Writing Excuses 20.25: Writing Confrontation (LIVE Aboard the WX Cruise) 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-25-writing-confrontation-live-aboard-the-wx-cruise

 

Key Points: Why are your fight scenes boring? Just blocking is boring! Four parts of a reaction, focus, what the character notices, physicality, thoughts, and actions. Is the problem using all four tools at the same time, or is it using all four tools every time? What's new and different for the character, that's what they notice? Fight scenes that work well contrast the character's history with their anticipation. The idea that confrontation will reveal aspects of character is a good reason to have a confrontation. Confrontations and fights should have emotions, character reveals,  something that matters, changes. Think about ways that strengths can become weaknesses. That's not a nail!

 

[Season 20, Episode 25]

 

[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 25]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Writing Confrontation Aboard the Writing Excuses Cruise.

[Dan] Fif… I don't know what to say now.

[Mary Robinette] Just your name.

[Howard] Your name.

[Dan] Ah! I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm cueing Dan.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I'm also Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we are aboard the Writing Excuses cruise in front of a live audience.

[Applause]

[Mary Robinette] And the first thing that happened on the cruise, one of the first things, was that Dan taught a class called why your fight scene is boring. I went to the class because I would also like to know why my fight scenes are boring and realized, as he was talking, that it actually applied for every form of confrontation that your readers… Your characters go through. It's not just the physical confrontation, it's also the verbal altercations, it's facing off against a dragon. It's… Well, I guess that is a fight scene. But, point being, it applied to a lot of other things. And we thought that it might be fun for you all to listen to how we come up with lesson plans and what… How we react to new material by coming up with something on the fly for you.

[Howard] And in the interest of explaining a little bit of the overall Writing Excuses meta, this happens all the time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] We start… Yes. We are podcasters with radio voice. We sound like experts.

[Mary Robinette] Ha ha!

[Howard] Which we're not. We learned so much from each other every day. We come on these cruises, we learn things from our students, we learn things from each other's lectures. It's such a wonderful place to be, being just smart enough to figure out that you don't know enough and you have to learn something new.

[Dan] I gotta say, I do love it when we start episodes with how smart Dan was that one time…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I was going to say, we should do that more often, but that requires me to be smart more often, and I don't know if I can do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. 15 minutes long, you know.

[Dan] Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] That's the length of smartness we need. Okay. So. There were a lot of things that you talked about, but one of the things that I was struck with… One of the students asked a question that then made my brain go, oh! The student said something along the lines of, so you're talking about how if a fight scene is only blocking, it's really boring. Which is, like, correct. So how do you get the reactions on the page without stopping the fight scene, without slowing things down. And you gave a whole series of answers. But my brain then started unpacking things into thinking about what reactions were. So here's what I've got, and I wanted to toss it around to see if there's something there. That there are four parts of a reaction. There's the focus, the what the character is noticing. There's the physicality of it. There are thoughts. And then there are actions. So, let's say you want to slow down a moment, you would use all four of those. So there's the I see the sword. There's the description of the sword, the sword is long and with a basket hilt handle. And then there's the physicality, the way the sword feels in the character's hands. That there is a weight to it. Then there's the thoughts. Yes, this is the sword that belonged to my father that he made for the six fingered man. And then there's the actions, which would be the slashing and the cutting. And that often, what happens when we are s… When we are… When things bog down is that we are using all four of those at the same time, but we don't need all four of those at the same time. That they can… That we… Sometimes we're only using one aspect, that the only thing the reader gets is the focus. And that's another way that things can go bad, we're just describing the way things look without hitting any of the other pieces of interiority or the character's looking at the wrong things and noticing the wrong things. Like, let me describe in loving details this sword while vamps are coming at me.

[Howard] It can also… I mean, yeah, you bog it down when you're trying to do all four of those things in sequence in turn. Compressing is super useful. You can use the same words or one phrase to cover two or more of those things. The familiar weight of the sword… Well, now I know how I feel about it and I've described that it is an object with mass. Okay, so I haven't said very much, but it's…

[Laughter]

[Howard] But you see where I'm heading with that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And that's the sort of trick that we've been using forever, which is you put a line on the page, make that line do as much lifting for you as you can.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, the thing that I'm excited about is that this is a… When you say this is the sort of thing we've been doing forever… The thing that I love about doing these episodes, and to refer back to an episode that just happened on the stage, but for our listeners, was several weeks ago, teaching, it forces me to line my toolbox up. Like, podcasting forces me to figure out what are the tools that are actually in there, and how do I use them? So, this is why I was like are these tools here? Have I found a set of tools that I can articulate that…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Makes something that I do unconsciously easier to do on purpose?

 

[Dan] Yeah. I think that's interesting, and I'm wondering if the issue is, are you using all those four tools at the same time, is that what bogs it down? Or is it using all four tools every time and that's what makes it so slow and ponderous? It could be that you need one moment that really gets attention… Like you said, magnify that, and draw it out, and then the others could just focus on one? To seem much quicker?

 

[Erin] I also think… I was wondering, do we use… I was thinking about fighting with swords. So we were in Scotland a while ago, and we got to actually do some sword fighting. Which was quite fun for me. And it turns out that I'm very aggressive with a fake sword, which was a fun thing to learn about myself. What's interesting is, like, I'm thinking back to the moment that I was sparring, and I'm thinking, even though I was reacting a lot in that moment, I actually did not have… Like, I could not have thought in that moment…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it was so new to me that thought was, like, beyond me. Like, I mean, maybe I'm sure on some subconscious level, like, I had to think, to, like, move my arm forward. But I wasn't having a deep thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I was just like, Go. Ra. Kill that man. But the guy who I was fighting against, a trained swords person, might have had time. He was, like, oh, I thought about the technique that you… He would slow down and say, like, oh, your technique is a little off here. Because for him, the physicality was so ingrained that he didn't have any time to spend on that and could spend more time on the thought. So, I think, what's interesting is thinking about, like, in a reaction moment, what is coming so naturally to your character that it's not worth putting all that space on the page, because it's just a familiar weight. And there's not much more you need to say about it. And what's the thing that's new, that's different about this situation? That is the thing that your character can lean into.

[Mary Robinette] I love that. You have just… And this is the thing that I love about talking to you all is that you just… What you said just combined with two other thoughts. One was the memory of doing that. One of the things that we asked them to do was to teach our writers what it feels like to have a sword. It's not… We weren't trying to learn how to fight. We were trying to learn enough to be able to write about it. And so we asked them to disarm us. And the thing that I remember was that I had about enough time to go, oh! Our swords hit each other, and I was like, oh, I could… And then the sword was out of my hand. And he had me in a headlock.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It was so fast that all I was left with were sensations that I could not register until after the moment, that my hands were stinging, and that there had been a poof of air as he went past. And that was all the time I had. And that just combined with the puppetry memory, which was, we did this show called Pied Piper and it was the hardest show I've ever done. When we started doing this show, we could not get through the entire show in rehearsal, because we were so winded. And, by the end of the show, it's like, I would come off the stage and I put the puppet down, I'd stretch a little bit, have a glass of water, and then I'd picked the puppet up and go back in. And that's my experience of it. But a friend of mine was watching it, and was like, you never stop moving. I'm like, what are you talking about? I took this whole little stretch break. And he showed me video that he'd taken from backstage. My movements are so fast and so economical and I'm not thinking about them at all. That's all I'm thinking about is the newness, the, Ah, I can have a stretch here, I can have a little sip of water. And I think that that happens… That must happen in fights.

[Dan] It probably does.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I was so excited about this. I'm like…

[Dan] No. This is cool, I'm trying to think of how this newness applies to non-physical confrontations, like, you were saying in the beginning. To a conversation or to an argument. And it certainly happens that we get into arguments. Often, with my children, that I have had this argument with you so many times before, and you already know that you have to go to bed at night. Why do I have to convince you every single time? And so, yeah, there are certainly ruts that we fall into. But I'm not sure…

[Mary Robinette] I think… Maybe the… That moment where you're like, that was a strange facial expression. What's going on there? Like, where they have a reaction that you weren't expecting.

[Howard] Yeah. Years and… Many years ago, I was commuting to work one morning and there was black ice on the road. And I can relate the story in a very… Very descriptive, blow-by-blow of everything that happened. But I've driven past that point several times and realized that I can no longer imagine how there was enough time for me to think about what I was doing and what I did… What I ended up doing was driving on the wrong side of the road in order to avoid a pileup of cars at the bottom of the hill. And I looked at this, and I thought, where did I even find the time or the room to do this? I don't understand it. Did time compress for me? Did it expand for me? Or was I just reflexively aware enough as a driver to automatically put my vehicle where things weren't going to kill me? I don't know. But I fall back on that experience a lot when I'm writing action, because it's fun.

[Erin] Speaking of finding the time, I believe it is time for us to take a break for our thing of the week.

 

[Mary Robinette] Our thing of the week is a TV show. It's on Hulu. It's called Death and Other Details. Mandy Patinkin solving murder on a cruise ship. It is so good and it is so twisty. It's 10 episodes, and one of the things that I love about it, it's… I just… I want all of my writer friends to watch it. It is nonlinear in the way it tells the story, because they will tell the story and then they will jump back in time. It is talking about the malleability of memory and how that affects crime and your… How it affects the difficulty in solving crime. There's this scene where he's trying to get someone to remember a scene, but he's also trying to point out to them that their memory is not entirely reliable. And so what you see is the character reliving the scene. She's like, okay, so there was this… The room. And then there was spilled ketchup on the floor, and something else. And then… And then it cuts back to him, and he is waving a French fry with ketchup under her nose. And that has caused her to imagine ketchup on the floor. It is so good. And I want everyone to watch it, because it also… And it also to… I'm going to keep talking about this. It's also talking about the narrative, the stories that we tell each other, and the stories that we tell ourselves. It is so good. Please go watch Death and Other Details, so that I have someone to talk about it with. I see two people in our live audience who have watched it. I will meet you in the bar.

[Chuckles]

 

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[Erin] I wonder, actually, if I have an answer or a thought about something that Dan was asking before the break, which is, how do we take these same sort of reaction tools and use them at a time when we're not hitting people with swords, lifting heavy objects or… I'm glad that you avoided it, Howard, going into many trees and other cars. And I think the newness there is… Can sometimes be that in argument, we sometimes reveal things that we might not reveal in another way.

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something else that Dan said that… He was talking about, and I wrote it down, that it is a lot of what we're dealing with in those fight scenes is the character… The fight scenes that work well is the character's history contrasted with their anticipation. So one of the examples in the class was out of Dune where Paul Atriedes is fighting Jamis and there's a lot of, like, little flashbacks, very very small ones. But I think when you're having that fight, that the verbal altercation… It's like, I know how these things go, and I'm anticipating the way… I'm anticipating the thing that you're going to say. You know how you… You have an entire fight with someone in your head before you actually start talking to them.

[Erin] And yet, the fight never goes that way.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] And the fight never goes that way.

[Erin] Because, I think, like, also your emotions become heightened in confrontation. And, sometimes, like, you can become the, like, a worse version of yourself. Like, you become more strident, you become… You see is on some little detail and decide to use that to pick the person apart. And everyone argues a little bit differently. And so, I think, thinking about, like, how do we bring that to the page. Like, it's not just, yes to no. It's this person brings in lots and lots of facts, and figures. This person appeals to emotion. This person breaks down physically. Thinking about what those things are, whether it's, like, a thing you've seen a thousand times, where you're like, not you again with these facts and figures. Like, Ah, that's what always happens. I should have been prepared. Or if it's something new that you're experiencing. It really, I think, is a great way to get to a heart of character, because sometimes we forget to shield parts of ourselves that we might otherwise, when we are angry, and we are trying to like get a point across.

 

[Howard] This idea that the confrontation will reveal aspects of the character is a beautiful reason to have the confrontation to begin with. A bad reason to put a confrontation or a fight in a book is to say, well, I've reached the point in the scene where something needs to happen, so now they fight.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And we can tell, as readers, as moviegoers, as TV watchers, as whatever, we can tell when that was the reason for the scene. And we don't love it. Even if it's really, really well done, we don't love it. We want there to be emotion, we want there to be character reveals, we want something to matter, and we want something to change. And if those elements aren't the underpinning of the action scene of the fight, of the argument, of the car chase, the whatever… Then it's just a thing you put in because you felt like this kind of story has to have that in it.

[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things Dan talked about in his class.

[Dan] I know. This is great. I don't have to participate in this episode…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because we're all just quoting me the whole time anyway.

[Howard] For those of you…

[Laughter]

[Howard] For those of you who have not benefited…

[Dan] It's wonderful.

[Howard] From the video feed… There is no video feed… The smug smile on Dan's face…

[Dan] Oh, yeah. I just ate a canary, and there's nothing you can do about it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Something else that I was thinking about as we were talking… But I'm now interested to see if it can play into verbal confrontations. That… The idea that the character's strengths become their weaknesses because we over rely on them and they shape the choices that we make, even when it's not appropriate. In the example in the physical conflict was, again, the Paul Atriedes and his shield training, that he had been trained so carefully to compensate for the shield and slow down, that he kept missing the other person. And I think that that may also work in stories. Like, if there's someone who's, like, I am always very articulate and forceful, and what they actually need to be… That has served them extremely well in negotiations. But now they are talking to a loved one and it's like, no, actually you don't need to be extremely articulate and forceful, that is a weakness right now. You need to be quiet and listen.

[Howard] There are plenty of stories to be told around when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And you've made a mess, because that's not a nail.

[Erin] That's not a nail is going to be the name of either my next…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Band or my autobiography.

[Howard] It's the label on the box of screws in my toolbox.

[Erin] Nice.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you all for letting me explore this new set of tools with you. I was extremely excited by Dan's class. There's a couple of more classes that are happening on the cruise that I'm also excited about.

[Dan] You should all come on the cruise.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Because the cruise that we've got coming up has a whole different set of classes that I'm also excited for. But, I think it's time for our homework.

 

[Dan] Yeah. So, for the homework, I want you to do one of the things that I did in my class. Which is, go and watch an action scene in a movie, something that you really like, whether this is a Jackie Chan scene or whatever. And then, to kind of underline how different books are as a medium, transcribe it. Blow-for-blow and step-for-step, and see how long you can get into that before you want to tear your own hair out. Because it becomes extremely boring. Then, after you've proven that the blocking and the blow-by-blow doesn't work, rewrite that scene in a way that does. In a way that translates to and uses the medium of prose.

 

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

Writing Excuses 20.21: The Lens of Context 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-21-the-lens-of-context

 

Key points: Context, worldbuilding, and setting! How do you know what you really need for your story? What will my character interact with? What does the plot need? The 8 gems of Rohisla! Where do you want to create emotion or conflict? Tie worldbuilding to character conflict. Think about the cost of this piece of worldbuilding. Think about implications! In prose, suggesting a broader context is okay, but in gamewriting, people get irritated if there's nothing behind the door. For GM's, don't build more world than you need. Think about what the reader needs to tell the story in collaboration with you. What if you have a context, but no story? First, what can go wrong and who is affected by it? What were you interested in when you built that context? Try a mashup, borrow a character from somewhere else and shove them into this context. Play with unspoken or hidden context!

 

[Season 20, Episode 21]

 

[DongWon] Wouldn't it be so nice if you could outline your novel, organize your worldbuilding, write your book, format your ebook, and publish it on the same website? You're in luck. Camprie is the all-in-one platform for authors, offering both a full-featured writing software and KDP-style publishing, but with 80% royalties and none of the predatory practices you're stuck with with a few other competitors. Campfire's tools feature versatile panels that make creating characters as simple as moving notecards around a corkboard only much more organized, convenient, and without the inherent dangers of working with thumbtacks. Its wide range of tools include templates for creating settings, a magic system builder, and more. All of which are connected to a word processor that makes it easy to reference your notes as you write. When you're ready, publish your book on Campfire's e-book shop and include artwork, worldbuilding notes, short stories, and more for readers who want to explore your setting in more detail. Try Campfire today at campfirewriting.com and bring your book to life.

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of…

 

[DongWon] Between drafting your new novel, building your lore bible, or meeting with your critique group, who has time to stress about website security? As a writer, your website is your digital face to the world that lets people know about your work and where they can find it. Securing your website means less stress about anyone disrupting that important outlet. Kinsta offers managed hosting for WordPress with lightning fast load times, enterprise grade security, and 24/7 human only customer support. They're available in multiple languages and ready to assist regardless of site complexity. It's complete peace of mind knowing your WordPress site is always secure, online, and performing at its best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security and is one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200 percent faster sites by simply moving their WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called MyKinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. And if you're moving from another host, they offer unlimited expert led migrations to ensure a smooth transition, so you won't experience any downtime. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's a perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new customers on selected plans. Don't miss out. Get started for free today.

 

[Mary Robinette] 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 21]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] The lens of context. 

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] And this is our first sort of episode now that we've introduced the lens of where and when. I thought the very… The very next thing we needed to do is actually talk about creating context in a story. And what I mean by this is that when you are worldbuilding, especially if you're doing science fiction and fantasy, you can create, like, so much world. You can create all the where's, all the when's, especially in science fiction and fantasy. So how do you figure out what the… How do you figure out, like, what actually is needed for your story? How do you use the world and the setting to create the context in which your story is going to succeed as opposed to sort of just everything you could possibly know about that setting?

[Mary Robinette] I tend to think about things that my character is going to interact with. So I tend to break things into details that are plot specific in that there is a plot event that's going to happen around it, there's a piece of worldbuilding, something is going to happen at the… With the gems of [Releasia?] So we actually really need to know what those gems are.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I love that it changes every time you say it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have no idea what you said [garbled]

[Howard] For context, in a previous episode, we created… And by we, I mean Erin…

[Laughter]

[Erin] The eight gems of Rohisla.

[Chorus: Rohisla!]

[Dan] How can you not remember the important…

[DongWon] That was like the 13 gems of Rho…

[Dan] Context?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Okay, you know what? Let's… I just want to talk about this for a moment, because as… From the standpoint of a humorist, I want to be able to tell jokes in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, where I'm not making fun of sci-fi or fantasy. And so what I establish is a context in which a thing is funny. The gems of Rohisla thing is making fun of the fact that we can't keep track of Erin's worldbuilding.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to write it down…

[Howard] And that's…

[Mary Robinette] So that I can remember it in the future.

