wetranscripts | Entries tagged with fantastical elements

Writing Excuses 21.28: Narrative Transitions

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-28-narrative-transitions

Key Points: Transitions. Through scene, break, interruption. Underline what happened or launch next scene. Question, bad, okay. Common tone key or match cut. End of a scene? Stop writing, then fix the transition later. Eight types of fun: sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression, submission. Transitions as pacing. Edit pass techniques. Bracket notes.

[Season 21, Episode 28]

[Mary Robinette] At Gen Con this year, Writing Excuses is doing a new thing. We're hosting something called Network the Gathering along with the Ray Bradberry Center and Maurice Bratis. This is going to be on Thursday, July 30th at 8:00 in Ballroom 4 in the Marriott. Part of this is something you can participate in. I mean, besides networking, we're going to have something called lightning readings, which we do on our cruises. This is like a sampler pack of readers. Each person does a two-minute reading, just enough to get a nice taste. Come listen, network, and then stick around for prizes. You can get a ticket in the Gen Con scheduling system for Network: The Gathering Thursday, July 30th at 8:00 p.m. in Ballroom 4 at the Marriott.

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

[Season 21, Episode 28]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Narrative transitions.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week, after having dug into what makes a scene last week, we're going to start talking about transitions. How do you move from one scene to the next? How do you move across that shift in location, POV, energy, whatever it is? And that can be moving from scene to scene. It can be moving from chapter to chapter or section to section, right? And so, what are the elements that you think about when you are trying to figure out how do I get from here to over there?

[Mary Robinette] So I think about what kind of transition I'm planning on using. And I think of them as sort of coming in three modes. There's what I call a through scene, and then there's a break, and then there's an interruption. So a through scene is where you use narration to transition us from one place to another. Like, we walked for many miles before arriving. And so it is technically the... you're just summarizing all of the offstage stuff is what's happening there. And then a scene break is the hashtag and you jump in time and space. And an interruption is where we stay in the same time and space, but interrupt the action in order to punctuate a moment. This is often the dun-dun-dun...

[DongWon] The knock at the door.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, the knock at the door. Yeah.

[Howard] I...

[dun...]

[Laughter]

[Howard] Years. That was...

[Erin] Figure that out.

[Howard] That was... that was easy. Years and years and years ago, I wrote a movie review for the movie Blood Rain, which was not good. and which did not advance from scene to scene very cleanly. And I described them moving the plot forward. Instead of it, like, flowing like a river, the cast all ganged up behind this boulder and manually pushed it down a dry riverbed. And it's the difference between something flowing smoothly and something looking like it's just too much work. It... you... it shouldn't look to the reader like you worked really hard to move between these scenes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] It should feel, to my tastes anyway, it should feel like like running water.

[DongWon] It should feel deliberate, right? First and foremost. And I think one of the big risks in transitions is if you have too much falling action at the end of a scene and then too much rising action at the start of the next scene, you end up in a valley where it's very easy for the reader to put the book down, right? You can have a disjunction between the scenes, but this is a little bit just another way to talk about get in early, get... or...

[Howard] In late, out early.

[DongWon] In late, out early. Thank you.

[Mary Robinette] I think about it as do I want to underline what has just happened or do I want to launch to the next scene? And sometimes you do both.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, an underline is like a reaction shot, which I describe reaction shots through what I've learned from Nathan Fillian. Have I done the Nathan Fillian? Okay. I couldn't remember if I had talked at length about this before.

[Erin] Is this the Nathan Fillian soap opera...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Thing? I love it. Remind us.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, he said that at the end of a scene in soaps, the camera is going to push in on you. And this older soap star said, "You are out of things to do. So you do... there are three faces you make. Did I leave the stove on? Oh, I did leave the stove on. No, I turned the stove off." And that basically what this says is...

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have questions. Things are bad. Things are going to be okay. And it helps the reader understand what is ha... and contextualize what has happened before. So I sometimes will get to the end of a scene, like, when it's not working. I'm, like, reading back through it and, like, why is this not working? And I'll look at it and go, is the stove on or off right now? Or do we have questions about it? Is this...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And sometimes just like adding a single line about that. It doesn't have to be like this entire big thing. It's just that single moment can...

[Howard] Okay. I have a quick personal question to ask.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] When you reach that moment, do you make the face? Do you make the stove on/ stove off face?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes. Yeah.

[Howard] I... because I've... I have caught myself, when I am writing, when I am drawing sometimes, I am stuck until I make the face my character would be making and feel what the character is feeling and then I can put the thing on the page. And that probably has no bearing on the conversation, but it fascinates me.

[Mary Robinette] No, but I do... I think it does to a degree because I think for me it is like I talk about these mechanical things, but it really is about chasing the vibes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And like the... for me the stove on or stove off is like this is kind of the underline. It's the but is the stove on or off is often the launch into the next scene because you're raising this new question. Which was one of the problems that I ran into when I was starting to shift from short stories to novels is that I kept ending everything with a solid sort of, ah, everything is fine now, or, everything is terrible. And it's one of the reasons that you sometimes use a through scene, or you want to end with a question. Because otherwise you are giving the reader a chance to leave. In theater terms, one of the problems with a blackout is that it's an opportunity for an audience member to escape.

[Erin] Wow. And you don't want that.

[Mary Robinette] You do not want... You want to keep them.

[Erin] I'm thinking a little bit about songs again, which is that... have you ever been listening to a song, I don't know why, but the wobble is coming into my head. The wobble is a song where you think that song has ended because they go into a long repetition as many songs do where things get quieter and you're like, "Wow, that was great. I had a lot of fun doing the wobble dance." And then they're like, "Just kidding. There's still three more minutes of song."

[Laughter]

[Erin] They just, like, come back and you're like, "Wait, there was no... Why? I don't understand. You, like, prepped me, like, to exit the song."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And I'm thinking, like, scenes are similar. Like, what you said, DongWon, about not wanting falling action and then too much rising action, is like a fade out in a song...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which telling people, like, this is the end, and then, weirdly, a fade in into the next verse and you're like, wait, that's an odd thing. In songs, a lot of times where you go from one scene or one part of a song to the next, it's after a strong moment. It is a long belt.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin[ It is like the moment of emotion in the song and then you're like, okay, quiet down, let me tell you the next part of this story. And so it carries the listener through.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think similarly, like, having an ending that's really strong, allows you to then start in another place, because that strong thing... the audience is still thinking about during the blackout, oh, my gosh, there was a gunshot, and then it went to a blackout.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Who could have shot it? By the time they think, oh, and also maybe I have to pee, you're already in the next scene...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And they don't have a chance to escape.

[Howard] The movie Corpse Bride, the song Remains of the Day by Danny Elfman has a crazy key change between the verse and the chorus. And there is what we call a common tone modulation between it. He sings, our jubiliciously lovely corpse bride. And the note that he's holding on bride is the same note that he begins the lyrics, die, die, we all pass away. But the whole key change has modulated around that one note. It's what we call a common tone key change. In cinema, there's a similar technique where very similar actions or very similar colors or whatever are cut between, it's called a match cut. And in prose, the technique is... I don't know what to call it. I would call it a match cut or a common tone modulation.

[Mary Robinette] I mean reaction shot comes out [garbled] ...

[Howard] Yeah, reaction shot. She cried into her cupped hands, at the end of a scene, and the next scene begins with he sipped his cup of noodles. And that transition to me is so... it's such a useful trick because I can have two scenes with completely different moods, completely different rising falling action, completely different settings, completely different characters, but that one common tone, that one match in the cut is enough to stitch them together so that it feels like the river is flowing instead of I'm sisyphus-ing a rock down the dry riverbed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think what a lot of this comes down to is, going back once again to the idea of macrocosm and microcosm, which I think about a lot when it comes to books clearly, like the fractal structure of things is a scene needs to have a beginning and an ending, right? And when you move from your ending to the beginning of the next one, whether you're looking for an interruption, whether you're looking for the match cut, building a bridge for the reader across that break, what you need to be communicating is intention. I meant to end the scene here. I mean to start the next scene here, and I'm going to grab you by the collar and move you from one to the other in a way that I think feels very deliberate and communicate something to the reader of A, how am I supposed to feel about the thing that just happened? and B, how should I feel about the scene that's about to happen?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And this is one of the things that makes ending a scene so hard is because you often don't really know the next scene, especially if you are discovery writing. Sometimes...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You end it because you're like, "Oh, I've got that, it's good vibe for ending here, but I actually don't know what I'm aiming people towards."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the the hacks that I have learned in the last 2 or 3 years, and I'm pretty deep into my career at this point, is that when you've accomplished everything that you need to accomplish in a scene, you can actually just stop writing it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then come back and fix the transition later.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, don't like... don't let all of our, like, you have to do these things or this is very useful to do. Like, don't let that make you feel like you can't end a scene. If you're having trouble, it's probably just you don't know what the next one is yet. Figure that out and come back.

[DongWon] Exactly. And speaking of abruptly stopping a scene, we're going to transition into our break.

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[Erin] So, I have a theory... now that we're back... about... I don't know if you all have ever heard of the eight types of fun.

[Mary Robinette] I've heard of some types of fun. I think when we...

[Howard] I've only heard of two.

[Erin] Which... what two have you heard of?

[Howard] Whee, this is fun, and Okay. No shit.There I was.

[Erin] So, this is a thing that comes out of games and they said like, why do people play games? And there are eight types of fun that you can actually be having when you're playing a game. And the reason... you might be like, what does this have to do? This transition is real... is real rough.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] But the reason is that when you were talking about the match cut, I was thinking, what is it that people like about that, especially in prose? And part of it is, I actually think it allows you to come outside of the story with a small part of your brain and be clever. Because you see the... like, even on some subconscious level, you're like, oh cup and cup, I get it, and it's not anything that's happening in the story on the page. It's... but it allows you...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To make a bridge yourself, and I was thinking, well, what is that exactly?

[DongWon] It's a meta participation in the story. Yeah.

[Erin] Exactly, and a lot of times, games think about how do you meta participate...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In the play. So the eight types of fun, I'm wondering if some of these are things that could carry you from one scene to the next. And I'm making it up in real time.

[Mary Robinette] I am so excited by this.

[DongWon] Yeah, I love this idea. Go on.

[Erin] But they are sensation, so the engagement of your senses.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] Fantasy, just like escapism. Narrative, drama and story. Challenge, which is an obstacle to overcome. Fellowship, which is feeling sort of a social framework or feeling like you're with these characters or with this thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Discovery. Expression and comfort and repetition.

