from it.

[David] Yeah.

[Dan] So I imagine someone out there listening to this podcast thinking, lack of risk-taking is not my problem, I've tried everything I can think of. It's… I'm just not selling anything. Maybe what you need to do is something ridiculous. Maybe you need to change genre. Maybe you need to try something new. Maybe you need to put that big golden book that Brandon was talking about, that idealized thing that you have in mind, put that on a shelf and write something different.

[David] Okay. Let me tell you one of the most critical things that you should bear in mind as a writer. Write the story that interests you. They say, write what you know. Well, I don't know anybody who's been a starship captain. Okay? I'm sorry, there just aren't too many of them around for me to go interview, that kind of thing. But if there's a type of story that is especially suited to you, that you enjoy reading, etc. Point number one, you're not unique. That means there are other people who enjoy reading that same sort of story. It may not be what's currently hot. But publishers don't necessarily look for what's currently hot. They look for what they expect to be durable. Some publishers do. They want to push you into writing whatever is selling right now. Avoid them. Okay? I'm sorry. But you should. Okay? Now, if they say, "We'll pay you a stack of money to write it," then you can say to yourself, "Okay. They'll pay me a stack of money. I'll get some practice writing, and then I'll be able to go do what I want to do." But, point number one, if you like it, other people will like it. Point number two is if you like it, you will write it better than something you are writing that you feel that you have to write in order to be hot, in order to sell your work. Okay? Point number three is publishers are constantly looking for things to publish. Now, some publishers, for whatever combination of reasons, have blinders on or at least blinkers. Okay? Maybe, it's like, I don't agree with the political philosophy in that book. There's all kinds of idiosyncratic factors that can come into play. But the bottom line is publishers need stuff to publish. Keith Laumer once said that there's not the great unsold novel. There's only the great unwritten novel. Because if you write it, and it is good and you submit it long enough, you will sell it because publishers are looking for things to publish. The editor who discovered Thomas Wolfe… Thomas Wolfe had been rejected about eight or nine dozen times. Okay? Then this guy found… Discovered Thomas Wolfe and made his entire career out of the fact that he was the guy who discovered Thomas Wolfe. He was asked by another editor at one point. The guy said, "I read the first quarter of a million words, and it sucked. Where did you realize…?" He said, "About word 300,000."

[Hmm, hmm, hmm.]

[David] Okay? What I'm saying to you is that eventually, if what you have done is publishable, it will find a buyer. Sometimes, even if what you've done isn't punishable… Publishable. Punishable? There was…

[Laughter]

[David] I've read some horrible books before. But even if what you've written in its current form isn't publishable, sometimes you'll get that little comment back that will tell you why it wasn't. More often than not, you'll get a form letter that says, "I'm sorry. It doesn't really meet our needs at this moment. Etc., etc." But sometimes you'll get that little flicker of a response, and you go, "Oh!" Now, I've been doing this… I've supported myself as a writer since I was 17. I'm 67 this year. So I've been writing… I've been earning my living pushing words around for 50 years. Okay? I've been a published novelist for… Well, we sold the first… I sold the first book in April 1989. So this is the 30th year since I sold the first book. In the course of that time, I like to think I've learned a few things. Okay? There are some very simple things that an author… Okay. For example. Any aspiring writer should realize that the most important word in any sentence is the verb. Choose your verbs wisely. Don't say, "He came quickly to his feet." Say, "He leapt to his feet. He jerked to his feet. He jerked upright." Okay? Never use an -ing verb when you can avoid it, unless you want the voice of what you're writing to be passive. All right? Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. If there's dialogue in a paragraph, start the paragraph with the dialogue and arrange the internal mechanics to make that work. Okay? Don't worry about choppy paragraphs. Worry about where you want to direct the reader's eye. You're setting the cadence, you're creating the rhythm. Maybe you need short choppy sentences and paragraphs at this point. Maybe you need one line paragraphs for emphasis. Okay? Maybe the one line paragraph that you need is, "In the world blew up." Okay? Because you're in the middle of a combat situation, there's a missile incoming, the character you're writing about doesn't know it. There's combat chatter, they're saying, "We're under fire," the character's turning around. Then the world blew up. As a separate paragraph. So think about those sorts of things when you're writing. That's not a question of my telling you to write in my voice. Because these are things that any writer can profit from, in the way that they construct and craft sentences, and sentences are what you build books out of.

[Brandon] We could probably sit here for another hour and listen to this.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because these are excellent points. But we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon. Thank you guys.

[Applause]

[Brandon] I want to thank Mr. Weber for coming on the podcast.

[Brandon] Do you have a writing prompt you can give to our listeners?

[David] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[David] Something to do. I would say, go home and create a character. Okay? Not one that you set out to build because this is going to go in your story. But give yourself the assignment of taking a character that you didn't create because you rolled it up or whatever. Then, build in your worldbuilding bible, in your tech bible, whatever, build why that character is who that character is. Because stories are about characters. If the character is not interesting to the reader, the story will go nowhere. If the character is not interesting to you, and understood by you, you will not be able to communicate it to the reader. Your characters will still, if you do this long enough, the characters will evolve in the storytelling, and they should. So, as the life experience of that character is shared with your readers in multiple books, you have to understand how that character changes and incorporate it. Characters are what stories are about. Sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right, and the story will usually succeed. A weak story that is well told will succeed, where a strong story that is weakly told fails.

[Brandon] Awesome. I don't know that we could put it better than that. So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/24/15-21-writing-about-children-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

Key Points: Writing about children can be difficult, and you may stray into caricature. How do you avoid making fun of them? First, don't just transcribe what kids actually say. Try to give the sense of being children without hitting the reader over the head, especially in dialogue. Children focus on different things than adults. If you add grammatical issues, be sparing. Kids are sometimes overly precise, applying a rule everywhere. Why are you writing about a child, focus on the bits that enrich the story. Looking at the world as a child does can let you portray the fresh wonder of the world. The life experience, and stakes, are very different for children. When the protagonist is a child, or a teen, the stakes rise, and the tension, too. Consider kids as foreign visitors, trying to avoid faux pas. Teenagers are spies in adult country! Teens are not little adults, they are trying to figure out the transition from child to adult. Don't minimize their feelings. To write about kids or teens, you need to respect them. Pay attention to what is important for the story, and the relationships, how other characters react to what the children say and do.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 21.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing about Children.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guests, Shannon and Dean Hale.

[Shannon] Hello!

[Dean] Hi. I'm Dean.

[Shannon] And I'm Shannon.

[Brandon] Thanks, you guys, for coming on the podcast with us.

[Shannon] Yeah, it's great.

[Dean] Thank you.

[Brandon] You're going to tell us how to write about children.

[Shannon] Okay, let's do it.

[Dean] Awesome.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, this has been surprisingly hard when I've done it. I'm never sure if I'm going too far and it's straying into caricature. Like, I can usually tell for an adult when I've gone too far in a vernacular or a voice or things like this. When you're approaching writing about children, how do you keep away from making it… It almost seems silly to me. Does that make sense? Like, I'm making fun of them rather than actually writing like them.

[Shannon] It's actually… I've written… Where I've taken direct transcrip… Directly transcribed what my children have said, and tried to put it into a story. Our editors are always like, "That's too extreme."

[Dean] Nobody would be like that.

[Shannon] "No one talks like that. Come on!"

[Dean] What are these, monsters?

[Shannon] So you can't actually… Actually, I did write what I thought was a humorous slice of life story about our four-year-old twins. The editor legitimately thought it was a horror story.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] I was very… The notes were very confused. I was like, "Why is she saying… Why is she reacting…" Then, finally, she referred to it as a house of hell. I was like, "Oh, she thought it was a horror story. That's just our everyday."

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] But it is… You can't do exactly what kids do. Just like… But it's true with any characters. Dialogue would be really boring if we just transcribed what people actually say. So you have to get the sense that they're a child without hitting the reader over the head. Particularly in dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] What are some of the markers in dialogue that you find for believable child language? Is it a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, con…

[Shannon] You know… First of all, I would say children are very observant about things that adults don't care about. So for… Just what they talk about is going to be different. That can be so much fun. What does this kid… What are they interested in, what would they notice? So there are these non sequiturs that just kind of pop up. It's a great thing for humor. I would say also, just as with any character, if you want to have like grammatical issues for the kid, pick like one or two and stick with those. Don't hit the reader over the head with, like, weird grammar things constantly. Just have that consistency be for that character. Just like you would for an adult character who might have a certain quirk with the way they speak. You don't… You wouldn't do it every single sentence because it gets to be too much.

[Mary Robinette] When I was doing the puppet theater, we were often… I mean, the protagonist was always a child. One of the things that I found was that… Also, going into schools a lot, was that kids tended to be overly precise sometimes. That they would have learned a rule and they wouldn't actually have any nuance about how the rule was applied.

[Brandon] I've noticed this in my children. This is absolutely true for almost all kids I've met. That they… You tell them something. They want that to be the way the world works. They now understand the world. Then, when you immediately violate it, because of the wiggle room we give ourselves, they call you on it. I remember when my… He was only like three or four. We had talked about certain words that we don't say. Then we went to a Disney movie and they said like one word that was like this. Then, later on, that kid was describing the movie to my father… His grandpa… And said, "Don't go see that movie, grandpa. It is filthy."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It's like a Pixar movie, right? I'm like, "Oh. Okay. Yeah."

[Shannon] I actually wrote a chapter book that was based on our twins, and really tried to be true to what it felt like to be that age. My… I sent it to someone who didn't know it was about these twins. My response was that the character was unlikable and nobody would be interested in this child.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Your children are unlikable and no one is interested in them.

[Mary Robinette] She's also living in a hell house.

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] But it can be too much. You don't… Like, too much reality, nobody wants. So what do… Why a child? Why are you writing about a child, first of all? What are they bringing to it? So you focus on those little quirks, those little bits that can just enrich a story.

[Dean] The best part for me about writing from… As a child, because that's kind of where I go, is get into that headspace, is just looking at the world in a different way. It makes the story somehow more interesting. It's like that quote from… Was it GK Chesterton? That's about the dragon and the… I can't remember how it goes, but the idea that…

[Shannon] That… The quote you're talking about is GK Chesterton says that fantasy doesn't tell you if dragons exist. Fantasy shows you that dragons can be defeated. I think you're thinking of a different quote.

[Dean] No, I am… I'm thinking of the door one. That there's a…

[Shannon] Oh… Yes. So… Like a kid of 10…

[Dean] Go, quote.

