wetranscripts | Entries tagged with ending

Writing Excuses 20.09: Lens 4 - Reaction

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-09-lens-4-reaction

Key Points: Reaction is everything. Reactions sell the impact. Slow down, let us see and feel the reaction. Give audiences reactions they are familiar with. When we write too quickly, we often leave out reactions. Watch out for reactions that don't match the character's goals, motivations, fears, or seem completely opposed to what they want. Sometimes reactions line up with something else, but tell us what that is. No plan survives. Make a list of possible reactions. Don't forget the other characters! Use your own experiences. At the end of a scene or chapter, what do you want the characters, and your readers, to be feeling? Tell us how they're going to feel, tell us how they are feeling, and tell us how they felt.

[Season 20, Episode 09]

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 09]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] The reaction of who.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm sure many of you writers out there are saying, Howard, it's supposed to be the reaction of whom. But if you've been following along with us, you know that right now we're in our fourth episode where we're talking about the lens of who, the lens of the character. How we are approaching our writing through a specific lens. In this episode, we're finishing that up by talking about the fact that really, reaction is everything.

[Mary Robinette] There's a saying in theater, acting is reacting. Where there is something that happens on stage, and then you react to it. The actions that you take during that reaction let the audience know what your character is thinking and feeling. Because on stage, you don't get to go inside their heads. As writers, we do get to let the reader inside their head, but often there's a mismatch between what's going on inside their head and the actions that they are taking.

[DongWon] Or, if you're not showing enough reaction, things will feel really, really flat. Right? There's a video essay I really love by Tony Zhou who does Every Frame a Painting about martial arts movies. One of the things that he shows is that in a lot of great martial arts movies, what you'll see is… You see the actual blow land three different times. You see the first strike, you see a… Usually, like, a slow-mo zoom in of the strike, and then you see the reaction of the person who got hit. It's that reaction that sells the impact. Right? Because these are [stunt] performers. They're not actually hitting each other, their hitting each other very lightly. So when I see an emotional beat not land, when I see an action scene not land, it's because we don't see and feel the reaction. So I'm always telling people, it's okay to slow down. People think that to get through an action scene, it's got to stay fast to keep things moving really, really well, and we're missing the reaction and that's why things start to fall flat or not have the impact you want.

[Dan] Yeah. In… Since we're on the subject of martial arts, one of the things that I love about martial arts fight scenes, and I saw this as well in a YouTube video, but I can't remember which one it was. I can't give my sources as well as DongWon can. Someone was talking about the importance of familiarity and resonance in a fight scene. The idea that I, as a person, have never been through a pane of glass. I've never broken through one. Whereas I have bumped my head on something. I have knocked against a wall. That sort of thing. So you watch Jackie Chan, for example, and you'll see him crashed through a bunch of panes of glass, like in the beg… The one I'm thinking of is the big fight scene in the Lego store. He goes through several panes of glass, and then crashes off of a wall. What that does is it gives us a reaction, it gives the audience a reaction they're familiar with. So that right at the end, that last bit of it, we go oooh, because we know what that feels like. That lets the audience react with the character. [Silence] That was so weird that now nobody has any follow-up.

[Mary Robinette] No, no.

[Howard] No, this is the reaction of…

[Ha, ha]

[Howard] The reaction of me looking to Mary Robinette and thinking, oh, you have a response, and Mary Robinette looking to me and saying, oh, that look on your face suggests that you're about to say something.

[DongWon] Reaction and reaction.

[Howard] Both of us were wrong.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I was just trying not to make this whole episode about martial arts movies, because Dan and I could talk for an hour on this topic.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I'm there with that. So, here's the thing that I was thinking earlier about the… Showing the reaction multiple times. That when you're dealing with that reaction on the page, you're dealing with where does the character feel it in their body? What are the thoughts that go through their head? And then, what is the action that they take as a result of those things. And how does it link to the things we've already been talking about, which is, like, motivation and their goals? How do these things tied together? I will see characters who receive terrible shocking news, and all you get is a line of dialogue from them. Like, how does that sit with them, where is that… Where do they feel that? That's part of that, that's slowing down and letting us feel it. It's not that your character needs to have a reaction every single time. But it is a way of disambiguating what their response is. Sometimes it's very clear what's going on, you don't need to put all of those things in. But sometimes you really need to slow it down so that we can… That we can link to it. Like, when you let us know how we feel it in our bodies, a lot of readers will also map that to their own body. They tighten their shoulders, unconsciously, you can tighten your own shoulders.

[Dan] Reaction is such an important one to focus on, because, like you're saying, it is one of the first things that we leave out when we start to write too quickly. When we think to ourselves, well, I know how this person feels about what just happened, the audience is going to pick it up as well. I don't have to make… State it explicitly. It's one of the first things that disappears.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will go through, when I'm doing my revision, and I will look for places where I need to layer that back in. Where I've gone too fast, and I've left it out. So, if you're thinking, oh, my goodness, there's so many things to think about when I'm writing, remember that you can layer that in later. But it's absolutely true. It's the other thing that I see people do is that they… The character will have a very cinematic reaction that is completely at odds with their goals, with their motivation, with the things that they're afraid of. The classic one is two people… Like, someone wants to get back together with someone else, and they go into a room, and they yell at them. I'm like, how does… How do you think that's actually going to work? Like, that's not how that… Or all of the stalkers, like, out there. Like, yeah, I want to convince this person that I'm loving and safe. I'm going to stand under their window with a… In the rain with a radio. I'm like, that's not… Like, that's not going to get the reaction you think it's going to get.

[Howard] One of my very favorite examples of reaction to things not going as planned… It's cinematic… Is in the, as of this recording, most recent Mission Impossible movie. There's a car chase in the middle, where Ethan Hunt… No, wait, I mean Tom Cruise… No, wait, I mean Ethan Hunt, is handcuffed to… I forgotten the actress's name and I forgotten the character's name.

[Dan] Hayley Atwell.

[Howard] Hayley Atwell. They're handcuffed together and they're handcuffed so that Tom Cruise would not be in the driver's seat. They switch vehicles, I think three times, and the reactions of, wait, I'm not driving. Wait, you don't actually know how to do this thing with the car. Wait, you don't have a free hand to use your weapon. Over and over again. Things don't go as planned. Sandra and I and my youngest son watched this… I say youngest son. 21. Watched this in a hotel room at Gen Con. This was his first time seeing it, and he, about three quarters of the way through, said, this is the most interesting car chase I've ever watched.

[DongWon] That's a great one.

[Howard] It is so… It's because it's all about reactions. It's all about watching how the characters who have their motivations, who have their skills, are continuously dealing with something going wrong.

[DongWon] Exactly. The reaction sells the emotion in that moment, and, Mary Robinette, you bring up a great point, the reaction and the action don't match when a character… That's when they feel really wrong. However, I will also point out that sometimes you could use that to paper over other flaws in your story. Right?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] So I watched Twisters last night. Which is one of the most fun blockbusters I've seen in a while. Truly, Hollywood remembered how…

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[DongWon] How to make movies again. There's a whole thing where the first half of the movie, there's a rivalry between these two groups, and I stopped at one point and was like, it makes no sense. It doesn't matter if they're both at the tornado at the same time. It's a tornado. They can both be there. It's big enough. Right? But there papering over that by the characters reacting to each other constantly as they're creating this rivalry. It was so fun watching them make faces at each other, make fun of each other, and outrace each other that I didn't care whether it made sense or not. Right? Because they were selling me the reaction, they were selling me the emotional stakes and reality of these characters that it stopped me from doing the step back and think about it for a long time, and 90 percent of the readers would never have done that… Or viewers would never have done that. I just think about story too much.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing to think about when we talk about reactions that don't line up with your goals is that they might line up with something else. When you mentioned stalkers, that's now the thing that I'm talking about. I apologize. Because that's a real thing that happens. People really do take actions that are not plausibly ever going to get them what they want. But it's because they are not reacting in that moment to their goals. They are reacting to something else. If you are able to present that properly in your story, that may be they are reacting to a previous experience, maybe they are reacting to a past trauma, maybe they are reacting to a desire rather than a goal which can be different things. If you don't put it into your story, the reaction will seem wrong. If you do put it into your story, then that dissonance creates a really nice moment.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of contrasts, I think this is probably a good time for us to take a little bit of a break.

[Howard] It's been said, and I wish I could quote who said it first, that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. This is not only an excellent foundation for military doctrine, it's also a very solid principle for writing. Your characters have a plan. If their plan survives from formulation all the way to the end of the book, assuming it's something they formulated in the first act, there probably wasn't enough reaction going on. We want to know what happens when the plan suffers and you have to come up with a new plan.

[DongWon] So much of it is listening to your characters. Right? I mean, and this goes back to the mismatch, when you have that mismatch, it often feels like it's because you needed something to happen for the plot. Not because the characters were organically responding to the thing. The thing I've learned from gaming as a GM, when I introduce a villain, when I introduce a scenario or an NPC, I cannot predict how my players are going to react. I might accidentally describe the bartender as being like two percent too hot, and now our session is derailed and now we're just…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] In this tavern for the rest… For the next two hours.

[Howard] Installing air-conditioning?

[DongWon] Installing air-conditioning. Of course.

[Howard] Okay.

[DongWon] Yes. Because anyways…

[Mary Robinette] It's compelling.

[DongWon] Sometimes your villain just isn't going to have the impact that you want and you need to find another angle. Right? You can't predict sometimes how your character will react and you need to listen to what their response is in the moment rather than what you need their response to be to move the plot forward. Sometimes that means either you need to change the dial on what the inciting incident is or you need to let your plot shift to follow the character's response.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Sometimes I will make a list of possible responses that my character will have. I think about what is the goal, what are they trying to achieve, what do I need them to achieve, and I list out things that could possibly get us there. The other piece to that, to both of your points, is that often when we're thinking about our main character, we are forgetting how the people around them are reacting to the actions that they are taking.

[DongWon] This is the solution to the passive character. So many times, there's a passive protagonist. Right? The reluctant hero. You need people reacting to the situation that aren't that character, because if they're not reacting and taking action, it's absolutely maddening for the audience and your story's not going to move forward. So you need to surround them with people who are having the big reaction to move things forward in that way.

[Howard] When we began with this lens on character, I talked about… Or I invited us to use our own experiences as tools. I want to lean into that again, now, because I find in my own life, there are lots of times when something painful or unexpected or surprising happens, and I act quote out of character unquote. I discover something about myself that usually I don't like. Boy, I'm not the sort of person who says unkind things to someone else just because I've lost my temper. But what's wrong, what happened here? So the tool is, look at your own reactions. Are there times when you've reacted to something and you've learned something about yourself, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant? I'm putting that forward to our panelists as perhaps… Our hosts, perhaps as a question.

[Mary Robinette] So, I think that that's… This is a… A great example, and it ties back into things that Dan and DongWon were talking about before is the… Is that thing where your character does do something that is out of character, and you… But when they do that, they still have to have a reaction to it. So if they snap at someone, and then… That's the external reaction that they've done, but the internal reaction is, ooh, I just said that. Is there a way I can fix it? That's a… That is a thing that can allow you to have both. There's this great… One of my favorite celebrity interviews, Nathan Fillion is talking about being on soaps, and how they're… He was a young actor on soaps, and one of the veterans said, at the end of the scene, they're going to push the camera in on your face. And you've got no script, you can't go anywhere. You can't… So you have three…

[Howard] For heaven sake, don't move.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So you have three possible reactions. Did I leave the gas on?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, I did leave the gas on. I turned the gas off.

[Howard] I can now see…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] Nathan Fillion making each of those three faces.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Once you start seeing that, it's… Like, you see a lot of actors who have those reactions. But the thing about it is, what he's talking about is letting the reader know how they are supposed to react…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] To what has happened. So I find that sometimes at the end of the scene, at the end of a chapter, that I will look at it and go okay, did they leave the gas on or did they turn it off? And think about how my character is feeling, but specifically, how I want my reader to be feeling. What reaction I want them to be having as well.

[DongWon] A lot of times what you want to do is… kind of going back to my initial example of the martial arts punch landing, is show it… Tell us how they're going to feel, show us how they're feeling, tell us how they felt. You know what I mean? Sometimes you need that structure to a scene. That can be as… That can happen all in one sentence sometimes. Right? You can do it real quick, you can do it real slow. All those things are really useful, but letting us understand the reaction, and giving us time to process what the reaction is, is hugely important.

[Howard] Yeah. As we've talked about throughout this season, we talk about tools, we describe them as lenses. We describe them as lenses because the things that you are putting on the page are the things that are informing the reader about what they are supposed to be thinking, what they're supposed to be experiencing, what they're supposed to be feeling. Reaction is a critical, critical lens. Are we ready for homework?

[Mary Robinette] I think we are.

[Howard] I feel like we're ready for homework.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, what I want you to do is, I want you to look at one of your character's reactions, and flip it. So if they take an action that escalates a situation, how would that scene play if they de-escalate it? Can you still get to the endpoint that you want? So take a look at those reactions and play around with them.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. Surprise! You're out of excuses. Now do something completely unexpected. Go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.51: And That Was That

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-51-and-that-was-that

Key points: Endings! Climax, plus wrap up (aka denouement). Compare end to the beginning. Not just a return to home, but something that reminds us of the beginning, but shows the change. Who, where, what, why do I care? Surprising, yet inevitable, with a lean towards inevitable. Don't just stop, let us see the characters settling into their new status quo. Give the reader a little dessert, some candy! Beware the new question or problem ending! Sometimes cliffhangers are okay. Just make sure the ending is satisfying to the reader. Watch out for shoving the unanswered stuff in the closet! Cliffhangers... how do you give a sense of conclusion while the plot is still open, and there are still big questions hanging? Different kinds of questions: character/relationship questions versus plot/world questions. Use the M.I.C.E. quotient! Lingering effect. Resolving shots. Where will the reader's head canon take them? Think about things you have read that you liked the way they made you feel. Emotional beats, body beats. Playlists!

[Season 19, Episode 51]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] And That Was That.

[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.

[Erin] So, we're going to talk a little bit about endings and how you have your big moment of climactic excitement and then how you wrap it all up for your reader. When I started thinking about this, I was really thinking about fantasy fiction. Because I feel like in fantasy, the world , like, often changes in these very big, dramatic, like, big ways, and then has... You have to make sense of all that and still bring it back to something that hits home for the reader.So I'm worndering how you all do that?

