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Writing Excuses 17.49: Bodies Are Magical

Writing Excuses 17.49:  Bodies Are Magical 
 
 
Key points: There's a common trope where a disability becomes a superpower. This also often makes the character super useful. And depersonalizes them, too. Be careful of plot relevant abilities. Write your people as people. Do your world building so that your characters can have agency without their abilities becoming a plot point. 
 
MICE: In a milieu story, often people will have someone live in somebody else's body or have a temporary disability, which makes the disability exotic and the person non-human. Idea stories often focus on "What's wrong with this person?" This often reveals an invisible disability, and shows that we are better people for knowing about it. It also makes the person non-human, again. Character stories often mean the person is trying to solve themselves, and focus on dissatisfaction with self. Very inhuman! Event stories often start with a diagnosis that disrupts the status quo, and looks for a cure that either restores the status quo or sets a new status quo. Q.E.D., try to avoid making the disability a plot point, a driver for the story. 
 
Superhero comics often focus on what happens when A and B fight. This is not a good model for exploring abilities or other characteristics. 
 
Final summations:
Chelsea: As speculative writers, try to imagine environments that remove barriers for people with disabilities.
Fran: If you have a disability, or acquire one, write your experience, write your story. 
 
[Season 17, Episode 49]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies Are Magical.
[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.
[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.
[Fran] I'm Fran.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] Today, we're going to be talking about bodies are magical. This is the thing where someone with a disability, suddenly, that disability becomes a superpower. Which is not necessarily the way things work.
[Nope, nope, nope]
[Mary Robinette] As we've discussed, there are times when the modifications that you have in the ways you've adapted, that those can be useful, but the disability itself… The classic one that people point at is, of course, Daredevil. Where losing his eyesight gives him magical powers on multiple axes, because all of his other senses have become heightened.
[Fran] Elsa Sjunneson, who we've talked about before, with her book Being Seen, but also online in different essays, has some great breakdowns of the Daredevil problem, by the way. You can Google those, they're amazing, we should probably have a link to that. [Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] But it is a very, very common trope that you'll see. Sometimes it's also a thing that people will do as a form of overkill. That they're like, "Oh, I don't want the person with the disability to be weak, so I'm going to give them these extra things."
[Chelsea] What I find is that when you have that character with the disability who has the disability, but then they have something that makes them super extra ultra powerful, it also conveniently makes them super extra useful to the narrator and other characters. It de-persons them in a lot of cases.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Fran] Plot relevant disability and plot relevant superpowers both have that same icky feel to them. One of the things that I tend to do is I have a lot of disabled characters in my fiction, but people don't notice them, because they're doing things on the page like protagonizing and antagonizing and making things and breaking things. Their disability doesn't necessarily have to jive with that or be part of the plot, it's just part of who they are. Having that sort of superpower that's utterly convenient to the plot or, unfortunately, sometimes the disability that is plot relevant, really does… It de-personalizes, like Chelsea was saying. What we have been talking about this entire series is seeing people as people and writing people as people and finding places for empathy rather than any other approach towards writing people.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, these things, let's unpack what we mean about it not being a plot point. What we're talking about is, like, it will absolutely affect the way the character moves through the world. Just the same way that the fact that I am 5'7" affects the way I move through the world. Fran is…
[Fran] 4'10".
[Mary Robinette] 4'10" and one of the things…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That she said to me when we saw each other in person for the first time is that one of the nice things about masks for her was that she could no longer see people's nose hair.
[Fran] Please, please trim. Anyway…
[Mary Robinette] But that is… Like, that's not a plot point. As Howard…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Strokes his mustache. That is a mustache. But the point is, like, that affects the way we move through the world. We see different things, we experience different things, but it is, someone's nose hair or lack thereof is not, like, a plot point. I hope. I mean, maybe. Go for it. If you feel the urge.
[Howard] To use an example that is perhaps less abled in nature, someone with very long hair on a windy day without a hairband, the hair gets in their face. That doesn't mean they're Rapunzel.
[No]
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Fran] On the other hand, just to use the height thing for a different reason, one thing that impacts me directly is when I'm at a stand up cocktail party. Most of the conversation happens directly over my head. I will miss things because people are talking above me. If I have everyone sit down, which I tend to do, then everybody's talking out my level, which is, like, the same thing with Zoom. It was great. Except that people now insist on coming up to me and saying, "I had no idea you were so little. You seemed so…" They want to use the word normal. I'm glad that they stop themselves. I'm really proud of people who stop themselves from using that word. But the aspect of… Like, Zoom is a great leveler for lots of people, but not for others. None of these things are necessarily a plot point, but you can use them as a way to express how you move through the world.
 
[Mary Robinette] Right. So, an example of this… Turning this height thing into a superpower…
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] Would be… A superpower plot point, would be that if Fran is at a cocktail party and discovers a special clue that only she could discover because she happens to be the right height to look under the table without anyone…
[Fran] Exactly the right height.
[Mary Robinette] Exactly the right height. That's the kind of thing where… I can hear people going, "But sometimes you do need a character who's smaller." It's like, yes. But that can't be their only purpose in the plot. That can't be… Like, every time there's a problem, it's like, "Let's get the small person in."
[Howard] A bomb could also be discovered by the horrible creeper who has a mirror taped to his shoe.
[Fran] Eew! Okay. Eew.
[Mary Robinette] Thanks for that, Howard. Thank you.
[Fran] I'm uncomfortable now.
[Howard] I'm sorry. Hey. You know what. I'm 5'6". I traveled a lot on business. It really did feel like a superpower that I could be comfortable flying coach.
[Mary Robinette] I mean… Those chairs. But at the same time, those… The headrests on those chairs are not built for someone with a short torso.
[Chuckles]
 
[Fran] To go back to the phrasing that you used, Mary Robinette, where you said, "But you sometimes need someone who is smaller as a character." That idea of, "Oh, I need a person who is like this so that the plot can do X," has… There are points at which that thought process is useful, but when you are constructing fully rounded characters without bias, taking a look at why you feel like you need them for this is an interesting exercise in self examination.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] Let's take a moment and pause for the book of the week, and then I… When we come back, we have more to say about this. Our book of the week is…
[Fran] Is not a book!
[Howard] Not a book.
[Mary Robinette] It is not a book, it is something that Fran has been wanting to talk about the entire time we've been recording.
[Fran] Yep. This is the TV series Killjoys. It came on the air in 2015, 2016, and ran for three or four seasons. A couple of those seasons get a little nebulous and a little weird, but then it brought itself back. What I want to talk about with Killjoys is that the premise in definitely season two, especially with an episode called Dutch and the Real Girl, is sort of what we've been talking about. This is an episode with a character who has been hack modded into something where her arm is a gun. But, also, she's got lots of other mods and things, and there is a whole discussion in there about being human, but also having a different role to play in both the series and in society. One of the things that I love about Killjoys, and there's a lot to love about Killjoys… It's got some cyberpunk elements. Victoria Modesta, the model that I mentioned with the prism for one of her legs, is in the show as a special guest for season two. The hack mods are part of a marginalized community group that is a long running theme through this show, Killjoys. One of the things that Killjoys did with this is they hired actual disabled people to play the hack mods. So you've got this amazing… I think Killjoys hired more disabled people to play roles on the show then all of Hollywood at that point. It was amazing to see. It's fantastic to see these actors operating with just the plot points that they have, playing lots of different characters. It's a great show. Especially Dutch and the Real Girl, that's one of my favorite episodes of all time.
[Mary Robinette] So. This is Killjoys, which apparently everyone needs to go watch. As you were talking
[garbled]
[Fran] It was actually produced in Canada, as many good things are. It did run for five seasons, started 2015. Hannah John-Kamen plays the lead in that. She's also in the second Antman as Ghost. So she's all over the place.
[Howard] Cool.
[Mary Robinette] As you were talking about that, I'm going to take us a little bit off topic and then bring us back. The… You made me think about discovery. I'm doing a rewatch of parts of it, but in season two, there's some good disability wrapped in that. There's just [background characters]… Just, like, you're watching and somebody just rolls through in a chair, there's… It's really great. None of these are main characters. None of these are main characters, and also, when you look at the bridge, it has steps just built into it.
[Fran] Yep.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So this is a world in which…
[Fran] Also, all of the chairs are fixed. So that character that rolls by can never actually sit at the bridge.
[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep. That's a great point which I had not thought about. 
 
[Mary Robinette] So part of what we're talking about here when were thinking about bodies are magical and not being plot points, is also, like, the world building that you're doing so that your character can move through this world. So that whatever it is that you have, however you have designed this character, that they can have agency in this story without becoming a plot point. So. I do want to dive in a little bit into what I talk about, about what I mean personally when I'm talking about having it become a plot point. People who are longtime listeners know me and my fondness for talking about the MICE quotient. So, here, the MICE quotient is this organizational structure, right. So, in a milieu story, it begins when you enter a place, and ends when you leave it. Often what you'll see is that you'll see someone have a character… They want to explore disability by having someone live in somebody else's body or they'll have a disability that is a temporary disability. That, basically has the problem of making that disability exotic and it's very, very othering. The idea structure which begins when you ask a question and ends when you answer it is like, "What is wrong with that person?" That's another plot point that you can see… Sometimes see where people will have someone who has like an invisible disability and it's all about, "Oh, now we discover it. Oh, we're better people because we know the answer to this question now."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Again, it's othering because it becomes… That person's the character. Character stories begin when the character is unhappy with their role, some aspect of themselves, and it ends when the character becomes happy with the role, which then means that they are having to… The problem that they are trying to solve is themselves. Which is, again, it is setting a very specific form of normal and having somebody be dissatisfied with who they are. As a plot point, that can be, again, very othering. Then, events begins with a disruption of the status quo, which is often diagnosis. It ends with restoration of the status quo, or the establishment of a new status quo, which means that you're always looking at a cure.
[Howard] Can I just say that I love that in a minute and a half, you've taken the MICE quotient and used it to explain how to do everything wrong.
[Mary Robinette] Yep. Yep.
[Howard] This is beautiful.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Thank you. So this is why when you've got a character with a disability, you actually don't want it to be a plot point. You don't want it to be a driver, because if you do… Or, if you do, you have to know that that is the story that you're telling. You're telling one of those versions of stories. You don't want to do it. If you're going to do it, you don't want to do it unintentionally, for certain. But if you want a character and you don't want them to be like, "Hello. I have this magical superpower. I am here because I am useful." Then, it needs to be decoupled from the plot and just affect the way they move through the world. Which is different than these are the story questions that we're trying to solve and answer.
 
[Howard] It's… While we are chewing on that amazing deconstruction, which I'm again going to say that I love, it's worth pointing out that a lot of where we see disability as superpower done wrong is in comics. One of the tropes of comics, and you see this in especially the ensemble MCU movies, is that at some point there is an idea milieu element which is what happens when Hulk and Thor fight? What happens when Thor and Iron Man fight? What happens when Iron Man and Capt. America fight? Comic book writers… This trope, everybody at some point has to fight everybody else, that is not a great model in which to explore ability, disability, age, old age, youth, whatever, because it is going to be inherently othering for a large portion of the audience.
[Fran] This is where I get to shout out to Marieke Nijkamp who wrote the Oracle Code, which is the story of Barbara Gordon. It's a graphic novel. It was published in 2020, before the rest of things happened. It's fantastic. Marieke is an amazing advocate for disability and disabled writers. Just wonderful to talk about. But if you get a chance to check out The Oracle Code, it is worth your time and does exactly the opposite of what Howard is talking about.
[Howard] To be sure, or to be clear, I say comics. What I mean is the superhero genre. Obviously, comics are a medium which can be used to tell all kinds of stories.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, we are approaching the end of our time together. So, before we go into our homework, I just want to check to see if Chelsea or Fran, as our guests for this series, if either of you have any big takeaways that you want our listeners to carry with them before we give them their homework.
[Chelsea] I mean, I think the thing that I've been talking about mostly in all of these episodes is how very much I want us as speculative writers to take the opportunity to imagine environments that are… That basically take away barriers to people with disabilities. Because they're… Well, I'm just going to be opinionated about this… Designed properly.
[Fran] I'm going to direct my comments to those listeners who have a disability, as well as those who may, in the future, have a disability, and just say, "Write your experience. Write your story. In whatever way you want to tell it. If you have the opportunity to reach for empathy, go for it." This is a really important thing, but find… Finding ways to put your story down is actually a wonderful way to just feel present in a way that doesn't mean you're educating people, it's just you're telling a story, you're doing a thing. It's… Please, please write. I would love to see everything you write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, with that, we come to our homework. For your homework assignment, we've had this conversation that at some point, everyone is going to be disabled. So, look at your cast of characters for your work in progress and decide what disabilities your characters have. Some of them will be visible. Some of them will be in visible. Some of them will be things that the characters themselves don't recognize as a disability. Decide what those are, and then make sure that none of them are a plot point. That these are characters who just get to exist and have adventures the same way all of the other characters do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.46: World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change

Writing Excuses 16.46: World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change
 
 
Key Points: To make your world feel real, make sure it incorporates change! A past, a present, and a future, with the events of your story and the historical context interacting. Plot is about constant change, and you need to think about how that intersects the changes in the world. At whatever scale suits your story. Pay attention to why a status quo exists, and what is holding back change. People don't all react the same way to changes. What can you use to give your story a sense of time? Break it into chunks. Use labels for times and events instead of dates. Idioms! Pay attention to diaspora, the movement of people and the interaction of cultures.
 