[Shannon] Is interested in reading a story that says, "Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon." A kid of four is interested to read a story that says, "Tommy opened a door."

[Dean] It's finding…

[Shannon] Everything is still so new.

[Dean] Finding the wonder in those things that are sort of rote and old is… For… As a writer, is awesome. I mean, you can be able to kind of get that reinvigorated look at something from the other side.

[Dan] Yeah, that's what I did with Zero G, which was the middle grade that I put out. The plot is… I always pitch it as Home Alone in Space, but really, it's Die Hard in space with a 12-year-old. It's Die Hard if John McClane were super interested in how fun it was to jump around in antigravity, right? Like, that's his focus. He's always either trying to have fun or he's hiding from bad guys. Because those are the cool things that a kid is going to care about in that situation.

[Shannon] Yes.

[Brandon] So, when we were talking about this ahead of time, you mentioned the stakes are really different for children in life, which really struck me. Can you expand upon that? How are stakes different for children? How does that influence writing about them?

[Shannon] Children don't have the same… Well, life experience. But, just, they don't have as much in their toolbox. They don't understand how things work, they don't have the confidence, they don't have experience, they don't have a credit card, you know, they don't have… So when they're put in a situation, it's going to be totally different than if an adult were in it. You can get so much tension by having the protagonist be a kid. And a teen as well. Also, even if the main character isn't a child, if you insert a child into a situation, the stakes go through the roof. Immediately. Oh, we've got to save these people. Yeah, let's do that. Oh, and there's a three-year-old about to fall off the bridge. [OOOOH!] I mean, it just…

[Dean] We did that with Squirrel Girl. Like, we were like, "We need more tension here."

[Shannon] Let's add a baby.

[Dean] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dean] That's exactly what we did.

[Shannon] She's not just saving the day, she's saving a specific baby. Suddenly, it's like, "Yes, we need to do this immediately." I was… We were just watching Adventures in Babysitting last night with our kids. I was trying to explain to them, because I'm a nerdy writer mom that's explaining story to my children in the middle of a movie…

[Dean] Mom, we're watching.

[Shannon] I know. But, I'm like, "Do you understand why…"

[Dean] Pause.

[Shannon] If this was about adults, it wouldn't matter, because…

[Dean] Can we watch it now, Mom?

[Shannon] They've got a credit card, they can just get a new tire. But, added to the fact that all these things are happening, is the fact that they can't let their parents know. They can't make the most logical easiest way… Choice to get out of this situation because they can't let their parents know. An adult wouldn't have that same situation. So, the stakes are higher, the tension's higher, and then [you opt] for fun.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry, it just occurred to me… One of the things that I often say, like, when I'm talking about kids is that… What you said, that they just lack experience. But I think of them as foreign visitors. Like, when you come… When you go to a foreign country, what you want is someone to explain what the rules are so that you don't make any social faux pas. So, like, when I go into… When we would go into schools doing school visits with the puppets, the mob mentality was the thing you kind of had to fight. Because they would… Like, if one kid did it, everyone would assume that that was the thing you should do. But it occurs to me that teenagers are actually like spies who have come into adult country and don't want anyone to know…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That they're from the outside or child land. So they're desperately trying to not get caught is still being children.

[Shannon] Yes. Oh, teens are… I love writing about teens. I think a mistake a lot of writers make is they don't want… First of all, they don't want to be annoying. They don't want their character to be annoying. So they just make them into adults. They say they're 16, but they really just behave like adults. They're missing so much great story matter there. What matters to a teenager? What are they going through in their lives? But in addition to the science fiction adventure or whatever you're writing, you've also got that element of this is a person trying to figure out… Navigate that transition from child to adult. That's really interesting.

[Dean] I think one of the things that we do as adults, or at least that I do, is tend to believe or to minimize the feelings of the kids, or minimize the experience.

[Right]

[Dean] To believe here they are going through this thing that… [Adolescence?] Oh, that's ridiculous. How is that difficult? But if I go into writing it that way, it rings weird. But the kids are feeling with the same intensity or more than we would if we were put in… If we were plucked out of our familiar environment and put into an environment where we don't know what the rules are.

[Mary Robinette] It's stressful.

[Shannon] That's a good point, that you have to absolute… When you're writing about kids or teens, you absolutely have to respect children and teenagers. You can't…

[Dean] It can be hard.

[Shannon] It will come off as false if you go in thinking and judging them and being like annoyed with them and wanting to just make them older. Come in respecting their point of view or it will be false.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dean, you're going to tell us about The Princess In Black.

[Dean] The Princess In Black is a phenomenal…

[Shannon] Phenomenal.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Yes, it's a… Let me see if I think of another word that you can say. No, it… What's the type of book that we are calling it? It's like transitional chapter book about a g… Princess Magnolia who is a princess and loves being a princess and walks around in pretty dresses. But when the monster alarm rings, she becomes the princess in black, and puts on a black costume and goes out and fights evil. As a superhero would. There are many books in the series, some of them…

[Shannon] There are seven so far. Yes.

[Dean] Oh, and if… Wait…

[Shannon] [Gorgeously?] illustrated by LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] How close are we to Easter? We're past Easter. Because I was going to recommend, there's a hungry bunny horde book if you're celebrating Lagomorph Liberation or some other kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Day.

[Shannon] [A bunny horde book] belongs in every Easter basket.

[Dean] That's true. That's true. So, The Princess In Black by Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by…

[Shannon and Dean] LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] Something…

[Brandon] We love these books in our household. My sons just went straight through the whole series eagerly, so… They're fantastic.

[Shannon] Yay. Thank you.

[Dean] More coming.

[Dan] I purposely did not tell my children that I was hanging out with you guys today because they would have just blown a gasket. So.

[Shannon] I have to tell a quick story. One time I… My son borrowed a bunch of books from a friend. Several of them were Sanderson books. We were going out to dinner with the Sanderson's, so I brought my son's friend's books with us and he signed them to this guy. When I returned them, I was like, "Hey, just FYI, I saw Brandon Sanderson, so we just had him sign your books to you." He said, "Hold on a second." He ran upstairs, he ran back down, with all seven Harry Potter books and said, "Would you like to borrow these?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'll sign them.

[Shannon] That's not going to happen. But only because… Also, talking about Princess in Black in terms of writing about children, these kinds of books… There's lots of different ways to write about children. In some of them, we like get inside a kid's head and show the world how they're seeing it. In other ones, like Princess in Black, it's purely wish fulfillment fun. There are no adults in this world. So we're not showing children by comparison to what they're not. We are just having kids in adventures. So the way they talk and the way they experience things is a very different style than in some of our other books.

[Brandon] I want to circle back to this what you said before about respecting children as you're writing about them. Because I find this is a hard line to walk sometimes, because some of the things my children do, as we've talked about, you just can't put on the page. Like my children, I think all children, are basically sociopaths for a large part of their…

[Narcissistic sociopaths. Yup.]

[Brandon] Getting that across, getting across… Like, I love my 10-year-old. He's awesome. But he will not accept that the world is not the way he wants it to be. If we say, "You have to do this." He says, "No." We say, "But if you don't, your teacher said this." "No, she didn't."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? I'm like, "No, we have a piece of paper here." He's like, "She didn't say that. It doesn't say that." He won't accept it, it's right there. Like, evidence means nothing to my 10-year-old, right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because he says it's not. So, how do you do things like this in a story about children, but also respect them and not act like they're… There's this fine line between talking down or treating down and also presenting how they are. That line can be really tough for me sometimes.

[Shannon] Yeah. It is a really fine line. Honestly, if we really wrote children exactly as they are in movies and books, nobody would like those characters at all.

[Dean] They just really aren't likable.

[Shannon] But we love them in real life.

[Dean] Yes.

[Shannon] But you just can't show that.

[Dean] [garbled… The paranoids aren't there… The paranoia…]

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] It's insane. So you have to show the bits… We're always asking ourselves, what's most important for this story? So, what matters about this story? Then characters in service of this story. Also, I mean, I think the… I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times. The heart, the foundation of every single story, no matter the genre, is relationships.

[Dean] Relationships. Oh, yeah.

[Shannon] Relationships between characters is all that matters, ultimately. Everything else is set dressing. So how the other characters react to the children is equally important to what the children say and do.

[Brandon] That's a really good point, thinking about it. Like, that's another dynamic that changes your perspective. Asking what the stakes are, asking what are the relationships, how does the child view the relationships with those around them? Which is going to be very different, but still very intense and important than the way I view the relationships.

[Dan] Well, those relationships… I love what you said about that being the most important thing. To talk about my own middle grade series again, the second one, Dragon Planet, I had this fantastic plot built, of how he was going to go out and explore this brand-new planet and there were dragons on it and all this stuff. I'm like, "This is still so boring."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "Why is this Dragon book so boring?" Then just added in the little character arc was that the little boy is trying to get his dad to think of him as a scientist. All of a sudden, all of the stakes were there because that relationship was in place.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I think of examples of stories where… That do not have relationships. But all of the ones that I get really excited about, like, the ones that I read for… Certainly, I think if you have characters on the page, that if they are not having relationships, there is a problem.

[Shannon] I mean any relationship, not just romantic, but any kind of connection…

[Mary Robinette] No no.

[Shannon] Between other characters.

[Mary Robinette] I just… There's… This is a total digression, but there's a story that I love that has no characters on the page at all. So…

[Brandon] Once in a while.

[Mary Robinette] Once in a while. Once in a while, you can do it.

[Shannon] Any rule can be broken.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the honoring of the children is that… What I've found is that when I try to remember like specific incidents from my own childhood, rather than looking at the outside of the children… From an outside observer point of view, that it is often a lot easier for me to have them move through the world in a way that makes emotional sense.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There was something that someone said when they were… It was at an assembly. Like an art exhibit opening, and someone had brought their infant, and the infant cried. You could hear a couple people in the audience make a dismissive sound. But the speaker said, "I am so glad that you brought your child, because we've all been that child. We have all cried." It was just like, "Yes, yes. We have all cried." It's a good reminder that everyone can enjoy art.

[Shannon] Some of us have been the mom who desperately needs to get out of the house. But I can't leave without the baby.

[Brandon] Didn't you take the twins on tour with you?

[Shannon] I took my kids everywhere. Yeah. The twins, specifically, came when we shot the movie Austenland in England. So they were there for seven weeks with me.

[Brandon] On set?

[Shannon] Well, you know.

[Dean] When they let you on the set.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] All right. We're out of time on this episode. It's been awesome. Shannon, you're going to give us some homework.

