Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-38-an-interview-with-charlie-jane-anders

 

Key points: A sequel? Backburner. Multiple POV and omniscient POV. Hidden narrators. The book grows up with the characters. Whimsy! Humor. Silly, noir, goofy! Pair humor with other stuff. Scientists and witches, lasers and spell books. One zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000... overload and boring. Add emotion and relationship. Fill the silence with active listening. Beat-by-beat plot? Many iterations. Little bits of information...

 

[Season 20, Episode 38]

 

[unknown] I swear, Detective, I was nowhere near the Polo Lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered. I was on a Who Dun It mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy. You, too, can join us on our next deadly cruise, February 6, 2026, seven nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas. Call now, if you dare, 317-457-6150 or go to whodunitcruises.com.

 

[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 20, Episode 38]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.

 

[Mary Robinette] And we're very excited to have a special guest, Charlie Jane Anders, joining us today.

[Charlie Jane] Hi.

[Mary Robinette] So, for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds in the Sky. And we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process, and to talk about tone, and some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when we're…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When playing with this book. And I think it… It turns out this is fairly timely, since you're working on a sequel right now.

[Charlie Jane] I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel, and people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster… By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus some deleted stuff from All the Birds. But it's… I wrote about 30,000 words, and I kind of… I have to kind of stop and think about it. So, that's on the back burner. I have other projects I'm probably going to work on first. But that's… I've written a chunk of a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. [Garbled]

[DongWon] Interesting. I mean… We're such huge fans of the first book, and it's been such a delight talking about it in the past few weeks here.

[Charlie Jane] That's awesome.

[DongWon] So, I'm very excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Eventually.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] At some point, there will be a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers, who are like, oh. Oh, I'm not the only one who does 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go huh.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I promised… Like, I decided to promise people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster this thing as a preorder reward. And so I always kind of knew I was going to, like… Just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel. And so I was like I know I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done. I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000, and it just kind of ballooned to 30,000. Because, that was just the section I was writing got to be that long. But… Yeah. I mean, it's going to be… I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work, and I'm going to have to… I'll wait until I'm at the point where I like feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, do you want to talk about the… Some of the work that you did with the first novel?

[Charlie Jane] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Because… There were a bunch of things that we were very excited about. When we picked it, one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one POV…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And because you were tipping into omniscient POV. It's something that we don't see used a lot. But I felt that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around the story that takes place over decades.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean… It's interesting. Like, I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious, kind of dipping into omniscient POV with that book. Like… And I didn't do it that much. I did it here and there, like, there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscient, and, like, I go much deeper into that omniscient thing. Like I'm just much more leaning into that. But I… I feel like it worked. Really, I thought it worked pretty well sparingly. Like, I thought doing it, like, once in a while, was really like fun, and if I tried to push it, it might have gotten… I don't know. I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV. I think for reasons that are kind of misguided.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] But I think they think that omniscient narrator is going to just like literally be omniscient and, like, just tell you everything that's going on. Which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators.

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] Like, they don't… Like, there's always a degree of, like, selectiveness  in what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is. Like, even going back to when it was more ubiquitous. But, yeah, I mean… There's a scene in All the Birds in the Sky which I'm sure you all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] And they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes, and then the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed, they actually guessed right and he is an assassin. He's actually… Wants to kill them. And, like, that was, like, I was like, oh, this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading. And instead, I don't know how many people have come up to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked. Which is so funny. Because I was like… I almost cut it out, I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna make people stop reading the book. It's gonna like… It's gonna destroy the book. So, for me, to just like throw that in. And I just… I felt like it was a fun playful thing. And I think the playfulness was an important thing with the omniscient narrator in general. And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger…

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] To people on the Internet who were saying you can't do X, Y, and Z, and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there's, like, a very, very vocal and very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed and I think you're exactly right, that there is such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience. I can totally see why people… I mean, that moment jumped out at me too. It's such a great little moment, and so deftly sliding from one perspective to another, and then opening up more of the world. And I want to go back to something that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator not really being quote unquote omniscient. They're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective. How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character then?