[Dan] Well, earlier this month we talked about Toy Story, and Toy Story does this wonderfully. That birthday scene at the beginning where they're all freaking out, oh, no, we're going to get a new toy, how is it going to disrupt our status quo? We get that exact scene at the very end, but we get it instead of we need to see if Buzz Lightyear is the new toy, and instead it is Buzz Lightyear is my best friend and we're working together to see what the next toy is going to be. What this is doing, and what I try to do in my writing, is compare the end to the beginning. It doesn't have to be a let's go back to the Shire and see how we've changed. That mythological return to home kind of idea. It can just be something that reminds us of the beginning but shows that it has changed. Recontextualizes it, sees it from a different perspective, so that we can go, oh, okay. Things have changed. A doesn't exactly equal A anymore, because we've added B to it.

[Mary Robinette] I found that I… I do a very similar thing, that I try to look for those resonance moments. I often think about it as doing like the beginning and inverse. And at the beginning of a story, a novel you're attempting to do, to ground the reader with who, where, what, why do I care. At the end, I find that I actually also need to hit those beats again. That I need to let people know who we are with, like, how my character change… Has changed, who they are now. Where we are. Sometimes it's a literal different place, but also, like, what the environment is. And then, the reason to care. It's like why is this important to my character and in giving some aspect of interiority to the character, really helps, for me, like to bring that sense of oh, we're home. This is the return. Even in stories where it's not, oh, and happily ever after. But this is moment.

[Howard] I'm a big fan of the surprising yet inevitable. And if I have to choose between surprising and inevitable, I will choose inevitable. Because that lets the reader feel smart. If I choose surprising, but non sequitur, then I often just make the reader angry. And so… Am I always clever enough to surprise the reader? No. Frankly, I'm not. So I look at surprising, yet inevitable, as the high bar, and reach for inevitability first.

[DongWon] When I think about authors who are famously bad at endings, or at least people complain about their endings a lot…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] So… The safest one to mention is Steven King, for example. Right? People hate Steven King's endings. Especially in his earlier novels. The thing that I notice about these is that they end abruptly. They don't give space for the dénouement, to use the fancy term for it. Right? That beat past the declining action where we get to see the characters entering their new status quo. The reason… I think that that is so unsatisfying. Right? And I think you guys are talking about really excellent points in terms of closing these parentheses, referring back to the initial moments, but also, as the reader, I want my candy now. Right? Like, I've eaten the full meal, but I do want dessert at this point. I want that last bite to leave with that gives me a sense of this was all worth it. Right? And sometimes that bite is a reward of, like, seeing the happy ending for them. Right? To go to Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee getting married, having a good time. That is a candy for Sam. For me, also, the candy is Frodo having to leave the Shire, because he's too traumatized. Right? Because that's something that tells me this journey meant something. It was so weighty and so difficult that poor sweet Frodo is shattered at the end of it. Right? To me, that makes so much of the arc of the whole story feel so heavy and rich and bountiful to me. Because I had that emotional moment at the end. People complain all the time that Lord of the Rings has four endings. I think it's important that it has each of those endings. It tells us that this… I spent the last however many months of my life reading these massive books or however many hours watching these movies that I did something worthwhile. Because the writers took me seriously enough to make sure that I felt good at the end of it.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that I had a hard time with when I transitioned from writing short stories to novels, is that I would hit the landing and I'd get out, and I wouldn't give the audience time to breathe and to have that candy. I love that metaphor of the way to describe it. One of the things that I see people do who are historically bad at endings, in addition to the and now we just stop, is that they will introduce a new question, a new problem. And this is very tempting to do all the time, especially, I think, with fantasy. It's like, and what about the other dragon?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And it's like, uhuh. Because that's… You're gearing up for a sequel. Not every book has to have a sequel. Often, if you do that, it doesn't feel like the book's ended. So try not to introduce a new story question at the end, trying not to like wrap… Ramp the tension up as you're heading towards the end. So the trick that I've found for myself is that I write that last chapter, my dénouement, my epilogue, I kind of write it as a standalone short story with the same characters and on the same theme.

[Howard] For… [Sigh] Okay. There are a bazillion different structures that we could be working within. And, primarily, when I talk about satisfying readers, I'm talking about satisfying myself and my own familiarity with structures that are primarily Western. And so within those structures, I try to make sure that for the first two thirds… After I hit two thirds of the book, I'm not allowed to introduce new characters, new technologies, new settings, new anything, because I don't want to do that exact thing, Mary Robinette. I don't want to drop a big fat question at the end, and I don't want to drop something that feels like a deus ex machina. The last third of the book, I have to use the toys that I put on the table in the first two thirds. And for me, for the structures and genres that I work within, that's pretty effective for forcing me to narrow my options for an ending.

[Dan] Well, I think it's important to remember that there is a difference between an open-ended ending and a cliffhanger ending. Look at the first Star Wars movie. We know when the Death Star goes down that the Empire's much bigger than this. We know that Darth Vader is still alive. But because of the order in which they present that information to us, we end on an incredibly final satisfying note. It doesn't feel like a stretch to keep telling this story in more movies. But also, we're not left with lingering questions. There's no last minute stinger scene of Darth Vader tumbling in his tie fighter and we go, dumdum-dum, he's still alive. We already know that because that was given to us during the climax. So you can have these kinds of things. You just need to end us on that moment that helps us feel resolved and satisfied.

[Erin] That's sort of reminds me of something we said all the way back when we were talking about beginnings, which is about building reader trust by asking questions and then answering them. I think there's a little bit of that at the end, too. Like, you want to make sure you've answered enough questions in this book that if you raise, like, one additional… Not raise, but if there is an additional piece of information out there, there's more to the world, it feels as if the reader's still got the questions that they had for this book answered, and that they trust that you will answer those questions, like, in the future. I will say that, like, as a… I am… People who are horrible at endings, it me.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I… Like, one of the things that I do that's a, like, an in between mistake, is the shove everything in a closet. So, this is, like, you're cleaning your room, and you get to the point where you've taken a lot of things out because you were organizing everything, but it looks really bad at that moment. You're like, oh, gosh, everything is everywhere. You could put things in the new places you've picked for them, or you could shove it all in a closet and then, like, close the door. So, sometimes, when things feel like they've ended… When I've written endings and I'm like, this feels unsatisfying… It's because there are things I just didn't want to deal with. Like, I was like, I just didn't really want to answer how they got to this place. So I just decided to ignore it.

[Laughter]

[Howard] In act one, you hang a snow shovel and a trash compactor on the mantle, and everything will fit in the closet in act three.

[Erin] Exactly.

[DongWon] Well, speaking of unsatisfying endings, I think we need to go to break for a couple minutes, and then we'll be right back.

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

[Erin] Chants of Sennaar is one of my favorite games that I've played in the last year. I'm not the only one. It was nominated for the Nebula award for game writing. So it is a great experience for anyone. Here's what happens. You basically show up in a tower, and people are speaking to you, and it's like, "Mum, mum, mummum." You're just seeing symbols and you have to figure out from context what their words mean. That's what the gameplay is. You're figuring out, oh, okay. Mammut means plant, and blah blah blah blah means upstairs. And you're figuring it out and you're putting it together. And then, you move to another level where people are saying cheek check bawk bawk… Whatever. They're using a completely different language, and whatever it is, you have to figure out that one. Then you have to figure out how to understand what each of these different level people are doing, what their language is, and figure out that, like, tick-tock in one language means rawr rawr in another, and bring people together through puzzle solving and language. It's amazing. The art is great, the music is great. And if you've ever thought hey, writing can drive people wild, this is a game that I know that you'll love. So, check out Chants of Sennaar.

[DongWon] Okay. So we were talking about this a little bit before the break. But I was wondering if we could talk about cliffhangers more specifically. Right? Because I think there's a specific art to ending on big open questions leading into book 2, leading into book 3, whatever it is, but still giving readers a sense of completion. Right? I was thinking… I re-watched the second Spiderverse movie the other day, which ends on an incredible cliffhanger. But also I… When I watch that movie, it's such a satisfying sense of completion, because questions were answered about the characters. Things were closed off about when Stacy started here, she ends here. Miles starts here, Miles ends here. So how do you get people… Characters to a sense of conclusion while the overall plot clearly is still hanging open and there's huge questions about what's going to happen to these people?

[Erin] I think… I love the Spiderverse as well as an example, for one thing, because it's just a great movie.

[DongWon] It's incredible.

[Erin] Also, it reminded me that there are different types of questions. I think sometimes we forget that. That there are character questions and relationship questions that we're answering that are different than plot questions or world questions. So I think figuring out what the core is of the story, going back and looking at the beginning. What was the promise you were making? I feel like Spiderverse, for example, is a movie that promises an emotional… That there's going to be an emotional and character development. And since it delivers that and answers some of those questions, I don't care as much about the theory dangling plot questions that are going to be…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Answered in the next movie.

[Dan] Yeah. For me, a lot of this comes down to making sure that you really know what your story is about. I… For example, and this is a very thin example. I'm sure I could think of better ones if I tried. But, Fellowship of the Rings… The movie, in particular, ends on this, well, and now we are out of time. Please come back next year. But that's the plot. Emotionally, what most of this story has been about is Frodo trying to decide is he in control of his own destiny, and is he willing to put other people in danger? And that emotional plot conflict gets resolved very solidly at the end when he's like, yes, I am in control. No, I won't put anyone else in danger. I'm going to go do this myself. So, from that perspective, it does feel done and satisfying. Because we have tied off a major thread. Even though there's clearly many others. So… Fellowship, I think, is an example where they could have tied that off better if that had been a priority for them. But making sure that you know what the story is actually about. I just watched a really wonderful movie called Polite Society which is a Pakistani British action comedy thing about sisters. These two sisters start off best friends, and then this huge rift shows up and it ends up with this giant like martial arts punch out. They defeat the villain, and a lesser movie would end there. This movie remembered, nope, this is a story about sisters. So we get that breathing room denouement at the end where they are back together, best friends, doing the things they used to do, and that lets us know that the real story is over.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will surprise no one. So, the M.I.C.E. quotient…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But, the M.I.C.E. quotient is a very useful tool for thinking about these and categorizing them. So. Sometimes what I will do at the end is I will sit down and look, okay, I started with an event story and then I've got a character story. Most of my middle is actually spent in a milieu, and then I wrap that up. But then I still have my event and character that I have to wrap up at the end. And I will often make a plan to go back and revise the beginning so I'm opening things in different orders. But at the end, going back to something Dan said earlier about the order in which you present the information to the reader, that's what I think about most when I'm doing these endings is what emotion do I want the reader to walk away with. If you think of it like a drug, what is the lingering effect? Like, you put up with a bunch of side effects, but there's this one long term effect that you want. What is that one long term effect? So, for cliffhangers, the long term effect that I want is what happens next? So that's the beat that I'm going to land on at the very very end. And if I don't want that cliffhanger, the what happens next, then I'm either going to not raise that question at all or I am going to put it earlier so that the beat of oh, I feel good about these characters and they seem healthy right now.

[Dan] We have talked so much this year about establishing shots. But we haven't really talked about this kind of resolving shot. The satisfying shot at the end. How do you want… What promises do you want to make at the beginning, but then what emotions do you want to leave them with at the end? I think that's a really smart thing to think about, and I'm going to call it a resolving shot.

[Mary Robinette] That's great. I'm going to claim that and copyright it right now.

[Laughter]

[Howard] One of the questions I ask myself when I'm writing and ending… And I ask myself this question because I'm the sort of person who consumes a thing and then immediately does what I'm going to get to in a moment, and that is where will the reader's head canon take them after they read the last line? What's the story they are automatically going to try to tell themselves next? I don't control that. I… They're going to take what I wrote and then they're going to… If I don't write an ending, they're going to write their own ending. If I write an ending they don't like, they're going to email me.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If I… But what is the head canon that I want to leave them with. And often, that… Using that as a framing for the resolving shot, that's… The cowboys riding off into the sunset. Well, you know, there's another Silverado down the road that will need their help, and that's the head canon that we get for that kind of thing.

[Erin] I'm wondering in setting up these sort of resolving shots, how do we know? I think that we've been assuming that you know exactly the feeling that you want to end with. But what if you're not sure? Is there anything you can look to, sort of in your writing so far, in order to figure out what is the best way to end things? Where… What is the thing that will satisfy the reader and yourself as the writer?

[Howard] For young writers, and when I say young, I mean writers who are new to writing, what are the things that you read that you liked the way it made you feel? Model your writing on the feeling map of those things, and… That's a great place to start. For writers who are more advanced, you already have a million techniques that are better than anything I can tell you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Just write.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, really it is digging down to what is the emotional thing that you want to leave. Right? Like, what's the thing that will make your reader feel the book in their body, when you leave them with it. Because that's the thing they're going to be the most excited about. So, if you're me, how do you make them as sad as possible in the last scene?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Right? Or, in the case of Spiderverse, ending on a beat that is so exciting everyone's jumping out of their chairs and yelling. Right? Like, it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But I think leaning into the genres of the body is the way to go for these last beats. Making them laugh, making them cheer, making them cry. Those are the kinds of things. Or making… Feeling a saccharine sweetness. Right? I think that's… When you want to leave that lingering taste, think about how do you do it with this kind of intensity.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I want to say that that feeling in the body is really the key because sometimes I will see writers say I want them to think, ah, that was a really clever twist. It's like, that's not… That's a… That's not a…

[Dan] That's not an emotion.

[Mary Robinette] That's a beat and a moment, and it's not something that lingers with you. It is not something that you necessarily feel in your body. Sometimes… But, ah, that writer was clever. It's like that's not… That's not a useful goal.

[Howard] Yes. Surprising yet inevitable is not satisfying if it doesn't also have the body shot…

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] Accompanying it.

[DongWon] Horror movies end on that last jump scare because they want you feeling bad and nervous as you walk to your car as you leave the theater. They want you to be afraid as you leave because that is going to be the thing you remember about that movie. If you feel that way, then you're going to get home and be like, yo, you gotta go watch that movie. I was so scared the whole time. Even if you were only scared in the last 10 minutes of it. Right?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you can do if you're… We've talked about looking at other media that you consume, but the other thing that's really simple is you can make yourself a playlist.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] That encapsulates the moods that you want. If you listen to a song and you're like, that! That's what I want my book to feel like. A lot of times it is because you're feeling that song in your body, and you can start to reach for what are the tools that I can use. Some of the tools that we talked about earlier when we were talking about character, some of the tools that are coming… That were coming out of language. These are all tools that you can use to manipulate that last moment and, yes, manipulate your reader so that they have that body feeling.