[Shannon] Yes. So we talked about how the stakes change when you've got a young protagonist. So find a storybook or a movie that is about adults, and conceive of it as instead to be about a teenager or a child. Just write a paragraph about how that plot would change. What would… How would the heart of the story change if everything that happened in the book still happens, but it happens with and to a child?

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/10/15-19-as-you-know-this-episode-is-about-exposition/

Key Points: As you know, Bob, maid-and-butler dialogue is all about exposition, and not very convincing. The good news is that at least you're thinking about exposition. Levels? First, dialogue is more fun to read than an infodump. Second, natural dialogue, not exposition dummies. Third! Too much dialogue, using it for everything. Answer? Symbols! Make sure your scenes have a plot movement as well as dialogue. Only tell the reader what they need to know, and tie it to conflict and character. Context! Be careful not to add actions and beats to every line of dialogue. Write your dialogue outward from the point. Why are these people having this conversation? All conversation is combat, is conflict. Focus on the details of what each character wants and notices. Use the person coming into the conversation late to fast-track exposition. How do you add description and exposition? Write five sentences, then pare it down. Try emulating screenwriting, setting the scene with just enough for a director or artist to know what to do, what the mood needs to be. Consider spatial intimacy. You don't paint an entire city, you paint one room, one street. You may build an entire house and decorate it, but give the reader just a glimpse, enough for them to infer the rest from the reflection off your iceberg.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 19.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're Bob.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm not Bob.

[Laughter]

[Howard] As you know, Howard…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sorry. That's the classic, as you know, Bob. The maid-and-butler dialogue where two people talk about a thing that both of them already understand, but they talk about it so they can exposite to the reader. So, fair reader, listener, if you didn't get the joke…

[Dan] Don't do that.

[Howard] Yeah, don't do that. If you didn't get the joke, now you do.

[Victoria] Can we talk about how meta it is that you just like explained the entire show?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Expositioned it… Expositioned it. Well, because it's… Never mind.

[Brandon] It's actually kind of nice to see in my students. As you know, Bob, or whatever, I call it maid-and-butler dialogue, it's nice to see in one way because they're at least thinking about exposition, right? Like, your first level up is when you realize dialogue is just way more fun to read than a big infodump. So I'll put this into dialogue. But then, your next level up is realizing that dialogue needs to feel natural and you need to construct a scene in such a way that the dialogue feels like it's coming from real people rather than exposition dummies there to give the exposition.

[Dan] If you want to see this done wrong, CSI Miami was shocking sometimes at the level that two forensic scientists would sit there and recite textbooks at each other while looking at a body or whatever.

[Brandon] Now, most of our questions, or most of our episodes this year are coming from questions from readers. There's actually a really… Readers? Listeners. There's a really great question starting this off, which is the next level up moment. This listener says, "I've noticed that a lot of my scenes are little more than conversations, typically with other actions used to set in a secondary capacity, if at all. Back story, plot revelations, growth, all shown through conversations." I'm going to assume this character… This read…

[Howard] This listener.

[Brandon] This listener, noticing that, is not writing maid-and-butler dialogue. They're writing good dialogue, but they're noticing, I'm doing… Making my dialogue do a ton of heavy lifting on this. I've noticed this in my own writing as well. So it's something that I worry about.

[Dan] So, this is something that can be handled really well with symbols. I don't mean symbolism in the AP English sense. I mean that you assign a visible thing or an action to a thing. The really obvious one is Luke, you've turned off your targeting computer. Right? We don't have to come out and say Luke has learned that he needs to use the Force. Because he turns off his targeting computer, and everyone goes, "Oh. Okay, I understand what this means. They establish that earlier. With the blast shield down, I can't even see. How am I supposed to fight? We get that same thing, reversed. Another really beautiful one is actually in the movie Toy Story where the first scene is we're going to spy on the little boy's birthday party and see what the new present is. It's all… Woody's in charge, and he's doing this thing, and he wants to make sure he maintains his position as the favorite toy. The final scene is that exact scene re-done, but now he has a friend. Now he's with Buzz, and they're partners. So without coming out and saying, "I have learned the value of other people and that friendship is important and I don't have to be the favorite toy to be valued," we get all of that through the use of this really stark visual symbol that just relays it to us.

[Victoria] Two things. I personally feel like this is a plot problem. I feel like this is a reflection, if the only purpose of your scene is this dialogue, then you need to separate out the verbal content of the conversation from what you're trying to accomplish in a plot sense of the scene. If the only forward movement in the scene is through the dialogue, then I think your scene is not working as a holistic scene, moving the overarching plot forward as well. I come from the anime school of worldbuilding. The anime school of worldbuilding states, basically, we do not infodump because we don't tell you anything except what you need to know going in. Everything that you learn, be it dialogue or exposition, is tied to conflict and character. So when I see scenes like this when I'm teaching or when I'm reviewing for people, and I see these large chunks of conversation, then that starts to happen in a vacuum in my mind. They're just hovering there in space. So I start to ask those authors, those writers, to start separating out the two lines, almost as if you're making a song, and you would separate the musical instruments or separate the lines and say, "What else is this scene accomplishing?" Because the nice thing about conversation, the beautiful thing about dialogue, it can happen in a context and then some. You get twice as much out of your scenes when there's a physical underlying context to the scene as well as a conversational context.

[Brandon] Let me ask you this, though. One of the things that I've just started becoming may be hyperaware of, too aware of, is that people using non-dialogue beats and actions and things in order to replace writing better dialogue.

[Howard] Well…

[Brandon] It gets really bothersome when I see my students and every line of dialogue is modified by a sentence saying what they're doing. They've learned that if someone slams their coffee cup down, it helps add an exclamation point. So every character with every beat is doing something.

[Victoria] But that is the equivalent of somebody thinking that they're revising by moving commas around. That is not actually fixing the motion of the scene, right? Those are crutches of the scene. So I actually think it's a lot better, I'll advise students to create a block of the scene and then a block of dialogue. Like, work us between the two. I actually think that a paragraph of the scene bracketing the dialogue is a lot more efficient than slicing up your bracketing scenes as notes throughout the dialogue.

[Brandon] I tend to agree with that as well. I like it, personally, with reading when you go into dialogue, the dialogue has been tightly worked so that it just gets across emotions and things without… With as very little outside the dialogue is possible, and then you transition back into motion and…

[Victoria] It also comes down… I know this is a tangential thing that relates to this, but let's talk about dialogue for a moment. Because I'm shocked by how many people think that when you write dialogue, you begin at the beginning and you go to the end. When, like, the truth is most conversations have a point. So when I write dialogue, I build outward from the point. What is the thing that the two or three or four people engaged in this conversation are trying to get to? I think when you build out from the point, instead of the hello, hello, goodbye, goodbye of it, then you start to understand why they're having the conversation. Really, like, we don't have conversations in a void. We have conversations in a context. So often when I see a lot of dialogue happening, a lot of information being conveyed this way, I start to wonder why there's an absence of context. Sometimes the context can replace some of the dialogue. Absolutely, it's a balance that you find in the writing. Like so many things that we talk about, you learn the right balance by doing it wrong and by doing it right. But I think… I mean, this is the time where you have to remember that all writers are readers. Find the things that really work. Find the good examples of it, and study them, the way that you would study anything.

[Howard] I think it's important to recognize that… And I use this as a punchline in a Schlock Mercenary strip a decade ago. Good Lord. The punchline was, "Captain, all conversation is combat."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The Captain's response is along the lines of I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot more now. The idea that we converse because there is a… There are competing ideas, and at the end of the conversation, those ideas will have changed in status. At a almost theological level, the religion of the sharing of information, conversation is conflict.

[Victoria] Absolutely.

[Howard] Even if we agree, there is conflict here, because if there wasn't conflict, we wouldn't need to talk. So, as you know, Bob, is broken because there is no conflict, there's no reason for me to tell you what you know. But, if I'm saying a thing… If I'm trying to explain a piece of worldbuilding to someone who doesn't know it, the disagreement… The conflict there is not I am providing information that you need. The more interesting conflict is I'm providing information that you don't believe, and you're now going to refuse or refute. It becomes an argument. You layer that atop character conflict, atop other things, and suddenly… I will read page after page after page of that, because it can be fun.

[Victoria] I think the pointedness of exposition is important. Either the fact that in dialogue, no two people come together to have the same conversation. We each come to a conversation with an idea that we want to convey to the other. So often, what's the interesting part of dialogue is when we miss each other in the conversation, when each of us is trying to basically have a monologue to the other one, and we have to have that collision point. I also, on the character building exposition side of it, I feel strongly that… This so often gets put into first person, but when you think about writing, regardless of whether your writing third person or first person or second person, you are writing a perspective. Every single character will notice different things. Every single character that you write is moving through their world and their environment differently. They see the world differently, they have different philosophies, and they're going to notice different things. So often, unless you're writing a purely omniscient world, you can tie the details of the things that we notice, of the things that we perceive that are relevant, to the attention of the character that you are writing about. So remembering that each of us has a bias, a way of moving through the world, each of the characters that you write is going to perceive different things about the world around them. Honing it into those details can help it from feeling infodumpy, can help the exposition from feeling it doesn't serve a point.

[Howard] One of my favorite stupid tricks is the person… We have this happen all the time, all of us. Someone walks into the room late and tries to join the conversation, but they don't know what's been said yet. Everybody is now instantly mad. "We just covered this!" "Yeah, but I wasn't here." "Why do we care that you know?" "I care that I know."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One, there's comedy inherent in it because we've all been there, we've all been annoyed, and we are now watching the lessening in status of the person that we would like to see drop. One of my… One of the rules of comedy. But the other thing is, it allows you now to fast-track the exposition and give them the equivalent of the as you know, Bob, in a way that has conflict just running… Just oozing off of it.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week.

[Dan] Book of the week, this week. One of my very favorite things in the entire universe is…

[Howard] Me?

[Dan] When… Well, you're related to it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] When Writing Excuses listeners, students at our retreat, people who listen to the podcast, come to me and show me their book that they wrote and have published. Like, that is just… Makes me so happy. That happened recently. Suyi Davies Okungbowa, who is one of our scholarship winners for the 2019 cruise, has got a fantasy book published. It is called David Mogo Godhunter. He gave me a copy. It's super, super good. It's basically the Dresden Files if it took place in Lagos, Nigeria. About a guy who is hunting fallen gods for a wizard. It's really good stuff. Really well written. He is presenting a very new, unique world that he does a great job of exposing that information to us. So… It applies to our episode as well.