 

[Charlie Jane] I mean, I think that like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kinda become a character in the book at some point. And, like… I've read, like, three or four novels published in the past year, and I'm… I think of the title of one of them off the top of my head, but I don't know… It's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I think of the title of. But I've read, like, a few books in the past year where the narrator appears to be omniscient, and then at a certain point, like, halfway through the book, you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from there vantage point of like… And, like, that's a trick that I see people do lately, of, like, oh, you think it's an omniscient narrator, but it's actually Fred. Who, Fred, knows a lot of stuff and just hasn't introduced themself yet. Just kind of like hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book. And, obviously, I feel like it's been out for long enough that, like, The Scent of Bright Doors. You don't find out who the narrator is until almost the end of the book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Like, I feel like that's a trend right now, the hidden narrator. The narrator who is actually… He's a specific viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Charlie Jane] Sorry.

[DongWon] Every single time, I find that really delightful and enjoyable. So… Maybe I'm part of the trend here.

[Charlie Jane] I've always [garbled] Yeah. Like, I feel like it could get overdone at some point. Maybe we'll be like, okay, enough of the hidden narrator. Like… I definitely… I think, yeah. I really like that. But I also think that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator. Like, have a narrator who just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or a person who just is in a privileged position has a degree of what appears to be omniscient, and then is like, ha ha ha. And there's probably a version of All the Birds where it turns out that it's narrated by Peregrine, the AI, and like… I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago, and one of the things I toyed with was, like, maybe for me to have a narrator speak up occasionally. It could be Peregrine, the AI, as narrator [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because Peregrine does have this privileged viewpoint. But I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient narrator. But I think… Like, I very much came up… Like, one of the traditions that kind of influences me is the tradition of, like, loosely, like, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who at least when I was young, they were compared a lot. In fact, how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him, and they're obviously [garbled] in some ways, but they do have that kind of… They do have a narrator who is chatty and over shares and kind of like… Often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways. And I love that. I think it's really fun and funny, and I think we've lost something by not… Like, I think it's… There… It's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like omniscient narration, there also are just busybodies who give writing advice with a little perspective where there like, these are the things you must never do, and, like… And those people… They're… I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Or learn to be less prescriptive, really. But, yeah, I like the playfulness, I like the… I think when you're writing… But to return to your question, DongWon, because I didn't really answer it. When you have… When you're not in a particular character's POV, I think it really helps if the narrator has, like, maybe not opinions necessarily, but, like, they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular, like… They're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not quite like within the confines of what people in the scene know. And so the narrators sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information. And so I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.

 

[DongWon] Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again, like, is it another layer in between you and the text?

[Charlie Jane] It's a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it's not me me…

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] It's not like me being, like, hi, is Charlie Jane, I'm going to tell you stuff. But it is kind of… It is my kind of… Obviously, everything in the story come from me in the end, of course, as always is the case. I think it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any other characters, I guess, is what I would say. But it's still not the authorial viewpoint, necessarily. And, like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff. Or you can have a narrator who provides misleading information or… I feel like a part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to, like, spoil the story, or, like, tell you too much, and, like, omniscient narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you… Like, give you more perspective, but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray. Or whatever. Or… I don't know. Um.. Yyeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator, for me, specifically, was the way you were using it to shape tone. Because in the first part of the book, when they are little, it takes on this kind of swami British, like, children's fantasy novel. Or children's… And then as we move, the omniscient narrator… There's a continuity of tone, but also, the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go. So that when we get to them as adults, we get very few intrusions of the omniscient narrator. They just appear at just, I think, very key points, because the rest of the time, it is stylistically more like an quote adult novel. Which is either… Which tends to be, in science fiction and fantasy, tight third person. Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters. That was something I thought a lot about, for sure, and I thought… I mean, I dialed it way back, like, in the earlier drafts, like, the first couple chapters, like, the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairytale style. Like, almost, Once upon a time, there were two sisters. It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that. And people were like this is too hard. Like… It's too jarring. That transition from, like, straight up fairytale, like, kind of to something more grown-up. I also, like, when I had the more fairytale stuff in the beginning, the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center, because I was going to start out with, like, two girls in the woods, and, like, it's very fairytale and… But Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer. And, like, just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page 1 that this is not that story. And in the end, I cut that, because I ended up not going quite that far into fairytale land and it felt intrusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page 1. But… And actually, Roberta is not really a serial killer in the final draft. She's just… She has killed someone, but there was extenuating circumstances. He kind of deserved it. But, yeah. I mean… But the tone kind of evolving was something that I really struggled with. And, in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with. Like, I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy and in fact in my subsequent works, I really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit, because I felt like I… It… That can kind of take over and it can become, like, the exclusion of, like, character and emotion and stuff. Like, I feel like I had to pare back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully… Like, fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and… So there was a lot more kind of… For lack of a better word, twee kind of whimsical cuteness in the first draft, and I really dialed it way back, and, like, only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we go ahead and take our break, and when we come back, let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.