[DongWon] Think about mood [garbled], think about playlists, those kinds of things.

[Erin] What I love about all this is we talked earlier about looking at the beginning, and then look at the beginning and the ending. I love that, because I'm thinking on my playlist, maybe I want to relisten to that first song…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That got me excited at the very end. Because that reminds me of the feeling that got me into the story, and that's maybe the feeling that I want my reader to have going out of it.

[Erin] And, with that, I have your homework for the week. Which is going to be to think of how your story, how your novel, how what you've been writing this month is going to end. Think of the first ending you can think of, and then think what might be the next scene, then write that. And then, the very last thing that we want you to do, is to celebrate yourself. Because no matter where you started, no matter where you end up, you have tried something really difficult this month, and we're really excited for you, proud of you, and really want to see whatever story that you have. I can't wait to read it.

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.48: NaNoWriMo Week 5 - Writing Endings

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.

[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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-33-deep-dive-the-schlock-mercenary-finale

Key points: Schlock Mercenary, a daily webcomic from June 2000 to July 2020. Why a daily web comic? Because Howard imagined it as a newspaper comic. Buck Rogers and Bloom County! Big save the universe plots and characters that we love with their own arcs. How do you balance those? Like a bumblebee, keep flapping! The guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. Worldbuilding, character work, and the punchline. An outline to hit the ending? If you find yourself diverging, you may need to redo the outline. The drumbeat of the daily strip versus the graphic novel format. Humor and context.

[Season 18, Episode 33]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive Prep: The Schlock Mercenary Finale.

[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 on the spot for this episode. Also, I think, for the seven episodes that follow.

[Howard] We're going to talk about... We're going to talk about finishing big things. And building big things. And... Um... Oh, boy, Schlock Mercenary ran from June of 2000 to July of 2020. Daily webcomic. Wrapping it up was one of the most difficult and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I feel like a discussion of how I did it and why I did the things that I did could lead us into all sorts of interesting and wonderful places with regards to the things that we've worked on, the things that you might be working on, things we love, things that maybe weren't done so well. There's so much to cover, so much to cover when we talk about wrapping up big things.

[DongWon] Before we dive into the end, I'd love to rewind a little bit and talk about the beginning. So, I think to understand how you wrap this up, I would love to understand first, why did you make it a daily web comic? Like, what were the things that drew you to that format? And, like, what was… What did that… How did that wire your brain in a certain way to think about how to structure things when you're putting content out on such a regular cadence?

[Howard] The enormous power of the default. When I began writing Schlock Mercenary, I imagined it as a newspaper comic. I submitted it to a couple of syndicates and was told in both cases, "This is not what we're looking for." I don't blame them. I'm actually quite happy that it didn't get picked up. But I… Up until that point, I really only imagined a comic strip as being a daily thing in newspaper format. I mean, the default was so powerful that I literally didn't imagine other things. Why does Schlock Mercenary look the way it does? Because in 2000, Howard really didn't know very much about what was possible with the web.

[DongWon] I mean, you were starting in an era when I think a lot of web comics were like that. Right? They were all coming out of this model of newspaper strips. They all were very episodic, very serialized. Then, over time, I think we saw a lot of these like daily gag comics suddenly start to develop meta-plot and structure and like these huge events that sort of overtaking them. Was that something you knew that you wanted to do when you started Schlock or were you starting with more of a gag of the week structure? And then, suddenly realized, oh, there's plot here. There's story here. There's worldbuilding in a bigger, more complex way.

[Howard] My two biggest influences going in on this were a great big book of collected Buck Rogers comics I had from the… I want to say 1940s. It might have been the 1930s. Newspaper comics. Where it was definitely long form, and there was some Monday reminder of what we were doing Saturday, cliffhanger. There was some of that going on. But I got the feeling that back then the newspapers just assumed, no, everybody's onboard. They're just picking up this paper and Buck Rogers is what they're reading. We own this audience. It was very streamlined storytelling. And Bloom County. Which did gag of the day sorts of things, but they would string together themes. There was one where, during the Iran-Contra scandal, the Oliver North stand in was an alien puppy dog that was just big eyes and cute and he's there on trial and no one can prosecute, no one can come down on him, because he's a cute puppy, look at him. Look, oh, look at what his antenna do. So we got a week of those gags, and then we move on. I thought, "Well, I could tell a longform story that does this thematic sort of thing on a weekly basis, and plot arcs will probably last about a month." I was wrong. Plot arcs, I found, lasted about a year to a year and a half. It wasn't until about two years in that I realized I had sort of the makings of a mega arc. I did not know where it was going to go. But I knew where it was going to start. It was going to start with some of the injustices that were created by monopolies and by top-heavy power structures and whatever else. Because those are great things to make fun of, but the more I made fun of them, the more I thought, "Man. I want to topple these. What happens if I topple all of them at once?"

[Mary Robinette] At what point in the process did you know the end that you were writing towards?

[Howard] That wasn't until around book 10. That wasn't until around book 10.

[Mary Robinette] For the listeners who have not experienced it, how many books are there?

[Howard] 20. Yeah, right about the time… Right around book 10, I thought, "Yeah. I could finish this in five more books."

[Ha ha ha!]

[Howard] I could wrap this up in five more books.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] And then I started noodling… I was just having so much fun with… I would

the thing and realize, "No, I haven't finished exploring this. There are more jokes to be told, there's more character development, there's… Oh. It's now been another 18 months. I'm on book 12 and I'm literally no closer to the conclusion I've envisioned than I was 18 months ago." But, yeah, right around book 10, I think it was book 3… The first book's called The Tub of Happiness. The second book, The Teraport Wars. Teraport wars is the one where we start seeing the grand Galactic whatever. Then, book 3 was Under New Management. Book 4, the Blackness Between was where I introduced dark matter as something that could have complex structures and life with desires that conflict with ours. Goals that bring us into conflict. Spoiler alert everyone. That's the piece right there which I think aired in 05, 06… That was the piece that ultimately needed to be resolved by book 20.

[Mary Robinette] Since you said the word spoiler, I do just want to let new listeners know that when we do these deep dives, that we go full spoiler. So we encourage you to read the material that has been linked to in the liner notes. Because later you're going to get all the spoilers.

[Howard] The good news is even if we spoil the big ending for you, there are so many beautiful moments… Yeah, I'm blowing my own horn here a little bit…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But as I read in preparation for this, I wrote this. Obviously, I know how it goes. I loved rereading it. I just had so much fun with the characters and with their individual plot resolutions. That was something that I learned fairly early on, which is, yeah, you can have a save the universe plot. But if we don't have characters that we love who have their own desires and their own plot arcs and their own disasters and their own recoveries from those disasters, the end of the universe doesn't really feel like it matters.

[Erin] You've mentioned a couple of elements, like the characters and all these things that go into it. How did you sort of decide in day-to-day when to devote time to the larger arc, when to devote time to an individual character moment or a great line? How did you balance that out over the course of one day going into the next?

[Howard] That. Feels. Like. The. That feels like the bumblebee and the laws of aerodynamics question. Because, very often I would stare at what was happening on the page and I would say I feel like I planned this. I feel like I did all of this on purpose. But I don't know how I'm doing it. Sandra is standing there next to me and saying, "Yeah. It's the bumblebee and the law of aerodynamics." Law of aerodynamics does not explain how a bumblebee flies. Bumblebee's job, keep flapping. So she would, right there, she said, "That's fine, honey. Keep flapping."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Since then, I have learned, one, the laws of turbulence in gases and liquids very nicely explain how a bumblebee stays aloft. It amounts to keep flapping. Two, I have become much more conversant with the sorts of tools I was unconsciously using. One of those tools was a prioritization of what is important… What is most important to have happen. For me, the most important, the guiding principle of Schlock Mercenary is there has to be a punchline. People have to be getting a reward for reading the strip today. So I would often begin with do I have a structure that is going to have a punchline at the end? There's a question that often gets asked, how do you know whose point of view to follow? The answer is I follow the character who is in the most pain. Because that's often going to be the most interesting. For me, it was, yeah, the character who's in the most pain is the most likely to be the one where there's going to be a good joke. But that's also… I'd rephrase the question. Who's going to be able to tell the best joke? We should pause for a thing of the week, and we'll come back in a moment.

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week, when we talk about very long-running series that have come to a conclusion, is a series of books by James S. A. Corey that is collectively known as The Expanse. Several of the books were adapted into a TV show as well. But the entire book series runs nine volumes, and wrapped up a couple years ago. It covers an enormous amount of territory, both in terms of story, character, and world. It starts very focused in our solar system, it's a big space opera. Then it continues to expand and grow in these leaps and starts that are endlessly fascinating and have endless complications with the characters. It jumps around in time as well as in space. I personally think that those two authors who cowrote the series stick the landing beautifully. It is worth going through the journey for all nine volumes that does a beautiful job of managing to balance the big ideas, the politics, and the individual character journeys. I adore these books. I'm very biased. I got the opportunity to work on the first couple of them. But watching where they ran with the thing from there all the way to the finish line was a thing of beauty, and I highly recommend everybody check out The Expanse books.

[Howard] I would like to return to the question Erin asked.

[DongWon] I have a thought on that actually.

[Howard] Oh. Go ahead.

[DongWon] If you don't mind me jumping in. It's more of a compliment than a thought, actually. One of the things that I thought that you do beautifully in this is really balancing three different toolkits you're using. I could see how you do that in a daily way. Right? I was reading these as a big block, not as a daily strip, but you have… The three tools I'm seeing in your kit here is, one, you have the world building, which gives you all this like big ideas stuff. Right? Whether that's dark matter being sent in, whether that's a civilization structured around this idea, whether it's like these digital heavens spaces that people get teleported into. You have all these high concepts that are sort of driving the metanarrative that's thematic. Then you have deep character work and relationship work that is driving the minute to minute plot of the story that keeps things flowing in such interesting ways and interesting dynamics and people are making choices rooted in who they are. But then you have the third tool in your kit, and this is what a lot of people don't have, which is, as you were talking about, the need for the punchline. So, on a daily basis, you have a structure of we need to get to that joke. So you're able to rely on the motivation of the joke, the guiding rails that you're on because of the character work you've done, and then the overall target, which is these huge intellectual world building structures. I think those three things operating in sync, almost in tension with each other a little bit, just… I can see it like laser targeting you towards that finale that you're getting towards. It was really fun to watch that unfold.

[Howard] Thank you. That's… It took me a long time to figure out that was kind of how I was doing it. One of the things I found out… And this is returning to Erin's question of how did you select which pieces you were working on. I realized that the way I had been creating individual strips and individual story arcs was not going to work for creating the ending. I needed to outline my way all the way to the very end with some big structures so that I could start aiming things. Otherwise I was going to ramble. I mean, the ramble was fun. We'll talk a little bit about in a future episode about that. But…

[DongWon] When did you realize you needed to do those outlines?

[Howard] Putting a year on it, that would have been 2015, 2016. I knew that I needed it and I wanted each of the last books to be about a year of comics. So it was…

[DongWon] So you're like two or three volumes before…

[Howard] Late 2017 is when I'd… When I was committed… When I actually started the last of the three books. That was… The way I structured it was I wanted to treat the ending as a trilogy. I want the first book of the trilogy to set up the final conflict and to bring all of the characters and put them in good… Get all the pieces on the chessboard and end us in a way… End that book in a way that feels triumphant but also propagates a disaster into the next book. That structure served me really well. If I'd tried to do it in five books, if I'd tried to do it in one book, I don't think I could have pulled it off.

[Erin] I feel like I hear people a lot coming to this realization, who are writing longer works, where they're like, "I started out, and I was just doing a thing. Then, outlines came upon me, and it turned out I needed them." I'm curious, how did that change… Did it change your process at all? Did it make it easier? Was there anything that was more difficult once you realized that you had to do that for the ending?

[Howard] For my own part, and I begin with that phrase because I don't want to force discovery writers into the same path that I was in. For my own fart…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fart.

[That's it for… Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I mean, you were talking about the gaseous nature…

[Howard] For my own part, I felt very… It felt very precarious to me. I was very worried that by outlining these things, I was going to break a portion of my process and wasn't going to be able to follow through. Fortunately, I was, at the time, hanging out with some really strong writers of outline and fiction in short form and longform and whatever else. I count their friendship and their examples and their instruction is critical pieces of getting me passed the fear of the precarious and into the understanding of Howard, you've got the toolbox. You've figured out that it's turbulence that makes the bumblebee fly. Now flap that direction, and it's going to work.

[DongWon] How much did you stick to the outline?

[Howard] The bigger part… The biggest part of the outline, I stuck to it. Five nines as accuracy. I know this book will feature this cast, this book will feature that cast, last book will have people split up and they come back together. So, at that level, yeah, very, very accurately. At a lower level, there was a place in the second book where I realized I had diverged wildly from what I'd originally imagined, but I really loved where it was going. So I sat down and re-outlined things and was pleased by with what… Where that went.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I've definitely done that too. I'm partway through a book and I'm like, "Oh. I'm going to do a different thing than I'd outlined." One of the things that I was struck by was the difference between the way it reads when you're reading it as a single strip versus the way you're reading it on… When you're reading it in graphic novel format. I wond… I've heard you talk a little bit about this in the past, about the way you think about it. I was wondering if you could unpack that for us now, the way you're thinking about…

[Howard] Sure. It's… The way I think about it is it was a horrible, horrible compromise. I worry still about people who read it in the longform. That's because the pacing of reading one strip a week… The pacing of panel panel panel punchline panel is very, very… It's like a drumbeat. When you read the whole thing as a graphic novel, it's the cognitive equivalent of just a constant pounding that I'll admit was not necessarily pleasant for me. But the pacing here is weird. I keep pausing for punchlines. Why am I doing that? Oh, because that's how this was constructed. That's just what it is.

[Mary Robinette] So what's interesting for me is I have a different experience. So when I read it… When I'm clicking through and read it strip, strip, strip, I get the beat, beat, punchline, beat, beat, punchline. But when I'm reading it as a full-page, as a graphic novel, the size of the jokes vary, and the other thing that happens is that I start to have… I start to carry context with me across the things. One of the things, like, that is so difficult about humor is that so much of it is contextually based. When you're writing something where you need to land a punchline, you've only got the context for those two or three previous panels. But when you're doing it longform, a lot of the… You're able to have a lot of the jokes that are landing for me bigger, because I'm carrying context through the whole thing, than when I'm doing it in an individual beat. For me, that was an instructive thing when I'm going back to my own stuff, which is in a completely different form that I can… To think about the way context is carrying across and having the jokes that are… Where the context only needs to be like one line before, but then also the ones where there's like a page off, that you've been setting up for pages and pages.