[Brandon] Title and author, one more time?

[Dan] David Mogo Godhunter. The author is Suyi Davies Okungbowa.

[Brandon] All right. So, the other question we have for this week is about adding description. How do you add description when it doesn't come easily? How do you find the balance between worldbuilding and exposition?

[Victoria] I am one of those people that believe you write five sentences, and then you ask yourself if one sentence will do the same amount of work. That's not to say that you should underwrite. I think you're totally fine to overwrite. But I usually believe that if you take a paragraph to describe anything, and then you ask yourself if every sentence in that paragraph is pulling the same amount of weight, you can usually get it down to one or two very powerful sentences. I think sometimes, especially in the fantasy tradition, we think more is more. Sometimes, more is more. But usually… I come from a poetry background. So, usually, what I think is especially in moments where we're truly setting up world, where the exposition and the description is not actively engaged with any one thing, with conflict, with character, with anything, but we feel the need to set the scene, that in that case, less can be more, when it is done pointedly.

[Howard] I think that the tradition of writing… When I say tradition, the form, the syntax of writing for the screen and writing for comics, where at some point, you are telling the director, you are telling the cameraman, you're telling the artist what to do. As the writer, there is a line you don't want to cross, where you may have told them too much. Yet, there's also this point where all you've given them is a white room full of people talking and they don't have anything to work with. When I talk about writing comic scripts, often what I will focus on, and this is useful for writing other things, is colors and moods and shapes. I'll say, "Establishing shot, longshot, super desaturated background to show distance, trees in the foreground, characters in the immediate foreground, brightly lit, whatever." That establishes a mood, where we are close up on the characters and they are in a huge space. Well, if I were to write this in prose, obviously I wouldn't write it that way. But I would want to talk about the tree that is nearest. I would want to mention that we can see for miles. It feels like we can see to the end of the world. Something poetic that establishes this same feeling of huge space with people in it up close. So, it may be that an exercise for description is to look at screenplays and the way they handle some of these scenes, and then look at how you would write it in prose to accomplish the mood. Rather than to say these are all of the millions of things that were in that picture.

[Victoria] So, this kind of comes back, for me, to the idea of spatial intimacy. Right? You cannot paint an entire city. Not in any way that a person can keep in their mind. But you can paint a room or a street in that city. I have this theory that there are two kinds of fantasy authors. There are… Or really any genre authors. There are authors who build you an entire house, decorate every room of that house, then give you as the reader the key to that house. You now get to explore every room. If you don't see it, it doesn't exist there. That's like the Tolkein philosophy, right? Then there are authors who build the entire house, decorate the entire house, and instead of giving the reader the key, they leave one curtain open. What you can essentially see then is one room, perhaps an open doorway, a hall beyond, and you're given just enough details to be able to infer the house beyond. I think that when you're writing fantasy or something where you feel like there's a lot of room for description, remembering that a few key details instead can have that iceberg philosophy, can show you and be reflective of an entire world.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I like to go back… Going back to what you said earlier and kind of tying this all together, if your worry… One of your worries is you're doing too much conversation, a few of those very well described tight… Like… This is when one paragraph is better than 17. A really, really like curious paragraph that gives you that window, that gives you that drape, that shows you… And brings you right in there is a wonderful powerful balance to some of these dialogues.

[Victoria] Absolutely.

[Brandon] We are out of time on the podcast today. I am going to give you some homework. What I want you to do is I want you to take a favorite piece of media of yours, whether it's a book, a television show, a movie. I'm going to use Star Wars for this example because it's pretty universal, a lot of people have seen it. I want you than to make a list of all the worldbuilding elements that are necessary to understand Star Wars. Right? To understand how that movie, how that world works, how that society works. Then, once you've got that done, I want you to watch the movie, read the book, the show again, and see at what pace the creators of that media put all of those things in. So you can get a sense for how somebody else is doing it, how they are using their learning curve and their description and their exposition to give that information to you. So, have fun doing that. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/03/14-5-viewpoint-as-worldbuilding/

Key Points: Worldbuilding using character viewpoint? How do you integrate setting into your characters? Start with the way the character interacts with the world, both physically and emotionally. Use actions and dialogue to show us assumptions and attitudes, how things work, without lengthy info dumps. Use two or more characters with different backgrounds or opinions, different viewpoints, to give the reader information about the thing, about the characters, and about the unreliable viewpoint. One way to use viewpoint to intersect with worldbuilding is in the way characters describe other characters. The same character seen through the eyes of two different characters can be very different. Think about how the character's voice directs the narrative versus keeping the narrative safe and trustworthy. First person, the character runs everything. Third person, you need to balance. Some voice, some straight narration. To make your worldbuilding richer, think about what people swear by, who makes what jokes, and how your character interacts with the environment. A room with marble floors comes to life when heels clack across it.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Five.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Viewpoint As Worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] One of my personal favorite topics… Perhaps even hobby horses, is to talk about how to worldbuild by using character viewpoint. I love it when books do this. In fact, it is one of the things that when I pick up a book, if the first chapter does, the first page does, I know I'm going to have a good time, at least with that character. I really like it. I want to talk about how we do it. So, how do you make setting an integrated part of your characters?

[Mary Robinette] I think a lot of it is the way the character interacts with it, not just physically, but also emotionally. That... the weight that things carry. So, using Jane Austen as an example, someone can… Like, two characters can look at each other, and that's no big deal. But when Austen handles it, she gives you that emotional weight. It's like she… And I'm thinking specifically in Persuasion, there's this scene when Capt. Wentworth pulls a small child off of Anne Elliott's back, and there's a moment where he's touching her. The emotional weight of that tells you, as a modern reader, that oh, there is no touching. This is… There is a lot going on between these two. It is… It gives you all of these layers of detail, while just being a physical interaction in the world. So that's the kind of thing that I find very interesting.

[Dan] One, very similar to that, is in Age of Innocence, when he takes her glove off. It is so steamy, and it's just a glove. But it tells you so much about the world and what it's like and the rules they have to follow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you do that. It's actually one of the things I enjoy in the Stormlight, is the safe hand.

[Brandon] Right. Right. The safe hand came from… So, for those who aren't familiar. Society has eroticized the bare left hand of women. This has all kinds of social implications, and all kinds of… People always want to ask me, they want to say, "Why?" They often come to me, "Why, why is this?" I can answer. From, like, I… In the worldbuilding, the past, well, there were these events and these influential writings that happened, and then there was some institutionalized sexism that insp… But really, the answer is, "Why? Because that's how their culture is."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's how they see things. It's not why because they are like, "Well, when my great…" No. They're just like, "This is how my culture is." Then that culture becoming a big part of how people see the world is the sort of thing that I just love.

[Dan] You just look at all the different cultures on Earth today and the cultural assumptions that we carry and assume are common to the entire human race. Then you go to another country, and it's… They've never even heard of it before. You realize that we do this all the time.

[Howard] Last season, we had an episode on confronting the default, in which we talked about exactly that. When I wrote, I think it was Scrap Ante for Privateer Press, they wanted me to develop a character for them… Develop an existing character. They wanted me to give a POV to a character who was a mechanic… And this, they've got game fic… They've got game stuff surrounding this guy already. Who is a mechanic, and he needed to sound like a mechanic, and they wanted to talk a little bit about how these things work. Then it needed to not be boring. So I created a mystery in which someone is sabotaging a Warjack, and in as lean writing as I could, I have this mechanic digging in and finding out that somebody has swapped a part that looks like another part, and he has names for all of these, and he's rattling them off the way a mechanic would. In the course of writing this, I started lifting names and altering them a little bit from actual steam engines and diesel engines and whatever else. When I sent it into the Privateer Press guys, Doug, who's the chief worldbuilder, read it and said, "you have done something that I have been terrified to do forever." Which is explain how these things work.

[Laughter]

[Howard] They loved it. It read like a fun story, and it was all POV. It was not, "Oh, this is how the magic flows through the whatever." It's just a guy fixing a thing and looking for a problem, and then determining that somebody had sabotaged this to kill him.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] So. An example from one of my books. In the Partials series, one of the things that I wanted to play with for the worldbuilding was the generational divide. People who remember life before the apocalypse and the kids who have grown up in a post-apocalyptic world. So I had the chance then to start with two or three chapters entirely from this teenage point of view, just describing a normal world. She didn't think it was scary, she wasn't constantly concerned with the things that they had lost. Then, we finally get to a meeting with adults, and they spend their whole time bemoaning how rustic everything is. Just the difference between their attitudes immediately tells you a lot about the world and the society.

[Brandon] Yeah. That's one of the things I like the most is when you can take two different characters and describe the same thing, the same event, or the same cultural mores, and then, with those two contrasting opinions, the reader is given a bunch of information. They are, number one, told about the thing. Right? You're getting the worldbuilding. But you're, number two, told about the characters. You're told what they find important and valuable, or what they notice. But, number three, you're also told viewpoint is untrustworthy.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] Which is a really important thing with these sorts of stories.

[Dan] That can make it very difficult. If you want to do that, that's something that you might need to refine and polish quite a bit, because your readers of the first or second draft might say, "Oh, you've got an inconsistency here." No, I don't. You need to look at who is saying it, and maybe I need to finesse this a little bit so that that is more clear.

[Howard] The number of times I have taken an inconvenient fact about the Schlock Mercenary universe and backtracked it to determine who said it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And then ascertained, "Oh. That person is actually allowed to be wrong about this." Did the narrator ever… Nope! Narrator didn't… Did a footnote ever… Nope! Oh, this is awesome.

[Laughter]

[Howard] This is awesome. I am off the hook.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have… There's a timeline problem in the Lady Astronaut universe. Because when I wrote the novelette, I was just like, "Eh, it's a one-off." I wrote it. I didn't do a lot of worldbuilding. Basically, when I got into doing the actual hard-core how long does it take to get people into space when you're kickstarting a space program… I'm like, "Oh. Elma's just wrong."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] About some of her memories. She's just conflating them.

[Dan] Just misremembering.

[Mary Robinette] Just misremembering.

[Brandon] I run into this a lot. But it is nice to establish viewpoints that are untrustworthy for this sort of reason.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a book that I'm reading right now that's doing a really interesting job of this shifting viewpoint is Semiosis by Sue Burke. It's a multigenerational novel. So you will move forward like an entire generation, and it's a colony world. So the first generation are the first people on the planet. Then the next generation are kids who've grown up there. The way they view their parents versus… The worldbuilding is fascinating, because… They're… You see how they're shifting and how the culture is shifting to adapt to the place that they're living. It's really, really interesting. It's all POV that's doing it.

