Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-27-close-reading-on-character-an-overview-and-why-we-chose-c-l-clarks 

 

Key Points: Short stories are like tapas, a bite-size treat. Relationships. Backstory. Choices. Ability, what the character can and cannot do, role, tasks and responsibilities, relationship or loyalties, and status, where they are in a power structure. Sequence and anticipation. Momentum or velocity. You are who you choose to be. Dragon's tears, and nebulous expectations.

 

[Season 19, Episode 27]

 

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

 

[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their  craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles about the Navigator of the Seas from September 14th through the 27th of 2024. With stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions. An ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 27]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C. L. Clark's Short Stories. 

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I am very excited that we're doing a trio of stories for this section of our close reading. Because I love to write short stories, but also, I think that there's a lot that you can learn from looking at one author doing a few different short stories. So, as a reminder, we're going to be doing C. L. Clark's stories, You Perfect, Broken Thing, The Cook, and Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home. Which were all actually published in Uncanny Magazine. I think, Mary Robinette, you were the one who brought these stories first to our attention. What made you think of them?

[Mary Robinette] So, I have known C. L. Clark for a couple of years, and one of the things that I love about their writing is that they can be extremely emotional, get deep into a character, within a very compressed space. One of the first things that I read of theirs was You Perfect, Broken Thing. Like, even today, I had to reread just to prep for this, it still makes me cry when I get to the end. That's a really beautiful gift, from a short story, is to have this kind of in-depth emotional response. The other thing that I love about it is that there's a very clear character arc that happens, and the character is encountering several different emotional spaces. Not only is the character inhabiting those different emotional spaces, the style of writing that C. L. Clark deploys to convey that is so specific to each moment, that it's… I thought that it was a really good example of "Look at this! Look at how much freedom you have when you are attempting to convey character."

[DongWon] We hear the word character-driven a lot when talking about different kinds of fiction, different kinds of stories. C. L. Clark's work really drives that home. It definitely feels like the character has taken the wheel of the car of this story and has just taken us wherever they're going to go. Right? There's so many unexpected choices for surprising or nuanced things that the characters say or do that in each… All three of these stories will catch me off guard in a way that was so delightful and so fun. In a couple of them, really, making choices that were almost borderline [garbled] choices in ways that I think are so relatable and understandable and… I can't even be mad at them when they've done something that I so heartily disagree with.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. The other thing that I really like with this is the second story that we mentioned, The Cook, is supershort. It's like 800 and… It's less than 900 words. There is major action that happens offstage and all we're looking at in this story is the difference in the way to people are relating to each other, based on this major action that happens offstage, but the major action is not the interesting part. So it just gets quickly referred to in just a couple of lines, and then we go on. I find that very compelling, that… There are a lot of these character portraits that I find in their work.

 

[Howard] I want to tie a couple of things together here and clarify something. Erin, you said you love to write short stories, and, Mary Robinette, you mentioned The Cook. I love to read short stories. I was trying to figure out why, and I realized I think I like to read them for the same reason I like to eat tapas. I love being able to get in one bite a million flavors all at once. You think of a novel as… It could be a three-course dinner, it could be a pepperoni pizza with everything, it could be… If you think of it as a pepperoni pizza, or a pizza with everything, thinking of short stories as deconstructions of the pizza, as tapas, little bits of those things that would be in the full meal, and which, in and of themselves, are complete. That, coming back to the idea of just being a cook, that is the mastery that I found in reading these. That… They're small, but there is so much in there.

[Erin] One of the things I like is that… To just build on this pizza analogy, which I love, and is making me hungry, is that these are three different lengths of stories. There short stories, but one is this very tiny pizza bite type of like…

[DongWon] It's a bagel bite.

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] trying to think of a name for them. It's a little… Thank you. Bagel bites. You have one that's basically, like, maybe a cross section…

[DongWon] A hot pocket.

[Erin] The hot pocket. You're…

[DongWon] I'm on it.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Okay, I just want to be clear that the story is way better a story than a hot pocket is a food.

[DongWon] Hey, some people like hot pockets [garbled] hot pockets.

[Erin] The third is maybe a slice. So, each one of them… Because it's the same author writing them, there's a certain… There's certain things that are done in all of the stories that makes us… Like, there's cheese in all three of those things. Theoretically. But the way that that cheese would be expressed is different.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Erin] Similarly, like, things like a description of another person, all of these have relationships also at their core. But the way that people are described is slightly different when you have three words to do it versus a sentence versus maybe a paragraph.

[DongWon] One of the reasons we chose Time War is because there's like 3 to 4 different voices in that book. So it's really useful to break it down and compare. Short fiction, similarly, because they're bite sizes, the metaphor we've landed on, it's very easy to figure out how to talk about different aspects and highlight different aspects. Being able to cover a collection of short stories, a handful of them here, let's us really compare and contrast how the author is highlighting different aspects of character, drawing out different elements of character, across all three stories. So I think it'll make for a really dynamic and fun conversation.

[Howard] When we do close readings, the power of these, for me, is being able to reference the text, being able to read to you, fair listener, the words that did the thing. With the short stories, it's so much easier to find the words. Because, you know what, in this one, there's only six sentences to choose from that did this bit of lifting on that character.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find, having gone from short stories to novels, is that the skills that I learned in short fiction, I deploy in novel form so that I have more space for… Like, I establish a character very, very quickly because I've learned these skills in short form. Which gives me more space to have character development, to have other things that are happening and interesting. Whereas I see a lot of people who are early career spending chapters and chapters trying to establish this character and all of this painful back story of the character. Frequently, when you look at short fiction, you're able to establish painful back story in just one or two sentences, maybe a paragraph. Especially when we get into You Perfect, Broken Thing, there is so much worldbuilding in that that's just conveyed superfast in super economical terms.

[DongWon] Well, that's kind of the thing that I want to talk about is there something Clark does so masterfully here, which is have this laser focus on character and be so late with worldbuilding. So much of the worldbuilding is defined in negative space. Right? The Cook is a great example of this, but all three stories do this in different ways, where there is very little that they are telling us about explicitly here's why this contest is happening, here's why the world is like this, is why these people have been persecuted out of existence. All that is left in the margins of the story, and not addressed. Because they don't matter, unless they matter to the character interaction. So we understand the world enough to understand why characters are making the choices that they make and that's it. It's a stop at that point. I think that is so cool, and is such a great demonstration of how much you can do if you really hone one of the tools in your kit. Then, when you carry that into novel writing, I think when you have that more expansive space to do the stuff that is offscreen in these stories, you still have that strong foundation in knowing how to write character, how to write that element.

[Erin] Yeah. I love when you said the worldbuilding sort of just comes in when it's needed. I remember in Your Eyes, My Beacon, that there's this the high court, which is…

[DongWon] Yeah. But barely mentioned.

[Erin] Like, all of a sudden, they were mentioned and I'm like, "Oh. Actually, I think this is the first time I hearing about high court. But it's very cool that both of the characters are very familiar with it." But didn't… It didn't need to be mentioned to me until this moment. I really thought this was like sort of an audacious but amazing choice. Because the time that you spend explaining the high court takes you out of the moment between these two characters is there trying to figure out what to do within this lighthouse.

[DongWon] It barely comes up again, but is this constant threat throughout the story. I never forget about the high court for the rest of the story, but it's mentioned maybe twice, off the top of my head.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] On the subject of taking you into and out of the moment, we're going to take a quick break, and be back in a moment.

 

[Dan] This week, our thing of the week is called… A role-playing game called Monster of the Week, which, as that name implies, is based around this kind of TV show Supernatural or Buffy or X-Files. The kind of show where each week there is another monster and you have to figure out what it is and deal with it. The reason I am recommending it is because it gets so creative with the powers that you have in the way that these powers help you to tell a particular kind of story. So, for example, one of the character classes has the power of getting captured by the monster. That is literally their superpower. The reason that that is useful is because getting captured helps reveal all kinds of things, where does the monster hang out, what kinds of powers does the monster have, and it fits into that genre of storytelling that you see on shows like Supernatural, where someone will get captured and then gets to talk to the monster or see how they work. So the sh… Game, once again, is called Monster of the Week and it's awesome. Check it out.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right. As we come back from the break, I want to give you a couple of very specific tools to be thinking about with character. Then, what we're going to do is, we're going to read to you the opening of… Just the first paragraph of each of the three stories, so you can hear how these tools are being manipulated even in this… In these tiny, tiny spaces. So these tools are about a character's identity. Ability, role, relationship, and status. We're going to dig more into these in the next episode, but right now what I want you to think about is ability, the things a character can and cannot do. This is all about how a character self defines. So the things they can and cannot do. Role are the tasks, responsibilities, that move them through the world. Relationship is about their loyalties. Then, status is about where they are in a power structure. So, as you are listening to us read these, think about ability, role, relationship, and status, and how they are manifesting even in these compressed spaces. Just these first paragraphs.

[Erin] I'll start with the opening of You Perfect, Broken Thing.

 

When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women’s locker room. I can’t stand anymore, but I know if I sit, I’ll never get back up. At least, not for another hour.

 

[Mary Robinette] The Cook.

 

The first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse. I’m standing in the inn’s common room and the other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. While some reach for a serving wench or boy, cheeks to pinch, a life to grasp—my stomach growls a monster’s growl. I should be slain; the growl is that fierce. I smell the roasting lamb, the unmistakable sneeze of freshly ground peppercorns, and garlic, but it’s all hidden behind the kitchen door.

 

[DongWon] Your Eyes, My Beacon.

 

She is light. Until she is not, and the lighthouse goes dark as the waves crash against the cliffside, the rocks at its foot jutting and jagged, a peril to even the most skilled navigators’ ships.

 

[Mary Robinette] So you can see how they are manipulating those things, even in these tiny spaces. That first one, we're seeing ability, the ability of the character completely manipulated. In the second one, we're looking at the tasks, I'm hungry and need to eat, and in the moment, that's everything that's defining this character. Then, in this last one, she is light, again, we're back to tasks, but also this role…

[DongWon] The status really comes in here.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] As she's failing to complete this task, as her ability fails her, suddenly her power and her status becomes very much in question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I think to do that with something that was really interesting I noticed between The Cook and Your Eyes, My Beacon, is, I think The Cook is very much relationship. The first time I see her, it's just a glimpse. It's about a specific other person, is being centered, really early on. Whereas in Your Eyes, My Beacon, when it talks about the lighthouse goes dark, a peril even to the most skilled navigators' ships, you can tell it's a role or status, I guess, because it's affecting all the ships. It's no longer about a single… It's not that ship. It's all the ships out there. That's where you can tell, like, it's a specific person's status or place in the world versus their place with regards to another individual.

 

[Mary Robinette] So this is just kind of a little bit of a preview of some of the things that we're going to be talking about over the next couple of weeks. And why we're so excited to be exploring the work of C. L. Clark.

[Howard] I want to look at The Cook again, because this, the shortest of the three, that first paragraph gives us so much information, and some of it is inherently mimetic, in that we are being given information by being asked to recall things that are not in the story. The sentence I'm talking about, I'm standing in the inn's common room and other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. Inn, common, warriors, ale. Pathfinder or D&D. You are there. Those are words that get used all the time. If you tell yourself, oh, I'm in a D&D setting, or I'm in a Pathfinder setting, or I'm in some sort of Western fantasy-esque role-playing game setting, except I'm telling a story, you know what, that's good enough. The story will play with that backdrop you've painted. We were told to paint it by being given those four words in quick succession.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. It leaves so much more space to then explore character. So you don't have to do a ton of worldbuilding. That allows you to then… The negative space that DongWon was talking about before, that allows you then to just focus on the character. Again, in that… In The Cook, the first time I see her, it's just a glimpse. One of the other tools you're going to hear me talking about is recency or primacy effect. By starting with this is the most important thing in this story. The first time I see her.

[DongWon] It's funny, we almost get the inverse of that with Your Eyes, My Beacon, because we are starting with her, we are starting with the she is light, and by the time we get to the reveal of what's going on with the lighthouse keeper, I… Me at least, completely forgot about this opening. Right? Completely forgot about the connection between the character and being light. Then, when that comes back, it's such a thrilling moment.

 

[Erin] I also wanted to note that the first time I see her, it's just a glimpse… The first time. Because you know there will be a next time. I love words like that, that help to create anticipation naturally in us by telling us there is a sequence of events, and if you wait, we'll get to the next one in the sequence.

[DongWon] All three of these imply future action. Right? We have her leaving the kill floor, this sort of athlete pushed to her limits. We're going to get more about this. Right? You get the first time I see her, you get the lighthouse going out, and the consequence of that. All three are such a great way of rooting yourself in character, but with momentum. Right? I think sometimes when people talk about characters, it can feel very static, because it's a portrait of here's a person who existed at a point in time. But the thing is people aren't static, they are in motion. C. L. Clark is a master at giving us that velocity. Each one of these, I feel like I'm coming off the starting block, and just sprinting away into the distance.

 

[Howard] There's a line from… I think it's… I think Hogarth speaks it in Iron Giant where he tells the Iron Giant, "You are who you choose to be." I love that line. You are who you choose to be. Just show us a choice. Show us the character making a choice. Now we know who they are in that moment. We don't know what their next choice… What they'll choose next time, but we now know enough. It's motion.

[DongWon] Yeah. But I love how that also feels in tension with this idea of character as destiny. Right? They are going to make choices and they have choice… They have agency, which, we're going to talk a lot more about in a future episode, but also, there almost trapped by who they are and what they need to be, and watching them struggle against that is so much the dynamism of these stories. Of how do you make a choice when you have to go fight a war? How do you make a choice when you can't leave the kitchen? How do you make a choice when you need to save your family? That is so fun.

[Howard] I want to come back to the kitchen. One last comment about tapas and…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] About the length of short stories. I was served something called a dragon's tear at a sushi restaurant. Which was basically a slice of habanero, teardrop shaped, wrapped around a little nugget of wasabi.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, no!

[Howard] Okay. That is one bite of heat and tears and sneezing and regret…

[Heehee]

[Howard] And joy.

[DongWon] What did you do to piss those folks off?