[Mary Robinette] I love this so much. I love this like... when I think...

[DongWon] I play games for all those reasons. That's all.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like...

[Howard] I eat food for all those reasons.

[Mary Robinette] I just exist for all of those reasons. This is like... and this is literally one of the things that I love about games and about writing is that the reason it works is that it mirrors stuff that we do in the real world.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm sitting here thinking about the way... I talked in the previous chapter, previous chapter, sure, the previous episode about my my little to-do list...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] My prompts and purpose of scene. Like, I love the idea of adding that in as like, okay, but what is this... is this scene...

[Howard] What kind of fun?

[Mary Robinette] What kind of fun is this scene promising? And then using that as a kind of framing tool to pull you in, to suck you into the scene a little bit faster, and then probably lie to them if we tell them it's comfort.

[Chuckle]

[Howard] And in the interest of meta... in the interest of metataxonomy, I think your eight types of fun are almost all type one fun. Except maybe challenge will sometimes fall into the type two category.

[DongWon] Narrative can be type two, challenge can be type two. Fantasy, even if you're playing Resident Evil 4, you know what I mean? Like, I think type one, type two is a really useful concept that I use constantly. And again, type one fun, it's fun while you do it. It's fun when you think about it later. Type two fun, which comes up a lot in backpacking and hiking and other outdoor sports, is it was not fun while I was doing it. I was cold and wet and miserable, but it's still... it's fun when I think back on it, and I'm glad that I did it.

[Erin] Well, one of the things, like, the comfort one type of fun is partly what they use to describe when people are grinding in a game...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When you're repeating something...

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] Over and over again in order to get the item. And it is like the hiking.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, it's like in some ways, you're doing it and it's not fun at the time, but actually the ritual of doing it over and over again becomes a weird kind of comfort.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] It's a thing you know you have to do. Like if you could, like, fast forward through all the hiking and just be at the spot, maybe you would do it. But you might feel like I missed something because in some ways the, like, struggling to get there is what makes the reward. It's that contrast...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Between like oh the slog and oh my gosh like I got the item or I got to the place I wanted to.

[DongWon] Well, and comfort.. Oh, go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] Well, when you're hiking, there's a whole bunch of those micro moments on the way to the place.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like, this is pretty, that's pretty. So, a whole bunch of small rewards on the way there. Because if you were having to do that same slog through like a... the same length...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And the same ups and downs through a featureless concrete obstacle course, none of that... that would not be fun to look back on.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, this is why people talk about a roadwalk or desert hiking as some of the toughest hiking because it's very repetitive with very little distinction from moment to moment. But yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. And so I think one of the things for the transition of it all is that, like, you can maybe use these feelings or these things to figure out how to bridge the gap. So you can be like, I'm going to bridge the gap with sensation...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] With like a sensory detail that will focus. I'm going to bridge the gap with discovery. Oh my gosh, something new is here. And then you can change everything else, the people, the vibe, the etc. But something about that type of fun...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or that type of emotion that's happening from the reader is actually carrying you across.

[Howard] I was rereading the final books of Schlock Mercenary in preparation for putting them into print and realized... I actually realized it just now from the memory of having reread it that I used the match cuts, the common tone modulations, much more commonly in act three when I am making scene changes while everything is more intense. Because the way the match cuts worked there, it was a pacing tool. It and... I hadn't thought about that until right now, but the kind of transition you use can be a throttle for accelerating the pace or for pulling back on the pace.

[Mary Robinette] That is exactly why I use the difference...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Between a through scene and a scene break. Like, the thing about it... So, if you think about... if you've ever gone to see a musical or a stage show, Hamilton does this a number of times where they don't do a blackout as they move from one scene to another. The dancers and the actors are still on stage. They are the ones moving the scenery. There's still an action that is happening. And so, you keep this sense of forward movement. Even though it actually takes longer, it doesn't provide you with an exit point. And so it's one of those things that you can use when you do a through scene like, we traveled for many miles. It is both slower and also keeps you more engaged than if you do a scene break and come back.

[DongWon] Well, one thing I think about too along those lines and kind of connecting back to this idea of eight types of fun is you need that difference from beat to beat for your reader to also process what just happened, right? Not to continue too much on my risotto hating, but when one bite is exactly the same as the bite before, at some point that repetition becomes hard to bear and it's hard to process what makes each individual bite exciting and wonderful, right? So if you go from an action scene directly into another action scene into another action scene, and I see people trying to do this because, like, oh, I'm writing an action book. This is a thriller. It needs to be fight, fight, fight. When you do that, I can't enjoy any of the fights, because I need that moment, that sort of transition moment, of the actors are on stage moving things around. It gives me a breather...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To process the emotional thing I just experienced.

[Howard] Well, that's the principle we talked about at the very beginning of the previous episode...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The conflation of the word scene in scene-sequel format, where sometimes we are transitioning between action and action and sometimes we're transitioning between action and hey let's take a breath and process the action that just took place.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And this is also the thing, for me... like when we were talking in the last episode about flashbacks and if those were two... if that was a scene-wich...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Or if those were different scenes. And, for me, the reason that they're a scene-wich is because you're using these through scenes to transition... these small, very small, micro transitions to move in and out of those. But it is... it's the same idea as when you are, I'm in this place and then we travel and then we're in this other place. Those are two different scenes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But we stitch them together with this through scene text.

[Erin] Yeah, that makes sense. I think... I was actually thinking about, like, because I love, like, scenes where there's a slight memory or we move a little bit in time, but we're still in the same scene. And I think, like, what's interesting is thinking about how the difference... what the difference is in the transition technique between the two of them. And I feel like it's like same technique, softer hand. You know what I mean? Like, if you, like, land like... if every single memory overwhelms the scene that it's in, then it feels more like a flashback...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it's like that memory is, like, punching you in the face. Whereas, as often happens in our own lives, if you're remembering something while still doing another action, that memory is a lot less like it didn't stop you from doing what you're currently doing. It's just something you're noting often because it informs what you are doing. Like, and I think the way... I was actually thinking about that going from one action scene to the next to the next to the next, to randomly transition in the middle of my thought, which is that one of the things I love about fight scenes is what you learn about the fighter...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] From the way that they fight and what happens. And having a second to process I'm not as good a fighter as I thought I was. Oh no, the next fight is beginning, is... makes that next fight more resonant than if it's just like I'm not even going to think about that. I'm just going and going and going. And I think that a lot of times when we use a memory, it's to add that additional context...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Without having to h... you don't have to show the whole my last fight showed me I was quite bad at this. You actually just do that with a small memory of being hit...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or a flinch that happens within the character and they're thinking, "Oh my gosh, like, this is just going to be like another... this is going to be like last time." This is adding extra depth and extra context...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To the current scene by having that small transition that brings the rest of the world of the story into the scene that you're in.

[Howard] If our listeners are anything like me, this episode contains a whole bunch of new and exciting thoughts about how to stitch scenes together. And I just want to present all of you, fair listeners, with the strategy that I'm giving myself, which is I'm going to apply these cool new transition between scenes techniques as edit pass techniques. I'm going to let myself...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Write the scenes first and then I am going to go back and look at the order of them and then I am going... once I know they're in the right order, then I'm going to worry about the prose that stitches the scenes together.

[Mary Robinette] I have... which I will put... we'll put in the liner notes on the website. I have examples of what it looks like when you do the same scene with a through scene versus a break. Because it is an edit pass thing that you can do later.

[Erin] Actually, to build on that, I am a big fan of using transitions, which I often struggle with because they're hard and that's why we're doing a whole episode about it, by making myself fun bracket notes as I'm writing. Like, I'll be like, and then she goes to the bar to confront that woman in a much more interesting way than I've got right now. And I'll put it within brackets so that I can find it and it doesn't end up in the final version of the story. But what I love about that is it allows me when I'm going on my edit pass to like almost have transi... like, give myself a little note of fun and a little giggle that makes the transitions feel like something fun that I get to do...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to something annoying that I have to do.

[Mary Robinette] I do this too. I actually picked this up from C. L. Polk that they will write in brackets at the beginning of a scene or the end of a scene sometimes. Amazing closing line goes here that summarizes everything that's happened and sends us into... makes us excited to go into the next thing. I'm like, so just leaving a placeholder for yourself. It's like this is what I want to happen. I just don't know how it works right now.

[DongWon] Wow.

[Howard] My brackets are all self-nagging. My brackets are tell better joke here. This was cool. Write it again.

[Mary Robinette] You're like positive self talk is very...

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's super important.

[DongWon] Yeah. Well, and all this kind of points to... I mean there's a thing that they say in film and TV which is... and this is especially true in documentary work, which is you find the movie in the edit bed, right? You... the shooting process and the script process is kind of your intentions but what actually emerges at the end is what happens in the editing process, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And I don't think books are that extreme in that way. But I think everybody's really spot on here in terms of as you're writing your first draft, as you're drafting as a process, don't worry too much about these transitions. These transitions can be layered in later. If you're somebody who does it as you go through, fantastic, right? We're not telling you not to do that. But if you're stressed out by hearing all of this, being like, I'm barely able to, like, write the scene that I'm in. I don't want to think about how do I get to the next scene yet? You can do that later.

[DongWon] And on that note, I have a little bit of homework for you, which is to kind of do the thing that Mary Robinette was talking about. I want you to take two scenes from your current work in progress and think about different ways to transition them and then try them, right? I want you to transition from scene to scene as a through scene, as a break, and as an interruption. Try all three of these and deliberately go through, reread them, make some notes about what worked better, what didn't work as well. Why was that happening? Why does that work for this scene and not for this other scene? So, that's your homework for now. Try some different transitions and see how it goes.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 21.07: Deep Dive -- "With Her Serpent Locks"

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-07-deep-dive-with-her-serpent-locks

Key Points: Birthdays are Leveling Up days! This story has teeth. Subtly diabolical. Use mythology to ground the story. Mix in science fiction technology. Barriers to writing? Angry snakes. When you have a big emotion, lean into it. Give it to a character and then help them pivot away from it. Intentions. Delaying information. Internalizing. What the hell?

[Season 21, Episode 07]

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[Season 21, Episode 07]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deep dive -- "With Her Serpent Locks"

[Marshall] Tools, not rules.

[Erin] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Marshall] I'm Marshall.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] And we are very happy that Marshall has joined us. He's usually on the other side of the microphone, being our engineer. But... Today is my birthday.