[Brandon] Now, that is not our book of the week, but it would be a good book for people to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] Dan actually has our book of the week.

[Dan] Yeah. The book of the week actually hits this topic perfectly. It is Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Which is a YA fantasy. Big secondary world fantasy set in a world inspired by Africa. What's fascinating about it… Many things are fascinating about it. But pertinent to this discussion, there are three viewpoint characters. It's a world where magic has been stolen. No one can do it anymore. The people who used to be able to do it are an oppressed class. So one of our viewpoints is one of these kind of former mage people. Then we have a princess who has been sheltered her entire life and runs away from home. Then we have her brother who is struggling with the King's policies. So they all have completely different ideas about what the world should look like and what it does look like and how they want to change it. It's really fascinating to see the interplay of those viewpoints as you go through.

[Brandon] Excellent. That is Children of Blood and Bone. I was on a panel with her, and she was really interesting. Had some really cool things to say about magic. So I anticipate it being a great book. Emily really liked it.

[Dan] Yes. She describes the book as Black Panther but with magic.

[Brandon] She does.

[Brandon] Now, one of my favorite ways to use viewpoint in worldbuilding, to intersect them, is by the way the characters describe other characters.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Uhuh.

[Brandon] I first picked up on this as a young person reading The Wheel of Time, where… And I'm not going to be able to quote these exactly. I'm sorry, Wheel of Time fans, but you have one character who would describe someone and say, "Wow. They look like they spend most of their day at the forge." Then another character describes the same person and says something along the lines of "Wow. If you beat that person at cards, leave early. Because otherwise, they'll jump you in the back alley." Those two descriptions are both "This is a tough, intimidating person." But seen through the eyes of two very different characters. I love this sort of thing. Description. Now, my question for you guys is, do you ever worry about the blend of… When you're in narrative, how much you're going to let the character's voice direct the narrative and how much you're not?

[Mary Robinette] It does depend on whether… Which voice you're using. Are you using first person, or are you using tight third? Because first person, all over the place. It's no problem. But with tight third… With third person, it is a tricky line. Because what I find is that the… Unless it is very obviously voice-y, that the reader will interpret that as being safe and trustworthy. So I tend to try to be fairly honest when I'm doing narration that is less flavored than when I'm doing something that… If I'm doing free indirect speech, I try to… That's… I try to reserve the perceptions for those.

[Brandon] Yeah. I always kind of go back and forth on this, because, of course, Robert Jordan did very much a lot of tight thirds. There would be these moments where it felt like it was right in their head, and other times when the narrator was speaking. He balanced it really well. I'm always a little scared about that. Because you do want the narrator, the non-present narrative, to be trustworthy. But you want the viewpoint of the character to maybe not be.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it's a thing that you can do… I was just reading The Killing of Kings by Howard Andrew Jones. It's not… At the time of recording, it is not yet out. But one of the things that he does is there is this character who's constantly… Male character who's constantly looking at women with a very male gaze. Like, constantly looking at boobs and ass. Just all the time. Then will say things like, "I don't understand why this woman doesn't like me."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right. Right.

[Howard] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] "It's like she's always so cold and distant. There's always a piece of furniture between us." I'm like, "Yep. Yes, there is. Absolutely, yes, there is." But it is… It's deftly handled, because he is staying absolutely true to the character's point of view. But by giving us very obvious physicality and recognizable body language from the other character, he's telling us how this behavior is actually perceived in the world.

[Brandon] Later in the year, we're going to do an entire week on writing imperfect worlds. Or imperfect characters. With… Using topics like this, not validating but acknowledging that some people are like this. We will cover that. It's going to be in a few months, but we are going to get to that. That is one of the… That's like Using Viewpoint and Character Level 501.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Being able to pull off some of this stuff.

[Brandon] Before we go out, any tips for writers on making their sentences, particularly their worldbuilding sentences, do more than one thing at once?

[Howard] What do these people swear by? I love that. My favorite examples of this currently are from the various different NPCs in the ESO world, where they swear by different gods. They are consistent in the way this works. It adds a measure of depth. Because some of them will swear by those gods, and somebody who is from the same culture will never utter those words. You can now tell that those two people are actually different. That's not the sort of thing that you expect to see… Well, if you grew up with video games. It's not the sort of thing that you expect to see in a videogame. But videogame writing has progressed to the point that we are expecting that level of worldbuilding, especially in dialogue that has to be read by an actor in a way that sounds conversational and believable.

[Dan] Very similar to that, and I'm starting to notice this more as I read… In the current science fiction that I'm reading, is what our people allowed to make jokes about. Which jokes can come from which species in the space station? And things like that.

[Mary Robinette] I would say, for me, the tip that I would hand to our listeners is to make sure that your character is interacting with their environment. Which is where I started us, but I'm going to give a really concrete example. Like, I can describe a room and say, "The room had marble floors, tall vaulted ceilings, and green velvet curtains." That tells you what the room looks like. But if I say, "My character's heels clacked across the marble floor as she strode to the window. The velvet was soft against her skin as she pushed the curtains back." You know so much more about the character and the world. So you're getting both things at the same time. I think that's going to make it feel richer to the reader, as well.

[Brandon] Awesome. Howard, you've got some homework for us.

[Howard] I do. This is the from-within, from-without episode, the Buck Rogers, Wilma Deering, the Twoflower, Rincewind. Take a character who is alien to the culture or the setting that you are writing within. But obviously has a reason to be there. Describe things from their point of view. Now describe those same things from the point of view of a native. Somebody who's grown up there, who's been there, who is familiar with it.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.35: Cliché vs. Archetype

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/09/02/13-35-cliche-vs-archetype/

Key points: Clichés, archetypes, tropes are tools that every writer uses. Tropes are the building blocks for stories. Fresh green beens, tropes, archetypes, or clichés are pretty good, even if you've had them before, but if you get it wrong, we can taste the can. Recontextualize, use the trope in an interesting way. Think about what the trope does for the reader, why does it work, and then incorporate that into your story. With a dash of unpredictable. Watch for cliché dialogue, tired dialogue, and ask yourself if there's another way for the character to say that. Put the well-worn tropes in a very specific life and place, and make them fresh again. Play up the fact that you and the reader know it is a cliché. Think about subversion, joking or playing on the shared context. Use tropes and archetypes as diagnostic tools, in planning or editing. Be aware that some tropes and clichés are steaming piles of poo. Be aware that some audiences want tired clichés, while others don't.

( When the tropes call... )

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We're going to be talking about archetypes as tools. Tropes as tools. Now, specifically, this week the idea is that we are approaching these as tools that every writer uses, consciously or unconsciously, and we're going to talk about how to use archetypes, how to use tropes, or at what points you want to back away or subvert that trope. Let me start off by saying you can't avoid tropes. Tropes are the way by which we communicate in a lot of ways. It's the way by which stories work. Also, tropes are not bad in and of themselves. The fact… They are simply something that exists, that are pieces and building blocks that stories come from.

[Howard] Let me open with a metaphor that has always worked well for me. If you have ever had fresh green beans, they are pretty delicious. Boiled, however… If you've ever had canned green beans, they are less delicious. When you do a clich… When you use a trope, an archetype, or a cliché and you get it wrong, we can taste the can. When you get it right, it's fresh green beans, and even if we've had it before, we like it. Also, add butter.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] A friend of mine uses a slightly different metaphor, which is very similar also in the "Well, this tastes like poo."

[Choking]

[Mary] Which is that books are building blocks, but that sometimes building blocks are made of poo and that's not architecturally sound.

[Dan] Well, I suppose…

[Brandon] Let's dig into this. Let me ask you…

[Dan] You and I build things very differently.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Don't use that archetype. It's canned poo!

[Brandon] So how do you make the poo not canned, Howard? How do you make it fresh… I don't know. No.

[Laughter]

[Mary] No, there's a reason this… That Howard's canned metaphor's really, really good. It's that there are a lot of things that when they are fresh, when they are new, they are not a cliché yet. This is why you… There's that joke about "Oh, Shakespeare. Everything he wrote was a cliché." Because he wrote it first, and people started using it. There's a thing that will happen over the lifecycle of an idea, which is that someone will have the rare original idea. It's like, "Oh, that's so fresh and new." Like Dracula. Although Dracula was not…

[Brandon] See, here's where I'm going to argue with you. Because I think that during Shakespeare's time, those things were already all tropes.

[Mary] Yeah… Well, that's… Yes. What I'm saying is that to go from trope to cliché… That cliché is the canned thing.

[Brandon] Right. So what is…

[Mary] Trope is the building block.

[Brandon] How do you make this happen? How do you… Like I'm worried that our listeners are going to be like, "All right, so I need to find the original idea. I need to do things no one else has done." Without understanding that's just not humanly possible. Now what you can do is you can take something, and you can say, "All right, I'm going to recontextualize this." I'm going to use it in an interesting way, or I'm going to be well aware that this is a trope and dig down as we talked about a couple years ago, the difference between a cook and a chef… Right? The cook uses the trope as it is, just because it is a trope, where the chef says, "All right, what does this trope do to the reader? What… Why is this trope interesting? How can I properly incorporate this into my story?" If you want to take an example of this, Firefly, the television show. It is a series of very, very time-worn tropes. You've got the prostitute with a heart of gold, you've got the preacher, you've got the mysterious stranger, you've got… I mean, everyone…

[Mary] You've got the cowboy.

[Brandon] On that ship is a very… They're cliché. They're straight up cliché. That, in the context of that story, they are all delightful, interesting, fun, and feel very fresh and original characters. Despite the fact that he's changed them only a little bit from the cliché.

[Howard] Several years ago, we recorded and it was just the three of us. The three dudes. We recorded What Did the Dark Knight Get Right? One of the things we said is that the dialogue was always unpredictable. It didn't have comic book dialogue. You didn't have somebody say, "I'm going to get you for this." You didn't have Batman in a gravelly voice, but even when he was doing that, you didn't know what he was going to say. You contrast that with, I think it was Hellboy 2, which had cliché throwaway line after throwaway line. For me, that is the flavor of the can, and that is one of the easiest things to pluck out of your work. You look at something that someone has just said. For instance, "What did you do?" Well, "What did you do?" has been uttered by actors thousands and thousands of times. It's not something that's technically cliché, but if you're trying to throw it as something that's really strong, you might have trouble. Is there another way for that character to ask that question?