 

[Howard] And the best example I can come up with is the one where… And I've used this in my humor classes… Where the puppeteer alien and the Kzin alien are talking about where human's sense of humor comes from. And the puppeteer is an herbivore, the Kzin is a carnivore, and the Kzin says, "I think that humor is an interrupted defense mechanism." And the puppeteer says, "Humans are insane. No sane creature would interrupt a defense mechanism." And knowing that the puppeteer is an herbivore just makes that funnier, because they're like sheep. Why would you interrupt a defense mechanism? But you have to have the context for that joke to play. And so, for me, the decision on building context is where do I want to be able to tell jokes. And that's… At one layer of obstruction up, where do I want to be able to create emotion? Where do I want to be able to create conflict? Where do I want to be able to create a platform that has no railings?

[DongWon] Ultimately, context only matters if it's giving context to something. Right? If you're just giving me context for the sake of having it, I'm not going to remember it. The reason we can't remember the eight gems of Revisla is that it's not tied to anything, other than the fact that we find this word funny for some reason. And it's… Which is why when I talk about how do you introduce worldbuilding, I always say to tie worldbuilding to character conflict. If a piece of information about how the world works is connected to something that the character wants, needs, or has at stakes, or is afraid of, then that is going to make it so that it's memorable. Right? And that can be as simple as children get report cards, when your eight-year-old MC goes home, there's going to be a report card waiting for him, and he doesn't want his parents to find out what it is. Now the piece of worldbuilding that's important and relevant, which is report cards, matters. Right? That could also be children are executed when they turned nine.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That's going to be an important part of worldbuilding…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Unless they have all eight gems of Rohis…

[Laughter]

[Howard] They were report cards [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] They just sort them into the poop chute.

[DongWon] Exactly. But all I'm saying is that… I think [Steven Universe Show] does this incredibly well. Where you start with a very simple premise and end up at the end of that show with an incredibly massive space operatic level of worldbuilding and scope. And the way they get there is that at each element that they're introducing to that worldbuilding, they're tying it to a very specific character in their conflict.

 

[Mary Robinette] And one of the problems that I think writers run into is figuring out what pieces they're actually going to need. And, for me, it comes down to the cost of it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] How many words am I going to have to spend on it to make the reader understand it? For instance, you all do not need, in order to understand this podcast, you all do not need to know that we are sitting in a hotel room. You don't need to know the order that we are sitting, which chair type people are, that Marshall stands when he is engineering and looks like a DJ. Actually, you do need to know it, it's pretty awesome. You don't need to know any of that to understand, but sometimes we get so excited because we thought these things through that we will put them down on the page, forgetting that it doesn't actually carry any story burden.

[Howard] And worse still, we put these things down on the page, forgetting that any context that is co-… That is made up of information that could be in any way relevant is going to suggest… Is going to have implications. Things that can grow out of it. I think of… And the books and the movies did just fine, so it's okay for me to complain… Hunger Games. The idea that a Battle Royale has become a central societal point post some sort of apocalypse suggests a huge measure of historical worldbuilding that I was never satisfied with the presentation of. And so the story fell apart for me. And I'm not saying that these stories are bad, because clearly they did just fine. But as a writer, I try to make sure that I'm not going to put anything into the context that I have to explain away later because it suggests something that makes my story hard to grab.

 

[Erin] This actually reminds me of something I learned when I was moving between prose and game writing. So, a lot of times in a short story especially, if you want to make your world feel like it has more depth, you will… You can include detail that suggests a broader context than this story has time for. So you could say, like, we met while searching for the eight gems of Rohisla, and you're not… That's not what the story is about, and it gives… And the context that matters is, like, this is my relationship with the character. So you've provided a relationship context, but not a world context. And yet, knowing it, makes you feel like there's a bigger world out there. In game writing, if you do that, people'd be like, in our next mission, we should go collect those gems, and, like, you have not written anything…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] For the GM, or if it's a videogame, like, there's nothing behind that door. And so then, players get frustrated, because there like, why did you create a context that I can't explore?

[Howard] You now need help from the eight GM's of Rohisla.

[Erin] Oh, wow.

[Howard] Oh… [Garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] But I think that that's something that, like, even in fiction, you can do. It's like you really have to be careful, like…

[Yeah]

[Erin] You don't want it to make it seem like the more interesting story is happening outside of the page that the reader is being forced to follow.

 

[DongWon] A piece of advice that I give to new GM's is don't build more world than you need. Right? And, like, if I am starting a new campaign setting, if none of my characters are playing a paladin or a [garbled] or somebody who intersects with religion, I'm not writing down what that pantheon is. I'm not going to sit here spending six hours making up 12 gods for this world if nobody here is religious. You know what I mean? And it's just like religion isn't a major component of the story. We don't need to know all the details of it. We can be pretty vague about it. And then, when you stumble into a situation that requires that, that's when you build it out. Right? And so a little bit of, like, a… You build the track right ahead of the train. Right? You're building it as you cross. And you don't need to have every single piece of this imagined out… Maybe have some idea of where that might be going. But think about, what are your characters interested in? Right? If you have somebody who is a merchant, then, yes, you're going to need to understand the economics of it. If your characters are children, no, you don't need to understand where the grain is being shipped from. You know what I mean?

[Howard] You brushed up against here the concept of just-in-time manufacturing, which became a huge market force in the 30 years leading up to the pandemic of 2020. At which point, we broke enough supply chains that everybody looked at just-in-time manufacturing and said, oh, no. This doesn't work anymore. And I loved how, as somebody who world builds, I was able to look at something that seemed very sensible and suddenly see circumstances in which it completely fell apart, because now I understood, in a way I just hadn't understood before, the way things are inextricably related.

[Mary Robinette] You'll hear a lot of times people talking about worldbuilding as there's an iceberg, but you only need the tip of the iceberg. And then there's an implication that you actually need to build the entire iceberg. For me, it's like if I am telling a story in which Titanic runs into the iceberg, yeah, I need to know that there's this mass under there. But if I'm telling a story about some fishermen who are going nowhere near the iceberg, I don't need to know it's there. When I was building puppets, I would build the armature that needed to be in underneath in order to hold their clothes up. That I would have where their bodies were… Like, the joints would be in the right place. Everything that caused the puppet to move in a way that was believable. But I wouldn't build the muscles, because they… The audience would never see them. They were not anatomically correct, except sometimes, when I was trolling on another puppeteer…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] There, it had a point. Right?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It had a purpose. So, for me, what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it is where do I want to put the effort, but where also do I want the reader to put the effort. Because the reason you don't have puppets be anatomically correct and you try to eliminate all of that stuff is every piece of that adds weight that then the puppeteer has to carry. And because your reader is actively building that story with you, every piece of context that you give them gives them a narrative weight that they have to carry. It's a memory that they have to hold onto. So if you use the context to direct their attention, to give them the tools to tell the story that you want to tell, to tell that in collaboration with you, you're going to have, I think, a more successful story. Do you need to know how things move? Yes, if it's in relation to something else.

[Howard] When I look at Fawzi bear, I think of him as being fluffy all the way through. I don't think of your hand in him. I just think… I mean, the surface of Fawzi bear, the way he moves… He's a big fluffy bear. And so the piece that you didn't build, because you couldn't, because there's no room for your hand, is a piece that I go ahead and imagine for you.

[Erin] And on that beautiful metaphor, we're going to take a short break.

 

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[Erin] So the question that I have, now that we're back, is, we've sort of been presuming in our first half that you know the story that you want to tell, and you can then shape the context around that story. What if you've just been worldbuilding in worldbuilding and worldbuilding and you've got all context, and you're not sure, like, where the story is in there? Are there any tools that you can use to actually figure out how to use that context as a lens and not just a landscape?

[Mary Robinette] I have a worksheet we've shared with readers before that I will use when I find myself in this position. It hasn't happened to me a lot, but every now and then, I have an idea and I have the world for it, but I have no idea what the story is. Because most of the time, I do have a character in mind. So I go through an exercise to figure out what kind of things that can go wrong and who can be affected by it. So I will list a list of 20 people who can be in that world, looking at the socio-economic spectrum. I will look at power structures. I will look for those things to look for where things can hurt. Which is not that every story has to be about pain and hurt, but that is usually a place to find a stake and defined someone who has a reason to want to change something. Whether it is something about themselves or something about the larger world. So those are things that I will look for is who has a reason to activate and…

[Howard] Just asking the question is often enough to end up with a character or an entire story. When I look at a magic system or a technology system, one of the first questions I ask is if it's valuable, can it be stolen, can it be smuggled, can it be counterfeited? Just asking the question is enough that suddenly a whole smuggling ring pops into my head, and now I have a story. A whole counterfeiting ring, and now I have a heist or whatever. So, asking the questions about, as Mary Robinette said, asking about the pain points is often the easiest starting point.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, one place to start… I think this is kind of tying into what Mary Robinette's saying, is take a look at the worldbuilding you've created. If you've done a ton of worldbuilding, you've done a lot of creating that context, and you're looking for a story to have that context within, then you can look… What you're looking for is what are you interested in. What you're looking for is why am I writing this story? And you will have focused on different parts of the worldbuilding over others. Say you are focused on the religion and spirituality of this world. Say you're focused on the history and mythology, the prophecies, the economics, the technology. Whatever those things are, figure out which one you were drawn to and build on that. Right? Like, this can be Mistborn's magic system. This can be the history and poetry of Lord of the Rings. This can be the Galactic politics of Star Trek. Right? Each of these are pulling the audience, and pulling you, as the creator, in different directions. And that can give you a starting point of what do you want to have your characters interacting with.

 

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes will… When I'm having trouble with this kind of thing, one of the other things that I'll do is the mashup. Where I'm like, okay, here's this context that's really interesting, this world. What happens if I remove a character from another context and drop them into this one? This is essentially fanfiction, which I think is a glorious thing. But this is a way to have your fanfiction jollies and still get paid for it. Which is that you take a character that you love from another world, you drop them into this context. They're gonna change because of the new context. Obviously, you're going to rename them, but the social circles that they have, all of those things, how do they react? How are they moving through this world? Sometimes I will… Sometimes it's not from another piece of IP, it's… I have this character that has come into my head that I haven't been able to find the world for them, and I just shove them into this context to see kind of… Thought experiment about what happens. And often the contrasts between the two will give me opportunities that I wouldn't have had when I was just, like, single-handedly… Or single-mindedly focused on one thing.

[Erin] Yeah. I think a lot of times… I've been thinking about this in a slightly different way, because of the game writing I've been doing, which is that, while you don't want to create contexts that, like, lead the person down the wrong path, creating game hooks when you are creating a setting is a big thing that people do in tabletops. So you'll write about a world and you'll create little pieces, like little bits of discontent, little pieces of things that the GM can, like, use if they want to, then create a whole story in a place that you haven't written it for them, you've just suggested it. I think of those as, like, the but-also's. Like, if you describe a great place, there's always somebody who'd be like, oh, but also… Like, oh, have you thought about that? Or think about, like, who in your setting would write the Twitter thread that's like…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Hold on to your butts. You think that, like, X thing is great? Like, about this context? Like, here's 15 things that are horrific. Like…

[DongWon] [garbled] Twitter? It's just a horrifying thing to introduce.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You know what? Coming back to the eight gems of Rohisla, you put them into your game, and then in the little sidebar for game hooks, it says, "Actually, six of the gems of Rohisla are genuine and two of them are counterfeits." And now we know that there's a story here that the players might be able to interact with.

 

[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that I think is kind of fun to play with, which is unspoken context. Where you, the writer, are aware of something and it is affecting the way you move… Everything happens in the story, but you don't necessarily need the reader to know it. For instance, when we recorded these episodes, we recorded them out of sequence. So the episode that you just listen to, we made a ton of jokes about poop chutes. But we were recording it on Navigator of the Seas and DongWon was not with us. In our timeline, the thing that we just recorded was an episode that you heard weeks ago about the eight gems of Rohisla, and we're all present for that. So it's shaping the way we are moving through. So sometimes it can be fun, actually, to have that little piece of that iceberg, you don't need the whole iceberg there, but just a little piece of the iceberg that is affecting the way characters interact with each other. And it's not that you have to make sure that the reader understands it. Like, I did not need to pause and explain this, you would have been fine without that. But it does affect the story. And so sometimes I will play with that. Like, offstage, these two were totally getting it on, and it's affecting small things, but I don't need the reader to understand it. I don't need to do a side quest to go watch the sexy fun time scene.

[Erin] Well, that is fun.

[Mary Robinette] It is.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I do think it's delightful that our context episode is the one riddled with inside jokes.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Dan] We didn't do this on purpose.

[DongWon] Half of them, I'm not getting, because I missed the cruise.

[Mary Robinette] There's a whole thing about trees and poop chutes and Legolas, like, scooping poop at the bottom, because that's where all his… It's…

[DongWon] Okay.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] All right.

[Erin] [garbled] context.

[DongWon] Without this context, actually.

[Erin] It gets away from us. It's time to give homework and move onto a new one.

 

[Erin] So, now we have the homework for you, which is, I'd like you to take a context, some piece of worldbuilding that you've done, and come up with three different narratives that you could write that use that context. Then, separately, I want you to take a narrative that you've written and come up with three new contexts in which that narrative would succeed.

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-05-lens-1-who

 

Key points: You and I must have seen a different movie or read a different book? Save the world or dragon killing game? Relatability. Depth. POV. Emotionally compelling moments. Relationships. The why of a character enriches the who. What is the lie that your character believes about the world? What is the truth that your character is afraid to know? Interesting details! What makes this person tick? Specificity. I'm so happy you noticed that. Tabletop gaming gives you a world, a story, a setting reflected and refracted through the players and the characters lenses. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 05]

 

[DongWon] We're excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you'll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We'll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining our writing. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you'll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit 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 20, Episode 05]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The lens of who. 

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

[Howard] And we've got a whole bunch of episodes queued up for you talking about the lens of who. I want to introduce this tool, this lens, by asking a question of my fellow hosts, and, sure, of you, fair listener, what's the most, you and I must have seen a different movie, or, you and I must've read a different book, moment you've ever had with a friend?

[Erin] So, mine is actually a game, and it's one of my favorite examples, so I may have said it before. But when I played Dragon Age Inquisition, a friend of mine also played it, and it's a game where you save the world and magic, what have you. But my friend was like, "Oh, I love that dragon killing game." I'm… I was like, "Dragon killing game? I guess there's a side quest where you can kill dragons…" He was like, "Yeah. I killed every dragon in the game. And then I was upset because there's no achievement for that." I was like, "Yes, because that's not what the game is about at all."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The game is not… That's not the purpose. But, for him, he was playing this epic dragon killing game, and only saving the world enough to level up to kill more dragons. I thought, wow, how exciting that this game has room for both your hunting experience and my actual narrative saving the world experience.

[DongWon] This is a face of me trying to remember, there are dragons in that game?

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[DongWon] I mean, it's called Dragon Age, but like… Anyways.

[Howard] The point here is that, and I've said this before, the largest part of what you get out of a book or a movie or a game comes through what you brought with you to the book or the movie or the game. I can't count the number of times where I've come away from a film, just having loved it and talk to somebody. They're like, oh, that was cliché, it was awful, it was boring, it was whatever. And I'm like, it was exactly what I wanted. I… How are we so different? Often these conversations, jokingly, end with, well, I guess you and I can't be friends.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Our perspectives are two different for us to have had that.

[DongWon] Yeah, but I think what you bring in with your interests and your… How you engage with it does change it quite radically. Right? Like, to bring another game example, I'm a huge fan of From Soft games. Those games are this is the Dark Soul series, Eldon Ring, Blood Born, and they're most notorious for having a part of the community that we derogatorily call the Get Good part of the community who just insist that you're not… You have to play the game in the hardest way possible, never looking anything up, never asking any friends, and that… If you're not good enough to do the game, then you just shouldn't be playing it. And I think they could not be misinterpreting the intention of the design more. That, to me, the game is very much about how difficult it is to go… To do things by yourself, and that instead, what we need to do is to reach out to the people around us, to the community, and find resources, find information and find help. But also, like, how hard it is to get clear information, to get help. I think it's a really beautiful meditation on the human experience. Because of its difficulty, but also because of its community. But that's maybe just me bringing my own lens to it, or my own perspective of what it means to be a person in the world.

[Erin] What I love about that is thinking about fiction, like, if you took your get good player and you your bring your community in player, and dropped you both in the zombie apocalypse, how differently would you approach things? Like, how differently would you take the exact same urgent problem… Like, you would be like, who can I reach out to, and they'd be like… I don't know… Get good killing zombies or what have you?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that's so interesting, is that a lot of times… I think it's easy to get really attached to a character as a person, like, you're like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Embody them like, this is what Ginny would do. So you sometimes don't get a chance to think about what are all the things that make up the character that you've created, and, like, what are all those lenses that they bring from other situations that happened before they were in this plot of this story right now.

[Mary Robinette] That's also… That's one of the things that will lead a character to being mono dimensional is that the writer only brings one lens…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To the character, that… I mean, how many characters have you seen in stories that appear to not have a family or friends outside this story? Like, they don't have anything outside the story, they exist only to do this one quest, and they feel extremely flat. When you start thinking about all of the different lenses that you can apply to that character, often by looking at the lenses in your own life, that's when you can start making a character that's multidimensional.

 

[Howard] In talking about this, this overarching concept of the way who we are colors our perception, influences our perception of what's around us, the lens of who is how your audience will relate to what's on the page. If you don't understand how that lens works, you will put things on the page and the audience will have reactions that you did not expect. Or not just that you didn't expect, that you didn't want. Because the lens may have been distorted. When we say lens, though, there's so many pieces to this that we're going to cover in episodes that come up. Relatability. When we say that a character is relatable. When we say a character has depth. When we talk about POV tools. First person, second person, third person, omniscient, limited, so on and so forth. All of these are aspects of that lens we'll be covering in upcoming episodes.