[Howard] Yeah. That was always difficult for me because, I knew, on any given day, the way the Schlock Mercenary website was built is when you arrive at the website, the most current strip is there. So I always wanted the most current strip to give you enough context that when you got to the last panel, there was a reward. Maybe you didn't need the whole joke, but you needed some of it. But if you went back and read more, then obviously there would be more.

[DongWon] Well, that's what I really love about using humor in this way, in the rhythm of that humor being at the end of every strip. Then you have the longer Sunday strips or whatever it is. But that rhythm… Because humor is fundamentally… Or not maybe fundamentally, but often about changing the context of information you have. Right? You're given information, the punchline is the abrupt recontextualization of the information you have to see it from another angle. Which, when you're trying to get your readers to absorb an enormous amount of complex worldbuilding it's such a useful tool. So the end of every four or five panels, I was getting not just the information that was given to me in a complex way, but then you would have an opportunity to tell me, "Here's the important thing you need to take away from this." It was like gathering the executive summary at the end of every strip in the form of a punchline, which really helped me absorb all the stuff that I was looking at. Because it's quite dense. Right? But it's... 20 volumes of complex military science fiction worldbuilding means there's a lot of information that you need to be having in your brain as context for why is this character making this choice, why is this civilization invading X, Y, Z. So the humor and that rhythm of the daily joke, I think, was an enormously beneficial tool for you in being able to deliver that in a way that if you had just done a straight graphic novel may have been incredibly dense, like Alan Moore style, like what am I looking at at this point? So I think that structure actually was… Ended up being a really beautiful tool in your kit

[Howard] Well, thank you. I… I'm admittedly self-conscious about it. The very first Schlock Mercenary book, Tub of Happiness, the only reason it got printed was that Sandra said, "Honey, people want to give us money for it. We can just put it in print." I'm like, "I can't even look at those strips and lay them out. They're so awful. I want to redraw them." She said, "Then don't look at them. I will lay out the book and we will sell it. Because I would like to eat." So there is a huge measure in my heart, there's this huge measure of it is what it is. Compromises were made. Which of the words between Schlock and Mercenary says that I won't sell out my art in order to feed my family?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Howard, if you didn't grow between volume 1 and volume 20, I think I'd be more concerned than you looking back at volume 1 and being concerned.

[Howard] Yeah. But, yeah, I love the perspectives that y'all are bringing to how you're reading it. One of the things that we're going to cover in a later episode is writing endings and how, from about book 10, I was laying the groundwork for what I knew was going to be the resolution to the conflict. I kept that piece. But I ended up being wrong about what the real satisfying piece of the resolution was. That, to me, feels like a great place to end the episode.

[Mary Robinette] Maybe we should actually do homework before we end.

[Howard] You know what? Let's do some homework about ending things. You may have seen on YouTube there's a little series called How It Should Have Ended. Where they take a movie and then they give you an ending that actually makes more sense. The one that leaps to mind immediately is using the eagles to fly the ring to Mordor. Take a thing that you love. Something that you've really enjoyed. Try to write a new ending for it. Something maybe that makes more sense to you, or that maybe it fits your head canon better, or you would just be happier with. But outline a new ending for somebody else's thing that you love.

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

[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or 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 the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.20: Branching Narratives

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/16/16-20-branching-narratives/

Key Points: Branching is what separates role-playing games from traditional stories, by letting players make choices. Like choose-your-own-adventure games. It's easy to let possibilities multiply out of control, so you need to plan the endings and the pruning. Make sure you know the intersections or checkpoints that keep the story on track. Let the players make meaningful choices. Tie the big beats (story, character, or whatever) to the checkpoints where the paths converge. If you put something important on one path, make sure other paths have something of equal value. How do you make branches fun? One trick is branches within branches. Another is responses by NPCs that help make them persons, not just information sources. Use conditionals and callbacks to show that choices make a difference, that they have consequences and ramifications. Avoid hat economies, choices need to matter. The best reward is consequences. Leave room for the players to make interpretations. Objectives or item collection can give an illusion of control, an apparent freedom of choice, while still pointing the players in the direction you want the story to go. Consider using access as a consequence to help control the direction of the narrative.

[Season 16, Episode 20]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Branching Narratives.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I want to go left.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, we're talking about branching narratives this week, which is a big part of the player choice we were talking about last time. Cass, where do we start with branching narratives?

[Cassandra] Branching narratives is, I think, over the years something I've learned to see as both almost a poem and a puzzle. It needs to be this elegant, very spare thing, but there's just so much thought that goes into it. It is really what differentiates a role-playing game from a traditional story, because branching allows the players to step into the narrative and make their own choices. Kind of like those old classic choose-your-own-adventure games. But every time you give a player a choice, you're kind of splitting off into two different realities. On paper, this doesn't sound too bad. Life is an infinite split of possibilities, after all, but if you're writing a game, you will not have a life if you follow that momentum. So every turn and every binary decision, these can quickly multiply out of control. As such, you need to have certain things figured out. Such as the ending where you plan to have people go, any early failures, and you need to kind of prune it, to make sure it fits the kind of format that feels both dynamic and elegant, and is still leading a player towards the information you need them to go. But if you do too much of it, players will notice that they're being… Well, you're leading them along. Sorry. James?

[James] No, like, I'm with you. I think, like what you said about pruning branches, you always need to be bending those branches back toward the main story you want to tell. You want to have things divide, but you want to think of it like links in a chain potentially. Where characters make a choice, and their paths diverge, and you can totally see the hand gestures I'm making, because podcasts are a very visual medium…

[Chuckles]

[James] But you diverge and then you bend those choices so they come back towards an intersection that I think of as like checkpoints that let you keep the story on track. So, for instance, if you give the players the choice of talking to the witch or talking to the Dragon, they can head off in those different directions, but you know, as the writer, that whatever they do in those two interactions, they're still going to get request to go find Bigfoot. So then both of those paths will converge again on Bigfoot's lair. So now, suddenly, you've branched apart, people got to make a meaningful choice, but now they're back headed towards the direction you want to tell.

[Howard] Yeah. For my own part, it's been helpful… I love the term pruning that you used, Cass, because there are… At times, you have to prune and remove possible choices, just in order to keep yourself sane. Other times, what you are pruning is choices that are no longer available because of a choice that the player has made. Then there's the decision, like with Bigfoot's cave, this is the thing I'm not going to prune no matter what gets cut or chosen elsewhere, this piece of the tree remains because I need it. Often it's helpful when outlining these things to make decisions ahead of time as to which pieces you just can't prune and which pieces you will be removing, you'll be swapping out, or, if they decided to kill off an NPC versus talking to them, you have the option to file the serial numbers off of that NPC and have them show up elsewhere, so the dialogue you've written, the clothing you've designed, whatever, those assets can be reused.

[Dan] One thing that I want to throw out really quick as a resource, if… It was very hard for me initially to get my head around how to write a branching narrative like this, and specifically how to outline one. Until I realized that there are several websites that have mapped the full flowchart of all of the original choose-your-own-adventure books. You can Google those…

[What!]

[Dan] And they're these beautiful little just kind of line drawing look like a subway map kind of things. They really help you to wrap your head around this idea of how the story can branch apart and then checkpoint back together. It kind of helps visualize it in a way that helped me a lot.

[Cassandra] I did not know that existed.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just like the effort it was taking me to not Google that right now is…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I want you to appreciate that I am not going down that branching narrative path.

[Howard] Well, I did Google it because I'm going to be told to include it in the liner notes.

[James] Well, I think one trick that's important to remember for that is to, in the story you're telling, tie the big story beats or big character beats or whatever that you want to make sure are in there, you want to tie those to your checkpoints. So you want to make sure that if there's a crucial piece of character development, it doesn't happen on just one branch, because you want to make sure that… To tell a successful story, if you know you have to hit certain key plot points, you have to make sure that they're at those points where all the paths sort of re-converge or else you need to do it separately in each of the paths. But doing it multiple times is expensive.

[Cassandra] I would also say that if you're insistent on let's say not sharing a narrative beat or like something important to the story at a certain checkpoint and, like, you want to keep it exclusive for one node, the other node should have information of equal value and consequence. Players don't necessarily mind it if they miss something if they get something else in return.

[James] Yeah.

[Dan] Okay. Let's pause here for our game of the week, which I believe is coming from Howard today.

[Howard] It is. Several years ago, I decided that I wanted to create a Schlock Mercenary role-playing game. It's something that I'd been asked about for a decade and a half until that point. So I sat down with Alan Bahr and we created the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. We looked at the possibilities of licensing a game engine from someone else or homebrewing our own. Ended up going with homebrewing. Because one of the things that I wanted to be able to do is create game mechanics that gave characters… Gave characters? That gave players the tools they needed to tell a story in the spirit of the Schlock Mercenary comic space opera. I wanted it to be funny. So we created the Mayhem deck and a whole bunch of fun materials so that… Our goal was I want you to be able, with your friends, to play a Schlock Mercenary game and have it feel like I'm there telling jokes with you. That was a pretty high bar to clear. I feel like we cleared it. Of course, I'm the authoritative source here.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Alan recently with… He went on to form Gallant Knight games and has done lots of role-playing game design since, has released the Tiny Planet Mercenary rules set which uses many of the same tools that we created, but is in the… It's a much smaller format. So there's Planet Mercenary and Tiny Planet Mercenary which are both tabletop role-playing games in the Schlock Mercenary setting.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it pronounced [squeaky voice] tiny planet mercenary?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Now it is. I think Alan might request that soundbite from us.

[Laughter]

[James] All right. Thanks, Howard. So, I want to know, Cass, how do you make these narrative chains fun? How do you make them fun and interesting?

[Cassandra] Oh, there are a lot of different techniques. You… Once you know the scope of what you're working with and how much you can play around with those dimensions, there are a bunch of weird little tricks. The simplest one being having branches within branches. When you're talking to the witch, who will eventually lead you on towards Bigfoot, there could be a whole subsection where you kind of coax her into discussing who she is, why is she there, and that can be a whole thing. Or… This is something that shows up in one of the games that I wrote that unfortunately fell through because AAA is full of games that die without anyone ever knowing its name.

[Laughter]

[Cassondra] I had a character there with prosthetic limbs, and there was always this option where you could ask him, "Hey, why do you have a prosthetic limb?" And he would give you progressively sillier and sillier answers constantly. I think for about 50 or 60 loops. Finally, as you get to the end of it, he just goes, "Really, this is none of your business, snoop," and just shuts off that entire dialogue chain, stopping you from repeating that whole thing again. Little tricks like that show up very often in video games to really build up a sense of this is a real person versus just an NPC that is regurgitating information for its use. Has anyone else seen like interesting things in branching narrative design?

[Mary Robinette] I have, but I actually wanted to pause to ask a question that I should have asked last episode. You used the phrase AAA games and I realized I have no… I can extrapolate what that means, but I don't actually know.

[Cassandra] Oh, basically games by companies like Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Bioware, things that tend to involve 100, 200, 300, or, in Ubisoft case, several thousand people in its production. So, usually, really, really high budgets, of a number that absolutely terrifies the crap out of me.

[Mary Robinette] Great. So it's a metaphor that is related to baseball, not to automobile repair?

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] Yes?

[Or batteries]

[Dan] AAA games are the ones that can help you get your car off the highway.

[Howard] All games are physics simulations.

[James] So, having never worked on a AAA game, I want to throw out something that you can do that is cheap, and it doesn't require a team of a thousand people, which is conditionals and callbacks can be a really great way to make things feel significant. What I mean by that is when the players make a choice, just putting some sort of little tag or reminder in their so that later on in the game, something can be different depending on their choice. So if you insult the witch and the first scene, when you took that branch, just having something towards the end of the game where you run into the witch again and she goes… She clearly dislikes you because she remembers that you said that thing. That can be one line of dialogue, but it suddenly makes the player feel like, "Oh, this is a real world with real consequences. Because a choice I made a long time ago is continuing to have ramifications." It wasn't superexpensive. It didn't lead to a whole new branch. It was just one thing that was tweaked. Similarly, if somebody picks up a different item or gains a different ability or even just has like a shifted NPC attitude, anything you can do that calls back to a decision a player made earlier feels like a reward, even if they didn't get anything. Because you're reminding them, like, "Hey, we're paying attention to what you're doing. Your choices matter."

[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that you see a lot in big MMORPG titles is what my friend Bob calls a hat economy. Which is, you can spend money to get hats, to get costumes, to get outfits, to get whatever. These have no bearing on the story. They're just this is how I want my character to look, and I have spent the money, so now I have a new costume. When you present a choice to a character, what they get needs to be more than just a hat. It can't just be, oh, I beat the game wearing red clothing. Oh, I beat the game wearing blue clothing. The choice has to matter.

[Cassandra] The best reward is always consequences. I am curious if anyone else has tips and tricks and things they've learned from writing branching narratives?

[Mary Robinette] When I was working on… I did the dialogue for Hidden Path, and it was a game called Brass Tactics which is in VR. The thing for me that was interesting about it, because it was really the first time that I had attempted to do this, was that I needed to be able to really create space for the player in that they could interpret one of the lines of dialogue that the NPC was delivering to them, that they could interpret it in multiple different ways depending on their own emotional state in that moment. Trying to figure out how to sculpt things that felt like they were… That inherently belonged to the character who was speaking them, knowing that an actor was going to imbue them with meaning, but also then leaving enough space. So, like, sometimes it would be something as simple as, "Oh, is that the choice you're making?" That leaves room for the character… For the listener, for the player, to think, "Wait. Does that mean that I should make this choice? Or are they trying to fake me out?" It's… That's all about what the player is bringing to it. But whereas saying, "I wouldn't make that choice if I were you," that is not leaving space for the character… For the player to bring their own interpretation to it.