[Mary] Jane Espenson says that new writers will often write things and go, "Oh, this is right," and it's right because it's familiar. I think that that's one of the things that happens to us a lot. You are absolutely right that there is not an original… That going out and finding original idea is not the answer. It's the combining of…

[Brandon] There are… It does happen. You're right. But I worry about writers feeling like they have to find that rather than learning to do what we're talking about.

[Dan] So, the example that keeps coming to mind while we're talking about this is the TV show Atlanta by Donald Glover, which I've started watching, belatedly. What is fascinating to me is that it feels incredibly fresh… Everything in it. Like, my jaw's on the floor a lot of it, because I've never seen this before and I think they found something new. They found something I've never seen before. What's going on is that they are using a lot of these well-worn tropes. A lot of the events and situations and the relationships are the same as in every other sitcom. But they are combined with a very specific life experience and an incredible sense of place that I'm not personally familiar with. That gives these tropes a freshness that really shines through.

[Brandon] I think that's a really salient way to put it, Dan. I'm glad you mentioned that.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for the book of the week, which is actually my book, The Apocalypse Guard.

[Howard] You sound so worried.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah, well, I'm worried because I don't know if it's out yet. Because we're recording this a year ahead and the publisher has not exactly committed to a release date. It might be September, it might be October.

[Howard] That's so cliché.

[Brandon] Yeah. But I'm going to just run with it and assume it's out or is coming out very soon.

[Mary] You can preorder it, if it's not out, which also helps.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] By the way, preorders are very good for authors.

[Brandon] They are very good. And I did just submit it to my editor, so we're hoping that they'll like it.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Well, what's your book about, Brandon?

[Dan] At this stage in its revision, the book is about…

[Brandon] The book is about… It's the story of… I wanted to tell the story of the person who fetches Superman's coffee. It's a story of an intern from Iona, Idaho, where my father is from, who gets a job being the clerical intern/coffee girl for the Apocalypse Guard, who are basically a version of the Justice League. They save planets in the Multiverse when they are threatened with destruction. That's their job, that's why they were formed. Well, at the beginning of the book, the Apocalypse Guard gets attacked by a shadowy force, and Emma, our main character, ends up getting teleported to a planet they were planning to rescue but hadn't gotten around to yet. She gets there three weeks before a flood is going to destroy the entire planet. She has no resources, no powers, and is an intern. It's her story of trying to survive on this planet while everyone else is off fighting a greater evil and has forgotten about her.

[Howard] That is going to take a lot of coffee.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It is a delightful, very fun…

[Howard] Sounds like a lot of fun.

[Brandon] Action adventure book.

[Mary] I can get that book now, right?

[Brandon] Yes. You… You can get it now. You…

[Howard] You, Mary Robinette Kowal.

[Brandon] Can maybe get it now.

[Dan] We're just rubbing this in your faces at this point.

[Brandon] We are…

[Brandon] All right. So let's get back to…

[Mary] Move on to cliché-ism.

[Brandon] That podcast that we do.

[Howard] Let me talk tools in another specific way. The line, "What did you do?" I just used that, and it will have been months ago for readers of Schlock Mercenary, just used that where Karl Tagon walks into the room, because a thing has happened, and he thinks it's Schlock's fault. We've seen this before. Schlock is saying, "It wasn't me. I didn't do that." Some sort of clever thing. Tagon says, "What did you do?" And schlock is talking to the person who did it, and is saying, "See! Angry face." Playing up the fact that Schlock knows this is a cliché. I doubled down on it by using the… I call this the common tone transition where the opening panel of the next strip, we've switched scenes, and a captain is yelling at a crewmember, saying, "What did you do?" So, yeah, it's a cliché line, it's a throwaway line, but the way in which I'm using it, I sure hope I'm going to get away with it.

[Brandon] You're stepping toward what we call subversion. Which is where you take the trope, you're aware of it, and you do something to play off the fact that the reader might know about this trope. So my question for you guys is when do you subvert and when do you play it straight? For instance, it was called Atlanta? The show that you're watching?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] They're playing it straight, it seems like. They're recontextualizing the tropes, but they're still using them. Whereas something like Deadpool is built around subverting tropes. You… We all share a context, I'm going to make a joke about it, that's the subversion of the trope. It doesn't always have to be a joke, by the way.

[Mary] I was going to say…

[Brandon] The character you don't expect…

[Howard] Good subversion… One of my favorite subversion's is the crossing of the threshold in the Hero's Journey in How to Train Your Dragon. Where instead of killing the dragon, he frees the dragon. It's a literal 180 degree inversion of what we expect in the Hero's Journey. When I watched it, because I'm familiar with some of it, I watched and I got chills when it happened. Like, "Oh, my gosh. That's a huge subversion. Can they stick this?" Throughout that film, there was subversion after subversion where moments that you expected from the Hero's Journey were handled in ways that were different.

[Mary] So, the Hero's Journey and archetypes… One of the… My favorite subversion's… Flipping of an archetype is the wise old man…

[Howard] The mentor?

[Mary] The mentor figure, which is always a Gandalf kind of… It's a tall old man, it's a Dumbledore, tall old man, white man with a long gray beard of some variety. Yoda is that archetype, but he's a little green toad guy. That's, I think, one of the reasons that we love him. He's still occupying the old, he still occupying the wise and filled with power, but he is small and green and very crotchety. And a Muppet. But I think that if you look at one of these things and you… If you go back to our casting exercise, and you flip an axis, flip one of the pieces… The hour… The power dynamics that they live in, that sometimes you can end up with a character who's still fulfilling the archetypical roles, but is way more interesting.

[Brandon] You mentioned the Hero's Journey. We should really do a podcast on that, someday.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] Yeah.

[Howard] We've tried a couple times.

[Dan] Oh, snap.

[Laughter]

[Dan] In-your-face, loyal listeners.

[Brandon] I'm sorry if you're not part of the in-joke. Go listen to many, many seasons ago on that one. All right. So how do you decide? We never answered this. When do you write straight and when do you subvert?

[Dan] I don't know.

[Mary] so, I think one of the things is, it is useful to be aware of what these archetypes are and what these tropes are, and understand that these are already in your brain. So, for me, one of the things that I will do is I will kind of glance, because I'm a planner. I will look at my plan to make sure that I have not accidentally deployed one of the tropes that I didn't want to, or an archetype. It's like, "Oh, look, this character's living in that role." Sometimes I'll use it as a diagnostic tool in the planning stage or in the editing stage. I kind of… I look at the… Go back to voice. The area of intention. Like, what function is this serving? If I actually need the archetype to serve a function, then I look at ways that I can subvert it in some ways... Or double down on it.

[Brandon] This is a really difficult one to talk about. You can hear us kind of talking around it because everything's a trope. So you can't be aware, even, of all the ones you're doing. In fact, if you go to the websites that collect these things, it can be a really eye-opening or a really disastrous experience when you read and see all the things you're doing. Because as a writer, you think, "Wow, this is so fresh and new," when it's really not. That can be very dangerous. At the same time, we should go back to the fact that some of these tropes, these clichés, are just steaming piles of poo.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Knowing which ones are and that you should just not use because… Next week we'll talk about our own internal biases as writers, so we'll dig into this quite a bit, but there's awareness you need to have. If you don't, people will call you on it.

[Mary] There's a lot of things… There are tropes in our cul... Tropes and clichés that are damaging because they reinforce harmful stereotypes about people who have to live with the consequences of those stereotypes being in the world. So you'll hear people talk about… Some examples are the magical Negro, the model minority,…

[Howard] Great white Savior.

[Mary] The great white Savior. These are examples that are rooted in colonialist background, and will… Are really very damaging. So the idea that with the magical Negro is that a black character exists only to support a white character's journey and to dispense advice. So you may sit there and go, "Well, I put this character in because I want to make sure that black people are represented well." But what you've done is you've put a character in that has no arc of their own and is reinforcing the idea that… From colonialism, that black people were there just to support white people, which is damaging. It's difficult, because it is in so much media. Again, we'll talk about this more next week. That you've internalized it. So it's really important to be aware of these things, and it's difficult to be aware of them at the same time.

[Dan] I want to talk about some other clichés. I want to preface this by saying I'm speaking of clichés that are not harmful, but just are very tired. When we get into those, I think it's worth pointing out that who you're writing for will move that line of which clichés work and which don't. I remember having a conversation with Brandon years and years ago about different levels of originality in the fantasy market. There are people who will read China Miéville, and anything less weird and while than him is considered old and tired. Then, almost every level has someone who's like this, I am all about this author and everyone who is less creative than this one or less original than this one…

[Howard] Another example…

[Dan] Is too boring for me.

[Howard] Another example of this is one that, we talked about this here, which is the cliché from the superheroes genre, which is that all of these superheroes at some point are going to fight each other. The plot is going to build… Be built so that that is going to happen. Well, here's the thing. People who love superheroes stories want that. That's a cliché that you are allowed to deploy. If it's going to taste like canned green beans, it means you've done it wrong. If it's going to taste fresh, it's because when it happened, it surprised us.

[Dan] Well, the point that I want to make is that for the audience that wants that, it will taste fresh, and for an audience that doesn't, they might not like it no matter how well you do it.

[Brandon] All right. Mary, you have our homework.

[Mary] Yes. Okay. So we've been talking about tropes. We did not talk about one of the best tools for learning what those tropes are, and that's called tvtropes.com. So, here is your homework. Set a timer.

[Howard] Oh, thank goodness.

[Dan] It's important.

[Laughter]

[Dan] It's important to have a timer.

[Mary] Really important. Because you can fall down the gravity well of tvtropes.com and just live there. So, set a timer. I'm going to say for half an hour. Go to tvtropes. Pick a trope. Pick a thing. Boy meets girl. Or pick a book. One of your favorite books. Type that into the search and then just follow the rabbit hole down. When your timer goes off, get out.

[Brandon] Get out.

[Mary] Get out and save yourself.

[Brandon] Get out and go type in "You just don't get it, do you?" and watch the YouTube video of clips from television shows and movies that have used that phrase. Just to kind of rinse and repeat…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Rinse and wash your brain out. That's one of the ones I want you to do, as well. TVtropes is amazing. It is also… It is also a terrible, terrible thing.