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's… But, see, here's the thing. I don't want a plate of dragon's tears.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I just want one. I want to go on that ride one time. Okay. I'll go back to that restaurant and get another one. Because it was fun. That, for me, is what short fiction can do. I don't know what this is going to taste like when I start reading it. It doesn't have a book cover. It's not shelved somewhere in the fantasy or science fiction section. My expectations are nebulous.

 

[Erin] I think that is a perfect time to go to the homework, which I have for this week. Which is to write a series of sentences. Each one… Pick a character that you have and write that character's name is someone who… And then something about them. Then write it again, and again, and again and again and again. Until you run out of things and you have to continue to keep writing, because that will help you find levels to your character that maybe not even you anticipated.

 

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

 

[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/11/17-50-consistency-inconsistency-and-the-crushing-weight-of-expectations/

 

Key Points: What does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to provide new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to the audience? Seasons and breaks, or a never-ending juggernaut? Focus on regularity or focus on content? Under-promise and over-deliver. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 50]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Consistency, Inconsistency, And the Crushing Weight of Expectations. 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Howard] This episode was my idea. Because today is December 3… Is it December third?

[Dan] It is.

[Dongwon] It is December third.

[Howard] It's December third. Wow, look at that. We're recording this on December 3 for December 11 because we realized we had a hole in our schedule of episodes. We could not let that stand. Then we took a step backward and had to ask, well, why not? What was our original commitment to publishing an episode every week without fail? I'm actually going to throw this question to Dan. Dan, do you remember 2008? Do you remember back then when we decided how often we were going to do this?

[Dan] I have [garbled] memories of 2008. I don't remember if there was a specific decision made other than if we're going to do it weekly, let's make sure we do it every single week.

[Howard] Yeah. See, that was my memory as well. That was a 2008… I guess it was the only 2008 any of us got. But back then, I was eight years in on what would become a 20 year run of Schlock Mercenary where the daily web comic updated every day without fail. That was a thing that, and I'm not mincing any words here, made me feel important and special. So I thought it was something that we should do with our podcast as well. So we have inherited that. Here it is 2022, very nearly 2023, and we are still insisting on putting this stuff out every week. Now, fair listener, we're not recording this episode in order to tell you that we're going to change that. We're going to explore how the crushing weight of your expectations drove this recording session and what the alternatives might be for those of you who publish newsletters or do other sorts of social media things, Patreons, whatever else. Let me throw it out to the august body of two…

[Dan] I just want to say really quick that us doing an episode about how we never miss an episode kind of feels like the radio station constantly interrupting songs to tell you how they never interrupt the songs…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. There's… For my pitch to this episode originally to Dongwon, I said, "Oo, oo, I have a silly meta-meta-idea."

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Dan, it's important to let them know what they're getting and so you need to remind them of what it is we're doing here.

[Howard] It is.

 

[Dongwon] Howard, question for you, actually. Is your streak completely unbroken? Are you at 20 years of not missing a single day?

[Howard] Yes. 20 years from June 12 of 2000 was the first strip through July 20 of 2020 was the final strip. Every day has a strip on it, and all of those strips aired on the day which they were scheduled. There was this one time where the strip aired about eight hours late because a universal… Err, uninterruptible power supply in the server farms was configured incorrectly and power cut out and the generator didn't come on and then the UPS exploded. We had to move to another host. I think that was in 06. That was the point at which everybody just insisted I was metal and I couldn't be stopped. When, in point of fact, that was I know people who can solve the technical problems and I have a buffer.

[Dongwon] How stressful has that been for you? Like, what does that feel like to know that every day I got to get this out? I mean, obviously, you're banking some, those are in the bank in advance, but what's that process felt like?

[Howard] It's like… I couldn't have accurately described it until I was out the other side of it. You ask a fish what water taste like, and they're like, "What? What does the world taste like?" No. I am now like the fish who has crawled out onto dry land. I'm like, "Hm. Water was nice. Air is different."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There was a constant pressure, but it was also a piece of what I used to motivate me, to get me moving. The idea that a strip, that a day could go by without a strip was just absolutely unthinkable to me. Because I knew that if I missed one day, then it would be okay, and I would just start missing days over and over and over again.

[Dongwon] Right.

[Howard] So… But that's me. That's… I don't want to project that mindset on to other people. That's where… With this whole discussion, we have to be careful.

 

[Dan] Well, that's what I want to bring up next, is… I honestly, despite doing two of them, I don't listen to a ton of podcasts. So is never missing a week, is that actually a rare thing? Or does everyone do that?

[Dongwon] I think, as one who listens to an insane amount of podcasts, it depends on the podcast. There are many that I follow that are religious about weekend, week out. Then there are some who are like, "Yeah, we missed four or five over the course of our several year run." Then there are some who update irregularly, and you just get new content when you get new content. I think one way that podcasters sort of get around the burnout component is by bundling them into seasons. Right? So we'll do 10 episodes weekly, and then take a break for two months while they prep the next season, and then come back for another 10 episodes. I think that's a way to sort of manage that schedule and manage expectations because really that's what it comes down to. So much of what this is what does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to be providing new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to that audience.

[Howard] Yeah. With some of the more produced… Produced is the wrong word, and I don't want to put a negative connotation on it. The more heavily produced… The higher production value podcasts run a lot like television seasons would run, which is, hey, we're going to do a run of a couple of dozen episodes, and then we take a break. During that break, what is happening is we are arranging for the sponsors and the ads and the content and whatever else for the next season. That's… When you've got five or 25 people working on a thing, that makes a lot more sense than insisting that this is a weekly juggernaut that just never stops rolling and outputting a thing.

[Dongwon] Well, so much of the advice for authors these days, is integrate multiple touch points for the audience. Right? So, you have your books, but then you're also maybe you have a podcast, maybe your Patreon, a substack, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. All these are ways in which you're interacting with your audience on a regular basis. So I think the reason I found this topic interesting was what's the logic behind how you structure that, how do you approach that, how do you manage your own burnout and audience expectations at the same time.

 

[Howard] Yeah. On the subject of authors, we should have a book of the week. Dan, did you bring us… Did you bring one?

[Dan] I did bring a book of the week. So, I am a big fan of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. She has a relatively new one, I think it's a month or so old, called The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. Which is a retelling of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in the Yucatán Peninsula in the either early 1900s or late 1800s. I'm not deep enough into it to know exactly where. But Sylvia writes a very distinct subset subgenre that I adore. Which is historical Mexican feminist horror. If you're into that, she is so good. Her… Last year, she put out one called Mexican Gothic which was a haunted house story. This one is much more kind of that H. G. Wells Dr. Moreau thing, but all from the point of view of this daughter, transplanted from France, growing up in the Yucatán Peninsula, raised by a Mayan nanny. Then, at the center of this giant culture clash, written with this delightful core science-fiction element on top of it. It's really good stuff. I'm not done with it yet, like I said, but it's fantastic, and I recommend it. So that is The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia.

[Dongwon] That's tremendously exciting. Mexican Gothic was really one of my favorite reads last year.

[Dan] Oh, it was so good.

[Dongwon] Just terrific.

[Dan] This one, thus far, I'm liking even more.

 

[Howard] That's… It's cool, and I love the way you described… And I'm going to make a point out of this… When you said the genres. Name those off again.

[Dan] Historical Mexican horror.

[Howard] Okay. Historical Mexican horror. One of the things that's fun about following authors on social media is that discovery that if you like, for instance, horror, branching into a historical horror is not a big stretch. You start seeing some of these overlaps. If you like historical, branching into Mexican and horror at the same time, that is not a big stretch. So, yeah, when you say Mexican historical horror, if you are into that thing, no, if you are into any of those things, there's a really good chance that you're going to like this new thing. This is one of the reasons why having some sort of presence on social media or whatever is useful to us so that we can find those places where we overlap with people's existing interests and say, "Oh, well, you know, you liked The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you might actually like Schlock Mercenary. It's not a book, and it's not British, and it has pictures, and it's not as funny, but…"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are enough parallels.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think with the social media component, like having sort of these regular contact points like I was talking about earlier is… Can be really, really important. Right? I think having the daily updates, the regular updates, that you were talking about from Schlock Mercenary. I think the basic advice for Instagram is, like, post a reel a day. Right? For TikTok, it's like regular… Make sure you're regularly updating your content. That can be really important. But that can also create an enormous amount of pressure on creators. I think it holds a lot of people back from even trying to start to build their brand that way. I launched a newsletter a few years back, it's called Publishing Is Hard. I really love doing it. One thing that I decided before I launched it was I'm not going to commit to a regular schedule. Because I know me. I know what my life is like, I know how much work I have on my plate at any given time, and, as a literary agent, the amount of work that I do goes up and down wildly. One week will be completely insane, the next week will be quiet. Right? So it just wasn't realistic for me to make a commitment of I'm going to send a newsletter every week. Now, my colleague Kate McKean also has a brilliant newsletter called Agents And Books. She does two newsletters a week. Right? We both have different audiences, different strategies, different approaches, and it's really cool to see what she does and what I do slightly different because I, at the beginning said, "I'm going to send these irregularly." When I first created it, it was in sort of the copy that I made. Anybody who has followed it has known that there will be periods where you won't hear from me for a minute, but then I'll send a new one out. The balance is you can sort of focus on regularity of getting the piece of content out, and it's usually a little bit shorter, it's a little bit more pointed, or, what I do, is make sure that what I'm giving somebody… I'm trying to make sure every piece is pretty special to the audience. Right? I'm putting a lot of care and craft into what I'm writing. Not that you don't for a daily update, but I'm giving something a little bit more emotional, I think, then what my colleague Kate does. Right? So I think finding that balance point between okay, if I'm not doing a weekly update, what am I offering my audience that sort of makes up for the lack of regularity in a way that balances it out for them.

[Howard] Yeah. To be sure here, if we had decided that Writing Excuses was going to be a 30 minute episode instead of a 15 minute episode, the weekly schedule would have crushed us.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Because the recording sessions, we just wouldn't have had enough time to do the things that we wanted to do.

[Dongwon] Yeah. Those people who do like weekly three hour podcasts? Unimaginable, to me, how they do that. I mean, it's just a bigger part of their lives. I think we all have primary things that we're doing that are incredibly time-consuming. So we can fit in these 15 minute a week episodes. Which is, just, again, a really different balance point.

 

[Howard] Dongwon, you talked about how the crushing expectations can prevent people from even getting started. For a while, I had a twitch stream… I still have technically, a twitch stream, I just haven't streamed in forever. A twitch stream in which the art that I was doing for the X DM books was showing up as part of the stream. Then something happened, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I realized the effort of configuring things so that I can stream this is preventing me from getting the work done. The stress of having an audience in front of me is preventing me from doing the really hard work where I have to be unafraid of making mistakes. I'm just not comfortable doing that on stream. Which is weird to hear from the guy whose 20… Or whose year 2000 artwork is available for everybody to look at. But, long story short, I stopped streaming and started getting the work done. So, yeah, the decision to create regular content can be a decision that results in less productivity. That's not what any of us want.

[Yeah]

[Dan] Well, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the points I want to make here is this is not an episode about how you should start a podcast.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Or about how you should have a TikTok. Right? We are not telling you that any of these outlets are necessary for an artist's career. What we're trying to get across is the idea that you need to look at your own output, at your own schedule, decide for yourself if one of these extra peripheral activities might be valuable to you, and then see what would be the best format to stick that into. If you want to do a podcast, you want to do a quick and dirty weekly one like we're doing, you want to do something longer and research that comes out in discrete chunks once a year, how do you want to structure that? Maybe the answer is nothing at all. All three of us used to be on Typecast which ran for about three years with different cast members here and there. We really worked hard to make that a weekly thing as consistent as possible. It wasn't always. Eventually, we had to let go of it because our schedules became such that it was not worth our time anymore. Sometimes that happens.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think an important point here…

[Howard] I still miss it.

[Dongwon] I do miss it too, actually. Yeah, it was fun. If I have any point here, it's… Yeah, don't feel like you have to do these things. If you do do it though, if you're thinking about it, don't be afraid to experiment. Right? Don't feel like just because most or some newsletters are weekly, that this is a thing that you're tying yourself to, but you're going to have to do every week. I think that expectation can actually limit you more than open things up. Right? So, don't be afraid to experiment, try new things, and don't feel like you have to do the one piece of advice that you've heard elsewhere. You can do in a regular schedule. My only advice is as you do that, to under-promise and over-deliver. If you're not sure you can do weekly, don't tell people upfront you're doing weekly. Right? Just say, "I'm trying this out, this is an experiment, let's see how it goes." Right? I'm currently launching a monthly twitch stream and I've said many times, this is experimental. We're trying this out. I'm trying to figure out how do I do scheduling, how do I coordinate this, how do I get guests on. All of this stuff. It's been super fun so far, pretty easy so far. But we'll see where I'm at in six months. So, just make sure that you're being realistic with yourself and realistic with your audience. Because where this goes wrong is when people feel really misled. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] There have been times where I've under-promised and under-delivered. Right? Like, that happens. But I think if you have that relation with the audience, you can work with them and sort of make it up to them and find a way to balance that out.

[Dan] Yeah.

 

[Howard] If you take away anything from this episode, under-promise, over-deliver. That's your soundbite. Thank you, Dongwon.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's a very good one.

[Dongwon] You're welcome. Words to live by.

 

[Dan] Let me throw out one more thing that I've learned with my newsletter. Which I do try to send out regularly. But regularly for me use… It is not tied to a day of the week or a day of the month. I try to do a monthly newsletter, but it is more important for me to get it out on a Monday than it is to get it out on the first Monday of the month. Just because I know that that is the time when it is most likely to be seen and clicked on. So that's a different kind of consistency, and a different kind of schedule keeping to keep in mind.

 

[Howard] Yep. Hey, Dongwon, you want to send us home with some homework?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, here's what I'd like all of you to do. Make a list of all of your regular commitments, the stuff that you're obligated to do every week. Whether that's going to therapy, picking up your kids, whatever it is that you have that is a regular thing. Put that on the list somewhere. Then, once you have all of that together, consider your bandwidth for adding new items to that list. Is that a daily Instagram post? Is that a weekly TikTok? Is that a newsletter? Is that this, is that another thing? Really think about what do I actually have time for. Then make a rough schedule of what content updates you could do in a sample month. Right? What feels realistic, what feels manageable. Then reduce that by a little bit. Right, in that under-promise kind of component. Right? Think about what feels realistic now, and then realize that you're probably not going to hit that target. What's a little bit under that that you could shoot for. Yeah. I think that's a good place to get started in terms of putting together a content plan for yourself.