[Chuckles. Happy birthday. Yay.]

[Mary Robinette] So I often think about this as leveling up day. I'm now at 5th... Level 57 human.

[I love that]

[Mary Robinette] It makes me feel powerful...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In a way that I'm 57 years old does not. Because then I can think about the new gear that I get and the tools that I get. And for my birthday, one of the things that I often do is I do what I call a party favor. Which is that I host one of my stories, but then I also talk about some aspect of it. Sometimes I show you a first draft. And in this case, we're going to talk about the story through the things we've been talking about with beginnings, some of the things we're going to be talking about with beginnings, and I'm also going to talk about some ways in which this story shows me leveling up. So, this is on Uncanny. It's called With Her Serpent Locks. My friends have read this story. And before I tell you where it came from, I would love to just see what your first initial thoughts of it were.

[DongWon] I really loved it. It's really fun, even though it comes from a place of like... There's definitely, like, teeth to this story. Right? Like, these things have a bite. And I really enjoyed seeing that unfold. But it's... I like the way in which the emotions of it is kind of sublimated, like, there's irritation, but it's all filtered through this very, like, I'm going about my day, I'm keeping my cool, I'm just like doing the things that comfort me, and it sort of has all these sensory grounding things so you can feel the simmering rage underneath it that's going to end up where it ends up. So, yeah, I really liked that emotional tenor and it made it a very, like, pleasant story to read. Even though it is coming from a place of like... Fuck this.

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] I agree. When I got... Especially when I get to the end, it just felt like subtly diabolical. Like, by the... Like, she's just going about, like DongWon said, going about the day, but, like... There was some planning going on and there was some anger. And then the execution at the end was just... It was very satisfying by the time we got to the end.

[Erin] Yeah. I really was thinking about it in the context of, like, some of what we've been talking about recently of, like, beginnings and openings, so I really... The end is great. But, like, I was thinking about, like, how it works. And one thing I found interesting is, it's based in mythology. Mythology that I'm aware of. Which is something we didn't talk about, which is something you can ground a story in a broader context and, like, even the context that like... Which is not 100% required, but this is a fairly well-known myth, like, the Medusa turning people into stone. And so it was really cool to kind of uncover what was happening on both the personal level for the character who I was not familiar with, but, like where it fits into my broader understanding of the myth, which is a fun way to ground, and also makes me feel clever, which we talked about in previous episodes. Which is the... I'm like, oh, this is that, and it's a little more explicit right after that. So I'm like, I figured it out...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Before it was told to me, which is something really fun that I enjoyed.

[DongWon] Yeah. And even in the way where I was like, oh, wait, I don't really remember this part of the myth. Like, I remember Medusa was, like, one of the Gorgons, but I don't remember who the rest of them were, or what the setup was, or even exactly how she died. I remember the Harry Hausen...

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[DongWon] Version of it. But it didn't feel necessary. Right? I got the pieces I needed to get. I remember the vibe of the thing more. And so I think that's the thing where, like, you don't have to worry too much about referentiality, so long as you're not, like, expecting me to remember every subtle detail of a thing. But like, okay, I know what the Medusa is, I know what a Gorgon is.

[Marshall] Yeah. The title, and then getting to that first break, the stone back of a man held on the ground, it's like, oh. I see...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Marshall] What's happening here.

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] I was like, okay, that's sick. I like that. But we were talking about grounding the reader a bit, but what I thought was kind of a clue is grounding these gods with this kind of technology, too. Like, how does a god get from... How does a god trying to escape from her family, and then how are they communicating across time and space, and do they have to take a ship over... Like, I just thought that was a really cool touch, like, the wormhole, the relay station. I just thought that was a cool, like, way to kind of like ground gods into... Inside the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. And then, why make it science fiction? Like, what was behind that choice?

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So [garbled] yes. Now we talk [garbled] about evolution of the story. So, I run this thing called a short story cohort, and one of the things we do at the beginning of the cohort is I check in with people on, like, barriers to writing, victories. And one of the people, as a barrier to writing, said she had a lot of stuff going on with her family, and she just felt like her brain was full of angry snakes. And one of the things that I always say is when you're having a big emotion, try to lean into it. Whether it's giving the character that emotion and then helping them pivot away from it, or lean even farther into it. And so that day, for the writing project, I said our writing prompt is angry snakes. And so what I wrote down... I saved this. What I wrote down was angry snakes. And then the next thing I told them to do was to set some intentions. That they should set a couple of things that if they accomplished those, they would feel satisfied by the end of the day. And the lowest bar is possible. So the things I set were start a new story, decide where, who, and what the problem was. That was it. And so I was like decide where? I'm like, backyard on a planet with rings. That was like the sum total of what I wrote down. Who? Medusa's sister. Problem? Zeus wants to visit. Like, that was what I wrote. And then... This is one of those stories where I got lucky. I talk about this, sometimes, when you get lucky and you kind of cough a story out. I got most of this story during that 2-hour block of writing. Not all of it. There were pieces that I was like, oh, have to fix that. But the opening line of the story was not originally the message from Zeus. It was originally the message hung in the air. It was the second line, was where I started.

[Marshall] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] And my very first take was it was actually going to be Medusa. And then I went over and I was like, can we just check on Medusa? Like, what are some things? I remember, again, she has some...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sisters. She's dead. So who else is around? And that was when I learned that the Gorgons, some of them were immortal and some were not. And also, I was like, there's gotta be a star named after... Like, all of the other things. And indeed, there is... Like, I didn't make up the name of that... I made up the idea that there's a planet that's habitable there. But I'm like, okay, so you've got immortal gods. That means if we go into science fiction, they should still be around. Theoretically. Unless someone has killed them. And that was kind of where I started. But I didn't know the ending when I started. I knew that I wanted a confrontation between the two of them. I knew that she was dealing with grief. I knew that she hated this asshole. Because, I mean, really, Zeus is, like, rotten. And the other thing that I knew as I was going was that I wanted to play with form. Because I tend to do this fairly immersive kind of... I don't tend to be flashy. And so the idea of doing this thing where Euryale is just doing the why, the where, the question words as my transitions was really appealing to me. And trying to do these very condensed scenes that were doing a lot of lift. But actually, not a lot happens in. Also, very appealing to me that it's this correspondence between the two of them. But at the end... By the time I got to the end, that final scene, I knew what was going to happen to Zeus. I knew that she had taken steps. But I had to go back and plant the... I don't know, basil [garbled layer] whatever it is, at the... I had to go back and plant some of that stuff so that it was there. I think she was originally cutting a lemon instead of a pomegranate. I'm like, it's a Greek myth, what are you doing?

[laughter]

[DongWon] Well, and cutting a pomegranate is such a good sensory detail.

[yeah]

[DongWon] It's such an involved task, it takes these different steps, and there's all this technique involved. I don't know. And it's just this beautiful red luscious image.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the other things that I was trying to do to level up is something that I will talk to you about after the break. Because it's about delaying information.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, before the break, I said that one of the leveling up things that I played with was delaying information. And one of the pieces of information that I was very deliberately delaying was the word Zeus. And also that, yes, this really is a Gorgon and all of the commentary about her hair is not metaphor, it's like I'm... I've got Greek myth mashed with... But that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. It's not something that I would have been able to do when I was a beginning writer. And it's one of the things that I felt like I had more control over. So I wanted... So I am curious about how that played for you, and what you see as the tricks I was using to be able to do that? Or anything else you want to talk about.

[laughter]

[Marshall] Well, you mentioned the hair not being a metaphor. Or not being... You know what I mean? It was something that was actually happening. And I think I started to kind of figure that out when she sat down and one of them was like...

[Mary Robinette] Bit the chair behind her?

[Marshall] Yeah. That was it. Bit the chair behind her, and she just was kind of doing something with it. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. These are actually, like, responding as she's feeling things. And I was like, okay, that's really cool. And then that, when... I was trying to remember the other spot. Oh. She just didn't want any more statues haunting her house. That line. I love that line. Because now I'm imagining all of these people coming there and her just being like, okay, now you're stone.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Marshall] Sorry, bro. And I just thought that was cool. So that connection of the hair and that image, and then Zeus shows up... I just thought that was really well done.

[DongWon] I love the pattern also you set up of the who what when where why. You know what I mean? Just the single word questions which you, like, hang a lantern on, because she's like I'm being deliberately annoying by just saying one word. But then it leads to the who. Right? And so I think it's just like fun to set up a pattern that is going to resolve, in that way. And resolve in the other thing of, like... I was like it's probably Zeus. You know what I mean? I, like, had a sense of, like... But there's plenty of gods in the Greek pantheon that are complete assholes. But there was something about it that I was like, I wonder if it's going to be Zeus? And then it was, which was very satisfying.

[Erin] I think one thing I found very interesting was at the end of the first paragraph after the spoken line, or the hanging in the air message, was about the asshole favorite grandson who got away with rape and murder and incest. Which is interesting, because her reaction to that is very blase, which to me speaks like something is going on beyond what you're expecting. Because like... It's not like she's like, and I will alert the authorities to this, or like... It's just sort of like, oh, this is like a known thing. It's happened. This again. Which is something that is very... I was like, well, what's going on with that guy? Like, that seems messed up. Like...

[Marshall] Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?

[Erin] Yeah. Like, why is nobody doing [garbled] feels like somebody should be handling this...

[Marshall] Tell somebody.

[DongWon] It's... I mean, weirdly, it's very outsized. Right? Because like... I don't think any of us know someone who's that terrible.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] But I do think a lot of us have someone in our family that's a little bit like, ugh, like that person [garbled] like... You don't... It's also like... I'm not clear on how bad of a person they are, but maybe they're not, like, perfect.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know what I mean? Or just, like, maybe it's just like a little bit. But that exasperation and discomfort with somebody you're connected to in your circle that you can't quite get away from is, I think, a really, really relatable feeling. Right? And so I think setting that up as, like, the grounding emotion is really helpful there.

[Mary Robinette] Awesome. I'm going to point back to a thing that you said when you were talking about setting up the pattern, the who, where, what. That I had to switch... I remember having to switch something, one of the wheres of one of them in order to get the beats to hit right. But the... At the very, very end, I also deliberately, the where, where would you like to be, I also deliberately gave her more words when she was talking to her sister's head.

[Chuckles] [yes]

[Mary Robinette] I also, in terms of... And this is what we... We'll be talking about endings much later in the season. But the last line was originally, considered the best spot for a hero. And then I was like, that's not her relationship with her.

