![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerWriting Excuses 19.45: A Close Reading on Structure: Tying It All Together
Key Points: Key takeaways? POV as structure. Fitting in to the genre, and changing it. What's the beating heart of your story? Parallelism. Permission to experiment. Know the rules, then step away as needed. Not taxonomies, conversations. Figure out how it works. Who am I writing for? Early drafts are a mess! Build it in layers. Take little bits of joy along the way.
[Season 19, Episode 45]
[Howard] I have three be a better writer tips. The first, write. The second, read. The third, get together with other writers. That third one can be tricky, but we've got you covered. At the Writing Excuses retreats, we offer classes, one-on-one sessions, and assorted activities to inspire, motivate, and recharge writers just like you. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 19, Episode 45]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Tying It All Together.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] This has been such a fun conversation. I have been enjoying this all through this series, of getting ready to really dig in. When you're thinking about these conversations, what's one of the big pieces that you took away that you're like, oh, I'm going to think about that a lot more now when I'm approaching my own work?
[Howard] For me, the big one was POV as structure. Because in Fifth Season, you have the usual scene switching of POV… I say usual. It's pretty common, you switch POV when you switch chapters, and that defines a structure. But there is… There's an all underlying superstructure there that we weren't expecting, part of the big turn, and there's an element of that that is hugely thematic. So I guess that's the big thing I came away with.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think for me, and this might be evident from how much I talked last episode…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] But, for me, the thing I think so much about with this book is how it fits in the genre, and what it has done to the genre and the excitement I have for books that will… That are coming out and will be coming out in conversation with this book. Moving away from restoration fantasy to a different model is so exciting to me, and I'm really interested to see where that goes and how that continues to develop.
[Erin] I think I'm going to be thinking a little bit about trying to figure out what the beating heart of my manuscripts are. Like, you know what I mean? Is it in this one… We were saying, like, it's the breaking apart of the world, it's the breaking apart of the Earth.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And you see it resonate so many different times. I'd love to think about what is that for my work, and how can I make it so when we… We talked about in one episode when you see it from all angles, you're still seeing that same central theme and central idea.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's… That one was also very exciting to me. I think the thing for me that I had honestly not thought about before we started talking about it and seeing examples in this book was parallelism. I've talked about symmetry all the time… I think about that, I think about mirroring. But having those parallels and the different ways that things get represented… That I hadn't thought about using as a conscious choice going into something. I'm very excited about that as a tool to use that I haven't been consciously using.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's really one of my favorites, and it's one we've seen throughout the entire series of close readings. But, in this one in particular, I think N. K. Jemison does something really interesting and really just integrated into each of the storylines. All of the beats of the plots.
[Howard] The… Along with the point of view and parallelism, the shift in… Using second person and using third person, using both of them, threw me a little bit at first, and then it became a structural signaling device. And the big thing that I took away from it is, hey, Howard, that one project that you've shelved because you can't figure out whether you're allowed to change tenses and change from first to second to third person? The answer is, you're allowed to do this. Whether or not I do it well? Whether or not any of you ever see it, is a completely separate question. But, this book gave me permission to try some things that I look forward to failing at.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really good point. The… This book, also, when I read it the first time, gave me permission to start thinking about structure in a different way. Up to that point, I had very much been thinking seven point plot structure. That was kind of my go to. I knew that I was using a structure that… I was using it as a prompt in many ways, to help me spot for things. With this book, I think what Erin was talking about before, with that beating heart, that… That this was the book that made me start thinking, okay, but what if… What if I didn't use someone else's structure? What if I didn't use something that was existing? And went into it and made my own thing. So, like the model that I'm working on now, I have scenes that I want to hit, but I'm deliberately not using a three act or seven act structure, I'm setting my breaks where the emotion is pulling it through, rather than… And I'm letting that beating heart of the story pull it through. But, having said that, one thing that I want to flag for readers is that I don't think N. K. Jemison could have written this as her first book.
[DongWon] Oh, absolutely not. This is what, her sixth book, seventh book, something like that. Yeah. I mean, she had two full series before this, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and then Killing Moon. So, like, she's deep into her career by this point, and was already quite successful as an author. Right? Then, I think, as we're going through this, a lot of this is, I think, yes, giving permission to break rules, but she's also showing such a mastery of the rule as she does it. She'll set it up, and then she'll break it. Right? I think that if you want to break rules is something that's really important of communicating, yeah, I know what I'm doing. Watch me do this, though. You know what I mean? There's so much the energy of how you can get away with quote unquote breaking the rules. So, I want people to read this and feel permission to try different things, to experiment, to not feel tied to a single tense, a single point of view, a single plot structure. Do some stuff that just feels really wild, that feels different and really stretch and grow. But do remember that you have to be good at the rule first, and understand the rule, so that you know what it is you're stepping away from.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Although, I am going to push back on that slightly, just a language thing, and hearken back to something Dan said much earlier in the season, which was that we want to talk about tools, not the rules.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] That's, I think, something that Nora shows is that she basically went into the hardware store and said, "Gimme your tools. I'm gonna make something."