[Howard] Outstanding. That's… It almost sounds like a life hack. Hey, I think we did it. I think we filled our December 11 hole.

[Dan] Yay!

[Howard] So. Fair listeners, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/06/19/17-25-archetypes-ensembles-and-expectations/

 

Key points: How do you differentiate the members of your ensemble? What is the story about, and who needs to populate that world? What archetypes do you need? Archetype may not be the right word. Roles? Mix it up, make the mentor also dopey comic relief. Consider roles in the plot, along with personalities or characterization archetypes. Beware of falling into stereotypes, of making characters just like your favorites. Make sure your ensemble has to come together as a group, that they have to work at it.

 

[Season 17, Episode 25]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Archetypes, Ensembles, and Expectations.

[Zoraida] 15 minutes long.

[Kaela] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Zoraida] I'm Zoraida.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] So, we... This... I've been looking forward to this one all masterclass long. Archetypes and ensembles. Really what we're talking about here is...we've talked in the past about making every member of the ensemble meaningful. Now we want to talk about why are they there? What do they do? How are they different from each other and what is each one bringing to the table? What skills or baggage or whatever do they have? So, when you're looking at this, Zoraida, when you sit down to start an ensemble story, a story that has an ensemble cast, how do you start differentiating the characters in this way?

[Zoraida] It's hard to say. I've been thinking a lot about this, but sometimes it's hard for me to identify that because I think that as I write what the story's going to be, I start with plot first sometimes, not always character. Which has changed in the last few years. I used to start with character first, and then go to plot. But again, it goes back to the question that I asked in a couple of episodes ago, which is what is the story about? So once I figure out what the story is about, I understand who needs to populate my world. Obviously, we have a leader. The leader should also have another kind of archetype, right? Like, are they important for example? Are they a mastermind? Is it the villain? Once I start identifying their archetype, that archetype for the leader, then I understand what is the actual job that needs to get done. Heists are little bit easier, because I think that in heists, you… Which is going to be my book of the week. In a heist, somebody has a very, very specific job. So what happens when you have an adventure? Right? Does somebody bring in a skill? Then, so, I think about skill sets, personalities, chaos… Right? What is the character that brings chaos and creates tension? That's kind of where I start. In chaos.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I like the way that you started by talking about sometimes you start with plot, and sometimes you start with character. Because I do think it's worth pointing out that the point at which you make the decision of this needs to be an ensemble cast might be in the beginning, it might be halfway through. You might have a big chunk of your story already in mind or outlined or whatever, and realize, "Oh, you know what? This is not going to work with a single person going through this alone. I need to add in… I need to turn this into an ensemble." Or it might be at the very beginning, you just set out like Howard did to tell a big group story solving a mystery. So that can happen at different points for everybody. Once that decision is made, Kaela, have you written ensemble stories before?

[Kaela] Yeah. Actually. When I look at it, I'm like, "Oh. Maybe I…" I never thought I was, and then I look at it, and I'm like, "Maybe I always do, actually."

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I think they all are.

[Howard] I don't do this. Wait. I do it all the time.

[Kaela] Oh, my gosh.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's kind of the unofficial subtheme of Writing Excuses is all of the instructors realizing we do things we didn't know we did. So, what about the archetypes themselves? That's in the title of our episode. What is an archetype? And how does it help us put together on ensemble?

[Kaela] They're reoccurring. Like, they're reoccurring characters or roles almost that you see a lot. Like, the mystical… Like, the hag or the… I don't know why that's the only one that comes to mind whenever someone says archetype. I'm like, "The hag!" I think because I secretly want to be the hag when I grow up.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] That's my dream.

[Howard] As life goals go, that's a good one.

[Kaela] Thank you.

 

[Howard] I think that archetype might not be the right word for us here. Because… I mean, you look at Leverage, the opening credits for Leverage. Hitter, hacker, grifter, thief, mastermind. Those get defined in a way that kind of makes them archetypes, but Carl Yung would not define hitter as an archetype. But for our purposes, it very much is. I was reading an article just last night, I think, about how many black superheroes have electrical powers. I realized… Actually, to the point that Mark Wade years ago did a comic book story that called it out. Let's see if I can find the line of dialogue. Yeah, the hero says, "Surprise. I'm a black superhero with electrical powers. I know, I know. Because there are so many of them." I bring this up because when you think of, say, Elliott in Leverage, when you think of the hitter, he's a guy who doesn't want to use guns, but he is super good at punching, and he's former special forces and whatever. Are there tropes there that make the definition of hitter predictable? Have you created the archetypal black character with lightning powers unconsciously? So, for me, anytime I'm creating a character that feels like an archetype, the first thing I look for is… The first thing I start doing is interrogating myself. Am I doing this because I've seen it somewhere before? Am I just re-creating a character from Warehouse 13 or Ocean's 11 or Fast and Furious five?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I needed things with numbers so that that rule of three worked.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or am I doing something fresh? In a recent manuscript comment, Sandra said, "Oh, I like the way the dopey character puts his foot in his mouth and keeps digging and actually successfully digs his way out the other side and everybody's like…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Good job." Because that's not what we see. What we typically see is the dumb character digs his way in deeper and then we don't on him and we move on with the conversation. So I look for opportunities to take the archetype and make it different than what I've seen before.

[Dan] Yeah. Well…

[Zoraida] Yeah. I mean I feel like… So, there's like a skill, right, that character can have. Right? This is like a part of their job. But I also think that there is like a symbol that they represent. Right? Like in Star Wars, right? [Apologies] to Yung, right, and Campbell. The dreaming farmboy. The trickster in Han Solo. The mentor in Obi-Wan, right? Like those are… Those are archetypes. They, like, represent something in the story. But I definitely agree with you, like, what if like what you think is an archetype is actually maybe a stereotype, right? How do some shows that have ensemble casts or books that have ensemble casts subvert that? So that's actually a really interesting point, yeah.

[Howard] Take the mentor… Take the idea of the mentor character and make the mentor character also be… I don't know what the archetype would be, but the dopey comic relief.

[Laughter]

[Howard] This is the dumb guy, but every so often, the dumb guy just drops wisdom that puts it together, so we're all going like, "Hey. How are you… No, that's good. I have learned it. I have now mastered the laser sword."

[Laughter]

[Dan] Okay.

[Zoraida] That's actually…

 

[Dan] I want to keep this conversation going, but I am going to stop in the middle and do a book of the week.

[What?]

[Dan] Sorry. It's gone on too long with no book. Our book of the week this week, Zoraida, you are going to tell us about Six of Crows.

[Zoraida] Okay. Let's see if I can do the book justice. Six of Crows is a book by Leigh Bardugo. It is about a group of unlikely friends. They are criminals in a fantasy world called Ketterdam. They have taken on an impossible job to break out a magical prisoner from a jail that is a literal fortress. It is one of my favorite books. It's an ensemble cast. It… To me, this book is one of Leigh Bardugo's best works overall. It is a masterclass in writing, in the way she introduces the stories and the characters, and to me it's just the perfect book. It is also one of the storylines in Shadow and Bone, the TV show currently on Netflix.

[Dan] Six of Crows is one of my very favorite fantasy books. Fantasy heist is difficult to do. But she absolutely hits it out of the park. So, Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo.

 

[Dan] So, let's get back into this archetype conversation, because I find it really interesting. One thing I wanted to point out listening to Howard talk about it is that there's two different ways to think about these archetypes. Because hacker, hitter, grifter, thief, mastermind. Those are the roles that they perform in the plot. But also, when you're dealing with an ensemble, specifically, there are archetypal personalities and roles that they can serve kind of emotionally. Characterization archetypes rather than plot archetypes. They have the very sophisticated elegant one. They have the kind of loose cannon crazy one. They have the really confident sassy one. They have the kind of quiet pragmatic one. You don't have to have the really elegant one be the grifter, like Sophie in Leverage. You could have the really elegant one be something else. That is one way to make sure that you're not falling into these stereotypes. But maybe your ensemble requires a leader who pulls everyone together and it requires kind of a really friendly person who is the glue that keeps them together and is the peacemaker that stops the fights. Maybe there's another person who's the younger one that everyone looks out for. Like there's lots of different kinds of emotional archetypes and group dynamic archetypes that are very different from the role that they serve in the plot.

[Yeah]

[Howard] The Doctor Who episode that I mentioned a month ago. Character's name is Mickey. His line describes the roles that he thinks he fits. He says, "I'm their man in Havana. I'm their tech expert. I am… Oh, my God, I'm the tin dog."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That… If you understand what man from Havana means, you can see what Mickey thinks he is and where he arrives. There are… Oh, I had another example of it, and it's gone now. So I'm going to hand it back off.

[Well, I think…]

[Howard] Kaela?

[Zoraida] Oh, go ahead, Kaela.

[Kaela] No, I was just going to say…

[Zoraida] Well, if you look at Six of Crows, there are six crows, there are six people in this heist. I think if you look at… If you break down sort of their characters, Kaz Brekker is an orphan. Like, his archetype, I think to me would be the orphan, and his job is the leader. Right?Inej, who she is… Her job is, like, a keeper of secrets, but she's also a shadow. So she like… And also the foil of Kaz Brekker. Then you have somebody like Wylan Van Eck, who is sort of a hostage, sort of a demo guy, but his archetype is the innocent. Right? So I start with… When I study this book, I feel like I'm looking at, like, okay, this is their function, and this is what they represent in a larger story. That's sort of an interesting angle to come at an ensemble cast, I think.

 

[Dan] Yeah. Definitely. Now, when… A concept that Dave Wolverton used to talk about when I was taking writing classes from him is called braided roses. The idea is that your characters all have this wonderful rose that makes them vital and important, but they also are covered with thorns. When you braid them together, they poke each other. So when you are putting together an ensemble cast, to what extent are you doing it on purpose to create conflict? Not just people who will inevitably work well together, but people who will inevitably butt heads. Because every ensemble we've talked about involves characters fighting and arguing and… They have to come together as a group, they can't just start together as a group.

[Kaela] That's one of my favorite things about ensembles. Like I mentioned earlier in an earlier episode about the sandpaper. Like, that's the thing that I'm there for. Admittedly, I've said that about like everything about ensembles. But…

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] I love angling them so that they rub against each other the wrong way in a way that will ultimately make them better. Like, again, bringing up Guardians of the Galaxy again, the transition from Guardians of the Galaxy One to Guardians of the Galaxy Two is so interesting, because we get the coming together of the group, which has plenty of thorns, as you're trying to get these people together. But then you also get the way that those thorns keep moving as they grow as people, because all of them have grown by the end of the first episode. I mean, not episode, movie. In the second movie, you watch how they're still the same people, so they're still going going to going to be rubbing each other the wrong way in ways that make each other better. That's… Character growth wise, I just find that so fantastic that they end up being the river stones that end up smoothing each other out. They end up… They always…

[Howard] The moment where in Avengers: Infinity War, when they find Thor and everybody's talking about Thor and saying, "Oh, my gosh. It's like a pirate had a baby with an angel."

[Yes]

[Howard] Starlord is like, "What am I? Chopped liver here?" Well, you are getting a little soft. You're one sandwich away from another chin. The… That bit of characterization where we see that Starlord, even though he's ostensibly their leader, feels threatened any time he sees someone who's better looking than he is…

[Kaela] Or more competent. Or stronger. Or…

[Zoraida] Yeah. That's vain.

[Garbled]

[Howard] Even with just one eye.

[Zoraida] I mean, it has to go into your character work. Like making sure that there's cohesion. But cohesion doesn't always mean harmony. Right? Like, these people can work well together, but they don't all have to be friends. Or they have to work to be friends.

[Dan] Well, this doesn't mean that every character has to conflict with every other character.

[Right]

[Zoraida] Right. Howard has been very excited.

[Dan] Danny Ocean has his sidekick… I can't remember Brad Pitt's name in that series. They are inseparable. They never butt heads. They agree with each other almost all the time. Even when they disagree, they don't fight about it. That helps give a lot more texture to what's going on.

[Howard] I just remembered a… It's a piece of biology that has stuck with me forever. When you have a fertilized egg cell that then divides, those two things are genetically identical. Okay. Yet, they're going to grow into an organism that has bazillions of cells, all of which have differentiated. The genetics did not tell which cell to do what. They didn't tell a cell, "Oh, you're going to go be the nervous system." No. You know how they developed that? They fight. They argue over resources and push each other to the outside. The ones that get pushed the furthest to the outside? Hey, congratulations, you've become the largest organ in the body. You've become skin and so on and so forth. So this idea that the ensemble comes together through conflict is in biology.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's fantastic.

[Incredible. I'm made of ensembles.]

 

[Dan] All right, Kaela, you have our homework this week. What is it?

[Kaela] I do. Today, I want y'all to identify the archetypes of each character in your work in progress. Take whatever you're working on, figure out, like, what each archetype is, what role they're serving, stuff like that. But I want you to try something out. Change that archetype or give them a sub archetype to try to branch out and create rounder, unexpected characters. Like we were talking about earlier. I think one of my favorite things is when you have a… Like a role and you expect it to be a certain way. You have a stereotype in your mind or something like that, but then you combine it with this emotional archetype that's not always together. Like the cold, emotionless warrior like, let's say. But they turn out to be the maternal figure, like the mother of the group. I love that combination, because you don't always see it, but they work together. Like new ways of exploring to give your characters more humanity, I suppose. More nuance.

[Dan] Sounds great. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

[Mary Robinette] The Writing Excuses 2022 cruise and workshop aboard the Liberty of the Seas is filling up fast. If you want to join us, go to writingexcusesretreat.com and register today. Looking forward to seeing you.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/02/06/17-6-hitting-reset-without-getting-hit-back/

 

Key points: How do you reset expectations, break old promises and make new ones, without breaking the trust of the audience? Deliver something different and amazing! Yes-and, keep the old promises and make new ones. No-but, break the old ones, but give them a different wonderful experience. Oh, crap. I broke it, and I don't know how to fix it. Dash through the red paint and hope no one notices. Telegraph the change as much as you can, and accept that you may lose some audience. Long-running shows often do a reset during season breaks. Give them a big moment of character change instead of the big climax they expected. And a Big Can of Worms for resetting your career... 