[James] Yeah. Going back to something that Dan had said in the previous episode about incentivizing players to sort of go the directions you want them to go. I think it's important, you can use things like objectives or item collection or other requirements to kind of maintain control of the story while still allowing an apparent freedom of choice, that illusion of control. What I mean by that is, like, let's say you got players that need to steal the crown jewels from a castle vault. You want to make sure, like, you detailed the whole castle. That's the game. You want to make sure that people hit all those areas and don't just bypass it. So you could force them to go linearly, where you say, "Okay. Well, they'll go in through the tower window, the fight their way all the way down through the castle to the vault, and that way they'll hit everything along the way." But that's a very linear, railroad-y sort of approach. A thing you could do instead is give them multiple options for how they break into the castle. Maybe they sneak in through the moat, maybe they sneak in through the gate, maybe they go in through the tower. But either way, if they somehow managed to get to the vault without going through all the castle stages, then when they get there, they discover, oh, you still need to get the key which is up in the Queen's chamber. So they're going to have to hit all those same encounters you designed, just from the other direction as they go back up to the top. So you still sort of force them to go through all the things that… The challenges that you designed, but you've done it in a way that made them feel like it was their choice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was thinking, as you were talking, that access as a consequence is a way of controlling the direction of the narrative. Shadow Point Observatory, which I'll talk about later, is one of those where your reward for figuring something out is access to the next layer of the puzzle. It also feels like… They also managed to tie consequences to feeling, like, oh, no, I'm not going to get there. But you can… But there's multiple paths to get to that access point.

[Dan] This has been a really wonderful discussion, but I'm going to cut it off here. Thank you so much. We have some homework now. I believe it is Cass.

[Cassandra] Yes. I would like everyone to write their choose-your-own-adventure story. You can use any of the multitude of pre-tools that are available on the Internet right now, including Twine, [Inkle?], and probably a whole number of things that I don't know about, because there are a lot of indy engines out there. Just check out the websites and see what it's like to make your own story.

[Dan] Great. That sounds good. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/18/15-42-writing-the-end/

Key Points: How do you pick the right kind of climax? Your beginning, the first act, telegraphs the ending. How do you pick the right one for the story? Identify what kind of story fulfills the character's journey. Write backwards, plan the ending and let that determine the rest of the story. The ending defines the story. Start with who are the characters when we leave them, then rewind to figure out what leads them there. You need to know what you're making to figure out the ingredients. How can the characters fail and still satisfy the audience? Give them hope. It should be satisfying, but still a train wreck. Build up to it. Fulfill the promises, and still surprise them. Don't change your ending just because someone guessed it. Satisfying does not necessarily mean happy.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 42.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing The End.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we're done.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Brandon] I don't usually get to do that joke.

[Brandon] We're going to talk about writing endings. We have questions from listeners, and a couple of them are really curious about how we pick what kind of ending we do. So, the first question is, how do you decide what kind of climax fits your story? They list battle, escape, conversation, inner turmoil, etc. All of those together sounds like a great idea.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, the… There's a school of thought that says your… Whatever your first line, your first paragraph, your first chapter, that will tell you in some sense what your ending will be. That will telegraph the whole story. That works much better for short things than for long things. But, by the end of the first act, you should know what kind of an ending… Whether this is going to end in a gunfight or a conversation.

[Brandon] Yeah, I agree. Now, if you're a heavy duty discovery writer, you may not discover that till the end, and then you need to rewrite it in. That's totally fine. But let's just say in the finished product, the reader should be able to anticipate what kind of ending it is… You are looking for after the first act of your story is done. Most of the time. That said, sometimes you do get twists, like, Into the Woods by Sondheim is a classic example of sometimes reversing expectations. It's very hard to do. But it's very rewarding if you do it right.

[Dan] I'm not sure that we're answering this specific person's question. Because they said, here's my list of things, a battle, a chase, a conversation. If I know that my book has to end with the hero defeating the villain, that could take the form of a battle, that could take the form of a chase, that could take the form of various different kinds of violence or action. How do you pick which one of those is going to be best for this particular story?

[Brandon] I like your reframing it that way. Because we're taking the easy answer to this…

[Yeah]

[Brandon] I think the harder answer, because… Looking at something like MCU films. One of my favorites is Doctor Strange. I know a lot of people think it's one of the weakest, but I love it, because magic and wizards. The ending of that one is basically a conversation.

[Dan] Yeah. And it's a very clever one. It is a puzzle, and especially coming on the heels of so many where, so many Marvel movies all ended with we're all over a city and the city is blowing up and we're flying around and shooting each other, that one ended with a conversation and a puzzle.

[Brandon] And you totally could have ended that one with a fight instead, and it would have felt appropriate for the themes that were happening through the story.

[Howard] Let's look at that ending a little bit. There is a whole bunch of very satisfying fight leading up to that ending. That ending is the capstone to the fight, the capstone to all of this action there at the end. To me, that's what made it satisfying. If he had arrived and immediately gone and had his chat with Dormammu, I wouldn't have felt satisfied.

[Brandon] That's true.

[Howard] I wouldn't have seen all the fun magic stuff I wanted to see.

[Brandon] Although, I will say, part of the reason I like that ending is it was a theme for the character, learning patience…

[Right]

[Brandon] We had seen that his trouble was he wanted it now, he wanted to be the best, and he wanted his answers. If you haven't seen the movie, he travels to get healed from a terrible injury so he can go back to being a doctor. He finds people who will help him, and they turn him aside. They send him out. He's like, "No, no, no. You've got to help me." But he has to learn to be patient with his flaws and with himself to find inner peace. Then he uses that to defeat the enemy.

[Dan] Now, to Howard's point, a lot of what's going on in the early action stuff is try-fail cycles. I think we can win by this. No we can't. I think we can win by this. No we can't. Then he puts the pieces together and completes his own inner arc, and that's when he figures out how to do it.

[Howard] I think that comes back to the original question. Am I going to end with a battle? Am I going to end with a chase? Am I going to end with a conversation? Well, Brandon's first answer was, these all sound nice.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You can have all of those. You can have, in the final six minutes of act three, you can have a battle that… Or, excuse me, a chase… Well, a battle that fails and someone gets away and you have to chase them and you catch them and you have a conversation, and then we're done.

[Brandon] I think the key here is for you to identify what kind of story will fulfill, not necessarily what you need to do, but will fulfill the character's journey. Then you could pick any one of these things. Whatever feels right at the time. As long as you are completing that character's journey. That's the harder decision.

[Victoria] So, I feel like I'm the monster at the end of this conversation.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Right? Like, the thing is, I have been waiting to talk until the end of this because I write my books backwards. So I actually don't do anything until I've planned the ending. The ending, for me, and that climax basically through the last page, determines the entire story I'm telling. So, for me, the total cohesion of it is second to figuring out the ending of the story. So I feel like I have perhaps a different perspective on this, because rather than write toward the end, and think what kind of resolution do I need in order to fulfill the promises that I've made early on, I write backwards, from the end to make those promises from the ending that I know I want to achieve.

[Dan] So, you are still then at a point in the process deciding how your ending is going to work. I actually write the same way. I think about the ending first. So, how do you pick?

[Victoria] It's the story I want to tell. I feel like the ending is not a culmination, it's the definition. For me, the ending is the punctuation at the end, it's the thing that we're working toward. An entire sentence has to end at that moment. I… It is part of the fundamental questions I am asking myself when I begin to have an idea and when I begin to ask what kind of story I'm telling. I really treat the ending is the opportunity for the absolute collision of all of the ideas that I have, of all of the places that I want to end. The thing that I actually ask myself, before I figure out if it's a battle or a chase or anything, is who are my characters at the moment we leave them? So, really, it comes down to who's alive, who's dead, where are they act physically and psychologically, and then, from there, I begin to rewind their last moments in order to figure out what is the thing that leads them there, and I rewind from there all the way until I get to the beginning and figure out who the characters are when we first meet them.

[Howard] Your Doctor Strange metaphor is feeling even more fitting now.

[Victoria] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The bit about working backwards from the ending, it does not feel backwards to me. When I'm outlining, these days all of my discovery writing tricks are now rolled into my outlining process. The… I've talked about the process where my first outline is a 10-year-old boy tells you about his favorite movie at high speed. The 10-year-old boy will say, "Ohohoh, I forgot to tell you this one thing." That actually goes into my first pass at the outline, because it's silly and it's fun. But I begin that process thinking, "What is the big awesome moment at the end that got the 10-year-old boy to come home and tell me, 'Oh, I have to tell you about this movie, it's so great!'"

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Howard] "Because there was this thing. But before I tell you about the end…" And then off we go.

[Victoria] Also, I have used, I feel like over the course of the episodes that I've been here, a lot of food metaphors. But to use yet another food metaphor, it's like the ingredients, like, you're gathering apples along the way, and you end up with an apple pie or something. I don't want to end up with, like, an orange cake. Like, if I grew… Like, I don't want to, like… If you write towards a discovery and you don't actually have a plan in mind, you risk gathering ingredients which result in a different end, which result in something that doesn't feel cohesive. Whereas I want to know what it is I'm making, so that I can figure out the ingredients that I need to find along the way to make that dish. It is all about that dish.

[Howard] If you're gathering apples, it is entirely possible to end up with cyanide.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because there's cyanide in apple seeds.

[Victoria] Okay. Different fruit, then.

[Howard] But that's… No no no, but your metaphor works perfectly, because you can gather apples, you can be gathering these things, and still have some options for what happens at the end. That's, for me, where surprising but inevitable will come in.

[Brandon] Let's stop and talk about your book.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[Victoria] Yeah. I have a new book out. Or I will, by the time this airs. It is called The Invisible Life of Addie Larue. It is essentially about a young woman in 18th-century France who is deathly afraid of dying in the same place she was born. She decides to summon the old gods to help her out of her life, out of her predicament.

[Brandon] As one does.

[Victoria] As one does. As one does. But the problem is, none of them answer. She prays that Dawn, and no one answers. She prays at midday, and no one answers. She prays at dusk, and no one answers. The one rule she has been taught all her life, never pray to the gods that answer after dark. She makes a mistake, and she does this, and she accidentally summons the devil. When he asks her what she would be willing to trade for her soul, she wants time. She doesn't know how much, she wants to live forever, and the devil says, "No." Because if you live forever, he doesn't get your soul, he gets the soul at the conclusion of the deal. So, in a moment of desperation, she says to the devil, "You can have my soul when I don't want it anymore." Sensing an opportunity, the devil agrees. The deal is done, and she discovers afterward that he has granted her the ability to live forever and cursed her to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

[Brandon] There you go.

[Victoria] I did not start writing it until… I had the idea eight years ago, and I didn't start writing it until two years ago when I figured out the ending.

[Brandon] What an awesome premise.

[Howard] And is this under the name…

[Victoria] V. E. Schwab.

[Howard] V. E. Schwab. The Invisible Life of Addie Larue.

[Brandon] All right. So. Another question we had… Kind of take this from a different direction, is, how can you end a climax without neatly resolving the conflicts, or, also, how can you have your characters fail without leaving the audience disappointed? How can you build up all this tension, and build up all these indications that there's going to be a heroic victory, and then… Not. Give. It. To. Them?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Well, in YA, you would say you would need to have hope. So you can end with a bad ending or a failure in YA, but the thing that you don't want to end up with is the lack of hope. I'm also a really big believer in saving the day, but not the world. I love it when your characters survive to fight again, maybe solve one of the problems, but in so doing, much like the try-fail cycle, end up creating another problem that they're going to have to face at some point down the line.

[Dan] Yeah. Unsatisfying endings are like my favorite thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Unsatisfying is the wrong word, because if you do it right, it will still feel satisfying and it will still feel resolved, even though you didn't get what you want. So, in all of my John Cleaver novels, except, arguably, the very last one, he does what he's trying to do. He fills the goal he sets out to fill, and then looks around at the wreckage surrounding him and goes, "Oh, my gosh. What was the cost of actually destroying this demon? I've lost my family, I lost everything that I had." And I just over and over for five books because I'm an awful person.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] The ending of Extreme Makeover does this same thing. It has an incredibly dark, desolate ending that a lot of people come back to me and they're like, "How… Why did you do that?" Because that's where it needed to end. That is actually the resolution of the arc that I set up, is that these characters are going to fail in the world is going to end.

[Brandon] It's why everyone on Seinfeld should end up in jail…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] At the end of the series. That is the satisfying resolution, under some understandings of how the plots were going.

[Dan] Okay. So. Taking Extreme Makeover as an example, all of my early readers, all of the offer readers, the writing group that I ran it through, they all came back and said, "What? How dare you end it there? We thought they were going to pull it out." I realized, okay, this is satisfying to me, but I need to make it satisfying to the audience. So, I played a lot of tricks on you. First of all, I started every chapter, and this came very late in the revision process, started every chapter with a countdown to the end of the world. So that you know, even if you think that I'm going to cheat at the end and pull it out, you at least have been told, every couple of pages, nope, the end of the world is coming.

[Brandon] That worked really well. What it did was it made the end of the world become a thing you're anticipating, and kind of looking forward to.

[Dan] Yes. Then, the other thing was, I kind of amped up the darkness inside of all the characters, so that when it happens, you're like, "Oh, good. That one just got his comeuppance." Then, "Oh, good, that one just got it." We get to the end and you realize, like, the worst thing that any character does in that book, in my opinion, happens in one of the last couple of pages. If you actually look at the dates and the times of this countdown, it's not counting down to the end of the book, it's counting down to that one betrayal. So, by the time you get there, you're like, "Well, yeah, he deserves to die. I've been following this whole time, I've been waiting for him to pull it out, he just did this awful thing to her, I want him to die."

[Victoria] This comes back, again and again, to promises. Right? To promise versus expectation, to finding a way to surprise people even when they know what they want. Because that's essentially the bargain that you're trying to strike here, is, a reader reads and, if you have a cohesive narrative, they have an idea of how they expect it to end and how they want it to end. You, somehow, have to find ways to surprise them, and not be predictable, while still fulfilling the general promise. You made a tonal promise over the course of your book. So, then, they can't be betrayed by the tone. They can't be betrayed by the ending. So there's like… It's a lot of promises to keep up with. You're going to end up with somebody upset. Like, no matter how well you end a book, somebody is going to wish you ended it differently. That's one of the hard parts of this.

[Howard] The one counsel I'd give is that if you have a public audience for a series, and you have not yet published the ending of the series, don't let the fact that someone correctly guessed the ending of a thing make you change the ending. I was on a panel with a guy who wrote for comic books. He would go through the letters and if somebody guessed his ending, he would just change it. I thought, "That is no way to live."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I assume that somebody is going to put all these things together, even if they're just rolling dice, and figure out what I had planned. That person gets to do a little dance…

[Victoria] [garbled… They get a cookie]

[Howard] And know that they are smarter than me, and that's fine.