[Season 16, Episode 46]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, World and Plot: The Only Constant is Change.
[Fonda] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Fonda] I'm Fonda.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] Fonda, the only constant is change. That's a phrase that we hear a lot. What do you mean by that? How does that relate to worldbuilding?
[Fonda] So, often times, we come across fantasy worlds that feel unchanging. We're out of time. I think we see this especially in portal realm fantasy, fairy tales, fables, stories that have that once upon a time feel to them. We know that in our world things are always changing. Our society is constantly evolving, technology is changing, social norms are changing. Even though I think there's absolutely a place for those sort of timeless ancient unchanging fairytale fable type fantasy worlds, personally I aim to create worlds that feel as real as possible. Part of that is making the world feel like it has a past, a present, and a future. And that the story that we're experiencing exists in a historical context, and the events of the story are also impacting what will be the status quo after you close the book on the final page. The fact that in our world the only constant is change intersects with the plot, because plot is also about constant change. Right? Each scene, each chapter, is a change that is driving that story forward. Because if you finish a chapter and you're in the same place that you were at the beginning of the chapter, that chapter is not necessary. So when you have change in the world intersecting with change in the plot, you're able to heighten and reinforce both.
[Dan] Yeah. I want to make sure to point out that this applies to a story of any scope. We're not suggesting that even the lighthearted romantic comedy that you're writing has to fundamentally alter the entire world. That's not what this says. The world of your story might be much smaller than the entire planet. But that it still needs to have that sense of past, present, and future.
[Fonda] Yeah, definitely. I mean, you don't necessarily have to be working on the scale of global change, it could be very small change, and world being the scope of what your characters immediate circumstances are. It could be change in a small town. Change in a high school. Change within this family. You have plot intersecting with world and that the changing world could be complicating the plot. For example, you have a romantic story, you have two protagonists, but some element of the world changing the industry in this town, causing one of the protagonists to have to move or a war pulling one of these protagonists away. I mean, all those potential changes in the external environment could complicate your plot. You could also have the events of the plot acting upon the world. So there is a give-and-take between plot and world.
[Howard] I like to think of change from the other side of the coin. Which is, why would things stay the same? Why does a status quo exist? There are status quo's that exist literally because we don't know any better. Because the technology hasn't been developed. In the 19th century, status quo for traveling around town was being a pedestrian or riding an animal or riding something that was being pulled by an animal… I mean, there was railroad obviously, but that was for longer trips. All the way up to the point that there were electric scooters and that there were people you could hire to take you to an airport to get on a plane. That degree of change was huge and a lot of it was driven by us learning things and things… Learning to do new things. But there's also status quo that is artificial. Where there is some sort of force keeping things from changing. Whether it's an economic force, someone has something to lose if we change things in the following way, or something, some structure has been built that prevents us from making the changes we want to make. Then there's status quo changes that are natural or huge, nature-sized, like… Was the story… Series of stories, Hellconia Winter, Spring, Summer… I can't remember the name of the author. Where you've got a planet that orbits twin suns, and it orbits on the outside… Complicated orbits. They have, like, a 1500 year year with hugely long seasons. So there would be these seasonal changes where suddenly the snow begins melting and it stays melted and what the heck is going on. So there are things that might change as a result of nature actually changing around you.
[Mary Robinette] The other piece of this is that people are going to have uneven reactions to that change. Depending on where they are in culture and society. So some people will embrace the change, some people will actively fight against it. You're going to have both of those things happening simultaneously, which is part of what makes something feel vivid and alive is that not everyone is having this even reaction. When you've got an event, whether that's the invention of a new technology or an invasion or just even class change, the events affect culture and culture affects events. Like, one of the kind of on a very granular level, when you're looking at rules, rules in a school or laws in a society, those rules… Or the ones that your own family sets… Those rules, the things that get delineated are always set in response to something. You don't have to create a rule about something if you don't… Aren't either afraid that someone is going to do it or if someone hasn't already done it, and often, it's, like, why would any sensible person… There's a… Why do we have a rule about the number of questions that is appropriate to ask a guest? Not saying that we have someone in my family is perhaps a little too curious, but…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] These are the kinds of things that can exist and can make that sense of history. Because people will… You can always have someone who remembers before the rule. Like, I remember flying bef… When you could go and meet someone at the air… At the airplane door. At the gate. That's… That is outside of memory for many of my peers, just because of where I was born. Or when I was born.
[Dan] There's a park just about a block away from my house that has a big sign posted that says, "No fireworks, nudity, or horseback riding."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I would love to know what event prompted the creation of that sign.
 
[Dan] But, let's pause here. Let's get our book of the week from Fonda.
[Fonda] So, the book of the week is Black Water Sister by Zen Cho. I wanted to highlight this because it is a great example of a story in which the fantasy elements interact with a changing society. So it is set in modern-day Malaysia, and there are ghosts and deities, but they are interacting with greedy land developers who are potentially going to be destroying a temple. The way that Zen Cho makes those elements interact is both very… It's very on point and it's also very witty and hilarious, and I really think it's a good example of what we are talking about. Because often times there are… We talked about choosing where you want to build the world in order to reinforce your themes, and Zen certainly does that because there is this sense that the fantasy world, the fantasy elements, are not unchanging. They are being affected by the real world, and things like… Like land development.
 
[Fonda] One of the reasons why I set the Green Bone saga in an analogy of late 20th century was because there were so many forces of modernization and globalization that were going on at that time. Some of them continuing to this day, but especially post-World War II and the economic boom of the Asian nations, and intersected really nicely with one of the things that I wanted to bring to the forefront in that story, which is that there is this magic element, and for a very long time it has been the birthright of the people who live in this place and control that resource. But there's no way that that would be immune to technology and to economics. Someone would find a way to, and they do, a foreign power finds a way to develop a drug so that what was once exclusive to these people is no longer exclusive. That intersects with the plot, and that's why these clans start having conflicts in going to war. So, let's talk a little bit about ways that you can make your fictional world, your invented world, feel like it has a sense of time.
[Dan] Yeah. So, I've… An example I'm going to throw out is my own book, Extreme Makeover. Which is set in our world, but is specifically about how that world is slowly degraded and destroyed by a new technology. It's a hand lotion that overwrites DNA. I realized quickly early on that while I was telling a kind of an apocalyptic story about the end of the world, that would necessitate massive societal changes over time. So the… My solution was to split the book into four distinct parts, each of them presenting the world in a different way. There aren't necessarily huge time jumps between each part. But it… Categorizing it that way gave me a chance to kind of make more obvious this is our world today. This is the part of the world where this new technology has been invented and people are focusing on that. Then, as that gets worse and worse, and as the world changes, these little breaks and it make it kind of easy for me to convey those changes over time.
[Mary Robinette] One of the tricks that I use sometimes when I'm trying to create the sense of change is to make sure that my cast of characters are not all the same age for the reasons that I've already talked about. But the other thing that I found very, very useful is the way we identify time, with the exception of 2020…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Is rarely by the year. It's usually something like before the war or after… Mid-panini, I've heard people talking about. But we come up with a catchy label for it. The something something dynasty. One of the things that you can do to create this sense that your world is very thought through is to just have people refer to something in the past with a label instead of an actual date. Because it also implies that… I've used this example before, that I had the battle of the seven red armies. Like, I have literally no idea what this battle is. I just needed to reference something that happened in the past, like a far distant event. That makes it sound like, oh, yeah, there was this whole big cultural war that went down. I don't know. I don't know what that is.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But it makes my world sound richer. It's the shorthand…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] [of cheats?]
[Fonda] That can apply to not just things that happened in the past, but the sort of echo of the historical origins for names and customs and behaviors. So, like, for example, there's… In my story, there's these people who are known as lantern men, and they're sort of patrons of this clan. But the reason why they're called that has a historical origin that dates to wartime. So having a… Having little idioms that people say to each other. I have placed interludes in my book that are structurally a way to create a sense of history. They're these brief looks back into myth or history. But then I bring them into the main narrative by having them tie into sayings or legends or TV shows and comic books or pop-culture that the current day characters are experiencing. So there's clearly a link between what came before and how that has, like, filtered into current day culture and behavior.
[Dan] We're getting… We're running out of time, but one aspect of this that's in your notes, I want to make sure that we talk about, is diaspora. Which we talked about a little bit during lunch. But I feel like the Green Bone saga is very good at conveying the concept of diaspora, and the way that different cultures migrate and kind of interface with an interface into other cultures. So can you talk a little bit about that?
[Fonda] Yeah. I mean, that was an element that I very much wanted to capture in my books, because I rarely see it depicted in fantasy novels. There's always races, different fantasy races, but they don't always take into account that people move. I mean, our whole world history is so based on the migration of people. There's a lot of cross-cultural pollination and cultures mix and they change and diaspora cultures are different from the culture that those people came from. That is an element of change and time and history that was very important to me when I was writing those books. I wanted to make it really obvious when you're reading them that these people who might be ethnically the same but have migrated to different places, now feel very distinct. Yet they have also some commonalities, and they've… So that was a tricky balance to strike.
[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite real-world details for this is the food in Peru. Peru is South American, it is very deeply steeped in the indigenous cultures, and then the Spanish who arrived. But also, they have had Chinese influence in their culture for hundreds of years, to the point that the traditional like grandma's house Sunday dinner is a stirfry in a wok.
[Fonda] Yes.
[Dan] Which changes… We don't tend to think about that being in a South American country, but this concept of the way the cultures have pollinated each other is present.
[Fonda] Yeah. In the before times… Dan, you're making me hungry, because I visited Peru, and the food there was one of the highlights.
[Dan] Oh, for sure.
[Fonda] But they have this fried rice dish which is called chaufa. I learned that it's called chaufa because the Chinese immigrants who moved to Peru and started these restaurants, the Chinese word, and I'm going to butcher it because I don't speak Mandarin fluently is chaofan, come eat. So when they would say choafan, like, that got transmuted into chaufa, which is this fried rice dish. [Garbled] That's just like a little, very cool worldbuilding detail that if you can find ways to create little moments like that in your story are just going to make your world feel so much richer and more real.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to actually recommend that people who want to dive deeper into food, because we could talk about it for hours, go back and check out episode 14:30, Eating Your Way To Better Worldbuilding. Which digs really deep into this. Including a fascinating detail, which is that often a side effect of a diaspora is that the food of the people who have emigrated to someplace else will freeze at a particular… At a cultural moment. The moment that they left their home country. Whereas the home country will continue to carry on and the food will continue to change. Which I found fascinating and totally relevant to this conversation.
[Dan] Yes, very much.
[Mary Robinette] But you can go listen to the full episode.
 