 

[Season 17, Episode 6]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] We are talking about resetting expectations. We are talking about breaking promises and then making new ones without actually betraying the trust of the audience. I'm trying to think of a good example of this. It's possible that the good example may be Million-Dollar Baby…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which breaks a promise to the audience, this is a sports movie, by giving us 1/3 act that shows that it's actually a drama about euthanasia, about… It's very dramatic and it's not very sports movie. As we pointed out when we mentioned it earlier, it's got a 90% fresh rating from critics and audiences over at Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe part of this is because it's 15 years old. But it won a lot of awards and it did great grossing in theaters. It was something which broke promises that audiences felt had been made to them, and then delivered something different, but delivered it so well that the majority of the audiences put up with it, they accepted it. They loved it, they came out of the theater… I don't want to say happy, but having experienced something amazing, which is what the filmmaker set out to do. So let's talk about that. What are some examples of things where you feel like the expectations have had to be reset and they did it well?

 

[Kaela] Well, I think that, personally, for me, there are two main movies that come to mind for this. One is Kung Fu Panda Two, which is one of my favorite movies ever, and How to Train Your Dragon, for different reasons, but both of them playing with expectations. I think Kung Fu Panda Two does multiple things with your expectations. For one, it kind of gives you an origin story again, except it's deeper, it's bigger, it's… You're like, "Whoa, I didn't think I was going to get this from a Kung Fu Panda franchise."

[Laughter]

[Kaela] So I think that's the other thing is, tonally, it's a lot harder, it's a lot… It's more explorative of pain, of destruction, of trauma, of working out issues like… Heavier themes than the first one. Like, the first one had a good heart still, but the second one just really dives in there in a way that you wouldn't have expected. But at the same time, I was not like, "Why is my fun movie sad?" when I watched it. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, they do a great job of acclimatizing you." They start out fun and everything too, but they do a good job of acclimatizing you to this is going to be a bit heavier of a movie. It's still going to be an amazing adventure, but it's going to be more emotionally in-depth than the first one without losing you. I don't know anybody who was lost with Kung Fu Panda Two. I think… I know most people just sat there stunned and in awe instead. Not disappointed.

[Howard] Yeah. I was kind of slack-jawed. I was, "Wait. How did they do that?" Usually, the origin story has to come first, and the two movie is a raising of stakes and a new adventure. But you managed to raise the stakes and give me a new adventure and give me an origin story and it's… Wow. It seems to defy… It seemed to defy the number two.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Which was pretty cool. Meg?

 

[Megan] I actually have an example of something that did it badly, that raised my expectations and then turned it on its head.

[Howard] Okay.

[Megan] It's the anime Attack on Titan. Which is about humanity fighting to survive when they are constantly attacked by huge giants who are referred to as Titans. We have are very strong protagonist character who's going to get revenge on all the Titans and he's going to save the world. They kill him off, seven episodes in. I was like, "Amazing. I love this. Now his meek sidekick character is going to have to step into his shoes and become the new protagonist and…" No. Protagonist came back, magically, and with magic powers.

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And is so magical now. I was like, "Man. I mean, that's cooler now, but… I wish he'd died."

[Laughter]

[You want a ghost?]

[Howard] Why couldn't you stay dead?

 

[Howard] As I categorized these in our outline, I talk about yes-and, which is a raising of expectations, making new promises while keeping old ones. I feel like yes-and is the easiest expectation reset. Because really, all you're doing is raising the bar. It's not like you've broken promises. No-but is the next one, and that's the actual reset where you had to make promises by breaking earlier ones. Yes, I know I promised you a sports movie, but I'm going to give you an amazing cinematic experience that's going to touch your soul and you wouldn't have come out to the theater to watch this anyway, but it's important and, thank you, everybody, and I'll take my Oscar now. I may be projecting a little bit. The third category is what I call oh, crap. It's the one where I felt like I most often lived in Schlock Mercenary, which is the discovery that you've broken a promise but only after it's too late to fix things. I foreshadowed something and got the technology wrong. Oh, crap. Oh, I can't actually make that work, what do I do instead? So in these three categories, what are our strategies?

[Sandra] I remember watching… Oh, it was decades ago, the making of Indiana Jones. A documentary. So it was like one hour long, the making of show. Listening to Steven Spielberg talk about how when they're writing the scripts, they would actually literally paint themselves into a corner. The opening sequence, Indiana Jones has just run from the boulder, tumbled out, and now he is standing trapped, facing a circle of spears, and there is literally no way to get out. Spielberg basically says, "Well, what you do when you've painted yourself into a corner is quickly duck and dash your way through the red paint and hope that nobody notices the footprints."

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Which is pretty much what that movie does. There may be better tools for this, but honestly, I think of like the Pirates of the Caribbean, I think it's 5, that begins with we're dragging an entire building through the middle of town using a horse-drawn cart.

[Howard] Yes.

[Sandra] It is absolutely completely and totally ridiculous, but basically what it's saying is, "This is the movie you're getting. If you're not on board, just go ahead and leave the theater now." So if you have to reset, any time you have to reset expectations, you're going to lose some audience, you're going to shed some audience who don't make the turn with you. That's just normal and expected. If you need to make the turn, make the turn anyway. Telegraph it is much as you can, so that people are ready for that moment. Okay, we all need to lean to the right. Lean to the right so we can make this turn, and… Now the wheels are back on the ground and we can keep going.

[Howard] There were a lot of turns in that scene where they were dragging the…

[Sandra] The whole building.

[Howard] The bank through the village, and, as I recall, they lost all of the money.

[Sandra] They lost the entire building.

[Howard] In the course of doing that. Yeah. Nice. Good choice of scenes. Nice metaphor. Well played. Bravo.

 

[Megan] There's something, especially in long-running television series, where, in between seasons, they will reset. So it's always sad sometimes when they come back into a season and these characters are now gone, and, oh, no, the set where they spent all their time, that's different now, they're going to spend all their time here instead. Sometimes writers rooms will literally just reset the world and which characters we have and we just never mention it.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] Yeah. That becomes part of the expectation of watching a long-running show. You just kind of know that there's going to be a reset. A…

[Howard] Sorry. Let me interrupt you there. That's the experience of someone who has watched lots of long-running shows.

[Sandra] Right.

[Howard] There are plenty of people who watch a long-running show for the first time and as those things happen, they're like, "No!"

[Yeah]

[Howard] No. Because they feel like they've been betrayed.

[Sandra] An excellent reset to examine is the movie Serenity versus the TV show Firefly. Because you have this TV show that only ran for a very short time and then was canceled. Then you have this gap of time. Then they make a movie. In order to… Which is actually a jump in media. It's… A movie is a different medium than a TV show. Which meant that there are different expectations, different language you can use, and in order to make that shift, they had to do some reset. The one that I… That jarred me the most, was that by the end of the run of the show, the doctor character had kind of become reconciled with the captain character as we're a family. When they start the movie, there's a lot more friction between them and it's more like the beginning of the show than the end of the show. They had to do that reset in order to give the proper arcs to the movie, because the movie had to be able to stand alone as well. So, it jarred me, as a watcher of the show, but once I was like, "Eh," it was not so jarring that I was knocked out and walked away. I was like, "Eh, I don't like that, but… Okay. Take me along for this ride." So…

 

[Megan] As an example for the no-but resetting expectations, Avatar the Last Airbender did that to me in, like, the third season. Like, the day of black sun. Because they really built up to it. I was watching this is a kid at the time, about 13-ish. I was like, "It's finally happening." We've had seasons building up to this day, they really built up to it in those moments, too, where they're like, "We're really… This is the day we lay siege on the Fire Nation." It's the eclipse that we risked all our lives to find information about in the previous seasons. This is it. It's a two-parter, and everything, so I was like, "Oh, this is finally going down. We're going to take down the Fire Nation." And it doesn't. It does not pan out. They fail the invasion. Because they already knew and were already ready and just gone. They're shocked and terrified, and I was too. I was like, "What?" But what they did was a great job in that, because otherwise it could of felt like really deflative, where you're like, "Well, great. Okay, but what did we spend all this time for, then?" But what they give you is a bunch of other things that you really wanted and needed, like, most particularly, the Zuko storyline carries out the days of black sun two parts. Having Zuko come in and that's the moment where he decides to defect from the Fire Nation and healthy avatars make his new plan to take down his dad. Like, that ends up making the story worthwhile. So, no, I didn't get like the big climax that I was really prepared for, but I got Zuko's storyline intersecting finally and his big moment of character change.

[Howard] You can argue that we set out to defeat the Fire Nation, and we got the victory we didn't expect, which was turning Zuko.

[Megan] Yeah.

[Howard] So, you can make the argument that you actually fulfilled the promise. I think that's part of how you make no-but work is that you take the new thing that you hand them and say, "By the way, this actually fulfills all of your other expectations." Trust… I'm just going to paint it red so that it looks like what you were…

[Giggles]

[Howard] Yeah. [Garbled a neat] trick.

 

[Howard] We need to have a book of the week. Or a thing of the week. I think Meg's got it.

[Megan] I have a thing of the week that also ties up a lot of the things that we've been talking about in all of the other episodes. This is a Korean drama that I originally watched on WB's drama streaming service, which no longer exists. But you can purchase the show on DVD which I have. The show is called Circle: The Two Worlds or Circle: the Connected Worlds depending on your translation. But every episode is two completely different stories. The first half of the episode takes place in 2017, the other half takes place in the far future. The 2017 story is about these twin brothers who are going to university and there's some strange things going on and they're investigating it. It's a smaller story about brothers investigating a mystery. The future story is high sci-fi, and there's this town where you can only live if there's a chip implanted in your brain that regulates your emotions and there's no pain and no fear and there's no crime. It's about a police detective who is trying to investigate an alleged murder that's happened inside the perfect city. But the guards won't let him in. But it turns out he has a second motive to get in there. He believes there's evidence about two twin brothers who disappeared back in 2017. It's these two completely different stories, completely different genres, and you've got expectations set up for how these kinds of stories work. It's slowly about how these two storylines tie back into each other and influence each other. Circle: the Connected Worlds.

[Sounds cool]

[Howard] That sounds really cool, and I wish I had it on a streaming service right now.

[Megan] Howard, I have my DVDs here in Utah. They could end up at your house on accident or purpose at some point in time.

[Whew!]

[Howard] Well, see now you're making all of our listeners terribly, terribly jealous…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which just doesn't seem like a fair thing to do.

 

[Howard] Early on in Schlock Mercenary, I was writing… I mean, the design principles for Schlock Mercenary were I am not making fun of science fiction in my science fiction comic, the comedy will come from other things. But it was very newspaper humor, dad joke type stuff. Would have fit right in in the age of people collecting newspapers. But this was a web comic. About two years in, the Teraport wars begin, and the stories begin getting bigger. Brandon Sanderson wrote the introduction for book 2, The Teraport Wars, and said, "This is the book where Schlock Mercenary figures out what it wants to be when it grows up."

[Accurate]

[Howard] It very much… This was not a thing that I did consciously. It certainly wasn't a thing I did expertly. But it was a thing I did. I had an existing audience, an existing brand, and I decided to take them from a quick episodic fast beats sort of story to a much larger form story. I got lucky in that I guess the audience was so small to begin with that when it grew, we didn't notice that we lost anybody. But this was definitely a case of something which at the time I began creating it was one thing, and at the time I finished it was very much something else. Even though you still have this blob character and mercenaries running through the core of it.

[Sandra] You had an assist from the fact that web comics are expected to evolve. So there is a genre expectation that there will be evolution which totally assisted in the redirect, which [garbled can be…]

[Howard] Yeah. That is the… That is what we called the low expectations of audiences watching amateurs.

[There's that. Anyway…]

[Howard] Good times. Wow. Are we really already 19 minutes in? What else can we say? I had a… We just need to can of worms this part. The whole career level can of worms of how do you rebrand yourself after spending 20 years as a cartoonist. Whatever I go do next, how do I keep the promises of my old brand…

[That's]

[Howard] Or break them in such a way…

[Another can of worms]

[Howard] I don't know.

[I think we just need to…]

[Howard] That's an old can of worms.

[Garbled]

[slap a lid on that, and say, whoops, can't cover it.]

[Howard] Whoops. Sorry. That's another eight part thing.

 

[Howard] Okay. We ready for homework?

[Homework. You are giving us the homework this time.]

[Howard] Okay, I am. In the first episode, I talked about how this intensive was expectations and promises, and how I didn't call it Eight Expectations because that would have forced me to drill down and to configure the content in such a way that there were eight discrete elements covered across seven episodes plus a… It was a headache. Your homework is to fulfill the promise that I decided not to make because I would have broken it. Call this intensive, call this discussion we've had over these last eight episodes, Eight Expectations. For you, for your toolbox, write down eight different categories in which promises and expectations can be used as structural elements, as troubleshooting elements, as critical elements, as career elements. Laying over all of the other tools that you use, that we all use, when we write, when we create. So there's your homework. Write the thing that I was either not smart enough or into much of a hurry to write, the course outline for Eight Expectations. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/26/16-52-structure-is-a-promise/

 

Key points: A structure you pick may set expectations and make promises you didn't expect. Kishotenketsu. Police procedurals. Mysteries have clues! Three act structure, and hero's journey. Be aware of the structure you use, because audience satisfaction may depend on it. Save the Cat! M.I.C.E. Quotient. Use the structure, but paint over the color-by-numbers, too. Younger readers may need to be taught about the structure. Consider using the nesting of M.I.C.E. Quotient because it is satisfying to audiences.

 

[Transcriptionist note: Again, I may have confused the labeling. Apologies for any mistakes.]