 

[Mary Robinette] And as part of our break, Charlie Jane, I think you're going to tell us about your newest book?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Thank you. So, my newest book, which came out on August nineteenth, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well. It does get a little darker and sadder in places. It is about a young trans woman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she's a witch. And her mother, Serena, has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened. And Serena [Janie?] decides the way to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of embrace life is to teach her mother how to do magic. Which, magic being magic, has some unpredictable results, and magic is kind of a mirror for, like, your desires and your sense of self in this book. And so, not surprisingly, Janie's mother comes to use it very differently than Janie does, and that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflict. But there's also, just, like, a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff, mixed with a lot of cozy queer vibes and, like, queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as, like, we get flashbacks about Janie's mom when she was a young woman, and also Janie is researching queers of the eighteenth century. Which turns out there was a lot of them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] So, yeah, it's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just, like, this icon from your childhood.

[Mary Robinette] It sounds so good. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.

[Charlie Jane] Yay.

[DongWon] [garbled] That sounds really amazing, and just what we need.

[Charlie Jane] Well, thank you.

[Mary Robinette] Let me remind you, that is Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor, and where to place it, and how much to dial it up or down, and it's a fun, but complicated, subject sometimes. When you were working on All the Birds in the Sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I mean, I think from the jump, it was a very whimsical novel. And, like, I was writing a different novel… Like, what happened is, backing up slightly. I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir like paranormal detective… Not quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel, in the kind of vein of, like, Jim Butcher or Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, or the Octave… The October Daye novels. Like, that kind of stuff. And it was like… We're talking 2011. I was working on this urban fantasy noir book, and I was walking in the park, and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head. And I had to go write down a bunch of stuff about it. And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently. The urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places. It had a lot of very silly stuff, but it also had that more noir tone. So I always knew that this was going to be more whimsical. And I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun, kind of almost goofy, novel. And, like I said earlier drafts were much goofier. And I feel like, as a writer, I am someone… At least I have been someone to whom goofy humor comes really naturally. Like, my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with, like, ridiculous premises and, like,… Just like the silliest stuff  I could come up with, and they weren't very good. They didn't have… The characters are one-dimensional. Often, they just ended, like they would just, like, oh…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And that's the… Story's over now. Go home, folks. Nothing to see here. Oh, you wanted resolution. Oh, well, too bad.

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] But, yeah. No, I was really good at goofy, zany humor, and it… Basically, I would say that the course of, like mo… The first, like, I don't know how many years of my career, from, like, when I started writing fiction seriously to All the Birds in the Sky, I was learning to kind of… Learning to pair humor with other stuff. And eventually kind of dial back the humor, because I got the feeling… And I got feedback from people that the humor was… That I was like sacrificing character and emotion for the sake of humor and that… And so now, I think, I am… When I use humor, it's something that I… Is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally. But originally, it was just like the automatic thing that I always did. And then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that [garbled] or under that or whatever. And I think that… I mean, there's a version of All the Birds… Like, in my very, very first crack at All the Birds in the Sky, it was going to be just like complete, like, campy comedy of like scientists and witches battling it out with, like, lasers versus, like, spell books versus, like wizar… Like, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody's just like… There's like every silly trope from both genres, just like bursting out all over the place. And that would have been actually very boring. Because one zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000 zany tropes is just like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] It just becomes… It just… Yeah. It just becomes, like, overload and it's boring and… Functionally, they all start to feel the same. Like, an elf and an alien are not that different, unless you put a lot of effort in making them different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Charlie Jane] And so, yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be… And I had just written Six Months, Three Days, my short story that [garbled] attention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional. And so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it. And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of whimsical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of, like, being… Especially the main part of the novel, when they're growing up, being in their twenties, and just, like, getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And, like, you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life, kind of, but life still kind of sucks.