[Dan] Awesome. This has been a great episode. Fonda, take us out with some homework.
[Fonda] So, the homework this week is for you to take a timeless story. So pick a fairytale or a fable and reimagine it happening during a period of change in that society. So my example would be, let's say, Sleeping Beauty falls under the curse and she wakes up 100 years later. But that kingdom has been through a socialist revolution. Now the Royals are in exile. How can you imagine a timeless story being very different as a result of the world changing?
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to tag onto that really fast, and then will let everyone go. Beauty and the Beast, the Disney film, if you look at the fashions in it, takes place about 10 years before the French Revolution.
[Dan] Yeah. Sorry, Belle. Anyway, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event

Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event
 
 
Key points: Event stories are driven by disruptions of the status quo, the normal. They tend towards externally driven conflicts. Begin with a disruption of the status quo, end either with a restoration of the old or a new status quo. Events happen! But mostly, sequences of breaking, over and over and over. Cascades following one decision. But not just big events, small disruptions too. Obstacles are when each action further disturbs the status quo. Complications are when one problem opens up a different problem. Focus on where the characters are expending effort, what are they trying to solve. External events can be overwhelming, how do you avoid that? First, every try-fail cycle does not need to be the same size, or have the same difficulty. So, control pacing by picking smaller events and consequences, and stacking them. Make a list of possible problems, and slowly escalate them. Consequences are what matters to the character. When you start a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of a story, you only have one. Gradually take away choices, close doors, until there is only one left. Make it a hard choice!
 
[Season 16, Episode 39]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive into Event.
[C.L.] 15 minutes long.
[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[C.L.] I'm C.L.
[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.
 
[Dan] We are back with the fifth episode of our M.I.C.E. Quotient master class. So excited to have you all here for it. Today we're going to talk about the fourth and final element, event.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So event stories are driven by disruptions of normal. These are… Tend to be very externally driven conflicts. They began when a status quo is disrupted, and end when it is restored or there's a new status quo. So many things that we think of as plot are actually event. There's a tendency I've noticed among particularly science fiction and fantasy readers to think that the big actions that are happening are all of the plot, and they forget that all of the other pieces are also plot.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But event is all of the things that happen. But it's mostly about things breaking over and over and over again. It's that thing that happens in the real world where you're like, "I'm just…" And I should say, we are having our bathroom remodeled as we are recording this.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] The cascading effect of making one decision to change a status quo, which is, let's have a new bathroom, winds up impacting everything else. Because once you decide that you're going to peel up the floor, then you discover that since your grandfather built the house, that the floor beams are actually two by sixes instead of two by tens which is standard for a floor. So that then in turn breaks their ability to put in water lines and air conditioning because they have to fit them into smaller spaces. Also, then you have to have things reassembled. Then, when you're trying to record a podcast, there are contractors who are constantly coming in and interrupting. None of you have heard any of this because we have solved it by managing to record around things. But it is this cascading chain led from one decision to make one change in the status quo that is then breaking all the rest of my normal. Good times.
 
[Charlotte] Good times. I'm so glad that you said that, because I think certainly for me when I was starting out with event, I always thought of it is something massively big, explosions, a meteor coming, Independence Day type thing, but it can actually be something much, much smaller, like a bathroom or a tap on your sink breaking, something like this. Anything that disrupts the status quo, or your normal. Right?
[Mary Robinette] That is absolutely correct. So, again, as you say, this is… But a lot of times when we think about ramping up the tension in event stories, we think about needing to make things bigger and bigger and bigger. It's really just about this cascade of normal breaking, that you attempt to fix something and not only does it not work, but something else breaks next to it. So, again, in the obstacle versus complication thing, obstacles in this form are when each action causes the status quo to become more disturbed. So, again, in small frame world, if someone has a problem with their boss, that's an external problem. That's not the problems they have with themselves, that's an external problem. So they want to change that status quo. They go to HR to try to resolve it. That action then directly causes them to get fired. So that's an obstacle. It's where they tried to change something and a problem in the same thread line causes it to just go wrong. Complications are when a question opens up to a different problem. So someone has a problem with their boss. They go to HR. That, in turn, leads to them being held prisoner by terrorists. Who are the terrorists? Where did they come from? This is heading things in a completely different way. So these are… This is the kind of thing that you're looking for. I mean, you could make the argument in some cases that this is a continuation of a disruption of status quo. I am thinking of it is kicking off an inquiry thread about who are these people and the milieu of escaping a hostage situation.
 
[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say, event is the one that is the hardest for me to get my head around. Is that your experience as well? Is there something trickier about event, or am I just thinking about it wrong?
[Mary Robinette] I think that it is that… Because event is action driven, everything feels like it's an event. Stories are inherently about change. That's a thing that happens in stories. So when you're looking at… Let's say that you're doing a milieu story and your characters… Let's say your characters crash land on a planet. If they arrive on the planet, that is definitely a milieu story and the thing that they're trying to solve is getting off the planet. If they are explorers and they land under a controlled set up in the story begins after they have already arrived on the planet and they are attempting to… Their ship breaks. Okay, the ship breaking is, at this point, an event. Because it has disrupted their status quo. Because they're supposed to be there and they're supposed to be exploring. Whereas if they are crashing on the planet, if they are there unexpectedly, and trying to leave, their primary goal is to leave the planet and fixing the event of the problem with the ship is incidental to the primary thrust, which is getting off and surviving the planet. That's why it is… With this one, and with all of them, the question that you're looking at and the thing that is often the deciding factor isn't necessarily… I mean, a lot of it is where you start and stop. But a lot of it is what are they trying to solve. Where are they expending their effort? In a murder… If someone is murdered and you put the focus, the primary effort goes into trying to answer questions, that's an inquiry. If the primary focus goes into learning to live after this person has been murdered, and someone else's dealing with the question of who did it, there are detectives who are going off and solving things. But the focus of the story is on how does the widow survive, how does the widower learn to fold his own laundry… It's a little bit of gender stereotyping, and…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] We're just going to roll with it right now. My husband is actually the one who does laundry in our household. So… But this is… That's the… One of them, the focus is on trying to establish a new normal, and the other is on trying to answer a question. That tells you the kind of conflicts that go in the middle and where you're putting your emphasis.
[Dan] Okay. So, as with some of the other ones we've looked at, the value then of figuring out what kind of story, which of the four M.I.C.E. elements you're dealing with is that it helps you to focus your story and it helps you take it in the right direction, so that you're not spinning off like you said into story bloat and adding unnecessarily unnecessary elements because you know more exactly what your story is about.
[Mary Robinette] That is correct.
 
[Mary Robinette] Actually, I'm going to talk… Pause here to talk about our book of the week, because I think that's a good example of this, and the trickiness there. So I am the audiobook narrator for Seanan McGuire. Also, currently, as we are recording this, I am in the process of recording When Sorrows Come which is her new book. When you hear this, it will be out. It's book 15 in the October Daye series, so FYI. But the thing about these books is that they are a combination inquiry-event with character going on as well. But the thing about the inquiry… Toby is a detective, and there are things that she needs to answer. But really, when you're signing up for the books, what you're interested in is watching her kick some ass. So the primary driver in a lot… Is arguably that these are event books. Chaos just surrounds her, things are constantly going wrong. She's constantly getting stabbed, she's constantly needing to solve problems. There is much less emphasis put on the actual detecting. The detecting exists is a set up to give us all of the events that go wrong. Are we there and interested in it? Yes. Does it need to carry weight? Absolutely, because it's a novel, and it has multiple threads. But the driver for most of this is about this… These events, these things going wrong. There's also character stuff that's happening that is wonderful. There's… It's kind of a constant coming-of-age. But it is a coming-of-age that is always being kicked off by things going terribly, terribly wrong. And that affecting everything else in Toby's life. I like these books a lot. I enjoy narrating them. I… In every book, Seanan makes me cry while narrating.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, I highly recommend them. I get better as a narrator, FYI, over the course of 15 books. So don't judge me too harshly on the first books. But…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] But that was… The new one is When Sorrows Come. Correct?
[Mary Robinette] When Sorrows Come by Seanan McGuire. Yes. It…
[Dan] Awesome.
[Mary Robinette] Is absolutely a… It is status quo disruptions, just constant status quo disruptions. Like, we're going to check this thing out. Then the process of checking this thing out causes someone to get killed. The process of checking out how they get killed causes someone else to get killed. This is not a spoiler if you ever read an October Daye novel.
[Chuckles]
 
[Charlotte] So, with an event story, if it's about action, external things happening, status quo's being disrupted, how do you keep that from becoming overwhelming? Like, something happens and then something else happens and then another thing happens and it's all related, it's all consequence and staying in the same M.I.C.E. element. I guess it's a question about pacing, really. Like, how to control that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, pacing… The… One of the things that I misunderstood what I was first learning to apply the M.I.C.E. elements to things is thinking that every try-fail cycle had to be the same size, and that they all had to be the same levels of difficulty. So, similarly, that I that all of the consequences had to ramp up at the same proportional level.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that you can do when you're trying to control pacing through the events that happen in the consequences of those events is to think about smaller consequences and stacking them. Sometimes what I will do is I will make a list of possible consequences, things that can go terribly wrong. Then I'll… This is in a… I should say, this is in a phase when I'm stuck and brainstorming. It is not the way I just… Normally I just write. But when I'm stuck and brainstorming, I'll list the consequences and then I'll rank them in kind of best case scenario to worst-case scenario.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Then remove the best case scenario and sort of dole out the worst-case scenarios in a slowly escalating piece of rolling disasters.
 
[Charlotte] Right. This is all…
[Mary Robinette] But, like pacing is… Go ahead.
[Charlotte] No, I was going to say, this is always in relation obviously to your character, because what is devastatingly awful to me might not be the same for my sister or my friend. So it's always with the character in mind, right, the list of consequences?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlotte] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Right, right. Exactly. Because you're thinking about the character's status quo being disrupted. Although… So it is their sense of normal and their place in the world. The world being disrupted, for instance, there are big disruptions like the horrible disruptions happening in Greece right now as we're recording this. Terrible, terrible fires. Those are not affecting me. So it is a disruption of the status quo, but it is not a disruption to my status quo. C?
[C.L.] There was something I wanted to add around pacing. One thing that really got my head around the concept of pacing was the idea that when you begin a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of the story, you have one. Pacing is all about taking choices away, gradually. Closing more doors until there is only one thing left to do.
[Dan] Oh, that's brilliant.
[Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here going, "Yeah. Yeah, because it really is…" It is about getting to… Trying to get them to a point where it's an impossible choice, it's a choice that is hard.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Speaking of things that are hard, should I give them homework?
[Yes]
[Dan] I think that's great.
[Mary Robinette] All right. Grab your fairytale. You are going to attempt to strip out everything except the event stuff. So with Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the three bears come home, there is a home intruder in the bear's home. Furniture has been broken. They have to drive this little blonde girl out of their home. Their dinner has been eaten, they have to re-make dinner. Papa Bear has to repair furniture. Then, and only then, after they have restored their status quo, are they truly safe.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Mary Robinette] Or there's a home intruder and Papa Bear just kills her. Now they have to live with the consequences.
[Laughter]
[garbled… Porridge. What are you doing, Papa Bear? I'm retiring.]
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] Okay. So I want to ask, and I know this is homework, but I want to dig into this for a second. Is there a way to cast Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an event story from Goldilocks' point of view without making it just a milieu story?
[Mary Robinette] So, it is about a disruption to the status quo. If we start…
[Dan] If we start the story when she's in the house and the bears show up?
[C.L.] I think in this case…
[Dan] I don't know.
[C.L.] Goldilocks and the Three Bears, as an event story, Goldilocks is the antagonist.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. The only… Like… I think if you… Huh. So, it is about a change in the status quo. If Goldilocks wants to make a change in the status quo, then she would need… What does she want to change? Goldilocks. Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch. You have to start it at a different point.
[Dan] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch and is trying to force her to take a nap. She doesn't want anything to do with that. So she is going to make a forcible break from her family and she's going to run away from home. It gets back into character again.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Wow. I'm not sure. I think there's got to be a way to make Goldilocks an event story.
[Dan] Well, rather than puzzle over it now, that'll be a bonus homework. If anyone comes up with a really good one, let us know.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] But, for now, you are out of excuses. Go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.35: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?

Writing Excuses 16.35: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?
 