[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, like, a tool is, there are ways you're supposed to use them in ways you're not. You can use it in ways you're not supposed to. There are risks to that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You have to know what you're doing to get away with it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You do not want to cut off fingers.
[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] At least not unin…
[DongWon] Not your own, and not on accident.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Sometimes you just have to try it in order to learn that that's not… Should you open the glass jar with a hammer? Maybe.
[DongWon] It'll work.
[Erin] If you try it and then… Hum. Like, there's some… There were some downsides to that process. It didn't quite work the way I thought. Okay. Next time, same thing, but in a bowl. Okay, sure, like maybe you don't learn exactly the lessons…
[DongWon] Just know you need a broom nearby.
[Erin] Exactly. Like… But then through that, like, who knows? Maybe the broom, to kill this analogy, is, like, turns out to be the thing that you end up using. So I think there's a lot of times… I love what Howard said about, like, the permission to try to play. And no one will know, like, what you write in the dark. If you write something in, like, fifth person, which is a new tense…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Maybe… So…
[DongWon] Fifth person?
[Erin] It's like [garbled] season.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] You've got first person…
[DongWon] Perspective that has broken off of other perspectives…
[Erin] If you can figure that out, go for it. [Garbled]
[DongWon] Does it tap into the cosmic mind of the being that doesn't experience time as a linear…
[Howard] It's like second person subjunctivitis…
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] the only time [garbled] when you're alone…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And with a net.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And if you figure it out, look, come out and let us know, and we will have you on the podcast. I promise.
[DongWon] If you figure it out, publish it. You're going to win a Nobel Prize
[Mary Robinette] I have created the fifth person…
[Howard] Hey, let's take a break for a moment because when we come back, I want to make a food metaphor.
[DongWon] So, this week, I want to talk to you about one of my favorite movies I've seen this year, and possibly ever. It's a movie called I Saw the TV Glow. It's out from A24, from the director Jane Schoenbrun. It's her second movie. She's a queer trans director, and this movie is very much for the queers. It's like a really beautiful story. Really, it's technically a horror movie, because I think no one knows what else to call it, but there is very little in it that's, like, actively scary. At the same time, that is a profoundly unsettling experience for a very wide range of reasons. Basically, it's a story of two young people who are obsessed with a particular TV show. It's sort of set in the late nineties, and the TV show is very Buffy the Vampire Slayer like. So it's a movie that's a lot about our relationship to the media that we consume, our relationship to each other, and to our own sense of identity, and how that changes over time, and what do we owe each other and what do we owe ourselves. It's an incredibly beautiful movie. It's so well done. It's really… Has such a specific incredible visual palette. The soundtrack is absolutely killer. I cannot stop listening to it. It's full of bangers. So I can't recommend I Saw the TV Glow high enough. It just hit [VOD?] And it will probably be on streaming soon, so you should be able to watch it.
[Howard] While I was reading this book, I was experimenting with some nondairy non-wheat sauces for Sandra. And realized I needed words. I didn't even know what certain things were called. So I went googling and I found out that there were five French… And they call them the mother sauces. The more I drilled down into that, the more my inner taxonomist began to scream, because one of the sauces is a water and oil emulsion, and the other four are all… All begin with a roux. All begin with flour and butter thickening. I was like, that's not five mother sauces. That's two mother sauces. It should have been a mother and a father sauce. The point here is that when you are making something… The whole French cuisine thing, all of the quote daughter sauces, you start from an understanding of the sauce that you came from to make something new. And you don't step too far from it, or nobody will know what they're eating.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And so I was ha… I had that whole epiphany sitting over the pot making a sauce, realizing it has to still be food when I'm done. You know what else is a water and oil emulsion? Industrial lubricants. Mixtures of water and oil that are designed to provide a coolant and lubri… You can't eat those.
[Mary Robinette] That is not where my brain went with industrial lubricants.
[Howard] The point here though is that as we learn these tools, and as we file them for ourselves, we need to know why we're using them. We need to know how people in the past have used them. DongWon, as you categorized these families of genre books, I feel like that's super important for us to remember.
[DongWon] Well, that's why… I think it's important that it's not taxonomies, it's conversations. Right? Genre is a conversation that we are all participating in. All the fights we see between different parts of the conversation, different subcategories, different subgenres, who's initiating it, who's leading it, and who's determining it, all of those are because the conversation that were in feels very natural and very important to us. Right? So when you talk about the mother sauces, it's not so much that here are the five categories of sauce that everything needs to fit into, it's this is in conversation with the veloute, this is in conversation with the bechamel.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's like those conversations… And once you say that, I see it on a menu, and I'm like, okay. This descending in this kind of order. Right? This is epic fantasy, this is adventure fantasy, this is romance. All these things create a conversation that I can then jump in and I know what language we're using, I know what terms we're agreeing on. And the comp titles that you're talking about so often are the most rigid form of that, the most specific form of that. Because we need it, for, like, a business purpose. But I do think that they are useful still in certain ways of letting us understand who it is we're talking to and why we're having this conversation. Right? I think military science fiction is having a different conversation than postcolonial fantasy is.