[Mary Robinette] You also have to be an adult.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] Like, yeah. Being an adult is just… Yeah. Anyway. And so, yeah, and I feel like I really tried to have more of the humor come out of character, and I'll give a very specific example that I think I've probably touched on before. There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to, like… His relationship with his girlfriend Serafina is unraveling, like, they are just… Things are not working out between them. And there is a moment where the narrator… Like, they just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be, like, a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging as he's just over… He's trying too hard. And there's a moment in an earlier draft, where the narrator said… Says, Lawrence tried to fill the silence with active listening.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Which I thought was a [garbled] line, because, like, you can't do active listening if, like, nobody's talking. Right? And then I was like, you know what? That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump. What if it is Lawrence reflecting to himself, I wish I could fill the silence with active listening. Or I am… Or just realizing, in his own mind, that he is trying to do this thing that's impossible. Then it's got pathos as well as humor…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up. This is like… This thing I'm trying to do is not working.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And by changing… Just changing, like, three words, from, like, the narrator, like, standing above and, like, looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing ruefully, kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is… He's messing up, and that this is not working. That just made it… It was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And so that was a lightbulb moment for me, of just, like, oh, the humor can actually come from within the characters, and the characters can be part… They can be in on the joke to some extent, or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way. Kind of. I don't know.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that, because I can see now that you've pointed it out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book. Right? I mean, there's about six different tones in the book. Because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories. Right? And I can sort of see that… You talk about the early version as being very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy in play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it in a lot of ways. Right? Like, that original concept you had of, like, laser guns versus spell books, big explosive battle. That kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, it's quite scary and really upsetting, actually.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, like, we watch a witch die, pretty horribly, like on screen someone who's been really interesting and compelling. God, I love the way her magic works in the book, too.

[Charlie Jane] Oh.

[DongWon] But then I can sort of see where you start with this idea of, like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it. You don't lose the crazy energy of it, because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns, and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange. But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get out the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody. Right? All of those things that, to me, were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city, of trying to figure out how to be in a community with people, and all of that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves, while they are… Have been influenced by someone…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Else's idea of what the best version of themself looks like. And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of… It's like, aha! That's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It's not just a spoonful of sugar. Right? But there is a little bit of that, like, that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit. And it's interesting, because you can… I think both are failure states in terms of only being whimsy and only being lightness, and then only being darkness and grittiness. Right? Like, I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the author's trying to get at, if it's just, like, overwhelming violence and horror and upset versus overwhelming just charm and whimsy and… Both are hard to dig your sort of, like, teeth into. Right? To continue with food metaphors here. It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because, like, if you look at this book on a beat-by-beat plot basis, it's very dark and grim.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I guess so.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like two different kids who were… Who dealt with very different forms of abuse from neglect.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean…

[Mary Robinette] And then the… And increasing, like, escalating bullying, escape to places in which they experience different kinds of bullying. They have a brief… They both get a brief heyday of everything seems to be going well. But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationships. And then the world ends.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's pretty…

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Bleak. But it doesn't feel bleak while you're reading it. I mean, a couple of places that it does, but it is [garbled]

[DongWon] Only in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That, as we feel that heaviness before heading into the next sort of emotional beat. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.