 
Key Points: What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient? Milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Milieu stories are driven by place, beginning when a character enters a place and end when they exit. The conflicts keep the character from leaving. Inquiry stories begin with a question and end when the character answers it. The conflicts keep the character from answering the question. Character stories start with "Who am I?" and end with recognition of self. The conflicts focus on blocking change. Event stories are action, starting with disruption, and ending with return to normal or establishing a new normal. The conflicts are all about blocking that restoration. Most stories have multiple threads, nested like Matryoshka dolls. The M.I.C.E. Quotient can help you decide what to include or remove, by identifying what kind of thread you are working on. The M.I.C.E. Quotient originated with Orson Scott Card, although his idea element has been renamed inquiry. Almost all stories, from short stories to novels, have multiple threads, involving several M.I.C.E. elements.
 
[Season 16, Episode 35]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, deep dive into the M.I.C.E. Quotient, episode one, What Is the M.I.C.E. Quotient?
[C. L.] 15 minutes long.
[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[C. L.] I'm C. L.
[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.
 
[Dan] We are very excited to have you here. This is the start of another eight episode master class. We're going to have Mary Robinette teaching us all about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. This is something she's an absolute expert on. We're very excited. Before we get into this, let's get some quick introductions. We've got two incredible guest hosts with us this time around. C. L. Polk and Charlotte Forfieh. C. L.… C, can you introduce yourself?
[C. L.] Hi. I'm C. L. Polk. I write fantasy novels. I wrote a trilogy called the Kingston Cycle. I have a standalone book called The Midnight Bargain. I had a short story read on LeVar Burton Reads.
[Dan] [Oooo] That's awesome.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Dan] Well, we're excited to have you. Thank you very much for being on the show. Charlotte, how about you? Tell us about yourself.
[Charlotte] Hi. Hi, everyone. My name's Charlotte Forfieh. I'm coming to you out of the UK. I'm an emerging writer. I've written a few short stories and had them published. I'm currently grappling with a novel.
[Mary Robinette] I invited both C. L. and Charlotte to join us for this for related reasons. We've all… All three of us have had long conversations about the M.I.C.E. Quotient. But C approaches writing in different ways than I do. It's been interesting… I subscribe to their Patreon and it's been interesting to watch the way they talk about writing. It's really cool. Highly recommended. Charlotte is early career, but actually has formal education in writing, which I do not, and is one of my mentees and is actively working on her first novel using the M.I.C.E. Quotient. Some of the conversations that we were having around that also made me think, you know, this would be useful, I think, to a lot of the… You, listeners, because one of the things that happens with Dan and I is that we've been doing this for long enough that we forget sometimes about the things that are hard at the beginning. We also shorthand so much that frequently it's like, well, obviously. Obviously you're doing that. Everyone's like, "Uh, excuse me. Um, that? What is that?"
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, with all of that, here's how this is going to go. We're going to do an overview of the M.I.C.E. Quotient today. You're going to hear a lot of me talking today. Then, in the subsequent weeks, we're going to take each individual element of the M.I.C.E. Quotient and look at it, do a deep dive into it, and then we'll look at how you can use these tools. 
 
So, I should probably explain what the M.I.C.E. Quotient is. The M.I.C.E. Quotient is an organizational theory. It's an acronym. It stands for milieu, inquiry, character, and event. Longtime listeners will have heard me talk about it is the MACE Quotient, because there was a time when I was experimenting with using Ask-Answer for the inquiry. But I realized that in podcast it frequently sounded like I was saying Ass Cancer, which was not helpful…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] As a descriptive phrase. So, inquiry. It turns out that you can pretty much explain every story, fiction and nonfiction, through this fairly simple organizational theory. I'm going to talk about this through the lens of fiction, but it is everywhere. So, stories are made of these four elements. They're mixed in different proportions. Milieus, inquiries, characters, and events. These elements can help determine where a story starts and stops and the kinds of conflicts your characters face. 
 
So, for instance, milieu stories are driven by place. These stories begin when a character enters a place and they end when they exit. So, things like Gulliver's Travels, Around the World in 80 Days, are classic examples. The neat thing is that if you know where a milieu story ends, this also tells you what sort of conflicts go in the middle, because your job as an author is to figure out what your story needs to do and then systematically deny them the solution. So, milieu conflicts end when your character exits the place. That means that the conflicts are all about keeping the character from leaving. So these are things like struggling to exit, trying to survive, and attempting to navigate. That's milieu.
 
Inquiry stories are driven by questions. They began when a character has a question and they end when they answer it. It's a super complicated structure. So, mystery stories, classic inquiry stories. Like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot. For an inquiry conflict, your goal is to keep your character from answering the question. They're lied to, they can't understand the answer, the answers lead to dead ends, so many red herrings. These are inquiry conflicts.
 
Character stories are pretty much driven by angst. In the simplest form, they began when a character's unhappy, they end when they are happy. But the real start of a character story is when a character says, "Who am I?" and it ends when they're like, "Oh. This is who I am." They begin with this shift in identity, the self identity, and they end when that character solidifies their self-definition. So, coming-of-age stories, romances. The big thing there with conflicts, your character's trying to change, stop them. Don't let them break out of their roles. Fill them with self loathing. Have the change backfire. I'm not really a writer. I mean, that's a character story, right?
 
Event stories are driven by action. These began when the status quo is disrupted. So when normal breaks. They end when it's restored or there's a new status quo. Yes, everyone dies does count as a new status quo so this is disaster stories, like Inferno, Deep Impact. By this point, you probably understand the drill. You do not let your character restore the status quo. You get fight scenes, chase scenes, explosions. They try to set things right. It has unintended consequences. Just being mean. Like, that is your literal job as an author.
 
Now, it is easy to confuse character stories and event stories. Character stories are about internal conflicts. I'll never be popular. Event stories are about external conflicts. Oh, no, an asteroid is coming at the Earth.
 
So that's what the individual M.I.C.E. elements look like. We are going to do a deep dive into each one of those. But as we do that, I'm just going to go ahead and flag for you to think about, that you almost never see single thread stories. Most stories are made up of multiple threads. Because, honestly, the single thread stories tend to be really dull. So, how do you do it? Think about nesting code. For those of you who have ever done any HTML, if I just say nesting code, you understand what is happening. You'd have milieu, inquiry, inquiry, milieu. For those of you who've never done any HTML, think of it like unpacking a box from IKEA. You open the box… Or just a toy chest. You open the box, and you pull out all of your inquiry toys, and you're going to play with those. Inside that box, there's another smaller box that is made up of character. You pull that box out and open it and you pull out all of your character toys. You play with those toys. Then, at the end, you pack them back into the box. In order to get the boxes to nest neatly, you have to put the character toys back into their box, put it back inside the inquiry box, and then put those toys away. Otherwise you will never be able to return it to IKEA.
 
So, to use a concrete example, Wizard of Oz is a beautifully nested story. It begins with a character story. Dorothy is dissatisfied with her role as a Kansas farm girl. Then we open an event. Tornado! Then we open the milieu, Welcome to Oz. Then we get the inquiry. What do the ruby slippers do? We get to the end of the story, the movie, and then Glinda says, "Oh. The ruby slippers will carry you home. Oo…oo…oo." Which, honestly, she could have said at the beginning. But that closes the inquiry. Dorothy leaves Oz, which closes the milieu. She returns to Kansas, where everything is fine, which closes the event. Then, Dorothy says, "I didn't need to go looking any farther for adventure than my own backyard," which closes character.
 
So when you have stories that feel like the endings fizzle out or the ones that feel like they end and then end again and end again. Two Towers, I'm looking at you. This is often because the nesting code is broken. So, what we're going to be talking about is how to understand what each piece of the nesting code does so that you know which toys you're pulling out, and which ones you're going to use, and how to put them back.
 
So, there is my big overview. Now we're going to talk a bit as a group, after I've just blathered for quite a while.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] Should we pause for book of the week before we talk as a group?
[Dan] Yes, we should. You've kind of already covered the book of the week. Why don't you tell us about the Wizard of Oz?
[Mary Robinette] [laughter] Why? Why, yes, thank you, I will. I'm going to recommend the Wizard of Oz as my book of the week. This is the film version. One of the things… It's a film that comes on frequently in the US. But in my childhood, with broadcast television, when you only had three channels, when it came on, you watched it because it was on. I have watched it as an adult. It is beautifully nested. It is fun. To my surprise, it's actually quite funny when you watch it. There's a lot of jokes in it. I got to see it broad… Broadcast. I got to see it screened on the big screen with a full auditorium [in the before times]. I was amazed that it is really very much a comedy. When you think about it, this makes sense because all of the… The scarecrow, the cowardly lion, and the tin man all came out of vaudeville and were noted comedians and song and dance people of their day. So, it's good. It's like worth watching again. Then, we're going to give you homework about it. But that's the thing I'm going to recommend watching this week.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] It is maybe beside your point of M.I.C.E. Quotient, but I will also say, the Wizard of Oz has entered English vocabulary to a Shakespearean degree. It gets quoted by people who don't even realize they're quoting it. Because it has so many incredible lines of dialogue that have just kind of become part of the fabric of how our brains communicate.
[Mary Robinette] Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] So, I have a question for you to kick off this conversation. What do we do if we are not really a planner or an outliner? How can we still use M.I.C.E. Quotient stuff?
[Mary Robinette] I'm so glad you asked. Yeah, so this is one of the places where I actually think the M.I.C.E. Quotient shines. If you are writing instinctively, and you're going along and you hit a point, you're like, "Oh, no. I don't know what happens next." The thing that the M.I.C.E. Quotient is really good at is it's not talking to you about pacing, it's not talking to you about like how things… Like, the moment by moment structure. What it's really good at is helping you make decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. So if you're paralyzed by choice, what you can do is look at what you've already got happening. So if you're sitting there and you're thinking, okay, my character is trapped in this room and I need to get them out. Oh, I'm in a milieu. This is a milieu. Okay. What are the things that can go wrong related to trying to get out of the room? Then you can find your way out that way. Where you run into problems and you get story bloat, which is one of the things that can frequently happen to someone who is pantsing, is that you're like, okay, my character's trapped in a room and I need to ramp up the tension. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have their sister call them and ask them why they aren't at… Why they're not at the wedding yet. Why they're late to the wedding. Okay, but now you just introduced this whole wedding thing that you have to close down, and, that's a character thread, because now they feel like a bad sister, and that's terrible. So it can help you make that choice about what things you want to… What toys you want to play with in that moment.
[Dan] Awesome.
[C. L.] Very nice.
[Charlotte] Choose your can of worms carefully. 
 
[Charlotte] I have a couple of questions, actually. Where did the M.I.C.E. Quotient come from, because the first time I heard of it was on Writing Excuses and now I'm on Writing Excuses talking about it.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I learned it from Orson Scott Card, when I took his Literary  Boot Camp. He and I do not see politically eye to eye at all. But he was a gifted teacher and he had a book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which included the M.I.C.E. Quotient in it. I have done some tweaking and expanding. In the original, inquiry was called idea, which was confusing. What he meant was that a character was trying to chase down an idea. But it began when you asked a question and you ended when it answered it. So I renamed it to ask-answer and then inquiry.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I think the nesting code thing is me. I'm not sure about that, though.
 
[Charlotte] Okay. Thank you. My other question is there's a rumor going around… I mean, you've already said that M.I.C.E. stories have more than one element, but there's a rumor that I've seen in more than one place that a short story has one thread, a novella has more than one, maybe two, and a novel has two plus, maybe three or four. Is that right?
[Mary Robinette] So, no. I mean, yes and no. It is extremely rare to see something that only has one. You'll see that in flash. But most of the time what you have is, you have what I call kind of a major and a minor, or a light frame with short stories. The thing is that all of those elements are present. What you're looking at is which ones are pulling you all the way through the story. So if you think about the thread as a piece of elastic and you stretch that piece of elastic out. That, you're putting tension on that. The reader is holding on until that elastic releases. When it releases, you get this cathartic burst. So the more pieces of elastic you pull on, kind of the more strength you need to stretch that, and the more cathartic bursts you're going to get. But in a short story, you don't necessarily have enough room to tie on each of those pieces of elastic. So what you have is… Like, this moment right now is an inquiry thread within a larger thing. Arguably, Writing Excuses is frequently all about inquiry. But you'll… If a character is asking a question within a scene, and it's not an inquiry story, then asking it and then getting the answer, that is a very tiny M.I.C.E. thread that's happening within it. Whether or not you want to let it become a driver and be something that you maintain and sustain all the way through, that's the thing that adds the length. So anything that you're trying to sustain all the way through, those are the things that add length to the story. Which is why you almost never see more than one or two. I see, usually, that there's… Most short stories have two. 
 