[Brandon] Going back to some of the things that Dan and Victoria were saying, I think satisfying doesn't have to mean happy. If you can learn to split apart those two things… George Martin made a career on being satisfying but not happy in his epic fantasy. That is what people came to expect. That… Being satisfying… Even satisfying deaths is like a thing in the Game of Thrones series, that if you don't fulfill on, reader expectations are like, "Wait a minute. This is not what I was promised. I was looking forward to satisfying deaths."

[Dan] You can see that in the final season of the TV show.

[Victoria] We can't… I can't even talk about it, I'm so angry.

[Dan] So many people…

[Victoria] I'm still angry.

[Dan] Started to complain about halfway through the season, "Wait. All of the main characters are going to live through this!" That is not what they had been promised, years and years ago when that first book started. Then the show kind of flinched and stopped killing off main characters. It didn't satisfy.

[Victoria] That is a tonal promise break. You promised not only death, but satisfying death that adequately reflected the crimes which were perpetuated in life. It is one of the only things we all had to look forward to…

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I am still upset about it.

[Brandon] Moving on. Let's go ahead and do some homework. Dan, you have our homework.

[Dan] Yeah. So what we want you to do is just practice this. Take something you've already written, whether it is a short story, a novel, or whatever length. Then, rewrite your ending so that the opposite thing happens. This is not just let a meteor land and kill all of your heroes before they succeed. Find away that they can fail, but that it's satisfying. Whether you do this the opposite kind of tone or the opposite kind of… The opposite person wins. However you want to define opposite. Write it, but do your best to make it feel satisfying.

[Brandon] I'm really curious to try this on some of my own stories. I think it would be… This is going to be a fun exercise to practice kind of pantsing an ending, where you're taking all the things you've set up, and then coming up with a new ending. Very hard for someone like you or me who always knows our endings.

[Victoria] I was going to say… You've gathered all your ingredients for apple pie, and now…

[Dan] Now I'm telling you to make orange juice.

[Victoria] You have to go and bake something completely different with it?

[Howard] I've already told you, there's cyanide in there.

[Victoria] I know, I know. [Garbled] poison.

[Howard] You've got this.

[Brandon] You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/08/15-10-evaluating-ideas/

Key Points: How do you decide which ideas to keep and which to drop? One story cooking, others simmering with ingredients added as they come up. Know how the story ends! Interact with your ideas, explore, write them, and you develop the skill to evaluate them. Passion and excitement! What are you most excited about? It's a different skill, but you need to learn how to force yourself to write. Take the core of the idea and find something you are passionate about. Add your exciting ideas to the pot. Don't throw everything into one book. Find flavors that work together. Keep track of your ideas, write them down. When you're struggling with a story, when do you push through and when do you abandon it? Understand why you are struggling. Have the ending, or at least points that you are excited about writing, in mind. Try to make this chapter or this scene someone's favorite in the whole book. Force yourself to finish books. Make a checklist, what kind of problem is this? Avoid shiny new idea syndrome. Think about your goals. Finishing teaches you how to write.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 10.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Evaluating Ideas.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm out of ideas. Help?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Help?

[Brandon] So, we often talk on this podcast about how ideas are kind of cheap. But, let's shelve that. Like, we've covered that idea. That a lot of great… Writers generally can use any number of different ideas. Bad ideas make good books sometimes. So let's just shelve that. Let's actually talk about ideas, because I have had, once in a while, an idea that I was really attached to. I'm like, "You know what, I know ideas are cheap, but I want to write this one just because I want to write it." We have a lot of questions here, because we're doing questions from listeners this entire year, about how we evaluate our ideas and how do you figure out which ones to keep and which ones to drop?

[Victoria] So I am… I look human shaped to those of you sitting here, but I am actually a six burner stove. This is how my entire mind functions.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Six burners on the stove, only one of those at any given time on high heat with the project that I'm actually cooking with. The other five are all simmering on very low heat as I add ingredients to my ideas. So I actually have a very long cook time before I decide if an idea has legs. By the time it's time to assess what next goes on high heat, I know enough about the story to be able to tell whether it's worth pursuing. Now, for different people, these things are different, but for me, I don't pursue a story unless I know how it ends. I do this because one, I'm very prone to quitting and if I have an ending with my story, instead of looking out at the desert, I'm looking across a field and I know it's a finite amount of space. I also am convinced, to go back to the food metaphor, that the end of the story is the taste left in your mouth, and that we will retroactively reassess an entire book based on how strong or weak the ending is. I need my endings to be strong so that I don't lose hope and I want to work with them. So, that is one of the main ingredients that I have to have. When you add that to the fact that a lot of my ideas steep for anywhere from six months to three or four years, then I've never actually trunked a story once I've started it. Because once I've started it, I've known enough about it to know that it has the potential to be a book.

[Howard] As someone who, as of this recording, needs to lose at least 30 pounds…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The taste left in my mouth was the only thing that remained at the end of the meal… That would be heaven. With regard to evaluating ideas, I… You know that character in the police procedural whose skill set is they're really good at judging other people? You, dear listener, and me, we sometimes like to think that we're good judges of people. Or maybe that's a skill that we want. I have come to grips with the fact that I'm still not very good at it. There are people who I have made the right call on, but there are people who I haven't. Evaluating ideas is the same way. It's not going to happen overnight. You have to meet a lot of people and interact with them. You have to meet a lot of your ideas and interact with them. You have to explore them. You have to try to write them. Then, you develop this sense for, "Oh, this idea is a three book idea. This idea is a plot twist." Where… But both ideas could be expressed in seven words and look the same until you've worked at it a lot.

[Brandon] I work very similarly to Victoria with this whole burner thing. Whatever I'm writing on, I often can't say what the next thing is going to be, with the caveat that when deadlines are tight, it's going to be the one that I have a contract coming due on. But when I hit that point, and I try to build my schedule… A here is a free slot. You have six months you're going to be able to do anything. I can't often say which of the other five projects on the other burners it's going to be. I get there, and then I decide. While I'm working on my book, sometimes I'll be like, "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to do this thing next." Then it'll change to another one. If I had finished that book right then, we would have gotten a different novel next. Which can be, I know, frustrating for fans, because I'll tell them sometimes, here are the many things I'm planning to do next. I'm going to do one of these. Some of the ones that they really are waiting for just never come up because I'm not, when I'm trying to turn all the burners up, I look at them all and decide which one I'm most passionate about.

[Victoria] Well, there's a commonality coming into play here as well, which is the gut feeling. Which is, of course, very frustrating, because it is of course unquantifiable. It is the fact that we consume enough narrative to begin to feel in our own work when something is ready and when something is not. I just finished a book that I sat on for six years because, even though I had the pieces of it, I knew I wasn't ready, I wasn't a strong enough writer. That's a really hard conversation to have with yourself, because we get excited about ideas. So, I think having this six burner stove or a four burner stove or a two burner stove, giving yourself options, really helps you because you don't know where you're going to be at when you're ready to write that next book.

[Dan] The fact that, for all of us, what it eventually comes down to is passion and excitement, what are you most excited about? You will notice, nobody in talking about how they choose projects says, "Oh, this is what sells." Right? We always talk about don't chase the market. Don't chase the market! Like, there is not a market for any particular genre or style. What there's a market for is stuff that's awesome. You will be able to write better the idea that you just can't wait to start writing. You'll be able to write that better than anything else.

[Brandon] I will add the caveat there that when a contract is coming due, in a lot of ways, you also have to learn how to force yourself to write… Be passionate about something that you've committed to writing. That's a different skill.

[Howard] That's a different… Skill set.

[Dan] But you presumably committed to that because you were excited about it.

[Victoria] I was going to say, this is the thing. This is why it comes back to things we've talked about already, but it's why it's so important that you let passion and what you actually want to write and not what you think people want to read be a guiding force for your entire career, because that's the only way that you guarantee that when those deadlines come up, you want to write this thing. You're not writing something that you had no interest in writing because you thought it would sell. Like, you have to make sure that in some way, you have that emotional connection with everything on your burner stove, so that even if you have to move something into that forward spot, you're not dreading it. Maybe it's… Maybe you're really excited about something else, but it's really important that you have that core fire for everything that you're writing.

[Howard] Last night, my daughters made me sit down and watch several episodes of a YouTube, Teen Fortress 2 commentary gamer. At one point in the episode, he was doing something funny and they were playing a song… I think it was a love song or something. It was a song I was familiar with, but because of copyright, they couldn't actually play the song or the YouTube video would get pulled. So he had a cheesy karaoke version of the music playing in the background, and the Teen Fortress 2 computer voice reading the lyrics. This is the difference between execution on a brilliant idea which is going to sell millions of copies and execution on a brilliant idea which never would have gotten out of the recording studio. The song, as read by the computer voice… It worked in the episode, obviously, because we had context. But if you set these two things side-by-side, that is the difference between an author who doesn't yet know how to really execute on an idea, and an author who does. When people look at the things that I've done and say, "Oh, man. That idea was so brilliant." I shrug and I'm like, "You know what, guys, the idea was not brilliant." What was brilliant, and I say this patting myself on the back, is that I managed to stretch it out across an entire book, and I drew some really fun pictures, and I made some cool reveals. It wasn't the idea, at the end of it.

[Dan] Yeah. I, a few months ago, published a novella with Magic: The Gathering. Which, to our earlier point, I was not necessarily in love with that setting, right? Because I didn't know what it was when I signed the contract. Then I got into their offices, and they're like, "Well, this character and this setting. Go." So what I had to do was take that core of an idea and find something that I was passionate about in it. What am I going to be able to do? So, first thing, I made it into a heist story. It was not intended to be one, but they were cool with it, they rolled with it, because that's what I was excited about. Being able to take those kind of… Victoria talked about adding ingredients to the pots. I had this big pile of ingredients that hadn't gone in any pots yet, and I was able to throw those exciting ideas into the other job, and then get really excited about it.

[Victoria] Also, talking about one of the most difficult and important things to cultivate in yourself, is the understanding of the kitchen sink, right? That you do not need to take every idea that excites you and put it into one book. It's about… And I know I come back to the cooking metaphor a lot, but it's about finding, like, flavors that work together. You don't need to don't every seasoning and every spice and every ingredient in. It's about learning to withhold and say, "This would actually be better on its own as a starlight… The star thing of a different meal."

[Howard] On the second night we were in our house, we ran the dishwasher. You said kitchen sink. The dishwasher drains into the sink. There was this gargling which woke me up because it sounded like a voice. This idea came to me that, "Oh, my gosh, you have a family who's in a house and they think that the house is possessed because the sink is talking to them, and the exorcist can't do anything and the priest can't do anything, and the plumber fixes it." That was the end of the idea. That was as far as it went. This was 1999. Before Schlock Mercenary. Two years into Schlock Mercenary, I realized, you know what, I bet I can tell a ghost story in Schlock Mercenary where it gets fixed by the plumber and everybody is quite upset at that. So, yeah, these ideas, they come from weird places and some of them may seem completely stupid, but… I mean, to the kitchen sink point, I keep track of them. I write them down. You don't write it down, it's lost forever and you don't get to use it.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our awesome thing of the week, because it's not a book.

[Howard] Whoo hoo! It's awesome.

[Dan] It is awesome. So, Howard and I and some other local fantasy authors do a Twitch show. We play D&D online every week so that you guys can watch us. It is called TypeCast RPG. We're using… Right now, we're doing a campaign called The Gods of Vaeron in Fifth Edition D&D rules. That is me as the GM, Howard Tayler, Charlie Holmberg, Brian McClellan, Mari Murdock, and Ethan Sproat, all science fiction/fantasy professionals. All authors except Ethan, who's a professor of science fiction. It's super cool.

[Howard] There's a thing that happens in TypeCast which speaks well to the topic. I will sometimes illustrate moments from the game. There are moments which are beyond my skill, and I'm just not going to try. But, every so often, I will have an idea, and I need to execute on it in literally a minute and a half. Because if I wait too long, if I draw too slowly, it's gone. The practice that this has given me in evaluating ideas has been frighteningly effective. Because I have to make the decision quickly. I have to execute to the best of my admittedly limited cartooning ability. Yes, I've been doing this for 20 years. But I know what my skill set is and what my skill set isn't. That's the sort of thing that I think authors can learn from, in that you have an idea, you don't need to spend a novel fleshing it out. See how quickly you can flesh it out to determine what it leads to.

[Brandon] So, we have further questions along this line. One person asks, "How can you tell the story that you're struggling with has potential and that you should push through or if you should leave it and start working on something you like more?"

[Howard] Someone please answer this.

[Dan] Yes.

[Victoria] Ha ha ha. I mean, that's a difficult thing. I always say it's the same kind of thing along the lines of writer's block. You need to understand why you're struggling. There's a difference between struggling because you're afraid of not doing it justice, struggling because you're bored which you're guaranteed readers are going to be bored then, and kind of like, you need to assess where your mentally at in the process. I will say that some days one of the only things that keeps me going on a story is the fact that I do have an ending in mind. So, coming back to my definitely not prescriptive wisdom, but if you are somebody who struggles to finish things or finds yourself getting lost on the way, I do find that having an ending or at least having mile markers, having things and scenes and moments that you're excited about in the story, having them not all be in the first act, these are things that help me get from A to B to C to D and so on.

[Brandon] That's great advice. Having things you're writing toward, you're excited about. Another thing, kind of on the flipside, you can do is I try to set down… If I'm feeling bored, I try to step back and say, "How can I make this chapter someone's favorite chapter in the whole book?" I find that almost always I can find a way to change up what's going on just a little bit to make that specific chapter a real showpiece for the book. If you can do that for every chapter, suddenly you don't… You're not worried about the idea anymore, you're excited about how this is going. I often say that for newer writers, my experience has been that most of the time, you should use one of those options rather than abandoning the story. There are times to abandon stories, but I think it should be the exception, not the rule. It should happen very rarely. Particularly if you're new, you just need to learn to finish things. So, learn to make every chapter the most exciting or the most interesting chapter in the book.

[Dan] Definitely, if this is your first book or even your second, just finish it. Because forcing yourself to finish a book that you are maybe not in love with anymore is going to teach you how to stay in love with books. It's going to teach you so much more about evaluating their validity than we can just tell you over the computer here.