[Mary] Yes.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. I hope this was helpful for you. I hope you learn how to use tropes, and you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/13/13-19-backstories/

Key points: Backstory affects everything a character does, so it is one of the most important aspects of a character, but you also don't need to map out everything and try to fit it all in. A broad overview, similar to what you have of your friend's backstory, is probably enough. Then, when you are writing a character, you may find yourself inventing back story in the moment to explain their reaction. When you find you need more backstory, stop, make notes, and then later go back and weave it in. Sometimes you may want to build lots of backstory, but be very conscious of what the reader needs to know versus what you may need to know. Where can you fit in backstory? At the end of every action scene, as a pause or rest. Or when a character is interacting with something that triggers it. In conversation! Flashbacks are not just to give information. They should be presented at the right time to shape the interaction the reader is having with the story, to propel a story forward. Flashbacks that break the forward momentum of the story fail, while flashbacks that add to the momentum work well. You can use flashbacks to build a mystery and answer it, or to deepen it. Put your flashbacks in when the reader wants it. Avoid tangential zoom flashbacks. Think about what your character inherited, where they are now, where they want to be, and where they think they are. Those four parts are your character's cultural backbone. Then discover the rest as you write.

( When they were young... )

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Backstories.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We are talking character backstory.

[Hooray! Yay!]

[Brandon] This has been really hard to not talk about…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Before this point.

[Mary] That is, in fact, my backstory for this episode, is that I've been wanting to talk about this for months.

[Brandon] So, go! Backstories.

[Mary] All right. So the thing is, like, backstories are simultaneously one of the most important aspects of your character, and also the thing that you need to worry about least. Because a backstory is going to affect the way your character moves through the world, they're going to affect how they interact with other people, but at the same time, you do not actually need to map out their entire backstory, their entire life, and then try to fit it all in.

[Brandon] Yeah, because you will… If you work too much on it, you will try to fit it all in, and… Boy, the infodumps are really…

[Mary] So, generally speaking, what I try to do with my character is have a kind of broad overview of what their backstory is, in much the way that I have a broad overview of what someone else's backstory is. Like, I don't actually need to know more of my character's backstory than I do of Amal's or Maurice's. I don't need to know their entire life history, unless it is specific to the moment that I am encountering in that particular story. It's absolutely affecting the way they move through their life, and it's affecting the way I interact with them, but I don't need to know all of it to be able to have an effective, moving interaction, and satisfying one, with them.

[Amal] Do you ever find yourself inventing backstory in the moment, because as you're writing a character, you realize that they're having a very strange reaction to something, maybe more than you'd planned for, because you're caught up and then you retroactively invent backstory to…

[Mary] I'm, in fact, doing that right now with a novel that I'm working on. Where I knew that my character had previously been on this planet as a military surgeon. She's 78 now, she had been there when she was in her 30s during occupation. And she's back. I knew that about her. As the… As I've been working on it, I've realized that actually something went wrong when she was here previously. It wasn't just that she was a military surgeon. I mean, obviously, war is a lot of things going wrong for an extended period of time, but that there was a backstory that I actually needed to unpack. So what I've done is I've gone ahead and stopped and made some notes to myself, and then am continuing going forward as if I had already written that stuff. But this is the mistake that I see people make, that I have to go correct, is that I will see a lot of writers who make that discovery and never go back to weave it in previously. Which either results in the reader feeling as if they've been coy all the way through, and not… Or feeling as if the writer lied to them.

[Amal] Interesting. I had a moment like that reading a book that came out recently called Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. Where you're basically introduced to this character, who, in my case anyways, I just despised. Like, hated, hated this character. Then, you're kind of given a flashback very late in the book that does actually explain a number of the behaviors that made me detest him. But it felt like too little too late. It felt like no, actually I didn't… I feel like without having had… And that can actually absolutely be a decision. Like, maybe she just never wanted me to like this character. So it doesn't actually matter that I have this information, and so on. But timing those reveals needs to be a deliberate choice as well, I think.

[Maurice] So, I'm horrible at following any of this advice.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled to save myself]. I literally did 3000 words worth of world building for a story that was 6000 words long, so, I mean, that's the kind of guy I am.

[Mary] I mean, I've been there and I've done that.

[Maurice] I'm the same way when I'm building my characters and doing their backstories. I try to be conscious of the fact that yes, I've done all this work, the reader doesn't need to know all this, but I need to know this. Now, the one time when it did come in handy was with the first book of the urban fantasy trilogy. Because when I turned it in, it was a 60,000 word novel, because I was… I don't know, I was doing a thing. But when they accepted it, they were like, "Okay. But this is an adult urban fantasy novel. You need to add 30,000 words to it." I was like, "How I'm I going to add… The story is there, it's done." But what I ended up doing was, I have all this backstory material. All of a sudden, it's like, "Wait. 30,000 words? I now have room to flesh out and to show some more of that backstory for some of these characters." So you get an even deeper feeling of why they're doing the things they do. Because sometimes they're arb… And I realized that, when I was doing the draft, sometimes they are behaving in this nonsensical way. To me, it made sense, because I knew there backstory. It was like, "Oh, wait, I have gone to the other extreme of so not showing enough of this." It was like, now, forced to add that 30,000 words back, I was like, "Oh, why don't I bring the readers up along for the ride, so they can see this too?"

[Brandon] So, Maurice, let me push you on that. How did you get that in there without it feeling like an infodump? Because I think that you're absolutely right, you need this stuff. But it also needs to be natural.

[Maurice] Right. So, it became a matter of how am I going to dramatize this information? So, then it was like… So, basically, I would go through the narrative and see where the brakes were in the story, to go okay, now… There were like… For example, there was a… Wherever there was a big action scene, I needed to sort of reset anyway. So I've learned that during those reset moments, that's where I can slip in some backstory, because it gives the reader a pause, come down from that action scene and sort of reset the stage. During those moments, it's like, "All right. Here's a little bit more about this character."

[Mary] I also find… So I'll do things like that where I use it as a rest point. But I also will often handle the character's backstory in the same way I'll handle other pieces of infodumpy stuff, which is I will save it for moments when the character is interacting with something. So like if I want you to know how a mason jar works, I'm not going to go, well, a mason jar is a glass object that is used… What I'm going to do is I'm going to have the character pick up the glass, and I'm going to have them put water in it. I'm going to have them put a lid on it. I'm going to have them boil it. So that… I will have them interact with it. It's like, "Oh, that's how a mason jar works."

[Right.]

[Mary] So a lot of times, when I'm trying to slip backstory in, then I will have it arise naturally through conversation, or through something… Some environmental trigger, some concrete trigger that… Like with the mason jar example, my grandma use these all the time, these mason jars, and her dill pickles were amazing. That's the kind of… It's like, well, now you know that I had a grandma who canned things.

[Amal] Right. Exactly. The… It's funny. I'm thinking back to a short story I wrote called Madeleine which I've mentioned in another episode. Where, just talking about triggering things, literally the whole plot is that she has no control over the fact that she's encountering things and they are triggering these memories and hallucinations, which are also flashbacks… But are also weird, because there are new intrusive elements that are happening in them. But for… In order to choose what those would be, because they were… Like the fact that they were happening was the plot, I didn't want them to actually be moving in a way that advanced… Like… I don't know if that makes sense. Basically, I wanted them to feel as random and intrusive as memory kind of is on its own. And as unpredictable. So even though it didn't necessarily make plot sense… Like, it wasn't necessary to the plot that she be sipping a cup of warm milk, or that she needed to remember that when she was a small child, she sipped a cup of warm milk in the same way and blah blah blah. The… Like, I tried to just through moving through my own environment, kind of pick things, things that are sensory, things that are weird and interesting and stuff to try and trigger those things. Because ultimately, the point of those flashbacks was something beyond giving information about the character.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Which is Racing the Dark.

[Mary] Yes. So this is… Alaya Dawn Johnson is a wonderful writer. This was actually her first novel, which I had read years later. She wrote it, I think, 2008. It's YA and it is phenomenal. Especially when you're talking about character backstories. It's set in a series of island nations in which people have learned to bind the spirit. So they have bound the spirit of fire and death and water. They have been bound for about a thousand years at this point. Wind got away about 500 years previously and wreaked havoc. It's this young girl who is… She supposed to be a diver. That's what she does. Much like the pearl divers, but for this specific type of fish. The environment is changing in ways that make people think that a spirit might be breaking loose. It just… Things just keep getting worse for her, in ways that always seem… It's like and what other choice did she have? It's forcing her down this very specific path. It's just phenomenal. But her backstory, this… This… The fact that she was a diver is so important. Sometimes in things that she is able to do within the story, but also in the choices that she makes and the regrets that she lives. It's a wonderful story. I'm actually reading the second book in the trilogy right now. But Racing the Dark is the first one, by Alaya Dawn Johnson. I highly recommend picking it up.

[Brandon] Let's dive back into flashbacks. Because I love me a good flashback.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I just do. It's interesting, because when I first got into writing, I remember one of my professors saying, "Don't use flashbacks. Flashbacks are a crutch." That is kind of some writing advice, and yet I have series that use extensive flashbacks. In my current book, I would guess that there are 50 or 60,000 words of flashbacks.

[Mary] But you know how to use them. This is the thing, is that a lot of times when people are using a flashback, they're using it just to get information in. You understand that what a flashback is actually doing for the reader is allowing you to present information to them at a time when they need it. So, if we hearken back to a previous season, where I talk about the MICE quotient a lot, the MICE quotient is not about the linear timeline that a story… That a character goes through. It is about the order in which you present information to a reader. When you're using backstories, you are presenting it in order to shape the way the reader is interacting with the story, not just to hand them a piece of information.

[Brandon] Right. I mean, handing them a piece of information is really important…

[Sure]

[Brandon] But the issue is you don't want to frontload that into the story, you wanted when it will be relevant, and also when you're dramatically… You'll be like, "Oh, I can get the context of this scene now," and things like that.

[Mary] Which then you can use as momentum to propel the story forward. A lot of times, and this is when flashbacks fail, it is because they break the forward momentum of the story. When flashbacks work well, they are adding to the forward momentum of the story by giving the reader information that they need to understand the emotional context of what's at stake.

[Brandon] It also lets you build a mystery, and then answer it, or build a mystery and then continue it in an interesting way.

[Amal] I love that idea about momentum. I'd never heard it that way before. Because I found myself just now thinking of when I have found flashbacks successful. Interestingly, I'm more often thinking of film, because it feels as if it's a filmic device, literally showing you in a visual way things that happened before. I was thinking of like Ratatouille… Everyone's seen it, right? You said mice and I thought of…

[Chuckles garbled]

[Amal] Yeah, so in fact, it opened a flashback to Ratatouille. Where basically the climax of that film is absolutely about pushing that forward momentum. It's about… I think… I don't know if there's more than… No, there are a couple of them. But this flashback involves… To spoil the film…

[Mary] It's been out long enough.