Wait, wait. I think we've just been joined by a tiny cat. Yes, there is a tiny cat who's just joined us.
[Inaudible little tiny cat]
[Mary Robinette] If you hear a small mrrp sound, that is Felix. So, anyway. So, that's basically it. A novel can have 50 bajillion of them. But every time you add one, it kind of has the potential to make the thing half again as long, because you're… Every scene that you're sustaining it in, you're having to spend words to sustain it.
[Charlotte] Right, thank you.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So, we should wrap this episode up. It was long this time and mostly me talking. The next… The rest of them will involve other people way more. But, as it happens, I'm going to talk just a tiny bit more to give you your homework. Which is to actually watch Wizard of Oz, but what I want you to do is I want you to watch it with a piece of paper and I want you to track the M.I.C.E. elements. So you're going to be using M, I, C, E. What you're going to be looking at when you're watching it is when the elements open, when it closes, but you're also going to look for the smaller elements within it. For instance, when Dorothy gets to the witch's castle, she has to go into the castle and back out of it. So that is a milieu within the larger milieu of Oz. So, just track when she's keeping them alive… When things are being kept alive. The initial disruption of reminding us that things have been disturbed. So track them through, and see what you learn from doing that.
[Dan] Awesome. Well, thank you very much. I know that we all have lots more things we want to say, but that's what the other seven episodes are for. So join us again next week when we're going to dig really deep into milieu. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now. Go. Write.
 

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Writing Excuses 14.35: What You Leave Out

Writing Excuses 14.35: What You Leave Out
 
 
Key Points: Worldbuilding an iceberg? Just build the tip of the iceberg, and make readers think the rest of it is there, too. Build what's needed for verisimilitude. Figure out where your scenes are set, then figure out what that looks like and how it works. What are you going to be using the most? What will my characters be directly interacting with? Give the reader information in ways that asks questions, instead of answers them. Use relationships to other events, rather than exact times. Leave it out, if it doesn't help the story. Think about what the book is, then do the research. Do you need to show the event happening or can you just tell the reader that the event happened and had an outcome? Sometimes, you don't want to go there. Postpone that decision until you need it! Be aware of the uncanny valley of worldbuilding -- far off, skip the details, it's okay, we got the broad strokes. Too close, too many details, and suddenly readers start asking questions. Don't fall into that valley! Watch out for the super-detailed realistic piece that makes everything else look fake. Focus on what you actually need to keep the story from falling apart. Avoid worldbuilding details that would ruin the story.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 35.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What You Leave Out.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Pause]
[Howard] That probably wasn't what I was supposed to leave out, but go ahead.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] We all just sat there, going, "What is he? Oh!"
[Mary Robinette] And you are?
[Dan] I'm Dan, I guess.
[Howard] And I'm Howard. And unapologetic.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] All right. What you leave out.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled not amused]
[Brandon] So when I teach my students about this topic, one of the things I mention is when I was a newer writer, one of the things I got told frequently is that you want to, in worldbuilding, worldbuild a ton. But not put all of it in. Put enough of it in that the reader… You're indicating to the reader that it's like an iceberg, right? You can see the tip and you can see that there is so much more beneath. The more I became a published writer, the more I worked in it, the more I realized that that was… not a fantasy, but perhaps people in the business making it sound a little more grandiose than it is. Because most people I know do not worldbuild the entire iceberg and then show you the tip. What they do is they worldbuild the tip, and then they find a way to worldbuild a hollow iceberg that makes you think that there is the rest…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Underneath there. The goal in worldbuilding is not to do everything, just to do as little as you can and still look like you've done everything.
[Howard] Two nights ago, I was watching the special features for the movie Deepwater Horizon, for that film. They built an 85% scale oil rig over a little 3 foot deep pond. The reason they did it was so that when the actors were outside up high, shooting scenes, the actors are reacting as if they are outside and up high. They could have done the whole thing green screen, but they didn't. They needed that level of verisimilitude. Then there was this point where the VFX guy said, "So, we didn't actually build the whole oil rig. We only built the front." You see this scene where the helicopter is coming in and the camera has panned around the oil rig and it is just… Like 25%, 20% of the oil rig. Then the VFX says, "This is what we had to build," and throws all the other stuff in. After hearing how much time they spent building 20% of the oil rig for verisimilitude, the peace that they needed, this iceberg thing totally makes sense. Build the piece that's required for verisimilitude. Drill all the way down on that. Then fix the rest in post.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] So, how do we apply this to our worldbuilding? What do you guys do when you are worldbuilding? How do you give this indication that there's more underneath there? How do you decide what to leave out of your story? How do you decide what not to worldbuild?
[Dan] So, following along with this set building metaphor here, I remember reading an early interview with Gene Roddenberry when they were doing the original Star Trek series. He said that he wanted to have an engine room, and they weren't going to build him one, until he put that scene into the pilot episode. He's like, "Look, well, we have to have a scene here. I'm sorry, there's no way around it." So they gave him an engineering. What I do when I'm building my worlds and planning my books is I figure out, "Well, where are my scenes set? Where do I want those scenes to be set?" Am I going to be talking enough about main engineering, for example, that I need to figure out what it looks like and where it is and how it works, or is my story going to focus on some other thing? So they didn't build the entire, or even 20%, of the Starship Enterprise. They built a bridge and an engineering room and a transporter room, and that's kind of it. Maybe some hallways. Because that's where they knew their story was going to take place. So I try to figure out what am I focusing on, what am I going to be using the most, and that's what I focus on.
[Mary Robinette] I'm very much the same way. I really only worry about the things that my characters are going to be directly interacting with. I want to make sure that I understand enough of how they interact, of how it works, so that the interaction makes sense. But, like, when we move through our daily life, we interact with a lot of stuff that… There's a number of houses that you passed on the street and you have no idea what's in those houses. But they're still houses. You go to Disneyland. You don't actually know what it takes to make Disneyland work. It's just the front facing stuff. So one of the things that I do is that I think about the pieces that my character is going to have that direct interaction with, like you were talking about. One of the ones that I find works really well our past events. Referring to things… Usually these are things that I have no idea of what they actually are. But instead of saying, "Well, this happened in 1457." Like, I don't actually want to figure out how long ago a thing happened. I don't know. So I'll say, "Well, it happened during the… Right after the battle of the seven red armies." Everyone's like, "Oh, well, the battle of the seven red armies."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Clearly, she spent all of this time thinking about that. What that's done is it saved me from actually working out a timeline. Because I've… Now I can place the battle of the seven red armies anywhere I need to be.
[Dan] One of the things that that suggests to me is that you have given them the information in a way that asks more questions rather than answers them. That gives a gre… I mean, we know when it took place, but we know it based on a relation to an event rather than an exact number of years. In the audience's mind, it's not answering the question so much as it's saying, "Don't worry, I've got this. Also, here's something else to worry about."
 
[Brandon] Have you ever spent a lot of time in your worldbuilding before writing or during writing a story and then decided to leave that out of the story?
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.
[Brandon] When, why, and what made you make that decision?
[Mary Robinette] In the Glamorous Histories, for Without a Summer, I spent a great deal of time figuring out how Parliament worked in relationship to glamour, and what laws were being passed and not passed, and got into the novel and realized that that entire plot structure was completely irrelevant. I like knew… I had spent all of this research on this one particular historical figure who never appears in the novel now. It was basically, it just didn't help the book. Chucked it. It was one of the things that made me realize that I really need to think about what the book is and then do the research. I will say that I approach my research now the same way that I… I mean, I approach my worldbuilding the same way that I approach my research, which is that all do like these broad strokes, but I only really drill down on the stuff that I actually need to.
[Brandon] I spent a lot of time in the Stormlight Archive before I was writing it, working on the writing systems. The glyphs that they were going to draw and things like this. I left that all out because once I actually wrote the book and I looked back at the stuff I'd done, I realized I'm not an artist.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Beyond that, I'm not an expert in languages and… I just hired that out. So I took all the stuff I did… I didn't even give it to them. Because I'm like, "You know what, I'm going to use the text that I've written in the book." I'm going to give this to the artist and I'm going to say, "What would you imagine this to be?" Isaac came up with stuff that was waaay better than any of the stuff that I had come up with. It kind of taught me, also, that maybe I should spend my effort where I know I'm going to be using it in the story, and then I can, after the fact, I can hire some of these things out.
[Dan] Brandon, you and I just did this yesterday, actually, on the project we're collaborating on. The Apocalypse Guard. We've been wrestling with this book for months now, and yesterday made the decision that kind of the main thing we need to do to fix it is to axe one of the magic systems.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Dan] It was something very cool that we considered foundational to the story, but now that we're looking at the book in its current form, it's kind of beside the point.
[Brandon] It's also the thing that is causing the biggest problem with the story, because where the story is spiraling out of control are all these scenes where I spent lengthy amounts of time talking about the worldbuilding and the history. Scenes that Dan cut out a lot of when he did his revision.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] But the effect of it's still there. It's leading to this big confusing ending where I have… Do what I do, tie all these worldbuilding elements together. But in ways that were cool for those worldbuilding elements and don't really work for the story.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] It's a point where we have to cut out… One of the things that is my signature is a magic system. Granted, we have multiples. So it's still going to be cool. But it's going to be a way better book if we just streamline.
[Howard] My approach here is often to ask where the line is between show versus tell. There are times in the story where it's absolutely required for the reader, because it's fun, because there's emotional content, whatever, to show an event happening. Then there are times when all the reader needs is to know that the event happened and there was an outcome. So entire scenes will vanish from the writing, because what I needed to do, with the story needed, was for somebody to say, "Battle was fought. So-and-so won." "Oh, really, that sounds terrible." And off we go with the core story.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] All right. So our book of the week is Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder. I got to read this, an arc of it. It is fantastic. This is near future. It's an Internet of Things. A young woman discovers that her father has been murdered. She thinks. Everyone else thinks that it was a… Just an accident. Then people start coming after her. How do you disappear when everything is connected? So it's really, really cool. It feels like he has thought of everything. But the stuff that we're actually seeing is just the stuff that she interacts with directly. It's great worldbuilding, great characterization. I mean, it's a really good book. It also happens to illustrate some of these points.
[Brandon] Excellent. That was Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder.
 