[Mary Robinette] We've been talking about this. The last episode, we just discussed puppetry. That was a lens that I bring to the way I experience the world. Much like that, one of the things that will happen to me as a puppeteer is that when I am performing some types of puppetry, I will remember the scene later as if I am looking through the character's eyes, view, gaze. Even though it's obviously an object that is in front of me or above me. This is a thing that will happen to readers as well. If the character is having moments that are emotionally compelling. It's always, like, the really emotionally compelling things that happened to… When this happens to me in performance. If the character's having emotionally compelling moments on the page, your reader is going to remember things through the character's eyes. They're going to… How many times have you had this experience, right? Where you're like, oh, yeah, I can't remember much of that book, but I really remember being at the side of the road, I remember the rain pelting down, as if you had actually experienced it yourself.

[DongWon] It's important to remember that humans are wired to care about other humans. Right? It's why when I talk about, like, stakes, right, in a story, I'm always like, well, what relationship is at stake here? That's where tension comes from, because… But that's true of the reader to the character as well. Right? We want to know the person's emotions, interiority, and perspective, and that's how you pull people into the story. That's how you get people to understand it. Because we are always already seeing it through the lens of the character. There's… It's impossible for us not to do so. I think.

[Erin] Yeah. I think also you don't have to share… And I don't think any of us are saying this, the character's lens, in order to care about that character.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Because I think sometimes there are characters who are difficult, who challenge us in some way, who make us uncomfortable, that we don't want to be necessarily looking through that lens. But, it's still so compelling. In the same way that people look at horrible things online all the time, that they don't wish they were, but yet they keep doing. So I think it's really interesting to think about the main thing is that the lens is true to the character, not that it is necessarily both shiniest or the prettiest, just that it is actually emotionally grounded.

[DongWon] I mean, so many of my favorite characters are just absolute miserable bastards.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] You know what I mean? And, just like… But one that comes to mind is… I watched True Detective Night Country recently. Jodie Foster plays the main character in it, and is just miserable. Just like an awful person who is still trying to do good, and is still trying to do a thing, and is still the protagonist of the story. I ended up caring about her very deeply. But the joy sometimes of having a character that you don't necessarily automatically align with is it starts… It gets you to ask the questions of why is this person like this? Right? What made them this way? What are their reasons for being the way that they are? Then that gives you an excuse to dig into all the context of that character. Where did they come from? What was their childhood like? Why did they believe what they believed? What systems are they embedded in? All of those things. So the lens of a character… you don't have to do an awful character. I think that's fun and delicious. But, to each their own. But the excuse to dig into the why of a character… And I know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but like, that is the thing that enriches the who.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.

[Howard] I've got another exciting question for my cohosts. After these messages from our sponsors.

 

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[Howard] So, we've talked about getting characters as lenses. It sounds to me like it would be helpful if you just wrote the character… Every character's biography before sitting down to write the story. But I'm pretty sure none of you have actually done that level of pre-writing. Where's the shortcut?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Can you please tell me where the shortcut is so I can write less? Pre-write less, and be able to write write more.

[DongWon] When playing tabletop games, there's a character generation sheet that I like to use that has a list of questions on it. Some of them are [just like what's here] character's name, blah blah blah. The one that I think is the most useful to understand where the character's coming from, and this comes from Aabria Iyengar who's an Internet professional GM [DM?]. She asked the question that blew my mind, and I use in every game now, which is, what is the lie that your character believes about the world? When you can answer that question, that automatically put you in so much deep context about the character. So if you just have that one sentence about each character in your setting, you can already have so much to play with in terms of how they're going to bounce off each other, how they're going to react, how they're going to see the world.

[Erin] That just made me think of… I love that, and it just made me think of another question that I would ask, which is, what is the truth that your character's afraid to know? Because I think those could be completely different things, or they could be related to each other. But I really do think that I wish I thought that deeply.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Honestly. Wow. I wish I knew that about my characters. I think a lot of times, I… Dan talked, in a previous episode, about details and the importance of details. A lot of times, I like to discover characters through the details. So part of that is that my own subconscious mind is doing some work somewhere. So that when I start writing, I will throw… Like, my mind will generate an interesting detail, like, she only ate grits for 10 years.

[Laughter]

[Erin] For every meal. Don't know why. Then I'll think, well, why the heck would anybody do that, subconscious brain? Then I try to take the things that are subconscious and make them conscious. That tells me a little more about the character. Maybe I've decided that she's just, like, a grits enthusiast. Okay. Interesting to know. Then, knowing that, I keep writing, and maybe another detail comes out. She likes to light kites on fire. Okay, like, that's an interesting second thing. How does that relate to the information I know? So it's a very discovery… Because I'm a discovery writer, it's a very discovery method of character. But the more details you add trying to make them all connect, it's like having a friend that you learn a really interesting fact about and you go, well, how do I make this fact work with everything else I understand about you?

[Howard] Let me come to the grits really quickly, because… No, hang on. If I were to say oh, yeah, when I was in college, I ate nothing but potatoes for four years. Okay. That's not true. Right? That might be a thing that I would say, because I was eating cheap. But if we roll back and look at my budget when I was in college, one of the things that I ate a lot of was other people's pizza. They would share a slice of pizza with me. Maybe that, and I'm now speaking as if I'm the character of grits, maybe they did eat other things, but it was food that was given to them. There was some shame in having had to rely on other people for the actual nutrition. They remember making the grits for themselves, but they don't remember the gifts of food that were keeping them alive. So we have this truth that they are telling themselves about how much they made grits, and the lie that they're afraid to face, which is that they didn't depend on other people when in fact they did. So… Yeah, when… The question that you ask about that one thing that they said explodes into so many different things.

[Mary Robinette] So, I don't use either of those approaches. I love them both. But I don't use either of them. The approach that I use varies… My shortcut varies. Sometimes it's the, well, what is the hole that the character is trying to fill. Sometimes it's the interesting telling detail. I do use that sometimes. But I don't have a particular set thing and, using a puppetry metaphor, because I've got them. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, each of my… I was embedded in the show, and there were three principal characters… Three principal performers. Each of them took time to teach me. They would all say, this is how I approach the character. One of them said, you start with the figure, and you look at what the figure can do, and then that tells you the choices that you need to make to support the figure. Another one said you start with the text, and you figure out what the text tells you, so that then you can figure out how to make the figure do what you need to do to support the text. And another one said you start with the voice, and then you figure out how you use the voice to shape the text to support what the character does. The thing is that the audience didn't know and didn't care what their process was. At the end of the day, all the audience cares about is that your character feels alive. So whatever tool it is that we offer to you over the next episodes, that tool is the tool that works for you, and it'll be a different tool for each character probably.

[DongWon] Well, this is what I love about talking about tools, not rules. Right? Because as we're giving you tools, the lens of who you are as a person influences your tool choice. Influences your lens choice. What you reach for, whether it's the interesting character detail, or, like philosophically, what makes this person tick, or a variety of different ways of reaching for things as Mary Robinette does, like, all of that are rooted in our experience and our perspective and our interests as people. Right? Like, I'm very much somebody who is, like, what does make that person tick? You know what I mean? Like… And what those things mer… Or how those things emerge will influence your writing and your process. But the goal is that the audience, you're right, doesn't know what tool you used. They're enthralled by the story, they're charmed by the character, they're connected.

[Howard] And, as I said… I said earlier, you want to have a measure of control over what it is the audience is going to come away with. Except the audience has their own lens, so there's really only so much of that that you can control. It may sound like a rule when I say, oh, you want to be a good enough writer to be able to have some control over this. And yet, the exception to that rule is so glorious. If you can be a good enough writer that what you put on the page, you have no idea how anyone else will react to it, well, that is its own…

[DongWon] This is why specificity matters. Right? Going back to what Dan said about Erin's thing earlier, the reason specificity contains the universal in it is because if you're trying to be general, you're trying to control how your audience is going to react. When you're trying to be broad, you're saying, oh, this is for all of your lenses. Right? But if instead, you focus on your own, if you lean into the specificity of your perspective, lean into the specificity of a character, that they are a person who comes from a place, who has a context, then other people will connect their own lenses to that in their own way. If you try to do that work for them, it doesn't work. Because we each bring our own things to the table so the best thing that you can do is to be as specific as you can, and accept that you can't control everybody, and that your book, in being for someone, is not for somebody else. And that's okay.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's not just okay, that's essential.

[Mary Robinette] I was just at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they have is they have a place where they have three different literal lenses looking at the sun. One of them is showing you the sun in white light, one of them is showing it to you in only infrared, and another is breaking it apart into a spectrum. So you're seeing the same literal object three completely different ways. That's one of the things that the lenses we bring to bear does, is it… The reason it's important that each of us bring our own lens is that we are looking at these universal truths in these very specific ways that allows people to understand and bring their own truths to it. But the thing is also that, again, everybody who approaches those… Somebody who is red green colorblind is going to look at that spectrum one and not see the same things that I do. They will still see something that is amazing and wonderful, but they will have a different experience. So thinking about… thinking about the experience that you want the reader to have, which lenses that you're going to bring to bear to try to help them see the things you want them to see, but also be okay if they don't see it, if they don't get it.

 

[Howard] One of my favorite tools is one that… And this is an after-the-fact tool… Is one that Mary Robinette provided to me. Which is when someone comes up to you and describes something in your book that really affected them, and clearly it's because you did this and this and this, and the response is, "Oh, I'm so glad you noticed that."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "I didn't put that in there on purpose," is not the thing you say. The thing you say is, "I'm so happy you noticed that." Because, honestly, as a writer, and when I say honestly, I mean literally honestly, the thing that I get the most joy from is when someone notices a thing, when they feel a thing, when they have an experience with the thing that I put on the page. That is the best thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I love that I know a lot of other writers hate is I love listening to someone else read my stuff out loud. Because the way they interpret it is not the way it is in my head, and it is the closest I can come to experiencing it through someone else's lens. It's really disconcerting sometimes, but also glorious. One of the other things that I just kind of want to slip in here is when we're talking about these lenses, I also want you… The reason we're talking about let's give you all of these tools is that you, as writer, will be a different person on every day you sit down to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You're having a bad day, you're going to bring a different lens to the table. You're having a really fantastic day, different lens. It's just… This is why we want to give you as broad a toolbox as possible.

[Erin] I also just think that's a fun thing to remember about character, is that characters grow and change. Not just in the big moments, but sometimes, like, characters can have an off moment, or say the wrong thing. I think there are sometimes where it's like you love your characters so much that you don't want them to, like, slip in any way. But it is the variations within us, it's the variations in our lenses, that also make them so special.

[DongWon] And this really gets to the core of why I love tabletop gaming so much, because it's entirely about character. Right? You're always experiencing a world and a story and a setting through the individual character's perspectives. But because it's collaborative and improvisational, also, what I put out there immediately gets refracted back to me by filtering through the lens of all the other players at the table. So we are collaborating on a thing by reflecting and refracting constantly what each of us is bringing to the table, and through the character's perspective of their own lens in addition to ours. So the interplay of all that is the thing that I find so delightful and fascinating and endlessly entertaining about tabletop.

 

[Howard] And I think those notes lead us perfectly into the homework. Sort of an inverted Mary Robinette here. Instead of having someone else read what you wrote, I want you to write what someone else says. Interview two friends. Write down their answers, and yours, if you want to contribute, as completely as possible. Just two questions. What is the happiest memory they think of first? And, describe a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them before the age of 18.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-37-a-close-reading-on-tension-movement-and-resolution 

 

Key points: The law of the half step, a little movement creates tension. Solutions to problems that create a whole new problem. Yes-but, no-and! Repetitions that have changed just a little bit. Don't play coy with the reader, withholding secrets. Make sure your reveal give us new information, moves the story forward. EDM beat drops! Use mini-drops, small revelations, to assure your reader that we are moving towards a resolution. Use multiple threads, multiple pieces of tension, at any given time. Resolve something that the reader doesn't know needs resolution. Make sure the movement and resolution is story driven. Reframe have to do as get to do. Reframe have to hold this back from the reader as at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing, and I am going to build to that reveal. Make your goal to be cursed by readers who didn't want to feel the thing that you just made them feel.

 

[Season 19, Episode 37]

 

[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.

 

[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Season 19, Episode 37]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Movement and Resolution.

[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.

 

[Howard] I want to talk about music for a moment. Way back when I was studying music composition, one of my instructors talked about what he called the law of the half step. Which was that when there's a note that is a half step off from being the tonic or the dominant or whatever, from being in resolution, you have a chord that has created tension, has created a need for movement. The whole principle behind this was that as you are composing, you want to build chords where there are these half step movements just waiting to happen. You don't want to move a whole step, you don't want to have a note jump, especially if you're writing for choir. You don't want to have somebody jump a third or a fourth or a fifth in order to resolve the chord. You want the little movements that make things resolve. In teaching us about this, he said, "Now let's listen to some Wagner," because he was a cruel, cruel man. What we learned in listening to Wagner is Wagner was always resolving in one direction, while shifting something else out...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Of place. He knew what he was doing. How does this tie into close reading tension with regard to Ring Shout, where the tension depends on something that is just a little bit out of place? Something… It doesn't need to move far, but it needs to move. It really needs to move. The longer it doesn't move, the tenser we get.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it's a different way of describing something that I often use when I'm trying to create tension, which is the solution to whatever problem your character is dealing with creates a new problem.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which… One of the things that I specifically think about in Ring Shout is the butcher shop scene. She needs to find the butcher shop. She needs to go and confront this guy. Doing so unlocks… It's like she does it. She has the confrontation. That unlocks this whole other enormous problem that… The dream that she had had was not actually just a dream. Ugh. I still have problems with that scene.

 

[DongWon] I mean, we see that again, over and over, he's doing that in terms of creating these moments that are the yes-but, no-and. Right? Like things… Even when things don't work out for them, it opens a door to further progressing the story. When things do work out for them, it works out in an unexpected way. Right? So, I think the night doctors is another great example of that…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] When she goes into the tree, there's a [garbled] name for the tree that I'm forgetting in the moment, but…

[Mary Robinette] The Angel Tree.

[DongWon] Yeah. The Dead Angel Tree. Sort of that whole sequence, which is this deeply upsetting thing, which is a solution to a problem. But it raises so many more questions in doing so. Right?

 

[Erin] What I love about both the girl from the dream and also the sort of brother's voice that comes out, is that it's one of those things where it's like every time we come back to it, it's moved a little bit. So like there's a little bit of tension in that. Because you know that there's some revelation coming. There's no reason this would be occurring over and over again in the story, and then be like, "Oh, well. That happened." Like, it seems like it's building towards something. But in between, there's all these immediate, like, present tensions. Like, I gotta go into this butcher shop.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I have to like run into a place on fire. But then it will be like, "Oh, this little voice." And the voices saying something a little different. Oh, this little girl. But she looks a little different. It's almost like those movies where something small on a shelf moves out of the corner of your eye…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh, my God, this moved such a long way."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That is a great way…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To build tension in this story.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, to return to the music metaphor, it's that scale is building in the background. Right? It's each note is progressing up the scale, and at some point we know that's going to resolve. We know that's going to have to go somewhere.

[Howard] The… Going back to the music again, and the law of the halfstep. When you have a repeated theme in music, but something is changing, the accompaniment has changed, the tempo has changed. We've all heard it done when you play a familiar melody in a minor key. One of my favorite examples of that was Katrina and the Waves played in a minor key as part of a tribute during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. It was emotionally superpowerful, but you make little changes and it tells the reader, tells the listener, we're going somewhere. We're not just waiting for this piece to end. There is a resolution coming, and the modification of the thing that you're familiar with is leading toward that resolution.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is one of the things that P. Djèlí Clark does that I see early career writers not get where they have a character who has a secret, who has some past traumatic event, and they play coy with the reader. The reason that it does not work is, when it's handled badly is, that there isn't that movement, there isn't that giving us new information, there isn't anything to be gained by the withholding. In this, is the withholding and then the resolution of that. When she finally goes and has to relive that memory fully, that is a… That is a major plot point. It is one of the things that the story is building towards. As we are going through it, there are these tiny movements, we get these small resolutions every time we come back to it. With the things that Erin was talking about, with those, every time we come back to the voice, it's a little bit different. It's a… It is these small resolutions that then open up a different question.

[Howard] There's a common trope in all kinds of fiction where there is a secret and someone asks about the secret and the answer is you don't want to know the answer. Oh, you're not ready for me to tell you that yet. It's often so ham-fisted that we just think of it as a trope and we hate it. But in Ring Shout, there are secrets that she is not ready for the answer to. When you talk about the butcher shop, in particular, and we get an answer and the answer is a reveal where there is a whole scary horrible mess that you were just not ready to know about earlier.

[DongWon] Yeah. To modernize the metaphor a little bit, from Wagner… Sorry. But you can think about it in terms of like in EDM beat drop. Right? Like, you're building this slow thing, and then the beat drops, and now you're in a different rhythm and things are going faster. What you want is that sense of release when you get there. When you get to that beat drop, things should be popping off, being a little chaotic. Then you'll find a different rhythm, you'll find a different pace as you settle in past that moment. But the butcher shop is such a good example of that because it's a thrilling scene. Right? It is… The things that are happening in it are like absolutely buck wild. Even compared to the kind of horror we'd seen up until that point, this is reaching a different crescendo of that. Right? Which is part of the mix. That sequence is so memorable and is going to set the pace and tone for the back half of this story.

[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about moving toward that resolution.

 

[Shawn] Hey, it's Shawn Nelson, founder and CEO of Love Sack and host of the Let Me Save You 25 Years podcast. Want to avoid common pitfalls and get straight to the insights that drive success? Join me and recognize names like John Mackey of Whole Foods and Joe Vicente of Sparstar as we unpack the hard-earned lessons from their journeys. Ready to streamline your path to success? Listen to Let Me Save You 25 Years on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That's Let Me Save You 25 Years with Shawn Nelson. Listen now.

 

[Erin] The movie Clueless is great.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I'll just say it. So my recommendation is watch the movie Clueless, the nineties Valley girl retelling of the Jane Austen book, Emma. It's got classic clues, it's got amazing actors, it's got Paul Rudd at whatever age he was claiming to be at that moment. But the thing that I really love paying attention to is the way they take something from a completely different era, the Regency era, and move it into nineties valley girl voice. If you're thinking about voice in your own work, think about how did they do that? How do they make it seem like Clueless is a movie of the time and place that it's from while still keeping the plot and all of the things that come with being a retelling of an Austen classic? One thing I like to think about that you may do as you watch this work is how would you make that same story happen in the world that you're building? Enjoy that, while you watch Clueless.