[DongWon] Yeah. Beloved sister feels so much more the core emotion of the story. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Such a tenderness to her, too. And I think you do a good job of showing that early, both in terms of we think of that as somebody doing these nurturing tasks, preparing food, gardening, but also just like her relationship with her like awful little cilia covered...

[Marshall] Yeah.

[DongWon] Pet. It's like so adorable, but also, when I think about it...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I'm like I don't want a million leg making biscuits on me. It felt so bad to think about. But also you made it very sweet and very cute and very tender. Right? Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I love Butterscotch.

[Marshall] Yeah. I agree. That was a... That was an insanely good character moment, too. And, like, although it was a little off-putting, like... She loves this awful little creature...

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] And I love that last line of that section. They liked frolicking in the moss. And I'm like thinking of this thing with all these legs, like, doing something...

[laughter]

[Marshall] Okay, he likes that. That sounds awful, but... Okay...

[DongWon] Listeners, I'm sorry you missed the pantomime.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm like, is that a thousand little legs, or is that a marionette moment?

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm not sure what's happening over there. Cool.

[Erin] I have a question for you.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] I know we don't have endless amounts of time, but you talked about feeling like you were leveling up, and I'm curious, like, what that felt like to you, and, like, how did you feel that? Like, what specifically did you feel that you were able to do that you weren't before?

[Mary Robinette] So I know that... Like, I've had control over delay of information for a while, but this kind of slow reveal in such a compressed space? That felt like something that... Like, I know I couldn't... I know I couldn't have done that when I started writing. And so I'm not even sure that I would have been... Like, 5 years ago, doing that. I'm not certain. But I felt like this... The feeling that I had really was, oh, I know how to do this. And one of the things that I... It wasn't actually that I know how to do this. Oh, I've internalized this. That was the thing. When I've done this before, it has been a very, very conscious thing. Like, I've had to think about it and I've had to tweak and adjust it. And this time it was, I've internalized how to handle it. And that's, I think, part of why I described this story as like I just coughed and the story happened. That I was chasing the feelings and the emotions that I had in that moment. It's very short. For people who have not read it, it's only 1,700 words. So it was something that I could write... Mostly write in one sitting. Which meant that I was kind of in the same headspace for the entire time. So it really did feel like that thing I always talk about with puppetry, where, like, I've internalized it, the figure's just moving. And often, when I was performing, I would remember the show from the point of view of the character. Even though that's not... Like, my body is not in that memory, even though I know that I was there. But I had internalized what I was supposed to be doing so much that I was just acting within the moment. And that was very much that feeling with this. It's like I've internalized this, I'm just acting, I'm just feeling the moment. Which was a really good feeling.

[DongWon] There's a real ease to this story that comes through. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] It doesn't feel effortful or forced in any way. Not that your fiction normally does, but, like, there's a breeziness to it that I think makes it so appealing and easy to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It was... Like, I think that that can happen with my other stuff, but often it's something that I had to really work for. And, like, polish off the rough edges.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And this time it was like, no, I know exactly what I'm doing with this one. Which was a nice feeling.

[Erin] Awesome.

[Marshall] And I know we're not talking about revision right now, but, like, that's something good, I think, for, like, in my writing community, where a lot of new writers or aspiring writers or whatever you want to call it are trying to figure out, is this ready? You know what I mean? And so I guess I like hearing the fact that you were able to do this, but this isn't something that happens all the time. But it's also something that will happen, the more you do it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Marshall. I don't know if there's a question there, but like... Do you see what I'm saying?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. No, I think it absolutely is a thing to know. And that... Because you're right. It is so frustrating when you are working for it, and I see that also with a lot of people who've taken a writing Workshop. That they come out of it, and everything is so conscious that writing feels incredibly hard, because you're trying to do everything, trying to use all of these new tools.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] And so knowing that, oh, yeah, once you do that work, there is this payoff on the other end.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It just may take... May take years before you get there.

[DongWon] It's all practice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like I started... I sold my first book, I think, in 2005. I think that's right.

[DongWon] [garbled] a couple years ago.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So I'm about 20 years into doing this as a career... Up to... Whoof.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I have not actually said that out loud before.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that I was going to say is that when I was writing this, we also took a couple of breaks. So, even though it's a 2-hour span that I wrote this in, I know that I took a couple of breaks during that, in which I walked around. And the break's only 2 minutes long. Which is long enough to go get a cup of water, long enough for things to kind of kick over in my head, and then come back. So, like, one of the things that I've got in here is, in the original, is a prompt that I used when we came back, which is, after, she took a face mask out of another drawer and hooked it around her ears. And I've got... I preserved the prompt which was, what the hell? And originally, like in my... And again, like, this is a 2-hour span, I know that I was planning on... Like, I was thinking about how many iterations, how much back and forth... And then I was like, what the hell? Have him just show up.

[Chuckles]

[Marshall] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, he just shows up.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it's just like, what the hell.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, forget all of this. And that was also one of those things that, again, the internalization ... Internalizing of, oh, sometimes you can actually just make a decision to stop a try-fail cycle and just move to the next beat.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, you don't have to, like, build... Sometimes you can just be like what the hell...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This is happening there? And just move.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. Any other questions before I give them their homework?

[Mary Robinette] Well, first of all, thank you all so much for coming to celebrate my birthday.

[Erin] Happy birthday again. Thank you for sharing it with us. Yeah. I love getting presents on somebody else's birthday.

[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework. This story started with a description of emotion. Angry snakes. I want you to take a strong emotion that you've experienced recently, and describe it as a metaphor. Then, I want you to use that metaphor as your writing prompt.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-44-a-close-reading-on-structure-tradition-and-innovation

Key points: Where does it fit into the fantasy lineage? Using tradition, but also breaking from it. In conversation with... What the writer intends and what the audience thinks. The conversation that the author is having with the genre and the conversation that the reader is having. Anxiety of influence! Fifth Season is a break from the restoration line of epic fantasy. "The world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there's no changing it." Each POV is in a different genre. Story as unfolding and telling. When writing, do you think of being in conversation with other books, or with the canon? What has made you the storyteller you are? Who are you telling stories to? Be aware of the traditions you are following, and of the ones you are breaking.

[Season 19, Episode 44]

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

[Season 19, Episode 44]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation

[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.

[DongWon] So, this week I wanted to talk about another aspect of Fifth Season. I think we're going to zoom out a little bit, a little further away from the text. This is coming from a little bit of my perspective, both as an English major and someone who almost went into academia, and also as a publisher. But one thing that I'm really interested in talking about this book is the way it fits into the lineage of fantasy novels. I think this is a really interesting thing to think about when thinking about how to structure a book, how to frame a book. This kind of touches on some stuff like Hero's Journey kind of things and the way that's used in fiction. But also, just the place that this book has in the canon of fantasy literature, to use a loaded term. So, in a lot of ways, modern epic fantasy is established by Lord of the Rings and a lot of it is descended from that. I think Fifth Season is a really interesting break from that tradition that nonetheless is in conversation with it. Right? One thing that struck me on my second reading of the book several years ago was how much of it uses the classic fantasy tropes. Right? To me, it felt so contemporary and so fresh and so different. But when I stepped back for a second, I said, "Wait a minute. This is a book about wizards who go to a magic school and use crystal magic." I was like, this is just the most classic fantasy I've read in a second. Like, harkening back to, like, Tolkien seventies, eighties fantasy. And the way she pulled from that and yet flipped it and reversed it to create such an exciting, fresh work.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things… I'm glad you brought this up. One of the things that I also love about that, in that is that much like when you look back at the Wizard Master… Excuse me, The Wizard of Earthsea, that magic does basically one thing, you use words and you can change things. Yes, there are nine different Masters, but it's basically, you use words and you can change things. The thing that's happening here is you've got one thing they can do, they can do some vibrational stuff.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] It's all of the different ways in which it can be twisted and pushed, and then is in conversation with this whole, larger body of work that is outside of fantasy that causes it to be doing some really interesting fresh things. Also, I just need to put out a little shout out to Dark Crystal, which is my favorite crystal magic.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] I [garbled really] like the phrase in conversation with… Such an interesting one, because some of it is like we don't actually know…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, we believe that a work is in conversation with another work. I remember earlier you were saying that this work is maybe a little bit in conversation with Octavia Butler. I agree with all these things, but it's interesting, like, how do we know sort of what tradition a book is drawing from? How much of that is the book doing it, and how much of it is us doing it? Because we bring our own context…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] With us. So we're like, oh, I see these things here, and I've seen them in other places.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's a really interesting thing. Unless you ask the author, which we will…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] It's hard to know.

[DongWon] Well, it's the difference between sort of intent and the reader. Right? My subjectivity… Sorry, we're getting a little academic here. But my subjectivity as the reader is projecting all of the stuff that I've read. Right? Like, I'm not super familiar with Dark Crystal, so I don't see that. I do… I am familiar with Earthsea and Lord of the Rings and parable of the sower. So, for me, I'm seeing this book as being deeply in conversation with those three things. We were off mic talking about Omelas as well, the ones who walk away from Omelas, another Le Guin story that this feels very in conversation with as well. Right? So…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think what traditions it's pulling from is fascinating.

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, one of the definitions of genre is that it is literature that is in conversation with itself. That you are both be… Not just that it's the writer is thinking about it. It's that it is… The readers are having conversations about it. So, regardless of what Nora intended with this, because of the way it's being read, because of the way it's positioned, it is in conversation through the conversations of the readers. Actually, as we were talking about it, I think for me… I said Dark Crystal because it is puppets, but for me the thing that it actually brought to mind more was Crystal Singer. Which is a much older…

[Howard] McCaffrey. [Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Anne McCaffrey. Sorry, my brain just… Similar, one of the similar things there is that you have to have this particular skill, which is, in that case, perfect pitch. Then you go to this planet and you go through this transformation. Some people get turned into rock people by accident. But you are locked into this career now. Because you can no longer exist… There's a symbiont in this case, is the mechanism. But it's still that idea of this being locked in, being enslaved, for the benefit of this other civilization that then convinces you that the reason it's okay is because you are highly valued. So that then the characters become part of their own narrative.

[Howard] I just realized that's exactly like being a web cartoonist…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I could no longer exist without the Internet.