[Brandon] So, we've talked about worldbuilding elements that we cut out. Are there ever things that you have decided even before you launch into the book, you're like, "I'm just not going to touch that. I'm not going to go that direction with the worldbuilding." Things that you just… Why have you done this?
[Mary Robinette] Oh, like in the Lady Astronaut books, I very carefully do not talk about what the rocket engine is that is driving this ship to Mars. I like really carefully do not talk about that. Because of the amount of research that I was going to have to do. But also, my character is not a rocket engineer. Right? She pilots things. She needs to know how to pilot things, and she does math. So, she needs to do those things. But I did not need to know how the rocket engine worked. And as soon as I worked on figuring that out, that was going to lock me into certain decisions. Like, if I decide that it is atomic oxygen, that locks me into one line of technology. If I decide that it is nuclear, that locks me into another line of technology. Because I don't know what subsequent books are going to need, I decided to not make that decision and to leave room for it to be any of those things, and just… I establish some trust with the reader early on, so that I can just… Like, just get in there and…
[Brandon] You know…
[Mary Robinette] It's like, they're going to Mars. Obviously, they've solved how they get there.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I had a conversation with this… About this same topic with a writer that I know… That we were kind of brainstorming on some worldbuilding and things. The way I presented it as there's like an uncanny valley of worldbuilding where at a certain point, it's far off, and you're leaving out the right details from what we're doing so that nobody starts to question really how it works. Like, if you don't do enough, people are confused and you start to lose them. You do the right amount, and people are willing to take your word on it. They suspend their disbelief, they accept the worldbuilding, it feels really logical to them, you've got the couple of corner cases that they would assume. Then there's a stage where you start explaining it so much that the rational part of their brain kicks in and says, "Well, wait a minute. This and this and this and this," and you start to hit this sort of uncanny valley where suddenly you lose them. They aren't willing to suspend their disbelief anymore. That can be a really fine balance to walk.
[Mary Robinette] We have this problem in theater, with… All the time. Where you've got a set, and if you go very minimalist with it, you're asking the audience to be engaged. You go too minimalist with some shows, and everything falls apart. But if you've got like a set where everything looks really nice, and then there's this one piece that is hyper realistic, everything else in the story feels just awful. Beauty and the Beast, the animation… When they had… That was the first stuff of the computer animation…
[Dan] They introduced CG in the ballroom scene.
[Mary Robinette] The ballroom scene looks… It looks wrong, because it is more rendered than everything else. Then everything else starts to look false.
[Dan] I did a black box production of Assassins in college. It was all just super minimal sets, but we had a super realistic like rolltop desk, and it just… It looked terrible. Because it made the rest of the show looked terrible.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite pieces of set design that I ever did… This is a side tangent, but a good example. A friend of mine called me on a… On Monday and said, "We had a reading this weekend and are set designer did not show up with the set. I have just found out that she has skipped town with all of the money which she has spent on drugs. We open on Friday. Help me. I have $75."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So I'm like, "Okay." We sat down and we talked about what are the things that have to be on stage or the show will fall apart. It was a tree, the moon, and a wall. That was basically it. So I bought some foamcore, and I got some paint, and I did this dry brush minimalist New Yorker style thing of a tree, a moon, and the wall. I think I gave him a chair, too. As a bonus.
[Dan] 'Cause you're a benevolent god.
[Howard] You had eight dollars left.
[Mary Robinette] I still had eight dollars. I had to get paid out of that $75, you know. So I… But we stripped it down to what you actually need or the show will fall apart. When the review came out, it raved about the minimalist design and delicate ethereal touches of the set. Meanwhile, in the program, I am listed as scene proctologist, because I pulled that set out of my ass.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, point being, just look at the worldbuilding details that you need to keep the show from falling apart.
[Dan] Well, it can also be helpful to look at the worldbuilding details that would ruin things. When I did my cyberpunk series, I specifically avoided artificial intelligence. There's algorithms, there's swarm intelligence, but there is no self-aware thing because that is a singularity that I was not prepared to deal with. So, that's not in the story, it's not a possible technology in that world.
 
[Brandon] This story of Mary Robinette's actually leads us really well into our homework. Which Howard is going to give us.
[Howard] Yup. I want you to take your worldbuilding slider and I want you to pull it all the way to zero for one of your chapters. Take a chapter that's got some worldbuilding exposition in it, that's got some cues about what's going on in your world that are deepening things, and pull all those out. Leave yourself with zero worldbuilding. Have a look at that chapter and see which elements of the story fail and which elements of the story still work. This is not so that you can tell yourself that you don't need to worldbuild. This is so you can tell yourself… What the…
[Dan] I need a tree and a moon and a wall…
[Howard] I need a tree and a moon and a wall, and I will give myself a chair.
[Mary Robinette] As a bonus, in the liner notes, I'm going to give you a copy of the first scene of Shades of Milk and Honey in which I have done this exercise. So I have stripped out everything that I identified as exposition. I have to say, that scene is a mess.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.31: Learning to Listen As a Writer

Writing Excuses 13.31: Learning to Listen As a Writer
 
 
Key points: Write what you know? Extrapolate from what you know? Learn lots of things? Make sure you know before you write? Hemingway: if I write a story every day based on one thing I know, I will never run out of ideas. But how do you incorporate people and things you see around you? Often unconsciously, without knowing where I picked it up? Sometimes very consciously, write it down! Warnings? Sometimes. Often the attitude more than the exact words. Concepts! Pay attention or listen? Spend less time talking than listening, especially when it's something you don't understand. Watch for commonality or overlap. Let the other person tell you what they want to talk about. Release forms? No. A contract for expert knowledge. Be careful when you put people you know in your work. Try to make them not recognizably similar to specific people. Beware of using someone's personal experience as is. Nonfiction research? Watch for common experiences. Borrow an incident, but make the context and characters different. Do pause, and check. Cribbing reactions, probably not good. Borrowing incidents or events, probably okay. Do look for and celebrate differences, which are what make characters pop out and be unique.
 
( What did you say? )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Learning to Listen As a Writer.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] What?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm disappointed…
[Laughter]
[Howard] In Howard.
 
[Brandon] So. Old adage in writing, write what you know. Which I've always found a strange adage, because if I only wrote exactly what I know, and I think every new writer thinks this, you're going to end up with exactly the same book every time. But that's not what that adage means.
[Mary] No. I've always thought that that adage actually means extrapolate from what you know.
[Brandon] And learn lots of things. It kind of… I always… Often heard it referenced in this sort of make sure you know before you write. What we're going to be talking about today is if you want to write really spectacular characters, you probably want to learn to be an observer of human behavior and learn how to incorporate that into your writing. Which is full of all sorts of pitfalls at the same time. So, let's dig into it. How often do you incorporate things you see around you, specifically people? How do you do it? What are the issues you need to be aware of?
[Mary] A lot of times, I'm doing it unconsciously, because it's just something that I've overheard or seen and it's a mannerism… I don't actually remember where I saw it or picked it up. Other times, I do it quite consciously, where I will… Someone will say something. I'm like, "That's really smart and clever." I will… I have been known to just write it down.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Do you warn them, when you do?
[Mary] Ah… If it's someone I know, I warn them. If it's someone… Where it's on the subway or something, I'm like, "They're not even going to remember that they said that thing." It's not that I'm… The chances of it actually… First of all, the chances of my writing it down being exactly what they said? Pretty slim. But… Frequently, I don't wind up using it, but just the attitude of the character will stick.
[Brandon] For me, it will often be like the… If it's a clever quip like that, it's the concept. Why did I find this funny? A plus B was amusing to me. Can I come up with other A plus B's that are funny in the same way? But sometimes it's the same things you just mentioned. I say that character… The way this person is talking, that snapshot of a personality, is something I want to start playing with in my head until the character will work out.
[Howard] In terms of behavior as a writer, I would categorize that more under pay attention than listen. Listen, for me, usually means when I'm talking to another person, when we're having a conversation, I want to spend less time talking than I spend listening. I don't want to tune out the things that I don't understand. A while back, I just posited a question in response to some silliness that was happening. If somebody in a conversation with you describes an experience they've had that is completely alien to you, what is your reaction? Do you explain it away by telling them they're wrong? Or do you believe them, because there must be some reason that they're telling you this, and continue to listen and maybe learn about something that is completely alien to you? After adopting that second mindset, after realizing, you know what, my experiences, no matter how old I get, how well-traveled I get, how smart I think I am, my experiences are always going to not include 99% of what happens out there. If I want to be able to put those things in a story, if I want to be able to be a good person, I have to listen, and I have to believe. Because most people… I mean, when people are telling you about a thing that happened to them, or a way that they feel, most people aren't lying about that. They're being honest.
 
[Mary] The… One of the things that you were saying about the fact that your experience is only going to be like 1% at best of commonality or overlap, it just reminded me, the… Do you know where write what you know comes from?
[Brandon] No, I don't.
[Mary] It's actually Hemingway. I'm going to paraphrase it badly, but he basically said something like, "If I write… If I pick one thing that I know each day and write a story based on that, I will never run out of ideas." Which is a very different interpretation of write what you know! I think that one of the things for me about learning to listen as a writer is also learning to listen to the… To your own experience, and the places where your experience overlaps with someone else's. That drawing those lines and those parallels are one of the things that can help you unpack stuff.
[Brandon] Right. You may not, in other words, know what it's exactly like to be a welder in the 1940s, but you might know what it's like to be a father, and build on that commonality and explore the parts that are different while reinforcing the parts that are the same as you build a character.
 
[Mary] Yeah, this is something that my mom talks about. So my mom spent several decades as an arts administrator, and would have to… She would have to schmooze. She was a fundraiser. So her job was to be an active listener, because that is the best way to make someone feel… Feel like they are in an interesting conversation, is to let them talk about themselves or the things that they're interested in. But to keep from lying about it, mom would steer the conversations to those overlaps, those places where the other person had something that she was also interested in. I think that that's one of the things as a writer that when we talk about learning to listen, it's really learning to be curious and engaged with other people and to not center yourself in the conversation.
[Dan] Yeah. When I am talking to someone, this is particularly when I'm trying to learn someone… Learn something, I always learn the best stuff when I let them tell me what they want to tell me, rather than trying to get one piece of information. When I was talking to lawyers, I did a bunch of lawyer research for one of my books, there were two or three key things that I needed to know in order for my plot to work. But I learned so much more by just saying, "Well, you know, you… You're the expert here. Tell me more about your job and about what it's like and about your experiences." And just letting them take the conversation where they wanted.
 
[Brandon] This is part of why we're trying to do this, this year on Writing Excuses, is give you once a month or so a glimpse into someone's life that you may not have a chance to interview for things like this that you can use as a resource. My question then, to you… To the podcasters, is twofold. How do you record these things when you are interviewing someone? What physical means do you use? And number two, at what point do you need a release form to use this sort of thing? Do you ever need a release form, or what's the possible… 
[Dan] I have never actually used a release form. Typically, I will mention them in my acknowledgments of the book, and put in the little line of if there's mistakes, they're my fault, not theirs.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary] I've used a contract when I have been using someone… Using expert knowledge. With both… In the Glamorous Histories… Actually Glamorous Histories and Calculating Stars, I wound up hiring… In Glamorous Histories, I hired a historical law expert, and I also hired in Antiguan writer/editor to handle some dialects that I knew I was going to screw up. For the Calculating Stars, I hired an actual rocket scientist. Then, I also worked with some astronauts and some other NASA people who were not allowed to do this for money. Because it was exploiting their government position. But with all of them, I'm very upfront about this is the information that I need to get, and I do my research before I talk to them, so that I'm not asking them the 101 questions. Like, "How does a rocket fly?" I don't think…
[Chuckles]
[Mary] I… What I do is, I usually go in with very specific things that I need to know that I can't find. Then… Sometimes I will also do madlibs where I will write a line that just says, "He fiddled the jargon…"
[Laughter]
[Mary] "And turned to her and said jargon."
[Brandon] Jargon the jargon.
[Dan] That was the version of Calculating Stars that I read. It was awesome.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Now I…
[Mary] It was a lot of jargon.
 
[Brandon] I want to throw something out to you, listeners. We are planning right now to go to NASA and get you some…
[Mary] Some actual as…
[Brandon] Some actual astronauts on the podcast. I tell you this, we'd keep it a surprise but I have…
[Mary] We cannot…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Well, at this point in the…
[Brandon] No faith in our ability to not tweet about it.
[Howard] At this point, they may have already heard one of those episodes.
[Brandon] They may have. That's right. It's possible.
[Dan] Maybe.
[Howard] This was either really surprising, or now you know how excited we were about… 
[Laughter]
[Howard] That thing that you heard us be very enthusiastic about when we recorded it.
[Brandon] Were we going to put that one… Yeah. But…
 
[Dan] So I wanted to jump in quick and say that what Mary's talking about are very kind of specific and professional relationships. If what you're doing is just putting in… Putting people that you know into your work, you often have to be much more careful. When I wrote Extreme Makeover, which is about a beauty company, and I have worked in several beauty companies, I went out of my way to make sure that none of the executive staff in that book were recognizably similar to the executives that I had worked with in those companies.
[Brandon] That's smart.
[Dan] To avoid this kind of what did you do?
[Brandon] It might be urban lore, because I've never had it explained to me firsthand. So this is not legal advice and I'm not a lawyer. But I've heard told to me that the dividing line is use somebody's personal experience. Like, they tell you a story of when they were in World War II, and what exactly happened to them, that's… Then you use that exact story, that is where you're crossing the line into danger territory, that you're going to want to have a release. Because potentially, if that person were to decide to write a book about their life in World War II, and you have used their story, they could materially prove that your story has wounded their chances of their story selling. But when you say this person is a big interesting blowhard at a company, I'm going to create a big interesting blowhard like them and write a story, you don't need a release for that. So, watch that line.
[Howard] You're not going to [garbled]
[Dan] There's that blowhard.
 