[Howard] I did an unblocking session, a small group session, at the Writing Excuses Retreat in 2019. It was a delightful session. One of the things that I talked about is that… I've been doing this for long enough that I have a checklist. The checklist is there to determine is this an overarching story problem? Is this a scene problem? Is this a chapter problem? Then, is this a me problem? Am I sick? Have I eaten yet today? Do I need to hydrate? Do I need to go get some exercise? Do I need to go back to the well? Have I forgotten to take my medication today? There's all kinds of things. Until I have… Until I actually acknowledged that there was a checklist and that there were criteria, I was really bad at figuring this out. I've gotten much better at it because I get stuck all the time. I think we all, to some level, get stuck all the time. If the only question you know how to ask is, "Does this mean it's time to abandon the story?" it means, boy, you need a checklist, because there's a whole bunch of other things that come first.

[Victoria] You need more questions before that last resort.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Brandon] I… Even in my professional career, I've rarely abandoned stories. The one thing that I've abandoned most recently was done after revisions determined that revising the book to be as good as I wanted it to be would be as much work as writing a new book. That revision wasn't guaranteed to succeed. So I shelved that book.

[Howard] And the new book would be better.

[Brandon] And the new book would be better. I shelved that book, but I still finished the book. Right? Finishing things… We have another question here, "How do you find energy to keep a story going after that first spark of inspiration fades?"

[Victoria] I feel so strongly about this. This is shiny new idea syndrome. It is a medical syndrome. I think we have all felt it. There's a thing that happens either 50 pages, 100, 150 pages in, where suddenly you are like, "Um. This is familiar. I have…" That's exactly when you get a new idea. Something pops into your head. It's shiny, you don't understand it, it's mysterious and alluring, and you think I should follow that instead. So many writers, especially aspiring writers and authors, dropped the thing that they're working on to go follow the shiny new idea. It is a trick that your brain is pulling because in order to finish a story, in order to write a story, not only its beginning, but its middle and end, you have to become familiar with the material. As you become familiar with the material, that inherent shine of mystery and elusiveness wears off, potential energy becomes kinetic energy in which something is always lost. So we think, surely if I follow the shiny new idea, that one won't disappoint me.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] It is a way toward madness. It is a way to never finish anything. I think that comes back to finish it. Even if it's not fabulous, even if you don't want to revise it, you will learn so much in the process of hitting that finish line.

[Howard] I was a music composition major, and I did not learn this lesson as a musician. I think it may be the reason why I'm a cartoonist and not a musician. Because by the time I started cartooning, I had figured it out. As a musician, I came up with wonderful themes and textures and arrangements and everything was a couple of minutes long. My instructors kept saying, "Give us some theme and variation. Explore this, dig into this. Expand it." But it's perfect the way it is! It wasn't perfect the way it was. I had another shiny idea I wanted to chase instead. Yeah, you listen to an orchestral suite, you listen to the symphonic greats from whenever, there's a core theme in there that they explored and explored and explored and explored and explored before they moved on to the shiny.

[Dan] I think when you're in this situation and you're kind of bored with a story and you want to pursue a new one, you're trying to decide if you should drop it or not, take a look at what your goals are for that. What are you hoping to accomplish with this short story or with this book that you are writing? Because, first of all, as we've discussed, if you're early career, the purpose of that book is not to sell, right? If you think, "Oh, this is impossible. I'm not going to be able to sell this." Well, you're not going to be able to sell it anyway, it's your first book. Its goal is to teach you how to write your second book.

[Howard] We're saying that very kindly.

[Dan] Very kindly and lovingly. I had five garbage truck novels before I finally wrote my first published novel. So, think about it. So really what you're doing, if you're early career, is you're learning how to write books. You don't have to think, "Oh, this book won't sell." Or "This book isn't perfect." It doesn't matter, because your goal is to learn how to write. Finishing it is going to teach you how to write.

[Brandon] We are out of time. Howard, you have some homework for us.

[Howard] I have some truly terrifying homework for you. I want you to get a writing implement and something to write on. Pencil, maybe a notebook. Set it next to your bed. Or whatever the thing is you sleep on. When you wake up in the morning, write down everything you can remember about your dreams from the night before. If you can't remember anything, write the words, "I didn't remember my dreams this morning." Okay? Do this for a week. At the end of the week, review the journal, and see if there is an idea there that perhaps you want to explore in your fiction.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/16/15-07-creating-chapters/

Key Points: How do you make chapters? Feeling! Some people create them, others chop things into chapters. Chapters have a beginning, middle, and an end, like a short story. Chapters have a miniature arc of action. Chapters are like episodes, climbing towards a finale. Chapters interlock, forming a part of a book. Take your outline, which describes scenes, and think about what scenes can be combined into a single chapter, thematically or emotionally. Pay attention to the page turn! The chapter break forces a new beginning. How do you begin and end chapters? Do you do cliffhangers or not? Chapter titles, first lines, first paragraphs may signal what a chapter is going to be about. The beginning of a chapter is like the first line of a book, a place to grab the reader and pull them into reading more. Use cliffhangers sparingly. Try to use cliffhangers with a promise of what you are going to get, rather than just question marks. Pay attention to genre, thrillers need tension. Make your chapters rewarding, but keep your readers wanting more, too.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Chapters.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are, again, taking questions that we have been given and creating episodes around them. This one is a common question we get asked, which is, how do you make chapters? How do you decide where to break your stories up, and how to divide them up? I get this a lot, like in Q&A sessions that I'll do and things like that. It's always kind of hard to answer, because it's not a thing I studied. It's not a thing I ever looked at in anyone else's books. It's just a thing that I just started doing, and it just felt natural. I talk to a lot of writers, and that's how it goes. Right?

[Victoria] Yeah, it's hard to sit here and think about what are the mechanics or what are the rules. I feel like we're going to be able to talk about a lot of our personal guiding principles, but not necessarily any codified guidelines for something like this.

[Dan] Yeah. Although the good news is, based on what we're saying, listeners, you can take away that, at the very least, this isn't something that matters is much as you think it does. Right? You can kind of fake your way through it until you get a feel for it, and it will turn out better than you expect it to.

[Howard] We had a difficult time naming this episode. I think… I just realized the disconnect for me is that I don't create chapters, I chop things into chapters. I had a thing that is… I have a thing that exists, and I am deciding where the breakpoints are. Rather than saying, "Wow, I need a chapter here." As we prepared for the recording sessions today, we have a craft services table with food for us. I got to unwrap a block of cheese. That block of cheese is probably way less interesting than the novel, but it needed to be cut into chapters, it needed to be cut into pieces so that Howard didn't just walk away with a fistful of cheese. That's the way I think about it. These are…

[Dan] I mean, he still did, but…

[Howard] Well, that's because cranberry wensleydale is crack.

[Brandon] See, it's interesting because I do create chapters. I'm not taking the whole and just chopping it up. When I'm creating an outline, one of the things I'm doing is I'm… I'm just getting it all on there. But when I sit down for the day's work, I say, "All right, what do I need to achieve today? How can I form a chapter out of that? How can I have a rising action, how can I have questions be answered, how can I actually create something that feels like it has a beginning, middle, and an end?" Basically, I'm going to create a short story set in the world that is a continuation of other short stories.

[Howard] So, your chapters take shape after the initial outlines. I don't want to suggest that I do chapters when the final prose is done. Yeah, I'm the same way. In that I outline, but I don't outline to the chapters. They take shape later.

[Victoria] I think I'm in Brandon's camp here in that I don't like thinking about how hard it is to write a book.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] A book is a very long, very daunting thing. What my plots do is essentially function like a series of escalating episodes. I treat each chapter as a short story, as a short story of kind of interlocking stories. Almost like a season of television than a movie. So when I'm approaching a chapter, whether it's a short chapter for middle grade or a longer chapter for a fantasy, I make sure that I have a miniature arc of action happening within that chapter. I want to fulfill certain promises. I want to not only move my characters from A to B physically and emotionally, but I almost wanted to feel like an exciting little episode that does something in the interest of climbing the steps toward my finale.

[Brandon] Yeah, the great thing about this also is once you learn this with chapters, like… I don't want to imply this isn't important to learn. That's not what I was meaning at the beginning, because I think it is. But it's something you can pick up on your own. The great thing is, once you start to learn it… People ask, "How do you create a thousand page fantasy novel? How do you create…" I've got Stormlight Archive which is two arcs of five in a 10 book series, and each… It gets, like, that is way easier than learning to create chapters, which you do over time, practicing, at least I did. Once I got able to interlock these scenes, basically episodes, I could be like, all right, these 10 episodes make a part of the book. Three of those make an entire novel. Three of those make a super arc through a series. Then you start to do this, and the chapter is where that all begins for me.

[Victoria] I do the same thing, I think. Shades of Magic is broken into something like 10 parts, each part has maybe 5 to 6 chapters in it. Each part is functioning as almost a season arc. The entire book is like a TV show. Each chapter within the arc is like an episode of the season. I know that I want to create a certain pace. But also, I do this from a complete self-preservation standpoint of I would get completely overwhelmed if I couldn't break it down into a substantial… Like substantially a smaller piece. On top of that, I like the satisfaction of a chapter that feels like we go through all of the emotional beats that I want you to. I wanted to feel… I have books where I have had a one-page chapter. I'm not saying you can't do that, to a different effect. But in something like… The longer the format, the more daunting it is, the more I recommend that writers begin to think of them as many, many bricks in a wall.

[Dan] When I started, my chapters were basically just how much can I write in one day. Which is why in Serial Killer, every chapter is about 2500 words. Because that's what I was doing back then. That's still my most successful book, so maybe that's a good way to do it. But, like, by the time I got to Makeover, which was like my 16th published book, I had… I'd become much more of an outliner. So when I create an outline, it's this big massive thing that tells me scene by scene everything that's going to happen. Then I will look at that and go, okay, which of these scenes need to be combined into a single chapter? Which is a little different than what you're talking about, at least narratively. Because there's not a single thread of storyline that goes from the beginning of this chapter to the end, because it will have two or three different scenes and possibly different viewpoints in it. But I try to do that in a way where they're all thematically linked together, or where there is an emotional through-line through it. So we're going to talk about this aspect of the story or the world or the technology or the magic. We're going to see one character deal with it, and then a different character deal with it in a different way. They will inform each other. That will form a chapter.

[Howard] Chapters and prose really are the one place where prose and comics share a structure, and that is the guarantee to page turn. With comics, you're always writing to the page turn. Because there is a visual reveal that is huge when you turn the page. With prose, you never think about that because you don't know where the pagination is going to be yet. With electronic publishing, you know even less. Except for the chapter break. You are… I have yet to read an e-book where I was forced to see the beginning of the next chapter while I could still see the end of the previous chapter. For me, that's huge. Because it means there is this psychological shift tween that thing I just read and not being able to read anything… I'm making the gesture, turning the page with my hands… And now there is all new information all at once. That is… I think that's important to think about, because even if they're just pushing a button to do it, you, the writer, now have a moment of physical puppetry control over the reader. You know they're doing anything. What can you do with words in order to make that more effective? I probably just made it a lot more difficult for everybody, didn't I?

[Dan] No. That's actually brilliant. I've never thought of it in those terms, but I can look back… Even that first one, at Serial Killer, and see places where I did that. Where, hey, you need to be… "I'll see you in the morning." Then the chapter break is, "By the time I got there, they were already dead." You can do tricks like that. That's… Now I'm going to have to think about that and try and do it on purpose.

[Chuckles]

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

[Victoria] Yeah. So, the book of the week is Docile by K. M. Sparza. It's a debut novel, coming out in April. It's a really, really fascinating examination of consent under capitalism. It is a slight near future alternate history in which our debt crisis has reached a point in which people are selling themselves into kind of an indentured servitude for a variety of functions. In order to forget this part of their lives when they do choose to sell it… In order to erase their family's debt, they take a drug called Dociline. It's about two young men in the story. One who has decided to sell his family's debt off, and with it, himself, and has decided to refuse Dociline because of what it did to his mother. The other one is the one who buys his contract and is the heir to the Dociline Empire. It is about an examination of consent, of really, really interesting gender and sexuality, a lot of fascinating themes, and also, just a delightful read.

[Brandon] Excellent. Docile by K. M. Sparza.

]Transcriptionist note; Google Books says Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.]

[Brandon] Coming back to this, let's talk about… One of the other questions asks about how we begin chapters. I want to talk both about beginnings and endings. Because, thinking about it, where I break a chapter is often based on where I began a chapter. Because chapters work very well for me if I have some sort of note I can hit again near the end to signal, hey, we've completed this arc, or a character's looking for something, the character finds something. It's this MICE quotient thing Mary Robinette likes to talk about, I'm using very instinctively in creating chapters. So, how do you begin and end chapters, and then, kind of a question of this, if you want to talk about… Sometimes you want to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, sometimes you don't. What's the difference there?

[Victoria] Um… Go ahead.

[Dan] So, when I wrote Zero G and started my middle grade series, I wanted to give chapter titles. Because that's kind of a very good middle grade thing, I always loved chapter titles when I was a kid. That enabled me to set things up… This chapter is about X. Like, you know that right off the bat because there's a title that tells you. I realized, in the process of doing that, that that's kind of what I had previously been using first lines or first paragraphs to do. As a way of signaling a little more subtly this chapter is going to be about this character trying to do X. Some way of setting up, here's what you're in for, this is my promise, this is my establishing shot.

[Howard] Chapters, for me, are… The first line of a chapter is an opportunity for me to revisit the experience of the first line of the book, because often the first line of the book gets so much attention that, for me, anyway, the pros ins up far more refined. Not purple necessarily, but every word is exactly in place. I try to give that consideration to the beginnings of chapters because I see those as decision points for the reader. The… A lot of times, when I'm reading a book, I will turn the page to a chapter and realize, "Oh. Oh, this character. I'm not all this interested in this point of view." But, if there is some turn of phrase or some something right there at the beginning, to reward me for having turned the page… I'll muscle through it. But I'm a bad reader.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Don't write for me.

[Victoria] Yeah, because I write my chapters like short stories, I do put the same amount of emphasis into the beginning and end of each chapter as I would the beginning and end of the novel. I also really… I love it, like I come out of a poetry background, I love the challenge of trying to distill, not necessarily a premonition of what that chapter's going to be, but I write multiple perspectives. For me, that opening line of each chapter is a way to instantly ground you in the voice. Because I don't mark it. I don't start the chapter by telling you whose perspective it's in. So I'm relying on the moment of perception. I write it from third person, so it's just a close third. But the moment of perception at the beginning of the chapter can tell you so much about the person that you're following, about the things that they notice, not only what they're going to be going through in kind of a hinting way, but just where their emotions are at, where their mind is that, all those things. Then, yes, like Brandon, I am somebody who because I write them like short stories, and one of my favorite things in short stories is the full circle moment, I love finding a way to echo by the end of the chapter where we are at. Then, every now and then, I try really hard not to overuse the cliffhanger ending because I think it gets tired. I think you have to use it sparingly. I think there's a difference between having enough tension to make you turn the page and having a dum dum dum moment.