 

[Season 16, Episode 52]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Structure is a Promise.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] I'm here to tell you that whatever structure you picked for the thing you're working on is making a promise that you may not know you've made. For instance, if you're using the hero's journey, you may have promised people that the nice mentor character who is helping your hero is totally going to die. If you haven't decided that they're going to die, your audience may actually be disappointed when your Gandalf or your Yoda survives all the way into Act Three. We're going to talk about how the various structures we use set expectations for audiences and make promises. Often, these are cases of audience bias where we have no control of what people are expecting when they pick up what we've made.

[Kaela] Yeah. I kind of have a fun story about this. When I was younger, I watched Spirited Away for the first time. I'd watched a few Ghibli movies, but I wasn't really much into anime. So I was really unfamiliar with non-Western story structures. So I started watching Spirited Away, and it was this delightful charming thing, but I got about a third of the way into it and I started feeling this underlying anxiety about where is this story going. I don't… Like, we just keep… Like, ah. It actually interfered with my ability to enjoy the movie at all. Because I… My story brain was expecting three act structure with peaks and climaxes and pinch points and all of these things. Instead, Spirited Away is a much more kind of kishotenketsu, which is long slow buildup, world changing event, and then resolution. Because I as an audience member had no idea that that structure even existed, it was so hard for me to engage with the story that was on the screen. Because my brain was like, "What is happening here?" That is, to me, a beautiful example of the way that the structure creates a promise, and because I, as an audience, brought an expectation with me that the story didn't deliver on. I've since watched it multiple times and I love it for exactly what it is now that I know where it's going.

[Megan] Something you find in a lot of especially Hayao Miyazaki's films is that sort of exploration of the world before we get to what you were saying, with the structure wise, because he does not start with a screenplay. Hayao Miyazaki storyboards his whole movie. I'm not going to say like free-form stream of conscious, but he'll just start with the images of a theme, and he'll build just right in a row the whole film before he turns it over to the animators.

[Kaela] Oh, that's a fascinating process.

[Megan] You can buy books of his storyboards. You can see his hand drawings of the entire film. He does it all himself. It's incredible.

[Howard] Well, sadly, we are recording this too close to Christmas for me to say that's what y'all should get me for Christmas…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And have it actually arrive. I think that the story structure underpinning a lot of Hayao Miyazaki is kishotenketsu, which is a four-part structure that we haven't talked about much in Writing Excuses. We talk a little bit about it in Xtreme Dungeon Mastery. But it wasn't until I looked at that story structure that some of the Miyazaki films actually made sense. I was like, "Oh. This is why this happens here instead of happening here." Because my expectations were wrong. But let's talk about some other structures. What are some other structures that make promises and what are those promises?

 

[Megan] I love hour-long police procedurals. Detective procedurals, murder mysteries. I like, in any language, any like country, I love watching hour-long procedurals. One of the things that that usually promises…

[Howard] By hour-long, you mean like 47 minutes?

[Megan] Yeah. 47 minutes with breaks for commercials. Because those commercials or act breaks are an important part of the structure. That cliffhanger you'll get three act breaks in, where you're like, "Oh. There's another body. What are we going to do now?" [Garbled] there. One of the frustrations I had with watching the BBC Sherlock is that show is all about, of course, what a genius Sherlock is, so it didn't drop the audience clues the way most procedurals would. Sherlock just knows the answer. Or he paid someone offscreen to do the research for him. Instead of somebody dropping a line early on about, "Oh, yeah. Diatomaceous earth. It's used for tropical fish, and is used for this, and it's used for this." And the murder tool has diatomaceous earth on it. Then somebody in Act III casually mentions, "I love my tropical fish," and if you're paying attention, you're like, "That's the murderer."

[Chuckles]

[Megan] Because I'm someone who likes to guess along with it.

[Oh, yeah.]

[Megan] So shows that break that storytelling, or telling a different kind of story, like BBC Sherlock, it's very hard to guess what happens next, because it's not relying on the structure I was expecting going in.

[Kaela] yeah. I would say the BBC Sherlock is not actually a procedural in any way. Which is a surprise for a Sherlock show.

[Yeah]

[Howard] But this actually kind of steps across the line from structure to genre. Because… That's okay. But police procedural is its own kind of genre that comes with an embedded structure. It's weird to me that Sherlock failed to adhere to that, because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The police procedural with the Sherlock Holmes books. We circled back around and BBC said, "Pht! We don't want to do a police procedural, we want to do Sherlock Holmes, who is also Doctor Who and Merlin."

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

 

[Howard] But that's me [garbled]. Kaela? You had something you wanted to…

[Kaela] Yeah. So I guess the three act structure's probably my bread-and-butter as a writer. Like, that's how I do… And the hero's journey. Those are like two of my favorites. I guess I like that the hero's journey is just something that you do find embedded in all mythology. Mythology is my… That's my house, man. Mythology… I love the way it speaks universally. But also, it gives you a pretty strong structure for character growth and, like, that's the number one thing for me in stories as well as… Character growth in the hero's journey is just so good. That's why I think that when I watch a show that's kind of promising a hero's journey structure and then they don't really grow, I get frustrated. I'm like, "Ah, that was kind of the whole point, is that you change, but you didn't. Now I feel a little bit cheated. Can I have my refund for this Netflix?"

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] Oh. Oh, goodness. So, book of the week. I'm going to pitch to you Eragon by Christopher Paolini. Because this is a book which unapologetically draws from the three act… Or not the three act, the hero's journey structure as deployed by Tolkien and George Lucas. To the point that a friend of mine was reading, I think, book 2 and his friend was reading book 1. His friend picked up… Looked up from his, and he says, "Hey. Have they met Yoda yet?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "What do you mean, have they met Yoda yet?" "Well, because I…" These were guys who were super familiar with the form. I'm not knocking Christopher Paolini. He was incredibly successful by delivering a hero's journey which telegraphed the fact that it was a hero's journey and made it super approachable for audiences. So. Eragon, the book.

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Howard] I've been told that the movie is not something we speak of in our house.

[Laughter. What movie?]

[Howard] Eragon, the book, by Christopher Paolini.

[To me]

 

[Howard] Let's talk about some other structures. Sandra, you had something?

[Sandra] [garbled what I was going to say] is that… Taking this back to the whole idea of what can we as writers do, it's important to be aware that the structure you pick is going to create an expectation for the story you're creating. That means that when you are pulling back and looking at the craft and looking at… You had a head full of ideas and characters and what have you, you need to pay attention to the structure, the framework that you're going to stretch your characters and stories across, because that will determine some of the satisfaction of the reader when they're done reading your story, and that kind of thing.

[Howard] Meg.

[Megan] When I was first reading the Eragon books, they actually ended up not being for me, because I loved the original Star Wars trilogy so much that I felt like the books were too close. So, there's that precarious balance of "Yeah, I wanted something like Star Wars in a fantasy world, but. Not. This. Close." I remember getting really frustrated and not finishing the series, because I'm like, "Well, I know everything that's going to happen anyways, so why should I even…" So that's something about… I'd like to segue a little bit into Save the Cat! That I deal with a lot working in the animation industry. Because you will have people that'll be like, "Okay. Make it Save the Cat, but a little different." Because now everybody knows it, and everybody reads it. I have some development friends who, when they're reading a script go… It'll actually be marked against you if you hit all the Save the Cat beats on exactly the pages that Save the Cat recommends you do it in your screenplay.

[Laughter]

[Megan] [garbled] feeling that, "Oh, this writer is just painting by numbers and they're not telling an emotional authentic story."

[Oh, that's…]

 

[Howard] When you take a structure… When you use… We've talked about this in our episodes on M.I.C.E. Quotient and hero's journey and Hollywood formula and whatever else. I've used this metaphor before. When you adhere to the formula so closely that every beat is predictable, it's like people can see the lines in the color-by-number. You just filled in the little spaces with color, you didn't actually paint over it and make your own picture. It's the difference between canned beans and fresh beans. It still beans, but if you can taste the can, something's gone wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Which is interesting. I mean… This… I think we'll get more into this talking about genre, but there are certain audience segments where… I'm sorry, but they want to taste the can. Like, they showed up for canned beans, and they want to taste the can.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] That's, again, a thing where you're paying attention to your audience, who are you speaking to, and is this an audience who really wants like to taste the can as they go through their media or are they going to be grouchy because you didn't cook fresh?

[Megan] Knowing your audience I think is definitely an important part of how you handle your structure. Like, who are you speaking to, and things like that. We'll get more into that in the next episode with the genre and media promises, too.

[Well, I mean…]

[Kaela] It can be frustrating…

[Go ahead.]

[Kaela] I was going to say, it can be frustrating as a creator when the person who's in charge of publishing your book or distributing your film project, where you're like, "No, listen. Fresh beans are so good." They're like, "Ah. But the can sell so well."

[Yes]

[Kaela] That sometimes it can be hard to break expectations and conventions and still get a large enough audience that's interested in your niche fresh organic beans.

[Chuckles]

[Then…]

[Howard] This is a case where I err on the side of understand the structure first. Know how the structure works. Apply the structure in your writing or your rewriting. Then, if your alpha readers or your beta readers say, "Your structure didn't make promises and then keep them, it telegraphed your punches and sucked all the energy out of them." Then you know that it's time to go back in and over paint the color-by-numbers so people can't see the grid. Sandra.

 

[Sandra] Another factor to consider… We have three authors here who write for young audiences. You have to remember that what is old and tired and uber familiar to an older audience is brand-new for someone who's 12. They've never encountered it before. One of the reasons that Eragon succeeded so well is because it hit a generation that hadn't grown up with Star Wars. They may or may not have been exposed to Star Wars. But, like, for example, my kids just all rejected Star Wars, which meant Eragon was amazing and fresh and they'd never encountered this before. So our oldest child latched onto Eragon as this brilliant, brilliant thing because it was the first encountering of that hero's journey and it really spoke to her. So when you are writing for younger children, sometimes you need to teach them what beans are.

[Laughter]

[garbled new product]

[Sandra] You are te… You are… As you're writing for young children, you are teaching them the story structures that they will then have in their head as expectations for the rest of their life, which is amazing and scary as a creator.

 

[Howard] One of the structures that I want to mention here is the M.I.C.E. Quotient because M.I.C.E. works so well. It's milieu, interrogation, character, and event. This structural formula in which you determine what types of sub stories are being told in your story based on these elements. One of the principles of structuring things by M.I.C.E. is that… It's the FILO principal, first in, last out. If you open with milieu, then your story ends with milieu. Milieu was first in, milieu is last out. It's this whole idea of nested parentheses. If you go milieu, idea, character, then it ends character, idea, milieu. This is something that audiences are not typically conscious of when they're consuming a story that's… Because those things are so blurry by the time you've backed all the way away from it. But if you keep that promise, if you adhere to that structure, it's inherently satisfying and it's subtle. It's something that audiences often don't know has been done to them. That's one of my favorite things. That's, for me, the difference between the fresh beans and the canned beans, is that, hey, I delivered the beans, and I delivered them fresh, and you can't tell that I used the recipe off the back of the can or whatever. The metaphor's falling apart.

[Chuckles]

[garbled second metaphors do that]

[Howard] Metaphors do that. Especially from my lips.

 

[Howard] Hey, we're 18 minutes in. Kaela, do you have homework for us?

[Kaela] I do. Get your pencils ready everybody. I'll be grading.

[Laughter]

[Kaela] No. So, your homework for today, of course, is to first you want to look up all the things that we talked about today. M.I.C.E., the three acts, Save the Cat, hero's journey, kishotenketsu, all of the good stuff. Then, I want you to take your favorite thing, like, if it's your favorite movie, your favorite novel, your favorite web comic, whatever it is. Sit down with it, have these structures out in some way. You can pick one at a time if you want, and watch it all the way through and reverse engineer what it's doing. So you can see how it is hitting or you can even identify which structure it's using or going off of, at least as a skeleton. Then, for bonus points… You want those bonus points, right? Go ahead and take your least favorite thing. I recommend it be a short thing, just so you don't have to spend too much time with it. Then look at the structure again. Reverse engineer why it's not working. You'll learn a lot by reverse engineering things. I highly recommend that process.

[Howard] Thank you, Kaela. Thank you, Megan and Sandra. We're out of time. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/07/25/first-page-fundamentals-the-haunting-of-hill-house/

 

Key points: Voice! Sanity and dreams. The main character is the house. Two main ways to start a novel, action-driven and voice-driven. For voice-driven, the narrator ruminates on an important idea, something that gives urgency and stakes. Pay attention to punctuation, to how that emphasizes important things. Establish your authority. Tell the reader, up front, "I am going to tell you a story. Here is what the story is." Then tell them the story. Establish expectations, and subvert them. Imply menace at the corners.

 

[Season 16, Episode 30]

 

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, First Page Fundamentals: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dongwon] So, this week we're going to do a deep dive into an example here. We're talking about, again, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. So, to start, Mary Robinette, would you mind reading the first paragraph for us all, so we're all on the same page, as it were?

[Mary Robinette] The Haunting of Hill House.

 

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

 

[Dongwon] This really is one of my all-time favorite openings of a novel in the English language. I think it does so many things right. This is, first off, a great example of how you use voice to establish what your book is. One thing that we, I think, don't really talk about enough when it comes to voice is the musicality, poetry of what she has done here. There's such an elegant rhythm to it that Mary Robinette brought out so wonderfully there that it flows in this way that you get into this sort of… Lulled into this particular state of mind by, and you have this dreamlike quality, which, again, is reflected by this idea that larks and katydids also dream. Right? That, in tension with this idea of conditions of absolute reality, and then connecting that again to sanity. Right? So all of these elements are immediately put on the page of… We're in this sort of hypnagogic dreamlike state. We're dealing with concepts of mental illness and madness. Then we are introduced to the main character of the book. That main character is the house itself.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find particularly compelling about this example is… There are kind of two sort of ways of starting a novel. There's one that is sort of action-driven, which is what we usually focus on. Then there are voice-driven ones. Which are this thing where you take an idea and the narrator ruminates on it. It's something that is important. So there's something within this first paragraph that is also giving you a sense of the urgency, the thing that is important, the thing that is at stake here. That there is this house that so sense… The door is sensibly shut, that it's upright and it's holding darkness within. It's giving you a sense of "Oh, there's something terrible that is coming." But it never names what that terrible is. It's just making you this promise through what is important to the character, and the character is the house.