[Mary] Just… Listeners. You're right, we did go to NASA last week for you guys.
[Laughter]
[Dan] It was literally last week.
[Brandon] Literally last week.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Mary] But you can tell that we have not been to NASA yet, so we're engaging in time travel.
[Dan] We went to NASA last week. They had a time machine.
[Brandon] We will have another NASA episode coming up.
[Mary] I think it's when we will go to NASA last week.
[Brandon] We will have gone to NASA.
 
[Brandon] All right, let's stop for the book of the week. Howard?
[Howard] Okay. In the interest of learning to listen, there's a nonfiction book by Stephen Dubner and Steven Leavitt called Think like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. It is… It's a fairly short read, I think it's about a five hour audiobook, and it's got a couple of hours of the Freakonomics podcast tacked onto the end of it. But they talk about how their data gathering tools, as economists, as researchers, forced them to rethink things that were conventional wisdom, common knowledge, whatever, completely turning some of our ideas on their heads. Honestly, if you've… If you're unfamiliar with Freakonomics and all that, that five-hour listen may very well retrain parts of your brain so that you can listen in ways that you weren't able to before.
[Brandon] If you have somehow come to our podcast and not listened to one of the most popular podcasts in the entire world… 
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Then you should be familiar with it, because it's actually a very fun listen. They're great books. I really enjoy them.
[Howard] Well, Dubner, the journalist of the two, Dubner narrates. He's so conversational. It's just a… It was a delight to listen to this book.
 
[Brandon] So, building off of that, how specifically do you guys take a nonfiction book and use it as research for a book you're working on?
[Mary] Heavily. Says the person who writes historical fantasy and science fiction. I use it really heavily. But what I do is I look for common experiences that I see multiple types of characters have. I… But I'm also not above like going, "Well, that's a really harrowing story that I am giving as backstory to one of my characters." I typically don't… I can't even say that. Usually, you can take a single incident and when you put it into your story, the context is so different and the characters that are happening are so different, that it's not the same thing. Like in… There's a character in Calculating Stars who has a medical issue that was a medical issue that I read about in an astronaut biography. But it's also a medical issue that my father-in-law experienced. My father-in-law is a Vietnam-era fighter pilot. In both cases, it was probably caused by being a fighter pilot. So that was the kind of thing, and I was like, well, this experience is something that I feel totally free lifting because it's not a unique experience. Even though I'm taking the inspiration from a specific astronaut's biography.
[Brandon] Right. You want to take this and have it inform a larger picture of the character you're developing, rather than lifting one person wholesale and having every beat be the same.
[Mary] Well, the other thing is that you can take the same incident, but the character is going to react to it differently than the real person did. That's the stuff that's interesting.
 
[Howard] Procedurally, for me, I've found that… I've consumed… Over the last couple of years, I've probably consumed 250 hours worth of documentaries on World War II and space travel and a whole host of other things. All of that, I can't point at any one thing specifically that has informed my writing. But my writing is better as a result. Things have a more real shape because I am learning more real things. One of the most important skills I've picked up was the ability to question myself before I commit something in print. Where I would take something that I'm writing that… You know what, that's right, I remember reading this in a whatever or hearing it in a documentary. Writing something down, often something scientific or mathemalogical or whatever. Then I'll stop and say, "You know what? Let's take a moment and Google and make sure I'm using those words correctly."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Often, I will find out that I remembered that incorrectly, and I'm going to fix that now. It's… The more I know, the more I pause to check what I know before I commit something to print.
[Brandon] Now, did you say mathemalogical?
[Howard] I said mathemalogical and I said it on purpose, because it's funny.
[Brandon] That is so awesome.
[Laughter]
[Dan] But now, we've called attention to it. I've been trying to remember the name of this woman and I can't and I feel very bad. I will look it up and make sure it gets in the liner notes. But I listened to a memoir by a woman who was a chaplain for the Forest Service.
[Ooo]
[Dan] It was fascinating. There was one particular incident with a murderer that she had to deal with that I just thought was incredible. I spent a year or so trying to figure out how I could incorporate some aspect of that into the book I was writing, and realized that what I loved about it was her reaction and her choices that she had made in that event. That is what kept feeling wrong, and I ended up not using that. So that, for me, has become the line. That if I'm going to talk about an event or a technology or a thing or an illness or whatever it is, that's fair game. But if I am cribbing somebody else's very specific reaction to it, then I've stepped over the line.
[Mary] As we are wrapping up, the thing that I'm going to say that we have not said is we've been talking about the commonalities, but the other thing that's really hugely important is to look at and celebrate the differences. Because those are the things that are going to make your characters really pop out and be unique. So the commonalities are the things you can kind of coast on those, and it's important to know where they are, but the places where your character reacts that are different, those are the things that are, I think, really important. My mother-in-law says that you know that you love someone because… when you love them because of their flaws. I think that's kind of one of the things with… When we're trying to create characters and to listen as a writer, to listen to the things that are different from us and to celebrate those.
 
[Brandon] Awesome. Dan, you're going to give us some homework.
[Dan] Yes. We talked earlier in the episode about interviewing people. So we want you to do that. It might be a good idea to use a clipboard, just so you have something that makes you look a little more like an official interviewer, and a little less like a weirdo in a grocery store. But find somebody that you don't know, out in the world, and just ask them if you can take a few moments and just interview them quickly. Ask about their lives, ask about what they do, their job, learn something you didn't know before about a person that you've never met.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker2018-07-04 10:12 am
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Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships

Writing Excuses 13.26: Character Relationships
 
 
Key points: Beyond the character arc, with characters changing and developing, other characters get involved. That's where character relationships come in. Some people plan them in advance, while other people discover them in the writing. Leave yourself wiggle room, and when you find two characters that work well together, let them show you great scenes and better stories. Try the Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Mind: intelligence. Money: what is money for, and what are your goals? Morals: what's right and wrong? Manners: what's polite? Monogamy: hot, burning kisses? What is our relationship? The Marx Brothers: what's funny, and what's not! Alignment makes compatibility, differences create friction points, tension points. Another tool is position power versus personal power. How can you introduce backstory in a relationship quickly? A shared in-joke. Free indirect speech, aka internal monologue, reflecting on the relationship. Final question: the relationship after HEA! How do you write that? The classic romantic arc is a character arc, from I am dissatisfied with being alone to they hook up. After that, don't break the relationship, use an event arc, with something disrupting the status quo. External conflicts plus friction in the Kowal relationship axes equals story! Don't just strut like a hawk, scratch for your own worms.
 
( Putting words on the outline... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Character Relationships.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, we know what our characters… They have a big arc, and they're changing, and they're developing. Now other people are going to start interfering with that. Helping or hindering it. We're going to talk about character relationships. This is something that I do a lot ahead of time. But I know that Dan, for instance, just kind of… Often they…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Mess each other up and you see what happens.
[Dan] Sometimes. I do a mix of both. I like to plan out in advance when I know, for example, that I'm going to have a group of friends. I want to know how they all interact with each other. But very frequently, and in fact the book that came out earlier this year, Active Memory, turned into a father-daughter book. Not because I planned it that way, but because as I was writing the other two in the series, that relationship became more and more interesting every time the father came on screen. So by midway through the third book, I'm like, "Okay, you know what?"
[Laughter]
[Dan] "We're just going to focus on this, and we're going to do it right."
[Brandon] I would say… I mean, I joke about being a heavy outliner, but this is one of the places, no matter how much you outline, you have to have wiggle room for. When your characters are quote unquote on screen together and you find that you write them with great chemistry, that they are working… When those two characters are on screen, you have a better scene than when either of them are apart, you know that something is going on there, and you need to be willing to run with that and explore it. You want to write the scenes that are best. You want the characters to give you the opportunity to write better stories.
 
[Mary] This is one of those things that we're always talking about, that writing is a spectrum from outlining to discovery writing. This is one of the areas that I also tend to discovery write a lot. But I also have a tool that I use when I need to… Like, when I know that I'm going to need these two characters to fight, but I don't want it to be a stupid fight. Because… Oh, I see this all the time, where the characters are fighting and I'm like, "Why are you fighting? You're fighting… There's no…" Or conversely, the characters who really do not get along at all, and then suddenly wind up in bed together. I'm like, "What? You've got nothing in common." So allow me to introduce you to something that I call the Kowal relationship axes.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary] It's actually named after my mother-in-law, who used it as dating advice to my husband… Or to her son. I realized that it actually works incredibly well for describing the ways we interact with not just a romantic partner but kind of for everybody. So the idea is that there are six axes along which relationships exist. The more closely you are aligned on any one of these, the more compatible you are. The farther apart, the less compatible. It… The sliders don't have to be very far off. So those are mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers.
[Laughter]
[Mary] I will grant that my husband added the Marx Brothers after he realized… After we were married, that I had never seen…
[Laughter]
[Mary] We'll start backwards and work our way up. Marx Brothers basically represents that you have the same sense of humor.
[Brandon] Right. You laugh at the same thing.
[Mary] It's a very simple one. Monogamy is not that you're both monogamous, but that you have the same idea of what the relationship is. I mean, you've experienced the thing where someone thinks that you are BFFs, and you're like, "I kind of vaguely know you from work…" It's really super uncomfortable. So it's just you have to have… She labeled that one as hot burning kisses, which is better for the romantic stuff.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So they weren't all iterative?
[Mary] No.
[Brandon] When she… You being a writer have…
[Mary] Well, it was actually… The first four were alliterative, and then…
[Brandon] Then, hot burning kisses.
[Mary] Then hot burning kisses.
[Dan] Then hot burning kisses. Which, to be fair, can stand alone.
[Mary] It's true. So, manners mean that you have the same idea of what is polite… What is… And what is not. Morals are different from manners. Morals is your sense of what is right and wrong in the world. So you can have morals that are in close alignment and manners that are wildly off, or the other way around. I mean, that's often why you know someone on the Internet who's a terrible person on the Internet, and you meet them in real life and they're so nice. It's because your manners are really closely aligned, while your morals are wildly off. Money is that you have the same sense of what money is for, and the same goals towards money. It doesn't actually necessarily mean that you have the same amount of money, but that…
[Brandon] For swimming through in your giant money vault, obviously.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That's what you do with it.
[Mary] Yes. Obviously. Mind is that you have comparable degrees of intelligence. What's interesting about this is that they really do not have to be very far off. So you can have people that are compatible. Like, the upper ends of all of these sliders in terms of their compatibility, but even just a little bit off… Those are the points where the friction is going to happen. What that does for you if you know that, if you know the places that they're a little bit farther… A little bit off, it tells you what the fight is going to be about.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] The… Why would you even say that?
[Mary] Yes.
[Howard] That surprise… We are so like each other, and yet you just… That thing.
[Dan] Yeah. The… Using those, some of them being close together can also be a good reason why the characters stick together, even though the others are far apart. I mean, the Lethal Weapon franchise is almost entirely founded on the idea that their morals are completely aligned and their manners are wildly 100% off.
[Mary] They have very similar… They're also lined up on mind and they're also… At the beginning… What's, I think is interesting is that they are in agreement on what their relationship is. Which is that we don't like each other.
[Brandon] I work alone.
[Mary] Yes. For both of them. Their understanding of what the relationship is evolves together. So those sliders move in the same…
 
[Howard] I have a much simpler tool that I deploy much differently, which is the two scales of power. Position power and personal power. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer has position power over the employee. But a very, very charismatic, intelligent, effusive employee has gobs of personal power, and without even trying, can undermine an employer who doesn't have any personal power. In fact, you see this a lot in workplaces, in all kinds of relationships. Where someone assumes that their personal power grants them position, or assumes that their position power grants them… For instance, friendship with everyone under them. I pay close attention to this in Schlock Mercenary, because the military organizations that make up so many… Or that encompass so many of the relationships in the books are inherently about position power, and there's a wide array of differing personal powers in there. I need to make sure… We talked about manners. Something that you would say to a fellow grunt is not something that you would say to an officer. That… That dichotomy, I have to keep track of that, because if I get it wrong, it knocks people out of the story.
[Dan] I had… I worked in an office, and was there for the moment when the guy with all the position power realized that he didn't have any personal power.
[Mary] Oh, hohoho.
[Dan] The office became unlivable. It was fascinating to watch that. That has just given me the dialogue to describe what happened.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have a book coming out!
[Mary] Yes. I have two books coming out, actually. I have a duology, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Book one is called The Calculating Stars. That's coming out this month. Actually, has just come out last week. The sequel, The Fated Sky, is coming out in August, at the end of the month. The set up for the first book is basically, it begins about two minutes before an asteroid slams into Washington, DC, in 1952, wiping out… It's actually the Chesapeake Bay, because it turns out that a water strike is way worse than a land strike. But it kicks off the space program hard and fast and internationally, with 1952 technology. So the first book is push to the moon, and second book is push to Mars. It's a woman-centered cast, because I've got a lot of… Because it's 1952, all of the women who are in Hidden Figures, all of those computers? Not only are they computers at that point, but historically speaking, a lot of them were also left over WASPs, Women Auxiliary Service Pilots from World War II. So you have a lot of people who are lighter than men, better able to handle gravitational blood pressure shifts, and who are walking computers.
[Brandon] It's out, it's awesome, I've read it, it's great. You guys should all go read it.
[Mary] So one of the exciting things for me about this book also is that I had astronauts reading it, and we are actually going to be at NASA and do a project-in-depth about The Calculating Stars, which is the first book in the series, in two weeks. Although we will have done it already… It's time travel, don't worry about it. So this gives you two weeks to read the book before we get to NASA. Go ahead. Three… Two… One… Lift off!
[Rumbling]
[laughter]
[Howard] Was I supposed to make a rocket noise?
[Mary] No.
[Howard] Oh.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] That was a terrible joke.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I was waiting to see. Is she going to say lift off? Or are we not going to do that? Nope, she did it.
[Brandon] Either way, there will be massive spoilers for Mary's book in two weeks, so you should read it now.
 