 

[Howard] So you might have in front of you an outline for your work in progress where you've got a pretty clear picture of where things are going. Many of us will look at you and laugh a little bit, because your characters have not yet run away with the story. Others of us will look at you very jealously and say, "Wow, I wish my outlines work that way." The thing to remember is that this is your plan. You have an idea of how to move and how to resolve. The reader isn't in on it. Part of what makes Ring Shout, for me, so satisfying is that at every stage I could tell that we were moving toward a resolution. I knew that, but I had no idea what it was. How do you set about creating that for your readers?

[Erin] I would say that one of the things that I loved that I was talking about before with ring shout That is the mini-drops, the small answers that let you know that questions will be answered. So, looking at the sort of dream figure of the little girl… It's a little girl, who is this? Who is this girl? Wait, this girl is me? Wait, this girl wasn't a girl. And there's a barn. Like, there's all these pieces of information…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Come out. Like, we don't learn about the barn, really, until about three or four…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And then, once you hear about it, like, you may or may not contextually put together your own beliefs about what the barn is… It was exactly what I thought it was…

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But, it's each thing tells you, okay, this small question was answered, so I know the next question will be answered. That leads you towards the overall resolution of why is this important. Each single bit of information also tells you a little bit more of the reason that the girl is a girl in her mind's eye, even though… When the event happens, she wasn't young because it's easier for her. You're like, "Oh. That gives me both an emotional resolution and some more information about what's happening here." I think it is those smaller bits that really help to give the reader confidence that you are driving towards something.

 

[Mary Robinette] It's also that more than one thread is active at any given time, more than one story thread, more than one piece of tension, active at any given time. And each scene is moving those, like… In… Ah, it's so good. I'm thinking about, there's the girl, but also the Ring Shout scene. That in that scene, you're learning about how Ring Shout works. You're also learning about violence that's been happening other places. You are learning about how the Ku Klux's work. All of those things move just a little bit. And then the weather begins to shift. Each time, it's like… It's all of these little tiny half steps that resolve something while shifting something else out of alignment. It's something that you can do with your own work, is to look at scenes and see do you have only one thread that you're moving and resolving tension for in a given scene? That's for short fiction or longform.

[DongWon] It's why overlapping sounds and overlapping rhythms and melodies create greater amplitude. Right? They're not countering each other out. I mean, you want to make sure that they're not canceling each other out, which is a thing that can happen. So if you have different kinds of tension and they're running counter to each other, this can cause a drop in excitement and tension in the book. But if you're doing what he's doing here, which is adding all these different layers of here's the most visceral immediate layer of like they're fighting Ku Klux's in the street after trying to blow them up with this trap to the memories every time she draws her sword. We know we're going to get another beat on that particular layer. Then the Ring Shouts, the sort of epistolary pieces that start off each section…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Each of those is adding another note to the sort of stack of melodies that we're getting that is building over the course of the book. It makes the whole book feel like one of its own Ring Shouts. Right? It's one of these owned stories that has this impact and potential and is saying something very specific and powerful.

 

[Erin] I also love that sometimes it's building and creating emotion, even when you don't think it is. So, for example, all the people, the voices that… The images basically that she's getting when she draws the sword happen basically the same way every time that we see them the first few times. So it feels like this is just a thing. When you draw your sword, you get some random pretty tragic things that happened. But then those voices come into play at the end…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Of the novella… Spoiler alert, but you were supposed to read the book. Like, those all come into play feels like such a great res… Like a resolution I wasn't even expecting.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I think that sometimes that is also something that we could do, which is to resolve a thing that you didn't know needed resolution, that it feels so emotionally satisfying to get it.

[DongWon] You keep us moving so much that we forget that, oh, her best friend died, which means that she could be one of the spirits of the sword now. You know what I mean? So that moment when she comes is such a resolution to that whole arc, the arc of friendship, the arc of the tragedy of her death, and the ark of the sword, all coming together in a single moment that leads to such a big emotional catharsis for these two characters and this relationship.

 

[Howard] One of the things that makes this kind of movement and resolution satisfying is when it is always story driven, rather than driven by the necessity of the meta-, the beat chart. I want the reader to not know this yet. I want the reader… Now I want them to know this. Okay, that's fine. Having a beat chart at the beginning that says the reader is in the dark about a whole bunch of things and this is my list of reveals. But every one of these reveals not only needs to be justified, but the reader needs to feel like there was a really good reason why nobody in whose POV I was had that information until just now. One of my favorite parts of the book is the realization that the trope of oh, I had this sword because I am the chosen one of these women who gave me the sword, and then, after the butcher shop scene, you're like, "Wait a minute. I'm not their chosen one. I'm someone else's chosen one." I… Oh, and that's the point at which, for me, I no longer knew… I had no clue where this was going to resolve. I was now genuinely frightened because there… We had this discussion years ago on the podcast. There's so many worse things that can happen to a character than death.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Having them make the decision that you as the reader hate is so much worse. I was afraid of that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] [garbled] About the relationship between writer and reader, you were talking about the meta-beat, and I think that one of the things… A life thing that I have been thinking about recently is the difference between have to and get to. So, trying to reframe things that you have to do in your life as, like, I get to do that. It doesn't always work…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But…

[Mary Robinette] I may try it at home…

[Erin] But I do think that, like, sometimes instead of it's "I have to hold this back from the reader," it's "at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing to the reader and I'm going to build to that amazing moment of reveal." So I think it's about like wanting to share your story versus wanting to hold back your story.

[DongWon] This came up in one of my D&D games in a conversation with one of my players. We settled on this thing of the difference between holding a secret from you versus holding a secret for you.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's great.

[DongWon] So… If you think of yourself as a writer holding the secret for your audience, you're… It's going to be more exciting, more fun, better resolution if they don't know this thing yet versus like I'm keeping this thing from you and you don't get to have it. Right? I think that subtle shift in the mind set… It's as delicate as the get to, want to or get to, have to, or whatever it was. It's as subtle as that distinction, but I think it's a really important one, and that can be really helpful in getting to the most exciting kind of release at the end of the movement.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that also gets to something that I often end up telling writers which is, like, "Okay. So what emotion do you want the writer to have? Because, gosh, that writer is clever is not…"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] "Sustainable." That is the I am holding the secret from you.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The, "Oh, no," is I am holding the secret for you.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. [Garbled]

[Howard] My goal as a writer, as an early writer, would be… Yeah, I would like to be seen as clever. Now, I've reached the point where my goal is I want to be cursed by people who didn't want to feel the thing that I just made them feel. That's… For me, that's the high bar. Do I curse P. Djèlí Clark?

[Mary Robinette] I do.

[Howard] Maybe a little bit.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Maybe a little, but I enjoyed that ride quite a bit.

[Mary Robinette] I appreciated that ride.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm not going to say that this was an enjoyable ride.

[Howard] Hey, we've got one or two more episodes to talk about this? Two more. All right. Let's go ahead and wrap this up.

 

[Howard] In the musical vein, I have a fun homework for you. Write a scene three times. Same scene, and write it from scratch three times. But listen to different music each time. If you need help varying things, try all instrumental. Try something that's got lots and lots of vocals. Try something that you are completely unfamiliar with, you've never listened to before. For… See how that changes what you put down on the page.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-06-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-length 

 

Key Points: There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel. First, look at unfulfilled promises, or runaway atmosphere, and adjust those. What tells the story most effectively? Is the pacing off? Consider the master effect, what is the intended impact of the story, and do the separate elements support that? Often authors write their way into or out of a scene, and leave that extra text there. Cut it! NaNoWriMo, high-paced writing, may focus on whatever you're excited about, and leave out the parts that are harder for you to write. Take a look at filling those in! When layering, look for natural pause points. Watch for shorthand or compressed spots, which you can unpack to add emphasis or remove ambiguity. To add length, try sending them to new locations. To cut length, cut a character or a side quest. READ, review, do the easy fixes, audition (outline, then try changes on the outline), and do it! Adjust signposts and bridging material. Use narrative summary (aka summarize your darlings). Let things happen offstage, and have someone refer to it. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 06]

 

[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.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Length.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

 

[DongWon] With us this week, we have a special guest, which is executive editor at Tor Publishing group, Ali Fisher. Ali acquires and edits speculative fiction and non-fiction across young adult, middle grade, and adult categories, and is, as a bonus, a cast member of the podcast Rude Tales of Magic, which is a D&D flavored comedy podcast. But really Ali's here in her capacity as an editor, and has worked on a very wide range of incredibly successful titles in speculative fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy. Yeah, so welcome, Ali.

[Ali] Thank you. Hello, world. I am so excited to be on this podcast. Longtime listener, first time being on the podcast here. I've been listening to Writing Excuses since, I think, 2010.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Ali] Is that true? You've been doing this that long, correct?

[DongWon] I mean, next season will be year 20 soon, so, I don't remember what year we started, but… It's been a minute.

[Ali] Yeah. I… I've been listening to Writing Excuses longer than I've been in publishing. So, it's a real pleasure.

[Mary Robinette] This somehow delights me. And also makes me feel impossibly old.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] revision, which is also something that makes me feel impossibly old when I get into it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] We know that… We've timed this because we know that a lot of people have just finished NaNoWriMo, and you have written a novel and now you have to figure out what to do with it. So, that was why we invited Ali in, because as an editor, she has a certain understanding of what happens with novels. So, the first thing we're going to talk about is length. Because most of the projects coming out of NaNoWriMo are going to be too short. Having said that, every time I talk to someone about a novel, I always hear them say either, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too long." Or, "Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it's too short." I never hear anybody say, "But it's just right." There's no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel.

[DongWon] Exactly, exactly. Even when novels come to me as an agent or when it goes to the editor or the publishing house, I feel like that is one of the first things we're talking about, that's, like, where does this fit in terms of length. So, Ali, when a project comes across your desk, when I send you an email with the most brilliant thing…

[Ali] Uhuh.

[DongWon] Attached to it…

[Ali] Of course.

[DongWon] What is your immediate reaction when you start thinking, oh, I wish this was a little bit on the shorter side, I wish this was a little bit on the longer side. What are the questions that start coming to your mind to help you figure out how to answer that?

[Ali] Yeah. Absolutely. So, working in speculative fiction, often we're sort of… We see the higher range of word count on like different novels, novellas, or whatever, because there's a lot of additional writing that sometimes takes place in those books, especially at Tor, known for door stoppers.

[Chuckles]

[Ali] A wide range, though, really. So, depending on the age group it's for, there tend to be different sort of hopes and requests coming in from retailers for their shelves and what are their assumptions of those readers' reading lengthwise. Right? Middle grade being slightly shorter. YA has really run the gamut at this point, but… With adults attending to have potentially the longest word count that I've seen. Those are very broad generalizations, but it tends to be something that is absolutely always on the table in the conversation when books come in. But that word count conversation also tends to happen after an initial read and just sort of taking stock of… There were promises that were never… That I was excited to read about, we never saw them, or there was a lot of atmosphere here, but it felt a little exploratory to your process, and I actually think that it could feel bigger if there's less in there. So, stuff like that is a little bit more… A little less like let's chop this to a really specific length, and more of a what else… What's helpful in telling this story most effectively?

[Mary Robinette] I'm really glad you said that, because one of the things that I see a lot with early career writers is that they will have internalized these rigid ideas of how long a book needs to be. Sometimes they think that they have to cut 10% when they finish a book. I think they've picked that up from Steven King. But it's not just cutting. Like, shorter is not better, longer is not better, it's the why of it, for me. Like, why are you trying to cut or expand? That helps inform the places that you're doing it. For me, length, like description, that sort of thing, has a lot to do… Has a strong relationship to pacing.

 

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. I think sometimes when a book can feel too long, that is because the pacing is… It's too drawn out. It's not moving fast, I'm not getting pulled enough… Pulled through this as forcefully as I want to, to have like a really great reading experience. So, I think sometimes the idea is, okay, there's some fat, we can cut here. There's some extra elements that aren't quite landing with the reader for whatever reason, and if we remove those scenes, then maybe things will move on a little bit quicker. Then, sometimes, we make sure on the other side too of everything is always up to 11, it could be exhausting as a reading experience. We kind of need those breaks and those breathing points to kind of absorb character information or background information or worldbuilding, and kind of like really settle into the story in some ways. So, I think length and pacing often feel very connected.

[Ali] Definitely. It is very hard to know before you get to the stage where you have confirmed beta readers or an agent or an editor who will read your book and tell you about things like pacing and tell you their [garbled] responses to stuff like that. I'm going to bring in something from a book that I read once…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Excellent.

[Ali] Right off the bat here. There's a book called The Fiction Editor, The Novel, And the Novelist. It's very short, I think it's like 170 pages, by Thomas McCormack. I don't know much about Thomas, but he was an editor once upon a time, and he has a concept called the master effect. The concept was the master effect is the cerebral and emotional impact the author wants the book as a whole to have. It goes on to say it can be… It's sort of like it's propped up by observation and insight and emotion and experience. So, like what does this all lead to? I think, when you're looking at length, it can be helpful to look at the separate elements, as they like relate to what that big overall feeling is that you want. It can be sort of like interesting to see what inspires that feeling most, and what doesn't really add to it. Right? Especially if you're looking at like tension or something, you might find with an eye really clearly set on, "Oh, I want this to feel really tense," then you realize like, "Oh, this traveling isn't quite getting me there," or something.

 

[DongWon] It's sort of like… We were talking about word count expectations by category and genre, that the publisher wants. If it's an epic fantasy, you want it to be this length, whether that's like 100,000 or 120,000 words. If you wanted to hit with middle grade office, you want it on the shorter side. Whatever that specific range is. But those aren't… They are arbitrary and they can be very frustrating when you run into them in a rigid way. But the logic of it does come from somewhere, which is, when you're reading an epic fantasy, so much of what you want to be hearing… Experiencing is that expansiveness, is the breadth of scope and perspective, and to get a sense of the politics and the magic and those kinds of things. So you're expecting a slightly slower pace when you're coming into an epic fantasy than you would if you were coming into an adventure fantasy, which you want it to be moving a little bit at a brisker pace, getting from action scene to action scene, from tension to tension, a little bit quicker than you would when you're not having big feast scenes or big courtroom political scenes. Right? So I think a little bit of those length expectations really are driven by genre and category, because those connect to certain types of pacing and certain types of reading experiences. So if you're thinking about that, you call it the master effect? Is that what the term was?

[Ali] Yes. Yeah. Thomas called it.

[DongWon] When you're thinking about the effect that you want to have on your reader for your particular category, that's where length can really be part of the conversation coming into it.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that we're going to talk about in our next episode, where we're talking about intention. Edgar Allan Poe has a similar concept, which he calls the unity of effect, where you kind of think about what is the overall emotional goal that you're aiming for, and then everything that you put into the novel goes into that, and I think that length is one of those things that you're also manipulating as you're moving through. One of the other things that you said, Ali, at the beginning was talking about… Or maybe it was you, DongWon, talking about… Oh, I can see you've left some of your homework here. But there's another thing that I see authors do, and I've done myself a lot, which is that we don't really know where the scene is going so we write our way into it to discover it. But then all of that text is still there. So I frequently find that often the beginnings of scenes and sometimes the ends of scenes are places where the author is trying to figure out how do I get into this scene or how do I get back out of it. That you've done the thing that the scene required, and then you're kind of floundering, going like, eh, I don't… It needs a… I don't know, let's… Eh… Then there's just a lot of text where you were trying to figure out the perfect line, and then you don't cut any of it, because you don't know which pieces are actually supporting it.

[DongWon] Exactly. I think… I would love to dive into more about how you identify those and some techniques for cutting or adding, depending on where you need to do that. But let's take a quick break first, and we'll talk about the specific techniques when we come back.

 

[Ali] For my thing of the week, I wish I could pitch every book I've ever been able to work on. But, since it's 15 minutes long, and we're not that smart, I'm going to constrain myself to just the most recent publication that I had the genuine pleasure to acquire and edit. This is Infinity Alchemist by World Fantasy and National Book award winning author, Kacen Callender. Kacen is the author of Hurricane Child, King of the Dragonflies, Felix Ever after, Queen of the Conquered, and many more. Infinity Alchemist is their YA fantasy debut. It rules. It's basically dark academia burn the magic school down. In it, 3 young alchemists come together to find and then protect the rumored Book of Source before others use it for alchemist supremacy. Of course, these 3 heroes end up in a legendary love triangle, and please remember real love triangles connect on all 3 sides.

[Chuckles]

[Ali] [garbled] is clear, mostly trans, mostly POC, and polyamorous. The magic system is inspired by quantum physics, so it's very original, very cool, and available just now as of last week from Tor Teen.

 

[DongWon] As we come back from break, I would love to start digging into some of the techniques. So, say you… Coming out of NaNoWriMo, the expectation is you've written 50,000 words, and now you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, how do I make this a little bit longer?" How do I make this feel like a full novel that is ready for a fantasy reader, or ready for a YA reader, whoever it is you're trying to reach? So, how do you know where to add length? What are the points at which… How do you add to the volume of the text without slowing down your pacing too much, or disrupt or throwing off your plot structure or your character arcs or whatever it is?

[Ali] First of all, congratulations. Well done. I don't… Every time I hear about NaNoWriMo that sounds absolutely bonkers to me. That is extremely impressive. My understanding is writing at that sort of sprint pace, for a lot of people… Some people that is a very standard piece of writing, for a lot of people it is, like, pedal to the metal, tough situation. My guess is you gravitated towards like writing things you're most excited about, or, like writing towards characters if that was what you're most excited about or writing towards just the world if that was what you were most excited about, so it could well be that, like, there are full category elements that are somewhat missing, that just don't feel as instinctive or easy or smooth for you as a writer, to, like, write when you're in that zone, when you're in that kind of sprint zone. So there may be whole categories that have opportunities for lengthening.