[Dongwon] It's such a quiet way to start. I mean, it's such a description of just a house and then some stuff about dreams and sanity, right? But really, fundamentally, the core of this paragraph is describing the fact that it's a well-built, well put together house. That is what it is. It's stood for a long time. It's probably going to keep standing for more. But then you end on that final turn, which is such like a delightful moment for me, which is, "Whatever walked there, walked alone." It's just this way of slipping the knife in right at the end of all of that lovely description, all of that sort of smooth beautiful rhythmic description. That the menace that's been building over the course of this paragraph sort of culminates in this moment of… There's going to be that moment of surprise, there's going to be that dark twist to this book. Again, that reflects the structure of the book, that reflects what Shirley Jackson is doing over the course of this story, of giving the characters, of giving them this experience, and writing in this very elevated way. But still, it's going to have that bite. There's still going to be that moment when the character twists and something is not right. Yup?

[Mary Robinette] I want to… Since we are doing a deep dive on this. I actually want you, the listener to go to the Writing Excuses webpage and look at the first paragraph which we will have in the liner notes. The reason I want you to look at it is I want you to look at how she has structured this. So, as a narrator, one of the things that I look at is punctuation. She is placing those commas, those periods, the semicolon… She's placing those very deliberately to provoke causes. Those pauses draw a line underneath things that are important. So where are the pauses that occur in this? Under conditions of absolute reality. We have a semi-colon. The larks and katydids are supposed by some to dream. There's this thing that's like some people think this, some people don't, you're going to have to make your own decision, is what she's doing right there. Hill House, not sane. Again, she sets that apart with those commas. We get to holding darkness within. That semi-colon again to just kind of punctuate that. Then, to really draw a line under the… What the thrust of this entire thing is, it's the very last clause of that opening thing, of that opening paragraph. Walked alone. With a comma, and then the period, and then the paragraph break. You step back slightly before that. And whatever walked there. That's also set apart and she's drawing attention to it very consciously, I suspect, with the way she's imagining the rhythmic quality of this language. So when we're talking about voice, this is one of the things that you can be doing. I'm not saying your writing must have a bajillion commas and semicolons. What I'm saying is use them consciously. Don't think about them so much grammatically. The grammar exists to describe and codify the ways that we naturally group language. What you're thinking about is where am I grouping my thoughts. What is important, what is the thing that I want to set apart so the reader can see it, and what are the things that I want to draw a line under?

 

[Howard] The very first line re-contextualizes what we are being told several times as it unfolds. Most people don't read this slowly. But. No. Live organism. Okay. No live organism. What am I being told? No live organism can continue. That's pretty bleak. For long. Okay, that's less bleak. To exist. Sanely. The word sanely has suddenly re-contextualized everything else. It's not existential, it's sanity. Under conditions of absolute reality. As the little things reveal, that sentence drives me screaming into the Gothic horror of the haunting of Hill House. I… To be honest, I have not read the full book. Exploring this first line convinces me that I might not like that ride.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But the poetry with which that very first line is constructed is absolutely beautiful. That's the sort of promise that I like to be made, I like to be the recipient of, early in the book.

 

[Dan] I am really loving the… Just the little clause, not sane. I mean, it's… The w… So much of this is beautiful. But that one in particular. Not only the suggestion that a house can have or not have sanity, which is fascinating by itself, and which does set up, like Dongwon said, the idea that the house is the character. But, compared to that first sentence, and I, like Howard, have never actually read this so I'm coming in cold and I would love to know if I'm wrong about this. But he's basically saying that in order to have sanity, you have to escape reality sometimes. The fact that the house is not sane implies then that maybe it does exist under conditions of absolute reality. That what we're about to see is not a dream, it's actually real things that are happening. Which takes away some of our safety net and makes this not only kind of unexpected, but also more dangerous.

[Dongwon] [garbled] with that not sane… Every time I hit that line, like, the whole theater audience in my head leaps to its feet and starts cheering…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Like, every time I hit that moment, I'm just like… This is not sane. How did you do this? How do you make me feel this unsettled by that tiny appositive? That tiny, comma-framed phrase there? But. Anyway.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's give the reader or listener a moment of feeling slightly safer. We'll talk about the book of the week.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We'll take you away from Hill House just for a moment and talk about our book of the week. Which is prep for next week. That's Moby Dick. You're going to tell us a little bit about that, right, Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, we're going to talk about the opening page of Moby Dick. Probably one of the most famous lines, opening sentences, in English literature. But when I mention Moby Dick by Herman Melville, I can sort of in my brain hear a large percentage of the audience groaning at the idea that they have to read this ponderous weighty novel. I felt that way for a long time, until I read it sort of in my mid to late 20s. I finally sat down and I was like, "Fine. I'm going to read this thing. Everyone talks about it." I was completely surprised by the book that I actually found. That wasn't this dry tome. It's funny and it's deeply strange. There's like whole chapters that are just talking about whale biology and then long descriptions of like what whaling actually is. It's dark. I cannot overstate how strange of a book this is. It doesn't feel like anything else I've ever read. It's so… It's such an interesting examination of the human experience, of what it is to be in the world and figure out how to survive within it under these conditions. I love this book. It's not going to be for everybody, but I promise it's not the book that your English class taught you that it was going to be.

[Mary Robinette] So, ah…

[Howard] The book that my English class taught me was a… Like, 50 page Cliff's Notes of Moby Dick.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That does not do that book justice.

[Dongwon] It absolutely does not.

[Dan] You're not supposed to admit that out loud.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, that is Moby Dick by Herman Melville. So go ahead and read that for next week.

 

[Mary Robinette] Meanwhile, we are going to continue talking about The Haunting of Hill House. Because there are other things that it is setting up in here besides just "Oh, this is really, really good juicy voice-y thing."

[Dongwon] The thing I want to draw everyone's attention to is… The punctuation is masterful. I mean, I think we focused on that for a long time for a good reason, but the effect of that on the reader, I think, is establishing an iron grip over your brain in this moment. She establishes an enormous amount of authority, of I am telling the story to you, and I am going to tell it my way. It's going to be distinct and unusual. But also, she just establishes this complete authority. That's one of the things you need to do to the reader in your opening page is tell them, "I am a good writer. You want to spend time here, because I'm good at this." Right? I think she does that in this way by manipulating the rhythm, by manipulating the punctuation, by doing unexpected and sort of things that you're quote unquote not supposed to do. She breaks some rules, but she does it in a way that's very masterful. So, I think, one of the lessons you can take here is to aim for this kind of authority. Which isn't necessarily meaning like you can break the rules in the same way that she does. But find a way to be as compelling and convincing of your mastery of language in your mastery of scene and setting and all those things as she does here.

[Dan] It strikes me, Dongwon, and tell me if I'm wrong about the book as a whole, but this opening paragraph is using a lot of the same tools and playing with a lot of the same toys as Lovecraft. That first sentence in particular is incredibly Lovecraftian, but in a much more sophisticated way than he ever was. Just the way that it is kind of combining these concepts of supernatural and science, directly. Phrases like no live organism and absolute reality. Then, at the same time, this is about a house that's not sane and katydids that dream. It's a really sophisticated combination of those very specific tools that Lovecraft used to establish the tone and the atmosphere.

[Dongwon] I think there's some… Yeah, I think there's a similar preoccupation with sort of this concept of insanity and the very specific way that… We don't really talk about it this way anymore for probably very good reasons. But she also has flipped it on its head in so many ways because instead of viewing the cosmic horror that breaks your brain, the thing that breaks your brain is absolute reality. It's having to be present with no ability to dream, no ability to escape sort of modernity in all of its like groundedness, and the concreteness of this house. So I kind of love the way that she has inverted that in this way and how the language just pushes you immediately into that space, and, I think, is in conversation with it, but I think in a way that says, "Lovecraft, you wish you could do this." Right?

[Dan] Yeah, exactly.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Dongwon] You wish you could dream the… To reach this level. So, yeah.

 

[Howard] I'm reading and rereading… I printed it out so I can have it in front of me as we're having this discussion. I realized that the thing that is not stated explicitly per se, but which is inextricably related to us, is that Hill House is a living organism.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, wow. That's a promise that I bet gets fulfilled later in the book.

[Mary Robinette] So, this thing that you just noted. This is a thing that I adore when an author does, when they demonstrate through all of the contextual clues that something is alive. She is not being coy about the fact that Hill House is a living organism. She spending a great deal of time letting us know that it's a living organism. In someone else's hands, that discovery would come later. That would be the I don't want them to know this thing. The big reveal is going to be the house is alive and the whole thing is from the house's point of view. That's not what she… She's right up front. This is a living organism. It is not sane. You're going to spend the next however many pages inhabiting that. Literally and metaphorically. This is… We've talked about getting the reader to trust you at the beginning. These are all things that she is doing with very deliberate choices. She's not being coy about the central thing. The interesting geewhiz factor. Which is that the house is alive.

[Dan] Yeah. And…

[Mary Robinette] You can absolutely do that. There are plenty of examples of being coy with the central… Sixth Sense. But how interesting it is when you go in, and it causes all of the stakes to shift, and become so much more immediate because you have that connection with the character.

[Dongwon] To me, it's always such a plus when a writer can start and tell you, "Here's what the story is," and then proceed to take you to the story. But when they've told you up front, "Here's what's going to happen," I just love that because it's setting expectations and then fulfilling them. As a reader, for me, one of the most satisfying things is being told, "I'm going to tell you a good story. Here's what the story is." Then they tell me the story. I'm like, "Yup. That was great. Thank you for that. Let's do it again sometime."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because the other thing that happens when they do this is this is what the story is. And it's not going to go down the way you think it is.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, she is telling us that right off the bat. She's establishing expectations, but also she is subverting them. Imagine any haunted house. It is going to be dark and creaky and full of… There will be weird breezes coming through because the walls don't meet. No. This house, the walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm. Doors were sensibly shut. This is not the kind of haunted house we are accustomed to. That by itself makes it more menacing. In the same way as like the introduction to Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs. He is clean, he's well shaven, he's not the creepy monster we thought. Neither is this house. Yet, there is still some menace to it. The fact that the doors have been shut is sensible. Which is just implying this menace at the corners of the story in a house that looks completely harmless.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we are going to give you some homework. I'm actually going to give you two pieces of homework. Or three. One is Moby Dick. The other is there's an adjacent story that I want you to read. It's called Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell. It's nominated for the Nebula. I think it's nominated for all of the awards this year. It's fantastic. It's basically what happens if you go to an open house at a place like Hill House. It's fantastic. Then, the last piece of homework that I have is your actual home, is that I want you to write an introduction to your book that is a voice-driven opening. So, this is going to be something that is… You're just doing description. There's no action. There's no dialogue. It's not about a person doing a thing. It's about a thing that matters deeply to the fundamental core of the story, and that you're just going to take some time and describe it. Inhabit that. Think about tone and setting and stakes and bring us all of those things that you would normally bring us through action through your descriptive text.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/20/16-25-breaking-into-game-writing/

 

Key points: You'll probably start at the bottom. Work-for-hire means follow the marching orders, and someone else owns what you make. Put yourself out there. Cold calls, a portfolio, networking. Game jams! Snowball your career, start small and roll up into bigger gigs. Give the boss what they want. Be careful of trying to impress and ending up setting expectations that aren't sustainable. Competent, on time, and pleasant to work with is enough. To break in, you need to be obstinent, and keep throwing yourself at the door. 

 

[Season 16, Episode 25]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Breaking into Game Writing.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are finally arriving at the topic that I bet a lot of our listeners have been waiting for. For seven weeks…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We've been talking about how to write for games. But today, we're going to talk about how to break into it as an industry. How to try to get paid for it. So, Cass, if someone wants to become a game writer, what do we do? Where do we start?

[Cassandra] I think setting expectations, unfortunately, is definitely where you want to start. It is a highly competitive business, regardless of the field you're talking about, whether it's tabletop role-playing games or video games or anything in between. So, like any other job, unless you benefit from nepotism, but that is a topic for something else, you start at the bottom. No one is going to hire you to run a new game right off the bat. Nobody wants to publish your homebrew setting. Not because they don't necessarily believe in your abilities, but because they have an entire stable of people who have already proved themselves and have contacts to reach out to. Most of your work is, unless you end up opening your own studio, going to be work for hire. Meaning somebody else owns your creation. As such, you have to be prepared to follow those marching orders, within reason. You're a mercenary. [Garbled plot games?] Prior to the show, we were discussing artists versus artisans. I'm curious about the analogy you're using there.

[James] Yeah. So, this is one I often use, along with mercenary, like you said. Where I think an artist is all about sort of expressing yourself and creating the thing that is you, embodied on the page. An artisan I think of as somebody who does a job for somebody else. So when I say… I always say for game writing or any sort of tie-in work for hire, you're building a house with words for somebody else. They tell you what they want. You build it. Then they control what happens to it afterwards. So if you build a beautiful word house and then they decide to paint it with purple polkadots and you hate that, sorry. Like, that's not your house. Like, your fundamentally building something for someone else. I think that's really important for people to know going in. Because it can be easy to get your heart broken if you go in thinking you own something when you really don't. But, so, getting in again is the important part for this show. So, how do you get in, Cass?

[Cassandra] You have to put yourself out there. I know it is possibly a difficult thing to do if you're an introvert, which I think a lot of writers are, but this is definitely one of those things that is just necessary. You have to cold call companies you love, maybe noting a few specific things that you enjoyed about their games. You have to present a portfolio. You have to have a portfolio. You should network, at least as much as you can within the boundaries of what you feel comfortable with. Cons, social media, talking to people at social media, internships, meeting devs… Dan, you have any other thoughts on this?

 

[Dan] Yeah. But before we leave this concept of the portfolio, how does someone build a portfolio before they get hired?

[James] I'm glad that you asked, Dan. We were definitely going to hit that.

[Giggles]

[James] So, making your own portfolios, you kind of have to start a lot of the time by making your own stuff. So that can be writing a little one page role-playing game, it could be writing interactive fiction like a choose-your-own adventure, writing fan material for an existing game, new adventures, new rules, etc. Modding a videogame. Even just writing a short story. Anything you've done that's somewhere related to the job you're trying to do can be experience. Then you take that to companies, usually smaller companies while you're first starting, and say, "Hey, I've done some stuff that's related to this. Here's what I can do. Do you need my skills?"