[Brandon] Let's… Let me ask you guys another question about relationships. One of my favorite things in books and in film and whatever is when you get two characters who minutes after interacting, you can read in their interactions an extensive history that they don't have to tell you point by point by point, which is boring. Characters who just… You can read their relationship in moments. How do you write this? Any tips, any tricks?
[Mary] An in-joke. Just one. You don't have to do a lot. But an in-joke, like if two characters are talking and one of them is like, "Oh, yeah, like the time with the pumpkin."
[Chuckles]
[Mary] You don't have to do anything more than that.
[Dan] You said you wouldn't bring that up, Mary.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Sorry.
[Brandon] They did that in the Dirk Pitt movie, and it worked really well, to kick off the fact that these two characters have been in lots of crazy hijinks together.
[Dan] A story that does this really, really well is Sneakers. Because there's that whole little group of misfits and people, and one of the great things they do is the character Mother, who is always bringing up weird conspiracy theories. The first time he does that, Sidney Poitier, who's the ex-CIA guy, he reacts before he starts the story. I mean, he starts the story, and before he has a chance to get to the weird stuff, he's already rolling his eyes. You immediately know, "Oh, they do this all the time."
[Laughter]
[Dan] They have this very specific relationship to conspiracies in government, and it tells so much in the timing of his reaction.
[Brandon] That's awesome. Yeah.
[Howard] The Rocket and Groot scene where we are introduced to them in Guardians of the Galaxy… Groot's only dialogue is "I am Groot," where Groot is drinking out of the fountain, and we establish very, very quickly that the relationship between these two is kind of father-son and kind of boss-employer and kind of brains and brawn, and yet there is something woven in there that we just don't know, but it's there.
[Mary] I think that the thing with that is not just the in-jokes, but also, tying into what Dan was talking about, that... the characters' reaction to each other. So this is a place that you can use one of the tools we talked about when we were talking about character voice, which is that indirect… That free indirect speech, where the character's internal monologue can be a little bit about their relationship. "Oh, no, no, no, not this story again."
[Brandon] You see this in relationship… Romantic relationships a lot. Someone walks on screen, in a movie or television show, and you know instantly that those two characters have a history, a relationship. Often times it's that they're extremely cold to one another, which we read as, "Oh, something happened in the past between those two." I would say, less is more, in a lot of these instances. 
 
[Brandon] Now, different topic. I wanted to make sure we asked you, Mary. You had an entire series where two characters went through a classic romance relationship, and then multiple books afterward where many people would have just stopped the series. In most movies and things, they just stop at the point where the first book ended. You wrote wonderful, awesome books about a different kind of relationship in some ways.
[Mary] So… Why, thank you. So, anyone who's married knows that you can actually be in a committed, happy relationship… Anyone who's in a committed, happy relationship, whether or not you're… You can be in this wonderful relationship, and there's still conflict. But the conflict is external. So the way I actually structured that… Okay. It took me a while to figure out. So I tend to think about the MICE quotient a lot. What I realized was that a romantic arc is structured as a character arc. The character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self, and then… That is, "I am alone." Then they hook up. That what happens when you… For the most part is that when people attempt to write relationships later, what they do is they're still writing a character arc, but once you're in a relationship, that couple is now a single unit, and you have to treat them as a single unit. So when you have the "I am dissatisfied with an aspect of self," that means that it's all about an internal conflict between the couple. So what I did was I treated it like an event arc instead, where they were totally happy with each other, but any event arc is when something disrupts their status quo. So I made sure that all of the conflicts that were hitting them were external conflicts, and then used the Kowal relationship axes to talk about how that friction expressed itself between them.
[Brandon] I would say that one of the reasons I like this is, it's a pet peeve of mine… Maybe that's the wrong term… That when the two characters hook up, the story is done. Which it's totally not.
[Howard] Or we have to make them break up so we can put them back together.
[Mary] That drives me crazy.
[Brandon] It's the sort of thing that I feel like, as storytellers, sometimes we internalize this thing which is a complete lie. Sometimes the best stories, in fact often the best stories, are when the reader's personally invested in both characters and personally invested in this relationship, which only happens once they are together. It's the same sort of thing in a different way that happens with Mistborn, this trilogy. If you haven't read it, the story that I originally wanted to tell was how do you keep an empire together after you've conquered it? When you're the Rebels and you've blown up the Death Star and taken over, and none of you have any experience in leading an empire or whatever, a republic, how do you make that happen? It's gotta be way harder than blowing something up, keeping it together. That's what made me initially start working on the series. With relationships, keeping together a relationship, I wouldn't say maybe it's harder, but in some ways it is, right? Because you have to work on it every day. The initial euphoria is gone, and something deeper is growing and building, but that's way more interesting.
[Dan] There's a beautiful quote from the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, in the fourth one, where the kid just wants to go off and be a hero. One of the witches says to him, "It's easy for the chicken to strut like a hawk. But let's see him scratch for his own worms." I always think that… That is such a more interesting story to tell, is how do you actually live rather than do this one cool thing and then be done.
[Mary] I think that it's also important to note that this is… This thing you're talking about of working on a relationship is not just a romantic relationship. Like, if you've met someone at a con or just school or… And they've moved away, it's difficult. You have to work constantly to maintain that level of friendship. It doesn't just take care of itself. I think that that's one of the things that you can do when… As a conflict point, as a tension point, is not the we want to break up, but we want to hang out and there are things getting between us. That's the other secret that I used in the Glamorous Histories is that I gave them, both characters, the same basic objective in addition to the same basic relationship objective, which was they wanted to get offscreen to a fade to black scene.
[Laughter]
[Mary] All they wanted… It's like, we really want to do a fade to black scene right now, but we're being attacked by pirates.
[Brandon] I would say… You mentioned friends kind of growing apart just because you're no longer in the same social circles. If that's happening to you, start a podcast with your friends…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Then you get to see them and hang out with them.
 
[Brandon] We're actually out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.
[Mary] Yes. So take the elements of the Kowal relationship axes. Look at your characters. Decide where their friction points are. I want you to just pick two of them. Don't pick all of them, if you want them to be friends. Decide why they're that way. It's not enough to say they're… They have different manners. Like one of them is from the south, one is from Hawaii, which is…
[Laughter]
[Mary] [garbled] and I. But pick two, decide why, and then give them an external conflict and let the friction express itself.
[Howard] Can you rattle off the axes again?
[Mary] Yes. They are also in the liner notes. Mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, Marx Brothers.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker2017-08-08 04:54 pm
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Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/06/12-32-structuring-a-short-piece/

Key Points: Flash fiction and short stories. Short fiction is usually just two MACE elements. Flash fiction is usually a single MACE element, often one problem to solve. Introduce the problem, a couple try-fail cycles, and solution. Often MACE elements get nested, or form frames. Also, changing POV often changes MACE elements, because they are all about affecting the primary character. MACE is often useful for pruning -- focus on what you really want to tell, and remove extra threads. Sometimes flash fiction, short fiction, implies questions or endings for the reader, instead of explicitly describing them. This is good for issue stories (elemental genre).

MACE: Milieu, Ask/Answer, Character, Event.
Milieu: starts when a character enters a place and ends when they exit (often returning home); main conflict is getting out, returning, stopping the main character from getting out of the milieu; journey, quest, man against nature.
Ask/Answer: the character asks a question, ends when they find an answer; main conflict is stopping the character from getting the answer: mystery, puzzle, trying to solve or find an answer. Sometimes getting the answer introduces a bigger question.
Character: internal conflict, starting with dissatisfaction with self, end with new self-definition or acceptance of self; conflicts block the character from finding satisfying self-definition; love, romance, coming-of-age.
Event: external conflict, status quo has been disrupted, ends with new status quo or resolution of some kind; conflicts block character from achieving new status quo.; action, adventures. Often event story introduces character story, as the disrupted status quo causes the character to question their self-definition.
(For more details, see the liner notes!)

( Swing that MACE, hit them in the gut... )

[Brandon] We're out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework to help us practice the MACE quotient?
[Mary] Yes. Now, ironically, this is probably the longest description…
[Laughter]
[Mary] For a homework assignment. What I want you to do is, I want you to take either a new idea or something that you're working on that you'd like to be a short story. I want you to write… Pick one of the MACE elements. Whichever one you want to pick. Whichever one you feel like is your major driver. I want you to describe that in three sentences. So the first sentence is where the story opens. The second sentences what your major conflicts are. What your major conflict is, or the type of conflict. Your third sentence is where that winds up. All three of those things should match. Then, I want you to pick a second MACE element and do the same thing. So you've got two things. Say you've got one that's character and one that is ask/answer. So that's part one and part two of your homework. Part three of your homework is to nest them. So that you start with the ask, then you introduce the character, then you close out your character tag, and then you close out your ask tag, so it's nested. Part four of your homework is to flip it, so that the character is on the outside… It doesn't have to be character, whichever of these you picked. Character is on the outside, ask/answer is on the inside. I have this written out in full detail, you'll be happy to know. It is in the liner notes. So that you don't have to remember all of the things that I've just told you. And all of the description of the MACE elements is also in this.
[Brandon] You get a worksheet this time!
[Mary] You get a worksheet.
[Whoohoo!]
[Mary] This is the benefit of the fact that I teach classes sometimes.
[Brandon] Excellent. That actually sounds like a lot of fun. You guys should all totally do that. But for right now… This has been Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses, now go write.

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[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com2011-08-11 05:11 pm
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Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

Writing Excuses 6.10: Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/07/writing-excuses-6-10-scott-cards-m-i-c-e-quotient/

Key points: MICE: milieu, idea, character, and event. Milieu: where the story takes place, starts when you enter the space, ends when you exit it. Stories about setting. Idea: start with a question, end when you answer the question. Character: start with a dissatisfied character, end with satisfaction or at least reconciliation. Event: something is wrong with the status quo, and ends with a solution. The MICE framework can be used at multiple levels, story, chapter, scene. Make promises and fulfill them. These can be nested, but close them in the order you open them. (Actually, reverse order -- MI ... IM).
( Mickey... Donald DUCK! )
[Brandon] All right, then. So, writing prompt. I should probably make myself do it, because I haven't done it in a while. So, writing prompt is do this with a different fairytale. Let's pick one.
[Dan] MICE quotient for Red Riding Hood?
[Mary] Red Riding Hood's a good one.
[Brandon] Red Riding Hood. That's a great one. MICE quotient for Red Riding Hood. Try and write a page of each story of the different things for MICE. Okay.
[Dan] Sweet.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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