[Charlie Jane] Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] That was so… I mean that… I think I went into Roald Dahl mode a little bit, like Roald Dahl…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] Books was like stories that I read when I was a kid, of, like, people being really kind of tortured…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] By adults, or by each other, and, like… I don't know. I… Yeah, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me, dude, that was like… That was really a lot. And this is the thing, I… With every book I write, like, I don't know… Like I just… I don't know until I… Until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it. There's some parts where there like oh, this is funny, and other people are like, that's really horrifying…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] And I'm like, oh. Okay. Like I just… I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell sometimes when you're inside a story.

[Mary Robinette] It's hard to tell.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. God.

[DongWon] When you're inside it… And then… I think it's also sometimes what community you're in. You know what I mean?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] And if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles can sometimes not travel well and certain other communities.

[Charlie Jane] That's very true. Yeah. And like… Yeah… I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like I'm just going to do all of it and see what I can get away with, kind of.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Can I ask you… You said there's one version where it's like this, and there's one version where it's like that. Do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?

[Charlie Jane] I mean…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] For that… For… When… I'm going to send people… When, I'm hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material. I had to… Like, one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like… Scenes that almost made it into the book, like, they got very close, but they were cut for link reasons. But also, there's a whole… Like, I'm calling it an alternate ending. It's like I feel a little bit bigger than that. It's like a whole other, like, version of the climax with a lot of stuff leading up to it that was different. And I… So the other day, I was looking back through the draft folder and I have things labeled, like, sixth draft, seventh draft, but it's very arbitrary.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] What you consider a draft, what you consider… What's just another pass. But it definitely went through, even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes… Went through editing with Tor. It had already gone through a bunch of different versions before that, for sure. Like it had already gone through multiple iterations. And, like, there were versions that were very different. Like people who get that PDF are going to be like, whoa. This book was going to be much weirder. Like, I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be. Like the… There was a very different version where, like, the climax is very different. And the plot is much more elaborate. Like, I think I dealt… I pared back the plot a lot to try to reach something that was more kind of… Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. Speaking of paring things back, okay, it is probably time for us to pare back to our homework. Did you have some homework for our fair listeners?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes… Like, intrudes into the scene a little bit with, like, little touches of omniscient, I thought… Think it would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and, just like add, like, five or six narrative asides that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know in the scene. Just like little bits of information. It doesn't have to be, like, major reveals, it could just be, like, oh, and by the way, this guy ran over someone's dog and nobody knew, and he got away with it, or something like… Just little bits of information that there's no way that anybody… Any of the characters, other than maybe the character we're revealing a secret of, could have known. Or, unbeknownst to these characters, three blocks away, this was happening. I don't know. But make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like… Not… Not just like complete like random information, but stuff that's, like, relevant to the scene and hopefully adds, like, a little bit of humor, but also, just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's happening in the scene.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Charlie Jane] And just see how that looks, see if… What it does to that scene.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's great homework.

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/20/17-8-the-alchemy-of-creativity/

 

Key Points: The Alchemy of Creativity, aka how do you translate from one medium to another and keep the original spark. How do you turn the movie in your head into compelling prose? How do you take a script you are handed and turn it into comics or storyboards? Movie in your head people, remember that prose needs room to breathe. Pay attention to the difference between ideas and execution. Sometimes you need to write down what the movie in your head shows you. How do you transform ideas into thing and keep the excitement? Rough draft! Use 10-year-old boy watches a movie outlining! Write the part that excites you. Dessert first writing! That's one way to capture the lightning in a bottle. Sometimes drafting is the slog, and revisions are where you put the lightning back in. Sometimes you may need to change the POV or tense to make something work. I.e., find the right framework so you can execute it. Make sure your bottle is shaped right to catch the lightning. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 8]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Alchemy of Creativity.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] The Alchemy of Creativity. How do you translate things from one medium to another and keep the original spark? Meg, you pitched this to us. How do we do that? What are we even talking about? I'm confused.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Okay. So this isn't me saying, "How do you turn a book into a movie?" Because I'm sure we could talk circles around that for hours. But on a smaller scale, how do you turn the movie in your head into compelling prose? Or, how do you take a script you're handed and turn it into something like comics or storyboards? What are some of the things you have to personally consider when you're going from one form of a story into another?