[Brandon] Right. I've… We've talked about this before on the podcast. I've… The further I've come in my career, the more I've disliked the cliffhanger that says, "And he went to open the door and…" dum dum dum. I've liked the cliffhanger that says, "And he opened the door and his ex-wife was there." Right? Like, the cliffhanger that promises you something rather what you're going to get rather than promising you a question mark. When you can make those work, I like them. I do like to use chapters occasionally to force the page turn. I think you do have to use those, particularly in epic fantasy, you have to use it wisely. The longer your book, the fewer of these, I think, you can actually use. Which is counterintuitive. But if it's a short book, it's… You feel less guilty making them read it all in one or two sittings. If it's a long book, that will get exhausting.

[Dan] Well, that's what I was going to say, too, is, in addition to book length, consider the book genre. Writing in thrillers, you want every chapter to end on something tense. Maybe a cliffhanger, maybe not, but if you ever get to a point of rest where your reader can say, "Oh, okay, everything's cool. No one's in danger right now, I can go to sleep." You're writing your thriller weirdly.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, I have a big fantasy series that I feel like behaves more in these epic ways, where you have to use them sparingly, where every chapter really functions like an episode. Then, I have a series wherein I wanted to feel like a comic book without pictures. In that case, it is the chop, chop, chop of the turn. It is treating every chapter like a moment. In that case, there is more grouping of chapters into a smaller arc. But it's about… You can use brevity to the same effect that you can use length. You can use any element, like we're obviously talking a lot about the opening line and the ending line, but every aspect of a chapter is the utility that you have, from the voice to the length to the paragraph formatting, everything that you choose to do. To how many scenes you want, whether you want to have scene breaks within the chapter or not. I think it's about setting rules and expectations for your reader. It's really weird if every chapter of your book is like 30 pages long, except for two, unless those two moments are affecting something that is extremely dramatic.

[Howard] Episode five of season two of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, one of my favorite episodes, and it structures for me, it outlines what I kind of feel like a perfect chapter is, because, all of the threads come together in this moment of triumph, and then we get a POV and realize, oh, wait, that wasn't all the threads. Oh, a bad thing happened. End of episode. Page turn. So it's enormously rewarding, and then there's this piece at the end. It's not that it's super short, there's this piece at the end which absolutely draws me further in. Yeah, my philosophy on chapters is that I want every one of them to be rewarding. I want people to be excited that they read that, but I want to leave them wanting more, so that the next chapter is something they'll turn to.

[Victoria] Well, I just want to say, I think rewarding is a key word here, because rewarding is different from dramatic. Right? Like, I think there's a cheat code sense that if you want the chapter to be the most exciting version of itself, for the most rewarding version of itself, you have to end in this like dum dum dum, whether implied dum dum dum or actual dum dum dum. Sometimes, the most rewarding thing that a chapter can do is give you the equivalent of a full meal, and then the promise of something new. I think it's about also… It's about balance. It's about varying it between those things.

[Dan] So, just last week, I read Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which is part of the Tiffany Aching series, one of my favorite ones. There was a chapter in there with a funeral. It ends with the funeral. There's no cliffhanger whatsoever. There's absolutely nothing to drive you forward. It is completely final. But. The way that the ending was written was so beautiful. It was this perfect capstone to the dead person's life, to the survivors moving on and still going forward, that I couldn't wait to read the next chapter. Because I'm like, "This is so beautiful. How can I not be reading this?"

[Brandon] Curiously, the Terry Pratchett young adult novels use chapters and his adult novels don't. There's no chapters, they just are scene, scene, scene, no numbers. I've always found that very interesting. Why he chose to do one way or another, I'm sure he answered at some point.

[Brandon] We are out of time for this episode. Although I have some homework for you. I would like you to take something you've written, and try moving the chapter breaks around. See how it feels to you to force yourself to end in the middle of what you thought was a scene. How to add more onto your chapter and end there. I bet you will find that you're doing this pretty naturally, that you're already creating these arcs. But maybe you'll learn something interesting about your writing and be a little more intentional about it. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.48: Q&A on Novels and Series, with Brian McClellan

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/11/26/12-48-qa-on-novels-and-series-with-brian-mcclellan/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you write an ending that gives a sense of closure, but still leaves it open for more stories?
A: Make sure the ending is satisfying. Try introducing a cast in the first book of strong supporting characters, then have your satisfying HEA ending, and future books star other supporting characters. Wrap up most of the plot lines, large and small, but leave tantalizing bits. Finish this villian, but expand the scope for the future.
Q: If I write one book and it takes me a long time, should I put it out as a serial? I understand people put out serials or make their first book free to get people interested in sequels, but what if I don't plan on having a sequel? Is a serial a bad idea?
A: The serial is in a renaissance. Make sure the chunks are satisfying, with a climax, hook, and lead-in to the next part. Make sure you finish the story before you start releasing pieces, because you want to be able to revise early parts.
Q: For an unpublished writer, is it a waste of time to pitch a multi-book series, or should I focus on standalone works until I've gained some traction?
A: Best, to go in with a standalone that has series potential. Every editor wants a book to be standalone when they start reading, and a series when they end.
Q: How do you keep readers engaged, and coming back for more, between novels in a series?
A: Teasers! Short stories, novellas, anthology stories, even outtakes.
Q: For a first-time author, should a series be completed before looking for an agent, or is the first book enough?
A: First book.
Q: Do you ever find that you have this great outline for a trilogy, but when you go to write it, you find you've written the story for all three books in a short period of time? How do I fix this? Am I cutting too much? Am I missing more subplot?
A: Give it to test readers and see what they think. If it is moving too fast, add subplots, add character plots, add viewpoints. Check your try-fail cycles, and make it hard on your characters. Consider expanding on why your characters made the choices they made. Add set pieces.
Q: Is it possible to write a series as a discovery writer?
A: Yes. Make sure your ideas are big enough, and then go!
Q: What are some specific examples you can give of foreshadowing and how it works on a longer piece of writing?
A: Fix it in post! Make sure you foreshadow three times. But don't be heavy-handed. Don't forget the red herrings to go with your foreshadowing.
( One more question, and then... )

[Brandon] All right. So let's do the homework, which again, I have written down Dan does something weird.
[Dan] Yes. Okay.
[Piper] Wacky.
[Dan] So, this is Dan gets to be weird again. This is actually a game that you will hear on a lot of comedy podcasts. So, in honor of this being our series, closing out our series idea, I want you to take two books or two movies. Get suggestions from friends, make sure that they are whatever weird things. Then, that is going to be part one and part three of a series, and you have to figure out what part two is, in the middle.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Piper] That's fun.
[Dan] It's a lot of fun.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/06/10/writing-excuses-7-24-project-in-depth-way-of-kings/

Overview: Summary of Way of Kings. Three prologues? Shallan? Setting? Dalinar? Outlining, plotting, and writing? Revision? Ending? Naming? Kaladin?
( Whew! All the news that's fit to print? )
[Howard] Writing prompt time, folks. Take a page from Brandon. Literally, page 320... No. Take a page from Brandon. Take a character of yours who you think maybe is not working the way you want them to. Split that character into a character and a foil.
[Brandon] Ah. Nice. Very nice.
[Dan] Cool.
[Brandon] All right. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: JIT again?

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Writing Excuses 6.30: Help! I can't end my book!

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/25/writing-excuses-6-30-help-i-cant-end-my-book/

Key points: Stuck in the corner with a deus ex machina? Go ahead and do the deus ex machina, then go back and establish it. OR rewrite the situation. Look for solutions that tie into the characters, the world, and the plots -- thematically related. Look for the smallest change, so that your characters still have to work. Lukewarm ending? Raise the tension, simplify, and look for resonances, especially with the beginning. In any case, write the ending and then fix it. Early highlight? Is your story really what you think it is? Make the most interesting part the focus. Ask alpha readers what promises you made. Overlap your resolutions in one scene. Explain before the climax, not afterwards. When do you give up your formula/outline? When you have something better. How do you set up a satisfying ending with sequels? They will talk about that next season.
( cut and paste ending? )
[Brandon] All right. Dan, bring us our last writing prompt of the season, of the year.
[Dan] Help! I can't end the season!
[Mary] So what you have to come up with...
[Brandon] Dan needs a hamburger...
[Dan] Yes.
[Brandon] You need to write a story about Dan needing to get a hamburger, about all the things that stop him from getting to this hamburger.
[Dan] Then, in the end, I don't eat a hamburger, but I get something far more satisfying.
[Mary] Christmas leftovers!
[Dan] I was thinking chile relleno, but that will work, too.
[Howard] Mama Chus...
[Brandon] All the Writing Excuses crew is salivating.
[Howard] I'm sorry, we're going to start naming restaurants we love, and that's not what you wanted.
[Dan] All right. We are completely out of excuses, and so are you.
[Brandon] Thank you for listening all season. We'll see you next year. Go get some writing done.
[unknown] Whew!

Current Mood: shortchanged

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Writing Excuses 5.19: Fulfilling Promises to Your Readers

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/01/09/writing-excuses-5-19-fulfilling-promises-to-your-readers/

Key points: Be careful of memorable, vivid phrases. Beware of a gorilla in a phone booth derailing your story. "Don't put a gorilla in the phone booth if that's not what your story is about." Watch out for "bait and switch" endings (aka deus ex machina). When the rest of the story has built expectations, don't yank the rug out from under them. Ask yourself, "Where am I spending my time?" That is making a promise. Beware deus ex wrench, things going wrong without foreshadowing. Cool twists may break promises, especially when they shift genres. Make sure you have enough foreshadowing, and that if you put a gorilla in the phone booth, you let him call Chekhov by the end.
( gorilla costumes? )
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses... except we need a writing prompt. Howard?
[Howard] OK. Um... promises, promises, promises. All right.
[Brandon] Oh, I made you do it the other time. So you have to do it again. Dan'll do it next time.
[Howard] No, we'll be fine. I'll get this. I just... it's right here on the tip of my tongue. Think of all the times that... in grade school, you or a friend of yours said something and said, "I promise." Any time that a child has made a promise in that sort of a context. Pick a really good... and that usually means in child context, stupid promise that a kid has made. Now use that as the leaping off point for a promise that you're going to keep in a book.
[Brandon] OK. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Howard] I'll be your best friend.

Current Mood: hobgoblins

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Writing excuses 5.13: How do you write the second book?

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/11/21/writing-excuses-5-13-writing-the-second-book/

Key Points: The second published book may be mechanically easier, but emotionally harder. Your first book may not have an ending, which can teach you to start with a resolution for the second book. Your first book may fail because you are thinking too big, and need to find a story with a cohesive beginning and end. Your first book may teach you that "you can do this." To make the second book easier, learn the terms for what you are doing (e.g. POV, third person limited, character). After finishing book one, trying to write a sequel often is hard because you need a new character arc, something new for the character to learn. Coming up with a compelling new storyline after putting the galaxy in peril can be tough. Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. "Stories are good because people you care about are doing things you care about." [Brandon]
( Second system syndrome? )
[Brandon] All right. Zombie John Brown. Writing prompt.
[John] Writing prompt. You have developed some strange thing... your character has developed some strange thing on his nose. So you get three different things that you could do. Somebody comes up and says, "I think that's an alien." Or somebody comes up from the occult and says, "I think I know what that is." Or it's a love story. It develops into a love story. Not with the growth. With somebody else.
( the camel's nose )

Current Mood: squiggle

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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 28: Brainstorming the End and Working Backwards

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/07/18/writing-excuses-4-28-brainstorming-the-end-and-working-backwards/

Key points: Many writers start by figuring out the ending, then working towards it. Be careful about telegraphing the endings too much. You can always turn an too-obvious ending into an early reveal distraction.
( Leaving out the middle... )
[Howard] Okay. Is there a character arc for our biker dude?
[Brandon] Yes. But I don't think we have enough time. Dan... um... oh, writing prompt... What is the character arc for our biker dude?
[Dan] Writing prompt. That is a great writing prompt.
[Brandon] We planned that all along, and was our twist ending.
[Dan] And we went back and foreshadowed it in the beginning of the podcast.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you need to write about a motorcycle, and it's actually 18 minutes in.
[Brandon] All right. Well. There you go. This has been Writing Excuses. Next time, we promise not to throw any puppies at bulldozers.

Current Mood: reversal

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 22: Idea to Story

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/25/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-22-idea-to-story/

Key Points: To turn an idea into a story: Look for the points of conflict. Look for the boundaries -- what kind of story is this? Consider plot, setting, characters. What is the ending? How will you resolve the story? Look for characters who are in pain. Check old ideas that didn't get used yet. Brainstorm interesting ideas -- set pieces, events, twists, interesting stuff.
( the nuts and bolts )
[Brandon] We're out of time. But let's go ahead and give you the writing prompt which is the same idea that we used at the beginning.
[Howard] Insects have in some way evolved defenses against all of the poisons that we use to kill them and many of the chemicals that would work to just kill anything because they have somehow developed magic.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: nodding

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

June 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.09: Lens 4 - Reaction
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.51: And That Was That
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.48: NaNoWriMo Week 5 - Writing Endings
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.20: Branching Narratives
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.48: Q&A on Novels and Series, with Brian McClellan
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.30: Help! I can't end my book!
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.19: Fulfilling Promises to Your Readers
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing excuses 5.13: How do you write the second book?
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 28: Brainstorming the End and Working Backwards
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 22: Idea to Story

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with ending

Writing Excuses 20.09: Lens 4 - Reaction

Writing Excuses 19.51: And That Was That

Writing Excuses 18.48: NaNoWriMo Week 5 - Writing Endings

Writing Excuses 18.33: Deep Dive: The Schlock Mercenary Finale

Writing Excuses 16.20: Branching Narratives

Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

Writing Excuses 12.48: Q&A on Novels and Series, with Brian McClellan

Writing Excuses 7.24: Project In Depth: The Way of Kings

Writing Excuses 6.30: Help! I can't end my book!

Writing Excuses 5.19: Fulfilling Promises to Your Readers

Writing excuses 5.13: How do you write the second book?

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 28: Brainstorming the End and Working Backwards

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 22: Idea to Story

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