[DongWon] That makes sense. So you're really looking at it overall and saying what are the things that I was drawn to when I was putting this together, but maybe not feeling the sort of holistic sense of I want to have this effect on my reader, here's the things I didn't put in there. I'm writing an epic fantasy and all I did was right cool battle scenes. Now I gotta go put back the court intrigue, now I have to put a romance in here, now I have to put in those character arcs that maybe aren't as fleshed out as they were when I was thinking about how to get enough words down on the page. Right? So I think that's a great place to start, I'm just feeling like where are the elements of this story that I want to be putting in that I wasn't thinking about in that moment.

[Ali] Yeah. Unless you're pitching [garbled] battle scenes, and then…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] It's just a collection of battle scenes, which sounds…

[Laughter]

[Ali] [garbled] and you should do that, but then you need 20 more battle scenes.

[DongWon] I would recommend Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes, which is basically just one battle over 3 days for the entire book. So…

[Ali] Awesome.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Ali] Very cool.

 

[Mary Robinette] So I… What I look for when I'm doing this… The kind of thing that you're talking about, the layering of… Layering in the romance element or sometimes you've written a scene and it's only dialogue and there could actually be some description… Maybe we'd like these people to be some place. So what I look for when I'm going to like layering description, for instance, is I look for natural pause points. Because when you… When you're spending words on a description, the reader has to slow down to read them. So every word you've got on the page is basically creating a pause in the readers head between one line of dialogue in the next. Which is why… Sometimes you've had the experience where you see a character answer a question and you don't remember the question that was asked. Because there's been a ton of description in between those 2 things. So I'll look for those natural pause points to put in descriptions, but also to unpack emotion. One of the other things that I find when I got a finished novel is that at the… Especially the last 3rd of the novel, I just want to be done with the novel. So I, like, shorthand every emotional experience my character is having. This is a place where you can add length by going back and unpacking the things. You don't want to unpack every emotion that the character has. You want to unpack the ones that are… Again, going with that unity of effect. So I think about it as places where I want to add emphasis or remove ambiguity, as some of the places that I'm looking at for unpacking the emotion. Is this an emotion that I want to add emphasis to, because it helps you understand the character better? Or, is this moment ambiguous? Can I give a little bit more here? Like, did I completely forget to give any physical sensation to my character experiencing an emotion?

[Ali] Totally. So, like what you're saying, it could be that at the beginning, you have a… When notable emotional experiences happen, you have the full range of… The emotion beforehand and the observation, and the tension, and then the emotion itself, and then the internal judgment on the emotion, and, like, go through the entire sort of the cycle of that. And watching then the reaction, or the dialogue that comes after it. By the end, it's like, "Uh, she was sad."

[Chuckles]

[Ali] Moving forward.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You've read my manuscript.

[Ali] Yeah, but it works at the time. So, like, just… That's also about balancing and finding that style… Style similarities across maybe when like different… Different days felt different levels of oh, no, I have to make up for 2 days now, or whatever, that you were getting through.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the other hacks that I have for adding length is reverse engineering something that I do for short fiction where I need to compress. So, with short fiction, I try to have everything in a single location. With novels, sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I need to make this longer. Where can I send them that I haven't sent them before?" Because it will make the world feel richer. It's like, oh, reuse locations, but sometimes sending them someplace else gives me additional words that I have to write because I have to describe the new place. Again, it can make the world seem broader and richer and more interesting if I just change location of a scene.

 

[DongWon] Exactly. So, on the flipside of that, though, you've got something, it's a 200,000 word manuscript, you need it to be 110. Right? You need to cut a lot of it because it's simply too big for whatever reason. Either for the readership or even sometimes bumping up against physical limitations of publishing.

[Chuckles] [Yes]

[DongWon] It's hard to remember that we are making physical objects that we're shipping around.

[Yes]

[DongWon] And when you print more pages, it gets more expensive, and when it's heavier, it's more expensive. That can really affect things. So when, for whatever reason, your publisher is saying, "Hey. We would love this to be shorter." Or if your friends are saying that, or just your own instincts, where do you start to make those cuts? What are the things that are either easy things that you can start to look at? I mean, like, okay, across the board, I could start pulling out these scenes, or, what are the more difficult interwoven elements that you're starting to look at?

[Mary Robinette] As, apparently the only writer in the room…

[Laughter]

[Ali] But we have a lot to say.

[Mary Robinette] You have a lot to say. But I will…

[DongWon] We have a lot of opinions about how writers should do things.

[Ali] Yeah. Since you asked what's the hard part.

[Mary Robinette] You have opinions about what I should do, but I can tell you what's mechanically difficult and what's easier. The easiest way to reduce a bunch of length very fast is to cut a character or a side quest. That'll pull out a ton of length really fast. It can feel daunting when you are thinking about doing that because usually it's a… It's woven into the book all the way through. So I… What I will do is I will… I have an acronym that I use which is READ. I will review, do the easy fixes, audition, and then do it. So by audition, what I mean is that I will… If I have to do a really big at it like that, I'll reverse engineer my outline. Then I will experiment with pulling out those scenes just in outline form to see whether or not the basic flow is still there. Then, when I get into it and start the do it part of it, I put all of those into a scrap been, because I will almost certainly need pieces of them later. Then, largely what I'm doing is I'm having to adjust my signposts, which is the way I exit and enter scenes, and the material… The bridging material from getting from one thing to another. When I'm cutting things. Then, when I'm cutting characters, often it's, like, you just go in and you change the character names and then you have to tweak the dialogue to make it make sense for that character. But it's one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of length.

 

[Ali] I also think there's a… Maybe I'm wrong but I feel like, generally, out there, there's a bit of like a demonizing of narrative summary. It can really go a long way to… There are scenes that are fully dialogue, beat by beat, like this is happening, that can probably be brought down to a couple of sentences. That's like reducing your darlings, I guess. Or like…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Summarizing your darlings.

[Ali] Summarizing your darlings. Exactly.

[DongWon] I think this is where show, don't tell can lead you astray. Right? It takes so many more words to show something than to tell sometimes. So, sometimes if you have this sense of I can summarize this, I don't need to walk through every part of this group figuring out what their plan is, or having this interaction or this conversation, you can condense that into a few sentences. You can condense that into a paragraph. Provided you're making that narration interesting and still connecting it to the character. I think there are ways that you can give us very large amounts of information very quickly. And then keep moving. That can really accelerate the read in the pace of the book in a lot of good ways.

[Garbled] [go ahead]

[Ali] I was just going to say I just love what you said about auditioning. Because I think it can be very daunting and emotionally taxing to cut things that you wrote and loved. I will say as an editor, I have recommended things and been very sad about them and felt like I genuinely know I'm going to miss this. But the audition process was such a smart move. Because then you can like be really honest about whether that's going to take something away that's genuinely precious to the book, or if it's like something that was very cool, but isn't needed.

[DongWon] Because sometimes you audition and find that, oh, that was loadbearing.

[Yeah]

[DongWon] This whole thing doesn't stand up without that element. So it's like, okay, we can't touch that one. What else can we do? Unlike renovating a house, you can actually pull those out and see what happens to the whole structure.

[Ali] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to pull out a loadbearing wall under any circumstances. Unless you're like, okay, I'm going to have to pull this out, but then a beam of steel…

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] So… But when you're pulling things out, I like what you said about the show, don't tell, and the narrative summary. But the other piece that I think a lot of people underestimate when they're thinking about length is how much can happen offstage. In the gap between scenes, in the gap between chapters. You can… I found that I can cut an entire scene and just have someone refer to it having happened. That the implication is sometimes enough, if the scene was not doing anything loadbearing, aside from like one thing, that often I can just say, "Oh, yes, I see that you got the diamonds," instead of actually showing them going into the store and buying the diamonds.

[Ali] Yes.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Obviously. A thing that all of my characters do.

[Ali] So fancy.

[DongWon] I did not assume that they were buying the diamonds, when you set up that scene, but… Yeah. I mean, you can just tell us that anything happened.

[Mary Robinette] That's why you need the narrative summary.

[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. Exactly. 

 

[DongWon] Well, apropos, I suppose, for an episode about length, we're running a little bit on the long side here. So, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] I do. I want you to… This is a way to play with length. You're going to find 2 scenes that… Scenes that are right next to each other. What I want you to do is I want you to remove the scene break, and then write bridging text to connect the 2 of them. So that narrative summary about how they got from point A to point B. Then I want you to find a different scene that has that bridging text, and cut it into 2 different scenes. So that you are removing it and creating new signposts, new entry and exit points to get from those 2 scenes. I want you to try that. See what it does to length, see what it does to your perception of the pacing

 

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

 

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-48-nanowrimo-week-5-writing-endings 

 

Key points: How do you wrap up your novel? What makes a satisfying ending? Make sure the parentheses are closed. But how do you decide what to resolve, and what to leave open? Endings let the characters and your reads feel everything that has happened. Give the readers the same grounding that you did at the beginning. Where, who, why, how. Restate the core thematic elements of the story. Give us the aftermath. How do you leave the door cracked for a follow-on, and still give a satisfying ending? Remember, life is messy, and your character may not achieve all their goals. Leave some things unanswered. Think about how you want your reader to feel, and make sure that is the last beat, but leave other questions hanging. End with a success that leaves something else to try. Revision! Not for NaNoWriMo, but when you reach the end, you know what questions you should have been asking, and you may need to go back and set it up right. Go ahead and try different endings! Nowhere near the end? Write yourself some notes about what you want the ending to be.

 

[Season 18, Episode 48]

 

[DongWon] Hello, writers. Whether you're doing NaNoWriMo, editing your newest project, or just desperately trying to keep up with your TBR pile, it's hard to find the time to plan and cook healthy and nutritious meals to keep you energized on these jampacked days. So, I'm here to tell you about Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. They can help you fool's [one word fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef prepared, dietitian approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with one less excuse to keep you from writing. This November, get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-pack deliveries right to your door. Ready in just 2 minutes, no prep and no mess. Had to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code WX50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.

 

[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 18, Episode 48]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 5, Welcome to the End.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Mary Robinette] Congratulations. You have made it to week 5. For those of you who are still writing, and all of you should be, because we believe in you, you are now trying to wrap this thing up. Listen, if you lost steam, you don't have to have 50,000 words. This is about just moving forward. You can save this episode and listen to it when you're ready. But we're going to be talking about how to wrap up your novel. So, what are some things, like when you are thinking about moving towards a satisfying ending? What are some of the elements that you think about as, hmmm, this feels good?

[DongWon] It's funny. I have an issue, editorially, in thinking about endings. I have such a bias towards openings and the beginnings of books, and all like getting into the story and asking all these big questions, but I sometimes forget to think about how important the ending is. So I've made it a real focus for myself in the past few years to really pay attention and really care about how a book ends and how we're moving on from the story, emotionally. Right? There are so many very famous authors, very successful authors, who are notoriously bad at endings. Where the book just kind of stops. Right? So I think we criticize those endings, but there's a way in which maybe we can think about endings as a broader category than just making sure there's a long denouement, where everything is fully wrapped up. But, overall, I think making sure those parentheses are closed, that we were kind of talking about last week, as we were talking about starting to get to the climactic beats and making sure certain things are tied up. But how do you prioritize what are the things that you want to close off, what are the things that you want to leave your reader with a real sense of resolution on, and what are questions you want to leave open?

[Erin] I think endings are difficult because they're quiet. In some ways. Not all. But there's a moment where everything you've been doing sort of resonates in the room. It's like the moment after a concert ends, when you can still hear the mild echo of the music in the air. There's something like really beautiful about that. But also frightening in the stillness. Because it's sort of you don't have the candy bar scenes that we were talking about last week to like distract you, you're really sort of left with you and the word. I think that's why a lot of times I'll say, for me, I had a real tendency to like just try to murder everyone…

[Chuckles]

 

[Erin] At the end, because then there's no one left to be in the quiet and in the stillness. I could just be like, "The end. They're dead." But I actually have found out that… Somebody told me once that it's like landing a punch. When you punch someone, you want to actually let that impact happen. If you punch someone, and then go to black, you never really see them feel it. And that endings are the moment where actually your characters get to feel everything that has happened. As frightening as it is, it's really important to also give your reader an ability to feel what has happened at the end or throughout the course of the book.

[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that The Wire ends. As much as I think season 5 went wildly off the rails, that final moment, you've got McNulty driving down the highway with a person. He stops, and he gets out of his car, and he just stares at the city for a while. Then we get a chance to see, like, what is each one of these people doing, and we get to see McNulty thinking about it and digesting it and processing it. Then he gets back in his car and he drives away. Giving your characters the chance to process what has happened and what they've gone through gives your readers that same chance. Rather than just yanking out the rug and saying, "Thanks for reading my book. Imagine for yourself what happens next."

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I had a lot of problems with when I started the switch from short fiction to novels is that I would in my novels the short story pacing. That I would stick the landing and I would be out. Because novels are about immersion. I wasn't giving my readers time to absorb this. The dénouement that we talk about sometimes. So what I've started realizing is that I need to give them the same things that I gave them at the beginning of the book. I need to ground them, because my character is in a different emotional place. They're often in a different physical place. So I find that if I start thinking about it with the why, where, who, and how that we talked about at the beginning, that I can… I know more of the elements that I need to include. It's like it helps me ground my readers. Like, who is my character now? Who have they become over the course of this journey? What physical actions are they doing in this scene that conveys that to the reader? Where are we? Like, how is the status quo changed? Like, what does the environment tell me about this new landscape, and, like, why is it important? So these are the things that I will be thinking about. Like, we're talking about the very, very last piece of it. But it's that looking back at the beginning for my answers to what we're talking about at the end. Some of it is what Dan was talking about in the previous episode of the inverse thing, or, you've heard me talk about it with nesting code. But that's what I start thinking about, is easing them out and kind of very similar pacing to how I brought them in. If it was a fast opening, that I'm going to give them a faster paced close. If it was a thoughtful opening, that's going to tell me something about the pacing at the end. So, sometimes I'm looking at mirroring that kind of pacing that I had at the beginning, sometimes I'm looking at doing an inversion, because it's saying something about the changes that have happened across the course of the novel.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Sort of building off of that idea, I think there's sometimes… One of my favorite types of endings that I've run into that I think kind of plays into this is when the last scenes are just a restatement of the core thematic elements of the story that you've just experienced. Right? So I think going to your Wire example, McNulty, looking at the city of Baltimore at the end is just a statement about what this whole show was about, what this 5 season project was, was we did a portrait of Baltimore, and now we're looking at it and reflecting on the journey that we went on. One of my very, very favorite endings to a TV show, finished last year, was Better Call Saul. Which, I don't want to quite spoil it, but the way that it ends is such a statement of what is important in the show. Right? Why did we spend all of this time with Saul as he went on this whole journey? It's making really clear, crystal-clear in some ways, the importance that love has in that story and what he stands for and what is important to him and who he wants to be. That is all restated in the final episode in this really beautiful, elegaic way. So I think when you're looking at your ending, it's almost a little bit like writing an essay in college, where you start with you state your theme. You explain how you're going to say your theme. That's kind of the opening to your story. Then you get to the business of explaining all the things. At the end, you're like, "Here's my conclusion. In this story, we discover that love is real." You know what I mean? There's a very simple, boiled down version of how you end the story that can look like that, that I think can be simple and impactful. I'm thinking about your punch example. There's a thing in Hong Kong cinema where you will actually see the punch 3 times. Right? You'll see the blow land, and then it'll cut to the slow mold impact of like you can see how it's affecting the person who got it, then it'll cut back to the wide angle and you'll see them jump backwards or fall down or whatever it is. So you see these 3 different beats and 3 angles on the same strike. That's the thing that makes it feel so impactful to the audience of, like… It can also seem corny when it's done certain ways, but, so often, it happens very quickly, you don't even really see what's happening, you just see boop, boop, boop. And you realize that that guy just got crushed in that moment, he got hit so hard. You can feel his ribs breaking, in that moment. Right? I think letting it sink in in that way and being a little obvious in your ending is not a bad way to go.

[Dan] If you've ever watched a GIF of like a disaster, someone falling down, something collapsing, and it ends right as soon is the disaster happens, and you're like, "But wait, I wanted to watch it land. I wanted to watch it fall. I wanted to look at the rubble for a minute." That's what we're talking about, that sense of, yes, you've seen the big thing, but you didn't really get a look at the aftermath, that's what really is satisfying about it.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the other tools you can use to make that disaster really satisfying.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writers. Welcome to week 5. How are you doing? I wanted to share something with you. I wrote my first published novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, during NaNoWriMo. I also wrote multiple unpublished novels during NaNoWriMo. I've won Nano and I've had years where I could not hit that 50,000 words. So as you enter this last week, I want you to remember that every word you've written this month has been a victory. Because the journey is the thing. By writing, you are learning to write. You're learning to set goals. You are learning about your writing process and what works for you. Whether you wrote 50,000 words or 5000 words this month, you are a writer.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we're going to talk about kind of the messiness of it all. I think you had something you wanted to say?

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a thought as we were talking about all this, where we've talked about closing things out and leaving things on this very resonent ending. I think that can be really important. In the categories that most of us work in, there's a lot of series writing, a lot of people writing trilogies, a lot of people writing ongoing series, and a lot of people are doing quote unquote standalones with series potential. So, one of the things I would love to hear your thoughts on a little bit is, how do you leave that door cracked open? How do you give the satisfying ending, make a book feel like a book, even if it's middle of a trilogy? Right? Make the audience feel like I went on a journey, this had a conclusion. I feel good about where we're ending. And still have more questions to be asked. Have… They want more story, they want to spend more time with these characters. What do you do to leave that door cracked open?

[Mary Robinette] The trick that I've found is that life is messy, and that I don't have to give my character all of their goals. When you read a book and the character achieves all of their goals, those are the ones that feel too tight. So sometimes I don't… It's not so much that it's a cliffhanger, it's that I have deliberately left something unanswered, knowing that that can be a problem for later. But I think about… To give that sense of satisfaction, I think about how I want my reader to feel. When I'm looking at nesting things at the end, I try to make sure that whatever solution, whatever goal thing lines up with the emotional feeling I want my reader to have, that that's kind of the last beat I land on. That's the thing that gives it the sense of closure as a standalone, while the other questions that are still hanging there are available if I want to use them for future books. So, like in Calculating Stars, Elma achieves her goal of going to the moon. Right? But I don't answer your questions about what it's like when she gets there. I don't answer your questions about what the next steps are. I leave all of that open. Her conflict with Parker is still a conflict with Parker. Like, that's not a solved problem. So I have all of that to play with when I come back to the subsequent books. Then… This is outside of the scope of NaNoWriMo, but when I am looking at my next book, I look at my solution to the first one, and that becomes my problem for the 2nd book.