[Kaela] Okay. So I am a very movie in my head person, which I think most people have… Recognize when they read Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls, because it's a very visual book. Now, one of the challenges that this gives me is that sometimes I get… What's the word? Micromanage-y about everything that's happening. Because in prose there needs to be room to breathe. You can just say someone crossed the room, you don't have to say exactly how. You try to deliver the exact experience that you're seeing in your head, it will overwhelm people and it will ruin the delivery. Because I'm like I want to tell you every little twitch of their facial expression, because I see it so clearly in my head. But doing that robs the reader of the opportunity both to see it in their own way and it over crowds… Like… It completely over crowds the delivery. So that's something I really have to watch. I have to pull myself back.

[Sandra] That's fascinating to me, because I do not have a movie in my head.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] I have a feel of the scene or an emotion of the character. So… Then there's also the sound of the words in the feel of the words in my head. So it's all about the words and the feel and the interaction of those things for me. So, right there, we've got a difference in alchemy and approaches which I love hearing about. Because until you said that, people talk about having movies in their head or how they read a book and see it in their heads, and I just don't. I don't see things. I don't visualize. But I feel it. I feel whether the words feel right, whether the character's emotion is correct on the page or whether my theme is being expressed.

[Megan] So you have to translate this more spacious emotion into words. How do you go about doing that?

[Sandra] This is where I wish I'd thought that through before…

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] [garbled One of my?] Favorite things about Writing Excuses is having an epiphany in front of the microphone and then not being able to follow up on it, because it's still an epiphany. I can't take this apart yet. Let me say this. Another way to articulate what we are talking about here is the difference between ideas and execution. It doesn't matter where I get my ideas. I'm full of ideas. I never run out of ideas. The movie in my head is always running and it has a soundtrack and it has a rumble track and it is always there. How do I execute on that huge library of interconnected and unrelated and sloppy information in order to create a thing that delivers an experience that some part of me will look at and say, "Ah, yes. That is the experience of that thing as extracted from the brain… That is the experience we meant to come across." That is where… What's the expression… That's why they pay me the big bucks.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't actually pay me the big bucks, but having a career as a creative lies not in having good ideas, but being able to do what Meg has called alchemy, [garbled] execution.

[Sandra] Yeah, that's… This is one of those places where you have to learn your own creative process. I really love that we have already two competing processes that are… Not competing but different to compare. Because I can't… My process is going to have to look different than Kaela's process is, because we're starting from different places and our brains just work differently. If I spend a lot of my craft learning time trying to see a movie in my head so that I can then follow Kaela's process, that is wasted effort. If I… I don't need to see a movie in my head, I can move with feelings and emotions.

 

[Megan] So, for work, I generally have to translate other people's words to visuals. I'm a storyboard artist for animation, which means that every six weeks somebody hands me a script and says, "Turn this into a movie." So I actually have a couple extra steps than most of my coworkers, because I read the script, watch a movie in my head, and I'll take out a pen or a pencil and a mark on the script itself where I'm imagining the camera is cutting. Then I have to write up detailed list of my shots. Like, okay, medium camera up close, foreground is this, background is this. Wide camera, these characters doing this. I'll pinpoint like emotional moments, and I'll star them, all this stuff. I have some friends who can read a script and instantly just board it finalize. They can just go immediately from one to the other. But it's, like, personally, I have to translate it into two or three different creative languages before I can get to my final set up, because it is a, for me, a process of turning a script into storyboards.

[Sandra] Yeah. On Twitter, just recently, I was reading a thread from Ursula Vernon talking about how she writes and how her writing process can't actually speed up anymore because she can't sleep often enough. Because she will, like, as she's falling asleep, the characters talk in her head and the story progresses. Then when she gets up in the morning, she just writes down the thing that her brain did while she was falling asleep. So there's no way for her to write any faster, because she can only sleep so much. That's fascinating to me because Howard does the same thing. He will fall asleep with character dialogue and things going in his head. I can't do that. I have to shut my brain off and turn off the stories in order to be able to fall asleep. Because if I let the stories run in my head, they will keep me awake. For… Hours! And hours, and hours. Then I will have anxiety and I will have to get up and write down the thing because I'm afraid I will lose it while I sleep.