[DongWon] Also, you start to turn into rock…

[Howard] I was just going to die…

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Howard] I started to turn into a rock. No, the… Sorry, the important thing that I was going to say was that whether or not the author is consuming, is aware of, is having a conversation with the genre, the reader probably is. The best example I can think of for this is the TV show Heroes, which, when it came out, a bunch of us said we've already read this comic book. It's just the X-Men. Why are you trying to read tell it? We've already done this. Heroes was wonderful. It did neat things. But it was trying to do so without the audience having read comic books. Which can't happen. So, when you talk about tradition and innovation, it's entirely possible to convince yourself through anxiety of influence that you are innovating because you are not reading everything else. That's probably not the way it's going to be read.

[DongWon] Right. One thing that I think about Fifth Season is it is deeply in a lineage, in a tradition, and I do think that Nora knows that. Or N. K. Jemison knows that. But… How she thinks about it, I'm very curious to hear. I've not had a conversation with her about it. But, something that I do think is really important is that this book also represents a rupture. This is a very stark departure from one of the core… What I think is one of the defining impulses of epic fantasy, and what I also think is exciting is that because of this rupture, we've seen the start of a new lineage. I see fantasy works now in conversation with Fifth Season, rather than Lord of the Rings as they sort of… I mean, the Poppy war is the example that this brings to mind the most. And because… What I see the difference is, is most epic fantasy… I'm not saying that N. K. Jemison was the first person to do this, but she did it, I think, in a way that was very effective and sort of opened the genre up, is most epic fantasy is what I think of as restoration fantasy. Right? So, Lord of the Rings, the world was good, it has fallen through the rise of Sauron, and just the general, like, rise of the age of men, and the goal is to restore the former glory. The goal is to get Aragorn, the heirs of Numenon, back on… Not Numenon…

[Howard] Numenor.

[DongWon] Numenor, back on the throne. That is so much of what that book is about. The farmboy finds a magic sword can defeat the evil, restore the kingdom to the place of justice and glory and good. It is about restoring a former order. Right? This is part of what makes a lot of epic fantasy inherently conservative, because it's saying things that used to be good, we need to get back to those ways of being. Right? Fifth Season is saying the exact opposite, of examining structures over and over again and saying these things are broken beyond repair. Because we are exploiting people, damaging people, hurting people in a way that the only answer is to burn it down and start something new. Right? Or it's not even particularly interested in what the new thing to start is. It is interested in the examination of what has gone wrong entirely at this point, to the parts that we, as the readership… I don't know that every reader is feeling this way, but are coming around a little bit to maybe Alibaster was right. Maybe he had a point. This is the Magneto is right argument for X-Men fans, of which I've been a big component of. This is Kill Monger's right, this is siding with the villain a little bit because restoration can't be the answer for everybody.

[Mary Robinette] There's a line in the book that is the world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there's no changing it.

[DongWon] Exactly. Speaking of accepting things being the way they are, let's go to break for a moment, and will be right back.

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Family Reservations by Eliza Palmer. This is so good. It is not a science fiction or fantasy book. This is mainstream. You should read it. It weaves together some of the most complex family dynamics I've seen. Part way through it, I was thinking, "Oh. Oh, this is King Lear." Eliza describes it as succession meets fine dining. So it has some of the most delicious food descriptions ever. The story does a beautiful job of handling omniscient narrator. And I highly recommend it, not just because it's a fantastic read, but also because it is a masterful use of omniscient narration. If you been wanting to play with this tool, this book is a really good one to read to see how it's been handled in a modern context. Although you should expect to come away being very hungry.

[DongWon] Okay. Before the break, Mary Robinette, I think you had a point that you were trying to expand on with the quotation of that line.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's just that when we talk about things that are in conversation, and when you look at when this book was written in the conversations around Black Lives Matter and breaking the world, there are parallels that a modern reader will bring to that, whether or not it is intended. Then, I think, also one of the things about it for me that is interesting structurally is that if you think about the structure of the book also breaks structure. Like, it is not structured the way you've seen other books structured. That is part of what makes it feel so fresh, is that we aren't seeing regurgitation of the hero's journey. Although she is re-purchasing parts of it. Like, when you look at a hero's journey, there's a mentor, there's a character, like, Alibaster is literally called the mentor. The Guardians, one of the other things that happens when they go into the Threshold is that... In the Monomyth, you meet the Guardian, and they are literally called the Guardians. But they are the evil ones in this. It's... It is interesting to me that then the way that first book works, it interrupts the hero's journey at what some people call the dark night of the soul. Sometimes people call it the descent into the abyss, where we literally go into the earth. Like… So… But it is fundamentally not the hero's journey.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This book is fundamentally not that. It is taking those elements, it is breaking them, and it is re-purposing them to build this entirely new structure.

[Erin] I think it's like bringing new things in. I mean, the… It's so funny to think about the hero's journey. It's also maybe… It's there, but, like, it is only one small… There are a lot of ways to tell stories.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] There are a lot of traditions of storytelling. We have a small one that we've taken and sort of, like, that has been part of fantasy that I think does come from that Tolkien way of thinking. I feel like one of the things that I've been really loving in recent works in general is seeing different ways of telling stories coming into things. I think that probably there's also some of that that this… That this book is in… Is in conversation with. Even though not everyone may know that that's a voice that's being…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Added to the conversation.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think that's something really cool that books can do, which is that you don't have to understand every single thing that the book is working with in order to enjoy that story, in order for that story to be influential on other stories that are being told.

[DongWon] Exactly. It goes into the ambient conversation and space, and then people start responding to it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I particularly enjoyed is that each kind of track of the story has a different structure.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That works with each other's. So, Dam…

[DongWon] Damaya.

[Mary Robinette] Damaya. Damaya is very like, "Oh. Here is the orphan child who is becoming the chosen one," kind of thing. Syonite is getting very much the reluctant hero journey. For the beginning of it. But then when you start braiding them together, where these things are working in parallel, they fracture, they go in different directions. Then you got this other thing, the whole second person section, which doesn't play by any of those rules.

[DongWon] This is a trick I think of most clearly used in Game of Thrones, where each POV character is in a different genre of story. Some are in event, like… You have… What's the young girl's name, I'm blanking on her. But each of the characters, they're like, some are in an adventure story, some are in a political stunt story, some are in a straight up horror story. Right? Some are in a supernatural story, some are in a grounded political fantasy. N. K. Jemison has done that here, where again, we have the child coming into her own power, we have the wizard at the height of her power exploring the world, and then we have the very contemporary sort of like tragic hero story. Again, going back to the parallelism or the POV, realizing that all three are the same person…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is just… Makes it a stunning trick in terms of how it operates within the genre conversation.

[Howard] Um. I was just reading a bit from Leverage Redemption, the new seasons of leverage. One of the characters says, "Hey, look. We're going to mess this guy up pretty hard. Are we the bad guys here?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sophie says, "Oh, yes. Never forget that, Brianna. We're not heroes, we're just necessary." I love that moment, because in one context, yes, you're necessary and I'm siding with you. You are in… You're hurting this person, but you're doing a good that needs to happen. And on the other hand, I look at it and say, in the context of Fifth Season, well, this is probably how the Guardians feel about themselves. Oh, we're not the good guys, but we're necessary. And just that brushstroke across the Tolkien line of black-and-white, good versus evil… That's silvery gray brushstroke, it just shimmers and invites you to stare at it. I love it.

[Mary Robinette] There's an interlude at the one third mark in this book, which arguably is the end of Act One, sure. But it literally says, "A break in the pattern, a snarl in the weft. There are things you should be noticing here, things that are missing and conspicuous by their absence." I think that's one of the things that makes this so powerful, is that she is… There's a line from Hemingway that says that a story is the things that you leave out. And the things that she's choosing not to show, the structural elements that she is choosing not to use… We don't get the reconciliation. We don't get the restoration. All of those things that are being left out on purpose are what makes this so interesting.

[DongWon] Yeah. An earlier [garbled] reference how she calls out I'm not going to tell you the nice part of this story…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, no rude.

[Howard] When we talked earlier, previous episode, about… Erin and I had this conversation off-line about… Sometimes we'll just read spoilers because we want to know what happens, but we still want to enjoy the story. A story is an unfolding, and it is also a telling. I can appreciate the telling without the unfolding, and I can appreciate the unfolding while not paying attention to the telling. The consuming media with that in mind, feels to me like a break with tradition. It also, and I'm just going to put a pin in this, argues really well for this book, because it is so well told. The telling is so much more than the unfolding.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's why we would encourage you to read it more than once.

[DongWon] I have one question that's a little bit of a pivot. As a publisher, I've talked about this a lot on podcasts and elsewhere, I think in comp titles. Right? I'm inherently wired to think, this book is like these other books. This book is in conversation with these other books. I'm curious, as a writer, are you guys actively thinking about lineage in that way, or, like, canon in that way, and the idea that a canon can be a personal thing. Right? In terms of, like, what you've read and where that comes from.

[Mary Robinette] Um, I mean, definitely, I've never done anything like Jane Austen with magic or The Thin Man in space…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah, that is true. Yeah. So I think you're very unaware of your influences…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. Definitely never done Apollo era science fiction that was influenced by Ray Bradberry. Absolutely haven't done that. I don't know what you're talking about.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I don't know that I… I mean, I know what I've read and if I… I could reconstruct the things that have made me who I am as a storyteller. I think it's a lot of things though. I think some of it is canon science fiction, I think some of it is barbershop tales.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I think some of it is a lot of things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I do think that this is something that I a lot of times will challenge a student to do, which is to think about what has made you the storyteller that you are.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And who are you then telling stories to?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I think those are two really key things, because otherwise, other people will tell you, like, when you put a book out in the world, anyone can tell you who you're in conversation with. But when you're writing it, you get to decide.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] At that moment, take the power and say, this is who I am and here is how I want to tell this tale.

[Howard] The better you get at reading, at comprehending what you read, the more able you are to, when you write, to consciously say, I am writing like the things I have consumed and to be able to say I am going to attempt to write unlike the things I have consumed. I am aware enough of the traditions I've been consuming that I am going to break with them and I'm going to write differently than them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That's a… I see that as a late career skill that takes a long time to develop and you develop it by reading.

[DongWon] That's what I love about Fifth Season is it is both deeply honoring and in conversation with the traditions that it comes from, but also is so deeply interested in being like, "Uh uh, I'm doing something different."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Erin, I really loved what you said in terms of the books that made you a writer or, like, the things that you're in con… The stories and not even just books. Right? We're pulling from all parts of our lives. For you, that being different from the conversation that you think the audience is, like, who is this for, what books are they reading, what books will they know and understand? Then, thirdly, the one that you can't control in any way, which is, what people will actually say your book is like. Right? What people will say once it's out in the world. I think your relationship to each of those three different interpretations is really, really important. As a publisher, I'm most interested in the second one, the one that I want writers to come in with is an understanding of here's my audience, here's what they're reading, this is like that. But you understanding for yourself why you're writing this and where you're coming from I think is so important and so powerful.