[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that we've talked a lot about try-fail cycles. Generally, a novel ends on a success. I mean, it can end on a failure, but I think it has some sort of emotional closure. But, it feels to me like it's a success that leaves something else to try. That thing that you're trying becomes the thing that happens in the next book. So that's sort of like… So there's a finishing, but there's something more.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Dan] This is such a horrible thing to bring up the last week of NaNoWriMo, but a lot of what makes a lot of this work is the revision process. Knowing that, okay, we've reached this point. Now we need to go back and set it up right. Getting to the end, having satisfying answers, really means you need to make sure what questions you're asking. In the Fellowship of the Ring, for example, that first book ends with the Fellowship breaking and everyone splintering off into different places, and yet it does feel conclusive, because Tolkien made sure that the question asked at the beginning, is Frodo constantly wondering am I leading people into danger? Can I really live with the fact that I am corrupting everyone around me? So, leaving the group behind and setting off on his own with Sam, that is a victory for that specific question. So it feels, okay, this feels very natural. We've asked this question, we've answered it, obviously there's other problems, but we've concluded this part of the story.

[Mary Robinette] But this is why we… When we talk about you have to keep writing and finish, this is why. Because you don't know always what questions you want to set up at the beginning until you're getting to the end. It's… Like, when I was an art major, I would see people… I mean, I did it myself. Where you would draw the perfect hand and the perfect arm and the perfect shoulder, and then you would step back and the entire figure was entirely out of proportion. Because you work thinking about the entire picture. So with novels, like, one of the things that you can be doing for yourself during this last week is coming to an agreement with yourself about, oh, this is what I want the book to be. Like, these are the… And if it doesn't match what you started, that's okay. You have a new understanding of it. You can go back and fix everything that you did earlier later.

[Erin] I would say one other way to do that is if you want… If you liked what you had at the beginning, and you feel like you've gotten away from it because that also happens is something that I like to do right before, when I've done Nano, like, right before I get into the last bits is to actually tell myself out loud, or actually to be honest, tell my cats out loud…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] The story so far. Like, not every single thing, but, like, what I can remember of the story. I find that what I go to, like, the things that I choose to explain are the things that have continued to stick with me about the story that I'm telling. So I may have forgotten one subplot or one character, but, like, when I go to say, like, the Fellowship of the Ring, which I wrote during Nano… No…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. It is about X, like, that's what gets to the core of it for me. Then I can say, if that's the core, then what's the ending that works for that core? Then, like Mary Robinette was saying, go back and fix the rest in post-, as they say in the movie business.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, truly, when working with clients on projects, the things that usually change the most our beginnings and endings. Right? Often in tandem. If the last act isn't quite working, then you'll find the roots of those problems in the first act. Middles always… I mean, every part needs revision, but the middle tends to be a little bit more defined from the jump, and then really… It really is about asking questions and answering them. So if the answers are wrong, then maybe the questions are wrong, and vice versa. So, this is again, this is NaNoWriMo. If you're not feeling super great about your ending, that's totally fine. Right? We're not… No one's expecting you to have the perfect answer to the question you didn't even know you were asking on day one, because it's been a crazy month. You've made it this far. Right?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will also catch you here is that you're like, "I don't know how to solve this. My character has to solve this thing and I don't know how to solve it." You feel like you're locked in because of everything that you've written up to this point. But your… When the book is out in the world and you're letting other people read it, they never have to see this draft of it.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So you can always go back and just say, "You know what? They could have solve this the entire time, if they had only been able to tesseract spiders into the building with bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] I knew it!

[Mary Robinette] "But I didn't introduce the ability to tesseract earlier. So, I'm just going to say that they can do it, and I'm going to make a note to myself that I have to establish that when I go back and do my revisions." So just go ahead and give yourself the tools that you need and fix it in post-.

 

[Dan] Well, one of the great things about writing and NaNoWriMo does this perfectly is you can try different endings. This is what I said about free writing in the beginning. If you get to the end and you think, "Well, maybe this would work as an ending. Maybe this is a good solution to the problem." Write it. If it doesn't work, don't delete it. Try something else. Right that. I know that for a lot of you, that is so painful, me telling you to write a bunch of extra words that are not going to be in the final manuscript. Well, guess what. That's most of this job.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. I had a project recently where 500,000 words were written that went into the trash that will never see the light of day, for the 150,000 that got published. Right? Sometimes that's what happens. Right? I think one of the best lessons about NaNoWriMo is there's no such thing as a wasted word. Everything that you put down to paper got you to this point. It helps you realize that these extra scenes need to be written, even if the older scenes also had to be put in a drawer somewhere. All that was useful work. All that was the work that got you to understand what your book really is and make your book the best version of it it could be. So I hope you're hearing us talk about revision and not feeling discouraged. Instead, be excited that you now have clarity about what it is you're trying to accomplish with your book, even if it's just a little bit. Even if you have one degree more…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I hope you don't have to write 500,000 words…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] To the 150 that got published. That's not great. We all felt not great about that. But also, we all felt great about the book that was there at the end, and so proud and so happy about the work we did on it.

[Dan] Well, the same thing that I said earlier about endings, making sure that you're asking the right questions to provide a satisfying answer, apply that to your life! Apply that to the process. Apply that to NaNoWriMo. Don't necessarily think of this as I'm going to end November with one awesome book. Think of it as I'm going to end November having learned how to write a book. Then, even if the ending is weird or there's bits in the middle that are clunky and awkward, that's okay. You learned how to write a book.

[Mary Robinette] Just briefly, I want to speak to the people who are like, "Hey, you know what, I'm coming up on 50,000 words, but I'm nowhere near the end of my book."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's fine. You can… We're talking about things in proportion right now.

[DongWon] Totally.

[Mary Robinette] You're totally fine. Don't worry about it. You don't need to have, like, the ending. You just need to hold on to what you're aiming for.

[Erin] Yeah. You can… You may want to take a break. You may say, like, writing 50,000 words in a month was a lot, so even though I don't have the ending like I want to get there. This is when you could leave yourself lots of fun notes in brackets, like, "And here's the part where they figured out the meaning of love," and, like, "Here's where he defuses that bomb filled with spider bees."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Right? Then you can come back and your future self will have the problem of figuring that out. But I hope the main thing that your future self takes away from it is you wrote stuff that did not exist at the beginning of this month and it exists and only you could have written it.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So we're going to give you some homework. This is, again, a way to help you just keep moving forward. Especially those of you who are like nowhere near the ending and you're just like, "I gotta keep going. I've just gotta keep going."

 

[Mary Robinette] Here's your homework. Gift your character with your insecurity. Brainstorm about what should happen next in the voice of the character as they're facing the challenges in the scene. Because your character doesn't know what's going on either. So all of that and just be part of your character development, and the brainstorming process may get you closer. It also will just get you words on the page, which is very useful. You may wind up cutting it later, but after you hit 50,000 words.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Good luck. You're out of excuses.

 

[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any question that is on your mind.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-37-mandatory-failure

 

Key Points: Deep dive into Mandatory Failure, book 18 of the Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. Book 1 of the three-book finale! Start with an explosion, due to enemy action that continues through the last three books. This book focuses on a refugee crisis that the mercenaries are dragged into help resolve. Setting up a big galaxy event, with a logistics problem? Big problems matter when you see the effect in small places. People growing up and stepping up. How should we behave in a crisis? The world's worst apology. A comedic tool, cascading failure. Emotional for you, the writer, versus emotional for the reader? Check your alpha reader, crit partner, or reasonable facsimile. Do figure out what level of feedback you need. Authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion? Balance emotion and craft. Mandatory failure -- you are going to fail. But don't let that stop you.

 

[Season 18, Episode 37]

 

[1:30 minutes inaudible advertising Hello Fresh]

 

[1:51]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, Mandatory Failure.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Howard] We have reached that point in this eight episode miniseries where we're actually doing the deep dive part and diving into the books. Mandatory Failure is the 18th Schlock Mercenary story and is book 1 of what I structured as a sort of a three book finale to the 20 book mega-arc. So that's really the way I think of it, or the way I thought of it. Yes, it's the 18th book in a thing, but it is the first book in a trilogy that will end in a big way the fellow cast members here have just read it, and I'm sure have bazillions of questions for me. I'm anxious to not be able to answer them.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I'll just start. The question that I have actually comes from what you just said, which is knowing that this… You meant this to be its own sort of self-contained thing within the larger. How did you decide where to start? To make it a satisfying beginning for the trilogy?

[Howard] I gave it a prologue with an explosion, and the explosion in the prologue was an explosion… It was enemy action, and it is enemy action that continues throughout the trilogy. But in this case, it sets off a very specific local series of events that this book focuses on. So the fact that the enemy action… We have non-baryonic entities, the Pa'anuri in the Andromeda galaxy, and, oh, no, they have actually developed a weapon that lets them fire plasma through hyperspace and destroy targets kind of at will, and there's nothing we can do about it. That drives the next three books. That is… They have a plan, and that drives the next three books. But for this book, the first thing that they hit creates a disaster, creates a refugee crisis, and our heroes, the mercenaries, get dragged in to… It's not very mercenary-ish, they get dragged into help the refugees.

[Mary Robinette] They were voluntold, I mean, really.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They were voluntold.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, I mean, they were voluntold, and the way… It was fun to create it that way. One of the mercenaries is related to someone who's there on the scene, and because of the weird and very very racist laws in place in that system, they couldn't hire outside help unless they were related to somebody who lived there. So she makes a call to her sister, and her sister talks to the CO, and off we go, as mercenaries that nobody wants to have.

 

[DongWon] It's such an interesting, almost counter-intuitive plot decision that you made because you know that you're setting up this big galaxy event. Where you start is an entire volume that's really focused on a logistics problem in a very specific area of how do we deal with all of these corpses, I guess. They're kind of corpses.

[Howard] Yeah.

[DongWon] So much of that initial section is taken up with the mechanical logistics. How do we harvest them? How do we bring them back? How do we feed them? Then, also the political problem of how do we make this… How do we not start three wars or whatever it is, by doing this thing? You know you want to get to point C. What made you decide to spend so much time in this very narrow slice? That is not a critique, I think it works beautifully, but…

[Howard] It was a lesson that I learned early on, which is big problems don't matter until you see the effect in small places. Famine? Yes, that's a disaster. Me being hungry? Is an F-ing catastrophe. So that's… I wanted to drill as far down as I could. Having refugees begin waking up before we're ready for them and wonder where their family members are. That is extremely poignant, extremely relevant to millions of people on the planet Earth right now. It was difficult for me to write because it was so raw. But by doing it that way, when I blow up more and more things later on, you can extrapolate. People have already felt it in the small space, and now they can project it on the big screen, and I make you feel even worse. As an author, that's kind of how we think. What can I do to make you feel worse than you feel right now.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You did a good job of that.

[Howard] Thank you.

 

[Mary Robinette] Really, I like that… Like, one of the things that I want to just draw attention to is that… DongWon, you mentioned a number of different things that you're doing with that, but you're also doing like you've got these character arcs that are also happening for multiple different characters. So you set up this thing with Peri where she is pretending to be in charge and is like trying to figure out the balance of where power is. What is too much, what is comfortable? That's again reflecting like this larger power struggle that's going on.

[Howard] Well, it's one of the themes, one of the quiet themes which were actually going to try and reflect in the cover art. These books aren't in print yet. Book 17 features Capt. Tagon on the front cover, front and center, there really aren't any other characters there. Books 18, 19, and 20 will feature other characters in the center positions, and Capt. Tagon's picture gets smaller with each volume. Because part of what is happening here, and maybe this is the parent in me, is that his company is… These people are growing up. These people are stepping up. Having a corporal need to take charge and actually boss people around as if she is a flag officer, that's kind of huge.

[DongWon] It really effectively set up the narrative rhyming, or the thematic rhyming we're going to see over the next three volumes of who gets to have power, who should have power, and who takes power. Right? Over and over again, we see entities, people, taking control who shouldn't, people trying to resist that, people getting control when they deserve it. I don't know. You keep asking this question from all these different angles in each of these different scenarios. What I love about this disaster and the logistics is A, it sets up sort of the moral stakes in a certain way, of like this is how people should behave, this trying to care for each other in this type of crisis, which then when things go off the rails in the future, it gives us that grounding. But also really sets up this understanding of thinking about power, thinking about authority, in these ways, because we get to see the characters thinking about it in a very explicit on page way.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things along these lines that I also thought was really lovely in the first book is how that question of power dynamics is playing out, not just in the hierarchical nature of the ship, but also in the marriage, the Foxworthy. Like, the scene where he realizes that he has… Where he's trying to apologize to his wife for casting a shadow, and then he's like, "No, wait. That's wrong because that's still centering me."

[DongWon] The world's worst apology.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Such a bad apology. So bad. But it's also the kind of thing that you encounter in real life, and again, it's that becoming aware that you have power, that you have been exercising in ways that you really should not have.

[Howard] When we come back from the break, I want to talk about why that apology was so important. Why that was one of the most difficult scenes I've ever written.

 

[Erin] I am so excited to talk about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Which is one of those novels that I think lots of people are talking about and I came to it late. My main question was why did I not read this sooner. So, it's a book, it's a historical fiction novel, that follows the descendents of one woman who has two children, one of whom marries the governor in Ghana, in present-day Ghana, and basically helps to oversee a slave castle, and the other one who is one of the slaves sent over to America. It basically continues to track their families. So each chapter, you go one generation down as you see what happens to the half of the family that remained in Africa and the half of the family that went through slavery all the way down to the present day. I'll warn you, it's a bit brutal at times, it does not shrink away from its subject matter. But it's beautifully written, and each individual descendents story is just this wonderful sort of short story life experience that really puts you in the mindset of the character as she tells this amazing historical fiction tale. So, again, that's Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

 

[Howard] So. I'm going to go ahead and confess, full confession here. When Kevin apologizes to Elf, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote that. I must have broken down into tears half a dozen times while doing it. Because I kept trying to tap into that relationship and into the experiences of someone who knows he has unjustly but accidentally exercised power over someone else, is preventing them from becoming what they could be, and wants to fix it, but the very act of trying to fix it is itself an exercise of power. Wading through that… It was fun to write, in that… DongWon, you said worst apology ever. Clumsiest apology ever.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] But the whole time I was writing it, I could tell that for Elf, it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever received because it was so genuine.

[DongWon] Well, that's a wonderful end to the scene, [garbled] of the scene of her tearing up. It just shows how much it landed, even though we, as the reader, have that… The comedy in the scene is him trying to explain this thing that is so… He keeps, like, apologizing for the thing he just said in the scene. Right?

[Howard] It's… That is a comedic tool, the cascading failure… The cascading failure where it's…

[DongWon] The mandatory failure.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I love that tool. But here's the thing. When I was writing it, I knew that part of what I was creating was a character moment that made this Kevin precious, and I was about to kill him, and he would never come back. Elf would forever have this memory of something her husband had done for her, and even if we are able to restore her husband from a backup, that backup doesn't include this data. As she says later in the story… Schlock says, "The doctor can bring him back." She says, "I want the one who apologized."

[DongWon] It's a heartbreaking moment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's so… Yeah. It's like…

[Howard] I had been waiting… No lie. I had been waiting five books for the opportunity to put paid on that… This promise that, hey, just because I've introduced a form of immortality doesn't mean death is cheap.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Doesn't mean there's no cost to it. I think it was book 13 where Schlock dies and they try and bring him back from bits they can find and end up having to restore him from backup. We actually had a conversation in a Writing Excuses retreat, and I remember the cast staring at me kind of wide-eyed like, "You know what you've done?" My response then was, "I think I know what I've done. I… You're making it sound worse than I thought it really was. Maybe I should pay more attention."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Yeah, it took me five books to find the point where I could really turn the screws on the poor reader.

 

[Erin] I was thinking about what you just said about writing the apology itself and how it made you feel. I often hear people talk about I was crying… I know I wrote this, and it was working because I was crying while I was writing it. It never happens to me because I'm cold inside.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But I'm wondering…

[Howard] Yeah, just dead inside.

[Erin] Chaotic dead inside. But I'm wondering, how do you know in that situation, like, if what you are writing is emotionally landing for you versus emotionally landing for the reader? Because I think you got in the place you needed to in the end, but, like, how do you separate the you who's experiencing it from the you who's trying to craft it?

[Howard] I have a cheat that is not available to anyone else. I'd been using it for a decade by the time I got there. I would write the scripts, and then I would hand them to Sandra, and I would watch Sandra read. I could see… I mean, I learned… I mean, I already knew a lot of the body language and the things… Micro expressions and whatever else. We've been married now, as of this recording session, we are coming up on 30 years of marriage. This is someone I'm very, very close to. I would watch her read. I watched her read this scene, and she teared up and she giggled, and she teared up and she giggled. Then she handed it back to me and said, "I want pictures." I knew, okay, this one's right. This one is right. I could not have created the Schlock Mercenary that I did without Sandra as the pre-alpha feedback loop. Because many times I would hand her a script and should look at it and she'd say, "Okay. Yeah, no, I think with a picture…" I would snatch it from her and say, "Stop! Just stop talking. I can tell it's wrong because you have confusion and there should be no confusion at this point. The words should be enough." I'd storm off to my office and I'd make it better. Then I'd bring it back, and she would look at it and say, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes. Now I…" So…

[DongWon] I will say, you say this is not available to other people. But it is, maybe not in the exact form like…

[Mary Robinette] Sandra is not available.

[DongWon] [garbled a third of your marriage is not available]

[Howard] You can't have my Sandra. No.