[Mary Robinette] One of the things also to keep in mind when you're building a portfolio, regardless of the medium in which you are building it, is that portfolios are judged by the weakest piece in it. Because your best peace might be a fluke as far as they're concerned. So whatever your weakest piece is, if you're like, "Well, I'm including this. It's not really good but there's this one piece about it," take that piece out. Take that piece out. A portfolio is only as good as your weakest piece.

[Cassandra] It all ties into something I also wanted to say. Joining game jams, at least for video games, is a really good way of building your portfolio. It gives you an understanding of working within time constraints, working within the constraints set by somebody else, and also, you'll have people judging and commenting on your work. So if you don't necessarily find yourself a good judge of your own abilities, game jams are a good way of outsourcing it, right? Very slightly?

[Dan] I'm not sure that I'm familiar with game jams. Can you…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I don't know either.

[Dan] Talk to us about that?

[Cassandra] I keep forgetting everybody hasn't been in the games industry… Video games industry for far too long at this point. I need a new job.

[Laughter]

[Cassandra] So, game jams are things organized by the videogame community. I think nowadays by some of the people out of the RPG community. It's basically people will say, "Okay, over the course of this particular weekend, we need you to make the thing that uses these two ideas." Very often these ideas are voted upon by a community. So it could be stuff like make this a romance game. But it must in some way involve sentient cacti. Then everyone just goes to town creating them. Depending on the game jams, there are pre-events, where you can partner up with artists and programmers, other writers, and kind of fuse together into this temporary team to pull things off. It's definitely very stressful, I will not lie. It's something people need to watch out for, because I've seen folks burn out on it. But it's very much an interesting way of approaching stuff like this.

[James] So I wanted to throw out a couple more examples of, Cass had talked about, various ways you can network and get your portfolio in front of people. We mentioned cons and social media and internships. But there are some others. There are… You can meet with the devs, by, say, interviewing them as a fan or for podcast, fan sites, the press, whatever. That can be a good way to make contacts in the industry and just get some face time and learn about how things work. I love press because you get to ask people how they do their job and learn from them and get paid for it. You can also take non-writing jobs at game companies just to be sort of around it and learn by osmosis. You need to be careful with that, because if I hire an accountant at my game company, I want an accountant, not a game designer. So you need to make sure that first and foremost, you do the job you were hired for. If you do it well, then the people in the quote unquote creative departments are going to be a lot more likely to give you a shot when they're looking for freelancers. There's also mentorships. Cass, you had talked about one called the Pixels?

[Cassandra] Yes. It is just, I think, a yearly thing where a number of people offer to be mentors. They organize classes and workshops. They have little talks that are hosted across the year. You can apply with the knowledge that there is a group of people embedded in the video games industry who are invested in getting you to the next stage. This is a little bit of a sidebar, but one thing I definitely want to note. If you're breaking into game writing and you're from a marginalized community, it is incredibly easy to see a list of requirements in a job opening and go, "No, this is not for me." Especially in the video games industry, you will see people going, "Okay. You must have shipped at least one AAA game." Something that is very difficult, because positions in narrative are very limited. What I've learned from recruiters and managers over the years is people don't actually care about that. There are very many, many recruiters who will hire people with a good portfolio, who do not meet those credentials. As you're breaking into it, like, keep that in mind. Like, do not be dissuaded.

[Howard] One of the things that I found in the few occasions when I've done work for hire for game companies for other folks is that the skill set that I built writing Schlock Mercenary and writing other things had some holes in it. I had to learn new things. I had to learn them pretty quickly. Fortunately, I'd learned that I can learn things very quickly and I know how to build a craftsmanship skill for myself. But it's a challenge. It's a… The learning curve is steep. While I know we already have homework for this episode, one of the things that I think will build confidence for you and going out there… Putting your name out there, somebody says, "Well, can you write multi-branched dialogue?" Well, the question… The answer you always want to be able to say, "Yes, I can." Because I know I can learn how to do it. But you don't say that part out loud. Over the last several months, we've given lots of different kinds of homework assignments in Writing Excuses. I've looked at a lot of them and I've said, "Oh, that looks tedious. I don't want to do that." Okay? If you want to break into writing for hire in any business, I challenge you, take the homework assignments that look tedious and you don't want to do them, and do them anyway. So that when somebody says, "Can you do this?" Not only can you say, "Yes," because I know I can learn how to, you might even be able to say, "Yes. That was a homework assignment on Writing Excuses and I did it three days ago."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yes, but you don't actually need to say that part out loud.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Please don't.

 

[Dan] Let's take a minute for our game of the week, which is coming from James.

[James] Yeah. So this week I wanted to talk about a tabletop game called Dread. The reason I wanted to bring this up for this class is because it's fairly simple. It's something that you could make without the big team. The basic mechanic of Dread is that you use a Jenga tower. Every time you have to try and do something, the GM says, "Okay. Pull one piece." Or pull two pieces. Or pull three. Depending on how hard you're trying. If the Jenga tower falls, your character dies. It's a horror game. That little mechanic is so good at creating tension, because as the game goes on, everyone's just naturally getting more and more scared of that thing falling. So, like, that's a very simple mechanic, that, like, is an idea that you could come up with and put… You could build a game of an idea that simple and put it online and really impress people. Similarly, the character creation system is the best I've seen in that it's just a series of leading questions. So the GM will give you a bunch of questions. They'll be things like, "Why didn't you talk to your father before he died? What's hidden in your sock drawer? When was the last time you cried?" So as you answer these things for your character, it's impossible to not create a back story. So, that's Dread. It's a supercool indy RPG. I encourage people to check it out.

 

[James] So, as we're coming out of that, talking about Indy RPG and talking about credits, while absolutely you should be applying at the big companies, it's also really important to be looking at the smaller companies and seeing what companies are doing good work, because you're going to have a lot easier time getting in there. Then, I always think of like Katamari Damacy or the sort of what I call the snowball theory of career, which is you get credits whatever you can, and then you roll them up into larger and larger gigs. So maybe you start putting out a little thing on your own, and then you use that to get in with a small RPG company, and then use that to get into the next larger one and so forth.

[Cassandra] But I think, universally speaking, impressing bosses, the process is pretty much exactly the same. You should give whoever hires you, whether they're from a small company or a large one, precisely what they want. You want to hit your word count, not more, not less. You absolutely want to hit your deadlines. If you can't, you should always be transparent about your inability and give people enough time to create a buffer in case something comes up.

[Mary Robinette] But, speaking of buffers, this is a piece of general life advice to people. One of the things that people will do when they want to impress bosses is that you will do 110% that first couple of months. The problem is that they assume that that is your normal.

[Hehheh]

[Mary Robinette] And you will then have to do that level of work all the time. If you… If they add more to it and you succeed at that, that is what they think is your normal. So you actually want to build a buffer in for yourself. A piece of advice that I heard very recently was to come in and plan on giving 80%. So that the times when you actually have to do extra, that reserve tank is there and that you can bring that. But the other is not sustainable. I've spent my entire life building it to create crises because I work best in a crisis. But that also means that I have big burnout periods.

[Dan] Yeah. I saw somebody on Twitter the other day… Maybe this was something you had linked to, Mary Robinette, but they said their therapist had told them that if you always do your best, it's not your best anymore, it's your average.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That can be such an easy trap to fall into. Especially for an employee or a freelancer.

[James] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, when you… I'm not saying, like, to deliberately slack off. But think about how you work best, and do that. But don't… Remember that whatever expectations you set at the beginning are the expectations that you have to live up to for the rest of your time there.

[James] Yeah. I would say, as somebody who has spent a decade… Oh, to say, as somebody who's spent a decade hiring authors, one of the easiest things you can do to really stand out is just match their existing material. Do that thing we were talking about before, where, identifying their formatting, the language they use, the way the game is written. If you can copy those specific style elements for the game when you're writing for it… If what you can give them looks as close as possible to what an in-house generated document looks like, you're going to make it easier for them. You're also going to make it seem like you are already on the team. It makes it a lot easier to hire somebody if you can tell that they're going to be able to jump right in with very little on boarding.

[Mary Robinette] Cass, what were you going to say?

[Cassandra] I was going to say capitalism has definitely created a very toxic work environment in general across all the industries. What you mentioned earlier about not giving your 100%, but instead something that is comfortable with a buffer to grow into if you need to crunch. Like, that is really good advice, and that is advice that I think a lot of companies are trying to push under the carpet. Because they want to pressure everyone to go as hard as possible, churn them out and get the next new hire who is willing to work for a lot less then you might have once you've realized your importance and role in that company. Which I think is an oddly depressing point to bring up in an episode about breaking into the game industry and writing industry.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, but I will say… Yeah. I will say something from having hired people, from talking to my husband who works in winemaking, to talking to a contractor, to talking to editors. If you are competent and show up on time and are pleasant to work with, you are… That's basically all people want.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. It's like what James just said about making things easy on the hiring person, making things easy on the manager. It's not that you have to give 110%, you just have to hit your word count, hit your deadline, make their job easy, and then they're going to hire you for the next project.

[James] Yeah. That was… my very first editor, when I started out in journalism, told me, "Oh, James, you're one of my favorite writers." I went, "Oh, thank you. Like, what is it about it that speaks to you?" He goes, "You're always on time and you're always on word count." I said, "Oh. What about the writing itself?" He went, "Oh, it's fine."

[Laughter]

[James] But he kept hiring me.

[Dan] Yup.

 

[Howard] I… When I was drawing the Munchkin Starfinder stuff, there was a big piece I was doing and I had given one of the very small characters a very large wrench for comedy value. There was this approval process. It kept coming back. The guy at Paizo, I don't know his name…

[James] Probably best not to say.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You know what, it's fine. It might've been a Mike, it might have been a Matt. It began with an M, I think.

[James] It was probably Mark Moreland. Sorry, Mark.

[Howard] It had two M's in it. That's fine. But what came back was "make the wrench smaller." Okay. So I did a quick erase, redraw, made the wrench smaller. Came back again. "Make the wrench smaller," again. At which point I stopped and I talked to the art director and I said, "I could be wrong, but I think what Mark means is I hate the whole idea of the small character with the large prop, and I don't want it in the piece. So what I'm going to do for this next fix is I'm going to give the character a flamethrower instead so that it fills the visual space. Let me know if Mark's okay with that?" Now I'm saying it's Mark, because it must've been. What came back around was, "Oh, that's perfect, he loves it." I share that with you because giving the bosses what they want depends entirely on a suite of communications skills that involves you knowing what the boss wants even when sometimes the boss doesn't. That's hard to navigate.

[Mary Robinette] Well… Also, it involves asking questions.

[Yes]

[Mary Robinette] Like, never be afraid to ask a question when you don't understand the parameters.

 

[James] I want to just… To end on an inspiring note, because it can be so intimidating to think, "Oh, well, these people got in. They've always been in the game industry." I would just love to know, like, Cass, how did you break in?

[Cassandra] Oh. To the game industry, specifically, in terms of development? My first big role was because I would not shut up. I was working PR at a convention, and I met someone who worked at Excel. I ran up to him, like, "Oh, my God. Did you work on the original [garbled planet escape car?]?" He was like, "Yeah." I was like, "I want to work in your company." He was like, "I'm just a writer. What do you want me to do?" I'm like, "I don't know. Here is my portfolio. If there's ever an opening that you think is appropriate, please let me know." We kept that up for about four years before I got hired. It was just constantly me just jumping up and going, "Hi! Please?" So, blind obstinence. That's how I got in.

[James] I think…

[Chuckles]

[James] I think that's really important for people to hear, because, like, that is the message. It is just throwing yourself at it. I got in the same way. Where I wanted to work on Amazing Stories magazine, which was run by the same people who did Dungeons & Dragons. They were hiring for an editor-in-chief. So I emailed the CEO of the company and said, "I am totally unqualified for that job, but I have this portfolio of journalism. Is there anything at your company that I might be useful for?" She brought me in and started me out working on their website, finding JPEG's for a nickel a JPEG, which was very far from being a magazine editor, but it got me in the door. So don't be afraid to just throw yourself at the door.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I got in because I… A friend of mine had been asked to write loading screens. He does not write short, at all. It's not Brandon, it's someone else.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But he knew that I wrote short and that I wrote fast and introduced me to them. So I wrote these loading screens. I could get the word count that they needed and I would turn it in on time and I had no problems with multiple iterations. Then they hired me again to do something else, because I had turned things in on time. That's basically… I came in from the side, but it was because I had honed a set of skills in a different area, and then turned up on time and hit word count.

[James] Yeah. Perfect.

[Howard] Dan, you want to go next?

[Dan] Yeah. I'm actually relatively new in the games industry. I have written a bunch of tie in fiction in the past. But about two years ago, I started getting approached by game companies. That's just because I started producing two different web series. We do Typecast, which is the Twitch show that Howard and I and a bunch of other authors do where we play games online and I'm the game master. Then, I also do a weekly YouTube series of role-playing game reviews. So it is… I was not actually, at the time, seeking out employment writing games. But raised enough eyebrows… Or got onto enough people's radar because of all the web stuff I was doing related to gaming that I was contacted by people at cons and stuff. So that's where it came from me. But that's after 12 years of writing books. So…

[Howard] So, about 12 years ago, I've been making Schlock Mercenary for eight years. I was at a convention in the green room with Tracy Hickman who was pitching this idea for this book he wanted to write called Extreme Dungeon Mastery. He couldn't find a publisher for it. I told him, "Well, here's a Schlock Mercenary book. We self publish these. You should totally self publish things." What he heard, apparently, was, "I would like to publish your book, and can I draw the pictures for it?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He came back to me and said basically that, and said, "Oh, and can we have it by GenCon?" I did the math and realized… Sandra and I both… We had this discussion. "Tracy, you're asking us to turn around a 160 page role-playing supplement in 12 weeks." He said, "Yeah, can you do it?" I'm like, "I really don't think we can do it, that's too fast. So, no." Then he came back to us three weeks later and said, "But I really want to do it. Can you do it?" I said, "Well, now it's nine weeks. So obviously, the answer is yes."