[Howard] See, my method is more, look, characters, if you guys aren't going to tell me a nice story at bedtime, I'm just going to have anxiety instead because I'm going to spin on real stuff, and that's boring. So… Have some fun.

[Yeah. See, this is…]

[Howard] My brain is your playground. Go! Don't break anything.

[Sandra] This is actually a skill I would like to learn. You know what I was talking about… I don't need to see a mov… I don't need to learn how to see a movie in my head. But that one I would actually like to learn, because it sounds like a nicer way to fall asleep than me with my wrestling thoughts every night. So… Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Emptying the head is hard.

[Emptying is hard]

 

[Megan] So you've thought up a great moment for your story and you can feel the emotions all right, and you're so excited to do it. How do you transform ideas into thing while keeping what made you excited about it in the first place?

[Sandra] This is where rough draft is my friend. Just… Or… Oh, I know. Howard has this outlining method he calls 10-year-old boy watches the movie. Like, he literally writes down the idea as if a 10-year-old has seen this movie and is telling you about it. Okay, so then they were in a car chase, and then the train comes sideways out of nowhere. And then there's a helicopter… Oh, by the way, there was a helicopter way back in… Like, literally back and fill as we're telling the story. Just dump it. Then you can go clean it up. So there's this let the excitement just blah onto the page, and then you can engage your more critical brain at a later stage. Seems like one of the ways that people do that.

 

[Howard] We need to take a break for a thing of the week.

[Yes]

[Megan] Right. Thing of the week, this week, is a YouTube channel called Every Frame a Painting. It is a series of video essays dissecting how different creatives bring their own vision to the big screen. Two of the videos I'd especially love to recommend is how Jackie Chan does comedy and how Edgar Wright edits for jokes. I don't think those are the actual titles of the episodes. Ah. Edgar Wright: How to Do Visual Comedy and Jackie Chan: How to Do Action Comedy. There you go. These are my two favs.

[Awesome]

[Howard] Cool. I haven't seen either of those, but they have comedy in them, so…

[Megan] You need to.

[Howard] It's possible they will be right up my alley.

[Kaela] I love Jackie Chan, so I know what I'm doing…

[Sandra] Yes. [Garbled I've got] plans for after we're done recording.

 

[Howard] So. But let's come back to those tools. You've got something you're excited about. What do you do to capture that excitement, that energy, that elemental spark in the medium in which you execute?

[Kaela] One thing I do is I just let myself go write that one. Like, I know I used to try and pull myself back because I was like, "Oh, I have this perfect scene idea in my head. I can feel it. I can see it. I live it." Then I was like, "Oh, but I'm not there in the story yet, I can't write it yet."

[Howard] Write the homework first.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I just let myself have dessert first. That's probably the best way of putting it. Dessert first writing. Where when I love it and I'm excited and I can feel it, I just dive in and I just full on draft it. Drafting is my favorite part of the writing process, anyway. So I'll just let myself go ham. I don't worry if I'm like, yes, I used three paragraphs to write something that should probably be one. Because I'll do that later. That's what revisions are for. I'll do that throughout the book. I jump around, and I go back and forth and up and down in order to get to all of those dessert places. Whenever I feel the excitement for it. It's all about the excitement, it's like… So I've captured that lightning in a bottle feeling.

[Howard] Meanwhile, the guy who's putting green vegetables on the buffet is like, "What?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "What! You gotta eat your greens."

[Kaela] I'm sitting down with seven different cakes. Hello!

[Howard] You've plowed through 11 bowls of pudding.

[Laughter]

[As many as four kids. That's terrible.]