[Amal] It's been out. So, basically, there's this restaurant critic and he is impossible to impress, he's made this restaurant lose its Michelin stars because he's so asorbic, and our hero, the rat, has to cook a meal that's going to impress him. So instead of trying to build up these airy things, he cooks a very, very simple country meal, ratatouille. He cooks like a vegetable dish. Then, to show how delicious this dish is, as the critic is tasting it, literally, the camera kind of like sucks you backwards into a flashback and you see him being a small child tasting ratatouille for the first time and loving it. It's all warm sepia tones. Like, everything about the texture and the light and the timing of the flashback is such that you realize yes, he's eating the best thing he's ever had in his life, partly because it's reminding him of being a child. It builds so much character stuff into that one moment. Which then resolves the film. It's... So it's not, you don't need to know any of that stuff about the critic beforehand, you need to know everything opposite that. You need to know the critic is a jerk, who... It's so great. Anyway.

[Maurice] I was just thinking about that… I tend to write a couple projects at a time, so like, I have a short story and a novel project I'm working on right now, and they both kind of hinge on this use of flashbacks, which I hadn't really thought about until this conversation, how much they're hinging on the flashbacks. So in the short story, you have this woman, she has a shattered psyche, and so as she's trying to… I love the idea, again, I love this idea of the forward momentum… As she's progressing through the story, there's stuff that she's dealing with in the present, as she's remembering the past at the same time. So there's kind of this going back and forth, going back and forth, but it is about building that forward momentum of what I'm trying to reveal about her and her trauma and her overcoming it. Within the novel project, and partly, don't get me wrong, I love a good flashback. I just love a good flashback. So I was just thinking about how I'm using the flashback now in the current scene I'm writing, which is almost, in a lot of ways, just to set the mood for the rest of the chapter. So it opens with a flashback in order to just… Part of it is to just you're going to get some insight into the character, which sets the mood for what's going to happen in the rest of the chapter. So I love the idea of flashback and how it just… We all have these secrets that lay buried deep within us, sometimes we're not even always aware of. So just that slow revelation of what that might be reveals a character to us.

[Brandon] Put it in when the reader is going to want it. I think of when my students do it poorly, or when I did it poorly when I was a new writer, is you're writing along and you'll be reading this story, and then… Tangential flashback, just zoom, and the author thinks that they're giving lots of character, but really what happens is your reader, you're in a scene, and then suddenly you're off reading about grandma's pickles…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And this extended thing, where really all you needed at that point was, "Oh, my mom… Or my grandma used to put pickles in jars like this. Hmm. Every time I take a sip, it tastes like pickle juice to me."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Or you need a… Don't do it this way, but a "Oh, no, not one of those!"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You need that hook that later on you're going to get the explanation to.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] That is my reaction to pickles most of the time.

[Brandon] Obviously.

[So good]

[Brandon] Depends on if they're kosher or if they're not. Anyway.

[Mary] Pickled okra, y'all. I'm just sayin'. Pickled okra is just... Ah'm just goin' ta go full out Southe'n on y'a. It is just...

[Brandon] We are almost out of time, so...

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Last comments on this?

[Mary] Yeah. I'm going to say that when... That you can spend as much or as little time building your character backstory as you want, but I do think that there are some things that you should know about your character going in. That you need to know where they are… That their cultural backbone, I would say. Which is how… And when I say cultural backbone, it's four things. The inherited one, what is the culture that they have inherited? What is the culture that they are currently living? What do they aspire to? And then, what is their perceived culture? That if you know those four pieces of your character's backstory, that most of the rest of it you can probably discover as you are writing. If you want to dig deeper into any of that, then I think you can. But don't feel like you need to create a 3,000 word biopsy for each of your… Not a biopsy.

[Laughter oh, my God.]

[Mary] Well, you know, their backstory was…

[Amal] An exquisite corpse.

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Mary] All right. So your homework is I want you to explore what these different tools do. So I want you to write a scene where a character has a flashback that exposes some aspects of their backstory. Then I want you to reset that scene again. And this time, in that same scene, they are going to talk to another character about their backstory, so that they're having to deal with the ramifications of it in real time.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J. R. Johansson

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/04/30/12-18-gendered-dialect-with-j-r-johansson/

Key Points: Men and women have different motivations in communication. Women, in general, seek connections, while men seek status. Women use rapport talk, while men use report talk. Men tend to goal-oriented communications, while women are building bonds. When women join other women, the first comment is likely to be a compliment. With men, the first thing is likely to be a joking insult. Relations versus dominance. Most of this is socialization. Be aware that the exceptions are as interesting as the rules! Broad spectrum of engagement. When a woman says, "This is what happened to me," they are looking for empathy, sympathy, where a man is likely to answer, "Let me fix that for you." Women often apologize, are overly polite. They use equivocating, and self-deprecation. To learn the other side, read work written by and for that gender. Get someone to flag your writing. "Spend more time listening than you spend talking."

( All the talk, uncut! )
[Howard] Okay. We are out of time. Susan, do you have a writing prompt for us?
[Susan] Um...
[Mary] I actually…
[Howard] No, Jenn has the writing prompt for us.
[J. R.] I do. I have a writing prompt for you.
[I'm so sorry, I don't.] [Laughter] [We got you covered. Go to it.]
[J. R.] Okay. So, I think it's very, frequently when you see a matriarchy represented in fantasy, sci-fi, any of those type situations… It's really just a patriarchy with women in all of the roles. So write a scene with a matriarchy that has them communicating and dealing with each other in a little more of a female fashion. See how that goes.
[Howard] Outstanding. Fair listener, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 12.14: Controlling Pacing With Structure

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/04/03/12-14-controlling-pacing-with-structure/

Key Points: Pacing can be having more stuff happen, fulfilling promises more quickly. But it can also be structural, the form of the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Punctuation and paragraphing. Shape. Things. Comma, 1, period, 2, paragraph, 3. Pause. Lots of short sentences, faster breathing. No punctuation just running away -- a different kind of excitement. But sometimes, a long sentence will read faster than a bunch of short ones. Length of sentence. Paragraphing. Be careful of overuse, but a one sentence paragraph can drive a point home. Pacing reflects the character's experience. Watch the transitions between dialogue and narrative, which have their own pacing. Dialogue often embodies conflict. Beware overusing character beats -- trust the dialogue to be the focus. Sometimes what you don't say is more important than the dialogue. Let the readers fill in. Often we start a dialogue section with a quick zoom in, a little specific detail that tunes us in.

( Commas, periods, paragraphs... )

[Brandon] We are out of time for this podcast. Turned out to be super interesting. I'm going to give you some homework. I want you to take a piece of your writing, and I want you to revise it without changing a word. I want you to change the punctuation in the paragraphing, only. I want you to try to go both ways. Make things shorter, make things longer. Play with it. See what it does to have a whole bunch of single sentence paragraphs. See what it does to mash it all together. See what happens if you split some of your sentences into fragments, and put the other fragments later on… Or not later on, but on the next paragraph. Things like that. See what it does. Play with this. Learn to master this tool. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: sideways

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-01: Characterization and Differentiation, With Robin Hobb

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/10/12/11-bonus-01-characterization-and-differentiation-with-robin-hobb/

Key points: How do you make characters unique and interesting? How do you create characters? Some writers start with a plot or a what-if. Others start with a character. When a character steps out and starts talking, the world will form around them. Ask who are you? What formed you? What kind of family did you grow up with? What did your parents do for a living? Are you from urban, rural, or where? Wealthy, poor? Think about how a character's backstory influences them. A lot of it is your character's reactions to whatever is happening. When the story unfolds, trust yourself. Differentiating characters really means paying attention to the characters' backgrounds. What vocabulary do they use, how do they see things? Attitude, sentence structure, slang, cadence, it all makes a difference. Then add in description. And reactions to other characters and events. Reaction shots reveal character!

( In the depths of the character... )

[Dan] Do you have a writing exercise you can give to our listeners?
[Robin]'s Well, I think one of the things that's kind of fun to do is to pull some of your favorite books down from the shelf and look at the dialogue. Purposely kind of train your eyes so you're not looking at the he said, she said. Or, if you can find a long section where it's simply this person, that person, this person, that person, can you tell in the middle of the book who's speaking? What were the tricks that were used to do that? Or…
[Howard] Why isn't it working?
[Robin] Pull out a section of your old dialogue and look at it and say, "If I ran this all together in one paragraph, with the reader really be able to tell that somebody else was speaking the second part of it?" Just try it out. Talk out loud. There are some things that are written in dialogue and they just… When you try to actually say them, they don't work. There are some books that I really loved when I was a kid, and then I went to read them out loud to my own children and I suddenly realized that the dialogue was just terrible. The story was great, but I could not make it sound like something somebody would believably say to someone else. So it's try it out loud…
[Dan] That was my book she was reading…
[Laughter]
[Dan] By the way.
[Howard] She really enjoyed I Am Not a Serial Killer as a child.
[Laughter]
[Dan] She read it to her children at night.
[Robin] I read it to my children at night.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Awesome. Well, Robin, thank you so much for being here. This has been wonderful. Thank you to our audience. And to everyone out listening, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: draining

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

June 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.48: Bodies, Why? (Part III)
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.33: Building Tension
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.31: Everyone Has an Agenda
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.30: Know Your Characters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.29: The Job of Dialogue
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.21: Player Characters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts i
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.26: Taking the Chance, with David Weber
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.35: Cliché vs. Archetype
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J. R. Johansson
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 12.14: Controlling Pacing With Structure
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-01: Characterization and Differentiation, With Robin Hobb

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with dialogue

Writing Excuses 18.28: Writing Conversational Dialogue

Writing Excuses 17.48: Bodies, Why? (Part III)

Writing Excuses 17.34: Developing Subtext

Writing Excuses 17.33: Building Tension

Writing Excuses 17.31: Everyone Has an Agenda

Writing Excuses 17.30: Know Your Characters

Writing Excuses 17.29: The Job of Dialogue

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes

Writing Excuses 16.21: Player Characters

Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts i

Writing Excuses 15.26: Taking the Chance, with David Weber

Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale

Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition

Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 13.35: Cliché vs. Archetype

Writing Excuses 13.19: Backstories

Writing Excuses 12.18: Gendered Dialect, with J. R. Johansson

Writing Excuses 12.14: Controlling Pacing With Structure

Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-01: Characterization and Differentiation, With Robin Hobb

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