[Mary Robinette] I think it is the most important thing. To know why you're writing it and who your writing it for.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because you can lose yourself. I mean, I think it's important, you want to get published, you want your stuff out in the world. But I think if you lose hold of who you are as a storyteller, then you won't be happy with the story no matter how successful it is, no matter how many other people like the way that you told it.

[DongWon] 100 percent.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It is a common thing that I will see with… When I was going through the slush pile, I would see people attempting to mimic someone else.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And seeing people thinking about what does this editor want? What does that editor want? But it is that thing about what you want… I'm also going to say one other thing about the conversations that we're having. I would not be surprised if Nora had read Crystal Singer and forgotten that she had read it, and that that turned up in the book. Because I have, when I'm gone back and reread some things, I've been like, oh, I didn't actually think about the fact that when I was writing Glamorous Histories, I'm like I'm going to do this something fresh and new with my magic, it's all going to be based on folds and threatens. Then, I'm watching Game of Thrones… Not Game of Thrones. Wheel of Time. I'm like, oh, look at them using folds and threads. No consciousness of that. But this is what we're talking about, that you can be influenced by something, it can come into the book, but it's still your own.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's still your own, even if you have been in conversation with something and forgot the the conversation happened.

[DongWon] This is me talking about patterns once again. That's okay, that's how stories work. We are all absorbing stories that we've read, we are all absorbing fiction that we've engaged with, and recombining it and putting it back together in our own ways. Right? So just because a reader will come up to you and be like, "Hey. This is just like that thing from… That Anne McCaffrey did," doesn't invalidate your work at all. Your work is still your work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So don't let that throw you. It's okay to have influences, it's okay to come from a place and… In fact, I think it's one of the most important things, is to recognize you come from a place and try to understand that. If you don't have a perfect understanding of it, that's fine too.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With that, I have some homework for you. Very much along these lines. I want you to make a list of the books that you consider the antecedents to this book that you're working on now. What works is your book in conversation with? Are you following on and building on that foundation, or are you disrupting and pushing back on that legacy in one way or another?

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.48: Bodies, Why? (Part III)

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/11/27/17-48-bodies-why-part-iii/

Key Points: Sometimes fantasy, the dragon, robot, or other element, gives us a metaphor that let's us examine things may be too difficult to talk about directly. If people don't have the words to describe the pain they have, nobody can help. Don't tell people what the pain feels like, describe what happened and let the reader imagine the experience. Talk about how much does the pain interfere with things you are trying to do. Changes in dialogue and sounds of words can help signal pain to the reader. Talk about adaptations or compensations that a character makes, and what happens when those fail.

[Season 17, Episode 48]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies, Why? (Part III).

[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.

[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] Ow!

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.

[Fran] I'm Fran.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] All right. For this episode, what we're going to be looking at is... we're going to be talking about pain. We're going to be talking about how journeying with pain is awful, and also, some of the metaphors that we can use to kind of approach writing about pain. Let's dive into that. Fran, do you want to unpack that a little bit more for our listeners?

[Fran] Definitely. I find writing about or expressing pain to others really difficult. In part, because, one, when you do that online, quite often people want to talk to you about their pain. It becomes sort of an echo chamber of pain. Which, I really do care about other people and I wish that no one was in pain, but I also need to do my work. This can become sort of a never-ending cycle. I'm not here to educate people about pain. I have had that question asked of me, of, "Don't you want other people to understand where you're coming from?" No, I want to write stories. That's what I want to do. So talking about disability in this whole series has been kind of tough for me in that. But it's also important. So some of the time, the ways in which I do this are I create a structure within which I discuss elements of pain or the interactions with the medical community that I've been having since I was one. That was… Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand definitely did that, in a way that was for me a vehicle to, I thought, initially unpack those different rooms of experience. It turned out to be the most angry thing I have ever written in my life, which was another aspect of pain that I didn't realize was there. Fantasy, the dragon, the robot, or the spaceship element, actually gives me a metaphor to start examining things that otherwise are very direct and very real. So that I find super helpful. I know other people have very different experiences because this is not a one-size-fits-all topic. So, huge big pointy arrows around your mileage may vary. Your pain scale may vary.

[Howard] My…

[Chelsea] You don't want to get me started on the pain scale.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] No. Let us absolutely get you started on the pain scale.

[Howard] My… Arguably, the most important thing I've written is No, I'm Fine. Which I wrote for an anthology that benefits my friend, Robinson Wells. It's about 750 words of creative nonfiction, in which I, in first person, walk the reader through my brain not working correctly. Me not wanting to take a pill, even though I know the pill is going to help me. The process of writing that… I wrote it during a family vacation. Sandra took the kids off to see some rocks. We're in Utah, they're nice rocks. I stayed home and wrote. She came home and her first words to me were like, "Oh, my gosh. What happened? Are you okay?" I realized I'm not okay because in order to write this correctly… Apparently I wrote it so well I walked myself through it. It was powerful. It was a learning experience for me. I say most important thing I've written because it's the only thing I've written where people have come up to me and said, "Howard, I think you saved my life. Because I shared this with my wife, and now she understands what's happening to me." So… I'm not reflecting this at Fran, I don't want to… I'm not here to educate people. I just want to write nice stories. But every so often, I just got to lay down the education because if people don't have the words to describe the pain that they're having, then nobody can help.

[Fran] Let me reframe. This is… This particular conversation where I was asked, "Don't you want to help people understand?" was really directed more towards me answering specific questions on an individual basis. Which brings up the sort of I have expressed myself on social media, now everyone on social media wants me to interact on an individual level with them, which… Hi, social media, I love you, you're awesome, but also, I want to write. My answer to this person was I do do education. I do write about things that are important to me, but I do it in fiction. I don't necessarily want to spend the time educating individuals when Google exists. Among other things. So, yes, educating, yes, creating spaces where other people can empathize and find themselves in those stories. Yes, absolutely. Burning up my time and energy to do something that the person could easily do for themselves? Not so much.

[Howard] Yeah. I'm not going to write that essay again and again and again and again for everybody who asks me what it's like to have my brain.

[Fran] Right.

[Howard] I want to write it once.

[Enjoyed it]

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the reasons that sometimes writing about bodies as not… Literally not human can sometimes allow us to give people another way in that sometimes feels safer for the writers as much as anything else. So, just as a… On the pain scale end of that…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have… I've been a puppeteer for most of my adult life, and my pain scale is set so that I think would I perform with this? The answer is, well, yeah. I performed Little Shop and the thought that I often had when I was working this massive puppet was if I experienced this pain outside of this puppet, I would go to the emergency room. But when I do experience that level of pain outside the puppet, I don't. What I do is I keep teaching until we realize that actually the pain that I thought was just fairly normal was shingles. So, when I'm trying to put that into fiction and trying to explain these levels of pain, I often turn to other forms of talking about it. Whether it's like putting a character into a spaceship with a spaceship itself is malfunctioning and that reflects the body. What are some other things like that that either Chelsea or you, Fran, have seen done well or used as ways to create this emotional distance for yourself as a writer?

[Fran] I am happy to kick that to Chelsea first. I have some thoughts…

[Chelsea] Well, I think about… I'm trying to think about this… One of the things that really kind of limits me to somebody's story is when I read about like their experience with like a disability that they have in common with me. Is that I have… I'm kind of like pointing my fingers up my eyes and pointing these fingers at them. It's like I see you. I know a lot of people do this because when I was done writing Witchmark, I had several people come up to me and say, "Me, too. I have PTSD too and the way you wrote about it was so great because it wasn't like an after school special about PTSD, it was Miles had this experience and he's toughing it out through that." Honestly, I didn't really realize how much of that experience I had woven into the story because I was just like, "Okay, well, Miles' experience is like mine, so I'm just going to do it the way I would do it." That, again, makes me want to cycle back to the pain scale for a second, because I have years of toughing it out with pain. So if I go to a doctor, and they say, "What's your pain level?" And I say, "Oh, well, I'm pretty uncomfortable right now." I'm actually talking about an eight, but the doctor doesn't know that, because they don't know that I've been like living my life at five for literally years.

[Fran] I… Two things about the pain scale, because I've… I put things at low numbers because I'm constantly in pain, but I'm also living in kind of an orchestra of pain. I… For a long time, I knew how to draw because of where the pain in my hands was. Figuring out how to express pain on a single linear line of weird faces really doesn't match up to my experience at all. First of all, it defines pain as a one… As one thing that is happening to you instead of a multitude of things happening all at the same time on different levels. Two, it expresses it on a single unvariable situation, whereas pain's so hard to get conveyed to another person who hasn't experienced it. At one point I was… Your brain is going, say seven, say seven, say seven. But what comes out is, oh, it's a four. Then I have to say… But when I had kidney stones, that was also a four. That usually gets me an interesting reaction from people.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I imagine so.

[Fran] [garbled] a parallel that they understand, especially if they've had kidney stones. Pain is a relative experience, that is the worst thing to share with other people. We can share experiences like food, that's a universal experience. Breathing is a universal experience. Pain is an individualized experience that is so tied to all of our other ideals for ourselves and each other, and choice, and all sorts of things that we have to work through. So when I see pain or disability for that matter written about well, it is usually in terms that are relative and that are cumulative. So it's not just a single thing that is a character definition. I think this goes back to way in the beginning of this, where I mentioned that somebody on a panel had said, "Well, I'd make a hero unlikely by giving them a disability." This is not something that you just like drop on somebody as like here's your disability sticker. It's an actual layering of experiences and things and ways to maneuver around stuff and ways to get the thing you want to do done while in pain without biting somebody's head off while you're in pain. That's the other thing that I've… That I love. Like, Elizabeth bear does this really well with her… Chelsea, what's the space station series that they're navigating pain and the elements of different types of disabilities while in space, while working as security and medical systems and… I'm going to come up with the name of the book in a moment…

[Chelsea] Are you talking about White Space?