[Erin] I was thinking about comp titles, and I think they're really important, obviously, for business. But I think it's also really cool to think about, not just the what of a comp title, but also maybe some hows.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin], so, like, there's, like, my book is like X plus Y, but also, like, I would love to have, like, the word styling of this, and the plot of that, and the character relationships of this third thing because I think that helps us focus not on, like… If you're not in the middle of selling a book, like, comparing yourself to the end product of somebody else, but trying to understand the process. Joining the conversation versus sort of listening and then thinking, like, well, why isn't anybody talking to me?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Part of it is figuring out how it works. I think that's so important, and why I've loved doing this reading series, because it really got us into the how does it work.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] And that's the thing that, like, I think ultimately I will remember even if I forget the individual books, which I won't, because there amazing. But, like, even if I did somehow…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, I think I still will remember, like, the tools and the craft that came with them.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that… That thinking, again, more consciously about the traditions that your writing in, which is one of the things that we were looking at with the Fifth Season. It's like, oh, yeah. If I think about that, if I think about who I want to be writing for, which I always think about kind of generally… I usually am also writing for one specific person. But if I am thinking more consciously about that, and about the ways in which I want to invert something that somebody else has done, it gives me a broader palette to play with. That's fun. I have really, really enjoyed the way we've been able to dig into this book, and I honestly wish we had more episodes that we could do with it.
[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's such a big, rich, dense text that there's so many things and so many conversations we could have here.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] One of the things that I'm looking forward to, and I… As of this moment, we haven't done it yet, is interviewing N. K. Jemison, and taking all of these thoughts that we've had across all of these episodes and trying to distill that into a conversation where we find out what really happened.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Yes. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Because almost certainly, what we think the process was is not the process that went into creating this book.
[DongWon] Well, one thing I want to reiterate for our listeners. We've kind of hit this a couple of times, but this… Howard, you were quoting from the acknowledgments of the book at one point, about how incredibly difficult the process of writing this book was for N. K. Jemison. We can look at this and say, this is a masterpiece, that this is so exceptionally well done, and X, Y, Z. And as a reader, that can feel very intimidating. Right? But what I want to remind you all is that this was hard work that she did over years and a lot of careful thought and…
[Mary Robinette] And nearly threw away.
[DongWon] And nearly threw away. This book was, I think, a real struggle in a real way to get to where she wanted it to be. That's because writing really good books is hard. Writing really exciting fiction, breaking new ground, is all very difficult. Especially when you're trying to find a fifth POV to write from. Finding that territory is difficult. So if you're sitting there, writing, and being like, I don't know how to structure like this. I only know how to do five act structures, seven point plot structure, whatever it is. That's okay. We're not saying that you have to do anything like this. We're saying, look at this, there is so much we can learn from this. But also, God damn, this is hard.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] There's a piece, an art piece, called Ink Wing. It's framed, hanging on the wall in our house, which was done by my daughter while she was at art school, or during the time when she was in art school. She was at home at the time. And which she had given up on, was furious at to the point that she threw it and it frisbeed and ended up on the roof of the house. Then she climbed up and pulled it down from the roof of the house. In the way we've framed it, you can't quite see the bent corner. But I love that piece, because it's gorgeous. I can't see flaws in it. I can't see anything wrong with it. Yet I know personally the artist who created it was so upset at it that she threw it onto the roof of my house.
[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that a lot of people forget about. That there is that point in the process. One of the other things that I want you to take away from this, when you're thinking about your structure, and your writing something, and you're like, oh, this is a mess. For those of you who do crafting, as anyone walked into your crafting room while you were in the process?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] You know what that looks like.
[DongWon] I do not want people looking at my wood shop halfway through.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. It is an absolute mess. That is what early drafts are like. That is what the early structure is like. So you have freedom to be messy in these early drafts. The finished product that we have been all going Whew! Ha! That's something that came after many iterations. So remember that while you're working on this, if you take nothing else away from this structure discussion, remember that you can work it in layers.
[Erin] I think also that there is a way to take little bits of joy along the way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I have been learning to play the guitar this year. I am quite bad, I will say, still.
[Laughter]
[Erin] That there are chords that I do know now how to make with my fingers without thinking about it that I didn't before. One time I was strumming badly and I was like, but I actually know this is a G chord and I didn't before. I was like it is important to take a minute to marvel at the things you have mastered, the things you have learned, the things you feel good about. Because there's always something more you could be doing, there's always somebody writing quote unquote a better book. There's always somebody else doing something you wish you could. But only you can do the things that you have done. I think there's just something so important to take that with you and celebrate yourself. Because you rock.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] With that, I think we're going to give you homework. We're actually going to give you homework with your own work in progress.
[Mary Robinette] I want you to reverse engineer an outline for your work in progress. This doesn't have to be incredibly detailed, this can just be like here's the one important thing in this chapter. Much like we had you do with at the beginning of this where we had you look at the table of contents for this book. Then I want you to look at that outline that you've got, and I want you to try to add one parallel.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