[DongWon] But people… You can have a beta reader. You can have a crit partner. You can have a collaborator in some ways. I think having those people in your life that you can rely on to be early readers or even people just to bounce ideas off of. That… I mean, that is available to people in certain ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've heard it called an ideal reader, which is that you think about the person that you want, that you are writing for. So, like, I with the Lady Astronaut books in particular in writing for [Alessandra?] and I'm looking for the moment where she is like… Where I'm like, "Oh, she's going to hate this so much. She's going to be so mad at me." I'm like, "Yes!" That's what I'm writing for is a lot of times is will it provoke that? It gives me a way to kind of AB test things in my own brain even before I commit them to the page by thinking about how the person is likely to react to it.

[Howard] I actually struggle when I'm submitting things to writing groups because when I get their responses, it's already been filtered. No. I wanted to watch your eyes while you read. I wanted to watch everything happen so that I knew… So that's… It's difficult to find.

[DongWon] That is too much feedback for some people. Right? For some people that is to intensive of a process to feel that disappointment immediately in that way, to filter is necessary. So, no for yourself, as you're figuring out who your crit partner is, who to work with, what writing groups to work with, what level of feedback you need.

[Howard] But coming back to Erin's question, I could not know that I got things right until I checked it with Sandra. That one especially, because it's a relationship between a man and a woman, and he's famous and she's not, and draw whatever parallels there you care to, I really needed to make sure that it worked. Once I had her approval, I knew that it did.

[DongWon] It felt like a very personal authentic moment. I felt a realness in that scene as I read it, but I think that comes through very well.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I think… A secondary question, I think, that was lurking beneath my question, is authentic emotion versus manufactured emotion. Because I think sometimes… Like, for example, when I'm not being cold and dead inside, I might cry at like a Hallmark movie when the music swells, but I don't think that's… That's just like I can feel the thing working on me. You know what I mean? It doesn't feel like it comes from a genuine place, it comes from like all the things that are happening around it that are telling me to react in a specific way. Like, when the music changes in a horror movie, it might not be scary, but the thing is telling you is scary. There's a difference between that and when the emotion is genuine and it's coming from a real place. Being able to tell the difference between when you're writing a more surface, and there's room for all levels… But when you're writing a more surface level emotion, and when you're really getting to the heart of things, I think can be really difficult because they both feel emotional.

[Mary Robinette] So the… I hear what you're saying, and the reason I'm over here making faces that if we had a video feed, the viewers would be like, "Ooo, what's going on there?" is because i think that when… I think that… For a long time, I would say, "Oh, yes, you can feel it." That there's this idea, but there are some people who don't have those reactions. Like, when I'm writing with depression, I am strictly crafting my way through that, and I know from experience that the reader cannot tell. Then, people with varying forms of autism often don't have the same kinds of reactions, so it's much like telling someone that you have to read your work aloud in order to know whether or not it flows, which is not a process that's going to work for a deaf writer.

[DongWon] It's just another tool in the set. Right?

[Mary Robinette] It's another tool.

[DongWon] Being able…

[Mary Robinette] It's a tool that can't… I understand what you're…

[Erin] Let me just… My question is actually less about the emotion and more about the craft, though. What I'm saying is you can fool yourself into thinking you are writing something because you are putting all the emotions into it on a surface level. How do you ensure that the craft under it is doing the emotional work needed so that you may be making yourself cry on a surface level, but in fact, you're not getting to something else because you are… It sounds right, if that makes sense…

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] But it is not right. So it's actually the opposite.

[DongWon] That is tricky. Especially the things that are so raw in a way that's… It's so intense of an emotional place that there's not enough craft on it to make it legible to me or connect to me. Sometimes it just feels… I'm so inside someone else's experience that I'm like, "I don't know how to take this in or respond to it." So you always need that balance. Right? You always need to… The score has to be right, the lighting has to be right, all these different things. Right? I think what's so interesting about this conversation is we're seeing that it really is finding that balance point between something that feels very true to you, and something that is rooted in however many years of craft you apply to it. You've got to that moment, Howard, not just by tapping into the emotion of it, but also you've been drawing these characters for years and years and years.

[Howard] Oh. So much, so much craft.

[DongWon] You know how to hone a joke. You know how to do this. And you edit it and reworked it and all those things.

[Howard] So much craft. There was… Gosh, eight years ago, I don't know exactly. I was asked to narrate a Christmas program. The way it had been written was very we are going to tell the congregation how they should feel. I objected to that on several levels. But the uppermost level was my writer brain. It was like, "No. No. We can do this so much better." So I asked them permission. I said, "Can I rework some of this? I think I can trim it a little bit and make it a little smoother. Do you mind?" "Okay, fine." I took all of the tell statements out of it and reframed everything in ways that encourage people to begin imagining feelings for themselves without telling them to do that. The response from the person who created it was, "Ah! Can I have this? Can this be the new edition of… Can I just use these?" I'm like, "Fine. It is my gift to you." It was all craft. It was all craft. It was very much the toolbox of I'm just going to remove all of the statements that tell you how you should feel, and include characters feelings.

 

[DongWon] Can we talk about the title real quick? This idea of mandatory failure. The reason it… Your comments made me think of it was, so much of learning craft, so much of learning how to do all these things, is simply like doing it over and over again. Right? You have to learn by doing. Now, the reason I love this title and I love this idea is inherently you are going to be failing, especially at the early stages, to do the thing that you're trying to do. To access that emotional state, to set the stage properly to execute on all these different emotional levels. Failure is not just part of the process. It is a mandatory piece for success. Or at least that's how I'm interpreting what you said.

[Howard] No, that's exactly right. The quote… And the quote grew out of a subversion of the NASA statement. Failure is not an option. Which is a way of saying this is too important to make any mistakes on. This is the piece we absolutely have to get right. But so many people misuse that and say failure is not an option all the time. I subverted it. Failure is not an option, it's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] That is my favorite of the 70 maxims. It is maxim 70. It's where the series ends. Putting in here nicely set up for me… I mean, it's sort of a theme in my own life. I'm going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again in order to get it right. These characters are going to have to fail at stuff over and over and over again before they get it right. In this book, in the next book, and in the trilogy that wraps things up. Speaking of wrapping things up, we should homework.

 

[DongWon] Our homework this week is going to be a writing prompt for you. So what we would like you to do is imagine a major disaster has just occurred. Write a scene directly in the aftermath of this incident.

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

 

[Howard] This episode was made possible by our amazing Patreon supporters. To support this podcast and get exclusive access to Q&A's, livestreams, and bonus content, visit the link in our show notes or go to patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-31-getting-personal-mining-your-life-for-themes

 

Key points: How do you take personal stuff and mine it for fiction and storytelling? Sometimes it's just things you love day-to-day. The things we carry! Sometimes it's small details. Try putting the polar opposite, or at least different approaches, into your story. Turn it up to 11, and then back it down and play with it. Take care of yourself, too. Give yourself time and space for tough stories. Life is more than just trauma, you can mine happy stuff and good memories, too. Make sure the reader knows what is going on, too. Give them the signposts, breadcrumbs, context to make sense of the inside joke, the emotional tug.

 

[Season 18, Episode 31]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes.

[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 have opinions... That don't always make it into my stuff.

[Dan] Keep them to yourself.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] No, this is an opinion episode. So, this is our last episode where we're kind of digging into Dark One: Forgotten and how and why it was written. One thing that is very personal for me is the concept of memory. I, when I was first married, spent eight months living with my grandfather who has Alzheimer's. This is one of my favorite people in the world, he practically raised me for a huge chunk of my childhood. Then I… The situation was reversed, and I became his caretaker and helped kind of guide him through this disease that eventually killed him a few years later. I had not realized how much un-dealt with trauma there was until I wrote a John Cleaver novella called Next of Kin, which is specifically about a monster who consumes other people's memories and then relives them. All of this stuff just came gushing out. I have since written several books that deal very closely with memory and what it is to have or lose memories. Dark One: Forgotten is one of them. That becomes a major part of the story, especially at the end when all of the supernatural stuff is revealed. So, I thought it would be really interesting to talk about this specifically. Not memory, but the broader category of how do you take something that is so personal, that means so much to you, and then mine it for fiction and storytelling?

[DongWon] I get the question all the time of, like, "What are you looking for in a project? What makes something stand out to you? What makes you pluck something from the unsolicited submission pile?" Not every book has to be this way. Obviously, there's lots of reasons to write, there's lots of fiction that works. But, for me, the thing that I'm looking for is always where do I see the author in this story? When I read a pitch, when I read a piece of fiction, I want to know that a person who is in a place in a situation felt that they had to tell me this story. Why were they the only person who could do this? That comes from really personal places. That comes from stories that are rooted in people's childhoods and their experiences and their hopes and dreams and fears. I think that, for me, is always the thing that makes me really just like sit up and pay attention and get so excited to work on a story.

 

[Howard] Sometimes it's as simple as the things that you love day-to-day. Like… I mean, the foods that you eat, the things that you listen to. As somebody who studied music and sound recording technology, I listen a lot. So, describing sounds in the things that I write is fun for me. I like to do that. That's… Now, it has to be the right character in order to be noticing something. Some character will say, "Well, what's that booming noise?" Another might say, "There's a 30 Hz rumble and it's increasing…" Whatever. But the foods that I love to eat and the smells associated with those foods, these are things that bring characters to life. That absolutely make the page into something that lives for us. Because the things that we love, the things that we sense, the things that we are passionate about, we infuse into our characters in small ways. It doesn't need to be a book about food, or a book about pipe organs, or whatever, it can just be a book about people who experience things the way you experience them.

 

[Erin] When I think about sort of personal issues and the personal things, I think about the things we carry. Which is, a lot of times, the way that I think about like the issues that we're going through in our lives and the things that we're processing. There are some things that we carry for a long time that may show up in all of our fiction. Memory may always be a component of what you're talking about, Dan. I'm also fascinated with memory for different reasons, because I don't have a very good one. So I'm very fascinated with how much memory makes up who we are. But then there are things that you pick up along the way. Some of them are things like foods, smaller things that bring you joy. Some of them are issues that you're working through for a specific period of time in your life, and then set down. What I think is really exciting is that fiction gives you an opportunity to, number one, find out what things you're carrying. Like, you didn't realize, Dan, like, how much that was a part of you until you put it on the page. So, sometimes when you're writing, you can go back and find out, "This is something I've been carrying, and I been carrying it so long that little bits of it are like sprinkling out on the pages that I'm writing in the things that I'm doing." But what can be kind of difficult is that over time, the things that you carry change. One thing that I found really interesting, I think I've talked about it before on the podcast, is during the early pandemic, like, so much of what we were carrying was changing. As writers, you're trying to catch up to the issues in your life that are changing, and it's changing the way that you do fiction, and it's changing the stories that you're trying to tell. There's something really amazing and beautiful in that. But I think it also can be difficult to know how to catch up to the issues that are now the things that you're carrying.

[Dan] Yeah. I love that metaphor for what you're carrying, because so much of carrying something comes down to how you're carrying it. Carrying a rock might be very easy, or very hard, depending on the size of it. But also, if I'm carrying it in a backpack versus carrying it in my shoe, that is going to totally change the way that I am interacting with it and the kind of the amount of pain that something relatively small might cause. If it's just something that I'm not aware of or that I'm not dealing with. That can spill out sometimes problematically into fiction. With that first draft of Next of Kin, I had to tone it back and say, "Okay, wait a minute. This needs to be a story about John Cleaver, not a journaling entry about Dan Wells."

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that that… To get to some more practical nuts and bolts of how to do this, that when you're looking at stuff from your life, when you're mining it, you don't have to say this is a thing that is happening in my life and then put it in as a major plot point in the book that you're writing. It can just be something that you're holding in your head and it will inflect it. Or it can be showing up in small details. Like, one of the things that I talk about all the time is that I will gift my characters with the things from the real… From my real world that are just nagging at me. Like, when you look at Lady Astronaut of Mars, there's a scene in which Nathaniel cannot make it to the toilet in time. I had spent time with my grandmother who at the time was 105 years old, and we had that moment together. She has no relationship to him. Like, I didn't write a story about my grandmother. I didn't write a story about that. But I explored the feelings and the moments and the viscerality of that, and transplanted it into another time and place and with another character. You can do that with large thematic things or you can do that with just small pieces of it.

[Dan] Doing that can add so much flavor and emotion to a story. Because it is something, like DongWon said at the beginning, that is intrinsic to you. We can read that scene and go, "Oh, this author has gone through this. This author knows what they're talking about and has helped put me into a position to experience some of those same emotions." Which, for me, is a huge part of why I read in the first place.

 

[Howard] One of the most challenging, and I would argue, the most likely to make your story robust, techniques is to take whatever this is and find the polar opposite and be able to put both in the story. If you have a particular hobbyhorse… I mean, it might be a sensory thing, like foods or music, it might be a political stance. If you can take the polar opposite and represent that well, then not only will you succeed as a human in more deeply exploring that thing you're passionate about, you will also make your story more robust, and it won't feel like… It won't feel didactic. It won't feel like you're just preaching to us.

[Erin] The polar opposite may not be like the obvious like political difference. The reason I say this is one of the things I was working through in my own writing is a lot of my published short stories are about somebody who is facing a culture that is the enemy. Like, the antagonist of the story is the cultural norms that don't support this person's life, and figuring out a way to kind of get past that. Often by lashing out at that culture. I felt like a lot of what I was exploring in retrospect was the idea, like, the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house. But during Covid and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, part of what I started thinking is, well, what am I saying does dismantle the master's house? Am I saying that it gets to remain standing? That isn't what I necessarily want to be saying. I want to be looking at different ways around this issue that are separate. So, some of the stories that I'm working on now are more about people having differing opinions about how to accomplish the same goal. They all agree that the master's house should be dismantled, but some people want to blow it up, some people want to burn it down, some people want to use the tools. Figuring that out has made the stories richer because I'm experiencing this issue on a deeper level and therefore so are my characters.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about that is sometimes that can be really direct in terms of like the metaphor and… When I say I want to be able to see the author in the piece, sometimes that is very obvious in terms of like I have a book that will have come out just this last spring called Chlorine that's by a young woman who is a child of immigrants, used to be a high school swimmer, and the book is about a child of immigrants who is a high school swimmer. Right. There's like a very much one-to-one, like, I can see, oh, yeah, you are in this story. But other times, it's like layered through many, many filters of metaphor. Right? So I think about N. K. Jemison's Broken Earth books, which are just a searing portrait about… Of marginalization, of oppression, of colonialism and all these things, that feels like she wrote a book about living in America. But there's nothing in that book that I can one-to-one map to this is that ethnic group, this is that cultural group, this is that… She is writing a book about magic schools and wizards and magic rocks. But still managed to make something that felt very politically trenchant to me as a reader in 2020 or whenever I was reading that. 2019. It was very transformative for me of understanding how an author's experience can completely inform a text without it necessarily being legible about what specific thing maps to what.

[Howard] After the break, I'm going to talk about turning the knob to 11 first. But we're going to take a break.

 

[DongWon] So, the thing of the week this week is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. As we are talking about how stories can be very personal for us, sometimes the audience's relationship to that is also very personal. Right? So, this is a movie. It just swept the Oscars a little while ago. It's made by a directing pair named the Daniels who wrote and directed it. So it is very much a story of Asian immigrants to the United States and their children's relationship to them. For me, as a queer Asian American child of immigrants, it hit very, very close to home for me. There's so many different aspects of that story that I identify with, and there's so many things that feel so specifically grounded in someone's experience and their perspective and then, the specific experiences of the actors themselves and what they brought to those roles, that it, I think, really resonated with the audiences because it did have a very deep personal connection. It felt like everyone was bringing their own selves to that set, to that production. That is so touchable and it's so tangible and legible in the end product in a way that meant… Means it was hugely impactful for me when I saw it, and for a lot of my peers and for a lot of people in the world generally. So, if you haven't seen it yet, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a magnificent movie. I love it almost on every level. It is absurdist, it is strange, it is charming and romantic and funny and exciting. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

 

[Howard] So, in This Is Spinal Tap, there's this joke about how the guitar amp has a knob that goes to 11. Well, how does that make it louder? This one goes to 11. Ha ha, very funny. As a sound engineer, there's this technique that I learned that works great in audio engineering, it works great in applying filters in Photoshop. It is terrible to try and work with in cooking. The principle is this. Start by turning the knob to 11. Somebody [garbled] "Does this need more bass?" I don't know. Let's see what more bass sounds like. All the way to 11, and then pull it back. When I said earlier, find the polar opposite, I didn't mean start with 11 and keep it there. I met start with 11, and then… And then nuance it and play with it. Because until you know how loud it goes, you might not really feel the shape of it. The same thing in Photoshop. You're applying a filter, throw the filter all the way down, crank it all the way up. Then pull it back and start to massage it. This doesn't work well in cooking, when you're, say, trying to see how much cummin is enough and you begin with the whole jar. That's hard to undo. But I love this principle. This is kind of a multilayered sort of approach to the approach, because audio engineering and visual stuff and cooking are things that I've already talked about, and they colored, not just what I write about, but how I talk about what I write.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to bring up is that… It occurred to me while you were talking about this in terms of turning it to 11, is also remember as a writer that you are also a person. I would encourage you to take care of yourself first and foremost, and to be gentle with yourself. A lot of what we're talking about when we're talking about mining your own life for themes is digging into your own traumas, into some of the worst things that happened to you, into oppressions that you experienced on a daily basis. I once made a joke to my own therapist that [garbled] Of my job is sticking a crowbar into a writer's trauma and then pulling until a novel pops out…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I don't actually do that to my writers. I don't actually mine their traumas in that way and don't try to re-traumatize them.

[Mary Robinette] The writers say other things.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I'm sure that they do. I do want to encourage people though to remember that this is dealing with very difficult material and that you should be taking care of yourself first. You should be paying attention to what your limits are, and I would encourage you, if you're doing this work, to make sure that you are working with people who can support you in that, whether that's professional mental health or a support network, whatever it is. Make sure that you are checking in and seeing how you're doing as you're going through this process.