[Laughter]

 

[Sandra] This is another interesting place where Kaela and I apparently are different, where… Because most of my aha moments, most of my lightning in a bottle moments, are actually in revisions. Drafting is kind of a slog for me. It is in the revisions that I catch the lightning and put it back. Like, I drafted, and all of the beauty leaked out in my drafting. Now it is just flat on the page. So in my revision, I go catch the lightning and put it back in. Howard and I used to, early on in the comic, I remember so many conversations with Howard where he would bring me comics and say, "Okay. I think this was funny when I wrote it, but now it is all drawn and I think the funny has leaked out." It's this thing that happens when we become overly familiar with the scene, we lose touch with the thing that is actually still there. We just have said the words so often it makes no sense to us anymore.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] That is me and revisions.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Yeah. So I'm happy that for me, putting the lightning back in is a thing that happens for me in revisions, because it makes the revision process exciting and interesting. But… Again, different people, different approaches.

[Whoa!]

[Megan] And they all work.

[Sandra] They do. That's…

 

[Howard] Any other tools? Any other concrete bits? Crunchy stuff?

[Sandra] I'm trying to think… We were talking about influences in a prior episode and talking about going back to the well, going back to remember the thing when you feel like you have lost the track or lost the thread, stepping back and describing your thing to somebody new. Saying what is the thing, what was it that excited me about this story. And seeing that…

[Howard] Yeah, that was part of the process for my story An Honest Death in Shadows Beneath. Shadows Beneath is a compilation from Brandon and Mary Robinette and Dan and I of things that we workshop on the podcast several years ago. My story, there was this bit that really excited me and every time I sat down to write the story, that bit kept leaking out and I realized that the bit was only working if I told it in a different tense. If I changed the way, just the POV, and the narrative unfolded. I wanted to shoehorn it into the third person limited POV and it just didn't work until I pulled it forward into a more immediate tense. It's which is weird, but that was the way I'd originally, I guess, heard the idea in my head, and it wasn't until I came back to that that the story flowed cleanly.

[Kaela] That's a really good point about finding the right framework as well. It's not always just about executing something, but sometimes it's finding the right framework so that the execute… So that you can execute it at all. Like, there… Like Cece. I wrote two different books with Cece. Cece's idea of souls being on the outside of your body and how that would change your world. I wrote two different books about that, and it just didn't work for some reason. I was like, "Why? Why isn't it working?" But then I said it in a completely different place, I gave the main character really specific motivation of trying to save her sister. Then I decided, yeah, I'm going to do a Shonen anime tournament. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make this like a battle to the death Pokémon style, like somewhere between Pokémon and the Shonen battle. That actually created so many more… And first person instead of third person. Like, all of those things amalgamizing together into one thing ended up being the framework where that kind of a story could shine. Because it put into question… The stuff that we joke about with Pokémon is that like legal? You're making animals fight against each other? But in this world, it's criaturas and their people, which is what I wanted to explore about, like, how would it affect other people's souls, like, on an emotional theme level. That was the thing I was most interested in exploring. I didn't have a world previously or an emotionally intimate enough voice because it was third person. First person really brought that out, to give that the justice that I wanted to. The thing that made me want to write it.

[Sandra] Yep. If you want to catch lightning in a bottle, the bottle needs to be shaped right to catch the lightning.

[Kaela] Yay.

[Sandra] So if you can go back and remember what your lightning was, what the spark was that drew you to this story or this character or this location, and figure out, okay, what else do I need to change around the thing so that it can live here without being squelched.

[Howard] I'm now picturing 20,000 Writing Excuses listeners all out on assorted hilltops in thunderstorms…

[Laughter]

[Howard] With huge arrays of bottles holding them up saying, "This one's round, please?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "No? Here's a square one. Please?"

[Sandra] All we need is Robert De Niro as the pirate captain on an airship to go catch the lightning.

[Howard] Oh, my.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Sorry, guys.

[Howard] All right. That might be a good mental picture to wrap up on. Because his portrayal of that lightning pirate in Stardust brought me such joy.

[Sandra] Oh, so much joy.

[Howard] Such joy. Lightning in a bottle indeed.

 

[Howard] Okay. Do we have homework this week?

[Megan] We do have homework and it's practicing turning an idea from one form into another. This week, you're going to choose a theme from a movie you love and write it up in a novelization style.

[Howard] That is much better advice than standing on a hilltop during a thunderstorm with a collection of glassware around you.

[Safer]

[Howard] So… Fair listeners, thank you so much for joining us. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.