[Laughter]

[James] That's the story of the game industry.

[Howard] I broke in by doing something way too fast. Sandra was brilliant in assembling all of this. She contacted our friend, Stacy Whitman, to help with the copyediting. We ended up putting a team together to publish a Tracy Hickman book at GenCon. Then I ended up at GenCon, and coming back to what Cassandra has said, at that point I was now networking with games people instead of with comics people, and other opportunities began presenting themselves.

[Dan] Howard, is Extreme Dungeon Mastery still available?

[Howard] I think we might be out of print of the hardbacks. I need to talk to Sandra. I'll post something in the liner notes about whether or not it's still a thing.

[Dan] Okay. Cool. Mary Robinette, what were you going to say?

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, by interesting coincidence, next week we will be talking about teams. I think that we should probably wrap this episode up and go to homework, so that we can talk about teams next week.

[James] Yeah.

[Dan] Agreed.

 

[Cassandra] Your homework this week is to brainstorm something short you can make to showcase your skills. It could even be the homework from a previous lesson. Then make that thing and post it online for free.

[Dan] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/17/14-7-how-weird-is-too-weird/

 

Key Points: How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling? Typically, you get one bye, you can ask the audience to believe on big thing. Everything else has to follow from that. Beware of "Oh, it's magic" so anything goes. This depends on the expectations of the audience, and the genre you are writing. But even serial urban fantasy has one major shift, not anything and everything. Make sure the audience knows where they are and what they are doing. Sometimes the worldbuilding is too weird the first time, but re-reading is okay, because now you know something about what is going on. Sometimes you can do more weird things by connecting them to the first bye. Think of a budget -- weirdness, boring, anything that challenges the reader, they all draw on your budget. Too much, and you lose the reader.  Learning curve... add weirdness slowly, building off other weirdness. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How Weird Is Too Weird?

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] My friends used to call me How Weird.

[Ooh! Garbled… Starting this podcast]

[Howard] Yeah. How Weird is too weird. Just…

[Brandon] Oh, no. Sorry. No.

[Howard] That was like fourth grade.

[Margaret] [garbled]

[Howard] And junior high.

 

[Brandon] Well, let's… We're going to theme this again. This is our year of worldbuilding. So we're talking about how weird is too weird, specifically in our worldbuilding. Let me just ask, how do you, and I kind of want to bounce this off Margaret first, because she's the one we've heard the least from regarding these topics. How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling?

[Margaret] Well, it depends to a certain extent on the media that I'm working on for that particular project. But in television, one of the rules of thumb that I sort of inherited from my training in my experience is the idea that you get one bye. Like early on, you're setting up, the beginning of your film or the pilot episode of your show, and you get to ask the audience to believe one big thing. Everything else has to sort of follow on from that. A show that… I mean, an exciting example of a show that no one has seen because it never actually turned into a TV show, but I was working on a show called Day One for NBC. The bye for that was these giant alien monoliths suddenly erupt out of population centers all over the Earth. This is the vanguard of an alien invasion. It would have been a really cool show. But that's the one thing we get. We don't get that and armies of flying elephants and dolphins can now talk. Like, you get the one thing. Past that, everything either has to come from those monoliths and the alien invasion, or it's got to be rooted in the familiar world that the audience is already going to be familiar with.

[Brandon] That's very interesting.

[Howard] There's a flipside to that coin that gets cited a lot by apologists and whiners of all flavors. That's, "Oh, you can believe in a universe that has dragons, but you can't believe in a sword that cuts through a horseshoe?" Well, you didn't say it was a magic sword. A sword can't cut through a horseshoe. I will totally believe in dragons, because they gave me… That was their one bye. If they want to tell me that dragons cut through horseshoes, that's fine, I can probably absorb that, and say that their one bye is magic exists and that includes creatures. But you have to pay attention to this. You don't just get… You don't just get to throw these things down because, oh, hey, it's magic.

 

[Brandon] So let me ask you, Margaret, do you take that same perspective on fiction? The one bye? Or would you kind of say that's a short form, television thing?

[Margaret] I think it depends a lot on the expectations of your audience, and the genre that you're writing in. When I'm working on Bookburners, this is very much designed to be in the vein of something like X-Files or Warehouse 13. It's that urban fantasy sort of set up. So the assumption is that the world works basically the way that we assume that it does, but also there is this encroaching magical force that is coming into the world that causes this. We don't get that and the major power… And the Vatican doesn't exist. You can only shift around so many things before it starts to feel arbitrary. What you want to do is make sure that you're setting your audience up in a way that they know where they're standing and what they're doing.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really good point. As you were talking, I was thinking about China Mieville. Like, with the new weird movement, the basic bye is stuff is going to be weird. We're going to have women whose heads are bugs. Not the head of a bug, but their head is a bug. But gravity works the way gravity works. Electricity works the way electricity works. So if China were attempting to do stuff is going to be weird, I'm not going to explain the physiognomy of any of these creatures. But and also gravity doesn't work the way you think it does. That would be two byes. So I think that you can do kind of a blanket bye in terms of this is sort of a genre expectation thing.

[Brandon] Right. Say, I'm thinking of like Hitchhiker's, right? Where the… There is not one bye. The bye is nothing will make sense, but it will be funny. But I do think genre expectations are a big deal here, right? When you write… You pick up an epic fantasy that's a 1000 pages long, it's secondary world, you are going on board for I'm going to get a lot of worldbuilding. When you sit down to watch a new show that's been pitched to you as a science-fiction thriller with a singular hook premise, you want that premise to be the focus of the show, not and then this other thing.

[Howard] You brought up Hitchhiker's… I assume you're talking about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes. So much weird. The reason they get away with it is that the narrative voice would take some of the weirdest… Hey, boy, this came at you from left field. I'm going to now use this… Use the opportunity to explain it, as an opportunity to be funny and to satirize something you didn't see coming. So as that extreme weirdness happens, the voice sells it in service of something else. I think that's where I draw the line.

[Brandon] The voice is the familiar.

[Howard] You want to make it weird…

[Brandon] In the Hitchhiker's Guide.

[Howard] The voice is the familiar.

[Margaret] You, as the reader, have a literal guidebook to all of the strange stuff that is going on in those books.

[Mary Robinette] Plus, the point of Hitchhiker's is that you are Arthur Dent. So the expectation that has been thrown down is everything is just going to seem strange.

[Brandon] Everybody else gets this but you. That's kind of the joke.

 

[Brandon] Let me ask this, then. Have you guys experienced media or read books or stuff where the worldbuilding was too outlandish for you? That it was hard for you to get into?

[Howard] Yes. I'm going to apologize for it, because I loved it anyway. Iain Banks, Look to Windward. The opening sequence is a war, battle thing, in which we are just immersed in the POV of an alien who is essentially a six-legged giant ferret. He never says, "These are six-legged giant ferrets." I never get all at once a description to tell me where I am. I read the first chapter and was lost as to who I was until I got to the end and thought… Oh, I was actually kind of disappointed. Oh, these aren't people. This had felt very human. Then I read it again. Reading it again, I was fine. I felt like I was the target audience for this. I was absolutely the target audience for any Iain Banks' novel. But that first chapter was too weird on first reading. Iain Banks… His one bye for me is if you have to read it again, read it again, this is going to be fine. You're going to love this. It's going to be okay.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Which, Mary, you're going to give to us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, this is The Nine by Tracy Townsend. Which is, for me, right on the edge of too weird, but in ways that are… I, like, finished the book and have been recommending it quite a bit. It's… It feels like London, and it feels like a steam punk London, but there are these other creatures that are going through. It's a… It's taking advantage of the many worlds theory, so it's a version of our London, but definitely on a different world, and there are these creatures that have their eyes in their feet.

[Brandon] That's different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And, so there's all of this very solid worldbuilding that goes from that single premise. But my brain is like, "Why would that evolve?" Like, and then trying to picture it, and trying to understand how it all works. So they tend to be arboreal, they do a lot of moving through trees. They have ferocious teeth, but they have no eyes in their head. Their eyes are in their feet. It is… It's… For me, like, I think one of the lines for me on the weird factor is how much time I spend trying to picture it in my head and if that's going to throw me out of the story. Now I pitch this is a book of the week because I think it's a gre… Terrific heist novel. It's got great character building. The steam punk makes sense. Frequently, when I read steam punk, it's like, this does not… Why… None of this makes sense. There's so much to love about this book. But if you are looking for something that is like, "All right, things are going to get weird," the nonhuman races in this world are weird. There's also tree people who are… Will shave their bodies, plane their bodies to take on specific shapes in order to cater to humans. It's like… There's so much stuff in this book. It's just filled with "Whaaat?" There's a ton of that. But mostly the reason you read it is because great characterization. And just a thrilling heist novel.

[Brandon] Awesome. That was The Nine.

[Mary Robinette] By Tracy Townsend.

 

[Brandon] So tell me this. Mary, when you're working on short fiction, how do you budget your weirdness?

[Mary Robinette] So. The… It's actually surprisingly like television in that you do pretty much get the one bye, you get the one thing that is this is weird. Mostly because everything that you put on the page, you have to spend words on to explain to the reader. So when I'm trying to get the reader to understand something, I know that it's going to throw them out of the story. Proportionally, that's going to take more of the narrative than it would in a novel. Even the same number of words. So I tend to also do one bye for short fiction. Usually, the short story is something that is exploring that one idea.

[Brandon] Something Margaret said earlier really kind of hit with me. We will have a podcast later in the year about how to make a story have worldbuilding depth rather than just breadth, which is the idea of taking a concept and digging deep into it. You said earlier this monolith story that you were working on. The idea being that you get your one bye as the monolith, but that doesn't mean that has to be the only weird thing. You are just going to connect any other interesting science fiction/fantasy elements through the monoliths.

[Margaret] Right, right. The idea in this series, and I think I can safely talk about what we might have done had this been a thing. My apologies, Jesse Alexander, if I'm spilling anything here. But in the pilot episode, there are these giant monoliths. Everybody is dealing with the fact that these things have erupted out of the ground. After that, other strange things start to happen. But it kind of comes at you one at a time. I think that speaks to what Mary was talking about on the short story. The idea of that subjective line of how weird is too weird… When you lose your audience, it's too weird. Anything up to that point, not too weird. When I started in film school, one of the things they told us was that the only firm rule of screenwriting is that you can't be too boring for too long.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Try to cut the boring stuff.

[Howard] That's a really good rule for everything.

[Margaret] Yeah.

[Brandon] I thought about this a lot when I've been teaching my class. I've said to my students, worldbuilding is the place where you generally are given more leeway. If you can keep your characters relatable, it doesn't matter how weird it gets as long as that character remains familiar. Now, sometimes, that character you want to be part of the weird, and then you're going to do other things to ground us. I really like what we've come up with with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing, where the guy is the normal, and everything else can be a little weird, or a lot weird.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] I… I'm thinking about this in terms of budget. Let me give you an analog… Or analogy. The concept of social capital. People will often ask me, "Oh, will you plug my Kickstarter?" Well, I have a limited amount of social capital. If I plug your Kickstarter, then I'm digging myself into a hole when the time comes to plug mine. As you are writing, as you are introducing weird things, as you are spending time on exposition, but it really needs to be exposed. As you are spending time on navelgazing, but you really want to dig into this emotion. All of these things are coming out of a budget. I don't know how exactly readers quantify the budget as they are reading, or television viewers quantify that budget, but if you think about it as a budget, you are doing a thing that is challenging the reader, and if you go too far, you lose them. Boring is challenging. Because a slog is challenging. How weird is too weird? When you've gone over budget, it's too weird.

[Brandon] Yeah. I would rely a lot on your beta readers, on early looks at things. Also, I think learning curve… We haven't even touched on in this, but I do think if you add your weirdness on slowly, building off of other weirdness, then you have things that feel perfectly normal by the end, that if you would have thrown it at the reader in the first chapter, you would have been in trouble.

 

[Brandon] We're going to do our homework. Margaret, you've got our homework this time.

[Margaret] Yes. The homework today is to… Well, your homework today, if you choose to accept it. Take a project that you are working on. Figure out what your one bye is. Can you narrow it down to one science fictional or fantastical element that is the core to the story you are telling, and have everything flow from that?

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/09/09/13-36-confronting-the-default/

 

Key Points: What do you think is normal, what are the ways that you think things should be? Seasons in LA, or Australia? Matters of faith? Gender, race, and all that? What about writing a strong female protagonist, except she's the only female in the book? Be aware of your biases! Think about where they came from, why do you have them? Fail better the next time.

 

 

 

[Amal] So, on the subject of biases and norms and defaults, I want you all to think about a bird. Think about what makes a bird a bird. I want you to write down a set of characteristics, say five characteristics that are… That, to you, define what a bird is. I could… I'm not going to give you examples. You can do this on your own. Then, once you have those five things, find real-world examples of birds that in fact don't share those characteristics. Just kind of examine why is it that the bird you came up with is the bird that you came up with, as opposed to some other bird.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/15/13-15-what-writers-get-wrong-with-mike-stop-continues/

 

Key points: Gay people just want to read about people who happen to be gay, not about gay topics. Gay people often lean into stereotypes. Gay people create their own culture. There is a whole spectrum of ways that you enact being gay. Even passers support flamboyant gay people. The media does seem to have more flamboyant gay characters than subdued gay characters. Pay attention to the order of reveals. Happily married, loves sushi, and gay OR gay, happily married, loves sushi? Look at characters as a mystery, reveal clues, and then the big reveal. Be aware of you and your readers' defaults. Do your research, get gay readers from within the gay community, and talk to people on the Internet to write better gay characters. "What's his secret?" Mostly, just make characters who happen to be gay. 

 

 

[Dan] This was a really interesting discussion. So, do you have some writing homework you can give us?

[Mike] Yes. So take your work in progress. Take any… Start with a scene. Take any character in that scene, and make that character… Change their sexual identity. So it could be to gay, to lesbian, bisexual, asexual, pansexual. Whatever it is. Rewrite the scene. But see just how little you have to change to make that character a different… Have a different sexual identity. You'll be surprised. It might be zero words. You might have to change literally nothing.

[Dan] Awesome. I think that sounds fantastic. Well, thank you again. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.