[Erin] That also may mean giving yourself more time and space for stories that hew closer to your heart, closer to the bone. So, whereas you might be, like, "I finished the story and I'm going to send it to my critique group the next day," if this is something that is very personal for you, you may come more personally… More of yourself may be exposed when you're getting feedback, when you're talking about it. So it's wise to give yourself a break and make sure that you're sort of ready for that experience so that you're not sort of out there, like raw, and then people are trying to give you feedback and it's hard for you to take it, because it feels like it's feedback to who you are and not what you wrote.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] But also bear in mind that when we talk about mining your… Getting personal and mining your own life, your own life is made up of more than trauma.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] You can mine the happy stuff. You can mine the good memories. You can mine those good sensory details, the good relationships. Like, every romantic relationship that I write is in some aspect based on my relationship with my husband. My picture book, Molly on the Moon,… Actually, I guess this is a trauma, but it is based on a real life thing that happened with me and my brother, where he took my stuffed lamb and I was like five. But it's also based on this other happy memory of me making a toy for him. You can look for those, those are gems. There's a thing that I think we do when we discount our own life and experiences as being like normal. But there only normal for, like, you. They're not an experience that anyone else has had.

[DongWon] This goes back to what Howard was saying of put sounds, put foods, put tastes, put sensory things that you experience in there. You're mining more than just like the big heavy dark stuff. I completely agree that I would also encourage you to find the joyful things in your life and put those in your text. Find the friendships, the relationships, the experiences. Plenty of people have great relationships with their parents and their family. It is just as important to see good parents in the young adult section as it is to see neglectful parents. Right? So I think finding that balance is so important to building a really important, well-rounded presence in your book.

 

[Dan] I loved what you said about kind of being careful, making sure that when you get feedback on this type of very personal storytelling, that you're in the right place to receive it. I also… I want to add to that, that I find the need for revision to be even stronger when I'm dealing with something that I care about this deeply. Because often the first thing I've put down does not work for the story. There's a thing I say all the time, which is that your first draft is for what you want to say, and your final draft is for how you want to say it. When it's dealing with something that relates specifically to a pain or a trauma that I am processing, the first draft isn't even what I want to say yet. It's just this kind of blurp of feelings that come out. Then I need to go back and work it into a form and say, "Yes, the story does want this emotion here, and it does want this rawness, but maybe not… Maybe it needs to be shaped a little better. Maybe I need to turn this more into what the character is going to do rather than just me."

[Erin] I think that's true for joyful fun things as well. I mean, think about when you have a shared joke with someone and somebody else walks in and you're trying to like explain it. There's 18 amazing like things about your friendship with that person that are like all boiled down to this sentence, that you have no… It's really difficult to explain. That can happen in your own relationship to your happy memories. Like, you have a very deep relationship with why this particular thing that happened is so meaningful for you, this food, this sound, and you have to make sure to bring the reader along and give them enough of it that they can understand it, so that they don't feel like they're eavesdropping on a joke that they will never get.

[Dan] Absolutely. I remember… There was an episode of Babylon 5 where the captain had been given a teddy bear. It was so weird, the way he interacted with this teddy bear in the way he kind of growled at it all the time. I was convinced that this was part of some plot centric supernatural or science fictional something that was going on. No, I found out afterwards, that it's just that the guy writing that episode really hated toys and really hated funny cute things, and assumed that every member of the audience would share that exact relationship…

[Laughter]

[Dan] And… So all of… None of the jokes landed, none of the stuff he was trying to do made sense without the context that was inside of his brain. So making sure that you give her the reader all of these…

[Howard] The director pranked him...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] By filming the whole thing and giving it to us.

[Ha Ha!]

[Dan] No, but you have to provide the audience with the right signposts, the right breadcrumbs, the right context so that this emotion, whether it is good or bad, whether it is painful or whatever, this inside joke makes sense to them as much as it makes sense to you.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.

[Howard] Well, fair listener. As you may suspect, the homework is going to feel pretty obvious here. I'm going to make this a three-part assignment. Take something that is joyful for you, that you think about and that brings you joy. Take something that is painful for you, that you think about it, it brings you pain. Take something that is vivid for you, that when you think about it, there are sensory associations. Those three things, give those things, either individually or altogether, to a character or characters in whatever you are writing and see if you can express those things in ways that feel real to you.

 

[Mary Robinette] Our next episode will feature a special guest. It's Kirsten Vangsness, who is best known for her role as Penelope Garcia in Criminal Minds. Kirsten is also an incredible writer, and we loved talking with her about imposter syndrome and using tools from your non-writing life to fuel your writing.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-09-unpacking-the-tension/

 

Key Points: What drives a story? Tension! So what kinds of tension are there? Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Tension is emotional, it requires engagement. Narrative tension is what the characters feel, contextual tension is what the readers feel, and they don't have to be the same. Anticipation, expectations about how we think things are going to go. Juxtaposition, contrasting expectations and actually how things go. Unanswered questions, mystery, but also other levels. Cold start horrible situation, then back off to earlier, making us wonder what happened. Mystery box storytelling, what's in the box, what's the solution to the puzzle. Do a question and answer quickly to build trust with the audience. Anticipation is expecting an outcome, while unanswered questions, where you, the reader, don't know the answer. Micro-tension is smaller tensions, often lower stakes. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 9]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Unpacking the Tension.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are going to be spending the next several weeks talking about tension. I'm going to go ahead and frame this a little bit, because as we were trying to set the season, we each brought something that we have been struggling with a little bit or a new toolbox that we've been noodling with. Erin and I happen to have simultaneously just taught a class on tension. So she's going to be chiming in here in a moment. But I want to start explaining what's going through my head with this. So, we are often taught that a story must have conflict. I think that actually what drives a story is tension, but that conflict is the easiest form of tension to teach. I started thinking about this while I was reading Japanese literature, which often does not have any visible conflict, but there's a ton of tension. It really solidified for me while I was watching Ted Lasso. Slight spoilers here, but when you look at… Watch the Christmas episode of Ted Lasso, there's no villain. Everyone is being kind. There's no conflict. All of the conflict comes from this anticipation of something that you think is going to go wrong. For instance, at the beginning of the Christmas episode, he's watching It's a Wonderful Life and he's drinking, so, obviously, the next thing that's going to happen is he's going to go on a bender, and he's going to have a dream sequence. None of that is what happens. But they so clearly signpost it that it builds this tension, and then you get this release… So, what I want to talk about is looking at some different types of tension. So we're going to kind of give you an overview, and then for the rest of the episodes, we'll be digging into each type of tension. So. I'm going to break them down, and then let other people talk. The types of tension that I am identifying as I am attempting to build this toolbox are anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and then micro-tension. Erin, on the other hand, is building… Is constructing a tension toolbox in a different way.

[Erin] Yeah. I will say that one of the things I love about tension, just to start, is that tension is emotional. Just the word tension feels more emotional than conflict. I think it's an amazing reminder that you need some sort of engagement with the thing in order to be tense. If you don't care, you won't be tense. I think sometimes because we think a lot about conflict, people will open a story or a novel or a movie with a conflict that we haven't bought into. So we're not feeling the tension. We just see the conflict. Like when you have a little… Your two dinosaurs, as a kid, and you have them fight. The two dinosaurs are fighting with each other, but why? Does anyone care? So, to me, tension is a lot about building in and thinking about the emotion. The other thing that I really love about just tension versus conflict is that conflict is something that is felt on the page. Your characters are in conflict with each other. Perhaps. Or with nature, or what have you. But your reader is not in conflict. They are observing the conflict. The tension is the thing that both the readers and the characters can share.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Dan] I love this description of tension as requiring an emotional investment. For me, the way I have always thought about it, tension is a combination of anticipation and hope. You anticipate something bad is going to happen, you hope it doesn't. But without that hope, without that one outcome I like and one outcome I don't like, there isn't really any tension. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

[Mary Robinette] I think the outcome of tension and hope is where a lot of romance comes from. It's like, oh, you know that they're going to get together. So that's the thing that you're hoping for the entire time, but you keep seeing all of the reasons that they aren't going to get together, which is what builds that tension. That's a… I really like that framing, Dan.

[Howard] Yeah. I've… Without going into detail, one of the things that for me makes a good action scene is if I care about what's happening. If the action scene… Fight scenes are often inherently conflict, because they're fighting, but if I'm not feeling tension, if I'm not emotionally invested, all the great fight choreography is just eye candy. I don't care. So tension is key. It's critical.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think that brings up a really interesting point, because for me, tension is almost always about relationships, because stakes aren't necessarily about survival, stakes are about consequence and how you see yourself or how you see other people in connection to other characters. Because that's how we think about it, and that's how we feel it, so just for a quick example going to what you're saying, Howard, like the lobby scene out of the Matrix is them fighting a bunch of goons. The tension in that scene doesn't come from are they going to shoot these security guards. It comes from is Neo starting to realize who he is? Is he in tension with himself? What matters to him? So we're excited by that scene because we see, as Morpheus says, "He's starting to believe." We see that relationship starting to change. So the tension comes from an internal journey that the character is on, not the conflict of there are 10 random goons that need to get out of their way at this point.

 

[Erin] I think you can also, like, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm just starting my story. Nobody yet cares about my characters. How am I going to create this tension?"

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] One way to do that, also, is to tap into kind of primal tensions I think that we feel. So if you're on a spaceship and the spaceship is breaking, that's bad. But it's also this person's first day on the job, like, there's a certain primal, "oh, crap, I just got this job, and now everything is breaking." Or I have to give a speech. The things that people freak out about in their dreams. Like, that kind of thing, if you put it on the page, it's a way to tap into tensions that people might be feeling in their own lives. Then use that to kind of move the action forward while you build up the character engagement.

[DongWon] Yeah. The thing that you said about conflict being something the character sees, but tension is something the audience sees. Conflict for the character is am I going to survive this. I, as a reader, at the beginning of a book, I don't really care yet. I don't know you. Sure, if you fall out into space and die, that's not particularly interesting to me. But what is interesting to me is are you going to feel bad about it being your fault that you fall out into space and die. Right? I think that's the difference between tension and that conflict in that way of stakes matter… Survival matters to the character, but you have to give me a reason to care. That's where tension comes in.

[Howard] Circling back to Mary Robinette's five things here, can I talk about juxtaposition for just a moment?

[Mary Robinette] I think you can, after the break. That is going to create tension for our readers, our listeners…

[Gasp]

[Mary Robinette] As they wait to find out what Howard is going to say about juxtaposition.

 

[Dan] All right. So our thing of the week this week is Dark One: Forgotten. The first official collaboration between Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson. This is the prequel to a story that has been out in graphic novel form for a while, called Dark One. It's a portal fantasy. This is presented… The prequel is presented as a… As if it were a six episode podcast. Someone is making an amateur true crime podcast about a mysterious murder that has remained unsolved for 30 years. Over the course of the series, discovers many more mysteries and a much larger thing going on. This is a lot of fun, because of that nature of a… As a faux podcast, it is only in audio. It's available pretty much everywhere audiobooks are available. Take special note of this thing of the week, because several episodes from now, we're going to do a deep dive on this one. When we finish our whole tension class that we're doing, we are going to do a deep dive into Dark One: Forgotten and talk about the process of writing it and producing it and everything at length. So, it's a little over six hours, and it's a lot of fun. They did an amazing job on the recording, the cast is wonderful. So, Dark One: Forgotten by Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard. Tell me. Tell me about juxtaposition. [Garbled]

[Howard] Okay. Return of the King, the Peter Jackson, we have the scene where the Steward of Gondor has sent troops into Osgiliath to try and take it back. While those troops are in Osgiliath, the Steward is eating and making… I can't remember if it's Merry or Pippin… Making them sing…

[Dan] It's Pippin.

[Howard] It's Pippin. We are watching… Is it John Noble? Is that the name of the actor?

[Dan] Yes.

[Howard] I think it's John Noble. We are watching him crush food in his mouth and dribble on his face and tear meat from bone as we watch these soldiers drive into Osgiliath. It is brilliant and beautiful as juxtaposition and also serves as a way to give us X-rated levels of gory horrible violence without actually doing that. Our… Your brain does all the work because of the juxtaposition. It makes you terribly tense because the soldiers on the horses have not yet been turned into grapes in John Noble's mouth yet and you don't know if they will be.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Something that it makes me think of that I've been thinking about a lot is how much of storytelling is a collaboration between the author and the reader. We talk about this in puppetry that the difference between playing with dolls and a puppet show is that one of them has an audience, and that the puppet exists in this liminal space between us. It is also true for writing, that I can write something, but the moment you start consuming it, you're going to bring your own lens to it, your own experience, and you're going to combined things in your own head in ways that I can't anticipate.

 

[Erin] That makes me think a lot of something that I find really fascinating about tension. It is that difference between what readers are doing and what the characters are doing is narrative tension versus what I call contextual tension. So, narrative tension is the tension that characters feel, and contextual tension is the tension that readers feel. They don't actually have to be the same. If the characters are blithely walking into an ambush, but you signal to the reader that there's an ambush coming, there's a difference there. Versus where both folks, both are feeling tense. So there's a lot of really, really fun things that you can do there, in separating those two, and playing with where your character's feeling tension, and where do you want your reader to be.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think of this really as genre expectations. Right? So if you're in romance, you're in horror, you're in mystery, in the ways that we've talked about it in the past, the audience has certain expectations. This is why, when I talk about storytelling, I always talk about pattern recognition. Right? We have read and absorbed thousands upon thousands of stories over the course of our life. So, we have ideas about how these things are supposed to go. You can use those expectations for a lot of these techniques which [we mention?] here, in particular, anticipation and juxtaposition. Anticipation being sort of like we think we know how it's going to go. Then, juxtaposition is the contrast of we thought it was going to go this way, but now it's going that way. I think you can use that tension between the audience expectation and what's happening in the text to kind of create a discordant note that automatically creates a sense of tension that the audience is so hungry for it to be resolved. Waiting for that resolution, waiting for that next cord to progress, so that we know where we're going, is one of the most effective ways to create tension between the book and the audience.

 

[Dan] So one of the elements on Mary Robinette's list that we haven't talked much about yet is unanswered questions. Which, at one level, that's just what a mystery is, right? Somebody is dead, we want to know who killed them and how. So we have that question. But there's a lot of other ways to use this type of tension. The example that comes to mind is the old TV show Alias, which kind of leaned a little too heavily on this particular trope, but many, many… I would go so far as to say, most of those episodes started with the main character in a horrible situation, and then we would cut away and say, "72 hours earlier…" Then, that leaves us with this unanswered question of "Oh, no. I know she's going to be in a horrible peril at some point. How does that happen? How is that situation created? What is going to go massively wrong?" That creates the tension that draws us through the episode to get the answer to that question.

[DongWon] This is also what's commonly referred to as mystery box storytelling. This is this J. J. Abrams idea of asking what's in the box, what's in the puzzle, can be a driving force for your entire narrative. So, Lost is probably the most famous example of this. Sometimes they can be unsatisfying if it's clear they never knew what's in the box in the first place, but you can really connect with an audience who also wants to know what is the core of this mystery, what is the core thing that's happening. A more recent example is Severance. It's a good example of like, "What the hell is he actually doing down there?" It's something that really drives the story forward.

[Erin] Speaking of boxes, literally, since we've done Glass Onion as thing of the week, maybe you've all seen this, but it starts with a box being opened. I think that why this is so important is because in order to have your audience trust that you will answer the unanswered questions, it helps to pose a question and answer it early on. So that you're like, "I am capable of answering questions." How will they open this box? They do. You saw it. So then you're actually willing to give them more space. Each time you answer a question for an audience member or for a reader, I think what happens is you lengthen the amount of time that you can put between question and answer as they trust you that much more.

[Howard] Dan's example, from Alias, 72 hours earlier, is the in media res, and we're familiar with that structure. One of my favorite reversals of that can be found in the first paintball episode of Community. I think it's episode 23 of season one, where Jeff leaves the room. We've been told, "Oh, there's going to be a game of Paintball Assassin," whatever. Jeff leaves the room and says, "I'll see you losers later. I'm going to go take a nap in my car." Then we see, kaching, one hour later. Jeff wakes up in his car, steps out of the car, and the campus is a wasteland, with sort of zombie wasteland music playing. For a couple of minutes there, you're wondering, "Okay. What happened?" I now have a lot of questions about what could have gone this wrong in an hour. Now, obviously, it's a community… It's a community? It's Community, so it's a comedy. So there is exaggeration. But the tool is still there for you. Running the clock forward a little bit and things have changed, and how did it get this bad this quickly?

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to briefly cut into say that one of the reasons that we separated unanswered questions from anticipation is that… We went back and forth on whether or not they should be lumped together… Is that with anticipation is something that you know is going to happen. Like, you know that when they walked down the basement steps, that a bad thing is going to happen, and tension comes from that. It's anticipating an outcome. Versus unanswered questions, where you don't know the answer. So in one… You can be… With anticipation, you can be wrong about the answer. Like, often you build tension by having them go down the stairs, and then something jumps out at them. But it's just the cat. So you can build anticipation and tension and let the reader be wrong about what they're anticipating, but that is different than the reader does not know what is going to happen.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, so, like in Severance, I'm actually expecting not to get answers to many of the questions I have. It's sort of a genre expectation, that I would almost be unsatisfied if they did answer all those questions, but finding out more so I can start piecing together the puzzle is one of the narrative things that's pulling me through this story that I'm loving.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The last piece of it that we need to define, and then we'll go to our homework, is micro-tension. I'll try to keep this short. Micro-tension are smaller tensions that happen within a larger scene. So if your character is attempting to deal with a murder, but then they also have to make spaghetti dinner and the water boils over. That's a micro-tension. They're small tensions that pop up often from mundane sources, but not always.

[Howard] They can be related to the plot. I need to get the autopsy report, and in order to get the autopsy report, I have to apologize to the coroner. Now, macro-tension would be I'm going to steal the report.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

 

[Howard] Hey, should I do the homework?

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a great idea, Howard.

[Howard] I should do homework. Okay. In this episode, we covered five types of tension. Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Look at your current work in progress or something that you're reading… Last week, we invited you to read a mystery… And try to identify examples of each of these. That's it.

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Imagine working with horses as a way to explore and enhance your creative process, all while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of Bear Lake, Utah. Led by me and Dan, this four-day workshop is suitable for writers and riders of all levels and experience. Come make new connections, receive valuable feedback, and set your writing goals in motion. Visit writingexcuses.com for more information about Riding Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go ride.

 

 

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.