[Fran] Yes! Yes, thank you. Thank you. There are so many different aspects that are really well portrayed in layers. Aliette de Bodard does an amazing job of talking about emotional and physical pain, especially in The Tea Master And The Detective, where she's got her Holmes character is physically just… It's really incredible. So I really appreciate when writers use layers, when there is no magical fix, when you just need to get through the day in different ways. Those are really, really brilliant things. You can often… Just kind of like you can tell whether an author is a coffee drinker or a tea drinker by what their character drinks. You can often tell if somebody has been through an experience of at least empathizing with someone else's pain or their own pain, because you have to empathize with yourself, too, by how it comes across on the page. If it is just this one thing that is happening where nothing else is happening, that's a little bit harder for me to believe.

[Mary Robinette] Why don't we, since we just had two great recommendations, why don't we actually pause for our book of the week, which is neither of those two…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It is a short story, but we also recommend both of the ones previously mentioned. It's a short story by John Wiswell, called D. I. Y. You want to say why you wanted to recommend that one this week?

[Fran] I love this story. This is up at tor.com. These characters feel real, and they feel so innovative on the page as far as how they're going about solving problems, but also how they're dealing with people who are not them. John projects empathy in everything he writes. This is one of those that just really, really got to me in all the best ways.

[Mary Robinette] So that's D. I. Y. by John Wiswell, and we are linking to it in the liner notes so you can hop to it since it is available online.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I found when I was doing some research for The Spare Man, was that… This idea of pain. My character has a deep brain pain suppressor. It's one of those devices that is about to become not science-fiction. But the problem that they have is that people's pain is so specific that running clinical trials on pain suppressors is incredibly difficult because no one's pain is the same. Also because of this pain scale that were talking about. So it's one of those things that technically there is actually a way to suppress pain in the brain, but, practically speaking, there's… They are running into serious, serious problems figuring it out. Which then means that when you're trying to convey that to the reader, this pain, that actually writing it in a way that the reader feels it in their own body becomes very challenging. Something that Steven King suggested in his own writing is that if you want people to feel pain, that rather than trying to tell them what the pain feels like, that you just describe what has happened to them and let them… So, like, instead of trying to describe what it feels like to have your toenails pulled out, you just say that they pulled out the toenails. Everyone's like, "Eww!" That one works. That one makes sense, because all of us have had some damage done to fingernails or toenails. But many of the pieces of pain that someone with… Dealing with a disability or chronic pain that it is so specific to them and it's not something that people without that particular body shaping are going to experience. So, what… Like, some of the tools that I've deployed are… To give my characters almost synesthesia experience of pain, where I start describing it with colors or textures. I realized that even when I was talking with someone else that even describing sharp pain versus dull pain is a metaphor for something that is happening in your body.

[Howard] As a kid… I say as a kid. Between the ages of 16 and 30, when I described pain, when I described it to myself, it was colors and shapes. Orange triangle, gray square, gray triangle, red circle, were all different kinds of pain. This is fundamentally useless when you're trying to communicate with a physician and they're asking, "How bad is the pain?" I said, "Well, it's a big orange triangle."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Okay, where's the triangle?" In looking at the pain scales that physicians use, I quickly realized that it was a tool that was not only going to help me when I go to the doctor, increasingly as I age, but when I write, because one of these scales talks about how much the pain interferes with other things I'm trying to do. Zero is no pain. One, hardly notice, two, notice, but it doesn't interfere. Okay. A lot of us who have chronic pain, have managed to take our pain and push it down to two and tell ourselves that it doesn't interfere when in fact it probably does interfere, but that's another discussion. Then you jump up to eight. Awful, hard to do anything. Nine, can't bear the pain, unable to do anything. 10, on one of the scales, 10 was the patient shouldn't be able to report a 10 because if the patient is experiencing a 10, the patient is not able to say the word 10. On that scale, for me, I realized, "Oh, I've had a nine and a half." That was when I got a shot in my foot and it hit the nerve. Everything shut down except that sensation. Briefly.

[Fran] I would just like to point out that pain scales are… Contain inherent bias as far as medication goes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[Fran] And getting pain relief medication, especially if you are female, especially if you are from a marginalized group, especially if you are a black woman and you express your pain according to the pain scales. They will automatically ratchet it down. It's hideous to me that that assumption is made. I think that, again, medical model, but also there's no empathy there. The lack of empathy in those things.

[Howard] Well, but, circling back to what I can write, the idea that a character is feeling the pain and it is interfering with what else they can do, that! That's a plot point. I can write that.

[Fran] That's great. One other thing for writers to think about is that the length of your sentences and the sounds of your words when a character is in pain can be impactful and useful. If you have a character who speaks in a long flowing syllablant sentences that have a lot of esses in them and suddenly everything there speaking with is stabbing or uses a lot of k's or hard sounds and t's in them, with punctuation every single word or dashes or however you… Just breaking up the lines conveys a lot more than you think it does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Studying poetry will help.

[Fran] Well, I was going to use the Bukowski example. Which is that Charles Bukowski had emphysema and when… As he progressed in his writing, his lines got shorter.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's fascinating. And unsurprising. The other tool that I… Tool and challenge I find is that when you have a character that has chronic pain, it is part of their normal. So, keeping it alive on the page so that the reader remembers that, because otherwise the reader will default to their own, which is, as we've discussed, not matching, since nobody's pain matches. So it's a challenge to both keep it alive for the reader, not have the character be whiny, for the reader… Whiny!… And not have the character think about the pain more than they naturally would. One of the ways that I've found to handle that, and I'd be curious to know if either… Anyone has different techniques to highlight the adaptations that the character has to make. So… And only mention the pain when one of those adaptations fails. So, like, I have… I was talking about this previously, that I have a lower back thing that I have… That I just… I had kind of forgotten that I have it, because it's… Puppetry injury that I've had for so long that I… I manage it. But, like, when I get down, I'm very often touching something as a go down to make sure that my balance stays correct. I will crouch with a straight back. So, making sure that my character was crouching with a straight back, putting her hand on something to brace as she was getting up, mentioning those things. Then, the moments where she's… She does something that she shouldn't do, like getting up and turning at the same time. Which is one of the failure modes. So, trying to do those things was one of the ways that I found to keep my character's pain alive on the page without having it… While keeping it in proportion to the way… To her lived experience. Have you… Does anyone else have other tools that they can recommend?

[Howard] Describing the modes of compensation is a critical piece for me. We talk a lot about how a scene, you want to describe it using multiple senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, whatever. Describing a scene and describing that… I reach out with my hand to steady myself. Or, I pause for a moment to take inventory about what it is that is hurting. How does my knee feel? Am I ready for these stairs? Yeah, I'm ready for these stairs. It's just a momentary thought, and then down the stairs. Yeah. Writing those things in as… In the same way that I write multiple senses when describing a scene.

[Mary Robinette] So let's segue from that straight into our homework assignment.

[Howard] Oh, goody. That's me.

[Mary Robinette] Which is yours.

[Howard] Okay. Earlier, I mentioned the No, I'm Fine essay that I wrote. I have an assignment for you. Creative nonfiction. Describe… Describe's the wrong word. Write a story about the worst, or some of the worst, or very bad… You pick… Pain that you have experienced. Use as many senses as you can. Paint the whole picture for us. Write it in such a way that you're evoking the pain and the emotion and the setting and the context and that whole experience for the reader. Doesn't have to be long. Between 250 and a thousand words is probably enough for one really juicy pain.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/10/14-6-fantasy-and-science-fiction-races/

Key points: Worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. [Avoid the pitfall of othering your alien races, coding them using characteristics of Earth races and people. See the May 26 episode coming up on Writing the Other.] Realize that to an alien, e.g. Sgt. Schlock, everyone else is an alien. Your aliens need to function as people that can tell the story. You may take shortcuts or compromises. Think about "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" They need to feel alien, but not incomprehensible and not just some aspect of humanity. Remember, to aliens, humanity is all one race. How do you make your aliens relatable to the readers? Your protagonist can try to figure it out and react to it. Explain what is important to the alien, and then show them trying to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is easy to relate to. When is a horse a horse, and when is it a zyloplick? (a.k.a. Don't call a rabbit a smeerp.) Treat your races as full cultures, and treat your not-a-horse the same way. Think about the consequences of the differences. Let us taste grass, and experience a sense of wonder with the wind in our nostrils. Force yourself to not let your races be one note. Beware of coming up with races to fill a role in your story, and then not putting in the work to fill out their culture. "How is this going to change the way they interact?" You need to know the rules and the reasons behind them, to make them feel like real people, but you don't need to dump all that information on the readers.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Six.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy and Science Fiction Races.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] We are going to be talking about worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. Before we dive into this episode, I wanted to bring up a potential pitfall in dealing with this. That is, very naturally, as you write, you are going to other your alien races. In so doing, by making them different from yourself, you are probably going to start to naturally code them by giving them characteristics that are very similar to Earth races and Earth people. You can see this famously in George Lucas's prequel trilogy about the Star Wars, where he takes the person who is the merchant and he codes this person by the way he speaks and the way he looks as Jewish. This is dangerous, and it is something you're going to naturally do. Because of the biases you have, because of the world we live in. We have an entire episode coming up in May, on May 26, where we talk about this. Dan and Tempest talk about Writing the Other and kind of a giving permission… Giving yourself permission to do this, even though you will probably get it wrong sometimes. We think it is important to be trying to reach and stretch.

[Dan] Exactly. It is more important… Obviously, you need to do it right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Put in the work, do your effort, we've got a huge slate of Writing the Other podcasts this season and we'll let those episodes cover this. Right now, we're going to move on and just talk about cool fantasy and science fiction races.

[Brandon] Yep. So, taking that huge can of worms and setting it to the side as a real issue that you should be thinking about and researching about, we're going to turn slightly the other direction and just talk about building fantasy and science fiction races. I kind of want to put you on the spot, Howard.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Brandon] Because I love…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your science fiction races. This is something you are really, really good at.

[Howard] I am…

[Brandon] How?

[Howard] Flattered and terrified. A large part of this grows out of the realization early on that calling… For anybody to call Sgt. Schlock, the amorphous… The carbosilicate amorph… Anybody calling him an alien is… Well, they are alien to him. There are other aliens. At one point, I made the joke where some… "Schlock, don't you have any alien superpowers?" He's like, "You guys are all aliens. Do you have any alien superpowers?" That's the easy version of that joke, and I never get to tell it again. What I had to wrap my head around is that I need all these aliens to function as people that can tell the story in a way that I don't have to use a lot of words, because I'm a cartoonist.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I have to take some shortcuts. I have to give them all eyebrows. The Uniocs, the guys with the great big one eye, have two eyebrows. Why? Because I need two eyebrows.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't need two eyebrows. I do. So there are compromises that I have made. But fundamentally what I am trying to do every time I introduce an alien… My first thought is not, "What cool superpowers does this alien have?" It is, "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" As I've been working on prose, Dragons of Damaxuri, which is… It was my nano project in 2018, and I didn't finish it, because it needs more than 50,000 words…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I didn't get to 50,000. It needs more than 28,000 words. But that book, every time I mentioned an alien, I realized I don't have any pictures to work with. I have to give the reader enough so that when we mention that this is an alien, when they do something, they feel alien without feeling incomprehensible and without feeling like I've just mapped them onto some aspect of humanity. Fundamentally, with the alien races, from that standpoint, humanity is all one race.

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] People of color, people of… Whatever. We're all one race.

[Mahtab] Howard, that's something very interesting that you mentioned, because you said you need the two eyebrows, especially because you have to show them. Now, that just makes me think about what if I just wanted to make an alien a blob of… An amoebic substance? But then, how would I make them relatable to the readers? Like, it's kind of a… Two sides of the coin. You want to make an alien not like a human being. He could have three or four arms, they could have five legs, but you have a head, you have a body, so that the readers can relate to it. But if you did not, and if you just had it made into a blob, then how do you show expression or… Well, it won't be illustrated, but… That's what I always wonder. What if I wanted to make something so weird that no one's ever seen it before, but then how do they relate to it?

[Howard] The trick that I'm using in Dragons of Damaxuri… And it's comedy. So I can freewheel a little bit. My point of view character is an artificial intelligence who has a physical avatar body, and who wants to fit in and wants to understand people and recognizes that everybody has a body language. So periodically an alien will do something with its ears, or it will take the two eyes on stalks and look at each other. Which I took from Larry Niven. But any alien with eyes on stalks is going to do that. Lou, the protagonist, she either knows what it means or she doesn't know what it means or she's guessing. She knows that it's important. So as I'm describing these things, these are becoming people who feel things and who do things that mean things. Our protagonist is trying to figure it out and trying to react to it.

[Dan] An author who did very alien aliens very well was Ursula K Le Guin. One of the things that she did in several of her stories and books was… She would present these incredibly bizarre things that we almost don't know how to relate to them, but she would explain what was important to them, and then we would watch them try to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is incredibly relatable. So even though we don't necessarily understand who they are or where they're coming from, we know what it's like to try to get something that you want. We know what it's like to lose something that you love. So those aspects can still come out.

[Mahtab] Yeah. I think that's a good point.

[Brandon] Next week, we'll delve into this a little bit more…

[Howard] How weird is too weird.

[Brandon] Because our topic is how weird is too weird. But I did want to talk about this idea a little bit, about… Like, for instance, one thing in my writing group that a friend of mine always will point out is he hates it in books when they use something that's not a horse to be a horse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Now, personally, I kind of like that, right? But where do you guys fall on this? When do you just call a horse a horse, when do you call a horse a zyloplick, which is what they ride on this planet, and in all ways it is a horse, except it's got scales.

[Dan] Well, see, for me, that comes down to a lot of the same issues of… Not just animals, but the races themselves. I remember, in our old writing class with Dave Wolverton, one of the things he said about kind of the standard Tolkien-esque fantasy is that what we said at the beginning, elves and dwarves and orcs and stuff, are really just kind of Earth cultures super-otherized. How much more interesting is it to just treat them as full cultures? So they're not just every dwarf is Gimli and has a Scottish accent and an axe, but maybe they like really spicy food. Maybe they have all these other massive facets to their culture that real cultures have that fantasy cultures sometimes don't because they're based on stereotypes. So with the horse, it's the same thing. If the horse doesn't do anything different than a normal horse, just call it a horse. But if it has scales, does that mean it's also a lizard? Does that mean that it's cold-blooded and you have to have a completely different kind of stable? Like, there's a lot of interesting roads you can go down if you want to look at that kind of stuff.

[Howard] The movie Avatar…

[Mahtab] That's just… Yes.

[Howard] Had…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The horses…

[Mahtab] Direhorse.

[Howard] Except it wasn't a horse because… Because…

[Dan] You plugged yourself into it.

[Howard] You plugged yourself into it. The place where, for me, that fell short was I wanted him to be experiencing some of what the horse is experiencing, because now it's not a horse. Now, he's got the wind in his nostrils, and I'm going to taste grass. This is so… Now, there's a reason for that connection to… Now it's got sense of wonder for me.

[Brandon] Book of the week this week is Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. Grand Master of SFWA, Jane Yolen, one of my favorite writers of all time. I recently reread this book to do a piece on it for Tor.com. I love this book. It was one of the very first fantasy books I ever read as a kid, and a lot of the stuff in this book went completely over my head.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But it was my first boy and his dragon story. Which, there are a lot of classic kid and dragon stories, but this one is wonderful. It's about a young man who is a slave, who works for a wealthy man who owns dragons that fight in pits. They're basically cockfights with dragons. As a kid, this was just awesome. Reading it as an adult, I'm like, "Wow, this is… This is really uncomfortable."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In ways she obviously wanted it to be. Because these are inten… Intelligent creatures that they are raising to fight, and the young man, his way to get freedom is he's going to steal an egg, which in this culture, you're kind of allowed to do. They won't really talk about it, but if someone is… Like, grabs an egg and raises it themselves, they all kind of think that's a cool thing, and you can get away with it if you can actually make it happen. Which very rarely would it ever happen. He has the dream of doing this, and he actually gets an egg, a young dragon, and starts raising it. But the story is about how he's going to have to raise it to go fight to the death for him to have a chance at freedom, and his growing bond with it as he realizes it really is intelligent. A beautiful story. Kind of a brutal story. Both whimsical and realistic at the same time. Which is really an interesting mix, but Jane is very good at that. So I recommend Dragon's Blood to you. If you've never read it, it's a wonderful book.

[Brandon] I want to bring us back to this concept that Dan was talking about. Because I find one of the things that is most difficult, but most satisfying, about worldbuilding races is forcing myself to not let my races be one note. This is really… It takes a lot of work. Because very naturally, and I think this is partially for shorthand reasons, it's also for bias reasons, but it's also… It's very natural for us to go and watch a movie and the movie has only an hour and a half to show us something, so it shows us this fantasy race, and it's like, "These are humans, but they have no emotions." Or, "These are humans, but they don't get metaphor." That works really well as a cool shorthand in a film. But as we are writing and we have more time to spend on these races and cultures, I think it's really important to make them more than one note. How do you do this? It is really, I think, very difficult.

[Mahtab] I think Ursula Guin did that in The Left Hand of Darkness when she did the andro… Yuck, I can't even figure that word, but androgynous races. I think that was a really cool way to deal with… Not making them male or female or… Just exploring that entirely different way of doing it and the relationship between Estravan and Genly Ai, who came in… I thought that was very cool. So, just to take away the gender and do it in that way, I thought that was pretty well done.

[Brandon] Yeah. Left Hand of Darkness is a masterwork in how to do this right.

[Dan] I suspect that some of the problems that we have in kind of making our fantasy and science fiction races feel rounded, is because we come up with them to fill a role in our story first. Then we realize it's too much work to also give them all of this cultural baggage that is very different and very nonhuman. So we're just like, "Well, they're… It's just a Wookie. He's just like the quiet mechanic who never talks and is very hairy." So if you force yourself to do it, to actually go in and say, "Well, how is this going to change the way they interact?" This is something Howard has recently done with the… I can't remember the names of any of the aliens. But there's the ones with four arms.

[Howard] The Fobottr.

[Dan] Yes. You kind of recently… I don't know if ret-conned is the right word, but you defined more solidly how they interact and the way that they require groups… I just thought that was really interesting, because all of a sudden, they were more interesting and they were distinctly different from the humans.

[Howard] Part of what I did…

[Dan] In a measurable way.

[Howard] Part of what I did when I designed them and when I designed their culture, I gave them a history that involved a diaspora… Diaspora? I don't know how to say that word. I know how to read that word. They were scattered. They have traveling merchant clans, warrior clans, whatever. Their culture is not monoculture. Sometimes when they connect with people of their own kind who have done a better job of preserving their original culture, there is conflict. Your naming conventions are all wrong. Why… None of that made it into the story, but all of that made it into my notes. What it let me do, and it's a silly thing… What it let me do was have characters whose names didn't fit the pattern of everybody else. I knew that there was a rule behind it. I knew it fit.

[Dan] Well, I think maybe the big lesson for the rea… For our listeners, then, is reading the comic, it's not a treatise on Fobottr… How do you say it? Culture.

[Howard] Fobottr.

[Dan] But I could tell very clearly the strip at which oh, Howard's changed the way this… He's defined this culture all of a sudden. They feel like real people. Even though you're not going out of your way to dump all the information on us.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap it up here. Mahtab, you were going to give us some homework?

[Mahtab] Yes. Take one major historical incident that occurred on Earth and set it in space, with an alien race or races.

[Dan] Cool.

[Brandon] Awesome. I'm very curious to hear what you guys… Or read what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.14: Suspension of Disbelief

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/09/04/writing-excuses-6-14-suspension-of-disbelief/

Key points: Suspension of Disbelief. Plausibility. Helping the reader pretend that it is all real. Don't be too tidy. Insert things that are just part of the world, not plot specific (beware fluff!). Don't ask readers to suspend their disbelief about too many things. Let readers know early what they need to believe. Don't break human nature. When readers believe the characters and the story, they will stick with you for fantastic things. Lay the groundwork. Don't shoot yourself in the foot with Chekov's gun. Start by making small things plausible, and build up to being strange things. When characters are surprised, it can help readers believe. Try bathos -- a dash of ridicule in the midst of intense drama and emotion.
( nailing down belief? )
[Brandon] All right. We're going to take this out. Mary, you've got a writing prompt for us?
[Mary] Yes. I want you to write a story and make us believe one impossible thing. If you can't come up with it on your own, try teleportation.
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 21.28: Narrative Transitions
mbarker - Writing Excuses 21.07: Deep Dive -- "With Her Serpent Locks"
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.48: Bodies, Why? (Part III)
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.14: Suspension of Disbelief

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 21.28: Narrative Transitions

Writing Excuses 21.07: Deep Dive -- "With Her Serpent Locks"

Writing Excuses 19.44: A Close Reading on Structure: Tradition and Innovation

Writing Excuses 17.48: Bodies, Why? (Part III)

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

Writing Excuses 6.14: Suspension of Disbelief

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